Bloodroot (31 page)

The next day at school, I could think of nothing but the scrape of his stubble, the hot flesh of his stomach under his shirt, the trail of his hand moving up my leg. I had to close my eyes and put my head down on my desk. I didn’t understand what had happened between us. If the rumors were true, John Odom was no gentleman. It made no sense the way he ran off and left me. I knew that my feelings for him were dangerous, but after what had happened at the springhouse, nothing could have kept me away from him.

After school let out, I walked over to Main Street. I don’t remember getting there. I only remember standing in the shadows of an awning across the street as dark came early, the sky turning sunset orange between the buildings. I watched the door of Odom’s Hardware
for him to come out and when he appeared, stepping onto the sidewalk and turning to lock the door behind him, my chest went heavy and tight. I crossed the street without feeling the ground underfoot. As I drew close to him everything came into sharp focus, his carved face, his shining eyes, his black hair. He stopped when he saw me and drew in a breath. Somewhere distant I heard voices and traffic, but on Main Street we were alone. We stared at each other for a long while in silence. I felt everything inside me threatening to rise to the surface, but I knew it was important to be calm and still. His coat collar was turned up on one side. Without thinking, I reached to smooth it down.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

I tried to smile. “I need a ride.”

He smiled back. “Mountain’s a long way off.”

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s a pretty drive.”

He looked past me into the street. “You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.”

I stepped closer to him. “Why’d you run off like that?”

“I don’t know. I guess I came to my senses.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I can’t be with somebody like you.”

“Somebody like me?”

His eyes returned to my face. “Somebody good.”

“Well,” I said. “I think you’re somebody good.”

He paused. “You don’t even know me.”

I took another step closer. “I don’t care.”

He opened his mouth to protest but I didn’t want to hear it. I took a deep breath, mustering my courage, and did what I had wanted to the minute he stepped out of the hardware store and locked the door behind him. I grabbed his coat and stood on tiptoe to kiss him like before. In those long seconds, something happened that I can’t forget. A strong wind came howling down Main Street, a cold blast whirling with dead leaves and trash, whipping my hair and plastering a sheet of newspaper to John’s shoulder where it clung before flying off toward the stoplight. I remembered stories of banshees Granny had told me, Irish witches who wailed outside houses at night to warn families of danger. To hear a banshee was always a bad omen. That night in my
dreams, when I broke away from John’s kiss, the banshee’s veiled face floated inches from mine, the wind from her scream taking my breath. But on Main Street it was John who broke our kiss. The wind died as fast as it came, letting go of my hair and John’s coattail. He held me for a moment at arm’s length. “Are you sure about this?” he asked. “Because once I get ahold of you, I ain’t turning you loose.” I said yes without a second thought and followed him to his car.

I wasn’t ready for Granny or anyone else to know about us at first. John continued to park at the bottom of the road, a little inside the tree line, and we took long walks on the mountain. I was careful to choose paths I hadn’t explored. The going was harder, briars clawing at our ankles, but I didn’t want to risk running into Mr. Barnett or Doug Cotter. I wanted to climb to the top of Bloodroot Mountain with John, to stand in the secret meadow with him. I hadn’t tried since I was fourteen, when I caused Doug to fall. But John and I never made it that far. He always wanted to stop and sit, on fallen trees or rocky bluffs, anywhere he could kiss me. Sometimes I smelled another woman’s perfume on his clothes, but I didn’t say anything. I knew I hadn’t fully claimed him. At first I thought if I could be with him the way those other women were, I would have all of him. But each time we got close, his hands under my dress and mine tearing at his shirt, he pulled away again. Then one day, lying on the ground beside the springhouse, he said, “I’ve had plenty of whores, Myra. That ain’t what I want out of you.” His words stung but their meaning made me hope I was different than the ones who left perfume on his clothes. Whenever he got quiet I held my breath, praying that he would propose to me.

Every second he was out of my sight, my stomach churned with worry about what he was doing and who he was with. I sat on the back steps chewing my nails, stood at the bottom of the road and looked for his car even when I knew he wasn’t coming, took to my bed sometimes before dark and buried my face in my pillow. I knew Granny saw my misery, but she didn’t comment on it. Sitting at the kitchen table, tension hung like smoke between us, choking our conversations. Finally, I couldn’t take keeping the secret any longer. As scared as I was that she’d deny John and me her blessing, I had to confess.

At the beginning of winter, we were taping sheets of plastic over
the house’s old windows to keep in the heat. It was already cold and drafty in the front room. I stood holding the thick silver tape roll for her, realizing how old it seemed she had grown overnight. I tried to memorize the seams and creases of her face, soft and wrinkled as brownish crepe paper. I charted the constellations her age spots made, took in the black brogans she wore for outside chores, Granddaddy’s dingy socks rolled down around her ankles, and the faded flowers of her dress, thin from hundreds of washings. I ached for her then as much or more than I did for John, thought of choosing her and the mountain and never getting married or moving away. But she turned to me, as her fingers smoothed a long strip of tape down the window frame, and said, “I believe my girl’s got something to tell me.” I wasn’t expecting to burst into tears. The flood startled me more than it did Granny. She came and held my face in her arthritis-knotted hands. “I’ve got cataracts,” she said with a sad grin, “but I ain’t blind yet. Now, I done decided I ain’t going to meddle. You’d just end up resenting me for it. But you better be careful, Myra Jean.”

I understand what Granny meant. Like her, I let my twins make their own mistakes. I don’t make them wear shoes, even when locust thorns have blown among the weeds. I don’t stop them from climbing trees or robbing beehives or swimming with snakes. I let them go, as Granny did me, only without warning them to be careful. I know they wouldn’t listen. But I protect them from a distance. I used to spend weeks without John or any of the Odoms entering my mind. I saw my twins out from under a cloud. I taught them how to count and hunt and clean fish. One day lying in the grass I flew them, lifting them up with my feet on their hipbones, holding their hands with their hair hanging down and their small faces shining. They took turns, the girl’s homemade dress swaying over me and the boy’s floppy shirt filling with wind like a sail. They laughed and I laughed with them, until tears leaked out of my eyes. I know they won’t remember it. They might never know me again that way. Lately it’s been hard to think of anything but the past. I carried a disease with me out of that house by the tracks and pieces of me are still coming off. It’s unfair how my fear has grown over time and begun to take me over. Sometimes it feels like John has won. But I’d rather die than trap the twins as I was trapped while I was with him. That’s why I’ll always give them their freedom.

After my talk with Granny, I didn’t hide my relationship with John, but I spent less time on the mountain for the sake of Doug Cotter. I knew he loved me, and I cared for him enough not to flaunt my happiness. John and I mostly went to Millertown. I thought of my mother, running off with my father when she was my age. John showed me places and I imagined her there, the glass-sprinkled lot of a drive-in, the restaurant where I ate pizza for the first time. I wondered if my parents ate it together as John and I did, by the window of a dim place with checked tablecloths and silk daisies in vases.

When spring came, John taught me to drive his car. We spent hours tooling down the back roads of Valley Home and Slop Creek and Piney Grove with the windows down and the radio playing, pulling over for long golden meadows and covered bridges and ponds green with scum. The more time we spent together, the more certain I grew that he would propose. That’s why I pushed aside my nerves and took him up Bloodroot Mountain to meet Granny. I was relieved to see that she was charmed by John, but by then nothing could have kept me from being with him, not even my love for Granny.

One Sunday afternoon we were supposed to meet at the spring-house after church. We hadn’t walked together in a long time and I missed being on the mountain with him. Granny and I always rode to Piney Grove squeezed between the Barnetts in the cab of their truck and I was quiet all the way down the mountain, dreaming of lying with John once again on the bank beside the spring. After the service I waited in the churchyard as Granny and the Barnetts chatted with the preacher, sitting on my mother’s grave with my knees drawn up under my dress tail. I tried to talk to her in my mind. I closed my eyes and conjured her, not bones in a casket six feet under, but the girl I had seen in pictures with somber eyes and long hair parted straight down the middle. I felt closer to her than ever before. I sensed her spirit moving up through the grass and passing over me like a sigh. She of all people would understand how loving John Odom made me feel. She had run off to town with a man herself, left Granny and the mountain behind for him. Now she would lie in her grave beside him forever. I pictured a double headstone with my name carved in granite next to John’s. The image filled me with warmth from head to toe.

When I looked toward the church again, Granny and the Barnetts were finally heading for the truck. I jumped up and ran fast enough to beat them. I leapt over the side of the truck bed into the straw and dirt, dress billowing up. I rode home hugging myself against the keen spring wind, knowing I was late and John was waiting for me. As soon as Mr. Barnett let us out at the house, I vaulted over the side of the truck and took off. I heard Granny saying to the Barnetts, “Lord, I don’t know what’s got into that girl.”

I ran all the way to the springhouse with a stitch in my side, but I couldn’t slow down. It seemed I could already taste his lips, cold from the water he would drink from his palm. I only stopped running when the block hut came into view on a rise above me. When someone stood up out of the bushes on the opposite side of the spring where he had been squatting, I expected it to be John. But I saw the fair hair and the long, skinny legs and the smile I had carried all the way up the mountain wilted. It was Mark Cotter, holding a cane fishing pole in one hand and a string of fish in the other. For a moment we were both too startled to speak. The woods were quiet and still besides the wasps hovering in and out of the springhouse opening. Then he grinned in his lazy way. “Look who it is,” he said. “I ain’t seen you in a long time.” He came down the slope and splashed across the creek to where I stood. I scanned the trees, heart thudding in my ears, hoping his brother hadn’t come with him. “You found my good fishing hole,” he said, standing so close I could smell the salt of his sweat. “Don’t tell nobody and I’ll give you a bluegill.” He held up the string of dripping fish, rainbows shining on their scales.

“That’s all right,” I said, forcing a smile. “I won’t tell.” It was true, Mark and I hadn’t seen each other in a long time. He had become a man since I saw him last. It was more than the scruffy beard he had grown. There was something wiser about his eyes.

“I hope you know you’ve done broke my little brother’s heart,” he said after an awkward silence. “He’s been moping around the house like a sick puppy dog.”

I shifted from foot to foot, wondering how to get rid of him before John came along. “I’ve been meaning to walk up the hill and see Wild Rose.”

Mark shook his head. “Shoot, you’d be just as likely to see her out
here running the woods. They never made a fence that could hold that horse.”

There was another silence. I glanced nervously at the pole leaning across his shoulder. “Looks like you’re on your way to the house. Tell Doug hello for me, okay?”

Mark grinned again, but not with his eyes. “What are you doing up here anyway?”

“Nothing. Just taking a walk.”

“Why don’t you set down here and watch me catch a fish?”

“I better not,” I said, looking down at my dress. “I’ve got my church clothes on.”

He held his hand in front of my face, black with soil from baiting hooks. “Since when was you scared of a little dirt?” He lowered his cane pole to the ground. “Here,” he said. “You can blame it on me.” He reached out and took hold of my arm, fingerprinting the sleeve of my dress. I tried to twist away but he wouldn’t let go. I was surprised to see a flash of anger in his eyes. I had never thought he might have wanted me as much as his brother did. That’s when I heard John’s footsteps coming up the slope behind us.

“What’s going on here?” he said. I turned around and the look on his face made my stomach lurch. His eyes seemed almost inhuman, mean and glittering black like a crow’s. I had the urge to take off running for home as fast as my legs would go.

“Who the hell are you?” Mark said.

John stepped between Mark and me. “You better move that hand.”

“It’s okay,” I said, but neither one of them seemed to hear.

Mark let go of my arm. “Watch it, buddy. This is my daddy’s land.”

“I don’t care whose land it is,” John said. “You don’t touch her.”

Mark’s face flushed a deep, ugly red. “She’s on my daddy’s property, too. I reckon I can do whatever I want to with her.”

Before I knew what was happening, John had Mark Cotter by the throat. The string of bluegill slid onto the mud at our feet alongside the fishing pole. “You better get on away from here,” John said through clenched teeth.

After what seemed a lifetime, he turned Mark loose. Mark stood still for a moment gasping for breath, rubbing at his throat where John’s fingerprints were fading. Tears of humiliation stood in his eyes.
He looked at me in an accusatory way, as if I were the one to blame. Then he backed off and blundered into the trees, swatting vines and branches out of his path. I looked at the fish he had caught, left behind on the ground to rot in the sun, and felt a wave of pity for him so overwhelming I had to sit down on the bank. John watched Mark until he was gone and then lowered himself beside me.