We present an extract from The Red Bird Sings, the debut novel by Aoife Fitzpatrick.
West Virginia, 1897: After the sudden death of young Zona Shue only a few months after her impromptu wedding, her mother Mary Jane has a vision - she was killed. And by none other than her new husband, Trout, the handsome blacksmith beloved in their small Southern town. Trout is put on trial but no one believes he's guilty apart from Mary Jane and the eccentric Lucy Frye - an unmarried woman who always suspected Trout's power over her friend. As the trial raises to fever pitch and the men of Greenbrier County stand aligned against them, Mary Jane and Lucy must decide whether to play with fire and reveal Zona's greatest secret. But it's Zona herself, from beyond the grave, who still has one last revelation to make.
1 | Lucy Frye
Livesay/Meadow Bluff
September 16, 1896
Her mother kept urging her to get rid of the Remington, but Lucy couldn't imagine life without it sitting smart and modern on the dressing table.
Each silver letter was tiny and exquisite on the end of its own metal stalk, and there were few things more satisfying than firing them at the ink ribbon, punching words onto the page. She enjoyed the violence of the click; the permanence of the brand.
When she was buying the used typewriter from the Greenbrier Independent, the editor had doubted her stamina to wallop the stiff keys – questioned her ability to change the ribbon and align the arms so that the basket didn’t end up in a snare. But after only a few months of practice, here she was typing more than seventy words per minute with as many as four cooperative fingers. The tower of writing beside her elbow was a triumph of sorts. Yet the higher this column grew, the worse she felt, riddled as it was with her failed attempts at newspaper articles.
She winced at the titles poking out of the dereliction. 'Have a Dirty Cut? Dial Franklin 448’. That was the one about the new antitoxin, written after little Prudie Thorne died of lockjaw. The Independent had turned its nose up, advising her to stick to women’s affairs, before publishing an identical article under the editor’s name. Dog- eared, near the top of the pile, she spied ‘Neglect Felt by Society and Community’; a report on the recent scandal at the State Fair when not one woman in the county had competed in the hosing or glove departments. If you were to believe the judges, it was a moral disaster. But the newspaper turned this down, too, telling her to come back with something more cheerful, about fashion, or the household – maybe society.
Dejected at the memory, she dropped onto the chair and grasped her tin of rouge, its equator seeping scarlet. She prised off the lid and leaned toward the mirror, daubing each cheek. It didn’t look right, as usual, though her mother insisted that she try. The crimson might enhance the attractive cushion of a cheek like Zona’s. On her own face, it highlighted her homeliness, and once she’d cycled as far as the Heasters’ farm, it would double up on her redness, too.
Fingers greasy and lurid, she tugged at the paper in the typewriter carriage until it came free. When it was smoothed on the table, she had the strong urge to stay home and finesse her morning’s writing. This hesitation to visit the Heasters was new. She had never felt it, nor any need to shore up her appearance, before meeting Trout Shue. The man had this subtle demeanour when he looked at her – eyes narrowed, always seeming to wish her different in some unspecified way. Whether she was reserved or outgoing, silly or serious, his little frowns and sighs told her that he was never happy.
Meanwhile, he worshipped everything about Zona. Her best friend had been praying for Trout to propose marriage, while her own special wish was for the blacksmith to pack up and move on.
She wriggled into the neat jacket of her bicycle suit, regret hard and polished in her chest, because it was her own fault that they’d met. It shouldn’t have mattered that her new bicycle lamp was swinging loose; not in July, when she was in bed every night before sunset. Yet it was she who had insisted on dragging Zona down to the blacksmith to have a wedge fitted to the clamp. That was where they’d found a new man tending the bellows, in the place where old amiable Jim used to be. And she’d acquired a wedge all right. One named Trout Shue, who was still driving himself in tight between her and Zona.
She started down the stairs, cringing at the stupidity of it all, trying not to wake her spoiled parents and beautiful black-haired sisters. In the hallway, her leather tool belt hung by its strap from the coat rack, and she checked inside the stiff pocket for her small tin of oil, her adjustable wrench, her screwdriver and the little .32 calibre revolver that she’d taken to carrying since that rabid fox emerged furious from the grass over at Fort Spring. Alongside these provisions, she squeezed in a small gift for Zona, wrapped in taffeta.
Her bicycle, greased wheels gleaming, was stored under the lean-to behind her mother’s coop of ornamental fowl. The gold frame was shining after its recent wash, and the cork grips on the nickelled handlebars were smart and fresh. With her sleeve pulled over the heel of her hand, she wiped the saddle before hunkering beside the front wheel, a swipe of her thumb cleaning the glass face of her cyclometer. Its cream dial showed a series of small black digits, numbering the miles that she had travelled since midsummer – 0 3 1 7. She was going to drive that number up to 2 0 0 0, no matter how many bottles of Pond’s Extract she needed to soothe her peeling face. Just a few more months on her silent steed and she would finish her best article yet: ‘The Bicycle Woman in the Modern World’.
It was about the exhilaration of wheeling long- distance, and how she no longer felt obscure or uncertain when she was out on the road, in full occupation of her body. When she had told Zona about it, her friend’s eyes had glinted with more kindness than faith. Still, she was encouraging, not believing in being shy or contrite about anything since the birth of her astonishing child. But confessing her ambition to her ma and step-pa had been different. While the pair sat rigid on the tapestry sofa, she had imagined that the painted walls were throbbing along with her pounding cheeks, her face perhaps turning the same shade of brutal magenta.
I can live with it, Lucia, her mother had said, if you try descriptive writing. A bit of harmless showing-off. These women journalists exist, but think how hard – and hardening – their lives must be. With all this bicycling, people will think you’re depraved. Or deformed. For your own sake, she had added, exasperation ripening to anger, do something to preserve your. . . allurement. A woman never looks better than when she’s on horseback.
On the downhill toward Zona’s house, she raised her feet up onto the coasters. The air whistled by, sweet with summer’s end; the scent of warm clay and wheat stubble and the last green cuttings of hay. The smell of windfall apples came in a sudden drift, and her soul took its first gentle shift into fall. Patches of crimson flashed amongst the oaks and hemlocks and birches and maples, heralding the march of scarlet and yellow and bronze that would soon flame across the hills.
The Red Bird Sings is published by Virago Press
