by Sydney Mann
art by Chloe Cordasco
Eastover, South Carolina, had not seen wolves since the paper mill company had come to town and brought with it clear cutting and acrid black smoke. There had been no flashes of red through the pines, no tufts of fur left on chicken wire, no paw prints painted in mud and blood on porches. There had been no howls to pierce the lonely dark, and no one to join along. The wolves, like most of the town, had left. When the dust of main street settled, all that was left was the post office, a bar, the old church, and the three women of the Woods family. From the veranda of the farmhouse that their foremothers had made and they themselves had mended, they had watched as the town bled dry. Soon, there was no one to bear witness to their diligence — to the blood and sweat they poured into the handful of acres that had provided for their family for generations. Nor to give testament to those that came calling to their door, first asking and then demanding they sell their land. No one but Eliza and Dorothy saw the strength in their aunt Helen’s upright back as she refused their offers. The three Woods women were the only true witnesses to the events that passed in the small southern town during one hot, humid summer.
“I’ve got a letter for you to write out, Dorothy.” Helen passed her a small square of paper, and began dictating.
“Dear Mr. Jenkins, we thank you kindly for your offer, however we cannot accept…” She looked expectantly at Dorothy, who had stopped writing and simply stared, mouth agape, at her aunt.
“I thought that after last night… you can’t be serious Helen?” Dorothy implored, her palms flat against the table.
“We’re not safe here, how could you ever plan on staying?” It was as Dorothy began to raise her voice that Eliza cut in.
“The Woods women have stayed here for decades, nearly a century, we have made it through much worse before,” she said plainly.
“And what of that?” Dorothy pointed through the front window to the red paint that streaked the porch. The bottoms of her shoes were still stained with it, and the nails of all three women were rimmed with red, though no amount of scrubbing had erased the words.
“Those are just words, Dorothy,” Helen said, as if she were simple.
“They are a threat,” Dorothy cried.
“No more of a threat than leaving this land!” Helen retorted, snatching the paper from Dorothy and passing it to Eliza, who reluctantly picked the pen up from where it lay discarded in the center of the table. Dorothy opened her mouth, as if to say more, but thought better of it.
“We cannot accept your offer at this time.” Helen concluded her dictation, and Eliza copied it out. She tried to make eye contact with her cousin, but her thoughts were elsewhere. Her gaze had slipped past the red on the porch, to the horizon and beyond as the sun began its descent.
“Now you want to slide this forward, and make sure to do it in one quick motion,” Helen instructed Eliza, who looked increasingly confused, gripping the ancient rifle they usually kept stored beneath the floorboards in her hands. Their house was set far back into the woods, and the setting sun filled the rooms with an amber glow broken by the long, jagged shadows of the branches outside the windows.
“Wolves are small and quick, the traps may do the trick but we’ll work on your aim tomorrow.” Helen had been but a child when the wolves left for good, but now they were back. There had been pawprints in the mud beside the chicken coop, and specks of blood, though by their count all the hens were accounted for.
“I don’t know if I can remember all this.” Eliza set the rifle on the table, as if it were suddenly a great weight too burdensome for her to carry.
“Well, you wouldn’t need to if we would just sell this land,” Dorothy moaned.
“A girl should know how to protect herself,” Helen said, her eyes hardened as she thought of all that may be prowling in the night other than light-footed wolves.
“If we had a man in the house,” Dorothy waggled her eyes at Eliza, who blushed to remember the young man who had courted her before leaving on the back of a cargo train.
“But we don’t,” Helen said harshly, as she placed the rifle back in Eliza’s open hands.
The sound of the gun being loaded and reloaded, taken apart, cleaned, and put back together, was the music of the afternoon, and then the melody of the night as darkness finally set in. The moon was barely cresting over the woods, and none of the women had made preparations for bed. Dorothy sat slumped, her mending work forgotten, while Helen and Eliza set aside the rifle in favor of spades. Neither spoke it aloud, but this was not a night for sleep; it was a night for vigilance. The paint on the porch was still damp, the rope from the noose that had been left swinging above it lay still in a corner — some use would eventually be found for it, but tonight it was simply a reminder. Beside the stack of worn and faded playing cards lay a box of ammunition.
“Smoke.” It was Dorothy who noticed it first, standing up so quickly her chair toppled backward. All three women moved at once, none needing to be told what to do. From outside, the fire was barely visible, still low to the ground, but spreading through their fruit bushes, primed for ignition from the dry summer. This work, too, was done in silence. With a practiced hand, Helen flung the wet towels they kept soaking in a trough over the top of the flames; they spread out in midair, landing with a wet sizzle. Eliza and Dorothy passed buckets between themselves, scooping from the small pond they kept filled for the animals; it would be empty when this was over. By the time the flames had quieted, the bushes and several saplings were gone, but the large pine trees remained upright and watchful, and the three women released a sigh, throwing the rags and buckets they clutched to the ground. Their relief, however, was short-lived as a figure strode through the smoke that still hung in the air.
“Evening, Mr. Pickens.” Helen gave a curt nod to the man. He was thin as a whip, still dressed for a day’s work in the office, and he looked around at the burnt crops with distaste.
“Lucky this didn’t burn out of control, and that the bushes weren't fruiting.”
“Nothing to do with luck; we put it out ourselves.” Helen wiped her hands on her pants, straightening her back so she was eye level with Mr. Pickens.
“Heard you’ve been asked to sell.” Eliza and Dorothy exchanged a glance; the land that surrounded theirs had been bought for cents on the dollar, and cleared faster than they could blink, all by Mr. Pickens and Mr. Jenkins, whose names were on the paper mill. It was they who now owned a ghost town.
“Must be hard, caring for all this land just the three of you, and what with Henry gone to war and returning lord knows when… well, no one could blame you if you did.”
“You know well as I do that this land’s been in the family for generations, my children are buried here, their mothers’ buried here,” Helen gestured to the girls behind her. “And we will be too.”
“I have no doubt about that.” Mr. Pickens turned before Helen could respond and disappeared across the line that marked the beginning of his own property.
All three women looked at each other. Dorothy was ashen and looked close to being sick, but Helen simply pursed her lips and ushered them inside. They did not speak of what they would do in the morning, whether they would pack their bags and walk out of town, or if they would dig their roots even deeper into the land, holding onto all they knew and loved, contained within a few acres.
***
When dawn stretched its fingers through the Woods’ home, it found the three women already in the kitchen, clutching mugs of coffee. All were unwilling to voice what they felt was the obvious conclusion.
We must fight back.
We must flee, now, quickly.
We must persevere.
It was Dorothy who spoke first.
“I’m leaving within the week.” The clock over the sink ticked away.
“But Dorothy, we can make this work; we can make an agreement with them, we’ll only sell some of the wood and then……”
“Maybe I want something better than this,” Dorothy cried. “Maybe I don’t want to be afraid all the time.”
“That’s life, child,” Helen said, a hardness in her eyes as she remembered the last four decades spent in the town. The lives she had felt slip through her fingers, the battles she had fought and the scars they had left.
“I heard up North that they ain’t got a colored section no more and that there’s even an interracial couple all out and about in public and no one cares and —”
“That’s a fantasy, Dorothy! that’s not real life! How do you think that happened? You think they got together all peaceful like and they hugged out the fact that their daddy used to own my daddy? Child, please, this is the real world.”
“This is America.” She spat out the last word like it was dirty.
“You don’t get nothing unless you take it,” she pushed her finger into Dorothy’s chest, “and you don't have the spine to take nothing that ain’t already placed down right in front of you.”
“It will be better one day,” Dorothy said softly, wrapping her arms around herself.
“Maybe, but that day ain’t today and it certainly ain’t gonna be tomorrow, so until then, we’re gonna keep protecting this land, and we ain’t gonna leave it.” Helen stood firmly in the kitchen, legs planted wide.
“Helen, I —”
“Don't argue with me, girl; your father’s last wish was that I keep his baby safe, and by God, that is what I’m gonna do even if it means I have to chain you to this damn house.” Her hands shook at her side and Eliza looked worriedly between the two women. She could not remember ever seeing Helen this riled, not since they had found Peter, that day she had gone from living to surviving. Had the stoicism that kept her working so hard been worth it all?
“Maybe if you’d moved with Uncle Isaiah then Peter would —”
Helen didn’t utter a word before her open palm connected with Dorothy’s cheek, leaving the room in a tense silence before Helen clenched her fists to her side and strode through the front door. Dorothy wiped tears away as she hurried out the back door. Between them, Eliza stared at each receding back; by the time she decided who to follow, they were out of sight.
***
It was Dorothy who returned first, and seeing the lecture prepared on Eliza’s face, left again to begin the work of refilling the small pond in the yard with buckets from the lake. She was still gone as the house began to fill with a warm red afternoon glow.
“He’s dead.” Helen began pulling up the boards and grabbed the rifle from where it lay, clean and polished and ready for use.
“Pickens, they found him dead this morning, mauled by that damn wolf.” Eliza stifled a gasp.
“Heard it from one of the errand boys, now that Pickens is out of the way Jenkins wants his full parcel of land, and he ain’t willing to be as patient.” Helen loaded the rifle, buckshot sliding neatly into place. So they were to fight. It was only as she saw the look on Eliza’s face that she registered Dorothy’s absence.
“Where is she?”
“She, she’s down by the lake.” Eliza’s face blanched. The lake, the lake that backed the Jenkins’ property. The lake from where men would come as soon as it was dark enough that their faces would be cast in shadow and their actions hidden in the trees. Helen took this information in stride.
“Lock up the house, take the butcher knife from behind the chickens, and meet me in the hollow oak.” She looked over her shoulder at Eliza. “Don't worry, I’ll keep us safe.” She disappeared back into the night, and Eliza allowed herself three deep breaths to gather her nerve before doing as she was told.
The night air was crisp, the sun barely sunk, and the moon not yet risen, and all was cast in a purpley-blue light. The snap of every twig and brush of every branch set Eliza’s nerves on edge, and she held the cleaver with two hands so as to stop their trembling. She did not dwell on what a knife could do against men armed with guns, how Helen hoped to secure their safety, or why they had stayed when they could have left. She did not think about the way they had found Peter’s body on the edge of this very property, swinging slowly, his face so disfigured they had identified him by a cracked pocket watch. She did not think of the graves she walked over, her mother and her baby brother, her cousin and her grandma. She did not think of all the blood they had poured into the soil, a century’s worth of sweat and work. What would be lost, if they lost this land?
When she arrived at the hollowed-out oak she tried to slow her breathing, the sound of her racing heart flooding her ears, and pressed her body into the rotting wood. The moon rose slowly as darkness set in, and the shadows between the trees lengthened into inky voids.
Eliza did not know how long it had been since Helen had come back when she heard a scream in the dark. Eliza did not think twice; she ran towards where she knew the water’s edge to be, away from the lights of the house barely visible through the woods and towards the remains of her family. Another scream, now mingled with choking sobs, rang out, and Eliza knew in her heart that it was Dorothy. But where was Helen?
“Dorothy!” Eliza was running blind, chasing after where she thought the sound came from. It was as if all her muscles had been ready for this moment. Years of tension had left her spring loaded, ready to bound into action; as if she had been bred and born for running and fighting. As she came closer to the woods’ edge, she could hear voices.
“I… shoot…. Her go.” Helen's voice, unmistakably calm and stern. The response could not be heard, but Eliza could make out Dorothy’s whimpers of pain. She emerged into a clearing beside the lake in time to see a man gripping Dorothy by the roots of her hair as she tried to kick out of his grasp. He was pulling her back, towards the crowd of men, hooded and standing between the trees like watchful tombstones when a blur knocked him over. He screamed once before the shadow on top of him tore into his throat. Blood sprayed onto Dorothy’s face, and she ran behind Helen, who gripped her with one hand while keeping the rifle level with the other. The men retreated slowly at first, blood staining their white robes, but as their fallen comrade gurgled out a last breath and scrabbled at the ground trying to escape the shadowy mass still on top of him, they turned and ran. Within seconds, they had disappeared into the woods.
It was the wolf. It had to be the wolf. But even as the women recognized this, reality seemed to change before them. A reddish coat rippled, hind legs lengthened, there was a horrible snapping and crunching, and an animal keening sound, and before them. A woman. She was completely naked, her arms and legs and lips coated in what may have been mud or blood. Her hair was matted into thick locks, and it was turning gray at the roots. She panted slowly, nudging the body before her with her foot.
“Josephine?” Helen queried, simultaneously pushing Eliza and Dorothy behind her so she could properly aim her rifle.
“That won’t do any good,” the woman said, her voice was hoarse and deep as if she had not spoken in many weeks.
“You, you were a wolf,” Eliza said at the same time Helen said, “You are supposed to be dead.”
“No, I am a woman.” She straightened, as if suddenly aware of her appearance. “And I certainly am not dead.”
“Is he dead?” Helen gestured to the man.
“Yes.” The woman regarded Eliza, Dorothy, and Helen with a critical eye. Eliza and Helen now stood shoulder to shoulder; behind them, Dorothy had sunk against a tree, her eyes vacant.
“Why?” Helen finally asked.
“Because he was going to kill you.”
“I didn't ask you to —”
“You didn’t need to.” She took a step closer, and Helen cocked the gun, but she didn’t step back.
“Did you think it was simple luck that you never lost a chicken nor goat, that you never had any thefts, that the man coming after your house died so suddenly? Come now,” she smiled coyly.
“No one’s that lucky, and certainly not three black girls.”
“You’re Josephine Larouge.” Eliza thought back to the few photos she had seen of her great-aunt, the almond shape of her eyes, the slight cleft lip.
“I’ve been called that, yes.”
“Why shouldn’t I shoot you?” Helen cocked the rifle.
“I told you it wouldn’t do any —”
The woman doubled over as the shot rang out. Helen’s aim was true, but within seconds the woman stood upright again. Helen dropped the rifle in shock.
“You, I —, you’re. You’re dead.”
“You need me,” the woman said, looking past Helen’s incredulous face and locking eyes with Eliza. She wanted to press her back into the tree and sink down beside her cousin, but she held the woman’s gaze. Her eyes flickered over the blood congealing and dripping like syrup from her fingers, the sinew and striations of the muscles in her legs and back, her shoulders pulled back so she looked as if she had conquered both the man below her and the forest itself. She held herself like she could not be touched nor tamed by any man.
“We were doing just fine before you killed a man on our land.” Helen bent to retrieve her fallen weapon, keeping her gaze fixed ahead.
“Were you? A mob came to do god knows what, half your land burned, waking up to nooses, that’s doing just fine?”
“What kind of help… are you offering?” Eliza said, stepping forward so she was shoulder to shoulder with Helen.
“A little bit of this, a little bit of that…” Josephine curled her hand, and all three women gasped as they saw fingers stretch and elongate, nails thicken and curve.
“You’re a werewolf,” Dorothy said, her voice equal parts awe and fear.
“Something like that.”
“You want to make us… like you,” Eliza posed, brows furrowing.
“Yes,” the woman said simply.
“Why can’t you just keep doing what you’re doing?”
Josephine looked annoyed, as if Dorothy had asked a stupid question.
“Because I am old, and my bones hurt, and clearly it hasn’t been enough,” Josephine gestured around her.
Helen and Eliza exchanged glances, shoulders pressed tightly together, Dorothy peering unseeing from behind their legs; what were they to think?
But how could I not seize power when it is offered, even if power comes in the form of violence? But could I live and hunt as a beast and still know what it is to be a woman? But is there any choice, truly, in which I could live with the path not taken?
The first woman that stepped forward placed a hand tentatively in Josephine’s open palm. She could feel the blood coating the tips, the knowledge that this would not be the last time they were stained in such a way. But the moon had finally risen, all was cast in a silver light, and for the first time in a very long time, she felt powerful.
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