Consumption (10 page)

In 1908, the expanded Homestead Act allowed for young couples to get themselves a free piece of land from the government on which to start a new life. Free, that was, if one counted backbreaking labor, isolation, and a gamble with Mother Winter over life or death free. A few people apparently did. Either that or they saw no better option.

Lucy McClarin and her new husband, George, were two of these people. Lucy was fourteen at the time, and it was a blessing that George had taken her out of her house in New York when he did. Until that point, Lucy had been passed as a substitute for a punching bag between her three older brothers and her father. The two young lovers left under the cover of night, striking out with the hope that the damned possess, and stopping only when they reached Montana. There, they lay claim to their first and only home together.

It would be wrong to suggest that there weren't happy times in that rough year the two had together as a family. They settled in what was only just becoming Cavus, a fallout town from the leftover gold-mining folks who'd come before. The gold miners hadn't lasted long because they'd been chased out by the Native Americans living on the land. The Indians themselves would not live on the land where Cavus was. They called it “the Bad Land.” “Land of the Dirty Spirit.” When they chased the miners off, the Indians killed none of them, only made sure that they left. But by the time the Homestead Act came around, and Lucy and George came to the place, others had come, too, and the tribes who used to protect the land were barely able to protect themselves. And so the settlers came. And for a time, there was peace.

That winter was hard. Brutal. They survived it because of their neighbors and because Lucy worked harder than two men, planting and tilling the earth so that they might have something to eat. They kept warm the way newlywed couples will (the marriage had happened just before the train ride, and it cost them ten of their very limited two hundred dollars) and because of this, Lucy entered spring just barely alive after escaping the cold and, the big prize, pregnant. If she hadn't gone for the walk, who could say what their future might have held?

She shouldn't have gone out at all. It was near to freezing, and there was snow in the air. No, she shouldn't have gone walking, and yet…a person could only stand so much time between four walls. It was all right for George. He got out to work, to help the neighbors with the herds and tend their own sow and chickens. But he wouldn't let her do anything but the housework.

“Not until it gets warmer, Lucy.” He'd thought her very delicate since he'd discovered her condition, and she appreciated the way he looked after her, like a child almost. So she didn't do any work except what was to be done in the house. And there was work to be done there for sure. She cooked, she sewed, she mended. George was all the time ripping one thing or another out in the fields, and he only had two work shirts. Lucy knitted him a red scarf to keep him warm, and gloves, too. She did all these things. And when the women of the town met for a sewing circle or a church meeting, she went to those, too. But there weren't many women, not yet. Cavus was still a rough town; the settlers who came were trickling in, and most were bachelors or traders. Much of the time, Lucy found herself alone, listening to the din of her thoughts as they rose above the howl of the wind.

Though it was spring, outdoors it still looked like winter. There was snow everywhere, enough snow so that when Lucy stepped outside it looked like the world had turned upside down, and she'd walked right onto the sky. But for once, that day, the snow was on the ground and not pouring from the sky. George was up to the neighbors, helping with a sick calf, and she was all by herself. Had been for hours.

She dusted the hearth and worked on her needlepoint, but soon enough those walls, the ones George had put up with his own hands, dear man, started to feel like they were coming a little closer. Inch by inch they crept nearer to where she sat. Lucy worked on, but, looking up once, she swore she could touch them, each, on all sides. Touch them without even straightening her arms. And when she heard the creak and groan of the house and thought to herself that this was its death groan, that the house was going to press itself out of existence with Lucy still sitting inside of it, she sprang for the door. She needed to escape and she was going out. Just a quick walk, that was all.

The weather was cold, but it was warmer by far than what she'd expected. The wind nipped at her cheeks, putting color back into them, and Lucy took off at a dead run across the snow-packed plains, head thrown back, laughing. She was a wife, yes, but for all that she was still a girl.

She ran until she could run no more, the stays of her dress biting into her sides, and then she collapsed against the side of a small hill, using it for support and shelter. From her position, she surveyed the land in front of her. Sky white and
beautiful—Montana.
Home. She loved her new life. Loved everything in it.

It was the snow that kept her from hearing the trapper approach. He'd been through these parts long before the government thought about handing out acres, and he didn't make any mind of the lines on paper that showed where he was or wasn't supposed to walk. He set his traps where he pleased, and one of them was just south of here, where he'd come from checking it.

The trap had been empty, so the man was in a surly mood. More than that, he'd had a run-in with a settler the other day who'd threatened to shoot him if he didn't leave the man's property.
His
property, hah! The trapper had been there before that boy had learned to pull on his own nappies. If this was anybody's land, it was his. Even the Indians wouldn't come here. Were scared of it. Not him, though. He made a good living off of this land. He was still thinking on the injustice of it, of the wildlife getting shot or scared off by these new interlopers, when he came upon the girl, sitting plumb in the middle of the snow, not ten feet from his trap.

She was a little thing, almost a child; he saw that as soon as he turned her around, her startled face bowing out with a wide
O
at her mouth. He dragged her back behind the hill where he sometimes took shelter. It rested beside a stream, a small tributary of which had been manually redirected by a gold miner some few years back and then abandoned.

As he rammed himself into her, Lucy could feel herself tearing, could feel the splitting of her skin as her blood poured. But as it fell into the earth, worming its way into the split ground and sinking into the misdirected water, and then deeper into the soil, Lucy felt something else enter her, something that forced itself much deeper than the trapper and his trifling tool could ever hope to plumb. Afterward, Lucy was careful to cover the red spots in the snow, and she wiped herself clean with the freezing powder. It was funny, though. She hardly felt the cold at all.

It was only a few days after this walk that
George—teetotaling,
hardworking George—began showing up at Cavus's only bar. And it was about this time that he started telling his stories.

“I don't know her anymore,” George said, tipping back another mug of the whiskey that Big-Fist Billy, as his patrons called him, set down in front of him.

“Sure, and don't we all feel that way about the wives sometimes,” said Billy, wiping away the spill he'd made in hammering the mug down.

“It's different with Lucy.”

“They're all different!” This from down the bar. “Fucking women. Can't do a thing with 'em.”

“I know what to do with 'em!” This from old Ezra, toothless and cackling and as good as glued to his daily seat at the end of the bar.

“I tell you, something's wrong with her!”

“There, there,” said Billy, pouring another shot of whiskey into George's glass. It wasn't good for a man to be on so about his home problems. Didn't do anybody any good. If George had a problem with his missus, why, he or his fist ought to let her know it and shut up about it.

George threw the shot back and stopped talking. Three days later he was dead.

When he arrived home that night, stinking drunk but quiet, Lucy was waiting up for him. She stood in front of the fire, staring into it and stroking her belly. He wondered how long she'd been standing there.

“Nice night?” she asked.

“I'm going to bed,” George said, stumbling past her. And was there a prick of fear below the bones in his ribs? An icy finger jab-jabbing away at him? Yes, there was. Oh, yes, there was.

“Come here,” said Lucy.

There was a tone in her voice, an authority that he could not refuse. She'd begun speaking like this just as the winter ended, about the same time as she'd become pregnant. He'd put most of her strange actions to that, the being pregnant. He'd heard women caught strange cravings, acted highly strung when their belly was full of life.

“What do you want?” asked George, and he tried to pitch his voice gruff, hard. Lucy laughed. He wasn't fooling anybody.

As he approached his wife, illuminated there in the light of the fire, he saw again the physical changes that had taken place in these last few weeks. His sweet, slight angel had grown plump. And it wasn't with the baby's fat, there hadn't been time for that. This new Lucy was round and her cheeks always in a high flush, like the skin of a ripe apple. Her hair, too, was different. The thin red curls she'd had when he'd met her were now thick tangles. They glowed, sleek and shining, as if oiled, in the firelight.

“Husband, husband,” she purred. “Why do you think I want anything?” Her lips spread into a smile, and her two canine teeth, white and sparkling, poked out, biting at her bottom lip. A drop of blood formed, and she licked her tongue out to catch it.

Like a gut punch, a shot of heat hit his groin. He was overcome with a lust so fierce, so primal, as to physically bend him over.

“Stop,” he said.

“Stop what?” Her voice, deeper now than it had been when they left New York. That shyness, that sweet innocence he'd loved about it, was completely gone. Now she
sounded…cunning.
A cunning cunt. He slapped the thought away as soon as it bubbled forth, but Lucy, as though hearing it spoken aloud, began laughing.

“What are thee thinking on, husband?” she asked, and she pulled the hem of her dress up. Up. Up. Sliding it up her thigh, working her hand along the now exposed inside of her leg. She lifted it higher to reveal the hairy patch at her crotch and then, obscenely, she fingered it, undulating, thrusting it forward, toward his face.

He could not help himself. George sank to his knees and buried his face in the curls. Above him, he heard his wife moan, as she sank her fingers into his hair and pushed his head in farther. She did not sound like his wife. She moaned again, and George's mind leapt to the image of yesterday.

He'd come home from planting, the wheat all newly tucked into the ground, and he'd been happy. Proud, too, because if the wheat went well it meant that they'd be all right the coming winter, that they and the new baby would be well fed and not scratching and begging for sustenance by the end of the winter season, the way they'd been reduced to this year. He'd come home whistling, pushing open the door to their cabin and looking for his wife. She'd seemed distant lately, had been doing weird things like refusing to drink any water at all, like taking her clothes off during the middle of the day because she said she was hot, even with the fire out and the house freezing. But he could forget all that now. It had been a hard winter, sure, and the pregnancy had made it harder on his poor angel, still only a girl, really. But it was over. The wheat was in the ground, and things would begin to change, their new life could begin. He wanted only to grab his wife's waist and spin her round in victory. Except when he opened the door, she wasn't in the house. The whistle died on his lips as he saw very clear tracks leading across the floor and out the door. The tracks were made of ashes, and the ashes outlined his wife's bare footprint. She had, for reasons unfathomable to him, been in the fireplace.

His spirits falling with each step, he followed the footprints out the door and across the still barren earth to the small chicken coop.

He found her inside. She sat, crouched, with nothing on her but the yellow ribbon she used to tie back her hair. In one hand, she held the body of a chicken. The head was gone. In her other hand, she held a feather, and she was using it to trace long, bloody circles around her mouth. When she saw him, her eyes lit up. “Husband,” she said. “Oh, welcome home, my dear. And don't you know, dinner's on the table?” Then she cackled madly and held the bloody feather to him. “Have a bite! Have a bite!”

He yanked her from the coop and dragged her mercilessly into the house, where he forced her to scrub the mess off of herself and then pushed her into clothes. When she was washed and dressed, and sitting across from him at their table, he told her she must never do that again. Then he tried tenderness and asked her what was the matter.

“I just needed a good fuck,” she said. His wife, his dear, sweet wife sitting so primly and clean across the table, all traces of her earlier feast wiped clean. “I needed to be fucked and there was no one here to do it, so I ate the chickens instead.”

George rose from the table, his hands quivering, his mind refusing to process the words, refusing to process even the idea that this creature in front of him was his wife. He rose and, for the first time in his life, raised his hand and struck a woman. The slap sent her head cracking backwards, and when she raised it to right, he saw that he'd split her lip, and a small trail of blood leaked from it. Maintaining eye contact, she raised her left hand and placed it on her lip, then trailed the bloody finger around her mouth, so that when she finished, she looked as if she'd never left the chicken coop at all. He slapped her again.

It was this slap he thought of now, his head buried in between the thighs of his wife, and thinking of it, he felt another helpless shiver of desire course through him. Thinking of the slap and the blood with the smell of his wife pungent and ripe, the salt of her in his mouth the same salt as in her blood, he came. In great, shuddering gasps he came. Above him, his wife laughed.

Three days later the neighbor boy, who delivered the McClarins' milk from their family cows in exchange for Lucy's sewing skills (she had a fine eye for close embroidery), would be the last person to see Mrs. Lucy McClarin. When he knocked on the door three, then four times and still no one answered, he tentatively pushed it open, calling for Lucy. He opened the door all the way and saw her. She was sitting cross-legged on top of the table with her husband's left hand in her mouth. The hand was no longer attached to Mr. McClarin, and the man's body was nowhere to be found, even hours later, after the entire population of Cavus homesteaders turned out a search party. They never found George, except for that single hand, which was missing three of the five fingers. The remaining finger-bones were ragged and uneven, like someone had chewed them off. Lucy McClarin was gone, and they found neither hide nor hair of her. But judging from the rendered fat and teeth they found in the big black pot over the McClarins' fireplace, there was really only one conclusion that the town could come to. Lucy McClarin had eaten her husband.

Over the course of that spring, four more men disappeared, each unaccounted for. Nobody worried too much; there was a final blizzard that could have accounted for two of them…and the others? Well, life in Cavus was hard at the best of times, and sometimes people just left. They got tired and they up and left—families, houses,
responsibilities,
left them all for a new beginning. But the children weren't so easily convinced. They, led by the neighbor boy who'd discovered her, sang their song in whispers, sang the song of Lucy the Gobbler, as she came to be known. Years later, long after Lucy had been forgotten, the children of Cavus continued to sing it, sang it not knowing that not a month after Lucy went missing, two hunters coming down from Canada stumbled across what they thought must be a Native's skeleton, some Indian woman frozen to death long ago. Unknowing, the children sang their song.

I'm hun-gry, I'm thirs-ty.

Lucy, Lucy, what did you say?

I'm hun-gry, I'm thirs-ty.

And how many men did you eat today?

One?

Two?

Three?

Four!

Four dead men lying on the floor.

Sucked their bones

then ASKED FOR MORE!