Father shook his head. “You must do better. Soon it’ll be too hot to hunt in the daytime. Go further out. It doesn’t matter whose land they say it is.” He gave Milly another box of ammo.
Milly returned to the Homestead the next day with twice as many rabbits. Her clothes: blood-spattered over dust. Her face: wrapped in a scarf. With dark sunglasses below her huge hat, she resembled a gangly, white-cotton mantis. Milly glanced at other girls hanging sheets to dry, then carried her prey behind a nearby shed.
A new girl whispered, “Who is she?”
“Her name’s Mildred.”
“She’s Father’s actual daughter.”
“Who’s her mother?”
“I heard she left.”
“I heard she died.”
“I heard she killed herself.”
“Wouldn’t you”—the girl slid her thumb across her wrist—“if that was your daughter?”
“We call Mildred ‘The White Witch’ but don’t say that to her face — she’ll kill you.”
“I heard that,” Milly said, emerging from their hanging sheets like a filthy ghost.
The girls’ faces bleached linen white.
Milly hoisted her dead rabbits, bleeding and dusty, and plopped them down upon their clean laundry.