Sadie's Mountain (6 page)

“All right, then. Let me fix you some lunch.”

“Well, I’d like to see momma,” I try.

“Oh, Lord Jesus! I nearly forgot. You got me all flustered. Come on.” She grabs my arm and pulls me through the front room and promptly up the creaky stairs. Momma and Daddy’s room was upstairs with the room the babies shared. Downstairs was Missy’s and my room.

“The house looks exactly the same as I remember. Except smaller. Maybe I’m just bigger now.”

“Well, you’re probably used to that fancy place you got over there in Cal-i-forn-ia.” She says the last word almost mockingly.

Outside the door to momma’s room, she stops. “Now, I want to warn you, Sadie. Momma looks different. She don’t talk much no more, neither. She’s sleepin’ now but I’m gonna wake her up for you. She’d be devastated if I didn’t.”

I realize my mouth feels like a dry cotton ball. I nod yes.

As I walk in the room, it smells like a medicine I don’t know. It must be evaporating out of momma’s skin and being released into the air.

Missy walks over to the old metal bed and taps momma’s shoulder. She leans down and announces me in a loud voice. Momma opens her eyes and they dart around the room until they settle on mine. She motions for me to come closer, so I do.

“My baby,” she croons and softly grabs a hold of my right hand. Her hand feels light and fragile like a broken bird wing in mine.

I sit in the chair next to her. That’s all it takes for the tears to force their way out of my eyes. I have different types of cries: the ugly cry, the loud cry, the surprise cry, the whiny cry, the knot in the throat cry. This one is the stinging cry. My eyes will sting without the knot in my throat and they won’t stop stinging until I’m over it. Usually the stinging cry comes when I’m particularly saddened—usually reserved for things and people I love a lot. Sometimes it takes all day to go away—I just tell people I have allergies.

Momma looks so old, so weak, as if her body is being sucked up from the inside and her skin couldn’t keep up.

“Sadie,” she says, breathlessly.

“Yes, Momma.”

“I want ya to go up the mountain and get me some yella root for my skin and fer these sores in my mouth. It. Soothes. Me,” she says, painfully.

“Of course.” I look at Missy who shrugs her shoulders.

“Go, please,” she begs, dismissing me.

I’m so confused as I get up from the chair. But then again, I can’t really expect momma to be rational. She wants me to go up to Gauley Mountain and dig goldenseal roots. She might be perfectly lucid. Okay. Fine. I guess I have to go out after all. What harm can come of that?

Chapter Five—Jerky Jake

“Eat this,” Missy says, as I come out of the bedroom we shared as children. I’m wearing the clothes Missy threw at me out of a box in our old closet. It feels like I’m wearing my old skin in this well-worn black t-shirt, some washed out jeans, and my old, faded brown boots. The ones that were hers and she’d given me when my feet grew big enough for them. The ones I was wearing when...
No. I can’t go there right now
. But, as I wiggle my toes inside them, I wonder if I can find traces of my blood embedded in the old leather like they do on CSI.
Stop!
I tell myself.
This is sick
.

She’s made me a plate: fried chicken, greens, and potato salad.

“I’m a vegetarian,” I explain as I slide into the heavily waxed chair around the old, knotted wooden table.

“Of course you are,” she decides.

 I run my hand along the arm of the chair. It’s just as I remember except there may be a few more layers of wax now. I smile at the familiarity.

This table reminds me of all the ways I used to hide meat so I didn’t have to eat it. Sometimes I pulled the meat off into strips and hid it under the rim of the plate, or I’d drink all my juice and hide it in the plastic cup. Sometimes I fed it to my dog, Nancy, under the table.

That reminds me, she died on the side of the road after being hit by a car when I was thirteen. She was so funny. She’d get mad at momma when, come summertime, momma buzzed away her thick mane of peach-colored fur. She’d hide under the house for days, and walk around with her nose in the air after that for another week or so. She used to sleep in the bed with me and Missy. She’d press her little body against my side, reminding me she loved me with little pink-tongued kisses on my arm. She was a love.

I close my eyes and let these things come back to me. It reminds me that not everything about being here is bad. It’s just one bad thing happened, and somehow that painted all of the past with a darker hue. Like a line got drawn in my memories that wouldn’t let me through to all the good that rests on the other side of fourteen and a half. You know what; I’d love to get another dog someday. But, what if it makes a mess, or pees on the floor? I need things clean, orderly. I need things to be in control.

As I think about the pros and cons, I eat the greens Missy gave me even though I suspect there may be some bacon fat in them or something, and the potato salad. I leave my chicken-friend remains on the plate as Missy glares at me. I gulp down the sweet tea. I shrug my shoulders and she stares at the chicken, back at me, and then she frowns as she picks up my plate in defeat.

“You guys shouldn’t have let me hold ‘em when they were hatched, let me name ‘em and then cut their heads off in front of me.”

“That’s just the way life is, Sadie,” she explains. “How were we supposed ta know you’d be so...sensitive?”

I shrug my shoulders.

“Are you goin’ to drive over and walk a little ways or take the walkin’ trail over yonder?”

“Drive, but couldn’t I just go buy some goldenseal in a jar? She won’t even know.”

“Momma wants you to get it for her, from the ground,” she says, her mouth in a grim line. She rummages around in the pantry behind me as I stare at the kitchen walls, the pictures, the knick-knacks. Memories are just being held back by my purposeful blankness.

“Here,” she says, as she hands me a thin sack made from the leg of some old britches.

I look inside and find a root digger and some cheesecloth.

As I hold the digger, it tugs on a little string tied onto a memory in my brain. The wooden end feels so familiar. I run my hand up and down the soft edge and realize this is the very same one Momma had taught me with. She said she’d found it in a ginseng patch when she was a little girl, obviously discarded accidentally by a veteran digger. It had been sharpened into a perfect claw. Slowly, I put it back into the old britches.

I bet they were daddy’s
, I think as I run my fingers over the soft fabric. I hadn’t come back when daddy died three years ago—he’d had a heart attack. I just sent a really ornate, probably gaudy, flower arrangement from Ansted Floral & Gift. I couldn’t come. I can’t tell anyone this but I’d never wanted to see daddy again—not even dead. I know Missy doesn’t want to talk about him right now. Her memories of him are different than mine.

“Where are the babies?” I ask before I turn to leave.

“Elise is at school, Sadie. And little Joe’s takin’ a long nap. You’ll meet ‘em later,” she says, proudly.

“What about Dale?”

“He’s on a run ‘cross country,” she explains. “He’ll be back in four days.”

“The life of a trucker’s wife, huh,” I joke.

“Yep. We put up with a lot. You’d better go, Sadie, or you’ll miss dinner.”

“Okay, bye,” I say. She waves me out. She seems a bit busy.

When I step on the front porch, I remember—
I think my horse Monty is still in his stable.
He’s, what? He’s got to be about twelve years old. Missy never said anything about him dying like Frosty did; and I know the boys like to ride the horses so they didn’t sell him—I don’t think.

I walk slowly down the trodden path toward Monty’s stable. The familiar scents in the air tug on memory after memory. I try to swallow them down but they feel like they’re choking me. My throat swells with that hard lump again. I hate this feeling. That lump in my throat had stayed for almost a year after...I was raped.

Why is it so hard to say the word rape in my head?
I wince. I wonder if the lump will just stick itself in my throat the whole time I’m here. It doesn’t hurt but it’s annoying. It feels like I’m going to cry but even if I pinch myself until I do, the lump stays put.

I’m distracted from my throat when I catch sight of my horse. He’s standing behind the fence in the pen. His back leg is bent and his tail is swatting a fly buzzing around his hind end. He whinnies when he sees me like he’s looking for something. Slowly, in a trance, I walk up to the fence separating us.

“Monty Montana,” I croon, a huge,
real
smile planted on my face. He nickers and his back shakes while he stays still, his black eye assessing me—his other one is covered by his thick mane. I reach down and pick some grass and hold it out. He walks gracefully over to me, grazing his lips over my palm to retrieve his treat.

“The grass is always greener where you can’t stick your muzzle, huh, boy,” I whisper to him and pat his forehead and his long face. He makes the blow-sound as he exhales with his mouth shut as if to say, “Hello, friend!” His scent is intoxicating. There’s nothing like the scent of a horse to get rid of a lump in the throat.

His front hoof scratches the West Virginia dirt. Then he neighs, his voice sounding every bit as beautiful as when he was a youngster. It’s then that I notice he has grey fur mixed in with the black. He hops once and then goes into a full gallop around his pen. He rears up on his hind legs, neighs in his throaty way looking at me with his one uncovered eye.

“Haven’t seen him do that in a long while,” says a voice from inside the stable. It’s dark in there so I can’t see who it is.

“Hello?” I say with my hands steepled over my forehead to block the light. That’s when a teenage boy walks out from the shadow.

“Seth?” I say, surprised.

“Na, I’m Jake. The younger one,” he says, to clarify.

“Oh, Jake!” I reply, unsure of how to greet my little brother. He was only two when I left.

“So, what are you doing home? I thought you’d be at school.”

“I ditched,” he says, matter of factly.

I don’t say anything. I just nod and stick out my bottom lip in contemplation while I pretend to kick something that’s not there on the ground. I wonder if he does this a lot.

“So, you’re thirteen?” I say.

“Yep.”

I feel like crap. I don’t even know my own flesh and blood. He’s tall for his age, with feet he’s still growing into. Skinny, too, with long legs like daddy had. He has my nose but dark hair like momma’s sticking out under his ball cap. His face is impassive as he leans against the wooden beam at the front entrance of the stable watching Monty gallop around his pen. I wish I knew what he’s thinking. Monty neighs again long and loud, hooves scraping the ground.

“Ya want me to saddle him for ya?” Jake says.

“Really?” I say because that’s all I can think to say. I haven’t ridden a horse since I left.

“Really,” he says.

“Yes, please. I can take him up the trail that leads up the mountain to find some yellow root for momma. She asked me to go,” I explain.

“Okay,” he says. He winks at me and walks over to Monty. “Whoa boy,” he says, making himself big until Monty succumbs and lets him grab his halter.

He walks him into the stable as I follow. It smells like wood, hay, saddle leather, horses, and fresh mountain air. I feel giddy.

“Can I brush him?” I say, through my huge grin.

“Yep, brush is right there,” Jake says, pointing at the wooden box on the floor by the door.

I watch as little particles of dust float into the air while I brush him. His muscles flex under the brush and he clears his horsey throat over and over. I’ve missed this. I think I have a real honest to goodness smile on my face. This is a rare thing.

“Yeah, you should be glad it’s me here and not Seth,” Jake explains.

“Why’s that?”

“He’s pissed at you. He still remembers you from when he was four. He don’t like to say it but it hurt his feelings when you just left like that. He remembers you pretty good from before.”

“Oh,” is all I can say. I guess I’m going to have to deal with an angry fifteen year old at tonight at dinner.

“Is he at school?”

“Yep,” he says, as he slides the saddle on top of the saddle blanket. The saddle says, ‘Sadie’ on the part that runs down the side of the horse’s belly.

“I forgot about my saddle,” I squeal.

“We didn’t want to throw it out. Nobody’d buy it with your name on it like that. ‘Cept Dillon maybe,” he says, with a chuckle.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, everybody knows!” he laughs.

“Knows what?” I press.

“He’s crazy about you. Crazy being the right word. Got your name tattooed on his arm with some Bible verse,” he laughs again. “We all see it every summer whenever he wears a wife beater.”

My head is spinning. “A wife beater?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s a white T-shirt without the sleeves. You know,” he explains.

“I guess.”

“Miss Robbins is so jealous. She tried to make him get the thing burnt off or somethin’ but he got mad. They were screaming ‘bout it last year at the Country Roads Festival. It was kinda funny.”

“Miss Robbins?” I ask as I slip the bridle’s bit past Monty’s front teeth.

“His girlfriend, oh, and my English teacher too,” he says, plainly. 

I clear my throat as I close the strap over the cheek piece and pat Monty’s forehead. I don’t know a woman named Robbins. There was Mike Robbins. He was older than us, though. He joined the Army and left his new wife behind when he went to basic training. I don’t really remember her, though. She was a lot older than me. I wonder?

Dillon.

Here I am fresh off the highway and I’m already hearing about him. Part of me is pleased that Dillon never forgot me; the other part, the part that wants him to be happy, not fighting with his girlfriend about me, is displeased and I frown. Jake elbows me.

“Hey, earth to Sadie,” he mocks.