Chapter 11: Pick up the Bones II
(ALICE COOPER)
She doesn’t sleep, exactly. She sits in the car, eyes closed. In her mind, she plans out what she’ll do once the sun rises on a new day. A proper funeral will be hard to achieve when she works alone. There is no way that she can make coffins for everyone that died. She doesn’t want to ask anyone from the nearby town to help, either. That will lead to more gossip and someone might leak the disaster into a newspaper. She can’t have this out in the open right now.
She made a Blood Oath with the Bull King, and she plans to keep it. She’ll be in the Bull’s Compound eventually, but first she has to put her people to rest. After that she will meet up with an old friend of Red King. Every one of her ten days of grace will be used well.
When the sun tints the sky in orange, she forces herself to eat the last of the snacks from her road trip stash. She drinks an entire bottle of spring water. Bodies need food to function, and she has set goals for herself. Finally, she gets out of the car to open the gate. Slowly she drives into the homestead, hardening herself against the pain. There will be time for more weeping later, when everything is done.
She parks her car in front of the home she shared with Luka. This is the only home still standing. They didn’t burn it. Were they hoping she’d return to find it standing, like the last survivor of a war? She sits in the car, gathering her courage. Three days from now it will be the tenth anniversary of that day. The day when everything fell apart.
Shaking her head to dispel the memories, she opens the car door. She’ll start here and see what she can do for the rest of The Farm if there is time. It will be gruesome and emotionally draining, but she’s the only one left to do the work, and it has to be done. She rushes to the front door. It is locked. Moving off the porch, she topples a potted fern at the side of the stairs. The spare key is still there. She lifts it, wiping ten years of grime off on her shirt.
Unlocking the door is the straightforward part of the work ahead of her. Yet, she stands at the open door, looking in, and waiting. Waiting for what, exactly? For Luka to come rushing out, smiling sweetly and happy to see her? Waiting for Gavin’s baby cries to call her towards his room? Or Catriona’s voice, calling them to the table for dinner. She did that often in those last months. Helping Blaire and Luka to cope with the sickly baby and then the bereavement.
Catriona, always the caring older sister. Visiting almost daily. Doing the washing. Cooking meals. Cleaning the kitchen. Dusting. Vacuuming. Doing all the wifely duties that she just couldn’t manage after Gavin’s birth. Catriona, always taking care of everything and everyone.
Fucking hell. She was so stupid. So blind. Completely clueless. The anger rising inside her is the final push she needs to step across the threshold. This is just a house. That’s all. It’s not a home. Not to her. Not anymore.
Inside everything is almost as it was the day she left. Someone came to clean it, obviously. White sheets turn furniture into caricature ghosts. The decorations, pictures and paintings are all packed in crates marked clearly. She walks through the rooms, allowing the memories to come. In Gavin’s room, she falls to her knees next to the cot he slept in. She bites back tears. There is no time to cry. Or to fall apart.
She rises, hoping that the bedding will still be in the cupboard where she left it. It was, but in large plastic bags. Opening them, she takes out the pillowcases, stacking them neatly on the floor. After this, she enters the kitchen, looking for heavy duty cleaning gloves and hand soap. She carries all this outside, to the shed where Luka kept the garden tools. As always, the door is padlocked, but the lock isn’t closed. She knows everything will still be inside. It is dark, with no window. The light doesn’t come on when she pushes the switch. Using her mobile, she searches for the wheelbarrow.
Once outside, she loads all the items into this, and makes her way towards her grandfather’s house. Nobody needs to tell her this is where her youngest sister, Skye, and her family lived after Grandmother’s passing. This wasn’t the leader’s home, but the first home Red King built. It would have gone to her parents and then to Catriona, her and finally Skye. She knew how terribly sad Skye must have been when the place opened up, and she realized that an entire line of her family was gone. Skye, whose name meant adventurous. Skye, who has never in her life acted boldly.
“Well, mom,” Blaire says loudly, “at least you got it right with me. Catriona, who’s ‘pure’ was a fuckup, and Skye wasn’t bold. But me, I’m a warrior and I’ve been on a battlefield or heading that way most of my life.”
She leaves the wheelbarrow in the driveway. Then she pulls on the gloves and picks up a single pillow case. For a moment, the tears threaten to come, but she swallows quickly, turning her head slightly to the left.
“This is not the time for crying,” she tells herself. “First, you gather the bones. You, Blaire Nathara, have to wait for the funeral before you weep. No, not even then. Cry after the taste of vengeance. Earn the right to mourn them.”
She steps into the backyard with a sigh. She allows the bones to call her. For years, the rattling of bones has been her constant companion. Now, she will follow the calls of bones to gather the remains of her family and loved ones.
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Blood for blood. That is the clan way. She assumes it’s also the Bull Tribe’s way. The Chinese Cartel already proved that it was their way. No police. No politicians. They never needed outsiders to solve their problems. They punished perpetrators the way they saw fit. They lived by rules that governed them since the first time Red King put his feet on the land that would become The Farm. The mafias were pirates on land, Red King once explained to her.
“We are like ships passing each other on the open ocean, bear,” he said, sweeping his arm across the horizon. “We keep out of each other’s way, as best we can. And when our paths cross, we keep to our own rules. The rules of the sea. The rules of pirates. Because the ocean is vast, and law enforcement can’t reach us.”
Blaire turns to look at a tree. At the roots of the still smoldering heap, something calls to her. She moves forward, clutching the pillow case. There is a skull. No flesh. No hair. A faceless skull grinning up at her with perfect teeth. She only has to touch it with her bare hands to know who it is. Not even a hand, just a fingertip. That is all. But with that would come the memories of the skull. She doesn’t want to see how violent the death was. That’ll be too much for her, for anyone.
She rubs her one gloved hand with the other, as if they are two friends in need of support. In her head, she can imagine them talking to each other. Come on, righty-tighty, you can do it. She lifts the skull carefully. Her heart beats with fists inside her breast, wanting to climb out. She opens the pillowcase and places the remains there.
“Time to rest,” she says, her voice sounding far away to her own ears. “Sweet dreams.”
Bile rises from her stomach. It is a bitter, toxic taste on her tongue. She rises, stepping away from the tree with the pillowcase in her shaking hands. Swallows deeply. Rolls her shoulders back. Lifts her chin. Then she listens carefully. Next to the stairs leading into the kitchen is a hand. Although it’s burned and severed at the wrist, she recognizes the ring. It belongs to an oath brother. Alastair. He was a short, bulky man, but strong. A boxer. Light on his feet. Fast with his fists.
She added the piece to the pillowcase carefully. She left the ring where it belonged. There will be plenty of money in The Farm’s accounts to rebuild. She doesn’t need to steal from the dead to pay her way. She climbs the stairs slowly, running her fingers over the red bricks of her family home. A row of bullet holes scars the stone. She counts them as she passes to the door. Twenty-three.
She steps into the kitchen. The roof is gone, as well as most of the wall separating this room from the dining room next door. But the outside brick walls are still standing, black with root and bullet scarred. Also the hearth, where wood fires used to cook their food. Soups and stews for winter. BBQ for summer. Lasagna and mac and cheese. On the coldest winter evening, they all gathered here, enjoying the warmth of the fire and each other’s company. Red King and father would sing. Red King’s baritone and father moving to tenor. Sometimes they would beg Blaire’s mother with her soprano to join them.
Now there are bloodstains on the floor of the kitchen. From the heath the bones call to her, like a child calls its mother from a crib. She walks there briskly, wanting this to end. The wood is stacked in the cavity, just the way Red King taught them. But this wood is recently cut and unburned. In fact, it’s the only thing in the kitchen that isn’t burned at all. She searches for the bones. The sound is louder now, bleating like an injured lamb. Anger rises in her again. The red-hot fire burns in her veins. She pushes the stack of wood, shouting a curse.
In her mind’s eye she can see Rad King’s palm coming closer, aiming for the back of her head. He hated when they used bad words in his house. The chopped wood falls, and she has to jump aside to spare her feet. Three rib bones tumble to the floor. They have with a thin layer of meat. The sight of it makes her shiver. She adds it to the pillowcase with shaking hands.
An icy wind blows in through the door, disturbing the ashes on the floor. She finds a leg in the corner. A clump of hair and blood against a wall. She clears the place as fast as she can, filling two of the pillowcases. She counts fifty one bullet holes.
The day passes slowly as she walks through the homestead. She loads the pillowcases onto the wheelbarrow. Eleven loads of remains. She pushes it to the town square, where the fountain is nothing but a dry pit. In the early evening light, she drags branches and firewood into the pit. When she’s satisfied that it will be enough, she stacks the pillowcases upon the pyre, sprinkling them with gasoline from a can she keeps in the car.
Once everything is stacked, she lights it. By the time the moon rises from behind the skeleton of her family home, the flames are licking at wood and remains. She sits down on the decorative bricks of the courtyard, lighting a cigarette. She closes her eyes, but the tears burst out of her like a river that has been restrained too long. This time, she doesn’t fight to keep it inside. There is no way for her to keep it in, anyway. Her grief is too powerful to ignore. Her pain is too enormous to push down the dark abyss that is her heart.
She watches the smoke. At first it is only wisps, thin tendrils sneaking upward. An hour later, with the wind lightly blowing on the flames, it is a thick wide column of smoke. It whirls upward, a silent scream of agony. The voices of the dead crying to the heavens for justice.
She rises then, sprinkling herbs and speaking an incantation. This time the past is clear, as if she is looking at a movie. The Bull Tribe, guns ablaze, whips cracking, swords slicing. They move through the homestead. She memorizes each of the eleven faces. Watch them slaughter her people like cattle, as if they are nothing but meat, as if they weren’t people at all.
“But it’s you,” she spits the words at the shapes of the Bull Tribe. “You are an inhumane race of motherfuckers. And I’ll have my vengeance. I swear on the blood of my ancestors, nothing will grow on this land until the day I have extracted justice. An eye for an eye, the law says. Blood for blood, I say.”
Someone sighs next to her. She doesn’t turn to see who it is. She knows her father hates this pledge. But he isn’t the one standing next to the pyre in the real world. He doesn’t feel the physical ashes fall on his face and hands. He can’t even smell their burning flesh.
Blaire’s stomach cramps. She hasn’t eaten all day. Not since this morning. Despite this, she bends over to vomit. The yellow putrid puss barely misses her feet. She vomits until there is nothing left in her stomach, and still her body shakes. Still, she vomits, even when nothing more than dry gagging sounds escapes her throat.