The Bog Wife E-Book

Kay Chronister

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 441

Beschreibung

A gripping and claustrophobic rural gothic horror novel about an isolated family who worship the bog that surrounds them, perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher and Stephen Graham Jones. It is said that the Haddesleys have too much of the bog in their blood to live in the world. Living an isolated existence in the Appalachians, they observe strange rituals and worship the forest and mud that surrounds them. When Charles, the patriarch of the family, reveals he is dying, his children rally around him, only to find their fraying bonds tearing apart one by one, and their beliefs upended. For Wenna, the only Haddesley to have ever escaped the forest, it means coming home to face difficult truths. For Charlie, the eldest son, his father's death means facing up to new, terrifying responsibilities. Because the bog is waiting, ever-growing, ever-hungry, and if the Haddesley children aren't careful, they will awaken something they have tried to keep at bay for a century.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Summer

Nora

Percy

Charlie

Wenna

Eda

Wenna

Charlie

Nora

Fall

Wenna

Eda

Charlie

Percy

Wenna

Eda

Percy

Nora

Winter

Wenna

Charlie

Eda

Nora

Wenna

Nora

Percy

Spring

Charlie

Wenna

Eda

Percy

Nora

Wenna

Charlie

Eda

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PRAISE FOR THE BOG WIFE

“The Bog Wife is a creeping Appalachian folktale, an astute allegory for a decaying America, and a haunting, brilliant novel. This one is going to stay with me for a while.” Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts

“Kay Chronister spins a lyrical, eerie, genre-defying tale of how the bonds of family both nurture and corrupt. I was completely absorbed and, long after reading, still deeply moved.” Jennifer Thorne, USA Today bestselling author of Diavola and Lute

“Five siblings in their decrepit ancestral home, raised to believe outlandish things, some of which might be true, must navigate a new way of existing in the world. It’s got everything: Gothic eco-horror, plant consciousness, an emotionally distant bog-woman mom, a lying tyrannical father, siblings pulled between twin desires of wanting to individuate and to be part of something larger than themselves. Soulful, suspenseful, expansive and emotionally complicated. I couldn’t put this book down, and I’m sure that it will haunt me.” Katya Apekina, author of Mother Doll

“Both intimate and generational, The Bog Wife is soaked in trauma and reckoning. It’s a wonderfully absorbing read.” Aliya Whiteley, Shirley Jackson and Clarke Award-nominated author of The Beauty and Skyward Inn

“Beautifully written and atmospheric. Chronister perfectly captures a sense of isolation, with characters in a vast landscape that is somehow also claustrophobic, clinging desperately to the very traditions that keep them trapped.” A. C. Wise, author of Out of the Drowning Deep

“Chronister has written the next Gothic classic—destined to join the ranks of Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson, but with a chilling genius all her own. Equal parts tender and terrifying, human and monstrous, I absolutely loved this book. Go ahead. Sink into the bog. You won’t regret it.” GennaRose Nethercott, author of Thistlefoot

“Dark, brooding and oozing with atmosphere, The Bog Wife is a remarkable achievement. I loved every page.” Alison Littlewood, Shirley Jackson Award-winner and author of The Other Lives of Miss Emily White

“A remarkable feat of world building, which shines a light on rituals and traditions, family dynamics and the insidious potency of nature. A story that is vivid, compelling and beautifully told.” Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Water Shall Refuse Them

“A haunting chorus of rage and sorrow that feels like it’s been gestating in the collective unconscious for a hundred years. It’s a tragic and strangely beautiful story of a family on the margins, ruined by a toxic legacy and somehow still finding grace in the land they call home.” Tom Carlisle, author of Blight

“The Bog Wife is everything I crave in a story… Chronister masterfully explores the complex relationship between humans and the environment, questioning who’s really exploiting whom.” Alisa Alering, author of Smothermoss

PRAISE FOR DESERT CREATURES

“Existing at the sweet spot where A Canticle for Leibowitz and Blood Meridian meet, Chronister’s Desert Creatures is a vivid investigation of faith, perseverance, and human violence as they exist at the end of the world. A scintillating first novel.” Brian Evenson, winner of the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards

“Like a desert corpse, Kay Chronister’s debut novel blooms with dark and unsettling fruit, effortlessly weaving together the Western, the post-apocalyptic, and the Weird. An unforgettable feat of worldbuilding.” Ally Wilkes, Bram Stoker Award®-nominated author of All the White Spaces

“A Canterbury Tales western of faith and fickle miracles. A Scheherazade’s feast of horror. Pilgrims and heretics, sinners and self-serving saints, wolves and coyotes, deserts and general weirdness. Beautifully and disturbingly told, devastating and astonishing in equal measure.” Angela Slatter, award-winning author of The Path of Thorns

Also by Kay Chronisterand available from Titan Books

Desert Creatures

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The Bog Wife

Print edition ISBN: 9781803369655

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803369662

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: October 2024

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Kay Chronister 2024

Kay Chronister asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For my daughter

On winter nights, they burned heavy bundles of dried peat in the hearth and inhaled the scent of sacred ground burning while their father paced the length of the room, reciting the history of the Haddesley compact.

He said, Our ways are noble; they are ancient.

He said, Always the bog has belonged to us and we to it.

He said, A millennium ago, the father of our line was thrown into the mire as punishment for a transgression that he did not commit. His hair shorn, his hands tied, his mouth gagged, his clothes packed with stones. But he did not die. No man can tell what strange negotiations were made beneath the surface. But from that day onward, the bog was in him. When he rose from those depths, a woman rose with him to be his wife. You are bound now, she told him in her language, to the care of this land. Your sons’ marriages will reseal the compact between us. Your family line must not comingle, must not branch.

He said, Purity has been the way of our progenitors.

He said, It was unjust suspicions of sorcery that drove our ancestors from the old county, uncountably many years ago. But the first American Haddesley was led by his dowsing stick and the hold of the compact on him to this West Virginian bog’s very heart, and in this place he built our home.

Holding aloft an antique globe with his index finger on the dark expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, his voice reunifying the continents that time had torn asunder, he said, They are the same mountains. The same veins of water. We are natives to this land. And still the bog’s custodians.

He said, Always the bog has belonged to us and we to it.

And they listened dreamily, the five of them, as they melted into a pile of blankets and limbs and lolling heads: Nora’s chin on Wenna’s shoulder and her feet tangled up with Percy’s feet; Eda stroking Percy’s bath-damp hair as his small head lay in her lap, her back propped against Charlie’s. They were so warm, so close.

Later, none of them could remember where their mother had been while their father told that story.

SUMMER

NORA

Nora found the trespassers sprouting brightly at the bottom of the dry swale, an entire zigzagging row of them, broad-headed and firm as if they’d been maturing there for months although they couldn’t have been there more than a week.

Her brother Percy was only steps behind her, rooting out the sedge that stubbornly sprouted and resprouted on the banks of the swale no matter how many times they tore it out. Any minute now, he would see, he would know. His face would transform: his lips sucked inward until they almost disappeared, his eyes low and narrowed like he could see the growth of trespassers from seed to sprout right in that very moment if he only looked hard enough. The deep and focused calm that came over him as he worked in the bog—and sometimes, on the best days, lingered in him afterward—would give way to panic. For the rest of the day, he would be consumed by what-ifs and what-nows. He would spend hours opening and closing their battered old copy of A Field Guide to Flora of the Highland Fens in the futile hope that the trespasser’s name and picture might somehow appear there. Eventually, he would get up the nerve to inform their father, who would not under any circumstances know what to do to help but might, depending on his mood, reply with a thunderous arms-waving injunction to do more! or only nod as if he had already known and sink further into his sickness like it was despair that was eating away his stomach, not cancer. After that, for the rest of the night, everyone would be polite in a way that was like a membrane stretched thin across their anger, Percy resenting Charlie for not doing the custodian’s work that was his firstborn obligation and Charlie resenting Percy for reminding him that he should have been the one doing it, and Eda resenting them both for upsetting their father, and Nora stuck at a silent dinner table, resenting no one, terrified by how fragile were the ties that held them.

With a furtive glance back at her brother, she reached out and grasped the trespassers in her fist and yanked them out by the stems. She felt a heart-hammering little slip of relief as she lifted her hand to her pocket and hid the trespassers there, thinking that the night was spared. Percy would remain in that calm and focused half-dreamy state. He would be able to tell their father he had cleared the swale enough to open the lock that held back the river and flood the bog’s thirsty mouth without fear of contaminating it. Charlie would emptily but sincerely offer to help with the bog’s flooding, and Percy would tell him it was all right, it wasn’t his fault, and he would even mean it. Eda would make something edible for dinner.

But then Percy crouched behind her, and she saw him seeing the torn ends of the stems left in the ground, thin but conspicuous orange shoots that she realized now he could never have missed, and everything was worse than before, because now the trespassers were her fault.

“What is this?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Nora blandly, her fingers squeezing around the waxy flesh of the trespassers in her pocket until her hand became a fist.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t see it.”

“See what?”

“Look.”

Nora reluctantly turned and made her way back to him. Percy was two years younger than she was, twenty-two to her twenty-four, but so forceful and self-assured in their father’s old waders. A foot away from his hunched form, she stopped and crossed her arms before her chest. The small bulk of the trespassers burned in her pocket as if they had grown from her hip.

“What?” she said.

“This is bad.” He brushed away soil with his fingers and uncovered the white knob of the trespassers’ feet in the dark earth. He yanked the knob loose with an audible snap. A ragged mass of spidery roots trailed from his fist.

“Oh,” said Nora, emptily, because she knew Percy would be worried if she agreed that it was bad but angry if she protested that it wasn’t.

“They’re new,” he insisted. “I don’t even know what they are. Orange stems like that, I’ve never seen before.”

Nora uncrossed her arms then crossed them again. “Well, you got them out. And it’s only the swale, anyway.”

“Yes, and the swale goes to the bog’s mouth,” Percy said, as if she didn’t know that. “Anything in the swale could get carried to the bog. And I didn’t get them out. There’s roots.”

“Dig out the roots, then.”

“You can’t do that with mushrooms.” He raked his fingers through the small crater left by the trespassers’ extraction. “There are roots all through here.” Percy was on the brink of despair. “They’re everywhere.”

Nora fidgeted with the trespassers in her pocket, fighting the impulse to tell Percy to calm down, which never calmed him. She wished he wouldn’t always be so anxious. The fear that animated him only made her tired and limp with helplessness. She understood as well as he did that the trespassers meant something was wrong, but if she really accepted that the bog could be sick enough to die, the world became hostile, the future hopeless, their shared life as precarious and small as the lives of the flies that fell into the mouths of pitcher plants and never came out again. So she did not think about it. They were doing what they could: feeding the bog’s thirsty mouth with filtered water siphoned off from the river, plucking out trespassers when they found them, crossing the tender shuddering mat of sphagnum moss around the bog’s mouth as rarely as possible, and then only on bare feet.

“Maybe Charlie would know what to do,” she said.

They both knew that Charlie did not know what to do. That Charlie was, in no ways that mattered, really the bog’s custodian. But by reminding Percy that he was neither the custodian nor even next in line to be one, Nora hoped to discourage him enough that he would go inside with her.

Percy answered her with a dark look. It was an acknowledgment that she’d tried to hurt his feelings, not a concession that his feelings had been hurt. “I have to tell Dad,” he said, in the low half-muttered register that meant he was mostly talking to himself.

Nora tore her fingers away from the mash of fungal tissue in her dress pocket and followed Percy back through the pitted landscape of hollows and hummocks, close enough that they brushed against each other as they found their footing with a shared set of instincts. When they got to the house, they stood on the back step to unstick the wet earth from their feet, leaning habitually on each other’s shoulders for balance. They were still unsticking when Eda opened the back door and told them their father was dying.

*   *   *

Their father was propped up on a pile of pillows in his four-poster bed, his head and neck sticking out from a mound of flannel blankets. To Nora, he did not appear any closer to dying than he had been that morning. But he was more frantic than she’d seen him in a long time. “Come here, come close,” he said to them. “You’re wasting time we haven’t got. Where’s Charlie?”

Nora stood behind Percy in the doorway, her fear of disobeying her father edged out very slightly by her fear of moving closer to him. She was certain that somehow he would know about the wad of trespassers in her pocket.

“He’s probably in the study, Daddy,” said Eda, fidgeting with the pillows on the bed.

“Well, get him!” he said. “Someone.”

Nora and Percy exchanged a look, neither of them eager to fetch Charlie. Their silent negotiation ended only when Eda brushed past them with a heavy sigh to do it herself. Nora and Percy stayed where they were, Nora sticking her gaze to the crooked little wedge of hair between Percy’s ear and his neck, the mushrooms heavy and portentous in her pocket. Percy was shaking slightly, a full-body tremor that Nora noticed by the way the edge of the doorframe kept vanishing and reappearing behind his ear. She wished he wouldn’t try to tell their father things. His voice had just begun to crack loose from his throat when the sound of Charlie’s stumbling, uneven stride thudded on the staircase, and then they were flushed into the bedroom as Eda came through with Charlie leaning on her. Awkwardly they shifted back and forth as Eda struggled underneath him. He said, under his breath, “Please, just let go,” and she said, “You’ll fall,” and he said, “It’s fine,” and at last she deposited him in a heap on the chest at the foot of the bed, where he sat with a dismayed look on his face, closing his eyes as if he could shut out hurt that way.

Eda threw a quick, guilty glance back at him before she returned to fidgeting with their father’s covers, peeling back the blankets that she had just tucked in to put on his slippers. In the dark well of the blankets, their father’s sock feet were strangely small and soft and vulnerable, and Nora had the feeling that she should look away, but she didn’t, because it would have been too conspicuous, it would only have shamed him more, so they all three endured silently as Eda tried without success to wedge a slipper onto their father’s right heel.

“Stop that,” their father said, suddenly losing patience, striking at her with his socked foot. Eda flinched backward, chastened, and she held her crouched pose at the bedside as he began to speak, even though there was an unoccupied chair right behind her.

“Now, listen to me,” he said. “Things are coming to their natural conclusion. You’ve got to get Wenna back before the time comes for the exchange.”

No one spoke for a long moment. Nora could not remember the last time anyone had spoken Wenna’s name aloud.

“Wenna?” Eda broke the silence. “You want Wenna here?”

“Yes,” said their father. “All of you must be here.”

“I . . . don’t know if Wenna will come,” Eda said. Sometime in the past few months, she had begun to speak to their father in the same slow, measured way that she sometimes spoke to Nora, as if they were both wild animals that she had to soothe—but dangerous ones, so that all the time in her voice there was a hint of fear. “She hasn’t spoken to us in . . . ten years? Does she even know that you’re sick?”

“Wenna will come if she is told,” said their father, unperturbed. “She knows her responsibilities.”

Nora watched Eda to see what she would say to this, but Eda was staring past her at Charlie, her eyes beseeching him to say something. Charlie, as usual, kept quiet.

“You don’t have long,” said their father. “Have her here. Have everything prepared. Please.” He shut his eyes and seemed, for a while, to hold his breath. It was like seeing how he would look when he was dead, Nora thought, and then she was ashamed of thinking it, as if thinking it could make it happen.

“All right,” he said when he came back from inside himself. “That’s it. Except: Eleanor, would you get my things from the desk? I would like to write a little.”

Nora was startled and yet almost breathlessly pleased to be asked. Her father had never wanted her help with his memoirs before. He only ever asked Percy, supposedly because the dictation of the memoirs was part of Percy’s ongoing education but in actuality—they all knew, even Charlie, who would always pretend he didn’t—because Percy was the only one of them their father ever wanted to depend on. Nora was not, admittedly, interested in her father’s memoirs. The contents had already been thrust upon her—and all of them—in the form of long and meandering story-lectures since before she was old enough to understand them. But she was interested in being chosen for something. Her pleasure was shadowed only slightly by the trespassers in her pocket, which seemed all the time to threaten to slip out onto the floor.

She could see from the look on Percy’s face that he was hurt and even angry at being snubbed, but he knew better than to say so. He muttered something indistinct and slunk out of the room. Nora followed him out the door, wanting to say that she was sorry, that she hadn’t asked to be asked, and she didn’t even know why her father had chosen her, but he was down the stairs before her foot even landed on the first step.

From their father’s study, she retrieved the heavy goatskin volume that she had never before been permitted to touch, checking to ensure her fingernails were clean first. When she returned to her father’s bedroom, only Eda was still there. “Can’t I please make you something to eat, Dad?” she was saying. “I think you’d feel better.”

He didn’t answer her. “Eleanor, my littlest girl,” he said, looking to the doorway. “Eda, let her have the chair. You needn’t be here for this.”

Under the heat of Eda’s glare, Nora crossed the room and lowered herself into the chair at the bedside. She cracked the spine of the goatskin book and luxuriated in the soft, gluey scent of the paper. Her father, she knew, had bound the book himself. The cover was sewn from the skins of their family’s goats. Nora uncapped the pen that she’d taken from the study and held it above the first empty page, waiting. Her father had his eyes shut again.

He was silent for so long that she was afraid he was asleep, then that he was dead, but at last he unsealed his cracked lips and said, softly, “Get out the slip of paper in the front of the book.”

Nora did as she was told, flipping back through masses of heavy, ink-stained pages filled with dense columns of Percy’s handwriting until she reached the front of the book. She unfolded the paper. Everything to Charles, it said, followed by her father’s signature, written in an articulate script that she knew his fingers couldn’t manage anymore. The paper felt brittle between her fingers. She didn’t know what she had been expecting to find, but not this.

“You found it?” he said. His eyes were still closed.

She nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her and whispered her yes.

“Destroy it.”

“You . . . want me to rip it?” she said.

“I want you to destroy it. Entirely.”

Nora had the fleeting impulse to call Eda into the room. Sometimes, since he’d gotten sick, their father held whole conversations in a kind of trance, speaking meanderingly and too slow, making requests that bewildered his waking self. “I didn’t want this,” he’d say with disgust, even a tinge of fear, to the bowl of soup or hot water bottle laid out before him, as if they had materialized from nothing. If Eda heard their father asking her to tear the will up, Nora wouldn’t be in trouble—at least not with Eda, who was the one that really mattered, lately—when he forgot he’d done it later. But their father had sent Eda away, and Nora decided that she was more afraid of her father’s certain wrath now than his possible wrath later. Slowly, so that he had time to stop her if he changed his mind, she tore the sheet of paper lengthwise. Her father waited, his head cocked slightly to the side as if he were listening, until she tore the paper once more.

“I want that burned,” he said. “Don’t bury it. Now, tear out a new sheet of paper. Do you have it? Good. Write, Everything to the eldest living son.”

Nora got a feeling like a cold heavy thing lowering itself down onto her chest. Who was the eldest living son if it was not Charlie? “Why?” she said, before she could stop herself.

“Because,” her father said, and he sounded sad now, “I am not certain what will happen.”

“To Charlie, you mean?” she whispered.

Her father stiffened. He opened an eye. “We don’t have time to waste. Write it out. The eldest living son. As I said.”

Nora scratched the words out, wondering as she wrote if she should change her handwriting so no one would know for certain that it was her. They would figure it out anyway, she thought, and they would blame her once they did, and she again wished that Eda was in the room. “Should I—sign for you?” she said when she was finished.

“Should you sign for me?” her father mimicked, contemptuous now, making Nora startle. “Hand it here. Hurry up now.”

His fingers were already trembling even without anything in his grasp. Gently, Nora set the volume in her father’s lap, settling the pen into the crook of his hand. His hand clenched and then slackened against the pen. It slid down into his fist so that he held it like a child as he began, with painstaking effort, to etch the letters of his name. He was not yet finished when his fist loosened and the pen fell; he gasped for breath as if he had climbed a steep incline.

Nora held still with her hand suspended above the book and the fallen pen, unsure whether he wanted her to finish. Her father’s entire body was shaking.

“Thank you,” he breathed, with something like relief. Then, as if he had never been cruel to her at all, he said, tenderly, “Eleanor, my littlest girl. You’ll write to your sister, won’t you? I want you to be the one to sign the letter. She’ll come back for you. You know, she wanted to take you with her. She loved you most.”

There was nothing he could have said that would have surprised her more. She wanted desperately to ask how he knew, and why Wenna hadn’t taken her, if she’d wanted to, but Nora knew her father wouldn’t answer. “If you want me to,” she stammered.

“Good,” he said. “All of you must be here.”

*   *   *

Even though everyone acted as if they didn’t know where Wenna was, they had her mailing address. Every year, she sent a Christmas card—heedless of the fact that the Haddesleys had never celebrated Christmas—with an impersonal and unsigned message that could have come from anyone. She stamped her name and return address plainly on the envelope. Eda always opened the cards and left them in the kitchen for a week as if letting them air out, then tucked them back inside their envelopes and deposited them in a cardboard box in the attic with all the other remaining evidence of Wenna’s existence. That night, Eda extracted the latest one from the Wenna box and brought it downstairs. They met in the dim foyer beneath the west-wing staircase, speaking in whispers by unspoken consensus, furtive and urgent as if they were making mischief. What they were doing was not even a secret, but Nora liked how it felt to be huddled around the piano bench they were using as a makeshift table, Percy on one side of her and Eda on the other and Charlie standing at her shoulder, the four of them bent toward the same purpose. They were never together like this, not lately.

Eda sighed. “Let’s get this over with,” she said, picking up a pen. Nora almost let her do it. Eda hated to not be in charge of things. But the letter was too important to be sullied by Eda’s spelling errors or her long-simmering anger with Wenna.

“Dad said I’m supposed to write it,” Nora said, almost in a whisper.

Eda’s eyes narrowed. “You? Why?”

“Because Wenna liked her best,” said Percy, before Nora could answer. “And Dad thinks it’ll get Wenna to come back.”

Nora was pleased to hear that Percy thought Wenna liked her best, although she didn’t like the way Percy said it, as if it were embarrassing or even treacherous. “That is what Dad said,” she admitted.

Eda opened her mouth to protest but changed her mind. She slid the sheet of paper across the bench to Nora. “You write, then,” she said.

Nora took up the pen. “Should I write dear?” she said, her hand hovering above the empty page.

Percy snorted. “I don’t think we’re dear to her.”

“But she’s dear to us. Right?” Nora looked to Charlie, but he only worked his mouth, unsuggestively. No one would concede that Wenna was dear to them. Nora had already etched the first line of the capital D, but, with a decisive motion, she sutured the stroke into the first curve of a W.

“Please come home,” she narrated. “Does that sound stupid?”

“I mean,” said Percy, “it’s not really her home anymore. Is it?”

“‘Come home’ is fine,” said Eda, impatiently.

Nora glanced again at Charlie. He nodded, leaning his weight back and forth on his cane, inclining himself longingly toward the hallway.

“Dad is dying,” she said, and the pronouncement of the words wrenched something out of her. She rubbed her bleary eyes with her palm. “What if he’s actually not?” she said.

“He is,” Eda said.

“But if we carry him down too early, what would happen?”

“We won’t do that,” said Eda. “We’ll know when it’s time.”

Percy was nodding in agreement.

“Dad is dying,” Nora conceded. She went on: “We need you for the buriel rites.”

“It’s burial, with an a,” said Percy.

“It’s not.”

“It is,” said Charlie, reluctantly.

Nora hated being corrected, but she held back her frustration because she knew if she complained they would leave her to write the letter alone. She scratched out the word buriel and then the entire sentence and began again. The flat of her left hand smudged the crossed-out words into a blur as she maneuvered painstakingly across the paper. “He says, please come as soon as you can,” she finished. “Is that spelled right? Is that good enough?” She did not know how to plead with the Wenna that Wenna would have become in ten years. She did not know what that Wenna wanted or believed or loved. She wondered if Wenna still loved her best, or at all.

Eda looked at the ceiling. “She’s not going to come because you convinced her, Nor,” she said wearily. “She’s going to come because she knows there won’t be a bog-wife for Charlie if she doesn’t.”

“I know,” said Nora, although she didn’t think that was true, because if it had been, her father wouldn’t have been so particular about asking her to write.

That night, Nora stayed downstairs until everyone else went to bed, reading an old issue of National Enquirer—the cover story was a state senator’s secret conjoined twin, a tiny scowling figure that was said to cast votes for him sometimes and appeared, from some angles at least, to be a shadow on his suit jacket; it was not a particular favorite, but that was the only issue she could find downstairs—and fidgeting with the trespassers in her pocket until they were shredded into waxy little crumbs. When she was satisfied that she was the only one awake, she crept out the back door and emptied the contents of her pocket into the palm of her hand and hid the trespassers underneath the back step, where they could not be traced back to her.

PERCY

Percy couldn’t think about anything else but the orange trespassers in the swale. The headless sprouts were not like the other trespassers that had come before them: not the bull thistle that threaded the property-line, fast-growing and inexhaustible but so shallow-rooted that you could yank it out like hair; nor the out-of-place maples that sprouted close to the bog’s mouth, doomed from birth because the earth was too wet to anchor them there; nor like the little flowers that impersonated sedge until their buds opened, revealing blossoms pink and sun-hungry and unembarrassed that made them easy marks (and satisfying) for culling. The orange sprouts had not disguised themselves, but they had met him with a sinister indifference when he tore at them. Tear me out, they seemed to say. You won’t get the heart of me. That’s somewhere you can’t reach. He had clawed at the earth beneath the ripped-out stems but realized quickly that there were no roots to be found—at least, not roots that he could see. The trespassers seemed to have sprouted from nowhere, to have succumbed so easily that they must not have succumbed at all, and the whole swale felt compromised by their presence.

He searched for them in the Field Guide to Flora of the Highland Fens, holding a handful of leathery stems against the brittle pages, but he knew already that he would not find them there and he was right. There was nothing orange-colored in the guide. He suspected from the start that they were a variety of mushroom, but he wished that he’d seen their heads. He had an unaccountable suspicion that the trespassers had devised some way of getting rid of their identifying heads, like a salamander might shed its tail to make a quick escape. If he’d only seen the heads, he might have been able to figure out conclusively what they were. He would have known the depth of the crisis that lay before them.

After three days, not knowing what else to do, he brought the stems to his father.

Charles Haddesley the Eleventh was a small man, inches shorter than Percy, his shoulders even narrower than Charlie’s always-hunched shoulders. Sitting upright in the enormous mahogany four-poster bed that had slept all the American Haddesley patriarchs, he looked even smaller. For a long time before he entered, Percy stood in the hallway looking at his father through the crack in the door, trying to rearrange the small gaunt man back into the patriarch. He had spent his whole life learning a version of his father that was gone, and he didn’t know how to behave around the man that his father was now. His father used to slam his fists on the dining room table for emphasis when he told stories. His father used to sing ballads in a thunderous voice, pronouncing the ends of the lines as if he were angry at them. His father used to wring the necks of chickens in one deft motion. His father used to pace the lengths of rooms until he wore down the carpet because stillness bored him. Now his father sat staring at the floor to the side of his bed with a look of helplessness and bewilderment. For such a long time, he only stared. Then, as if he sensed Percy was there, his head lifted and his gaze sharpened and he was Charles Haddesley the Eleventh again, and Percy pushed open the bedroom door with the trespasser’s stems limp in his clammy fist.

“Percival,” his father said, companionably. “Sit down.”

Percy sat down.

“Look me in the eye,” said his father, and Percy did, forcing himself to keep his stare flat and focused. His father had the Haddesley eyes, green-gray, a point of hereditary pride underlined by the portraits hanging on the walls in which every Haddesley patriarch appeared with the same pond-colored irises. Of the five of them, only Wenna had inherited those eyes, which was ironic because Wenna had decided not to be a Haddesley.

His father’s eyes watered, but he did not blink. “That’s the difference,” he said, after an indeterminate length of time had passed, with the air of someone continuing an ongoing conversation, “between you and Charlie.”

Percy let his eyes wander to the door, feeling uncomfortably implicated in whatever crushing and unfair and probably true thing his father was about to say loudly enough for anyone in the hallway to hear, but also longing for his father to go on. A small and spiteful part of him liked hearing that he held up to his father’s scrutiny better than Charlie. The trespassers, he decided, could wait a little while longer.

“Charlie,” his father went on, “will never look at you. Always hanging his head as if he’s just been caught abusing himself in the bushes. Well—not that he could, now. But you, son, you know how to look a man in the face and dare him to look back.”

Percy squeezed the life from the stems of the trespassers, agonized and pleased. There was nothing he could say back that was not either an outright betrayal of Charlie or a rejection of his father. “Thanks, Dad.”

“You do,” his father said, with a vigorous nod. “You do, I see you. Listen to me, Percival. You need to end your brother’s life.”

Percy thought he must have misheard. He held still, waiting for his ears to untangle his father’s words into something other than what they had been. “You want . . . ,” he began, when he could not untangle them.

“It need not be violent,” his father admonished, as if Percy had said that he intended to bash Charlie’s skull in. “It’s not about punishing him. It’s about what has to be done for the good of the family, the family and the land.”

Percy nodded, because his father liked to know they were paying attention when he spoke to them and was prone to speaking with more and more force and volume until he got some kind of indication that he had an engaged audience. It had been a mistake not to close the door when he entered the room. At any moment Eda would come with their father’s breakfast or Nora would come looking for him and they would be overheard. At least, he consoled himself, Charlie still could not easily manage the stairs.

“I always had reservations.” His father’s eyes grew distant, and he no longer seemed to be addressing Percy. “From the first. But maybe he would have been all right, if not for—well. You know.”

Percy did know. His father did not need to say that a hemlock tree had fallen like a hundred-foot-long inarguable articulation of the bog’s displeasure onto Charlie’s firstborn pelvis. “Yes,” he mumbled, because he didn’t want to say it either.

His father scrunched up his face. “Speak up, Percival.”

“I said, yes,” Percy repeated, feeling as conspicuous and clumsy as a child.

“Well, good,” said his father, prickly now. Everyone, including probably their father himself, knew his hearing had faded. But he wouldn’t admit it, so instead he accused them of whispering or pretended he didn’t care what they’d said in the first place. “You must act quickly,” he went on, regaining mastery of the conversation. “What we don’t want is to confuse the bog about who is inheriting.”

“You want me to marry the bog-wife?”

His father sneered. “What did you think I was saying? Yes. Someone has to.” His sneer loosened. He looked weary then, reduced. His lips trembled. “The line,” he whispered, “cannot be allowed to lapse.”

Percy looked again to the door. Perhaps Charlie and his father had decided to test him, to see what treachery he might be capable of. If he said yes, Charlie would appear in the hallway bearing one of the gaudy rusted-out broadswords that hung on the wall in the great room downstairs and challenge him to a duel as if they were in one of those chivalric romances that Nora read. This was no more inconceivable than the idea that Percy could just step into his brother’s place as if he and not Charlie were the firstborn son. He could not really let himself imagine what it would be like to usurp his brother’s role, because both his fear and his longing became unbearable when he did. Hesitantly, he said, “Couldn’t I . . . do it . . . without, you know . . .”

“Don’t you think I would have said so?” his father snipped. “It gives me no pleasure to ask such a thing of you. But there has never been any case of a younger son inheriting while the elder lives. It would be a betrayal of the compact.”

Percy was quiet for a long moment that was made endlessly longer by the way his father’s eyes held him. What his father was asking him felt unthinkable. He had never even casually tussled with his brother, much less raised a hand to him with any kind of serious intent. He never needed to. Charlie did not compete for things. He either got them by default or relinquished them without resistance. He imagined, grotesquely, his brother receiving a fatal blow with arms hanging limply at his sides, the expression on his face one of glum resignation.

“Percival,” his father said, when he did not answer. “Tell me that you understand.”

Percy did not understand, but understanding had never once in his life been a prerequisite to obeying his father. He leaned closer so he could speak under his breath and still be heard. “How would I . . . do it?”

“Well, that’s up to you,” his father said airily, as if the subject was not an interesting one to him. “You’re stronger than he is, you know, especially now. But if it were me, I would use poison.”

“Wouldn’t everyone know?” He imagined Charlie expiring over a bowl of cowbane-laced SpaghettiOs as Eda and Nora sat on either side of him. The expressions on their faces. Wenna arriving a few days later, asking incredulously, what did you say happened to him?

“They may realize,” his father said. “But they are daughters. These are not burdens for them to shoulder.” He looked sternly at Percy. “Don’t tell me that you won’t be able to manage your household, once it is your household.”

“I can,” Percy said, although really it did not seem possible that any of the five of them other than Eda would ever manage the household. Right now, he could not even get his sister to let him put peanut butter on the grocery list. “I will,” he added.

His father did not look confident, but he seemed to have tired of the conversation. “Good,” he said. “Now, what did you want?”

The problem of the trespassers in the swale felt dwarfed and silly now, but it also took on new significance. If Percy—not Charlie—was going to be the patriarch, he needed to know how to manage the land. He could not let terror of his father’s disappointment get in the way of his obligations.

“I found something in the swale,” Percy said. He held out the stems for his father to see. His heartbeat thumped in the heel of his hand beneath the trespassers.

His father shifted so he was propped more securely on his mountain of pillows and leaned closer to Percy’s outstretched hand. “Hm,” he said, after a while.

Percy swallowed his impatient what? His father did not like to be hurried, especially now that he moved so slowly.

His father craned his neck to see closer, and then abruptly he pushed Percy’s hand back. “Flood the swale,” he said.

“That’s it?” Percy failed to hide his dismay. The whole reason he brought the trespassers to his father was because he thought it was dangerous to let water flow through the swale to the bog’s mouth if some hidden fragments of the trespassers might be carried along with the current. Besides which, he had measured the depth of the bog’s mouth, and it was not yet low enough to be flooded.

“What else?” his father said.

“Well—what are they?”

A look of unease crossed his father’s face. For an excruciatingly long time, he didn’t answer, and Percy couldn’t tell if he didn’t know the answer to Percy’s question or if he didn’t even remember what Percy had asked him. Then, scratching at the ceiling of his thin sickbed voice, he said, “Just flood the swale!”

“Yes. I will.” Compared with the other demand his father had made of him, it was easy, eminently feasible. It cost him nothing to comply. But when he returned to the bog, he found a row of trespassers sprouting where the swale met the hinged door to the Cranberry River. These trespassers retained their heads, and Percy knew as soon as he saw them that his suspicions were correct; they were mushrooms. His heart sank. He sometimes saw mushrooms in the sparse forest on the west end of the property, modest white-headed clumps strewn across the soil or fringed gray dishes sticking out like frills from the trunks of trees. But he had never seen any of their ilk here, where the soil was not mushroom soil because it was bog soil, a dense wet batter that supported only the shallow-rooted and perpetually thirsty.

They should never have tolerated any of the mushrooms, Percy thought. The mushrooms had all been trespassers. He tore out the orange mushrooms and gathered up the torn stems for burning, but he knew it wouldn’t make a difference. Mushrooms could not be dug up. They could not be evicted. He wondered if his father had known and had not wanted to admit to him the hopelessness of their situation.

For a while he stood over the swale, paralyzed by indecision, feeling that what he did now would prove whether he was really fit to be patriarch. He should have been able to take command of the land. Or he should at least have been able to confidently obey his father. Instead, he yanked the lever that held closed the door between the river and the swale as if it were his only recourse, feeling a sense of resignation.

As soon as the door lifted, water rushed out of the Cranberry River and bounded down the swale, twisting in the narrow furrow, lapping at its edges, white-tipped and propulsive. Percy stood with his hand on the lever, watching the water flow. He counted to sixty, like his father had taught him. When a minute’s worth of water had entered the swale, he took his hand off the lever. But the door stuck halfway open. Water broke violently on the iron plate and then dug underneath it. The flow into the swale persisted. Too much water was hitting the bog’s mouth, all of it possibly contaminated, and yet Percy stood frozen for precious seconds before he leapt into the swale, heavy clods of wet earth following him down, and pushed the door down with as much force as he could muster.

The door shuddered beneath him but did not budge. Water rushed furiously at him, through him, swirled at his waist and between his legs. “Hey!” Percy cried, though he knew no one would hear. Even if they had heard, they would not have come. No one else felt responsible. He leaned his whole weight into the door and hated his father and Eda and Nora and especially Charlie, who made everyone feel sorry for him even as he dodged the burdens that were his birthright, who sat complacently with a dour look on his face inside the house all day and did not offer to pick up the chores that had been Percy’s even though Percy had now picked up all the chores that had been Charlie’s.

Seconds or minutes or hours passed before he accepted that the door was not going to close. He scrambled out of the flooded swale and began gathering up sticks and undergrowth, breaking off alder and rhododendron branches, kicking down loose earth. It was punishing work, slow at first, the river water rushing defiantly through and even ferrying along the sticks that were supposed to be forming a dam. But eventually the flow was arrested, only thin rivulets of water seeping through. The swale slowly emptied.

With dread knotting his stomach, Percy followed the swale’s winding path to the bog’s mouth. Water rose above the toes of his waders. As he feared, the bog meadow had become a shallow pond. The bog’s mouth gaped open, flooded more in minutes than it had in successive days of heavy rain.

Percy stood in the flooded-out bog, feeling the ground dissolve beneath his feet. He twisted the trespassers in his pocket as if the punishment he inflicted on their limp bodies could do anything to rescue the bog from the trespassers’ infinite laying-down of roots. Then he went back toward the house. From their paddock, the goats fixed him with twin pitiless stares as he lit a match and burned the trespassers in the bald circle of land reserved for the purpose. He held his breath so their smoke would not enter him. His fingers black with ash and his clothes still soaked with river water, he went inside. Charlie sat at the table, fidgeting with a spoon and an empty bowl of oatmeal, and pretended not to have watched him.

“You need help out there?” he said emptily, not looking at Percy.

“I handled it.” Only for a moment, Percy thought, I could kill him.

CHARLIE

In the first weeks of his father’s illness, when no one yet knew he was dying but the idea that he would one day die became real, Charlie spent hours walking the bog meadow, thinking incessantly and with some terror of the woman that would one day emerge from the peat to marry him. In his head, he played through the stages of the exchange as his father had explained them. His father would be buried. The next morning, Charlie would rise before the sun and go to the bog’s mouth, carrying with him the dowsing stick that hung on the wall in the study above the desk. He would wash himself in the peat of his father’s burial ground until he was covered from head to foot. He would rise from the bog and close his eyes and follow the pull of the dowsing stick, and it would lead him to his bride. When he found her, he must spit onto her mouth to unseal her lips.

(“Ew,” Charlie had said at five or six years old, hearing this for the first time, not understanding that he was not allowed to say ew to the sacred.)

Then, his father said, he and his new wife would lie down together and consummate their marriage. He always used this word, consummate, and only this word, and so until Charlie was well into adolescence—long after he had grasped what the goats in the yard were doing to produce more goats, and even after he’d grasped that he and his wife would have to do essentially the same thing to produce more Haddesleys—Charlie thought that to consummate a marriage was to lie side by side, possibly holding hands, and that the act of lying outdoors, with ritual solemnity, was the thing that joined two people inexorably together. He carried this innocent assumption through so many explanations of the wedding rites that he was shocked and vaguely repulsed when his father at some point exchanged the word copulation for consummation and seemed not even to notice.

“You mean, we have to . . . do that,” he clarified, anxiously, “outside? When we’ve just met each other?”

His father’s expression took on a familiar weariness. Charlie was too stupid to be the Haddesley patriarch, that expression said: he didn’t hold the spade at the right angle when he cut peat, no matter how many times he was shown, or he didn’t ever get the hang of reading old French, or he couldn’t make Wenna and Percy and Nora listen to him, or he was in some other way completely insufficient. “Yes,” his father said, lips sealed around his teeth as if he were holding his contempt inside his mouth. “Otherwise, you will not be married in the eyes of the bog. The exchange will be unfinished. Did you never understand that?”

What else, Charlie wondered, was he not understanding? He could tell by the look on his father’s face that his father was thinking the same thing. Most of the time, he tried not to think of the bog-wife, or his future marriage, at all. Only in those first weeks of his father’s sickness did he begin to consider her as something real, not a talisman on whom the vague gestures of ritual were performed but a living person who would want coffee or not in the morning, who would brush her teeth over the basin that was only his for now, who would have to cut her toenails. Who would know him, and look at him, and think something about him.