We lay down in the open back of the truck and he asked if there was much chance of hurting me. I only laughed and when I took him inside I laughed again, it was that good a feeling.

And so, quickly, we got into the habit of one another.

Henry Law

It was easy to forget they’re not like us.

You could be looking at Miss Ada and talking to her simply, and then she’d say something like

Take into the account the evenings are getting long, Mr Law.

Her father too. We’d be talking easily enough and then all of a sudden I’ll remember he knew my pop and all my uncles from the day they were born ’til the day they died.

I suppose it was easy to forget because they made it easy. They had to, to get by.

It didn’t matter to Father that most Cures were cautious of us because he didn’t care for company, and it didn’t matter to him that a couple of the curings became local folklore and got told over and over, getting longer and stranger each time.

Tabatha Sharpe, for instance.

She was a Cure of mine from when I was very young and first in the habit of going for walks near Sister Eel Lake. I’d play in the long pale grass, pulling it around myself and weaving a wheaten cradle. I laced the stalks over one another into thick and clumsy plaits in the way that some Cure women bound their hair, and lay there for an hour or so, imagining myself an infant Cure. Helpless. Speechless. Pursing my mouth to signal I wanted my mother’s teat.

Father had told me that Cures remember nothing of being inside their mothers, which I thought strange. I remembered so clearly my time in The Ground. I remembered the closeness of the soil and the taste of rain come down toward me.

Once the backs of my legs started itching I kicked away the cradle.

Shredded its walls.

Tore it down.

On the way home I played a game I often played when lazy with heat. It was a simple game: I’d look into Sister Eel Lake and convince myself I saw her there – whiskery, oily mouth – and so frighten myself into running all the way home.

I squatted in the rushes and felt my dress peel away from my back, waiting to be taken by surprise.

But then: a noise. A real noise. A noise I hadn’t spun in my head.

A wet, slipping sound, and a pocket of air dispersing.

There was a baby where there hadn’t been one before. A baby wrapped in a bit of cloth torn from a sheet or a large man’s shirt. The cloth was covered in stringy bits of blood and the baby was sickly. I lifted it into my lap and the small head rolled away.

Tiny throat. Too tiny to cry.

Little pink disk for a face, the features slightly flattened.

Fair hair plastered down with mucus and blood.

I checked it over, and saw it was a girl.

My first thought: Some crazed parent has left her here for Sister Eel.

Offerings were sometimes made to her by Cures who thought she could shimmy under the fields and make succulent the crops, though it was usually a calf or a fox they left for her.

With my arms around the baby I walked the quarter hour home, looking at her face.

Mouth like a berry still ripening.

Eyelids so thin I could see through them.

We’d no Cures scheduled that day, and so I knew there’d been an accident when I saw the old van parked at a hard, quick angle to the house.

A smell of wet was coming off the van, a sucked-penny smell, and once inside the house it wafted thick and strong. I followed it upstairs, an ache starting in my arms with the weight of the baby. I could hear Father talking.

They were in the third spare room – our best room, with its view of the garden’s greenest part. There was a woman in the rocking chair. She was crying, mostly with pain, and there was a man crying with sadness behind her. Father was on his knees. He said –You really mustn’t move.

I’d never seen the woman before but later learned her name: Mrs Delilah Sharpe. She was sat in the rocking chair and her dress was rolled up to her waist and she held her own knees very far apart. Father was rolling a strip of torn sheet to pad at the soreness between Mrs Sharpe’s legs – there was already a heap of used ones on the ground, and I clucked my tongue at the long chore ahead of me – washing the strips one by one, perhaps even stitching the sheet up again.

Mr Sharpe saw me first, and then Father turned around. Mrs Sharpe lay back in the chair, her eyes closing.

The sun had gotten higher and the day was pumping hot and cruel outside.

–I found her at Sister Eel Lake.

Father had come close to me, stopped when he could see the baby’s wrinkled head. She seemed heavier, now that I was standing still, and squirmed while I did my best to rock her.

–Should I boil up some daisies?

Which was a broth we made for damaged parts.

–Go give Mrs Sharpe her baby, Ada.

By now Mrs Sharpe was trying to right herself in the chair. Mr Sharpe was still crying but not making any sound.

–You do it.

I held her up to Father and he looked at me stone-hard, slit-eyed.

A scolding, later. For sure.

He took her from the sullied cloth and carried her to Mrs Sharpe. When she reached across her risen stomach more bright blood came out of her. I heard its soft drip on the rug. Mr Sharpe sat down on the floor, his back to the wall. They were a young couple, and probably not married long.

I stayed in the door moving from one foot to the other, wringing out the cloth until I noticed the copper flecks on my hands. Like I’d been clutching a rusty pipe.