Kendra Fox-Davis
A Hurricane Wind
When Carrie heard the rumors of the young girl abandoned on the farm, it carved out an empty place in her stomach that wouldn't settle. No one knew what had happened in the months since Rachel had been abandoned, only that her parents were gone and she existed, in the description of one relative, like a wild animal. Carrie's insistence that Rachel come live with her was met with the same quiet stares as her announcement that she was moving in with a known bootlegger. Her attraction to the darker elements of their small community mystified her family. She reserved her place amongst the towns elite because they shared the same lemon skin; she had attended the University and returned to teach their children. Who else had room or want for a questionable orphan?
And so they went to retrieve Rachel from the farm. She rode in the car with her head against the window, which had been rolled up after they noticed she had balanced herself on her bare feet, perched on the backseat like a small bird. When they arrived to the house Carrie was waiting on the porch. In the bright midday sun, she thought Rachel looked like a small dark shadow. Something ran wild inside of Rachel. Like a hurricane wind, hot and suffocating. She would try her hardest to ignore it in the beginning, when she felt the soft rumbling beneath her ribcage. Lay still in the bed, sit quiet in the chair, but eventually she had to move.
In the woods she felt most at home, next to the other tall and dark bodies. She blended in with the brush and shadows, and was able to walk and run freely. Her footsteps left nothing out of place; everything welcomed the weight of her footsteps and the touch of her hands. When she walked out into the sunlight the warmth on her head crept down her neck and back until she melted into the air around her.
Only the laughs and jeers of children, some her own family, would call her back. The older teenage girls would avert their eyes and direct their younger siblings to take Rachel on back to Miss Carrie's. She sensed their wonder and awe, hidden beneath the crossed arms and crumbled faces. The children were more open, their smiles and laughter let her know they wished they could do the same.
Carrie would be waiting for her each time, out on the porch because one of the children would get excited and run ahead. Carrie knew the rapid, excited knocking of a childs knuckles preceded another humiliating spectacle. She knew Rachel's gleaming brown body would appear at the turn of the road, accompanied by her small army. Each time she waited out of the porch a good while after Rachel entered the house, breathing evenly through her nose until her heart stopped racing. It had become so routine that when people in town commented on seeing Rachel it was almost unexpected.
She never intended to kill Carrie, in the sense that she never wanted to inflict the pain that she imagined would accompany her death. She would stand over Carrie's bed for hours with the knife in one hand, searching for a place on her body that might free them both without hurt. Eventually Carrie would awaken, the first few times with her eyes wide open, peddling her knees into the mattress and squeezing her body against wall and headboard. She would never scream. And after countless nights, Rachel could tell Carrie was awake from a brief pause in her breathing. She would lie still but reach her arm out in the darkness, never seeking the knife but gently touching the cool, tight skin. Go back to bed Rachel, she would say, and the pity in her voice would shame Rachel back into the shadows of the house, where she placed the knife in the kitchen and wandered to her bed.
Carrie only became upset when she found Rachel in the kitchen late one evening, mixing rat poison into their food. I feed both of us that food Rachel, she said. The food I make for you, just like the house I keep for you to live in, the school I paid for you to get kicked out of, and the men I try to keep you protected from, the prayers I say to save your soul. And you can take all that. But you can't take my life. She dumped the food into the trashcan and walked into the hallway to the phone. She pressed her forehead against the window and remembered how the house looked when she was being driven in the other direction.
When Carrie passed over the town remembered her contributions to her church and to the generations of school children she taught. They forgot her transgressions, forgave her affair with the bootlegger, and stopped pondering her attraction to brown skin. Absent in her obituary was any mention of Rachel, the wild girl she had raised from a child to an adult, who she visit dutifully in the Board and Care Home every week for two decades until they were parted by Rachel's death.
The newspaper ran a caption under her picture that read: "Living to Live Again."