Page 34 of The Scarlet Ball

“Of course I did. Are you ready?”

“Yes. If I have to go to one more goddamn luncheon or ball or poetry reading, I swear I will go mad.”

Something flashed across Martha’s face, some combination of envy and irritation, that finally settled into a kind of rueful amusement.

“All right. Ginny, you may watch if you want, but you must not interfere. Once we have started, we cannot stop.”

“Tell me what you’re planning first,” I said. The smarter thing would have been to turn and leave, but I could tell that for once, whatever danger there was here wasn’t for me.

Martha started to speak but Bethany broke in, stripping her gloves from her hands and tossing them to the floor.

“It’s freedom,” she said fiercely. “It’s getting the hell out of this cesspit and it’s getting away from wildfires that want to turn me to ash and floods that want to drown me. It’s getting away from my mother.”

She sounded so young, but then, she was seventeen. How else should she sound? She was also determined, hellishly so, and it was very clear that rather than running from, she was running to.

“I’m staying.”

It won a smile from Martha. “Good. Then you can make yourself useful and get Bethany out of her clothes.”

As Bethany and I loosened her dress to pull it over her head, Martha went to the wall, where she selected an enormous earthenware pot from the stack. She stripped off her gloves and carried it with her to a row of potted trees, setting it down at the end before throwing in several trowels of black dirt from a nearby bag.

“Hurry,” Bethany urged me. Her dress dropped to the ground, followed by her corset and then, covering it all, her chemise like a fall of innocent snow. Naked, she tore off her shoes and stockings and turned to allow Martha to help her step one foot and then the other into the pot, wiggling her toes in the soil.

“All right,” Martha said. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, yes, yes!”

Martha’s hand came up, and suddenly Bethany was bleeding, a narrow rivulet of blood trickling from a puncture wound on her arm. I clamped down on a cry, wondering when Martha had picked up that knife, and then it flashed again, Bethany’s other arm, and then below her collarbone.

Martha worked quickly, peppering Bethany’s torso with short deep cuts. It must have hurt a great deal, but Bethany only panted like a dog, her sides going in and out, the blood running faster down her body until she was striped like a barber’s pole.

Martha dealt her perhaps twenty wounds, front and back, and by the end, Bethany was wavering on her feet. I didn’t feel too steady myself, and if I acknowledged that that was all blood, I might be sick. Instead I told myself it was just red, only red, just a color with no meaning behind it at all, but then Martha turned to me.

“Will you help?” she asked. “We have to work fast.”

I wanted to say no, but a glance at Bethany, pale under all that red, suggested that the sooner this was over, the better. I stepped forward, and Martha passed me a handful of twigs, none thicker than my smallest finger, none longer than my hand. They were green and supple, one or two bore tiny buds, and Martha nodded.

“Come on.”

I fell into a kind of daze as we worked, pressing the ends of each living twig into Bethany’s cuts. It was brutal; if you didn’t press them in deep enough, they’d fall out. Bethany shook from head to toe. I couldn’t believe she was still standing except that her face had a rapturous look now, exultant and distant at once as if she could see her salvation coming for her.

“Hurry,” she said again, and Martha snorted.

“Wood doesn’t hurry, and neither does spring. Calm down, we’re almost done.”

The change had started when Martha planted the first twig into the cut between her breasts. Bethany’s skin grew dark and then scaled, and the blood rose up underneath it before turning paler and chalky pink under her new bark. The distance between flesh and wood is a long one, but you would never know it for how Bethany grew upward and twisted. She raised her arms toward the glass ceiling of the greenhouse, and her fingers went long and supple. The twigs that had previously been so easy to dislodge took hold, grafted, and put out fresh new leaves with a sound like a turned valve.

I placed the last twig into a particularly deep cut in the cleft of her spine, and then I fell back as she finally twisted all the way around, stretching out her arms. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of her face peering at me over her shoulder, teeth bared in triumph.

Then I looked again, and it was only the play of light between the thick leaves of a young tree, the leaves clustered to give the suggestion of a face. Bethany was gone, and a smell like cracked timber and new sap lingered in the air.

“Well,” Martha said, and then she yelped as I grabbed her by the front of the apron.

“Explain.”

Coolly, she detached my hand from her clothing. Up close, she was much taller than I was. She probably thought she would win if it came to a fight, and she could think that for now. She nodded toward the tree that had been Bethany, or perhaps still was Bethany. It was no different at all from the other trees in the row. It might have been there all along. I might have been dreaming or hallucinating, but there was the pile of Bethany’s clothes and shoes behind us.

“Bethany wants to be a doctor. She wants to go to medical school in Illinois, perhaps set up a practice out West.”