Catskins & the Boy-King

It was passed down in stories that the old king died not knowing his son was his daughter. On his last day, he searched for and found the bend in the road, not too far from his house, where he would wait.

To be a very old king is a delicate walk into annihilation. He'd read of Norse rulers, nearing their ends, left on ice floes to meet Odin at Valhalla. He could arrange his own meeting. It would his last gift, one of convenience.

He had never liked his suit, pale-fish gray and frayed with age, but he wore it as this was official business. He had found himself slipping. Losing dates, names, and memories to vapor, and he felt called up to join the air above.

His was a marriage of two houses, made to solidify warring families in the holler, but, to his surprise, he and his queen had fallen into what he thought love probably was. They would slip in and out of it over the years, as he figured everyone must, and they'd settled into a routine he would have called comfortable if asked.

It was tight, this part of the road, and if he sat just so, the trees would obscure him from the driver of the car. He'd timed it so his queen would be on her way home from town with dinner—bucket of fried chicken, all the sides. Biscuits, too.

But with all conveniences, one must allow for a higher price. Maybe Roxy's wasn't a gift to him, he thought; perhaps his wife had hand-delivered a gift to herself, a lifeline free of his interference, and then, before he could follow that thought to its end, he saw a pair of headlights in the low-lying dusk.

Across the county from the dying king, Catskins slept on an old mattress in the back bedroom, nestled between dogs when it rained, when the dogs were living. She stayed with an old woman and her daughter. She waited on them, cooked, cleaned, took their video rentals back. Bonnie, the old woman, had honed over the course of her life a peculiar flavor of cruelty, one specific to a woman who ended up raising two girls when she hardly wanted one. Bonnie's daughter, Bea, faced the world determined to be, if not the opposite of her mother, a daughter who would willingly fade into the background.

Since she was little, everyone called her Catskins on account of the ragged outfit she wore, patched with the hide of the animal easiest caught in the valley. To catch a coon, you'd need bait. You could count on cat to come asking for food. A dozen furry tails hung from her dress, shaking limply when she moved.

She had only disjointed memories of her mother who had abandoned her—dark roots and frosted tips, a tattoo of a cross on her wrist—and none of her father, name unknown. At night, she often thought of how life might have been with her mother and, as she went to sleep, let the dark mountains that circled her become a part of her, until all that was left inside when she woke each morning, heart still pumping, was dirt.

The old queen, the clever Roxy, knew that the only child of a king had to be a boy, and she also knew, deep inside, that only girls would ever flow from her. She flipped through a magazine at her kitchen table. By now everyone knew the old king was dead. Funeral casseroles and pies would soon line the kitchen countertop; the house heaved with grief. She took a sip of Diet Coke, wishing the doctor hadn't made her quit smoking.

She'd named her little girl Jack, after her granddaddy, keeping her daughter distant from her father. The old man couldn't, she thought, be trusted to know that a woman was saving his kingdom.

Roxy threw the magazine in the trash. She knew she had one last pack of Pall Malls hidden somewhere.

Everything came back to their secret...