Also by Quinn Connor

  Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves

  Copyright © 2024 by Quinn Connor

  Cover and internal design © 2024 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons/Sourcebooks

  Cover photos © Magdalena Wasiczek/Trevillion Images, Anan Kaewkhammul/Shutterstock

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  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

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  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks

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  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

  The Pecan Children is a complex story of magical realism that includes brief scenes of child endangerment and neglect, a major house fire, death of a parent, acts of violence, and dubious consent between adults. We have tried to address these serious issues with utmost sensitivity and our deepest respect for those impacted by similar real-world trauma. Please take care when reading.

  For my mother, Helene,

  who passed her gift of words to me.

  —A

  For Angela Barrow—

  Mama, there are no words.

  You make my dreams possible.

  —R

  Contents

  Act I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Act II

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Autumnal Interlude: Autumn

  Act III

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Act I

  Chapter One

  A screech shreds the delicate membrane of the night.

  A great blue heron hoists itself free of the river, and Sasha winces. That sudden thrill of sound yanks every nerve—the urgent, mechanical blare blasting in her ear.

  When will this ever end?

  It’s the train, howling like a heartbreak as it passes into, or really through, the town. No trains stop in the old pecan town now, and no roads lead there, either, not since the storm that took out the only highway. Sasha’s small riverboat, that eternal go-between, chugs doggedly back and forth, the only way in or out.

  Her grip on the wheel is a vise. She wants to duck, to cover her head; that noise feels like some miserable thing beating itself brainless against her skull. “Any minute, folks,” she assures the nearest shadows. She eyes the shore just to make sure it’s getting closer. The passengers are as hushed as the midnight that enwraps them. No one replies, skeptical of the promise—or stunned by the train’s devouring shriek?

  Sasha pushes damp hair away from her face and drags in a rallying breath. This is her river. She is the principal actor here on this floating stage, and nothing will touch her. She recrafts, with effort, her breezy nonchalance. It is the role she most loves: the woman well walled.

  The river swills around the riverboat’s paddle. It’s a sticky night, gnats stalking the deck lights, the air still and slick. The banks of this river have a muddy relationship; sometimes they draw close, seeking their other half, other times shoving apart like haughty sisters. This evening is too dense for even Sasha to read the inscrutable smiles and frowns of the silty land ahead.

  The rich, sludgy soil of this country around the river is slightly reddish, as if all the blood spilled has soaked in, this ground struck blow after mighty blow. The first people who loved this place, the Osage and Quapaw, were mostly forced away, and the news hasn’t been great just about ever since. Since the first pecan trees stuck their roots down in this rocky ground and held on, it’s a place where people have made it work. But nothing works out here now. Sasha knows that. It’s only her sister, Lil, one of the last holdouts among the struggling orchard keepers out here, who just won’t let go.

  The train fades to an echo on the horizon. Sasha usually likes to gab to the people on the boat, but she can tell it’s not a jawing kind of night. She watches the swatch of brown slurry illuminated by the boat light on the river, then glances back at the town and its rocky ridge. A flare of light catches her eye. Something is burning back there, a bright tower of fire cutting the dark. The scent of it will reach them soon, even this far out on the water. Its brilliance sears into Sasha’s vision, and she stares far longer than she should.

  No doubt it’s just somebody’s controlled brush fire. But it’s a big one. Sasha struggles to drag her eyes away.

  Later, Lil would certainly ask her, How close is the fire to home? That’s the question that always haunts an orchard keeper. They’ve seen the destruction drought and cigarette butts can make of fine, healthy trees. But it must be several miles away from their land, with the town between them, so Sasha drags herself back to the river.

  The bank gives up its retreat, and the boat finally starts gaining. Sasha docks. The light on the boat is loose, and it shivers over the land, flashing here and there in a lazy teeter. She leans on the rail as passengers file away toward the parking lot.

  For one wild, intoxicating instant, Sasha’s feet itch with possibility. She could tie this baby up, jump over the side, and chase after these lucky sons of bitches with someplace else in the world to go. She could flee. She could hitchhike straight out of here to that sweltering, flatter-than-flat city where the fresh starts are. Leave the dying trees and the bloated river and the broken-down road the state seems in no hurry to fix and that train and just—

  Something draws her back, her gaze magnetized to that home shore, and she sees…nothing. She scopes the shadowy trees, body ringing like a bell. Silence, and nothing. The hillside blaze from only a moment ago is nowhere to be seen. It feels as if the breathlessness of the evening has choked it out, midnight’s fingers snuffing it in the second she turned away. Now not even a sigh of smoke.

  Only the bank. Only the river. Only the night.

  She drifts a moment longer in this strangeness, squinting into eerie darkness. That desire to escape seems to leak from the soles of her shoes, restlessness displaced by a deep disquietude and a longing to be home quick.

  Sasha doesn’t wait any longer. Late-night stragglers hoping to cross over are out of luck. She tosses the rope at the dock and starts back alone.

  ***

  Every morning as the sun rises, Lil walks deep into the Clearwater orchard. In their canopies, the precious pecans hang undisturbed, pretty and healthy in their heavy green cradles. Sometimes, when the light hits it just so, the orchard seems to extend forever, beyond its prized fifty acres, bleeding into the sunset.

  Lil picks her way into the oldest part of the orchard, far past the barn where the strongest of the trees grow. It’s the deepest place, with the coolest shade, past where anyone should go. It’s not easy to get to this place. It’s difficult to push through the thickets that grow so mottled, and through the trees that aren’t set in clean, mandated rows. Here, they grow at their own whim, thick clutches of gnarled roots covering the ground, until walking feels treacherous. But she knows the way through, and she twists and ducks through foliage until she pushes into the clearing.

  And stops.

  Where the shade is thickest there’s the pond, like a black moon set in the ground. Every morning, Lil comes to sit at the mossy edge. The water is always cool, the sun blocked off by the canopy of the single pecan tree that grows on its bank. At the pond’s edge, the air feels different. The noise of the world is dampened; even the wind blows more gently here, in her most sacred place.

  She dips her fingers in the water and drips coolness along the back of her neck as she scans the ground. Overnight, two pecans have fallen from the tree and nestle at its base. They aren’t the usual tawny brown; each is the color of prehistoric amber, brighter and more vibrant than any other fruit from any other tree in the orchard. Their strangeness still arrests her. Lil gathers them up, smelling the perfume of earth, the sharp richness of the treasure inside. All of her days are spent on the work of the pecan o
rchard, and she’s eaten more pecans in her lifetime than most people would eat in twenty. And yet she can only imagine how they would taste, these pecans from this tree.

  “Not today,” she murmurs. “Maybe one day.” Instead, she tosses them, one by one into the water; each winks like a gold coin, falling with soft splashes.

  Task done, she brushes dirt off her knees and returns to the sunlight, where her truck is waiting, the back loaded with a new delivery of fresh pecans from elsewhere in the orchard.

  Her ride into town only seems to get longer these days, and she makes it with a canvas bag of her best pecans shaking in the truck bed. The fences of every property that she passes could use some upkeep. So could the one road that leads to and from town. It’s been closed for …

  How long has the road been closed?

  It’s not that it was ever such a great road, just WPA-poured concrete over an even older dirt track, leading to the bridge that stretches over flat fields toward that western horizon. Nestled in the shadow of an improbable ridge, on ground too rocky for most crops, the town has never been wealthy or as big as ones now closer to the interstate, but it is old and quaint, with a main street people like to walk down on sunny days.

  But not many people have come to visit since that unseasonable, unprecedented hurricane took out their road, leaving behind a whole new map of topographical features—gravel mountains, fissures as big as the Grand Canyon, pocks and sinkholes and gashes.

  When had that storm hit?

  The road and the bridge had definitely already been wrecked by their thirtieth birthday. Lil and Sasha always had a party out in the pecan orchard. Lil made the punch boozy enough to accommodate a little rainwater. They’d hung lights in the more patient of the trees. There was enough Pop’s Barbecue for a hundred. But by then, people were getting out of town any way they could. The Clearwater birthday crowd was decidedly sparse. Autumn hadn’t even been there with her famous four-tiered pecan praline cake, always made from last harvest’s tender papershells, and Sasha had been so quiet.

  So that had been…

  Whenever it was, it’s a huge pain in the ass. Getting shipments out is harder than ever.

  Lil twists the dial on her radio, but it can’t quite grasp a station through clouds of static. She gets nothing but far-off voices that slip away like silk. The patchwork of farms with distant houses is more disheveled than it used to be when she, Sasha, and Autumn were young and would go running over fresh-painted fences and through pruned rows of pecan trees owned by neighbors. So many of those families have sold, so many trees left heavy with nuts that only the squirrels dine on. It hurts to see it; all neighbors she used to know by name, whose kids she grew up alongside. They held on as long as they could. The money doesn’t come steady, and the work keeps her sore and sunburned. But whenever Lil considers doing the same, giving up and moving to some city—No. The rest of the world can crumble as far as she is concerned. Lil is here to stay.

  The town is quiet today, from the library to the firehouse. With a population of more than twenty-five hundred at its height, plus those scattered across the fields and orchards beyond the town streets, this place has had some heft in the past, but there’s no knowing how many live here these days. A few people wander the streets, and a promenade of some of the older ladies are making their morning stroll through the square. A rich autumn mess of damp leaves gathers into gutters and curbs.

  When Lil parks in front of the Corner Market and Feed Store, the lights are on—if flickering. Su isn’t rumbling around inside with her broom and scowl. She probably just stepped out for a smoke. Lil heaves the canvas bag of pecans off the truck. She hip-checks the swinging glass door open. No one mans the counter, but it hardly matters if no one is browsing the canned goods and basic toiletries.

  Lil drops the canvas bag on the end of the counter that still bears a very old taped flier proclaiming, FOURTH OF JULY FIREWORKS AT THE RIDGE. Her back is grateful for the reprieve. Nabbing a scrap of receipt and a pen from a coffee mug full of them, she braces her elbows on the smooth wood to write down the weight of the week’s batch, and the total cost. Su’s the best for handling her shipping. But at the best of times, Su is absent-minded about getting Lil’s final payments, and lately, she’s worse than ever. Still, Su’s the reason Lil has at least half of the regular shipment orders she gets. So she perseveres. The fan turns aimlessly, stirring up the dead air.

  Pay up sometime or I’ll start charging interest, she jots. A glint of bright orange catches the corner of her eye. The candy hasn’t been restocked, but there are a few Reese’s. She snags a packet.

  Also I took some candy, she adds at the end of her note. Maybe that will get Su’s attention.

  Plastic crinkles from beside her head. A Snickers is plopped on the counter next to her truffles by someone with square nails and scabbed knuckles. Lil freezes, skin at the nape of her neck prickling.

  “Not such good service here, is there?” Theon teases.

  He always manages to sneak up on her, appearing the second she stops looking. Lil straightens, signing the note with more pressure than it needs, ink blotting like blood from a scratch, and tucks it under the corner of the pecan bag.

  He watches her. Leans on the counter next to her. His tie is striped horizontally, train tracks that narrow to a point at his throat, a target Lil longs to strike. “Spot me the price of a candy bar?” He pulls one of his pockets inside out to show its emptiness.

  “Starve,” Lil suggests. She can’t remember how long it’s been since he rolled into town. In a way, she feels as if he’s always been there, roaming about and snapping up family orchards from desperate, aging farmers who can’t pay the bills anymore. He is a rangy coyote, draped in costly wrinkled suits.

  As always, no matter what she says, shouts, or spits, Theon is just amused. “You’re cruel, Lilith. But consistent.” Happy to turn her back on that smirk, she stomps down to the entrance again. His hazy reflection trails her. “If this pokey old place isn’t paying you anymore,” he calls, “my offer still stands.”

  “So does my answer.” Lil pushes open the door into the sun-brushed air and onto the pavement, worn from years of feet. She jangles her key in the car door. “If you don’t stop coming around, I’ll start punching.” A girl can dream.

  “That’s okay.” Theon observes with animal-bright eyes as she wrestles the sleepy door open. He rips open the candy bar and bites it in half.

  Despite herself—she is reliable as a bull at ignoring a challenge in red—Lil pauses halfway to her seat. “I’m getting sick of seeing you around, Theon.”

  “But I’m patient,” he replies with that same amused grin. Like he knows the punch line of the joke and it’s on her.

  “I’m stubborn,” Lil says.

  “You can change your mind anytime, Lilith.” Theon tosses the rest of the candy in the grass. “I’ll be here.”

  She slams the door, flips him off through the window, and starts her truck.

  Chapter Two

  It is a groggy morning after a late night. That squeal of the train still rings in Sasha’s ears, and she sits up in bed, almost knocking her forehead against her bedroom’s low gable. That steam engine’s approach is like a strike; it might as well run on tracks straight through her ear canal.

  There’s no ferry today, as Sasha only drives it three days a week. Grumbling, she rolls over to check the messages on the answering machine she keeps up in her room.

  The recording crackles. “Hey Sasha, Su here. Can you cover a shift at the shop this morning? Thanks, honey, buh-bye.”

  It’s a new message, but Sasha has to replay the time stamp to be sure. It’s only the most recent in a line of identical requests from Su. There’s a whole tape full of the same: Pop over at the barbecue place, Cara at the school, Freddie at the library, Tammy at the hardware store, etc. None of them are very creative in their requests, just asking for her to cover the same shifts in endless cycles. Ever since she moped back into town after the breakup, the local businesses have been scraping together hours for her to work. Along with running the ferry almost on her own, she’s got about a dozen odd jobs. Not that Sasha minds. The variety is good for her. As in, it distracts her from being the lesbian-outsider twin sister of the town’s foremost orchard keeper. And it keeps her out of Lil’s hair, out of the orchard that was somehow always Lil’s and Mom’s only, and not Sasha’s at all.