The Untold Read Online Free PDF Page A

have a child to protect.
    She could not have guessed how soon.
    It is hard to know what tipped my mother on this particular night to a place so sharp and vengeful. The scrape of moon, the moths, the rain, the memory, all of it fertilized something inside her.
    Shifting back and forth on her feet in front of the fire did not ease her discomfort. As the rain pelted down hard on the roof she thought of Fitz falling from his horse and stumbling up the steps and then entering the house as if he owned everything in it, including her, and pressing himself upon her, smelling of whiskey and mud and other women. And as she thought it, anger pulsed within her.
    Other nights when she knew he would be drunk she wouldlock herself in her room, though that would only postpone his rage until the morning.
    She scanned the room. Next to the door was a cabinet where he kept his rifles and next to the cabinet was an axe. Fitz kept the key to the cabinet in his pocket so she took the axe instead.
    She pressed her back against the side of the cabinet and pushed it with all the strength of her legs. Then she set a chair in its place and sat and listened and waited. She was used to that.
    She knew every sound of him. The crashing as he rode through the forest, the thud as he struck through the paddock. All of it: the slapping, groaning, dragging, lurching sounds of him as he approached the house.
    And she knew, too, what she had never heard and longed to hear: the sucking sound of the earth as it clung to him and swallowed him up.

H alf naked, encrusted in sand, Jessie did not get back on her horse or roll herself into the river. She reached up, pulled a blanket from her saddlebag and wrapped herself in it. She writhed and cursed as pain seized her womb and she bit down on the edges of the blanket to contain it. Then, as three figures moved across the paddock directly towards her, she blacked out.
    Had she the strength or consciousness to mount her horse, she would have seen the figures first as shadows thrown across the yellow grass. And eventually she would have made them out: a woman, a man, a dog.
    As they approached, she would have seen the man was old, his mouth cragged like barbed wire across his face, his eyes deep sockets like dents in the earth when you kick away a stone. Bits of him were missing. His teeth, a piece of his ear.
    The old woman was better put together, though she was surely as old as the old man. Her white hair streamed behind her like spiderwebs and her horse was towing a cart. In the cart was a dead lamb.
    The old woman and the old man were following the dog.
    The dog was a yellow stripe with yellow eyes, and he zigzagged out in front of them. He vanished in the long grass of the paddock and the old woman and the old man kept track of him by the splitting and crackling of the grass where he went. They were botheager and charged by the find of the lamb and they were confident the dog would sniff out any warm-blooded creature within a mile of them.

    T HE DOG WAS a hunting dog and the old man had found him a year or so before, tied up to a tree. He had heard the dog barking in the valley as clearly as if the dog had been barking in an amphitheater. He followed the sound until he finally saw the dog in the distance, just a streak of a thing leaping up and down, barking a frenzy. As the old man rode in closer, the dog launched himself so far the rope around his neck snapped him back and his feet went skidding out from under him.
    The old man dismounted his horse and took a hessian sack out of his saddlebag. He walked slowly towards the dog and as he did the dog shook himself. His skin flapped around his bony legs like a curtain. He goaded the dog,
Come on, you wretch, smell that!
and pushed the sack out in front of him. It was the same sack he used for rabbits and their scent was all over it. The dog latched on to it as quickly as anything. The old man wrapped the dog’s rope around his muzzle and sank the bag right over