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brigdhTitle: Ain't Gonna Waste My Pleasures
Author: Brigdh
Ratings/Warnings: PG-13, non-graphic violence, references to murder
Summary: Cora and Polly and Willie, and how stories turn in to songs.
Cora was tough as nails and could shoot with a dead-eyed accuracy that put down whatever she aimed at. He’d seen her shoot a man with the same coolness she used to shoot squirrels, and she could handle any sort of gun, from a pistol to that ancient shotgun she kept behind the cabin’s door, long and narrow as Cora herself. It seemed easier to believe she might have acquaintance with ghosts than that she was some sort of secret poet.
Notes: Written for Yuletide 2013, for Lady Anne Boleyn. So much love and gratitude to my betas,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
threewalls and somebraveapollo! And thank you to Silver Queen for a very inspiring prompt.
This story is a crossover between the songs "Pretty Polly" and "Darling Cora" (though you can also read it without canon knowledge!). As with all folk songs, there are approximately a million versions of each. Here are some of my favorites, if you'd like a soundtrack for this story:
Pretty Polly: Ralph Stanley & Patty Loveless | Bert Jansch | Hillbilly Gypsies
Darling Cora: Appaloosas | The Church Sisters | Ed Hicks and Aaron Jonah Lewis
4401 words. Also available on AO3
Ain't Gonna Waste My Pleasures
Today’s batch of moonshine was likely ruined, pulled off the flame half-finished when the low grey clouds had begun piling up on the horizon. They’d drained and dried the still in a hurry, and in case they hadn’t been thorough enough, packed hay in every crevice that would hold it and wrapped the whole thing in old horse blankets pulled from the attic. It might still freeze, if their luck didn’t hold, but there was nothing more they could do. The daylight was going quick when Eli made once last round of the cabin and its clearing out back, the first snowflakes already blurring his vision. They were small but falling fast, looking like a white mist creeping over the blue rolling hills.
Not much need for a watch in this weather. The storm would keep away both friend and foe, which meant it would be only him and Cora until at least the morning, and maybe longer, if the snow kept on. He headed back inside, closing the door firmly enough to rattle its frame in the hope of shutting out any drafts. A far-fetched hope, that one, but not the worst he’d held. It wasn’t nearly as foolish as the hope he’d once had of marrying Cora, white dress and preacher and all.
Cora was sitting on a chair she’d drawn close to the hearth, bare toes almost touching the coals, her banjo on her knee. She plucked at the strings and hummed, murmured a few words unhitched from any particular tune. Her voice was dark and strong as coffee boiled too long, and woke Eli just as thoroughly. She gave no word or other sign to acknowledge him, so he didn’t speak either. He shucked his jacket and took a seat on the floor by her side, stretching his hands out toward the fire to wake some feeling in his red and pruned fingers. It didn’t seem to offer much more warmth than there’d been outside, but at least they were out of the wind.
Cora dropped her hand onto his head, ran her fingers down through his hair and inside the collar of his shirt. Somehow that was what made him shiver. She returned to the banjo just as idly and calmly as she’d ever left it, and raised a simple cord. “Polly,” she sang to herself. “Oh, pretty Polly.”
Eli groaned. “Not that one again. Don’t you ever get tired of bloodshed and love cruelly betrayed? Weather like this calls for something more cheery, or I’ll be up all night jumping at every little sound.”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of ghosts, Eli.” She fluttered her lashes at him, all mock-innocence. “Big strong man like you? What’ve you got to be scared of in a little girl haunt?” Cora would tease him just the same no matter who was watching, but sometimes when it was only the two of them she would speak her taunts in such a low-voiced smoky way that they sounded more like a promise. Cora was rough on the things she loved; her affection was as fierce and hard to catch hold of as a mountain lion. It was those she didn’t like that she was polite to– all business, no quicksilver grins or questions that were half-joke and half-challenge for them. So when the men drawn by the still laughed at him, or a more serious-minded one occasionally took him aside and offered him advice about how to control his woman, Eli only smiled.
Much as he did now, rising to meet her mockery. “Once it’s a spirit, it ain’t no little girl no more. What’ve you got to be so sure you’re safe?”
Cora’s smile was a thing of pure sharp-edged delight. “Safe and unafraid ain’t the same thing at all, my boy.” She set aside her banjo and got down off her chair, and neither of them spoke for a while after that. Outside the wind had reached a howling pitch, tearing around the cabin like an angry creature trying to burst its way inside. A clump of snow fell down the chimney and nearly put out the fire, but it recovered with a hiss and crackle, the shadows on the walls dancing as the light grew back to its previous strength. Cora’s skin was cool and winter-dry, but her mouth and cunt were hot and wet. She pressed him to the floor with hands on his shoulders and sat astride him, and his hands climbed up the compact wiry muscles of her thighs as she ground against him. He had to strain and fight to reach anything more of her, and even when he did, her kisses had teeth. She took him panting and so hard he could barely stand it, and his moans had a high-pitched, desperate edge. She was quieter, but looked like every needful thing he felt, still half-dressed with her hair down over her shoulders in a coarse black cloud and her throat arched back to the rafters.
Afterwards they gathered up what quilts and blankets could be found and made themselves a nest to lie in, not enough protection from the cold, but better than nothing. He curled up behind Cora with an arm around her waist and kissed the nape of her neck, where she tasted a bit like the dust of the blankets and a bit like sweat. One of her curls stuck to the corner of his lips. She breathed quick in his arms, nowhere close to sleep. “Ghosts have the same loves and hates as the living. But they ain’t bound by human rules like we are,” she said, picking up the conversation like it had never been dropped.
“What happened to all that ghosts-ain’t-real talk?”
“I never said they weren’t real.” All the earlier laughter had gone out of her voice, and her body was tense where he touched it, holding herself apart. “I seen one.”
Eli laughed out loud, though he hadn’t quite gotten the joke. “Just because you let me have my way with you don’t mean I got to believe everything you say.”
“Your way. That’s a damn inaccurate description of what just happened, darling.” Cora snorted, her narrow shoulders not unbending an inch. “And the reason you got to believe is that I don’t talk nonsense. You know me better than that.” She started to say something more, but clamped her mouth shut tight.
“Go on, then,” Eli said, gentle as he could be without irritating her. “Tell me about your ghost.”
He thought she was likely to refuse to answer, that she’d either claim it’d been a joke all along or go silent and inward-looking, as he’d known her do now and then. It took her a while to begin, but once she had, her voice had such a deep conviction that Eli believed every word of her story.
***
Cora hadn’t been an unusual child, at least not according to her own description. She’d been much like every other girl in the holler where she’d been born: hair corralled back into two plaits, skirts hiked up around her knees, and a tendency to be timid around strangers. Her hands had been rough with scrubbing pots and boiling laundry and the thousand other chores a farm required. That alone might have been the reason she took a fancy to a traveling man; he scorned all the hardscrabble work of life just like some untamed animal, and that had unsettled her girl-child self.
His name was Willie, and if his hair was too dark to be called yellow, it was still light enough to have something golden in it. He wore it just a little too long, as if he had better things to do than worry about his looks; same thing for the stubble that glinted on his jaw most days. His hands were lily-white and soft, though, and his eyes were true-blue, sweet and pure as a chicory flower. He wasn’t handsome in the usual way, but there was a vividness to him, like a burning light, that drew in people’s admiration. Maybe it was the way he grinned, bright and just a little cruel; it changed a lean, rawboned face into one you wanted to impress. Even Cora felt it.
He stopped by on no regular schedule, but she saw him often, sitting on the porch outside the general store with one long lanky leg folded beneath him. He’d sit there all day and play cards or dice with any other men who didn’t have work– or who were willing enough to postpone it, and he never lacked for some of those. When the game finally broke up, Willie always had a few more dollars than he’d started with. People said he didn’t play fair, but somehow that slander never stuck to him the way it would have with anybody else.
Likely that was because the store’s stock of corn liquor always replenished itself when Willie visited. He was generous with it, the way he wasn’t with cards. He’d keep a bottle by his side all through the afternoon and offer drinks to the lazy fools who gambled with him, or sometimes to one of the girls who’d stand just outside the circle of men and watch him with hope in her eyes. Willie would call her over and sweet-talk her into taking a sip, just to laugh when she coughed or screwed up her face. Once Cora had seen Katie, who was a few years older than her, sitting on his lap; Katie had looked proud as a queen, though later her daddy beat her for it.
He didn’t flirt with Cora the way he did with the older girls. But he watched her whenever she went by, those blue eyes hungry on her mud-splashed ankles and following her legs up beneath her skirt, looking like he could see right through the cloth. One day he reached out and caught her by the wrist, holding on hard even when she tried to pull away. She felt her bones creak beneath his grip, and a feeling darker than shyness flashed down her spine. Willie was faster than her though; before she could even decide what to do, he’d let her go and was grinning his sly fox grin. He apologized and said that she was driving him crazy with her coyness. Her wrist was sore the next day, but no bruise showed. No one had called her coy before.
Willie did persuade her to drink with him eventually. He said that she deserved something special for her first drink– not that this was her first, but she didn’t tell him that. She let him take her back behind the store for the occasion, and in return he swore he had something special, not moonshine but real whiskey. It might even have been true, because it didn’t taste like the whiskey she’d had before, wasn’t even the same color. It was brown in the glass he’d poured it in to show off to her, with tones of red and yellow, though that might have just been the light, sunset burning up the sky and sending long shadows of trees across the ground. Whatever it was, it was smooth in her mouth, nearly sweet to the taste. Willie claimed a kiss in payment, licking at her tongue like he was trying to get that city whiskey back for himself. He thought it was her first kiss too.
She went away with him not long after. He’d courted her with smooth silver words, saying that she had wounded his heart, that he’d wanted her for his own ever since he first set eyes on her, that she was unkind. He made all sorts of promises: he would show her pleasures, give her money and short dresses and more of that sweet brown whiskey. Cora recognized such talk for what it was, nothing but ballad lyrics worn small through overuse. She knew, too, that once she left there would be no coming back; there were words for girls who went away with strangers, and if Willie had had honest intentions, he wouldn’t have needed to court her in secret. Still, needs must when the devil drives, and there was many a man she’d known that would have been much worse to hitch herself to.
There were no automobiles in the hills in those days, but Willie had a horse he used to get around. It was a pretty, high-strung creature with one white sock, and seemed to be an entirely different species than the nag Cora’s family had to pull their plow. Willie helped her mount and told her to hold onto him to keep from falling; with her face up against his shoulders, she could smell him. Tobacco smoke mostly, though underneath was the sour reek of old sweat. But that might have been the horse.
No one saw them leave, and Cora knew it would be hours yet before anyone thought to look for her. Her family would assume she was doing her chores in the fields, or visiting at a neighbor’s, or even daydreaming in the woods, for which she had been scolded too many times already. Likely it would be tomorrow before anyone came after them– if they did at all. She still seemed to feel eyes watching as she made her escape. The skin on her back crawled, and she had to fight the urge to look behind her every few feet. There never was anything there when she gave in.
She tried to concentrate instead on Willie. He was older than was suitable for her, and she wondered what he looked like, under that buckskin jacket and gray shirt. His body felt hard and thin where she touched him. She knew what to expect when night came. That would be a true first for her, and though she hadn’t thought to mind it, her heart beat too fast in her chest.
Her tension grew throughout the day, the certainty that there was something to dread becoming more and more real, though she could see no cause. Her jaw ached from clenching her teeth, and it was a hot day, but the sweat under her arms and on her palms had the cold prickle of fear. She kept her shoulders hunched up nearly to her ears, shielding herself from a blow that always seemed just about to land. If Willie felt the same strain he gave no sign of it, but neither did he remark on how she flinched at every noise.
They were still riding when the day ended and the sky went through its show of colors down to deepest purple, nearly indistinguishable from black. By then her pulse was pounding in her ears and her mind seemed to run in circles like a mouse under the shadow of a hawk. There was no indication they were being followed, nothing to mark out a danger at all, but still she couldn’t relax. The birds in the trees had quieted with the disappearance of the sun, but the night was almost as loud as the day. Crickets and cicadas, unseen in the darkness, set up a racket like the thrum of a thousand fiddles, pressing in on all sides until she could scream just for the sake of getting the noise out of her head for one moment. Occasionally a bigger animal rustled through the underbrush, but it was hard to tell if it was fleeing the humans or coming for them. Once an owl swept silent and low across the trail, visible only in how it blotted out the stars above.
A mosquito whined in her ear, and Cora nearly fell off the horse ducking away. Willie glanced over his shoulder at her, and her logic caught up with her hindbrain. She tried to come up with an explanation that wouldn’t sound foolish, but her throat was still dry with terror, and in any case he didn’t ask, but only commented that they were almost there.
It felt like a long time before he directed the horse off the trail, but then nothing had seemed quite right to her all this day. Under the trees it was such an absolute black that she couldn’t even see Willie an inch in front of her, but it was only for a space before they were back out. The moon had risen, and she could see that they were in a meadow with a rockfall defining one edge, the sky open up above. Just as the horse stepped out into the grass, a gust of wind blew, strong enough to tear some of the leaves from the trees. The night had robbed the color from everything, but Cora knew it was too early in the year for the leaves to have gone to gold and brown, and it was a strong wind indeed that could rip them away still green. The horse tossed its head and whinnied, and Cora shielded her face from the wind-tossed debris. Something small and hard struck her arm, feeling almost like a pebble thrown to get her attention. The wind dropped as suddenly as it had come, leaving the night feeling shocked into stillness. As Cora looked about her, she caught the scent of fresh-turned earth, rich and loamy. It came from a pit nearby, just about the length and width of a body.
Willie had half-turned on the horse to gaze at her face. He looked eager, like a child waiting for his friend to open a present. She took her gaze away from him and gave it back to the grave; oddly, she felt less afraid now than she had all day. Finally having something to focus on steadied her. Willie hadn’t liked that. He jumped off the horse and dragged her after him, his hand on her arm even tighter now than it had been on her wrist weeks before, and she could feel each of his fingers and the bruises forming beneath. He hauled her to the side of the grave and shook her like a disobedient puppy; she tried to plant her feet and stand strong, but she rattled there on the end of his arm. She had noticed before that Willie had a head’s worth of height on her, that the muscles roping his arms and shoulders were much more pronounced and hard than her own, but she hadn’t thought to have to measure herself against him quite like this.
“Lonesome place for a graveyard,” she said.
He growled, a wordless angry sound, then told her it was all hers, that he’d spent the night before digging it himself. He held her tight against his chest so that she felt each one of his shallow shaky breaths.
Cora grabbed for the knife he wore at his hip, but he was still too quick; he twisted out of reach before she could draw it. He pulled it himself and stroked it down the curve of her cheek like he was shaving her, threatening her as he did. He wanted her to beg for her life, asked her to with more passion and desperation than he’d ever had asking for her kisses. When she wouldn’t, he put the knife to her throat just hard enough for her to feel the burn of a shallow cut. He whispered in her ear dreadful promises, and called her Polly.
“Cora,” she said, and spat full in his face.
He jerked away, letting go of her to wipe away the spittle with the hand that didn’t hold the knife. She twisted to run, but the second his touch left her flesh the wind blew again, even stronger this time, hard enough to put her on her knees. Willie kept his feet at first, though he staggered back into a patch of grass that grew more lush and dense than anywhere else in the meadow. There he fell, abrupt and violent as if something had pulled him down. The tall grass lashed at him, hiding most of his form, and the wind rose to a high pitch, screaming like a woman’s rage given full vent. Cora could only see parts of him, fighting and struggling under the wild dance of the grass; she could only hear the anger and fear in his voice, the words themselves stolen away by the wind. If she saw another shape there, heaving on the ground with him, it might have just been a trick of moonlight and storm.
The wind was loud and fierce as a tornado though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but once it stopped it vanished as utterly as a dream. A few broken branches slid back to earth, loud in the echoing silence. For a time there was nothing more, and then one brave bug began to cheep. A little longer and others joined it, until finally the whole night chorus settled back to their singing. They were just the same as before the wind, but somehow it no longer bothered Cora. She climbed cautiously back to her feet. Across the meadow, the horse stomped a foot and bent to crop at the grass, content as if nothing had happened. Willie wasn’t visible.
She stepped forward, ready to spring away at the first sign of movement, but it was a quiet night. The fear that had stalked her all day had washed away like dust after a rain, and though it might have been smarter to leave right away, she needed to know.
Willie lay where he had fallen, body curled gently like a sleeping child. She watched him for near on to a minute before she realized he wasn’t breathing. She ventured closer and nudged his ankle with her toe. Still he had no reaction. She wedged her foot beneath his side and turned him onto his back; his body flopped lifelessly. There was no blood on him or other mark of violence, but his face was pale and slack. Willie was dead. Cora simply stared, not sure what else to do. It occurred to her that the dark patch of grass he lay in was rectangular, the same size and shape as a grave. Long ago, someone had turned over the earth here but never got around to planting it with seed; it had given its fertility to grass and a few scattered wildflowers.
Cora took his knife and horse for herself and then left him there. The spot had a certain deserted beauty, but she reckoned Willie wouldn’t be the one haunting it.
***
Eli didn’t have much to say after that, and Cora seemed content to leave the story there. The storm outside kept on raging, and each cold little draft that wormed its way through the walls and under their blankets was a bit more eerie than he would have liked. The cabin walls creaked from a particularly big gust, and Eli tried to cover the sound with a chuckle that was weaker than he would have liked. “That was a pretty tall tale.”
Cora shrugged. “I don’t care if you believe it or not,” she said, and given her tone, she meant it.
“Sounds a lot like that ballad of yours. How’s it go? Gentlemen and ladies, I bid you farewell, for killing Pretty Polly my soul belongs to hell–”
She tsked, interrupting him. “I never did like that verse. I didn’t write it; someone else added it on later. Pure nonsense. Willie didn’t have time to bid no one farewell.”
“Now wait just a minute.” Eli propped himself up on an elbow. Cora was tough as nails and could shoot with a dead-eyed accuracy that put down whatever she aimed at. He’d seen her shoot a man with the same coolness she used to shoot squirrels, and she could handle any sort of gun, from a pistol to that ancient shotgun she kept behind the cabin’s door, long and narrow as Cora herself. It seemed easier to believe she might have acquaintance with ghosts than that she was some sort of secret poet. “Are you trying to tell me you wrote that song?”
Cora turned over so that she could look him in the face, raising one eyebrow in a coal-black curve. “Sure I did. Well, the first version of it anyway. People got a way of twisting words around into something of their own, though. Even I had to make up most of it– there wasn’t no one I could ask for Polly’s story, after all. I just guessed at what I could.”
Eli shook his head. “All this time you’ve been a famous musician, and here’s me with no idea.”
“Anyone can write a song.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You could too, if you had something worth writing about.” Cora put an arm around his neck and pulled him back down against her. They tangled their legs together and were quiet for a time, until she asked in a hushed voice, “Tell me something true about you, now. Fair’s fair.”
Eli had to think before he could come up with something to match her revelation. “I never seen the sea. I always wanted to, just once. Probably never will, of course; I never even been across state lines.” He shrugged one shoulder in a small motion, trying not to disrupt their comfortable position. “It’s not as impressive as your dark blood-stained woods, I suppose. I never told anyone only because it’s a foolish thing to wish for; deep blue sea’s just the same water as we got here. But I used to dream of it, when I was a boy.”
She laughed soft against his hair. “You’re still a boy.” Her fingers traced around his jaw, coming to rest behind his ear, at the soft spot at the base of his skull. “I’ll take you to see the sea someday. No one should go their whole life without seeing something new.”
“Sure,” he said placatingly, tucking his head down in the hollow of her shoulder, and more interested in sleep than arguing the point. “Whatever you say.”
“You think you know everything. Go on and doubt me, darling boy.” Her voice didn’t hold much real exasperation, though. She sighed out, coming near to stillness herself. “But if Willie wasn’t real, where do you think I got my first still from?”
***
Author: Brigdh
Ratings/Warnings: PG-13, non-graphic violence, references to murder
Summary: Cora and Polly and Willie, and how stories turn in to songs.
Cora was tough as nails and could shoot with a dead-eyed accuracy that put down whatever she aimed at. He’d seen her shoot a man with the same coolness she used to shoot squirrels, and she could handle any sort of gun, from a pistol to that ancient shotgun she kept behind the cabin’s door, long and narrow as Cora herself. It seemed easier to believe she might have acquaintance with ghosts than that she was some sort of secret poet.
Notes: Written for Yuletide 2013, for Lady Anne Boleyn. So much love and gratitude to my betas,
threewalls and somebraveapollo! And thank you to Silver Queen for a very inspiring prompt.This story is a crossover between the songs "Pretty Polly" and "Darling Cora" (though you can also read it without canon knowledge!). As with all folk songs, there are approximately a million versions of each. Here are some of my favorites, if you'd like a soundtrack for this story:
Pretty Polly: Ralph Stanley & Patty Loveless | Bert Jansch | Hillbilly Gypsies
Darling Cora: Appaloosas | The Church Sisters | Ed Hicks and Aaron Jonah Lewis
4401 words. Also available on AO3
Ain't Gonna Waste My Pleasures
Today’s batch of moonshine was likely ruined, pulled off the flame half-finished when the low grey clouds had begun piling up on the horizon. They’d drained and dried the still in a hurry, and in case they hadn’t been thorough enough, packed hay in every crevice that would hold it and wrapped the whole thing in old horse blankets pulled from the attic. It might still freeze, if their luck didn’t hold, but there was nothing more they could do. The daylight was going quick when Eli made once last round of the cabin and its clearing out back, the first snowflakes already blurring his vision. They were small but falling fast, looking like a white mist creeping over the blue rolling hills.
Not much need for a watch in this weather. The storm would keep away both friend and foe, which meant it would be only him and Cora until at least the morning, and maybe longer, if the snow kept on. He headed back inside, closing the door firmly enough to rattle its frame in the hope of shutting out any drafts. A far-fetched hope, that one, but not the worst he’d held. It wasn’t nearly as foolish as the hope he’d once had of marrying Cora, white dress and preacher and all.
Cora was sitting on a chair she’d drawn close to the hearth, bare toes almost touching the coals, her banjo on her knee. She plucked at the strings and hummed, murmured a few words unhitched from any particular tune. Her voice was dark and strong as coffee boiled too long, and woke Eli just as thoroughly. She gave no word or other sign to acknowledge him, so he didn’t speak either. He shucked his jacket and took a seat on the floor by her side, stretching his hands out toward the fire to wake some feeling in his red and pruned fingers. It didn’t seem to offer much more warmth than there’d been outside, but at least they were out of the wind.
Cora dropped her hand onto his head, ran her fingers down through his hair and inside the collar of his shirt. Somehow that was what made him shiver. She returned to the banjo just as idly and calmly as she’d ever left it, and raised a simple cord. “Polly,” she sang to herself. “Oh, pretty Polly.”
Eli groaned. “Not that one again. Don’t you ever get tired of bloodshed and love cruelly betrayed? Weather like this calls for something more cheery, or I’ll be up all night jumping at every little sound.”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of ghosts, Eli.” She fluttered her lashes at him, all mock-innocence. “Big strong man like you? What’ve you got to be scared of in a little girl haunt?” Cora would tease him just the same no matter who was watching, but sometimes when it was only the two of them she would speak her taunts in such a low-voiced smoky way that they sounded more like a promise. Cora was rough on the things she loved; her affection was as fierce and hard to catch hold of as a mountain lion. It was those she didn’t like that she was polite to– all business, no quicksilver grins or questions that were half-joke and half-challenge for them. So when the men drawn by the still laughed at him, or a more serious-minded one occasionally took him aside and offered him advice about how to control his woman, Eli only smiled.
Much as he did now, rising to meet her mockery. “Once it’s a spirit, it ain’t no little girl no more. What’ve you got to be so sure you’re safe?”
Cora’s smile was a thing of pure sharp-edged delight. “Safe and unafraid ain’t the same thing at all, my boy.” She set aside her banjo and got down off her chair, and neither of them spoke for a while after that. Outside the wind had reached a howling pitch, tearing around the cabin like an angry creature trying to burst its way inside. A clump of snow fell down the chimney and nearly put out the fire, but it recovered with a hiss and crackle, the shadows on the walls dancing as the light grew back to its previous strength. Cora’s skin was cool and winter-dry, but her mouth and cunt were hot and wet. She pressed him to the floor with hands on his shoulders and sat astride him, and his hands climbed up the compact wiry muscles of her thighs as she ground against him. He had to strain and fight to reach anything more of her, and even when he did, her kisses had teeth. She took him panting and so hard he could barely stand it, and his moans had a high-pitched, desperate edge. She was quieter, but looked like every needful thing he felt, still half-dressed with her hair down over her shoulders in a coarse black cloud and her throat arched back to the rafters.
Afterwards they gathered up what quilts and blankets could be found and made themselves a nest to lie in, not enough protection from the cold, but better than nothing. He curled up behind Cora with an arm around her waist and kissed the nape of her neck, where she tasted a bit like the dust of the blankets and a bit like sweat. One of her curls stuck to the corner of his lips. She breathed quick in his arms, nowhere close to sleep. “Ghosts have the same loves and hates as the living. But they ain’t bound by human rules like we are,” she said, picking up the conversation like it had never been dropped.
“What happened to all that ghosts-ain’t-real talk?”
“I never said they weren’t real.” All the earlier laughter had gone out of her voice, and her body was tense where he touched it, holding herself apart. “I seen one.”
Eli laughed out loud, though he hadn’t quite gotten the joke. “Just because you let me have my way with you don’t mean I got to believe everything you say.”
“Your way. That’s a damn inaccurate description of what just happened, darling.” Cora snorted, her narrow shoulders not unbending an inch. “And the reason you got to believe is that I don’t talk nonsense. You know me better than that.” She started to say something more, but clamped her mouth shut tight.
“Go on, then,” Eli said, gentle as he could be without irritating her. “Tell me about your ghost.”
He thought she was likely to refuse to answer, that she’d either claim it’d been a joke all along or go silent and inward-looking, as he’d known her do now and then. It took her a while to begin, but once she had, her voice had such a deep conviction that Eli believed every word of her story.
Cora hadn’t been an unusual child, at least not according to her own description. She’d been much like every other girl in the holler where she’d been born: hair corralled back into two plaits, skirts hiked up around her knees, and a tendency to be timid around strangers. Her hands had been rough with scrubbing pots and boiling laundry and the thousand other chores a farm required. That alone might have been the reason she took a fancy to a traveling man; he scorned all the hardscrabble work of life just like some untamed animal, and that had unsettled her girl-child self.
His name was Willie, and if his hair was too dark to be called yellow, it was still light enough to have something golden in it. He wore it just a little too long, as if he had better things to do than worry about his looks; same thing for the stubble that glinted on his jaw most days. His hands were lily-white and soft, though, and his eyes were true-blue, sweet and pure as a chicory flower. He wasn’t handsome in the usual way, but there was a vividness to him, like a burning light, that drew in people’s admiration. Maybe it was the way he grinned, bright and just a little cruel; it changed a lean, rawboned face into one you wanted to impress. Even Cora felt it.
He stopped by on no regular schedule, but she saw him often, sitting on the porch outside the general store with one long lanky leg folded beneath him. He’d sit there all day and play cards or dice with any other men who didn’t have work– or who were willing enough to postpone it, and he never lacked for some of those. When the game finally broke up, Willie always had a few more dollars than he’d started with. People said he didn’t play fair, but somehow that slander never stuck to him the way it would have with anybody else.
Likely that was because the store’s stock of corn liquor always replenished itself when Willie visited. He was generous with it, the way he wasn’t with cards. He’d keep a bottle by his side all through the afternoon and offer drinks to the lazy fools who gambled with him, or sometimes to one of the girls who’d stand just outside the circle of men and watch him with hope in her eyes. Willie would call her over and sweet-talk her into taking a sip, just to laugh when she coughed or screwed up her face. Once Cora had seen Katie, who was a few years older than her, sitting on his lap; Katie had looked proud as a queen, though later her daddy beat her for it.
He didn’t flirt with Cora the way he did with the older girls. But he watched her whenever she went by, those blue eyes hungry on her mud-splashed ankles and following her legs up beneath her skirt, looking like he could see right through the cloth. One day he reached out and caught her by the wrist, holding on hard even when she tried to pull away. She felt her bones creak beneath his grip, and a feeling darker than shyness flashed down her spine. Willie was faster than her though; before she could even decide what to do, he’d let her go and was grinning his sly fox grin. He apologized and said that she was driving him crazy with her coyness. Her wrist was sore the next day, but no bruise showed. No one had called her coy before.
Willie did persuade her to drink with him eventually. He said that she deserved something special for her first drink– not that this was her first, but she didn’t tell him that. She let him take her back behind the store for the occasion, and in return he swore he had something special, not moonshine but real whiskey. It might even have been true, because it didn’t taste like the whiskey she’d had before, wasn’t even the same color. It was brown in the glass he’d poured it in to show off to her, with tones of red and yellow, though that might have just been the light, sunset burning up the sky and sending long shadows of trees across the ground. Whatever it was, it was smooth in her mouth, nearly sweet to the taste. Willie claimed a kiss in payment, licking at her tongue like he was trying to get that city whiskey back for himself. He thought it was her first kiss too.
She went away with him not long after. He’d courted her with smooth silver words, saying that she had wounded his heart, that he’d wanted her for his own ever since he first set eyes on her, that she was unkind. He made all sorts of promises: he would show her pleasures, give her money and short dresses and more of that sweet brown whiskey. Cora recognized such talk for what it was, nothing but ballad lyrics worn small through overuse. She knew, too, that once she left there would be no coming back; there were words for girls who went away with strangers, and if Willie had had honest intentions, he wouldn’t have needed to court her in secret. Still, needs must when the devil drives, and there was many a man she’d known that would have been much worse to hitch herself to.
There were no automobiles in the hills in those days, but Willie had a horse he used to get around. It was a pretty, high-strung creature with one white sock, and seemed to be an entirely different species than the nag Cora’s family had to pull their plow. Willie helped her mount and told her to hold onto him to keep from falling; with her face up against his shoulders, she could smell him. Tobacco smoke mostly, though underneath was the sour reek of old sweat. But that might have been the horse.
No one saw them leave, and Cora knew it would be hours yet before anyone thought to look for her. Her family would assume she was doing her chores in the fields, or visiting at a neighbor’s, or even daydreaming in the woods, for which she had been scolded too many times already. Likely it would be tomorrow before anyone came after them– if they did at all. She still seemed to feel eyes watching as she made her escape. The skin on her back crawled, and she had to fight the urge to look behind her every few feet. There never was anything there when she gave in.
She tried to concentrate instead on Willie. He was older than was suitable for her, and she wondered what he looked like, under that buckskin jacket and gray shirt. His body felt hard and thin where she touched him. She knew what to expect when night came. That would be a true first for her, and though she hadn’t thought to mind it, her heart beat too fast in her chest.
Her tension grew throughout the day, the certainty that there was something to dread becoming more and more real, though she could see no cause. Her jaw ached from clenching her teeth, and it was a hot day, but the sweat under her arms and on her palms had the cold prickle of fear. She kept her shoulders hunched up nearly to her ears, shielding herself from a blow that always seemed just about to land. If Willie felt the same strain he gave no sign of it, but neither did he remark on how she flinched at every noise.
They were still riding when the day ended and the sky went through its show of colors down to deepest purple, nearly indistinguishable from black. By then her pulse was pounding in her ears and her mind seemed to run in circles like a mouse under the shadow of a hawk. There was no indication they were being followed, nothing to mark out a danger at all, but still she couldn’t relax. The birds in the trees had quieted with the disappearance of the sun, but the night was almost as loud as the day. Crickets and cicadas, unseen in the darkness, set up a racket like the thrum of a thousand fiddles, pressing in on all sides until she could scream just for the sake of getting the noise out of her head for one moment. Occasionally a bigger animal rustled through the underbrush, but it was hard to tell if it was fleeing the humans or coming for them. Once an owl swept silent and low across the trail, visible only in how it blotted out the stars above.
A mosquito whined in her ear, and Cora nearly fell off the horse ducking away. Willie glanced over his shoulder at her, and her logic caught up with her hindbrain. She tried to come up with an explanation that wouldn’t sound foolish, but her throat was still dry with terror, and in any case he didn’t ask, but only commented that they were almost there.
It felt like a long time before he directed the horse off the trail, but then nothing had seemed quite right to her all this day. Under the trees it was such an absolute black that she couldn’t even see Willie an inch in front of her, but it was only for a space before they were back out. The moon had risen, and she could see that they were in a meadow with a rockfall defining one edge, the sky open up above. Just as the horse stepped out into the grass, a gust of wind blew, strong enough to tear some of the leaves from the trees. The night had robbed the color from everything, but Cora knew it was too early in the year for the leaves to have gone to gold and brown, and it was a strong wind indeed that could rip them away still green. The horse tossed its head and whinnied, and Cora shielded her face from the wind-tossed debris. Something small and hard struck her arm, feeling almost like a pebble thrown to get her attention. The wind dropped as suddenly as it had come, leaving the night feeling shocked into stillness. As Cora looked about her, she caught the scent of fresh-turned earth, rich and loamy. It came from a pit nearby, just about the length and width of a body.
Willie had half-turned on the horse to gaze at her face. He looked eager, like a child waiting for his friend to open a present. She took her gaze away from him and gave it back to the grave; oddly, she felt less afraid now than she had all day. Finally having something to focus on steadied her. Willie hadn’t liked that. He jumped off the horse and dragged her after him, his hand on her arm even tighter now than it had been on her wrist weeks before, and she could feel each of his fingers and the bruises forming beneath. He hauled her to the side of the grave and shook her like a disobedient puppy; she tried to plant her feet and stand strong, but she rattled there on the end of his arm. She had noticed before that Willie had a head’s worth of height on her, that the muscles roping his arms and shoulders were much more pronounced and hard than her own, but she hadn’t thought to have to measure herself against him quite like this.
“Lonesome place for a graveyard,” she said.
He growled, a wordless angry sound, then told her it was all hers, that he’d spent the night before digging it himself. He held her tight against his chest so that she felt each one of his shallow shaky breaths.
Cora grabbed for the knife he wore at his hip, but he was still too quick; he twisted out of reach before she could draw it. He pulled it himself and stroked it down the curve of her cheek like he was shaving her, threatening her as he did. He wanted her to beg for her life, asked her to with more passion and desperation than he’d ever had asking for her kisses. When she wouldn’t, he put the knife to her throat just hard enough for her to feel the burn of a shallow cut. He whispered in her ear dreadful promises, and called her Polly.
“Cora,” she said, and spat full in his face.
He jerked away, letting go of her to wipe away the spittle with the hand that didn’t hold the knife. She twisted to run, but the second his touch left her flesh the wind blew again, even stronger this time, hard enough to put her on her knees. Willie kept his feet at first, though he staggered back into a patch of grass that grew more lush and dense than anywhere else in the meadow. There he fell, abrupt and violent as if something had pulled him down. The tall grass lashed at him, hiding most of his form, and the wind rose to a high pitch, screaming like a woman’s rage given full vent. Cora could only see parts of him, fighting and struggling under the wild dance of the grass; she could only hear the anger and fear in his voice, the words themselves stolen away by the wind. If she saw another shape there, heaving on the ground with him, it might have just been a trick of moonlight and storm.
The wind was loud and fierce as a tornado though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but once it stopped it vanished as utterly as a dream. A few broken branches slid back to earth, loud in the echoing silence. For a time there was nothing more, and then one brave bug began to cheep. A little longer and others joined it, until finally the whole night chorus settled back to their singing. They were just the same as before the wind, but somehow it no longer bothered Cora. She climbed cautiously back to her feet. Across the meadow, the horse stomped a foot and bent to crop at the grass, content as if nothing had happened. Willie wasn’t visible.
She stepped forward, ready to spring away at the first sign of movement, but it was a quiet night. The fear that had stalked her all day had washed away like dust after a rain, and though it might have been smarter to leave right away, she needed to know.
Willie lay where he had fallen, body curled gently like a sleeping child. She watched him for near on to a minute before she realized he wasn’t breathing. She ventured closer and nudged his ankle with her toe. Still he had no reaction. She wedged her foot beneath his side and turned him onto his back; his body flopped lifelessly. There was no blood on him or other mark of violence, but his face was pale and slack. Willie was dead. Cora simply stared, not sure what else to do. It occurred to her that the dark patch of grass he lay in was rectangular, the same size and shape as a grave. Long ago, someone had turned over the earth here but never got around to planting it with seed; it had given its fertility to grass and a few scattered wildflowers.
Cora took his knife and horse for herself and then left him there. The spot had a certain deserted beauty, but she reckoned Willie wouldn’t be the one haunting it.
Eli didn’t have much to say after that, and Cora seemed content to leave the story there. The storm outside kept on raging, and each cold little draft that wormed its way through the walls and under their blankets was a bit more eerie than he would have liked. The cabin walls creaked from a particularly big gust, and Eli tried to cover the sound with a chuckle that was weaker than he would have liked. “That was a pretty tall tale.”
Cora shrugged. “I don’t care if you believe it or not,” she said, and given her tone, she meant it.
“Sounds a lot like that ballad of yours. How’s it go? Gentlemen and ladies, I bid you farewell, for killing Pretty Polly my soul belongs to hell–”
She tsked, interrupting him. “I never did like that verse. I didn’t write it; someone else added it on later. Pure nonsense. Willie didn’t have time to bid no one farewell.”
“Now wait just a minute.” Eli propped himself up on an elbow. Cora was tough as nails and could shoot with a dead-eyed accuracy that put down whatever she aimed at. He’d seen her shoot a man with the same coolness she used to shoot squirrels, and she could handle any sort of gun, from a pistol to that ancient shotgun she kept behind the cabin’s door, long and narrow as Cora herself. It seemed easier to believe she might have acquaintance with ghosts than that she was some sort of secret poet. “Are you trying to tell me you wrote that song?”
Cora turned over so that she could look him in the face, raising one eyebrow in a coal-black curve. “Sure I did. Well, the first version of it anyway. People got a way of twisting words around into something of their own, though. Even I had to make up most of it– there wasn’t no one I could ask for Polly’s story, after all. I just guessed at what I could.”
Eli shook his head. “All this time you’ve been a famous musician, and here’s me with no idea.”
“Anyone can write a song.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You could too, if you had something worth writing about.” Cora put an arm around his neck and pulled him back down against her. They tangled their legs together and were quiet for a time, until she asked in a hushed voice, “Tell me something true about you, now. Fair’s fair.”
Eli had to think before he could come up with something to match her revelation. “I never seen the sea. I always wanted to, just once. Probably never will, of course; I never even been across state lines.” He shrugged one shoulder in a small motion, trying not to disrupt their comfortable position. “It’s not as impressive as your dark blood-stained woods, I suppose. I never told anyone only because it’s a foolish thing to wish for; deep blue sea’s just the same water as we got here. But I used to dream of it, when I was a boy.”
She laughed soft against his hair. “You’re still a boy.” Her fingers traced around his jaw, coming to rest behind his ear, at the soft spot at the base of his skull. “I’ll take you to see the sea someday. No one should go their whole life without seeing something new.”
“Sure,” he said placatingly, tucking his head down in the hollow of her shoulder, and more interested in sleep than arguing the point. “Whatever you say.”
“You think you know everything. Go on and doubt me, darling boy.” Her voice didn’t hold much real exasperation, though. She sighed out, coming near to stillness herself. “But if Willie wasn’t real, where do you think I got my first still from?”
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Date: 2014-01-03 01:32 am (UTC)Thanks for writing this! I'll try to post my Yuletide recs soon.
(The line about the horse with the white sock made me dig out the relevant quote from the January books: "Now, I heard tell you ought never buy a horse with one white sock 'cause the odd foot makes 'em stumble, but my uncle Finn, he had a white-sock mare - Prettyfoot, her name was, and she had a mouth on her like a iron shovel...")
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Date: 2014-01-05 08:04 pm (UTC)And do post your recs! I always enjoy reading other people's Yuletide recs. I probably have one more set of them to post myself.
(And ha, I'd completely forgotten that! I just felt there needed to be some sort of visual detail about the horse to fit the rhythm of the sentence, and one sock was the first thing that came to mind.)