Follow Me to Ground: A Novel - Softcover

Rainsford, Sue

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1982133643 ISBN 13: 9781982133641

Verlag: Scribner, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

One of Literary Hub’s Favorite Books of the Year

“Seethingly assured…like all the best horror, [Follow Me to Ground] is an impressive balancing act between judicious withholding and unnerving reveals.” —The Guardian

A “legitimately frightening” (The New York Times Book Review) debut novel about an otherworldly young woman, her father, and her lover that culminates in a shocking moment of betrayal.

“You’ve never encountered a father-daughter story like Rainsford’s slim debut” (Entertainment Weekly). Ada and her father, touched by the power to heal illness, live on the edge of a village where they help sick locals—or “Cures”—by cracking open their damaged bodies or temporarily burying them in the reviving, dangerous Ground nearby. Ada, a being both more and less than human, is mostly uninterested in the Cures, until she meets a man named Samson—and they quickly strike up an affair. Soon, Ada is torn between her old way of life and new possibilities with her lover, and eventually she comes to a decision that will forever change Samson, the town, and the Ground itself.

“Visceral in its descriptions…this unworldly story is a well-crafted and eerie exploration of desire…beautifully intoxicating” (Shelf Awareness). In Ada, award-winning author Sue Rainsford has created an utterly bewitching heroine, one who challenges conventional ideas of womanhood and the secrets of the body. “A triumph of imagination and myth-bending…equal parts beauty and horror [Follow Me to Ground is] unlike anything you will read this year” (Téa Obreht).

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sue Rainsford is a fiction and arts writer based in Dublin. A graduate of Trinity College, she completed her MFA in writing and literature at Bennington College, Vermont. She is a recipient of the VAI/DCC Critical Writing Award, the Arts Council Literature Bursary Award, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. When it was first published, Follow Me to Ground won the Kate O’Brien Award and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Award.  

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Henry Law
It didn’t matter to Father that most Cures were cautious of us because he didn’t care for company, and it didn’t matter to him that a couple of the curings became local folklore and got told over and over, getting longer and stranger each time.

Tabatha Sharpe, for instance.

She was a Cure of mine from when I was very young and first in the habit of going for walks near Sister Eel Lake. I’d play in the long pale grass, pulling it around myself and weaving a wheaten cradle. I laced the stalks over one another into thick and clumsy plaits in the way that some Cure women bound their hair, and lay there for an hour or so, imagining myself an infant Cure. Helpless. Speechless. Pursing my mouth to signal I wanted my mother’s teat.

Father had told me that Cures remember nothing of being inside their mothers, which I thought strange. I remembered so clearly my time in The Ground. I remembered the closeness of the soil and the taste of rain come down toward me.

Once the backs of my legs started itching I kicked away the cradle.

Shredded its walls.

Tore it down.

On the way home I played a game I often played when lazy with heat. It was a simple game: I’d look into Sister Eel Lake and convince myself I saw her there—whiskery, oily mouth—and so frighten myself into running all the way home.

I squatted in the rushes and felt my dress peel away from my back, waiting to be taken by surprise.

But then: a noise. A real noise. A noise I hadn’t spun in my head.

A wet, slipping sound, and a pocket of air dispersing.

There was a baby where there hadn’t been one before. A baby wrapped in a bit of cloth torn from a sheet or a large man’s shirt. The cloth was covered in stringy bits of blood and the baby was sickly. I lifted it into my lap and the small head rolled away.

Tiny throat. Too tiny to cry.

Little pink disk for a face, the features slightly flattened.

Fair hair plastered down with mucus and blood.

I checked it over and saw it was a girl.

My first thought: Some crazed parent has left her here for Sister Eel.

Offerings were sometimes made to her by Cures who thought she could shimmy under the fields and make succulent the crops, though it was usually a calf or a fox they left for her.

With my arms around the baby I walked the quarter hour home, looking at her face.

Mouth like a berry still ripening.

Eyelids so thin I could see through them.

We’d no Cures scheduled that day, and so I knew there’d been an accident when I saw the old van parked at a hard, quick angle to the house.

A smell of wet was coming off the van, a sucked-penny smell, and once inside the house it wafted thick and strong. I followed it upstairs, an ache starting in my arms with the weight of the baby. I could hear Father talking.

They were in the third spare room—our best room, with its view of the garden’s greenest part. There was a woman in the rocking chair. She was crying, mostly with pain, and there was a man crying with sadness behind her. Father was on his knees. He said

—You really mustn’t move.

I’d never seen the woman before but later learned her name: Mrs. Delilah Sharpe. She was sat in the rocking chair and her dress was rolled up to her waist and she held her own knees very far apart. Father was rolling a strip of torn sheet to pad at the soreness between Mrs. Sharpe’s legs—there was already a heap of used ones on the ground, and I clucked my tongue at the long chore ahead of me: washing the strips one by one; perhaps even stitching the sheet up again.

Mr. Sharpe saw me first, and then Father turned around. Mrs. Sharpe lay back in the chair, her eyes closing.

The sun had gotten higher and the day was pumping hot and cruel outside.

—I found her at Sister Eel Lake.

Father had come close to me, stopped when he could see the baby’s wrinkled head. She seemed heavier, now that I was standing still, and squirmed while I did my best to rock her.

—Should I boil up some daisies?

Which was a broth we made for damaged parts.

—Go give Mrs. Sharpe her baby, Ada.

By now Mrs. Sharpe was trying to right herself in the chair. Mr. Sharpe was still crying but not making any sound.

—You do it.

I held her up to Father and he looked at me stone-hard, slit-eyed.

A scolding later. For sure.

He took her from the sullied cloth and carried her to Mrs. Sharpe. When she reached across her risen stomach, more bright blood came out of her. I heard its soft drip on the rug. Mr. Sharpe sat down on the floor, his back to the wall. They were a young couple, and probably not married long.

I stayed in the door moving from one foot to the other, wringing out the cloth, until I noticed the copper flecks on my hands. Like I’d been clutching a rusty pipe.

—I best get this in the bath before the stains stick.

But I was well forgotten by now.

I don’t know if Father ever realized how this story spread in the town. Cures couldn’t grasp that a baby could leave its mother without being birthed, could wind up so far away and be discovered by me. As though plucked out of the air. It made more sense to them that I’d killed the Sharpe baby and given her parents a changeling—a strange little creature like myself, who would someday do my bidding.

For years I wondered if it was my dream of a cradle that called her to me. This was better than thinking that Sister Eel Lake was simply where too-soon babies go.

Always when we met he’d have some quick greeting ready. The third time we saw one another, the day after we put Miss Lennox to ground, he said

—You get on better with the heat.

It was the first time I’d gotten into the front of the truck. The edges of the passenger seat were stained a deep brown. He had Cure music playing and it seemed to gather speed as he turned corners and cast backward glances at the road by way of the little mirror between us. The bottom of the window had the usual hillside pattern of dust thrown up by wheels and missed by wipers.

We came to Sister Eel Lake and he looked at me.

—Keep driving.

I was surprised he’d been willing to stop there. Almost everyone was cautious of the lake and believed the story of the cannibal serpents. Those giant, gorging eels grown during the war to kill enemy soldiers who stopped to bathe and swim. It was well known how they’d gone hungry some weeks into peacetime, and so began to swallow one another whole.

When only Sister and Brother Eel remained they watched one another until the brother fell asleep, and it was his fear that shook me, his fear upon waking. Thrashing in the tight dark that was his sister, engulfed even as he stirred from sleep.

It was Sister Eel who had years ago eaten most of Christopher Plume, a slim and freckled child, when he was nine. Father worked on him a great deal, out of courtesy to the family.

—Are you afraid of your father seeing us?

Driving under a willow tree whose branches snagged around the windows.

—Father doesn’t really leave the house.

This was part of a lie we kept afloat. Cures would scare easy at Father’s animal tendencies, blame him for livestock gone missing, though he never hunted anything that wasn’t wild.

We kept going and came to wider, more unkempt corners.

—I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Scribner
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1982133643
• ISBN 13: 9781982133641
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar