The Black Caul

Chapter 1: The Granny Woman

The mountain had teeth, and Orpha Deel knew every one of them.

She had spent sixty-one years learning where the ridges bit down and where the hollows opened soft as a sleeping mouth. She knew which creeks ran sweet in summer and which ones turned iron-red after a hard rain, staining the rocks the color of old blood. She knew the laurel hells—those thickets so dense and tangled that a man could step off the path and be swallowed whole, turned around in a green dark where even the birds went quiet.

Caddis Hollow sat in the crook of the mountain's jaw, eleven families folded into the wrinkles of the land like seeds pressed into damp cloth. Poor farms, most of them. Smoke-black cabins chinked with red clay. Split-rail fences that leaned and sagged like old men after a long sermon. Hog pens. Root cellars. A churchyard where the stones were cut from the same gray rock as the mountain itself, as though the dead were just returning to the body they had always belonged to.

The war had been over nine years, but Caddis Hollow had not stopped burying it. There were men missing from every table. Boys who had marched south in butternut and come back in pine boxes, or not come back at all. Women who had learned to split wood and slaughter hogs and plow frozen ground while their husbands rotted in ditches at Shiloh and Chickamauga and places whose names they could not spell and would not forget. The Hollow had survived, the way a tree survives a lightning strike—still standing, still putting out leaves, but hollow at the center and full of char.

Orpha was the community's spine.

She was the granny woman. Midwife. Healer. Layer-out of the dead. Keeper of signs brought over from Ulster and places older than that, places no preacher could name without spitting. She knew which roots drew fever and which ones stopped blood. She knew how to turn a breech baby with nothing but her hands and a whispered word. She knew the songs you sang over the washed dead to keep them settled in their graves, and she knew the signs you nailed above a door to keep out what had no business coming in.

Every soul in Caddis Hollow had been pulled into the world by Orpha's hands.

Nearly every soul.

She lived alone in a cabin at the head of the branch, where the creek came down off the ridge in a thin silver thread that froze solid by November and did not thaw until March. The cabin was small—one room, a loft, a stone chimney that drew well when the wind was right and smoked like perdition when it was not. The walls were hung with bundles of dried herbs: pennyroyal, boneset, yellowroot, ginseng, bloodroot, blue cohosh. Jars of rendered fat and poultices lined the shelves. A birthing stool sat in the corner, worn smooth by forty years of gripping hands.

Above the door, nailed with iron tacks, hung a charm her grandmother had made: a cross of rowan wood bound with red thread, a sprig of dried mountain laurel woven through the center. Not a Christian cross, though it looked enough like one to satisfy anyone who did not look too closely. The shape was older than that. The shape was a door-sign, meant to tell whatever walked the mountain at night that this house was watched and warded and not to be troubled.

Orpha had never needed it.

She kept it because her grandmother had kept one, and her grandmother before that, back through the generations to the first Deel woman who had climbed into these mountains with a bag of seeds and a head full of signs and a knowledge that the land she was settling on was not empty, no matter how quiet it seemed.

The land had its own hungers.

Orpha's apprentice was Sallie Breece.

Nineteen years old, sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, with hands that were already steadier than most women twice her age. Sallie had a way of looking at you that made you feel like she was reading the fine print on your soul, and a mouth that said what it found there whether you wanted to hear it or not. She was not pretty in the way the Hollow valued pretty—soft, quiet, biddable—but she was striking in a way that made men look twice and then look away, uncertain whether they had been challenged or invited.

Sallie's mother had died birthing her.

Orpha's only loss in forty years of catching babies.

The grief sat between them like a covered dish nobody lifted the cloth from. Orpha had never spoken of it directly. Sallie had never asked. But it was there in the way Orpha's hands tightened on the birthing stool whenever Sallie entered the room, in the way she taught the girl with a fierceness that went beyond instruction and into something closer to atonement.

Sallie knew this. She was too sharp not to.

She let it lie because she needed what Orpha could teach her more than she needed the comfort of an old woman's guilt.

That was the arrangement. Unspoken, understood, as binding as any contract written in ink.

On the morning of January the fourteenth, 1874, Orpha woke before dawn to the sound of someone beating on her door.

She knew the sound. She had heard it a hundred times in her life, that particular desperate rhythm that said a woman was laboring and things were not going well. She was out of bed and dressed before the second round of knocking, pulling on her heavy wool coat and her boots and reaching for the granny bag that hung on its peg by the door—the bag that held everything she needed to bring a child into the world or ease a soul out of it.

The bag was old. Leather, cracked and dark with years of handling, the strap worn thin at the shoulder. Inside: clean rags, a sharp knife, a length of boiled cord, a tin of salve, a packet of blue cohosh for when the pains stalled, a packet of ergot for when the bleeding would not stop, a bone needle and silk thread for when the tearing was bad, and, wrapped in a scrap of calico at the very bottom, three iron nails and a twist of red thread and a small leather pouch of salt.

The last items were not for the birthing.

They were for what might come after.

She opened the door to find Green Tull standing on her porch in the sleet, hatless, his coat soaked through, his eyes wild with the particular terror of a man who has realized that the most important thing in his life is happening in a room he is not allowed to enter.

"It's Iva," he said. "She started in the night. It ain't—" He swallowed. "It ain't coming right, Orpha."

"How long?"

"Since about ten. She was doing all right for a while, but then she started screaming and she ain't stopped."

Orpha looked past him into the dark. The sleet was coming down in sheets, turning the world to gray glass. The path to the Tull farm was a mile and a half down the branch, across the ford, and up the other side of the ridge. In this weather, on this ground, it would take the better part of an hour.

"You send for Sallie?"

"Sent my boy. He ought to be there by now."

"Then let's go."

They went.

The walk was brutal. The path was a river of mud and ice, and the sleet cut at their faces like thrown sand. Green Tull walked ahead with a lantern that guttered and spat in the wind, casting wild shadows across the laurel thickets that pressed in on both sides of the trail. The laurel was dormant now, its leaves curled tight against the cold, but even in winter it had a presence—a density, a watchfulness—that made Orpha's skin prickle.

She had walked this path a thousand times.

Tonight it felt longer.

The Tull farm sat in a small clearing on the south side of the ridge, sheltered from the worst of the wind by a stand of white pines. The cabin was larger than most in the Hollow—two rooms and a loft, with a good stone chimney and a covered porch. Light burned in every window. As they came up the path, Orpha could hear Iva screaming.

Not the rhythmic, grunting screams of active labor.

These were the screams of a woman whose body had become a country she did not recognize, and she was lost in it, and she was afraid.

Orpha quickened her step.

Inside, the cabin was hot and close, the air thick with wood smoke and the copper smell of blood. Iva Tull lay on the bed in the back room, her shift soaked through with sweat, her face the color of tallow. She was twenty-three years old and this was her first child and she looked like she had been fighting something for hours and was losing.

Sallie was already there, kneeling beside the bed with a basin of hot water and a stack of clean rags. She looked up when Orpha came in, and the look on her face said everything: I've done what I can. It's not enough. Hurry.

Orpha set her bag down and went to work.

The baby was turned wrong—not breech, but posterior, the head pressing against Iva's spine with every contraction, sending bolts of pain through her body that made her arch off the bed and scream until her voice cracked and gave out. Orpha had seen it before. It was not the worst thing that could happen, but it was bad enough, and in a cabin a mile from the nearest neighbor with sleet hammering the roof and no doctor within a day's ride, bad enough could become fatal in the time it took to boil water.

She talked to Iva in the low, steady voice she used for frightened animals and laboring women—the voice that said I am here and I know what I am doing and you are going to be all right even when she was not certain any of those things were true.

She got Iva up on her hands and knees to try to turn the baby. She rubbed her back with rendered bear fat. She gave her sips of blue cohosh tea to strengthen the contractions. She did everything her grandmother had taught her, and her grandmother's grandmother before that, the accumulated wisdom of women who had been catching babies in these mountains since before the Revolution.

The hours ground past.

Green Tull stood outside the birthing room door with his hat crushed in both hands, listening like a man hearing his life judged through a wall. He did not pace. He did not speak. He stood perfectly still, and the stillness was worse than any amount of pacing would have been, because it was the stillness of a man who had already begun to grieve.

Sallie brought fresh water. Changed the rags. Held Iva's hand when the contractions came so hard and fast that the girl could not breathe between them. She did everything Orpha told her to do, quickly and without question, and Orpha felt a surge of something that was not quite pride and not quite love but lived in the same country as both.

At dawn, the sleet stopped.

The silence was sudden and total, as though the mountain had been holding its breath and finally let it out.

In that silence, Iva Tull pushed her son into the world.

He came all at once, the way babies sometimes do after a long labor—as if the body had been saving its strength for one final, furious effort. He slid into Orpha's hands wet and purple and perfect, his fists clenched, his mouth already open for the first cry.

Amos Tull.

That was the name Iva had chosen. She had told Orpha weeks ago, lying on her side in the cabin while Orpha felt the baby's position through her belly. Amos, if it's a boy. After my daddy.

Orpha held him up and cleared his mouth with her finger and waited for the cry.

It came.

Thin and sharp and furious, the way a healthy baby's cry should be—the sound of a soul arriving in the world and immediately objecting to the accommodations.

Orpha smiled.

Then she looked down at the caul.

Every midwife knew about cauls. A caul was the membrane that sometimes covered a baby's face at birth, a remnant of the amniotic sac that had not torn away during delivery. In the old country, a caul was considered lucky. A child born with a caul would never drown. Sailors paid good money for dried cauls to carry aboard ship as talismans against the sea.

Orpha had seen cauls before. Thin, translucent, like wet silk. Easy to peel away. Nothing to worry about.

This caul was black.

Not dark with blood. She had seen that too, and this was not that.

Black.

The membrane covered the baby's face and draped down over his shoulders like a hood, thin and wet and shining, and it was the color of a bruise that has gone past purple into something deeper and more final. It was veined—she could see the veins in it, dark threads running through the tissue like roots through soil—and it had a texture that was wrong, a roughness, as though it had been grown under stone rather than inside a woman's body.

Orpha's hands did not shake.

She had trained them not to shake forty years ago, and they had obeyed her ever since, through breech births and hemorrhages and babies born blue and still and mothers who died with their eyes open and their hands reaching for children they would never hold.

Her hands did not shake.

But something inside her went very cold and very still, the way a rabbit goes still when it smells the fox.

She peeled the caul away carefully, working her fingers under the edges and lifting it free of the baby's face. Amos screamed louder, his skin flushing pink as the air hit him, and that was good, that was normal, but Orpha was not looking at his face anymore.

She was looking at his back.

The birthmarks were there.

Three dark spots arranged in a triangle, and below them a crooked line, like a crack in stone. The pattern was small—each mark no bigger than a thumbprint—and anyone who did not know what they were looking at would have seen nothing but the ordinary blemishes that decorated every newborn's skin.

Orpha knew what she was looking at.

Three points and a crooked line.

A door-sign.

A hunger-mark.

The knowledge hit her like a fist to the chest, and for one terrible moment she was not in the Tull cabin at all. She was eight years old, sitting on her grandmother's lap in front of the fire, the windows shuttered, the door barred, listening to the old woman whisper the things that could not be said in daylight.

Once a generation, the mountain takes a tithe.

It marks the door it means to come through.

A child born under the black caul is not the danger.

It is the invitation.

Something will come up from the laurel hells to claim what has been marked, and it will eat its way through the Hollow to get there, wearing the faces of the dead as it comes.

Orpha had listened with the wide, unblinking attention of a child hearing a ghost story, not quite believing, not quite disbelieving, filing the information away in the same place she kept the recipes for poultices and the words to the laying-out songs and the names of the herbs that healed and the ones that killed.

She had never expected to need it.

Nobody ever did.

That was the cruelty of the thing. The knowledge was passed down in whispers, grandmother to granddaughter, each generation hoping it would never be tested, each generation letting a little more of the detail slip away because the human mind does not hold tightly to things it prays will never be true.

At the moment of Amos's first breath—the real breath, the one that filled his lungs and turned his cry from a whisper to a wail—the cattle in the barn screamed.

Not lowed.

Not bawled.

Screamed.

The sound came through the cabin walls like something tearing, a chorus of animal voices raised in a register that cattle should not have been able to reach. It was the sound of prey animals recognizing a predator, and it went on for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty, filling the cabin and the clearing and the hollow and the mountain with a noise that made every person in the room go still and white.

Then it stopped.

The silence afterward was worse.

Green Tull burst through the door, wild-eyed. "What in God's name—"

"Your wife needs you," Orpha said, and her voice was steady, and her hands were steady, and she placed the baby in Iva's arms with the same gentle competence she had used a thousand times before. "Healthy boy. Strong lungs. Go sit with her."

Green looked at her. Looked at Iva. Looked at the baby.

Then he went to his wife, and knelt beside the bed, and put his face against her hair, and wept the way men weep when they have been given something they were afraid to hope for.

Orpha turned away.

Sallie was watching her.

The girl had not moved from her place by the basin. Her hands were still wet, her sleeves rolled to the elbows, her dark hair coming loose from its pins. She was looking at Orpha with those sharp, reading eyes, and Orpha knew that Sallie had seen the caul.

Sallie had seen the marks.

Sallie had heard the cattle.

"Not here," Orpha said quietly. "Not now."

Sallie opened her mouth.

Closed it.

Nodded.

Orpha wrapped the black caul in a clean rag and put it in her bag. She washed her hands. She checked Iva for tearing and found it minimal. She delivered the afterbirth and examined it for completeness. She did everything she was supposed to do, in the order she was supposed to do it, because ritual was the only thing holding her together and if she stopped moving she was afraid she would start shaking and never stop.

When she was finished, she stepped out onto the porch.

The sleet had stopped, but the sky was still low and gray, pressing down on the mountain like a lid. The air smelled of ice and wood smoke and something else, something faint and sweet that Orpha could not quite place.

Laurel.

She could smell laurel.

In January.

She stood on the Tull porch and looked out at the mountain, and the mountain looked back, and for the first time in sixty-one years, Orpha Deel was afraid.