Excerpt of St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
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Ava Wrestles the Alligator
My sister and I are staying in Grandpa Sawtooth’s old house until our father,
Chief Bigtree, gets back from the Mainland. It’s our first summer alone in the
swamp. “You girls will be fine,” the Chief slurred. “Feed the gators, don’t talk
to strangers. Lock the door at night.” The Chief must have forgotten that it’s a
screen door at Grandpa’s—there is no key, no lock. The old house is a
rust-checkered yellow bungalow at the edge of the wild bird estuary. It has a
single, airless room; three crude, palmetto windows, with mosquito-blackened
sills; a tin roof that hums with the memory of rain. I love it here. Whenever
the wind gusts in off the river, the sky rains leaves and feathers. During
mating season, the bedroom window rattles with the ardor of birds.
Now the thunder makes the thin window glass ripple like wax paper. Summer rain
is still the most comforting sound that I know. I like to pretend that it’s our
dead mother’s fingers, drumming on the ceiling above us. In the distance, an
alligator bellows—not one of ours, I frown, a free agent. Our gators are hatched
in incubators. If they make any noise at all, it’s a perfunctory grunt, bored
and sated. This wild gator has an inimitable cry, much louder, much closer. I
smile and pull the blankets around my chin. If Osceola hears it, she’s not
letting on. My sister is lying on the cot opposite me. Her eyes are wide open,
and she is smiling and smiling in the dark.
“Hey, Ossie? Is it just you in there?”
My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only
accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting
occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right
before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge,
to get there—and then bolt across the chasm between you, before your bridge
collapses.
“Ossie? Is it just us?” I peer into the grainy dark. There’s the chair that
looks like a horned devil’s silhouette. There’s the blind glint of the terrarium
glass. But no Luscious. Ossie’s evil boyfriend has yet to materialize.
“Yup,” she whispers. “Just us.” Ossie sounds wonderfully awake. She reaches over
and pats my arm.
“Just us girls.”
That does it. “Just us!” we scream. And I know that for once, Ossie and I are
picturing the same thing. Miles and miles of swamp, and millions and millions of
ghosts, and just us, girls, bungalowed in our silly pajamas.
We keep giggling, happy and nervous, tickled by an incomplete innocence. We both
sense that some dark joke is being played on us, even if we can’t quite grasp
the punch line.
“What about Luscious?” I gasp. “You’re not dating Luscious anymore?”
Uh-oh. There it is again, that private smile, the one that implies that Ossie is
nostalgic for places I have never been, places I can’t even begin to imagine.
Ossie shakes her head. “Something else, now.”
“Somebody else? You’re not still going to, um,” I pause, trying to remember her
word, “elope? Are you?”
Ossie doesn’t answer. “Listen,” she breathes, her eyes like blown embers. The
thunder has gentled to a soft nicker. Outside, something is scratching at our
dripping window. “He’s here.”
You know, Ossie’s possessions are nothing like those twitch-fests you read about
in the Bible, no netherworld voices or pigs on a hill. Her body doesn’t smolder
like a firecracker, or ululate in dead languages. Her boyfriends possess her in
a different way. They steal over her, silking into her ears and mouth and lungs,
stealthy and pervasive, like sickness or swallowed water. I watch her
metamorphosis in guilty, greedy increments. Ossie is sweating. Ossie is
heavy-breathing. She puts her fist in her mouth, her other hand disappearing
beneath the covers.
Excerpted from St. Lucy's Home for Girls
Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell Copyright © 2006 by Karen Russell.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
