PART ONE

KINGDOM PLANTAE

1

THE CHILD GUSHED out from twixt Vern’s legs ragged and smelling of salt. Slight, he was, and feeble as a promise. He felt in her palms a great wilderness—such a tender thing as he could never be parsed fully by the likes of her.

Had she more strength, she’d have limped to the river and drownt him. It’d be a gentler end than the one the fiend had in mind.

Vern leant against the trunk of a loblolly and pressed the child naked and limp to her chest. His trembling lips lay right where the heart-shaped charm of a locket would be if she’d ever had a locket. So that’s how it’s gonna be, hm? Win me over with lip wibbles? she asked, and though she was not one to capitulate to bids for love, this baby had a way about him that most did not. There was courage in his relentless neediness. He would not be reasoned out of his demands.

Vern reached for the towel next to her. With what gentleness she could muster, and it wasn’t enough to fill a thimble, she dragged rough terry over the baby’s mucky skin. Well, well, she said, cautiously impressed, look at you. Vern’s nystagmus and resultant low vision were especially troublesome in the waning light, but pulling her baby close lessened the impact of her partial blindness. She could see him full-on.

He was smaller than most newborns she’d had the occasion to handle and had inherited neither her albinism nor her husband Sherman’s yellow-bonedness. His skin was dark, dark-dark, and Vern found it hard to believe that the African ancestry that begat such a hue had ever once been disrupted by whiteness. The only person Vern knew that dark was Lucy.

Viscous cries gurgled up from the child’s throat but died quickly on the bed of Vern’s skin. Her flesh was his hovel, and he was coming to a quick peace with it. His bones were annals of lifetimes of knowledge. He understood that heat and the smell of milk were to be clung to or else.

It was a shame such instincts would not be enough to save him. As much as Vern had made a haven here these last few months, the woods were not safe. A stranger had declared war against her and hers, his threats increasingly pointed of late: a gutted deer with its dead fawn fetus curled beside; a skinned raccoon staked to a trunk, body clothed in an infant’s sleepsuit; and everywhere, everywhere, cottontails hung from trees, necks in nooses and feet clad in baby bootees. The fiend’s kills, always maternal in message, revealed a commitment to theme rarely seen outside a five-year-old’s birthday party.

Another girl might’ve heeded the warnings to leave the woods, but Vern preferred this obvious malevolence to the covert violence of life beyond the trees. To be warned of bad happenings afoot was a welcome luxury. People might’ve followed Vern off the compound when she’d fled if there’d been a fiend there discarding dead animals as auguries.

Hush, now, Vern said, then, thinking it was what a good mam would do, sang her babe a song her mam used to sing to her. "Oh, Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. Oh, Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. Pharaoh’s army got drown-ded! Oh, Mary, don’t weep."

Even though it was a spiritual, it wasn’t a song about Jesus direct, which suited Vern because she hated music about the Christ. It was one of the few items on which she and her husband, Sherman, agreed. She nodded along to every sermon he gave about the ways the white man plundered the world under the direction of this so-called savior.

Whole continents reek of the suffering that man has caused. Can you smell it? he would ask. The congregation would shout, Amen, Reverend Sherman, we smell it! And then he’d ask, Don’t it stink? And they’d say, Yes, Reverend! It sure does. And he’d ask, But does it stink here, on the Blessed Acres of Cain, where we live lives removed from that white devil god of Abel and his followers? The people would cry out, No!

According to Mam, there was a time when Cainites were less ardent about Reverend Sherman’s teachings. His predecessor and father, Eamon Fields, was the congregation’s true beacon. An early settler of the compound, arriving in the first wave, Eamon rose quickly from secretary to accountant to deacon to reverend. He was a stern man, violent, but for Cainites who’d been traumatized by the disorder inherent to Black American life, puritanical strictness held a dazzling, charismatic appeal. Sherman was not so hard as his father before him, which disoriented the brothers and sisters of the compound. In the end, he won them over on the pulpit, entrancing all with his passionate sermons.

And do we dare abandon the compound and mingle our fate with those devilish outsiders? Sherman asked.

No, Reverend!

That’s right, my beautiful brothers and sisters, kings and queens, sons and daughters of Cain. We stay here, where there is bounty. Free from the white devil dogs who would tear us limb from limb. Their world is one of filth and contradiction, poison and lies! Rich folks in homes that could house fifty, one hundred, two hundred, while the poorest and sickest among them rot on the street! Would we allow that here?

No!

Sherman could make lies out of the truth—Vern had learned that much as his wife—but she full-believed her husband’s fiery sermons about the Nazarene. She’d witnessed the curious hold Jesus had on people from her trips off the compound. Every other billboard and bumper sticker preached his gospel. Christ-talk made up the few words Vern could read by sight because they were everywhere in large print.

JESUS.

HELL.

SALVATION.

JOHN 3:16.

He was on T-shirts, bracelets, anklets, mugs. And that damn cross everywhere. The whole world outside the Blessed Acres of Cain seemed an endless elegy to Christ and his dying, his bleeding, his suffering. How come white folks were always telling Black people to get over slavery because it was 150 or so years ago but they couldn’t get over their Christ who died 1,830 years before that?

Who cared if he rose up from the dead? Weeds did that, too. It wasn’t in Vern’s nature to trust a man with that much power. For how did he come to have it?

Her new babe would never have to hear a thing about him. Vern would sing only the God-spirituals. She didn’t believe in him, either, but at least there was an ineffability to him, a silence that could be filled with a person’s own projection of the divine. Not so with Christ, who was a person, a particular person.

"God made man and he made him out of clay. Put him on earth, but not to stay. Pharaoh’s army got drown-ded. Oh, Mary, don’t weep!" sang Vern.

Sherman didn’t abide music about Jesus at the Blessed Acres of Cain, but he let Vern’s mother listen to it in the wee hours when no one else on the compound could hear.

"One of these days bout twelve o’clock, this old world gonna reel and rock. Pharaoh’s army got drown-ded! Oh, Mary, don’t weep."

Vern’s words slurred as she succumbed to fatigue, though she was not so tired as she might have been. The last stages of labor had come on with the quickness of a man in want of a fuck, and with the same order of operations, too. A sudden demand, a vague series of movements, a driving push toward the finish, followed by Vern’s immense relief when it was all over. Birthing had been no more trying than anything else in her life, and this time, at least, she had a baby boy to show for her trouble.

Or baby girl. Vern’s mam had predicted a son based on the way Vern carried her belly, but now that the child was here, Vern didn’t bother checking what was between its legs. The faintest impression of what could’ve been a penis pushed against her belly, but then it could’ve been a twisted piece of umbilical cord, too, or a clitoris, enlarged from birth much as Vern’s own had been. Perhaps this child, like her, transgressed bodily notions of male and female.

Vern liked not knowing, liked the possibility of it. Let him unfold as he would. In the woods, where animals ruled with teeth and claws, such things mattered not a lick. There were no laws here in this wild land, and wasn’t it better that way? At the compound, Vern saw how girlfolk and boyfolk were, what patterns they lived out as if notes on a record, their tune set in vinyl, rarely with variation. Even Vern’s best friend, Lucy, recalcitrant to the marrow, would call her a man when Vern, against compound edict, wore pants to muck out the animal pens or took a straight razor to her thick, coarse sideburns, longer than many men’s.

Did it have to be such? Was it always so? Or was it much like everything back at the Blessed Acres of Cain? A lie.

Vern’s babe was just a babe. Guided by scent, he found his way to her breast the way many a child would, his head bobbing as he squirmed toward her nipple. You’d think I hadn’t been feeding you from my very own insides these last eight and a half months, said Vern, teasing, but she didn’t resent him his hunger. No child of hers could ever be a sated thing.

It was evening, but only just. Mam said that children born of the gloaming were destined to wander; that was why Vern’s mind had always been so unquiet. You got more opinions than sense, Mam had said.

Vern had doomed her newborn to the same fate, but she would not apologize for it. Better not to belong at all than belong in a cage. She thought to name the child Hunter for all the searching in his squeezing fingers and hunger in his heart, but then what if her mam really was wrong and he was a girl in the end? A girl named Hunter. It gave her a pleasant zing to think of the impropriety of it.

Back at the compound, she’d be made to name him after a famous descendant of Cain. Malcolm or Martin or Frederick, perhaps Douglass or Eldridge. Vern’s little brother was Carmichael for Stokely, and among her peers, there was Turner for Nat, Rosa for Parks, Harriet for Tubman.

Vern herself was named for Vernon Johns, the scholar and minister who’d preceded Martin Luther King, Jr., at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Lucy had complimented Vern on the name when she’d first come to the compound with her parents. It’s unique. No one’s heard of that Vernon man. I’m getting tired of hearing all these African American Greatest Hits names. This way you can be your own person.

If Sherman had his way, he’d name the child Thurgood, but Vern could not do that to her kin.

Abolition? she said, testing how it felt on her tongue. Lucy? she whispered, surprised by how much it hurt to speak that name aloud. Lucy. It’d anger Sherman to no end if she named his sole heir after the girl who never yielded to him once, and Vern lived to anger Sherman.

Vern licked her lips hungrily, overcome with a wave of inspiration. When the child was old enough to ask after a father, Vern would say it was Lucy. Raised in the woods, her little one wouldn’t know all the ways that wasn’t true. It was something she’d never hear the end of if Sherman were here, but then he wasn’t, was he? Lucy, she said one more time, then, Lu. Luce. Louie? searching out a variation that suited the fussy babe sprawled against her. Lucius?

None of the options felt suitable, and she frowned. Wild things didn’t bother naming their offspring, and Vern was wild through and through. Her mam had always said so. A child in the woods didn’t need a name, did it?

I’ll just call you my little babe, Vern said, planning to leave it at that, until she heard wolves in the distance making their wild noises to the night. There it was, a sensation of rightness. She didn’t have many of those, so when they came, they were easy to recognize. Howling, she said. Howling. That’s your name. He was her hungry, keening creature.

Just like her. Ravenous. For what? For goddamn what? There was nothing in these woods but darkness and a fiend who killed not for food or hide but for the pleasure it arose in him to end the life of something small. She’d fled the compound in want of something, and though she’d been gone for only a short while, she already knew she’d never find it.

THERE WERE NO WOLVES in these woods, not that Vern had ever heard of. Yet as her babe slept fretfully on her chest, lips still a-wobble over her areola, she heard their howling again, closer now than they’d been before.

Everybody at the Blessed Acres of Cain undertook thorough study of flora and fauna. There was none among them who couldn’t name near every animal and plant and fungus, what to do with it, how to tame it, how to kill it, how to make from it all the stuff needed for life. Reverend Sherman insisted upon this knowledge.

Education as a tool of liberation was a philosophy that dated back to Claws, the precursor group to the Cainites. Coloreds Against White Supremacy.

Back when the Blessed Acres of Cain was just an upstart Black nationalist group without the renown of the Black Panthers or the reach of the Nation of Islam, the founders ran schools often focused on survivalism. Driven by revelations from God, they wanted their people to renounce white civilization any way they could.

If Black people planned to survive in a society antagonistic to their existence, they had to learn to be resourceful. Intimate familiarity with the land reduced dependence on the white economy. These philosophies were the impetus for the establishment of the compound. A swath of land would help foster connection with the earth. There was a belief that because the dirt was eons old, it possessed knowledge, and by eating it, people could share in that knowledge. Some of the early founders said it could impart visions. Eamon Fields had taken this small amount of mysticism and used it as a seed to form an entire religion, but there had always been and always would be a practical component of learning and doing and working.

So Vern knew all there was to know about wolves, what they sounded like, their behaviors, their mating cycles, their hunting patterns, where they lived, their place in recovering ecosystems devoured by the white man’s fear and greed. She knew that the nearest wolf den was fifteen hundred miles from where she was.

How had she missed this? How had the very first sound of them not sent her heart into deathly contortions? She’d been too overtaken by the uncanniness of motherhood, with all its wetness.

The wolves that weren’t there howled, on the hunt. Bewildered, Vern pressed Howling tighter to her chest and moaned. This wasn’t supposed to happen, not out here. Hauntings were particular to the compound. Everybody got them back there. It was withdrawal, according to Eamon Fields, as still preached by Reverend Sherman. Detox. People on the compound lived lives removed from the poisonous influence of the white world. The psychic toxins that plagued the rest of humanity seeped out of them in the form of night terrors and visions violent enough that folks had to sleep strapped down.

But Vern had fled the compound going on two months ago. She was in the outside world now, supposedly swimming in toxins. These devils, then, unlikely as it was, were real.

Vern’s little brother, Carmichael, had once done a project on the reintroduction of wolves to the Yellowstone region. Under one of Sherman’s academic programs, young men could visit libraries off the compound. It was a recruiting technique. Black families saw how smart and cleaned-up Cainite boys were and wanted that for their own sons. Better the Blessed Acres than incarceration, they must’ve reasoned.

Carmichael’s project had been about the dangers of white toxicity, how European settlers had hunted gray wolves dead, disrupting the ecosystem’s balance. It took years of fighting to reintroduce them.

Maybe the Parks and Wildlife Services here had done the same in this area without Vern knowing. Wolves had been extirpated from this area, too.

Or wild dogs? Coyotes? But coyotes howled like dying witches, high-pitched and squealing. These chants were a sorrow song.

Vern tied Howling snug to her front with a piece of cloth. She braced against the tree to stand, legs unsteady from muscle strain and the weight of her still-big abdomen, uncontracted. Evening dew moistened the woods into a mire, and she had to mind her steps.

Vern walked eastward, away from the sound of the wolves. She touched every third or fourth tree to make sure she kept straight, each trunk marked with the carvings she’d made to find her way at night, when her vision was lowest. Her feet sank into the ground as she walked. Cool mud squeezed between her toes.

There was no path. With every step she cleared bushes and brush. Underfoot, leaves and vines and branches grabbed hold of her ankles. It was true dark now, with little light left from the setting sun to show which way was east.

More howling, and closer still. Vern forced her legs to move faster, heart racing. She wiped sweat from her temple, cheek, and brow. Despite the autumn chill, her swiftly beating heart and quickened breaths heated her body through.

We’re gonna be all right, she lied to her babe. Wolves didn’t naturally prey on humans, yet here they were now giving chase.

Their wolfish whinnies rang just behind her. So fast they’d caught up. She could hear their devilish steps against the sticks and the mud of the forest floor. They were just behind, a few feet away, then inches.

Next, hot breath. Afterward, a tear at her ankles, casting her downward onto her side, her poor babe awaking with his own howl. A hot tongue slithered in her ear, burrowing in that cave of cartilage. It was as awful as a kiss.

God of Cain, she said, out of habit, not devotion. Vern flung open her eyes. She would face her extinction and bear this hot, vicious undoing full-on. She’d watch their blurry shadows descend.

Vern’s eyelids fluttered. She looked left. She looked right. She squinted into the forest dark.

There were no wolves to be found. Vern blinked and rubbed her eyes, but no sign came that she’d been chased down and bit at. With a crimped brow, Vern hushed her crying babe with pats on the back, aware she’d forgotten all about him during her death throes.

Vern snapped her head to the left at the sound of a dry leaf crackling.

Who’s there? she asked.

A beam of light flared from the darkness, blinding her. The ground around her shifted, sections of soft mud flattening under a stranger’s boots. Someone with a flashlight stalked toward her. With one hand to her babe and the other made into a visor on her forehead, Vern scooted backward in the dirt.

She could neither see the stranger’s face nor make out more than a few details of his person, but slung over his right shoulder was a dead opossum dressed in pale pink overalls. The fiend had come.

The wolves always flush out the runaways, he said, voice suspended in that liminal ether between growl and whisper.

Vern lay frozen before him, regaining her ability to move only at the sound of an animal stalking in the outskirts of her periphery. It beat the ground with heavy footfalls and crunched twigs and pine cones with its massive paws. Hungry, it snarled. The noise was enough to distract the fiend, and Vern tugged the knife from her nightgown’s pocket and plunged it into his thigh. He cried out but didn’t retaliate, staggering toward the animal instead.

Vern righted herself, hoisting up onto all fours and then to standing. She crouched as low as she could as she ran, trying to make herself invisible in the wild plant growth of the woods. She didn’t hear footsteps behind her, but she kept running. She stumbled to a stop only when pain of breath-stealing magnitude twisted inside her belly. It squeezed like something alive inside her, wishing her dead, making it so. If the fiend was coming, there was nothing to do now but wait. Her life, Howling’s life, that was all in his hands.

Overcome, Vern worked herself down to her knees, legs spread. The urge to bear down as hard as she could supplanted every other humanly want in her body. Not one to deny her baser self, she did as the urge commanded and pushed. And so, with one babe tied to her chest, placenta and all, she bornt another. The fiend surely heard her screams.

IT WAS A SORRY LOT she’d birthed her babes into. They had naught but Vern. Vern, fifteen years old, who was not yet so lost in teenagedom that she believed herself knowledgeable or anything approaching such. The world and all its troubles were as much unknowns to her as they were to her children. What more could she offer them but her milk, her skin?

With Howling and his twin strapped to her, Vern gathered wood and built a fire. It made her an easy find in the woods, but Vern had expended too much energy on being frightened this evening. Let the fiend threaten and taunt. She’d not be chased from her bit of earth with promises of harm. Only actual violence could unmoor her.

Vern made a lean-to once she’d finished the fire. She’d wait until morning light to journey back to her camp.

Now, what to call you? she asked her newest child, smaller even than the first, his breaths gasping and unsteady. Like her, he was albino. The babe’s alabaster glow made him easy to see in the dark, a lantern in her palms.

How about Feral? she said, for no more reason than it sounded as rabid a name as his elder sibling’s. It made her happy to give them such improper names, because there was nothing good about what was proper.

Vern wished to make every moment of her life a rebellion, not just against the Blessed Acres of Cain but against the world in all its entirety. Nothing would be spared her resistance.

Outsiders looked down on Cainland, convinced of their superiority. Whenever Cainites moved together in a group off the compound, distinctive in their uniforms, parents stared and pulled their children away. People called them a cult.

Vern wanted to know what made these folks so sure they weren’t in a cult, too. A college kid had once walked up to Vern on a dare and asked, Do you really believe in the God of Cain?

Seconds ago, this kid and her friends had opened up a bag of food on top of a panhandler’s head and broken out in laughter. Was that what she believed in? Was that her god? Laughing at the downtrodden and weary? Nobody at Cainland would do that.

Vern said as much out loud, and the teenager replied, At least I’m not brainwashed.

Seemed like she was to Vern. Little children who passed the homeless always stopped; if not to give, at least to look, to acknowledge. It was their parents who scolded them into looking away, ignoring, hating. People defended all manner of views inherited from their caregivers to the grave, all the while claiming to have reached these conclusions of their own sound minds.

So Vern vowed to eschew the outside world as much as she did Cainland.

She held each babe as she stood on shaking legs before the fire. Her nightgown rippled in billows around her. The pink fabric, warped by time, had the bleached-bloodstain hue of an overexposed Polaroid. No one could say it was a dignified birthing garment, but then birthing wasn’t a dignified affair. One need only consider the sheer animal humiliation of the act: shit, mucus, sobs. O, what a thing to be reduced to your truest nature, to be once more a dog whimpering in the night, clinging to battle-worn pups, the vessel of your body transformed into a tunnel for viscera. At least in these lowly moments the world became absent of airs. There could be no tea-sipping with a veiny dark placenta sloshing out of you.

Vern crawled with Howling and Feral into the temporary woodland shelter, desperate for sleep that she knew wouldn’t come without a fight. The wolves always flush out the runaways, the fiend had said. Had he put those sounds in her mind, then? Those feelings and smells? Meat-scented wolf breath and wolf slobber and wolf nails? She’d never had a haunting as full-on as that.

Vern huffed in disgust, sickened by her naivete. Distance from the Blessed Acres hadn’t rid her of hauntings because everything Eamon or Sherman had ever said about toxins and withdrawal causing them was a fabrication. With her own two ears Vern had listened to her husband preach that nonsense and believed it. Foolery. She was no different than the Cainites who’d stood idly by at her wedding, sucking up Sherman’s lies about Vern needing his husbandly guidance to save her soul. People said Vern was stubborn and hardheaded, but not stubborn and hardheaded enough to be immune to lies. She had proof now that the hauntings had nothing to do with withdrawal because she was miles and miles from Cainland, but it shouldn’t have taken all that for her to know the truth. The visions Cainites had weren’t society’s toxins oozing out. They were toxins being put in. Had to be. That was all Cainland was, Reverend Sherman putting bunk into people’s minds. Turned out he was doing it literally, too. Poisoning people. When she’d settled in these woods, Vern had thought she’d been the one to encroach on the fiend’s territory, but he’d revealed his hand when he’d said what he said: The wolves always flush out the runaways.

He had to have followed her here on Reverend Sherman’s orders. The dead animals were meant to scare her back to the compound. When that didn’t work, he poisoned her mind with a haunting. He’d put something in the river water she drank from, something that was in the same water back at Cainland.

Vern reclined against the tree trunk that formed the base of the lean-to, babes on her belly. The curious quiet of November reigned. It was the season of shriveling and cadaverous light. So many creatures would die this coming winter, and Vern counted herself among them.

This recent revelation proved it. Escaping the Blessed Acres hadn’t changed the most essential truth of Vern’s being: a misfit in the Land of the Living, she’d always been a dead girl walking.

2

VERN SQUINTED at the fiend below. She watched him from her perch high in a shortleaf pine. He wore an oversized hunting cap, shearling-lined flaps protecting his ears against January wind.

She needed to be more careful. Just minutes ago she’d been on the ground, headed toward a trap to check it for meat. When she’d heard the fiend whistling, she had only a moment to dash up the tree to hide.

Howling and Feral slept on either side of her front, tied to her in a double pouch she’d made from a brain-tanned hide. Neither had yet made a peep, but they’d been napping now for hours and were due to awaken. If they did stir, she’d not be able to sway or rock them back into a lull. To do so would risk creaking the branch and alerting the fiend to her presence.

Vern berated herself for ever thinking her life would be free from harm by following in Lucy’s footsteps and running away from Cainland. Things had a way of working out for Vern’s best friend in ways they didn’t for Vern. She wondered where Lucy was right now—surely not up no damn tree. No, Lucy was someplace living the life, probably sitting in one of those fancy big-screen theaters eating popcorn and slurping orange