West Virginia, 1898
It was the middle of the night, but the sky screamed with light, knocking Helen Joseph awake. She rolled out of her blanket, almost crushing her dreaming baby sisters beside her on the floor. The cabin was filled with sleep; no one else had noticed that strange, streaky flash. Helen thought maybe she was still sleeping, but flowed along, anyway, following her legs out the door, following the thin, bright trail that lingered against the dark, stretching all the way to the place where it careened down.
Something had landed; she knew it. But she wasn’t sure if it had landed in her dream or on their farm. She walked up the mountain slope toward that twinkling plummet, surprised to feel that the ground was hot under her bare feet. The earth grew warmer and warmer as she drew closer, until she had to skip from step to step. The soil beneath her calloused feet rippled, alive as a serpent, shoving her off balance. Helen landed heavily against the thorny trunk of a cottonwood tree as the earth lurched under the impact of whatever star had just fallen. The lingering wash of light intensified. The brightness made her teeth hurt. She closed her eyes so tightly that her cheeks pinched, and waited for the rumbling to stop. It didn’t stop, not for a long while. With her eyes closed and her body stomach-down in the forest brush, it was like wrangling a semiwild dog, praying you didn’t lose the hot, moving creature to the open spaces beyond.
Helen felt this same kind of desperate holding, a blade of sharp regret waiting to slice through her if she let go and lost it. Eventually, like a settling animal, the earth quieted and cooled. Helen opened her eyes and stood up, straightening her forest-stained nightgown. The sky had grayed with daylight, so Helen didn’t have to squint her way through the wood looking for the fallen thing. She heard a sound humming through the quiet bodies of the trees and tracked it to its source, winding her way around churned-up stones and seasons-ago debris.
A hole in the ground—small, the size of a child’s closed fist—glowed jewel green and sang out at her. Not words. Just a feeling. Helen knew she was supposed to protect it with soil, and to care for it. The thing’s demands coiled around her feet and hands, gently pulling her forward.
Helen’s hands were planting-skilled, so she covered over the opening like she would any seed. Unlike any other seed, though, this one began to grow right away. A bright vine swirled and opened out around her in the space of two stunned breaths, in and out. The plant looped around her wrist, holding her where she still crouched in the dirt. The tie was not sinister. It was a connection. Helen wasn’t afraid or worried—she felt chosen, happy. Happier than she’d ever been. The vine pulsed out at her, a drumbeat of feeling, and she bent toward its caress as though receiving an answer.
As she dipped closer, a link between her and that gleaming astral coal snapped into place. She felt it, sudden and secure, in the space behind her belly button, like a lid on a pot. And just like that, Helen Joseph knew exactly what to do to keep this glowing creature alive.
1
West Virginia, 1998
The garden was quiet, submerged in the kind of heavy, consuming sleep a child needed. Long summer days provoked this kind of thorough repair, from the land itself and the people who tended it. Cello loved these summer sleeps for their forgiving softness, and the nourishing visions they brought him in the night. When Joanie shook him awake in the dark, a finger pressed against her mouth, he almost turned back into his soothing, murky dream. Almost—Cello could never say no to Joanie. He flung himself back into consciousness, back into the trailer with Joanie and his other foster siblings. She gathered her hooded sweatshirt close across her chest and pointed for him to follow her outside. He pulled on his boots and gently closed the trailer door.
Joanie was already huddled over a cigarette, shivering, even though the night was hot. Since the baby had been born, she seemed permanently chilled. Cello reached out to her, but instead of taking his hand like he hoped she would, she passed him the burning Grand Prix.
“I found someone,” she said. The shoulder of her sweatshirt slipped down, exposing a too-sharp clavicle.
“What do you mean?” Cello tried not to look at the crescent of skin, and instead looked away, to where North River Mountain blotted out the clear night sky with its dark hunch.
“A buyer.” Joanie reached out for the cigarette and Cello passed it back without dragging from it.
“What? What do you mean a buyer?” he asked, wishing he sounded more confident, less confused. It was an unexpected proclamation. He and Joanie had nothing of their own to sell.
“Franklin Lees. He came to my wedding—that’s where I met him. He’s been trying to one-up Mother Joseph for years. Wants a crate of cuttings. From the Vine.” A slight tremor began in Joanie’s hands, and Cello saw the lit cigarette end wobble.
“No. Absolutely not,” he said, stepping toward her. He crossed his arms tightly, careful not to touch her. Of all the things at the garden that could be bought or sold, the Vine of Heaven was the only immutable constant. It had been there before them and would go on after them. Cello worked with it every day, but it was still a source of mystery—like cutting keys to doors he would never open. He knew that secretly removing the Vine from the garden was as impossible as removing his eyes from their sockets—it was the rule every member of their foster family understood. Letta would always know. Anytime it was pulled from the earth, she said she could feel it in her body. She had to lie down in the dark anytime a plot was cleared.
“The Vine belongs to me, too. I work hard enough for it. If I want to sell it, I should be able to sell it.” With a vicious tap, she sent a drift of glowing flecks from her Grand Prix onto the ground. “He’ll give me a car, Cello, and enough cash to really get away. Us, I mean. We can’t stay here anymore.” Cello didn’t ask if the “us” Joanie meant included the baby, or him, or all three of them. He saw the determination in the tensed muscles of her face and throat.
She had been closed off since the birth, like the separation of that little body from her own had torn her partially away from this world. But he also knew that Joanie was desperate enough to undertake the transaction without him, and that she would fail without his help. If she failed, and Mother Joseph found out, Joanie would be destroyed. Cello nodded into the dark, like a hypnotized man.
“Wait until tomorrow night, when it’s dark,” Joanie said, and Cello shuddered where he stood, trapped by Joanie’s grim resolve. “And make sure you wrap what you cut really tight. Like you’re smothering it. I’ll take care of everything else.”
“Alright, Joanie. Alright,” he answered, knowing it was what he would always say to her.
When Cello went back to bed, he dreamed of the earth splitting open. He dreamed of a crack running through the garden, upending the trailers and all of the old car carcasses in a rusty wave. The children screamed and scattered, and Joanie was swallowed up by that blank, dark seam, falling farther and farther into the center of the earth. Cello peered down into the crack, at the toes of his boots nearly dripping over the edge. Before he could jump in or run, his eyes flickered back open into their small, ordered world. The thin wail of Joanie’s baby woke him over the other sleeping bodies, and Cello jumped up to soothe him so the other kids could rest a little longer.
The baby slept in a crate in the trailer’s kitchen, and Cello had to step over Emil sleeping on a pallet of old blankets to reach him. The baby had a name, of course, but Cello hated to use it, hated that the baby bore the name of his biological father. Every time Cello held him, he was stunned in stupid love by the baby’s light, warm weight.
He took the child outside into the dewy night, and stared down into his blinking little face. The baby knew Cello loved him, as much as babies could know anything. If Joanie fled without him and took the baby, Cello didn’t think he would recover. But he didn’t know if he could endure a life away from the garden, either. His heart was buried as deep in the earth as the sacred Vine of Heaven that twisted and bloomed around them.
Mother Joseph had chosen each child and brought them to Letta and Sil and the garden’s fecund swirl. None of them really belonged there, but there they were, inexplicably held. Each child had come to the garden with a hastily signed, official document. Mother Joseph made sure this at least was done according to the law. Including Cello and Joanie, there were six of them. The youngest was Emil, who was five, followed by Miracle who was eight. Sabina and Marcela were older, thirteen and sixteen. Cello had always envied them a little for being real sisters.
The rest of them weren’t blood-related. They mostly looked alike, except for Cello. The kids had the same burned-tanned skin, and their hair and eyes were all shades of dark. Cello guessed that it was the way they lived—mostly outdoors, always out under the sun. Letta liked that they all looked the same. It was easier to pass them off as a family if anyone came to the farm.
Even Joanie looked that way: dark and darker. He was lighter than the others, even after years of working outside, and his hair was long and straight and blond. He hated how greasy he looked compared to the rest of them, how he looked like a stranger.
When the kids were old enough to ask, the questions came. They were a painful surprise each time. How did I get here? Will we always stay? There had never been any parents at the garden, only Sil and Letta. Parents had meant nothing—none of them had seen what it looked like for a mother to love a child until Joanie came home pregnant. When the tenderness began to show, when it started to lift from Joanie’s body like a haze of pollen, it had been Miracle’s turn to ask.
“There’s really a baby in her?” She combed her short, dark hair away from her face as she leaned in over Joanie’s belly.
“Of course, dipshit,” Marcela said.
“And it really comes out? Like an animal?” Miracle drew in her breath, astonished.
“Yeah,” Sabina said, her voice soft as she concentrated on rinsing out a round of washing in the sink. It was winter—February—when Joanie was nearly six months along. There wasn’t much to be done outside, so the six of them huddled in the kids’ trailer. Emil was asleep—still taking naps, he was so little.
“That’s how I came out?” Miracle asked. “Really?”
“Of course,” Cello told her.
“But Letta didn’t—”
“Oh, God, no!” Marcela called from her seat on the floor, scraping the peeling polish from her toenails.
“Then who?” Miracle had looked right at Cello then, her small mouth twisted, suppressing an enormous feeling.
“Who knows?” Marcela said, tying back her furiously curly hair. “You just showed up one day. Mother Joseph said she came by a new little one, and did Letta want to keep you.”
“Course Letta didn’t say no,” Sabina said, her smile a warm flare shot out specifically for Miracle. “You were the prettiest baby. And Sil was so happy. We had a drought then, and the day you came, it rained.”
“We saw Marcela and Sabina’s real mama,” Joanie said, looking up from her small globe of a belly.
“Who was she?” Miracle whispered.
Joanie looked over at Cello, unspooling the memory between them like two ends of a skipping rope. Mother Joseph’s truck had driven up to the trailers and the driver ejected a woman with a push from the cab. She was covered in lesions, a small, gaunt body wearing two different shoes. She’d dropped the children by the door like some macabre stork, and was swallowed back into the truck in the span of a minute. The two little girls hadn’t looked back once at the person who abandoned them. Marcela gripped her toddler sister against her side tightly and wailed when Letta first pulled them apart. Blood dribbled down Sabina’s soft little arms where Marcela’s uncut fingernails had held her close.
“She was nobody,” Marcela said as she lifted herself from the floor and moved to her sister’s side. She dipped her hands into the sink and began to wring out the wet clothes that pooled there.
“You remember her? Did you ever see her again?” Miracle asked.
Sabina shook her head.
“It’s a good thing we didn’t, because I would’ve strangled her if I had.” Marcela violently unfurled a small, green T-shirt—Emil’s favorite—as she said it.
“What about Cello and Joanie?” Miracle asked, looking over to where they sat, Joanie on her cot, Cello on a plastic crate.
“We don’t have the same parents,” Cello said, knowing that wasn’t what Miracle had meant, but unwilling to tell her more.
“Well, Joanie’s baby’s gonna have a mom,” Sabina said, turning to nod at Miracle. “And that’s nice.”
“Yeah, if nobody tells Mother Joseph about it,” Marcela mumbled.
“Of course nobody’s gonna tell her,” Joanie said, propping herself up against the trailer’s thin wall. She shot Marcela a sharp look, as though pinning the conversation closed.
Cello wondered now, with the child in his arms, if someone had told on Joanie. It would explain her panic, and her urgency. If Mother Joseph had found out about the baby, of course Joanie would be desperate. He swore—on his own two hands—that he would do anything to keep Joanie and the baby safe. He felt the soft waves of the baby’s tiny snores even out, and because it was still nearly dark, Cello carefully set the baby down beside Joanie, and left to do what she had asked.
Cello would never have believed he could be coldly deceitful, that he could betray the only family he’d ever had so swiftly or so easily. But it was easy, because Sil and Letta didn’t suspect him. It was Joanie who they watched carefully—she was unpredictable. They watched Marcela, too, because she was selfish. Nobody watched compliant, steady Cello.
The chill of the almost-morning raised gooseflesh along Cello’s arms and on the back of his neck. Sil and Letta would still be sleeping. Cello decided to cut from the very first plot that had ever been planted at the garden, because Sil checked it the least. Cello secretly hoped the cuttings would languish away from their parent plant. That way, Franklin Lees wouldn’t get what he wanted, but Joanie would, and his loyalty to the garden wouldn’t be too corroded. He still felt a tingle of nausea as he approached the old grove, dripping with green and fragrance.
The black walnut trees that stood nearby smelled ancient; Cello could almost feel the human lifetimes they’d passed crammed close together. He steadied himself on one of them, laying his palm on the bark the same way he’d settle an animal. Cello shuddered under another wave of guilt—how could any living creature trust him now? He wondered how permanently this transgression would change him.
The oldest plants in the clearing grew to Cello’s eye height. The sturdy central stalks were crisscrossed with yarn-fine shoots, and their blue floral crowns seemed to nod as Cello drew close. They harvested from the base of the Vine, removing only its crawling, twisting ivy-like appendages. The plants did well in the shade, and did best in this particular grove. Letta said it was because her ancestor had found the very first Vine rippling up through the forest floor in this exact spot. The Vine still leaned on and swelled against the trees, but had matured over many decades to stand on its own. Cello looked closely at the nearest plant, not sure where to make the cut. Any abrasion in the stalk would ruin it—since that was where the sap pulsed most aggressively.
Cello wondered if Franklin Lees would even know what to do with it, how to plant it, how to tend it. He took an X-Acto knife out of his back pocket and sliced off three of the youngest shoots, still spiraling loose, not yet fully tethered to anything. He untangled them, and, as gently as he’d held Joanie’s baby that morning, he wrapped them in an old T-shirt on the ground. Joanie had said to smother it, but Cello couldn’t bear to think of the Vine slowly suffocating in the summer heat, rolled up in the bone-dry fabric. He settled a few handfuls of damp earth between each fold, and carried the bundle out of the grove. He hid the soft parcel behind the deflated tire of a decaying Oldsmobile, more fossil than machine now, that Sil had parked out back years ago.
Cello snuck back into the trailer and checked on the baby to make sure he was still asleep before easing himself down onto his own cot, turning his back to the rest of his dreaming family. He wasn’t sure how much time was left before Letta came in to wake them, but he forced his limbs to quiet and his breath to even so that Letta wouldn’t be able to see the way the disgrace gripped his body. His pulse slowed as he thought of Joanie, of her relief. Imagining Joanie at peace brought him the same comfort as a cool washcloth to the back of the neck.
2
“Morning, children!” Letta crashed open the kids’ trailer door. It didn’t lock, and never fully closed, so whenever the wind was up, a constant whistling through the gap between the metal door and the frame serenaded them. Cello had always wondered if the trailer came that way, or if it had been mutilated by Letta’s brusque entrances and exits.
“Breakfast time!” she trumpeted. Letta pulled covers—and kids—off bunks. Cello could still smell the dew on the air. It was earlier than they usually woke up. His throat burned with nerves; could Letta already know what he’d done?
“Come on, come on.” She adjusted her rose sateen robe over a jutting sternum. “Miracle—out!” She banged her ring-coated fingers against the wall beside the little girl’s head. Miracle scooted out from under the blanket so that just a tiny strip of her forehead showed. They all knew she’d be punished for wetting the bed. Instead of inspecting Miracle’s bedding, though, Letta sidled up next to Joanie’s cot. She lay on her side, the baby beside her in the sheets.
“Come here, handsome,” Letta cooed at the baby, slipping Joanie’s hand from the baby’s belly. “Come with Mama Letta.” She bent over, plucked the baby away and swaggered back to the flapping, open door. “Come on, the rest of you,” she called over her shoulder. Sometimes Cello believed Letta was completely rotted away inside, but her tenderness for the most helpless things—for Joanie’s baby, specifically—it was real.
The kids fell out of their beds and wandered after Letta into the humid morning. Cello didn’t say a word, even to Joanie. He just pulled Miracle from her bunk and peeled the damp, stinking sheets from her mattress.
“Get dressed, Miracle,” Joanie said, her voice as harsh as Letta’s.
Miracle pattered to the corner where they kept all of their clothes in two piles: one clean, the other dirty. No one had their own things—they all shared and somehow it worked out. Only Joanie had clothes that were her own, mostly because she was the oldest, and because she had already been married.
When Joanie’s husband died, it was sudden and complicated. She had lived away from the garden for a little while with her new husband, but came back with the baby in her belly once he was gone. Letta had set up the marriage, of course. Joanie never would have picked Josiah Joseph—sixteen-year-old Joanie wouldn’t have picked anyone.
Cello watched her put new sheets on Miracle’s bed, the way her body stretched and moved. He could see the old marks on her back from her time at the Josephs’ between the straps of her camisole. The evidence of that harm eased his guilt a little—his betrayal was a fair price to keep her away from Mother Joseph, to keep her safe.
Cello followed Miracle outside where the others were already eating in the grass, a row of faces spooning cereal into their mouths. The dense constellation of freckles across Emil’s nose and cheeks was indistinguishable from beneath a layer of the garden’s grime.
“Y’all are filthy,” Cello said, shaking his head.
“Cello, why don’t you take the kids for a swim while Joanie and I have some girl talk.” Letta bounced Joanie’s baby in the shade of an old beech tree. “You kids listen to Cello. Don’t want any running off.” Letta didn’t look at the others as she said it—only at him. “Lots to do today.”
“Yes, Letta,” Sabina and Miracle chorused.
Letta carried the baby back into her and Sil’s trailer. When Cello and the others left for the creek, Joanie still hadn’t come out of the kids’ trailer.
The water that morning was muddy, and Cello guessed it must have rained sometime overnight. Usually he wouldn’t miss a thing like that, the sound of rain pouring over the trailer, pouring over the ground. Cello liked to know everything that happened to the soil, and he was surprised that he hadn’t noticed something as significant as a rainfall. Maybe Joanie’s plans had dulled him. Maybe secretly slicing away the shoots of the Vine had changed something, melted away at his connection to the garden.
“Hey, Cello!” Miracle splashed at him from the shallows of the creek.
“Careful, don’t fall,” he called back. “Try to keep the mud off you.”
The kids were noisy, unfolding into regular children away from Letta’s gaze. Emil chased Sabina through the shallows with a handful of mud, and she squealed away, ducking behind Miracle.
“Are you in trouble, Cello?” Marcela flounced over to where he slouched on the bank. “You look like you’re in trouble.”
Cello was quiet, squinting against the strengthening sun.
“You did something you weren’t supposed to, I can tell.”
“Shut your mouth, Marcela. You’ll get in trouble yourself if you go around accusing people.”
“Well, did you?” she asked. Her dark eyes narrowed as she examined him. She was trying to read something there, Cello thought. Something she had no business reading. ...
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