PERDIDAS ESPERADAS

MOON RIVER, CONTINUED | 31°55'31” N, 81°04'50” W

I'm not sure whether the saying about troubles coming in threes in right, but I agree that they often don't come alone. For example, the Roost had another visitor that day, the neighbor boy Ronnie. Maria Ward didn't recognize him at first because he'd grown like a ragweed since the last summer. He came over to find her walking the length of the driveway, peering into the dirt, the grass, the hedges lining the yard.

“Everything okay, Miss Maria?”

“Yes, yes,” she said. Except the snake's body had vanished.

She recalled at that moment the stories about joint snakes and hoop snakes and the old legend her mother once told her when she refused to go to sleep. John had long passed out, the light whistle of his breathing a metronome in the night, and yet she had wanted to hear story after story, pressing for another. Desperate, her mother finally told her about the inada. In this tale, winter has lasted longer than usual and food stores are

running low. A hunter, distracted by tracking a lethargic buck that he knows will feed his family for a week, steps on the head of a snake. He doesn't notice he has crushed it and continues following his game, but when he goes to take the killing shot—a snake appears on the buck's back. The buck is startled, gets away, and the snake disappears as well. The hunter is angry at his bad luck, so he makes camp early and goes to bed hungry. But when he wakes up he is surrounded by inada who multiply when he hacks apart their

bodies. They nip at him for a week, and then another, and so on until the new moon when they finally allow him to die. She swatted at her ankles just thinking about the story.

“John's not home yet, Ron. I don't expect him for awhile.”

“Maybe later then,” he said, already backing away. “Sorry for the bother.” Maria decided a cat must have carried it off, shook her head and waved goodbye before going inside to finish the peppers. She caught her reflection in the window and wondered whether she'd grown so much too. Her hair was growing out and turning reddish in the sun, her dresses fit a little tighter at the waist. She angled the lid for the boiling pot toward her face to see better, and she caught a glimpse of the stranger entering the room behind her. She played off the vanity by covering the pot and moving on to her cutting station.

“Can I help you?” She picked up the knife and made rapid, industrious chops while he picked up a squash to test its firmness. He motioned to the counter.

“Quite the harvest you have there.” “We try.”

“You want to know the trick of it?”

She looked down to find the tomato she was trying to dice rather deflated instead, the innards running out of the skin and puddling on the board.

He stepped closer, picked up the serrated blade they kept out for bread, and reached over her for the plumpest one from the pile. The slice went down the middle in one movement and he showed her the two sides of the split globe, wet with seeds. There was a practice to his motions, and she knew he was the type who could bed a man down if the need be on him.

He offered the knife to her, handle first, and she tossed it in the sink with the rest of the lunch dishes.

“Thank you, but I think I've managed fine all these years.”

He put up his hands. “Just thought you might want to eat it instead of butchering.” “Weren't you looking for something?”

She offered him a towel, though she could see he had managed not to get any juice on him.

He shook his head. “Washroom. Must have gotten turned around.” “There's one at the front, to the left of the hall.”

He looked toward the direction she pointed, nodded and left her alone to speculate. She tried to figure out how that worked, getting lost with the bath but two doors down from you. She mimicked his motions with one of the halves, but the results were fit only for soup. On the other she tried another sawtoothed knife and managed to get the slices fanned across the board in thin rows, which both pleased and irritated her.

Maria Ward got the rest of the canning done that evening, but it meant not making it out to the chicken coop until it was an hour shy of nightfall. She hurried through the motions of scattering fresh straw. More rain had been promised that week but had so far held off, so she measured out the feed, grit, water, then spent the remainder of the day on the back porch. While scanning the trees for deer and their telltale eyeshine, she braided wildflowers and bog lilies to pass the time, the oriental musk of the blooms fragrancing the heavy air. Some nights it almost crowded out the notes of sulphur from the distant factories. The smell of money, her father would say, before taking a deep whiff of the rotted morning breeze.

When John came back, he saw her pacing and brought a bag of shelled corn from the pantry to help lure the creatures, even though he was worn out as always. The

foremen got to sit but he wasn't a foreman. A schoolhouse feud with the current foreman all but ensured he never would be, so he had to stand all day at the mill, in high summer temps made higher by the pulp processing. She didn't say anything when he lifted his haunches onto the porch handrail, hiding a groan by letting out a bark of a cough instead. They weren't supposed to sit up there, some of the wood was beginning to swell and splinter, but he did it all the same when no one could catch him.

While Maria rustled the bag and grasped a palmful of corn, John swung his legs and asked after her day.

"Mighty long," she answered, then listed all the jars she managed to put up. "Mama's going to be glad she missed out on all the fun."

She decided to leave out the stranger showing up, thinking how little it really amounted to. What was between them but the red sap of the tomato? Her fancy had merely run away, something that had set many a person afire. They all knew of those who worked to transform the smallest hope into the most glimmering reality. A few flakes of gold as inducement to sell everything, uproot or abandon families, to seek out

carpetbagging clairvoyants for scrying visions and phantasmagory out of a desert waste or elsewhere. So she kept quiet.

Right at dusk, a doe showed up. But their delight faded when they saw it was limping.

John hopped off the rail, easing his way up to the deer. Maria recognized it as one that roamed as a family on the other side of the bridge, and either familiarity or hunger let

her brother get close enough to put his shirt over the doe's face and neck, calming the poor thing as he smoothed his hand down its hindquarters.

"What is it? What's wrong?" Maria asked, almost coming off the porch in her strain to see.

"An arrow. It was one of the Howard boys, I bet. This was blood sport, not a killing shot. You aim at the lungs and heart, not shoot it from behind as it runs."

Maria watched as he felt his way around the arrow with his fingertips, the deer pliant at his touch. She couldn't help telling him, "It's a shame daddy won't let you go to that veterinary school in Iowa. You'd make such a fine doctor."

John pretended he hadn't heard. He showed her how to put the treats under the doe's nose, letting her feed while he listened for the heartbeat to slow. When she seemed to have gotten her fill, he took out his pocketknife, snapping the arrow off above the flesh. They watched as she bolted, disappearing silent as smoke back into the pampas grass.

John gave the patient's prognosis. "It was a large muscle, no infection yet. Should heal if she can reach back there to keep the wound clean."

He handed Maria the arrow then knocked the mud off his boots before heading inside.

Maria followed behind, stopping only to toss the splinter of wood into the treeline. Before heading to the pantry, she dropped off the money she had collected in their big safe, to lock it up until she could make the run into town. She went to pencil the stranger's balance in the ledger but realized she didn't even know what name to put down.

Nobody but Hugh had witnessed the arrival of the new guest; nobody yet knew the trouble Maria had ushered into their lives.