Blue Asylum by Kathy Hepinstall

Author:Kathy Hepinstall [Hepinstall, Kathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781611734263
Publisher: Harcourt
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

“What’s the matter?” Wendell asked from the other side of the bars. It was harder to see his face through the screen they’d put up for the mosquitoes. “Why did you stop the story?”

Iris wasn’t sure how long she’d been quiet. She’d been lost in the memory. She backed away from the window, but not far. There was nowhere to go.

His voice was quiet, respectful. “People start dying now, don’t they?”

She lay apart from the others as she always did, using as her bedding a sheet she’d stolen from a clothesline, full of ordinary scents: spring air and bluing and the clean sharp smell of nothing in particular. In the near distance, gaunt cattle stood huddled together. The war had started chewing on the cities and was now moving into pastoral scenes. It couldn’t stop the flowers, or the grass, and the trees looked the same. But a steer that could have fed ten families now could feed only half that. Strange how she could hate slavery but hate the Yankees, too.

She fell into a stretch of sleep, flat, gray sleep meant only to rest the body. She awoke to Verna’s scream. Horses were coming down the dirt road that ran along the side of the pasture. Iris jumped to her feet, confused, horrified. A man in a slouch hat on a palomino was ahead of the rest of them and was closing in fast. A loud shot went off next to her head and the lead man fell. Iris turned and saw Nate pointing his weapon. He fired twice more as they ran into the cypress forest.

A confusion of voices. Labored breathing. Biting cool of swamp water. Dawn came and shots rang in her ears and then they were all bunched up and dying in that cypress cove. She was on the ground, water soaking the back of her dress.

Rose, John, Verna, Mattie, Nate, Jackson, Thomas. When she came to her senses she was tied to the back of a horse, riding toward Fort Lane, where a judge would say the word that brought her here.

Lunatic.

She knew boys did not like crying women, and so she had held in her tears while she finished the story. Wendell looked at her steadily. She moved closer to the window.

“Do you think I’m a lunatic, Wendell?”

He shook his head.

“Then let me go.”

“Let you go?”

“Help me leave this place and go back to Winchester. You are my only chance for salvation. Please don’t abandon me. I’ll die here, don’t you see?”

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