Blood of the Earth by Faith Hunter Page A

about me living here alone and had insisted that I have top-of-the-line policies for the truck and the house. It had seemed a waste until now.
    I handed Rick the second card. “This is for the people who put the windows in.” I wrote a short note on a scrap of paper and put it in his hand with the cards. “If you would be so kind as to call them both, I’d be appreciative. Tell the repair people these are the damaged windows and that the siding over the logs in back was peppered with bullet holes. They’ll handle it, turnkey job.” Rick smiled and tucked the cards into his chest pocket. Watching him do that was oddly final feeling, as if by asking him to do this one small thing I was sealing my own fate.
    Shortly after that, I saw Rick and Paka to the door, their list of questions clutched in my fingers. This time, I had to bodily drag Jezzie and Cello away from Paka, an act that left me bleeding and them mad, but once the couple drove off, the cats quieted. I doctored my cat scratches with my own poultice made of plantain, arnica, calendula, and comfrey leaves mixed with aloe, applied with soft rags tied in place. I also treated my bruised jaw and eye socket where my sweet suitor had clocked me a few. It was painful and puffy and hadn’t healed like my cut fingers when I jerked them out of the earth, but the same herbs that worked on open wounds would help that, except in tincture form. I applied a bit with a heated rag, followed by a rag cold from the well water, back and forth between temperatures until the pain eased, though the bruises were an ugly purple, spreading down my neck with the pull of gravity and all around my left eye.
    Once the pain was eased and the bleeding had stopped, I finished putting away the pots and dishes and brought in the dry clothes off the line, carrying up the basket to the small bed in my little room for folding later. I didn’t want to do it now. I didn’t want to do anything right now. I had taken a man’s life tonight. He’d have lost it in moments anyway, but . . . I had hastened it on by seconds and claimed it for the woods. I should feel something about that, some guilt for killing, or happiness for vengeance satisfied. Instead, for reasons I didn’t understand, I felt only overheated, itchy, and twitchy, as if my skin wanted to ripple and bubble up, like a science fiction movie I had watched one time. I stopped, bare feet on the floor, feeling the wood beneath my soles, and below that the foundation, resting in the earth that had nourished the trees used to build the house, when they had lived. Alexandre Dumas, in
The Count of Monte Cristo
, had said something like, “. . . 
I
have been heaven’s substitute to recompense the good—now the god of vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!
” I wasn’t sure if God had yielded anything to me at all, or if I had stolen that right from him, and if so, he might just be taking his own good time to swat me down.
    At the thought, my skin seemed to settle. This was why I had been so twitchy. Tonight I had finally found some small part of vengeance, justice, and no small measure of satisfaction when Itook Brother Ephraim for my woods. But tonight, between one of Brother Ephraim’s heartbeats and his last, I had also committed murder. And I felt no guilt. The dirt beneath my house seemed to throb once, the feeling it sent through me vibrant and alive. And darker than I ever remembered. I didn’t know what to think about that.
    Unsettled, I went through the house more carefully, cataloging damage. There were broken dishes, still sitting on the shelves up high, and I brought in John’s old stepladder to take an inventory. I swept the shattered dishes into a plastic dishpan and swept up the mess of broken crockery that had hit the floor.
    My fingers traced the lines of the shattered antique hand-thrown pitcher. It had been made by Leah’s great-grandmother in the mid-eighteen hundreds. There had been no one to