To Us May Grace Be Given

1.

They came near the end of the day. We thought it was thunder at first, though there weren't any clouds. Eight of them on horseback with Bill Boyland at their head. "Eight men for a woman and her kid," Mam muttered as she loaded the revolver.

Once they came through our gate they stayed in their saddles. I couldn't see their faces for their hats pulled low; I only recognized Bill Boyland by his voice and the shiny gold watch hanging from his waistcoat. He told us Mam's letter and papers didn't matter none. Mam started arguing with him; I couldn't speak because my voice would give me away as a girl.

"Your Pa was a squatter," Bill Boyland said to me. He spoke slow, like I was thickheaded. "Now your Ma is right: ten years ago it didn't matter none, because ten years ago it was every man for himself. But that was then."

"And this is now, and you're nothing but a god-damned thief, William Boyland," Mam said.

"Constance, I warned you and Matthew both. This land deceives. It looks good but the dirt's cruel. Doesn't matter how much you pray over it, it's never gonna be good for anything but making meat." His hat nodded at me. "You're working your boy like a god-damned animal, and for what? You both deserve better than this."

"Better than our God-given home?" Mam asked. "Better than what's rightfully ours? I have blood in this land, William Boyland, blood and ten years' honest work—not that you would know anything about that."

A few of the men muttered when she spoke, but Bill Boyland raised his hand and they silenced quick. "Only the Land Office can give the homes out here, Constance. You should have filed claim—as you say, you had ten years to do it in." He hadn't raised his voice once. "Now I bought this land fair and square, Missus Norton, and I mean to have it. I want you gone before the next full moon."

When they had ridden away I let the knife slide out from my sleeve and Mam untucked the revolver from beneath her apron. She went in the house, leaving me to put away the loys. I made out like I was tired from plowing, but in truth I worked slow because I thought my heart might burst from beating so hard. Eight men. We had the revolver and the shotgun, but we were close to being out of cartridges for both. Mam hadn't wanted to go to town for weeks now; she was afraid Bill would have a man watching, who would come after she was gone and rob us blind and do worse to me. But I knew now that was a mistake. Eight men and he could probably come back with double as quick as you please, and it was less than a month to the full moon.

When I finally went in she had cleared the table and pulled the carpetbag out from under the bed. It was grey with dust; even before Da died Mam and I weren't supposed to touch it, though I used to open it when no one was looking. It's the past, Da would say when I asked him about it. From when we thought we knew better than God. We came here to get away from that.

The way Mam was laying things out, I knew I wasn't the only one who had peeked inside. She didn't even have to look, just put out the candles and the fancy drawings, and even the vials that I liked best. In your hand the stuff inside looked black, but when you held them up to the light you saw that it was really a dark, sweet red.

Beside these Mam put a knife I had never seen before, with a thick handle and two round blades folded up like a flower.

"I'll show him," she said. "I'll show him my god-damned claim."

"What d'you mean?" I asked. My voice sounded funny; sometimes I went so long without speaking I forgot what I sounded like.

Mam didn't answer. She was peering at the drawings, holding them up to the light and talking to herself.

I started cutting up the potatoes for supper, but I kept looking at that knife. Not round, the blades; more like petals, tight as a spring bud. I reached out and touched the handle only to jump when the blades snapped apart. Now it looked like jaws ready to bite.

"Leave it be," Mam said. She bundled everything up again and went back out into the yard. Under the beech tree she began dragging her heel in the dirt, making a circle.

I followed her outside. "Mam, what're you doing?"

She grinned at me then, not her nice smile but the way she smiled when we killed rats in the barn.

"Calling down the god-damned devil on that sonofabitch Boyland," she said, and got down on her hands and knees in the circle.

~*~

We had nearly three weeks before Bill Boyland was to come back, but as Mam explained it, sometimes the devil takes a while. We took turns watching the circle and keeping up with the plowing. Mam said it wasn't a circle but a kind of snare. She had put the last of our salt pork in the middle and kept adding drops from one of the vials to it, her face getting grimmer by the day. I didn't know why we didn't just send the devil to Bill Boyland direct, rather than bring him to us, what if the devil decided to take us all? But Mam didn't look like she was for questioning, so instead I said that the goats might get at the bait.

"Nah, Addy. It's devil's blood." She touched my shoulder, which made me feel better. "The goats are smart, they know better than to touch it."

"The devil will come for his own blood." My voice nearly twisted up, making it a question, but I caught myself in time. Mam was fierce with the whip when she got the rage in her.

"They'll come to rescue one of their kind," she said. "They won't come for food, they can get that anywhere. But they'll come for one of their own. Any of them within a hundred miles, they'll smell it."

And then I really wanted to ask questions, because I had always thought there was just one devil, the one in the Bible. Now I pictured devils like rabbits, with horns for ears and long sharp tails. I wanted to ask Mam how many devils there were, and did they come in different kinds, and what if we got the wrong one? But she was smiling the rat-killing grin again, and all those questions weren't really what I wanted to ask: If a devil came, what was to stop him killing us as well?

~*~

That night I took a while feeding the goats. They crowded around all warm and nibbled my fingers. We had to sell most of the animals when Da died, but Mam had made sure we kept the goats and the chickens. I watched the goats being born every year, and the ones I had to nurse I named in my head, though I never told Mam. When they grew too old for milking or making babies she would walk them down the road a ways to a fellow named Tom. He had a big herd that he rented out for clearing brush, sometimes even for the railroad. In the post office there was a print of the railroad coming through, and I would pretend our goats were just past the edge of the paper, eating up the dead grass and keeping the men safe from fire.

I whispered their names now as I fed them. Isaac, after one of my favorite stories. Leah and Rachel, because their story always made me feel sad, and I thought they would have been happier without Jacob. There had been one I named Matthew, after my Da, but he was with Tom now. Cain and Abel, for twins that kept butting each other. Even a little Addy, because she came so late like I had done.

If Bill Boyland got the land, we'd have to sell them all, maybe to someone for their meat.

Isaac butted my hand and I scratched his head. I knew him by his uneven horns. I knew them all and they all knew me, they would come when I called them. Mam wanted to keep the land because it was ours, because Da had cleared it and worked it until it killed him. But I wanted to keep the land for Mam and the goats, so we could all stay together.

I looked at Mam, sitting on the edge of the circle, waiting for the devil to come. Anything, to keep us here, together. Anything.

~*~

It was six days and nights before the devil finally came.