Blood Is Another Word for Hunger Read online

  “I don’t mind that you’re so very uncouth,” said Sully and sat down to join her new guest, her sort-of child, at the table. She’d taken—not quite pleasure, not quite comfort, perhaps reprieve—in the routine she’d fallen into with Ziza, enough that she could try to make pleasant conversation through the numbness.

  “Says the girl who slain five womenfolk with no more thought than she’d throw out dirty bath water,” Ziza said.

  Sully reached with her fingers beneath her head wrap to scratch her sweaty head and sized up Ziza from across the small wooden round table. She didn’t look like any girl Sully had seen before with her light brown skin and green eyes, sun-colored nappy hair, a cornucopia of freckles.

  “Was you always that color?” Sully asked. She’d heard tales about ghosts possessing women, turning them white with death. “Or was it what happened to you in the Thereafter? I knew a boy who had a patch of white in his black hair from all the worries of his life, though I’ve always been an aggrieved sort of person, and that never happened to me. They say I’m dark as a raisin.”

  After a few bites of beans, Ziza had a gulp of lemonade. “I was just born like this,” she said. She dipped her cornbread into a bowl of spicy red beans, thick pieces of meat from the ham hock mixed in among the onion. She ate every meal so ravenously, and it occurred to Sully there might not have been food in the Thereafter.

  “Isn’t there food in the place you came from?” she asked.

  Ziza hummed as she played with her spoon, tapping it against her bowl. “It’s hard to say,” she said. The only times Ziza wasn’t actively cheerful was when Sully brought up anything that took place before she’d come to the farm.

  “So you don’t like to talk about it or what?” asked Sully, aware she sounded coarse but unsure how to fix it.

  Ziza squeezed her eyes shut. “It’s just, what happens when you die isn’t a thing you can talk about. It’s not a place that exists where I can just describe the color of the sky and the whoosh of the water and the subtle hue of violet in the flowers in bloom. It’s more like being drownt and you seeing everything through icy water.”

  Sully blew on another spoonful of beans, but she didn’t bring it to her mouth. “Does it hurt your lungs like drowning does?” she asked. She leaned across the table toward Ziza, hungry to know the ways of death.

  “It’s more like the moment of letting go, when the fight is out of you. When you about to pass out so the pain of being denied air is gone.”

  Sully exhaled slowly, her lips trembling as she whistled out air. “I don’t see why you’d ever want to leave a place that feels like that,” said Sully. “Like peace.”

  Ziza stirred what remained of her food, the hand holding the spoon shaking. “Don’t say that,” she said.

  Even when the voice bearing the edict was as gentle as Ziza’s, Sully didn’t abide commands. “If you’re free to blather on and on about what a glorious day it is and hallelujah this and that and such nonsense, I can talk about what I want to talk about.”

  Ziza sucked in her lips and let her head droop a smidge, eyes averted from Sully. “You’re right,” said Ziza. “I spoke out of turn. I’m a guest in your home.”

  Sully didn’t expect the girl to capitulate so easily, and she was sorry her hostility had whipped the fight out of her. “It’s not my home,” said Sully after a moment.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “It’s not like I got papers saying it’s mine,” Sully said, and everybody knew papers were everything.

  “Did you not kill the folks who had the papers? Therefore could you not change the papers? Is an owner anything but he who kills for the papers?” asked Ziza. The temporary contriteness that had overtaken Ziza went as quickly as it had come.

  “But what would I do with this place?” said Sully, standing, finding Ziza’s inquisitive stare suddenly oppressive. She leaned back against the wood burning stove, where her cup of coffee sat keeping warm. She drank what remained, but still did not feel settled. She filled Master Albert’s pipe with tobacco and began to smoke it.

  “You could live out your days here,” said Ziza.

  “Why would I want to live out my days here?”

  “Why wouldn’t you? Do you wish to travel instead?”

  Sully inhaled smoke then blew it away from Ziza. It felt good to do this in the house. The Missus had always forbade Albert from doing so. “Travel? For what purpose? I thought travel was for seeing things, and I’ve already seen all I want to ever see, I think.”

  “For the pleasure of it. Or you could stay here. Whatever you do, I’ll do it, too. You bornt me, girl. Look at this,” she said, untucking her shirt from her trousers and lifting it up to reveal her belly button, where there was a large, black stump. The remainder of the umbilical cord that had connected them. “We can go or we can stay. Which do you want to do?”

  “I don’t want anything in particular,” said Sully.

  “Then I’ll want for the both of us. I’ve decided. This is your home and my home, now. Our home. And it will be others’ home, too.”

  “The others?” asked Sully.

  “They’ll surely be riding your murder wave here,” said Ziza. “You kilt five, did you not? And I am only one. When we disrupt nature, she likes to reestablish the balance.”

  * * *

  “The gods like a defiant streak,” said Ziza. She’d taken it upon herself to teach Sully the ways of the world. Her lessons came over many weeks, given as she and Sully roasted corn and hot sausage over the fire together, or scrubbed mud-stained clothes in the stream, or swept, or planted crops of peas, or gathered wood or stone to build dwellings for their impending arrivals.

  She learned about tinctures, roots, and bones. Some of it Sully already knew, like how to bring sickness to heel with the right cocktail of plants. The subject of resurrection was what interested Sully most, and she played close mind as Ziza babbled about necromancy, zombi-folk, mojo, herbs, conjurers.

  Ziza described a bridge made of dreamscape, said Sully had accessed a way to pull people across it. “Why me?” asked Sully.

  Shrugging, Ziza continued her work devising a crop rotation schedule for their land. She insisted that most of the acreage needed to lay fallow for at least a year, perhaps two, up to three, time over which they’d feed it with the manure of chickens, cows, pigs, and goats. “I guess the etherworld saw something in you and rooted up in you,” she said.

  Sully had always been touched by a flash of darkness. On the plantation where she was born, slave women gossiped about her true nature. Her mother, who’d been sold away when Sully was five, called her moskti after the blood-eating fairy in stories of their old home back across the water. They possessed human bodies and kept them alive by feasting on the blood of anyone nearby. As soon as she had teeth, Sully drew blood whenever she fed from her mother’s breasts. Four months old.

  “When it comes to the divine, it’s best not to worry too much over the particulars, or you’ll lose the forest for the trees, you understand?” asked Ziza.

  “No.”

  But everything Ziza said and predicted came true. Sully did give birth again, this time to a boy of ten named Miles. Two months after that came a forty-one-year-old woman named Liza Jane and a few days later her twin sister Bethie. Next came a man named Nathaniel with gray hair and skin dark like a fever dream who didn’t talk much but to recite lines of poetry. Including Ziza, five revenants in all came to stay, one for each of the lives Sully took.

  Sully kept her distance from all but Ziza. She watched from afar as they made a home out of the farm over the weeks and months. They sang songs without her, swam in the stream without her, tilled without her, picked blackberries without her, and laughed without her. They were a family, as exuberant in their togetherness as they were in their resurrections.

  Ziza was their shepherd—not just for the revenants, but for Sully, too, coaxing her like a lonesome, lost lamb back into the fold. “Sully,” Ziza said one day. “I’ve been m
issing you.”

  Sully wasn’t the sort of person people missed, so when Ziza said that, she didn’t know what to do with herself but fiddle with a piece of flour-water paste caked to her palms. She peeled off the flakey remnants onto the wooden porch, where she sat rocking in the Missus’s old chair.

  “Don’t you find yourself missing me, too?” asked Ziza, kneeling in front of Sully. She laid her hands on Sully’s knees and squeezed, and Sully stood up from the rocking chair so fast it almost toppled.

  “You’re the one who doesn’t want to talk anymore now that you’ve got your new friends,” said Sully. She cast a glance out onto the fields, where the newer revenants, Miles, Liza Jane, Bethie, and Nathaniel, were picking wild flowers—weeds.

  “It’d be easier to keep up with you if you didn’t sequester yourself away like you do,” she said, then shook her head and walked off. When she was almost out of earshot, she turned around and called, “I’d love you forever if you’d just try. Not that I don’t already love you forever.”

  It was foolishness. Ziza was a silly girl, prone to bouts of childish whimsy, yet Sully found herself enticed by the promise. She didn’t care about getting closer to the others, but Ziza? She could bask forever in her attentions.

  Miles, the little one, was a rascal and then some, always playing tricks on Sully. He’d replaced her jar of talcum powder with ashes once and another time laid a dead mouse inside her boots. But he was also a master of languages. He’d grown up in a boarding house up north where he’d learned German, Czech, Spanish, Russian, and Italian from the boarders. She liked listening to him rattle on in foreign tongues.

  Miles taught her to read and how to do math, and called her “Sis.” She didn’t like him, but she didn’t unlike him, either, and she found her hostility toward him and the others melting to indifference and then to a reluctant fondness as the weeks passed by.

  * * *

  There were enough of them now that they were a proper brood. Food stores had dwindled to dregs. Though the seagulls brought them fish daily, some of which they ate, some of which they smoked for future rations, they wished for more meat and more flour for cakes and biscuits. They needed more clothes, more shoes, more horses. They’d used what they could of what was available at the house, and to get more, they’d have to leave the cocoon of wellbeing that was the farmstead.

  Sully, knowing the local territory the best, drew up a plan to help them secure not only more supplies, but permanent safety. It was a plan of blood, for that was the thing she knew best.

  Ziza had called this place their home, but what was a home if it could be scooped out from under them at any moment? If someone else could come and take the papers? If whenever any of them needed anything, they had to live in fear of discovery by the townsfolk who wouldn’t look well on a former slave and other dark folk occupying a property in a white family’s name?

  It was no way to live, and if it was Sully’s last deed on this earth, she’d make the killing of the Missus and her family worth more than just her own peace of mind—because it hadn’t even garnered her that. Sully was a lost cause, but these folks could be happy here if she made it into a proper dwelling for them. Ziza could be happy.

  “I’ll do this alone,” Sully said as she explained her plan to others. She would raise an army, an army of revenants.

  Liza Jane shook her head. “Don’t talk nonsense.” She had a strong island accent that Sully loved. She’d stayed up many nights listening to Liza Jane’s tales about how she had escaped her plantation as a teenager and lived most of her remaining years as a pirate on a ship called the Red Colossus. “We are brave,” she said. “We’ll do whatever you say.”

  Miles nodded his head and so did Bethie. Nathaniel, looking sage with his gray hair and knowing eyes, said, “You will never be alone again, Miss Sully.”

  So be it.

  For several weeks, they raided the nicest wagons that passed by along the main roads, stealing their supplies, bringing the drivers and passengers back to the farmstead for Sully to kill. For each body disposed of in this way, Sully birthed a ghost. She numbed to the agonizing pain of labor and let herself be comforted by Ziza’s vast knowledge. Shepoke of a goddess named Artemis who watched over young girls, unwed women, wild animals, the wilderness. “You could be like her, don’t you think?” said Ziza.

  Sully was laid up in bed where she’d spent the last several weeks. The constant birthing had worn her to bone. The killing, too, hurt. “Army or not, I can’t do this anymore,” said Sully, worried she’d disappoint Ziza, but Ziza only nodded and took Sully’s hand in hers, kissing several times so tenderly, like no woman was supposed to do to another. It made Sully shiver.

  “I think we’ve got enough now anyway for your plan to work. There’s twenty-six of us in all,” Ziza said. She dipped a cloth into a bowl of hot water and pressed it to Sully’s head. “I’ll fetch Miles and tell him he can go into town to start the next phase.”

  The plan was for him to tell the sheriff about all the murdered folk at the farmstead, and when the sheriff led his troops here, they’d mount a full-on attack on their home territory. Take them by surprise. They didn’t know how great their number was. They didn’t know what weapons they’d raided, what traps they’d set. “We’ll be able to take over the town and make a fortress of it. We’ll be safe, and we’ll make a place where others can be safe, too,” said Ziza, squeezing Sully’s hand tight in reassurance.

  Sully wept in Ziza’s arms. She didn’t know where the tears came from or why they fell. Everything was going her way. Having killed twenty-six and birthed twenty-six, the count was even. She didn’t have to fear another tumultuous labor.

  “I’ll stay here with you as long as you want,” said Ziza, that warm smile that was always there shining brightly at Sully.

  “You should go help. I want you to go,” said Sully. “You been here the longest. You’re the one who can lead them.”

  Ziza’s smile began to waver as she worried her bottom lip. “I’ll go,” she said, “but you stay right up in here, you understand? If you leave, there’s a chance you could get caught in the cross fires. You might kill someone by mistake and then have to bring another back. Your body needs rest.”

  It was dark when Ziza finally went and the sheriff came with his cavalry. Sully let herself drift in and out of consciousness. She awoke to the sound of shots firing. She saw the spark of a blaze.

  Their entire property had been booby-trapped, sharpened branches primed to raise up and stab any person or horse who tried to get through. Sully heard their cries of pain.

  When the night grew more silent, she stumbled out of bed and into a pair of old boots. She walked down the stairs and out the front door. She saw Miles running toward her, a hand on top his head to keep his floppy sun hat from falling off.

  “Miss Sully,” he called, out of breath. With only the moon as light, she couldn’t see whether he was injured or if his clothes were stained with blood.

  “They’re all dead,” he said then whooped and laughed and ran up to her to give her a hug. She patted his back and told him to go inside and wash his face. It seemed like a big-sisterly thing to tell a boy.

  Sully walked to the barn where the weapons for slaughter were kept, where she used to sleep. Inside was the blade she’d used to kill the Missus. She felt nothing as she touched it, neither relief nor rage. Any memories she had associated with the event sat inside her unrecalled. The battle with the townspeople had been won, but Sully couldn’t answer why that mattered.

  There existed a depth of loneliness so profound that once experienced, no matter how briefly, trust in life could not be restored. Sully took a knife and stabbed it in her gut just above her uterus then carved a large circle around the organ. She removed it from her body and dug a shallow grave with her hands, buried it there as she bled out. When she died, at least the others might be able to use the etherworld that had made her uterus into a portal.

  “Sully!” she heard. “Sully
!”

  She had a feeling she was already gone, that she was hearing Ziza call her from the other side. There it was, that feeling Ziza described. Drowning.

  Sully was cold and heavy, and she felt her body struggle to lift itself up. After a few seconds of trying, she gave up.

  “No, no, no, no, no, no,” said Ziza, grasping Sully’s body, her voice fading until it was all gone.

  Sully wanted to say sorry, but she didn’t know words anymore. Was time passing? Was she wrapped in rope? Was the feeling of dying eternal? All these thoughts came as nightmare visions as she glided through a fog.

  Forever passed by, then—

  Sully felt heat. She felt water. She felt something squeezing her, choking her nearly.

  Sully was being born.

  She opened her eyes to find herself on a patch of dirt, Ziza above her.

  “Oh, my Sully,” Ziza said. She kissed Sully’s face, a hot streak of tears wetting Sully’s cheeks.

  “I don’t understand,” said Sully. She looked around and smelled the air. It felt as if no time had passed. The scent of gunpowder poisoned the air.

  “You were born again through your own womb,” Ziza said, face stunned into a bewildered frown. She’d never looked so shaken. “You were only gone a minute. Then I heard the earth crying. I dug it up and there you were.”

  Miles came and tossed a blanket over Sully. A young man named Dominic carried her to her bed. Others doted on her. They brought her medicine. They brought her food. When the initial commotion of her birth had passed, she asked all but Ziza to go.

  Sully expected her to say something like, “What makes you think I don’t want to go, too,” or, “Like I want to be here with your fool ass,” but she hummed to herself in the rocking chair in the corner of the room.