are we not all, spiritually, full of walnut hulls?

I was twelve when the war started. My father was never a man to miss an opportunity, and he set himself up as a doctor right quick, made a reputation for himself as a miracle worker, putting dead men back in their bodies so they could go and fight another day. Who really minded if prisoners of war kept dropping dead of a mysterious wasting sickness at the same time?

It wasn’t that there was any money in it, God knew the pay was shit, but it had other things my father wanted, among them plenty of opportunities for him to teach me the family trade.

I never knew my mother. Wouldn’t even be sure that I had a mother, that I weren’t another of my father’s monsters, except that he did tell me how he got me. I was a price paid, in exchange for her husband’s resurrection. My father claimed he didn’t even remember her name.

What the war gave my father that he most wanted, was a place close to power. The war was two years gone, half over though we didn’t know it then, when my father finally revealed to the general what we did. I remember my father waking me in the middle of the night to do a demonstration.

It was my task to find a man in the hospital tent who had breathed his last, but not yet been discovered. I found a boy of only about seventeen, one who I had met while he lived, and liked more than I should. He was a joker, the kind it was easy to make friends with. He had been teaching me how to play cards and, more importantly, how to cheat. His name was Jonah, and I wanted to see him smile again.

I helped my father to prepare while the general held the lantern, not understanding at the time the reservation and fear on the man’s face. What my father and I did was to me as natural as any other occupation. I knew we had to be secretive, because our work was illegal my father said, but I did not realize then how our trade made others recoil in revulsion.

I was the one who drew the dead boy’s chin up, cradling his head so my father could draw a line of the necessary oil down the outline of his windpipe and say the necessary words. I was still holding that boy’s head when his body gave a great convulsion and he cried out in terrible pain, as they always did. I was numb to it then. I saw the boy’s eyes go wide with terror, but he was alive, color rushing back into his cheeks, feverish warmth in his previously cold skin.

The general cursed and nearly dropped the lantern. My father turned all his attention to the general and it was left to me to soothe the fear of the newly resurrected, to give him water and wipe the sweat from his brow.

The look he gave me then, I still see it sometimes when I close my eyes at night. “You should have left me there.”

I didn’t know what to say. Father made him sleep, and by morning Jonah had forgotten whatever he had seen in the hours he was dead, but there was something yet changed about him.

I never did see him smile after that.

My father got what he wanted, though. He had total control over the dead soldiers, making them get up again so they could go on fighting again and again and again. He was petty king of the camp, the doctor everyone hated and no one could deny seemed to be able to do the impossible. He gloated in it, and I don’t know what he meant to do with it all once the war ended.

Half of me believes that if I hadn’t killed him, the war would have gone on forever.

The only kind of love my father could give was the love of the branding iron. He didn’t care one whit about anything he couldn’t claim as his own. It was why he named me after himself and it was a name I was glad to bury with him.

I killed him six months before the end of the war, just shy of my sixteenth birthday. I killed him because I couldn’t stop thinking about Jonah telling me I should have left him to the grave, or how he never smiled or joked anymore and wouldn’t even take out his cards to play. I took my father’s black book, all the money we had left, and I left long before dawn. Had to go on foot, because horses had never liked me or my father, but I knew how to be a shadow under the moonlight.

I needed time before I would be ready to face anyone again. I let my hair grow, my tangled curls going wild, and I thought about what I was going to call myself, how I would remake myself in a world without my father in it.

Last names didn’t matter to me, I could pick them up and shed them as I needed. It was the given name that troubled me, I tried on a dozen more in those months I was by myself in the forests, muttering them to the stars and the eyes I felt watching me in the dark.

I settled on Hesper. Evening. That space in-between, when the light slipped away and the only things that could see me were the moon and the stars and the creatures that didn’t see me for the unfinished thing I was.

#

It was over a year before I let myself be seen again. I had come to a cabin belonging to a grey-haired old man, who I found splitting firewood. I asked him if he could spare a place by the fire for me, in exchange for the two rabbits I’d shot that morning.

Even in spite of the changes I had made to myself, he took me for a man, and seemed happy enough to have a visitor. He invited me in, said his wife would cook for us.

His “wife,” if she could be called that, weren’t a day over thirteen. She had the scared and mean look of a dog that had been kicked too many times, and I was nice and courteous to her and the old fuck both, which pleased him more than I liked. He said not many people knew their proper manners these days, in a way I knew that remark was meant more for the girl than me.

We sat down at the table while that poor girl skinned the rabbits, and the man asked me what I did. I told him I was a healer looking for a new place to set down roots. Asked him if he had any ailments that needed looking after.

Any excuse to get my hands on the bastard.

He told me had an old injury in his shoulder that troubled him. I asked the girl to go and get me some fresh water, so she wouldn’t have to see what I was about to do. The old man shouted at her to hurry up as I rolled up my sleeve, and once that door closed behind her I plunged my hand into his chest.

If you know what you’re doing, human flesh parts like warm butter under your hands. I wrapped my fingers around his heart while he was choking and closed my fist tight, his blood running hot down my arm and dripping from my elbow. He dropped like a stone, thudding against the floor.

I bent, taking what I needed from his body. I covered the hole in his chest and closed his eyes before the girl came back, and she found me putting the things I took from him into jars. The pail of water slipped from her hands, a puddle splashing across half the room, mixing with the blood on the floor.

I wiped the blood from my hands and started cutting apart the rabbits, putting them in the soup pot the girl had prepared. I asked her where she was from.

The girl stood in the door, and told me she’d grown up not far away, that her pa had sold her to her husband for the price of a pig. Weren’t any better living with her pa, and if she went back he’d probably turn around and find someone else for her to marry.

I told her I was going west, asked her if she wanted to come along with me for a while, until she was able to look after herself or found some place she wanted to stay.

She said she’d like that.

I told her to mind the pot, I’d take care of her late husband. I left her standing by the stove while I dragged the bastard out by his boots.

They were good boots, so I took them. Fit me decent. I took his knife and the buttons from his shirt.

I didn’t have a mind to take the effort to bury him, so I made sure his ghost wouldn’t come back and I called up the mushrooms over his body to take care of him. He blossomed all over with pretty white caps and by the time anyone came looking for him there wouldn’t be anything to find.

When I got back to the cabin the girl had mopped up the blood and water on the floor and brought down everything valuable the old man had owned. I took his rifle, because it was better than the one I had, and I took his bullets and let her pick through the other things she might want to keep or sell.

I asked her what her name was. She introduced herself as Peggy Duncan.

“You can keep Peggy,” I said, “but your last name ain’t Duncan anymore.”

We ate rabbit soup and decided we would be Hesper and Peggy Cochran, sisters. We slept that night in the cabin and left early the next morning after breakfast.

The old man had a horse but Peggy couldn’t ride, so we turned it loose. We walked all day and well into the night, which was hard on Peggy.

We walked until we found a westbound train to hop, tucking ourselves in among the freight and being sparing with our food and mostly going hungry. While that black iron horse thundered westward, Peggy taught me how to carry myself like a woman, how to comb out my hair so I didn’t look quite so wild. I repaid her in card games and filthy jokes I had learned from the soldiers, and she would laugh even as her face flushed red to the tips of her ears.

It was nice. I hadn’t ever really had a friend before.

We got off the train when it was nothing but prairie for miles, in a little town that called itself Grand River. It wasn’t grand, and the river wasn’t much more than a lazy muddy creek.

It was exciting to spin myself a new story: the daughter of a doctor, one who trained me up out of paternal indulgence. Grand River didn’t have a doctor, so they were a little more willing to make do with a young woman who ought to have been thinking about marriage instead. The good people of Grand River let us take a little cabin not far from the church to call our own. It had used to belong to a couple that had gone back east when farming turned out to be more than they had bargained for.

Didn’t take me long to figure out how to twist my father’s magic to be something a little more useful to the living. I couldn’t use it to heal anybody else, but if I took on their wound, swapped out their illness for my health I could draw upon his black book to heal it in myself. And if coyotes had a way of dropping dead when they drew too near to my cabin, well that was one fewer to eat the neighbor’s chickens.

The folks of Grand River weren’t stupid, they knew I wasn’t any real doctor, but it only took saving a few people for them to decide to look the other way. I might’ve been some kind of witch, but their babies were born safe and a boy who was mauled by a dog walked out of my cabin without so much as a scratch on him. A woman’s abortion went bad, and I took her fever. All I ever asked of them was enough food and firewood for me and Peggy, and for their discretion. They gave both in ample supply.

Neither Peggy or me had much use for church, which was a thorn in the side of Pastor Matthews, who counted every other resident of Grand River in his flock. Every Sunday after church he would come to our cabin, to the faint disgruntlement of both the residents who were accustomed to hosting him for supper, and to me and Peggy who had to cook for him.

We decided to make a game of it, finding a way to drive the pastor off. The jokes didn’t do it, as a newly-ordained Matthews had ministered to soldiers during the war. For a time Peggy committed to acting like a wild animal or a heathen witch, but Matthews only reacted with mild irritation at the antics of a girl “old enough to know better.”

So I set about to try and seduce the good pastor, to test his commitment to his principles. I worked on him for months, suggestion and implication, a careless touch that might’ve been nothing. Peggy sewed me a dress to wear when he came round, and I made sure my lips were pink and shiny. I wound him tight and let him spin.

He came up to our cabin when the moon was full and bright and you could see for miles across the prairie. I was sitting out on the porch, idle as only a witch can be, listening to the coyotes yipping out in the dark. Matthews was as hot as the summer wind, scorching when he kissed me. Told him I couldn’t take him inside with Peggy there, so he took me back to the church, and there before the altar I gave that man something to believe in.

#

Maybe I was never meant to have peace for more than a few years.

Peggy grew tall with nobody to beat her down, and pretty enough that there were always boys and men too old for her snooping around our cabin. I chased off the men, and I let the boys stay because even if Peggy had lost her taste for husbands, she hadn’t lost her taste for fun. The mothers in town disapproved of her, but it wasn’t enough to keep their sons away from our cabin. Only thing I cared about was making sure Peggy knew how to take care of herself, both with the boys and any trouble they put her in.

Pastor Matthews was still chasing after me like a hound on the scent every time the moon was full, and it was entertaining for a while, but eventually became a tedious annoyance. The man didn’t have enough pride to keep his guilt to himself, and I didn’t care to soothe his troubled mind. Even taking up with a few other men in town wasn’t enough to dissuade the pastor. I think the only things that kept him from asking me to marry him was that I wouldn’t reassure him my healing was a gift from God, and the fact that my church attendance was limited to the hours after sunset.

I could smell it in the air, when trouble started coming for me out of the east. I didn’t know what kind of trouble, but it came with a thunderhead wind on the same black iron horse that had brought me and Peggy. All my hair stood on end the day that train rolled in to town, a feeling I couldn’t name and couldn’t shake. It was a stiflingly humid day, not fit for the kind of restlessness that had overtaken me. Peggy thought I was having fits. We were laid out on the shade of our porch, trying to catch the breeze when the man who had gotten off the train came walking up the path to our cabin.

He didn’t recognize me then, but I would have known him in the dark, the shape of that mouth that had never once smiled after my father had forced his soul back into his body. He wasn’t a boy anymore, he’d grown into his arms and legs and he wore a thick black beard. Jonah Blake stood with the sun beating down on him, looking up at me from under his broad-brimmed hat. “Folks here tell me you know things,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said, my sweat turned icy cold on my skin. “What are you looking to know?”

His voice never wavered while he told me the story, how he’d struggled after the war, and by the time he found his way home the house he’d been born in had been burned to the ground and nobody could tell him what had happened to his mother or his sister. “I want to know if they’re still alive,” he said, “and where I can find them.”

He paused, squinting at my face. “Have we met before?”

“I’m no medium,” I said, “I’m not in the business of talking to spirits.” Corpses didn’t bother me, but ghosts were a nasty business, all pain and things that refused to stay buried.

“Well the spiritualists can’t seem to give me nothing but tricks, anyway,” Jonah said, “so what can you do, that the folks here think you can help me?”

“I treat wounds, that’s all.”

“I had a woman tell me you as good as raised her boy out of the grave when he was sick with yellow fever,” Jonah said. “Said you spoke to the dead to do it.”

“People will tell themselves whatever they need to make sense of what they don’t understand,” I said. I wanted Jonah Blake to give up on me before he figured out where he knew my face from. “I can’t help you.”

I put him off day after day when he came to my door to plead and to argue, having apparently some conviction that I could help where the mediums and Mesmerists could not. I even asked Pastor Matthews to warn him away from me, but it only seemed to increase Blake’s stubborn bull-headed commitment.

“Why not try to help him?” Peggy asked. “You could probably figure something out.”

“Because this isn’t the first time he’s met me,” I said, “and I don’t want him to remember the first time.”

Blake took to following me, even when I went out to work. I was called out because Mrs. Loman had cut her hand badly, and needed looking after. Blake followed me all the way to her house, and stood outside while I took Mrs. Loman’s cut. I came out with my hand bandaged, aching something terrible, and had the misfortune of crossing paths with Mr. Loman’s horse, a gelded mustang who jerked away from me and panicked at the end of his tie. I hurried off down the street, but Blake had already seen it and I could almost feel it as he put the pieces together.

I got to my cabin before he did but he came banging on the door, shouting and demanding for me to come out. Peggy didn’t know what was going on and cried out when I took the rifle from over the door to greet Blake, determined that if he wouldn’t leave on his own I’d shoot him and be done with it.

Jonah scowled at me with such an ugly look. “You bitch, you’re the necromancer’s boy.”

I stood in the door, halfway between the place I’d come to call home and the world that had never wanted me in it. “I ain’t no boy,” I hissed.

“I thanked God every day I didn’t see you or your witch father,” he spat. “Hoped you’d both been hanged, but now I find you here playing doctor. Those folks out there know what you used to do? Do you still do it?”

“What those folks out there know is that they haven’t lost a baby or its mother since I got off the damn train,” I said. “Now that you know who I am, why don’t you get the hell out of here and find someone else to go chasing ghosts for you?”

Jonah laughed a cold laugh, and looked like he might weep. “Why didn’t you leave me dead?” He sounded like that question had haunted him for a long time. There had been those that we did leave dead, because it would have drawn too much attention if no one under my father’s “care” ever died.

I stared down the barrel of my rifle at that face I had thought about so often in the dark of night. The face I had cradled in my hands when he came back to life, full of fear and pain. “You won’t think the answer is good enough.”

Jonah let out a sound that might have been a laugh, might have been a sob. He half-turned and sank down on the step, draping his arms over his knees, slump-shouldered. I’d seen men broken because of the war, but it wasn’t the war that broke Jonah Blake.

I had laid my hands on him and snapped him in two.

I lowered my rifle, and stepped out on the porch. “What do you remember?” I asked, quiet.

“Nothing,” Jonah said. “Just the waking up. The terror. Worse than being on the battlefield.” He looked at me. “Your face.”

I let out a breath, and let the stock of the rifle come to rest on the porch. Grand River was too quiet a town for this. For me.

“Didn’t think your old man would ever let you off his rope,” Jonah said.

“I killed him.”

“First smart thing you ever did,” Jonah muttered, turning his gaze out to the street.

I was conscious of the pain in my hand, of the blood beginning to leak through the bandage. “Come inside,” I said, “I have to clean myself up.”

Peggy watched Jonah like I’d invited a wolf into the house. Peggy usually spent her days lazing about letting our cabin fall into a terrible state, but the presence of Jonah Blake had inspired her to wash dishes as if she was going to break each and every one of them over his head. Or maybe mine.

I sat down at one end of the table, Jonah at the other. I unwrapped my hand, blood beginning to flow from the cut again, dark droplets falling on our table. Peggy brought me the black book and the jar that still held her husband’s heart. It was beginning to wither and crumble, but I reckoned it was good for a few more uses.

“Where’d you get that from?” Jonah asked gruffly.

“The old man who used to call himself her husband,” I said. I opened the book, though I knew the words by heart. I muttered the words and my flesh began to knit itself back together, a few sluggish drops of blood leaking from the heart in the jar. Peggy stood behind me with her arms crossed, watching us.

I got the wound down to a slight scar that would fade in time, and Peggy picked up the bandages, throwing them into the stove to burn. I let out a breath, and looked at Jonah. “What are their names?”

“Naomi and Sarah.”

“I don’t know if I can find them,” I said, “but I’ll try.”

Jonah nodded and didn’t thank me.

I stood and went to the cupboard to get a drink. I inclined my head to Peggy. “I think you should go out with one of your gentleman friends tonight.”

“I’m not leaving you alone here,” Peggy whispered back.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Suit yourself.” This was going to be an ugly night for all of us, that was the only thing I was sure of.

Peggy made dinner and I read through the black book, trying to parse something useful from my father’s encoded writing. Jonah didn’t say much, just drank the coffee Peggy gave him and watched me. I felt like I was fourteen again, too small and skinny for my age, clinging to my father’s shadow.

We ate in silence while the clock tolled nine. “Peggy,” I said as she cleared the dishes, “We’re gonna need the hellwater.”

“What’s that?” Jonah asked.

“Worse than the worst liquor you’ve ever had,” I said, “and the only damn way I can figure to go chasing after ghosts. Do you have anything from your kin?”

He gave me letters they had written. I would’ve preferred something they owned, but circumstances being what they were, this would have to do. I would start with the mother.

Peggy got the hellwater out of the chest that we kept locked under my bed. It was stored in an old wine bottle, wrapped in silver wire. My father had always kept a bottle, but this one was my own making, put together on a night when the moon turned bloody. I didn’t ever use it except for the most dire cases.

We cleared everything off the table, and put out all the lights except one. Jonah sat across from me, the light flickering over our faces as I drank my shot of hellwater, the bitter taste coating my tongue and the back of my throat. I shook my head and let out a breath, reaching out my hands to Jonah.

He just looked at me.

“You’re gonna have to help me,” I said, already starting to feel like my skin was too loose, “I won’t know I got the right person, otherwise.” Jonah let out a slow breath, and put his hands in mine. I felt myself growing smudged at the edges, the boundary between me and everything else growing less distinct. I closed my eyes and slipped away into the dark.

Hellwater gets you the closest to death you can be while still expecting to be alive afterward. It’s been different every time I’ve felt it, cold and hot and as gentle as a warm breeze or as unyielding as stone.

With my eyes closed, I could see differently. I could see the flame, but not the candle. I could see Peggy like a silvery white glow, pulsing faintly with her heartbeat. And I could see Jonah, the same green color of the sky before a tornado, expanding and contracting with his breath.

I reached out into the space between the air, the way I went hunting for souls recently departed, and called out for Sarah Blake.

A thin golden thread ran from the back of Jonah’s hand, and out in the night. It began to coil around his arm, though Jonah didn’t notice what he couldn’t see. Ghosts cling to the living, tied by a thousand threads of kinship. Family, friends, lovers. Even someone who was only a neighbor for a very long time.

She came with a howling and an ache, and I flinched, my hands tightening in Jonah’s.

“What is it?” he asked, his voice sounding as if it were coming to me underwater, or through a heavy door.

I couldn’t look her in the face, I could never look the dead in the face. Their forms were inconstant, shifting and warping. “Sarah Blake is dead,” I whispered.

A great well of despair opened up in Jonah and I couldn’t look at that, either. “How did she die?”

“I told you I’m not a medium.” I wasn’t going to ask her any damn questions, wasn’t going to give her a chance to get in my head. “What about my sister?”

I had to work to thrust the ghost of his mother back into the night. She wanted to stay, to sink her hooks into her son. I could feel a heavy cold on my back, and called out for Naomi.

This thread flowed out and went taut. I let out a breath, carefully let my mind trace out along its length, trying to get a sense for where it ended. “Alive,” I said, my mouth sour and dry. “South of here.”

Another person’s hope is a painful thing to feel when you’re straddling the worlds of the living and the dead. I released Jonah’s hands and slammed mine down on the table, wishing I could squeeze back into my body, wishing this would all be over.

You might laugh, to think of a necromancer being afraid of ghosts. I’d tell you I have the damn right to be. The dead can smell it when the living start mucking about where they don’t belong, and they come howling to you like moths to a flame. Only thing is nothing hurts them anymore, and it’s the living who stand to get burned.

I felt Peggy’s hands on me and I wanted to tell her to stop, that she shouldn’t touch me when I was like this. I heard her shouting my name. “Hesper! Tell me what to do!”

I batted her away and bent with my head on the table, the table the only real thing before me, and I breathed. It was so heavy, so cold. I could feel my head against the table but I couldn’t feel anything else.

I only felt my hands when Jonah took them again. “Come back, Witch,” he said, and I didn’t hear any bite in it. “You’re no good to anybody dead.”

“Water,” I croaked, my throat becoming real and as dry as sand. “I need water.”

Someone pressed a glass in my hand, and when I couldn’t they brought it to my face. I must have spilled half the damn thing down my front, but the water was cold and clear and I could feel myself shrinking back into the seams of my skin. My edges were starting to become firmer. The ghosts were quieter.

I pressed the glass to my forehead, and opened my eyes. Peggy was fretting. Jonah was just watching me.

“I’m fine, Peggy,” I sighed.

Peggy lifted her hand and struck Jonah hard across the back of the head. “Don’t you ever ask her to do that again and don’t you tell anybody she can!”

Jonah cursed and rubbed the back of his head.

“Leave him alone,” I groaned, rubbing my temple. I dragged my hand down my face, and realized Jonah was still holding the other. He gazed at me, mixed pain and relief in his eyes. “Thank you.”

I stared at his face, and told Peggy to go outside for a minute. She looked at me reluctantly, but stepped out. I could feel the sweat on my back turning cold, my shirt sticking to my skin.

“I wanted to see you smile again,” I whispered.

Jonah just stared at me.

“I told you you wouldn’t think the answer was good enough,” I said. “But that’s it. There hasn’t been a day since I haven’t missed your smile.” I let go of his hand and stood, though my legs were shaky and I had to catch myself on the table. The hellwater had made a miserable wreck of me. I dragged myself over to the wash basin, setting the glass inside as I leaned against the wall.

“Do you have any idea how far my sister is?” Jonah asked.

“No,” I said. “She could be in the town just south of here, she could be in Argentina, for all I know.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to start looking,” Jonah said, getting up from the table.

I laid my forehead against the wall. If Jonah Blake knew who and what I was, then I couldn’t let him know where I was. My time in Grand River had come to an end. I didn’t feel anything about it then, I was too tired. “I hope you find her.”

He was quiet a moment, like he was thinking about saying something else. I heard him put something on the table. “Keep out of trouble, Cochran,” he said. After a moment, “Keep saving babies.”

I heard him go out the front door, and heard Peggy come back in. “Hesper? Are you alright?”

I pushed myself away from the wall and turned to look at the table. Jonah had left me a battered, worn, and bloodstained pack of cards. I picked them up, weighing them in my hand like they were made of gold. Before he died the first time, Jonah had told me I was a natural-born cheat. Made sense, I suppose, for the only child of a man who made a business of cheating death.

“I’m fine,” I murmured. “I’m gonna lay down a bit.”

I slept with those cards tucked into my shirt, close to my heart.

#

If Peggy were a smart girl she’d have stayed in Grand River. I told her she ought to, she had a home there and even if she never married she’d always have enough men chasing after her she wouldn’t have to worry about much.

What Peggy was, though, was god-damned stubborn bull-headed young woman. “If you’re leaving, then I’m leaving too.”

We packed up what was valuable to us, like we had in her husband’s house, and in the middle of the night we stowed ourselves away in a train car, headed somewhere further west. Didn’t think we’d go as far as California, not just then, but I thought Colorado territory might be a place wild enough for us. There was lots of world left for us yet, I didn’t want to run through it too fast.

“I want to learn the work,” she said, as the train went over a bridge, giving us a hell of a view of the canyon below.

“Fuck no,” I said. “Why’d you want to learn that mess?”

“Because it shouldn’t just be you,” Peggy said. “You’re just taking care of me, otherwise.”

“It’s damned dirty work,” I said. “I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

“There ain’t never gonna be honest work for girls like us,” Peggy said. “I’d rather have the boys for fun.” She light a cigarette and watched me shuffling cards. “You’re gonna have to tell me about Blake, sometime.”

“I’ll teach you everything I know before I tell you a damn thing about Blake,” I said.

“Oh, I knew he’d got his hooks into you bad,” Peggy said. “Didn’t realize how bad. Must have been a real looker when you met him.”