Prologue

       “Wymie!”

      At the cry from her sister, Wymea Berdone turned away from the big galvanized tub on the crude counter in the kitchen where she was doing the dishes. Hot water splashed from hands and lower arms reddened from heat and the caustic lye soap her family made from hog fat and wood ash.

      The ash they got from the wood they cut in the forests around their house in the Pennyrile Hills near the ville of Sinkhole. The hog fat they had to trade for these days, since Wymie’s stepdad, Mord Pascoe, had sold off the last of the pigs to buy hooch at Mathus Conn’s gaudy house and bar. It was only one of the ways life had gotten poorer for them since the tree that fell the wrong way had killed Wymie’s pa.

      “Baby, what is it?” she called, grabbing a rag to dry her hands.

      “It’s nothin’!” Mord bellowed from his easy chair in the cabin’s main room. “Mind your damn business, bitch.”

      “Blinda?” Wymie asked, ignoring him.

      Her little sister, ten years old with her dirty blond hair in pigtails and a rag-doll teddy bear clutched to the front of her ragged linen smock, stared at her with wide sapphire-blue eyes. They were the only trait the two shared in common. Otherwise Blinda was slight and Wymea was strapping, though considered comely by most of the menfolk hereabouts—unfortunately including Mord Pascoe. And where Wymie had hair so raven-wing black it was almost blue falling down over the shoulders of her blue plaid flannel man’s shirt, Blinda was fair.

      “What happened, honey?”

      “It’s him,” her sister said, without even a glance at the man lounging in the chair with his black-furred belly sticking out the bottom of his shirt, which was closed over his chest by the last few buttons holding out against the strain. The chair was a faded green and overstuffed. His own overstuffing had started the chair’s stuffing busting out of seams all over the cushion and back. “He wants me to go outside with him to the woodpile again.”

      Wymie felt the lower lids of her eyes pushing up in what she knew was a dangerous look. She directed it toward her stepfather.

      “I told you not to try that again,” she said, managing with effort to keep from shouting. She knew what yelling would cost her ma. As it was, Wymie’s defiance would cost the woman at least a couple face punches from those beefy fists.

      Through his patchy stubble of black beard, Mord showed a grin that was brown and twisted where it wasn’t gaps.

      “You could take her place, y’know.”

      “Try to touch me again, I’ll bust your nose like the last time,” Wymie said. “If I catch you grabbin’ at Blinda anymore, you’re lucky if I don’t do no more than bust your damn fingers.”

      She glanced meaningfully at the ax propped by the door. It took effort she could ill afford, with all the other burdens she carried. But she kept its heavy blade sharp. Her pa had taught her to care for her tools, before the tree took him. And he knew from painful experience that a dulled ax was more dangerous to its user than what he or she might mean to chop with it.

      “Don’t lie,” her mother said, with the flat intonation of someone repeating a chant they’d learned by rote, and long ago forgotten the real meaning of, if they’d ever known it at all. “Lyin’s wicked.”

      Wymie turned a frown toward her mother. Despite her resentment, her eyes lost their dangerous pressure and drooped down at the outside edges, weighted down with sadness. She remembered a time when her mother had been tall and straight, pretty, even.

      But the past three years, since her husband died, and especially the past two, since she married Mord Pascoe for no reason Wymie nor anyone about Sinkhole could tell, had shrunk her—shriveled her, almost—to a stooped shadow of her former self. Her glossy brown hair had turned drab and mouse-colored. The flesh of her face had drawn back, making her almost look like a mouse; and the cringing attitude she displayed toward her husband did nothing to dispel the resemblance.

      Why can’t you stand up for us for once, Ma? Wymie wanted to shout. She wouldn’t, though. She knew the answer. If she stood up to Mord Pascoe, he’d beat her down. He might not be willing to lift a finger to help out around the homestead, or even keep the family alive, but he’d heave his bulk out of that chair and raise both hands to hit a woman.

      He knew better than to do it with Wymie around. But he also knew—

      “Nuke it all, a man’s got needs,” he whined, giving the lie to her mother’s naming Wymie’s words a lie. “If his wife can’t handle them all, then his daughters should. It’s the patriarchal way of things.”

      A narrow, sly look appeared in his small gray eyes. “And you can’t watch over your ma and sis all the time,” he said. “Can you?”

      She growled.

      Ignoring her, now that he’d reasserted his power in the family, he pushed himself up with a great groan of effort. The fumes that belched from his mouth when he did carried clear to Wymie ten feet away. It smelled worse than his pits and feet and crotch did. “Now, enough of this crap. I’m the man in the house and you got to obey. C’mere, you little bitch. Now.”

      “Now, Blinda,” her mother said. “Obey your daddy. You got to do it. It’s that patriarch way, like he says.”

      “No,” Wymie said firmly.

      As Mord lumbered toward the cowering girl on short, fat-quivering legs, Blinda shot a frightened look at her big sister. Wymie nodded.

      Blinda darted away, ducking under a clumsy swipe of Mord’s pallid paws. She ran to the open window and leaned on the sill, sticking her face out to breathe in the cool spring-night breeze and watch the early fireflies dance. Her grimy toy bear dangled over the cracked wooden sill.

      Mord made to follow, but Wymie put herself between them, her bare, reddened forearms, still steaming from the dishwater, crossed beneath her breasts. She knew that emphasized their heft, but the gesture also helped get her message across. She didn’t want to raise a hand against the man unless she had to.

      As he said, she couldn’t be there to watch over her ma all the time.

      But she was here now.

      “Not another step,” she declared.

      “I’m a man,” he repeated. It was one of his favorite things to say. It was almost like he thought someone might disagree, or forget it if he didn’t repeat it often enough. “I’m stronger’n you, little slut. I could knock you out of the way.”

      “You could try.”

      He tried an engaging grin on her. It seemed to work on her ma, but it turned Wymie’s stomach. In her eyes it was nothing but a snaggletoothed leer.

      “You could take her place,” he said. “Help take the edge off for your poor daddy, the way a dutiful daughter should.”

      “It’s not gonna happen.”

      His eyes flashed and his heavy black brows jutted low and