Finally, long past midnight, she fell asleep.
Bronwyn’s eyes snapped open. A sound had awakened her. She blinked into the darkness, and listened intently, hoping it wasn’t more noises from the living room. It came again: a light tapping at her window. Her dream-fuddled brain’s first thought was, Dwayne? Then she turned and saw the face beyond the glass.
The haint.
She blinked, and suddenly the ghost was in her room. She sat up and snapped, “This is a really bad night, Sally.”
“It’s time to remember,” the haint said. “You can’t avoid this.”
Bronwyn started to fire something back, but instead she sat up, crawled to the edge of the bed, and without her cane, stood up to face the haint. “So what, then, is so goddamned important that I need to remember?”
“What happened to you.”
Bronwyn’s bad leg trembled with fury. “You think I didn’t read what happened to me? I know what all those words mean, honey, especially the really good ones like ‘sodomize.’ I don’t need to remember what that felt like.”
“You’ll face more challenges soon. Your strength will come from knowing you’ve endured these things.”
“I do know it!” Bronwyn bellowed. She no longer cared who heard her. “I know that I was blown up, cut up, ass-fucked, and stitched back together. I know I took down nearly a dozen of those bastards before they got me. I know that if it wasn’t for being a Tufa, I’d be dead by now, okay? I know all that! What I’m real fucking tired of is people, alive or dead, telling me what the fuck I need!”
She turned her back on the haint. “Go away, Sally. There’s nothing for you here. I don’t hear you anymore, and when I turn around I won’t see you.”
Before she could say anything, her bedroom door opened and Chloe entered. She was wrapped in a bathrobe, and her black hair was disheveled. “Are you all right? I heard shouting.”
“Is there anyone behind me?”
“No.”
“Then I’m fine,” she said, and sat heavily on the edge of the bed. Then she scowled up at her mother. “And how are you?”
“You could’ve… I don’t know, knocked or something.”
“At my own front door? You could’ve stopped.”
“Not at that moment, I couldn’t.”
Brownyn shook her head. “Man, that is so much more than I need to know.”
Chloe closed the door and sat down beside her daughter. “I recall walking in on you and Dwayne once. Believe me, I had no desire to see that, either.”
Bronwyn couldn’t repress a smile. “Yeah, and he got stuck going out the window.” She looked over at the glass, expecting to see Sally outside it, but there was nothing but darkness. “Everyone’s telling me what I have to do. Not asking me, even, telling me. I’m not in the army anymore, I don’t have to take orders.”
“They want things to be safe if something happens to me.”
“Things. They want a song to be safe. A stupid song.”
“A song that’s ours. That we brought across the water on the night wind. That’s been kept as a treasure ever since.”
“Just because something’s old doesn’t mean it’s valuable.”
“Spoken by the young.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” She fell back on the bed. “I’ll learn your damn song, Mom. I promised I would. But I won’t have a damn baby just because people want me to, and I won’t dig up things out of my own head just so a ghost can feel useful.” She put the Dollywood pillow over her face.
“You’ll do what you want, like you always have,” Chloe said sadly. She stopped as she opened the door. “You should probably try to figure out why that is. You didn’t get it from me, and I’m pretty sure your father’s not like that. But there’s a word for people who only care about what they want themselves.”
“Sociopath?” Bronwyn said sarcastically.
“I was thinking ‘asshole.’ But whatever works for you.”
Don Swayback found himself walking through a graveyard in the middle of the day. He knew it was a dream, but he couldn’t help but admire the vision his subconscious presented. The cemetery was on a mountainside, and below it stretched a beautiful valley bisected by a meandering river. Except for the headstones, there was no sign of civilization. The valley was covered in unnaturally green grass, and the sky was wincingly blue. He leaned on one of the headstones and slowly took in the view.
“What you really want to see,” a voice said, “is this way.”
He turned. A beautiful young woman in desert-themed military clothes stood in the shade of a tree. Something about her was odd, and in a moment he spotted it: a gaping space in her side, as if her flesh had been scooped out with a giant ice cream dipper. She carried her helmet under the opposite arm, and her bangs fell into her eyes. Her skin was pale with death.
Before Don could respond, she nodded to one side. He turned and saw an old woman seated in a folding lawn chair, a guitar across her lap. Sun dappled across her as the branch shading her waved in the wind. She was heavyset, with black hair starting to turn gray. She said to him, “That’s your cousin, Sally Olds. Died in Iraq back in the first Gulf War. She was my great-grandniece.”
“Hi,” Don said. He knew who she had to be. “So you’re Grandma Benji.”
She strummed the guitar. “Darn tootin’. You’re close to the line on some things, and you and I need to talk before you step over it.” She looked up at Sally. “Y’all go on, I know you got things to do. Me and Don just need to chew the fat for a tic.”
Sally leaned down and kissed Grandma Benji on the cheek. The tatters of flesh and organs swayed with her movements. Then she was gone, although Don had not seen her actually leave. He said, “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
“You know this is a dream, right?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“But you think you’re really meeting me?”
He looked at her closely. There was a fixed quality to her that seemed at odds with the mutable details of everything else around him. “I figure it can’t hurt to be polite either way.”
She chortled. “Anyway, we need to talk about blood. You got more Tufa in you than you realize. It ain’t always about quantity: you can have a man ninety-five percent pureblood, but if that missing five percent is the part that lets him ride the wind, he ain’t a true Tufa. You know about riding the night wind?”
Don shook his head.
“You will, I reckon. I hope. One night you’ll go outside, look up at the sky, and either hear the hum or feel the shiver. If it’s the shiver… well, you’re still kin and I love you, but it means you’ll never be a real Tufa. If it’s the hum, though, you’ll feel the stirrin’ of your wings.”
“That sounds… dramatic.”
She ran a riff down the guitar neck, her fingers nimble and sure. “That ain’t what I want to straighten you out about, though. It’s which side you’re gonna be on.”
“Which side of what?”
“Most folks think the Tufa are one big family. We ain’t; we’re two. One’s no better than the other, and one can’t go on without the other; like you can’t have light without dark for it to show up against. Make sense?”
“Sure.”
“Rockhouse Hicks runs one side. Mandalay Harris runs the other. You know either of them?”