Bloodroot (16 page)

I looked around in a panic until I saw the garden, its tomato-vine stakes rising up in the dark. I took Laura’s arm and we ran across the cut grass into the rows, trampling the plants under our shoes still caked with mud from Bloodroot Mountain. I dropped to my knees and dug with my fingers the best I could, rocks jabbing under my fingernails. Laura put the box in the ground and we used our hands to cover it over. I stamped the mound down and Laura tried to hide the spot with a curling green cucumber vine. She was panting, a mess of sweaty hair in her eyes. I reached out to touch her back. “We’ll come back in the daylight and do it better,” I promised. Then I looked to the house and saw a silhouette in the glass door. We ran back across the yard with black dirt on our hands and staining the knees of our pants. Mother Betty opened the door to let us in.

I never closed my eyes that first night, lying in the top bunk above the Foxes’ fat son. All I could think about was Laura’s face when they led her away from me to sleep in another room. For most of the next day Laura and I stood silent and wide-eyed in the hall. Sitting down made our situation seem more permanent so we stayed on our feet, lurking in corners and hidden spaces, hoping to be forgotten about. Mother Betty was talking on the kitchen telephone as she cleared the breakfast dishes. I heard her say we were found living like animals in the woods and our mama was locked up in a Nashville crazyhouse. I prayed Laura hadn’t heard, but when I turned her face was pale and still. “Is that true?” she whispered. “What she said about Mama?” I couldn’t answer but she knew anyway. A light went out of her eyes then and never came back. I had the urge to destroy something, like
the time I burned my mama’s scarf. I took a pair of bronzed baby shoes from the console table and flung them against the wall but they didn’t break. Mother Betty came thundering, rattling dishes in the cabinets, the phone still in her hand with its long cord stretched tight. When she saw my face her plump cheeks reddened. She stood staring, mouth hanging open. I stared back at her. Neither one of us said we were sorry.

At least there was plenty to eat at the Foxes’ house. At the edge of the backyard there was a high bank overlooking a newly built gas station, with the main road running in front of it. Not long after Laura and I moved in, the Foxes’ children, Pamela and Steven, asked us to climb down to the gas station parking lot with them. I wouldn’t have gone if Laura hadn’t wanted me to. I went to protect her, but standing inside among the aisles, the racks of powdered doughnuts and fruit pies and cakes, the humming dairy case against the wall, my palms were sweating. We had gone hungry so many times on the mountain, unable to sleep at night for the pain in our empty stomachs. Pamela and Steven offered to share what they bought. We followed them out and stood facing each other in the hot parking lot, stuffing candy into our mouths. Laura’s cheeks were packed tight and when she smiled around a mouthful of wet chocolate I couldn’t help smiling back. Soon Laura and I were going to the gas station by ourselves with the quarters we earned doing chores. It was a ritual with a meaning only we could know. The Foxes’ children could never understand how it felt to be Laura and me, what a relief it was to eat until we were full.

Almost a month after she left us with the Foxes, the social worker came back to visit. Her name was Nora Graham. Her hair was a frizzy tumbleweed and she wore half glasses low on her nose. She sat between us on a green glider out by the garden, as sloppy and disheveled as the night we were taken from the mountain. “We’re trying to find your father,” she had told us then, searching for something in a folder on top of her cluttered metal desk. “Are you sure you don’t know where he is?” When I shook my head she had smiled at me. “That’s okay. We’ll find him.” She was trying to be comforting, but if my father was dead, I hoped she was wrong. Now she sat with us beside the garden, asking questions to determine how well we were getting along. After a while Laura spoke up. “I reckon you never
found our daddy.” I stopped breathing and Nora’s pen stopped moving on her clipboard. There was a long silence. Then she said, “No. We never found him.”

That night in the bunk bed with Steven snoring over me, I thought of my father, the imaginary man whose presence had been with me on the mountain. I realized I might be close to where my mama had once lived with him, to where they had made Laura and me together. Even if he was dead, there might be a way to know something about him. I might find another piece of him and of myself. I wasn’t like Laura or my mama. In my heart, I knew I was like him. I had other people than the ones in my mama’s photo album and I could look for them. The question was whether or not I wanted to. I had a chance now to leave behind the mountain and my missing father and my crazy mama for good. I shut my eyes, trying not to picture her locked up somewhere dark and far from home.

When summer ended Laura and I started elementary school. It was a long brick building across a two-lane highway from a patch of deep woods. Seeing Laura among the other schoolchildren, silent and awkward with her pale skin and black hair, I understood that I must look the same way to my classmates. They didn’t laugh at me. They only stared. I made myself look back until they dropped their eyes, but I was scared of them.

Sometime during those first days of school, my fear turned into hatred. I taught the other children not to stare. I bent back fingers and twisted arms and pinched tender baby fat. It didn’t hurt when the teacher paddled me. Nothing did after my copperhead bite. If they had fought back I wouldn’t have felt it. I never got used to being among them, but Laura had an easier time. She was different away from the mountain. My separation from her began long before what happened with Steven. I could see in small gestures how she was adapting. The way she fastened her hair back with barrettes each morning before school, how she chewed with her mouth closed and clipped her toenails and said please as she had been taught by Mother Betty. I knew she wanted to play with Pamela and Steven. I tried to make them leave her alone. I hid behind the living room curtains and chopped up the windowsill with a knife. I threw rocks at the carpet van’s windshield, leaving pings in the glass. I tore the heads off
Pamela’s dolls, smashed Steven’s model cars. I warned them but they wouldn’t stop reeling Laura in.

Then one evening it was my turn to wash the supper dishes. When I was finished, I felt Laura gone from the house. I checked outside and the yard was empty, no sister sitting in the garden glider. Finally, I heard her voice and forced myself not to run toward the sound. It was coming from the old doghouse near the edge of the yard, grass still worn away and a metal stake where a beagle had been chained. Pamela and Steven said he was given away because he warbled all night. I knelt before the doghouse and what I saw knocked the wind out of me. Laura was wedged between Pamela and Steven in the dog-smelling shadows, crowded close to them with her knees gathered up. The smile died on her face when she saw me. Pamela said, “We got a clubhouse.” Laura said, “Come on. You can fit.” But her eyes said something else. I sat on my knees in the dust staring in at her. The others kept playing but Laura stopped. For her it was ruined and I was glad.

When I finally lost Laura, it was like my mama prying my fingers loose from her dress tail all over again. We had been with the Foxes for a year and another summer had come. I still remember how it felt, watching Laura’s back disappear into a downpour. She was holding Steven’s hand, water running down their faces. Sneaking off with him, the shelter of rain meant to keep me out. To see her fingers laced in someone else’s, not her twin, not her blood, was too much. If I had caught up to them then I might have killed him. Whether or not my nine-year-old hands were able, my heart was capable of it.

I followed them, moving through the rain toward the white haloes of the gas station floodlights. They were running and I hurried to match their pace. When I reached them they were sitting at the edge of the grass, looking as if they were planning to slide down on their bottoms. I thought how fast it would be and how much fun. I pictured Mother Betty’s neck turning blotchy and red when she saw her mud-streaked boy, her disgust for Laura and me showing plain on her face for an instant before she hid it again.

I watched Laura and Steven from a few yards away, cold drops tapping my shoulders like slugs from a slingshot, plastering my shirt to my skin. Their heads were bent close, water dripping from the ends of
their hair. I could hear them laughing under the beat of rain. Then she put her hand on his cheek and left a muddy print there. Such an intimate gesture made me sick. I charged at them, feet tramping in standing water. Laura leapt up, face a white smudge in the misty light. Steven knew they had betrayed me. I saw it in his eyes. I covered the mark Laura had made on his face with one hand and shoved him backward. He went over the edge of the embankment and Laura screamed. It was a fairly long drop to the parking lot below. She stared at me openmouthed, disbelieving. Then we went to the edge and looked down. Steven was at the bottom, slick with mud. After a moment he sat up and blinked at us. Then the blubbering started, loud and panicked. He struggled to his feet, slipping and sliding in the muck. I had a sinking feeling when I saw how his arm was hanging. Not because I was sorry, but because I knew it was over for Laura and me. I stood there watching him struggle to climb up as Laura went to get Mother Betty. When she joined me at the edge of the bank she froze for a moment with the rain wilting her beauty-shop curls. Then she pressed her hand to her throat and burst into tears. Laura and I ran off to hide in the musty dark of the doghouse while Steven was at the hospital having his dislocated shoulder moved back into place.

Mother Betty wanted us gone as soon as she got back from the emergency room with Steven, but it took nearly a week for the state to find homes for us. On our last day together we sat in the garden, rich with the smell of loam. Many times over the past year we had slipped off to look at the spot where our mama’s box was buried, with the ring and our father’s finger bone hidden inside. Now Laura sat across from me in the red dress she would wear to the new foster home. We were both leaving, but she was going first.

“We have to run,” Laura said. “Mother Betty won’t see us if we go right now.”

I stared down at the ants crawling over her knuckles. “We can’t.”

“Yes we can. We can go find Mama. We’re bigger now and you’re smart.”

I shook my head. “You heard it the same as I did. They’ve got her locked up in Nashville. And even if they let her out, I don’t want to be with her.”

“Johnny, hush,” she said. “Don’t you love Mama anymore?”

“You know there’s something wrong with her.” Laura’s fingers curled into fists. “No there ain’t.”

“She didn’t take good care of us. She’s not able to.” Laura fell silent. “We can still run away,” she said after a while, but with less conviction. “We don’t have to find Mama. We can just go off someplace else.”

“Laura,” I said. “I can’t take care of us either.” Her shoulders sagged. “What about Mama’s box?”

“You keep it. She gave it to you.”

She looked at me then, studied my face. “Okay,” she said. But it wasn’t.

When Nora Graham came, I followed Laura down the walk to the curb where the car waited, keeping my eyes on the ground. If I looked at her my heart might stop beating. I stared down at her feet, small and square in the dress shoes Mother Betty had bought her. I would never know them again that size. I saw through the patent leather, through the sock to her toes, the nails outlined in dirt because the mountain was never scrubbed out of them. I made myself examine her face, the curve of her nostrils, the wet rims of her eyes. I unwrapped a piece of bubble gum from my pocket and stuffed it into my mouth. I didn’t know what else to do with my hands. “Bye, Johnny,” Laura said. She knew me better than to say anything more. She was letting me go because she thought I wanted her to. I swallowed and strangled on the sweet juice. A cough rose in my throat. Laura looked at me one last time before she got into Nora Graham’s car. When she was gone, I spat the gum onto the sidewalk. From then on, the taste of candy sickened me.

LAURA

At school, me and Johnny started out in the same classroom. I was scared but my brother was in the desk in front of me. The way he held up his shoulders made me feel better. Then we started having to take these tests in a little room. There was a woman with coffee breath. She figured out how smart Johnny was and put him two grades ahead of me. I seen right then he might be gone from me for good someday, just like Mama. When they made us live in different houses, I asked
Nora Graham if I could go with Johnny. She claimed it’s hard to keep siblings together in foster care, even twins like us.

That’s how come I went to live with a preacher and his wife. The preacher’s name was Larry Moffett and his wife was Pauline. They was Church of God people. I put on the dresses they gave me and let my hair grow long like they wanted me to. I didn’t mind. It made me more like Mama. When I looked in the mirror it was easier to remember her.

But it was hard at first getting used to living there. I had chores to share with other foster kids. The house was crowded and always loud. The only quiet place was the basement. I went down there to do laundry. It had a washer and dryer under a dirty little window. There was a moldy carton of dishes shoved back in the shadows beside the washer. I took Mama’s box from where it was hid under my mattress and carried it down to the basement in a basket of towels. I pulled the dishes out of the shadows and sorted through them, bowls and gravy boats and teacups with the husks of dead bugs inside. I put the box in a big blue willow soup tureen and shoved the carton back against the wall.

I didn’t get to know the other foster kids that came and went. None of us made friends. We hardly ever talked to each other. We just did the chores and tried to get along with Pauline. I didn’t get to know the preacher either. He didn’t have much to do with us foster kids. We mostly answered to Pauline. She had the longest hair I ever seen, brown and thin with jaggedy ends, and her eyes was two different colors. One was green and one was brown. She had two different ways of acting, too. Sometimes she was nice and sometimes she was mean. One time she was making pies for homecoming. I dropped them trying to put them in a box. Pauline hit my arm with a wet dishrag until it bled. She drove me in the corner calling me names. I thought she wouldn’t quit, until Larry asked where his dress socks was. She turned around and hollered, “They’re on the bed with the rest of your clothes! I swear, Larry, you’re blind as a bat!” I hurried to clean up the mess. When she came back from finding Larry’s socks it was like nothing ever happened.