Bloodroot (29 page)

“Bobby said you was around.”

“Yes.”

“I ain’t seen you since the ninth grade.”

“I know. It’s been a while.”

Marshall looked down at his shoes. The morning was warm and the old T-shirt he wore had dark rings at the armpits. “I just got back in town not long ago myself.”

“Huh.”

“I took off on the Greyhound, lit out for Texas. I always did want to see Texas.”

I took a long draw from my cigarette. “How was it?”

“Not how I thought.”

I smiled. “It figures.”

“Yeah. I stayed in a hostel down yonder while I was looking for work. I swear, all I could think about was getting back home. I wouldn’t have bet on that, would you?”

“No,” I said, “I guess not.”

“I always wondered if you’d be back.”

“I didn’t think I ever would.”

Marshall looked down at his shoes again. “Neither did I.”

We were quiet for a while, watching a bag float end over end toward the used car dealership across the highway. Then he said, “Well, I come to tell you something.”

I pitched my cigarette, still smoking, over the porch edge. “What’s that?”

“I seen your sister.”

I stopped rocking and sat there frozen.

“I remembered her cause of how she favors you.”

“Where did you see her?”

“That’s what I thought you’d want to know. She was down at the county jail. Some man claimed Daddy was trespassing, digging ginseng on his property. I was in the office trying to bail Daddy out when they brung her in.”

“What did she do?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I had other things to tend to.”

The wind freshened, flapping the faded plastic pennants strung over the parking lot and blowing dirt across the planks at my feet. I sat thinking, listening to the hum of the drink machine, as Marshall watched patiently. Then I stood up. “Can I get a ride?”

At the county jail, I was shown to a place where there were booths with phones and windows. I sat on a stool between cinder-block walls. It seemed I was floating outside myself, watching from above, when the door opened and a guard let Laura into the room on the other side of the glass. She was swallowed up in a blue jumpsuit, rail thin and ghastly pale, her skin like curdled milk. Worst of all, her long black hair had been cut off. I couldn’t bear knowing she had spent even one night in a cell like the one I was in for four years at Polk County. I thought in those first seconds I would get up and leave. But when she approached the window to sit on the stool opposite me, the feeling passed.

Laura took the phone and I looked at the one on my side without picking it up. I had forgotten what I could possibly say to her after so long. The guard who had opened the door for Laura crossed the
room behind the glass and let himself into where I was. Without speaking, he brought a white envelope and handed it to me. Then he walked out another door, the one I had come through, where there was an office with a desk and filing cabinets and a water cooler. I sat blinking after him for a second and then turned to pick up the phone. “I told them I wanted to give you a letter,” she said. At the sound of her voice, an unexpected warmth bloomed in my chest. It was filled with images of home, high cliffs and light-gilded leaves and groundhog holes on the muddy creek bank.

“Are you okay?” I asked at last. It was a stupid question, and not what I wanted to say to her, but there were no words close enough to what I was feeling.

Laura smiled weakly. “They’re always trying to lock us up, ain’t they, Johnny?”

I tried to smile back but couldn’t.

There was a silence. Then she said, “Where have you been?”

“I guess I could ask the same of you.”

“Well, here lately I been in jail.”

“Laura,” I said. “What did you do?”

“I done a lot of things since I seen you last.”

I glanced around the room, toward the office where the guard was, down the line of empty booths, at the polished floor reflecting the lights overhead. “Yes,” I said. “Me, too.” Then I made myself look back at her. “I don’t have enough money to get you out.”

She took a ragged breath. “There’s a way you can get some more.”

I gripped the phone tighter. “How?”

“Go to my house on Miller Avenue. It’s bright yellow, beside of a car wash. I got a key hid in a watering can under the porch.”

“A yellow house?”

“Yes. I want you to go in yonder and get that ring from out of Mama’s box.”

I only hesitated for a second. “Where is it?”

She smiled her tired way again. “You know where I would keep it.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll find it.”

Then her smile faltered. “Johnny.”

“What?”

“I throwed that finger bone away.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. I didn’t know what I wanted to say.

“Wasn’t no use hanging on to it.”

“No,” I said after a moment. “I guess not.”

“It don’t seem right for that box to be empty, though.”

“No,” I said.

“There’s something I want you to put in it for safekeeping.” She looked at the envelope still in my hand. “I wouldn’t quit squalling until they gave it back to me.”

I looked down at the envelope, too, the sweat on my forehead turning cold.

“Open it,” she said.

I fumbled at the unsealed flap and reached inside. What I found there wasn’t paper. It was a lock of glossy hair, yellow as the sun, tied neatly with a length of string.

“I had a baby, Johnny,” she said. “I named him Sunny.”

For a few seconds I thought I hadn’t heard her right. I closed my eyes, trying to make sense of her words. I didn’t know if I could stand to hear more. If I was going to turn my back on her, now was the time. But I didn’t leave.

I bent closer to the window and asked, “Where is he?”

Her eyelids reddened. “He got took away from me.”

“No, Laura,” I said, even though I already knew it was true.

“I got to get him back,” she said.

“We will.” My voice cracked. “We’ll get him back.”

I opened my fingers and we looked down together at the lock of yellow hair in my palm. It seemed I could feel some old part of myself dissolving into smoke and ash.

After a while, Laura asked, “Do you still believe there’s such a thing as curses?”

I didn’t have to think about it. “No,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“I don’t either.” She looked up into my face. “I’m ready now, Johnny.”

“Ready for what?”

“To go see Mama. Let’s get Sunny and leave out of here for good.”

I looked into her eyes. They were like they used to be, only sadder. But I saw something alive in them that might be rescued. She didn’t
belong in that room so I put her back in our woods, shrunk her down and grew her hair into long black sheaves again, stood her on a mossy log with her arms held out for balance. I was beginning to see then what I have learned now. It’s not forgetting that heals. It’s remembering. I swallowed hard, wetness blurring my eyes. I hadn’t felt tears in so long I barely knew what they were. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll go see her.” I knew Laura was right. We were both ready. She looked startled. Then she smiled and I couldn’t help smiling back. I leaned over to press my forehead against the glass. I shut my eyes and pretended we were high on a rock over a bluff again, my tongue singing with the tartness of the berries she brought me.

MYRA ODOM

I can’t stand to hold them. I have to let them go. I don’t want to leave too many marks behind. There were fingerprints all over me when I came back here, and it’s taken a long time to wash them off. I hardly remember the names I gave them. That was another time. I think of them now by their real names. Silver like how her eyes glint in the dark. Cinder like how his eyes look in the white of his face. Woodsmoke, the way he smells passing by me in fall. Lacy, the way leaves pattern her shoulders as she moves under the trees. Their old names mean nothing now. Neither does mine. I am whatever I say I am. Rainy, when I come in dripping after a storm. Bird, when I climb to the ledge and sing down the mountain. Alive, now even more than when I was a child living here. I squat where I please and watch the water I lapped up from my hand run back out of me, spreading and mixing with the dirt of this place, swirling with pine needles as it heads down the mountain toward the creek where it came from. I am part of this place like never before. When I was small, there was always something hindering me.

Granddaddy was too protective, but I believe Granny’s instinct was
to let me go. She would allow me to stand for a while in the rain, hair parting soaked down the middle, before making me come in. Once she found me stripped naked facedown in the dirt. She stood watching for a long moment before she pulled me up by the arm, wiping at my blackened tongue with her apron and brushing sow bugs from my chin. “Lord, youngun,” she said, “you’re going to be sick as a dog.” All I wanted was free. Granny seemed to understand. After Granddaddy was gone she let me roam. But every minute in her presence it seemed she was touching me, stroking my hair, pulling me onto her lap.

I still miss her every day. Time is different on the mountain. It stretches out longer. I used to always know what year it was, and how old I would be on my next birthday. But, like names, it seems less important now. There’s a calendar hanging in the kitchen, yellowed and stiff as if something was spilled on it. It has been there on the same rusty nail since before Granny died. It’s a calendar from 1975, the year I came home and my babies were born. If I mark time, it’s by their birthdays. Not the exact date, because I forget sometimes. But I can tell by the weather, how it smells outside and what’s growing out of the ground. One day I’ll wake up and there’s a charge in the air and I’ll know it’s the anniversary of their birth. I’ll get up and see what I have to make a cake for them.

Today I woke to a chill wind blowing colored leaves through the window, scattering them across my bed. I sat up and plucked one from the blanket. I smelled what day it was, a scent I can’t describe. I went to the kitchen knowing they are six. The house was empty. They rise early and go into the woods because morning is their favorite time to play. The floor creaked as I brought flour down from the pantry shelf. My back prickled like there were eyes on me. I froze, sure it was all over, my time with them. It came back to me then, how it felt in that house beside of the railroad tracks with John, listening for the creak of his boot on the floorboards. But I stood still, counting backward, and nothing happened. No arm snaked under my throat, no fingers snagged my hair. I tried to hum as I made the cake, but I was rattled. I couldn’t shake the feeling of an end coming. Not the end of the world that our pastor at Piney Grove preached about, but the end of my world, the one I’ve made on Bloodroot Mountain for my twins and me.

I’m not sorry for the way I live, even when I see how Mr. Barnett looks at me sometimes, and Mark Cotter when I go up the mountain to buy fresh milk from him. He owns the farm since his parents died. I’ve only spoken to him once, when his wife was gone to town. I asked about Wild Rose. He claimed she spends most of her time loose in the woods now. “I don’t even try to pen her up no more,” he said. “She’s more ornery than ever since she’s got old.” He stared at my babies as he spoke to me, one on each hip, but he didn’t ask about them. I know Mark Cotter and I are not friends anymore, but he is still loyal to me. He must remember how it used to be. Whatever Mark and Mr. Barnett think of the way I live, they keep my secret. That’s all that matters. For six years, I’ve managed to hide my twins up here. But stirring the cake batter this morning I couldn’t stop thinking, not just about John, but about my whole life. I remembered myself as a six-year-old girl, when I marked time by my own birthdays and not those of my children.

I thought of Granny and how she liked to talk as she worked. There was a wringer washer by the back steps and I can still see her feeding Granddaddy’s shirts through, telling stories about Chickweed Holler. She talked most about her cousin Lou Ann, who I pictured as a crone with a hump, putting a curse on our family. I saw her with sores eating at her nose and mouth corners, eyes like holes pecked into her face by crows, standing on her high porch handing down love potions and charms to women desperate to bewitch a man, to have a child or lose one, to be granted long life or for someone else to die. I imagined powders in twists of paper, left hind feet of graveyard rabbits, snakeskin bags with toad’s eyes inside. They walked up the holler with their darkest desires and she did what she could to make them real. Even one of Granny’s great-aunts had gone to her.

“When Della was young and silly,” Granny said, “she had dealings with Lou Ann herself. She got struck on an old boy that came around selling Bibles, not that he ever cracked one open. Nothing do her, she had to have him. But he wouldn’t look twice at her. Well, Della went to see Lou Ann, with Grandmaw Ruth and Myrtle both begging her not to. She came back looking peaked. They all still lived at home and she asked her mammy if they could have chicken for supper. Said she’d be the one to cook it. Their mammy said she reckoned so. Della
went out in the yard and caught her one right then, wrung its neck and plucked it and took it in the kitchen. She pulled out the innards and Grandmaw and Myrtle thought she was fixing to make chicken livers. But that ain’t what she was up to. She found that chicken’s heart, popped it in her mouth, and swallowed it whole. Grandmaw and Myrtle seen her do it. She hacked and carried on, but she kept it down. Lo and behold, the next day that Bible salesman came calling. Him and Della ran off and got married. It didn’t last long, though. Grandmaw said he beat Della like a mule. I reckon he got shot six months later, messing around with some other man’s wife. Della wouldn’t talk about it much, but she told me all the time, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’”