Bloodroot (12 page)

Then John stopped coming to church and Myra would be there by herself. She’d slip in and set on the back pew. I could tell she was troubled. One afternoon she came up to the house looking peaked and her hands shaking. She tried to help me worsh the dishes and they kept slipping back down in the sink. Finally I said, “What is it, honey?”

She said, “John’s started drinking beer.”

“Well,” I said, trying to make me and her both feel better, “I never knowed a young man that wouldn’t take a nip every once in a while.”

“I don’t know, Granny,” she said, and wouldn’t look at me no more.

By November, Myra had quit coming up Bloodroot Mountain altogether. I cooked a ham for Christmas dinner but she never showed up. I set by myself beside of the tree Hacky Barnett drug in and put up for me, worried sick. Her and John Odom didn’t have no phone in that house by the tracks, and me and Macon never had one put in either, so I didn’t know what in the world happened to her. I had Hacky to drive me down yonder but seeing her didn’t make me feel no better. She acted spooked, kept looking at the door the whole time like she was afraid somebody was coming. We tried to talk but seemed like she couldn’t concentrate enough to carry on a conversation. I wept all the way back home and Hacky tried to comfort me by letting on like it wasn’t all that bad. He patted my shoulder and said, “She looks all right, Byrdie. There ain’t no places on her.” But I said, “Hacky, the places might be on the inside.” He didn’t have no argument for that.

Then two months passed without seeing Myra because Margaret Barnett fell off the porch and twisted her back. Hacky’s had a time
taking care of her, and I hated to ask him to drive me to town. I thought of asking Bill Cotter, but since his boys are gone it’s all he can do to keep the farm running. This morning I couldn’t stand it no longer and asked Hacky to take me to Myra right away. We didn’t talk in the truck. I guess we both had a lot on our minds. We pulled up in front of the house under a big black storm cloud. It had been spitting ice rain off and on all morning and it was a mess trying to get across that old yard. I climbed up on the stoop huffing and puffing and when I finally did get situated to knock on the door, it took Myra a long time to open it. Soon as she seen me, her mouth fell open. I was shocked myself, to see my grandbaby in such a shape. She was skinny as a rail and looked like she hadn’t combed her hair in a month of Sundays.

“Granny,” she said.

She walked into my arms and we stood there for a long time with tears in our eyes. Finally I heard Hacky clearing his throat behind me. We went on in the house and I never seen such a clutter. I taught Myra better than that, but I reckon she just didn’t have no gumption left in her. She cleared a place on the couch for us. Hacky set there the whole time holding his cap with his ears red, looking like he’d rather be anyplace else.

I told Myra, “I would have come sooner but you know I ain’t got no way around.”

“Have you been getting your medicines?” she asked. I could tell she was worried about me as much as I was about her.

I said, “Hacky runs to the drugstore for me. Him and Margaret’s been so good to me. I don’t know what I would have done.”

Myra smiled at Hacky and looked sad at the same time. I know she wants to be the one taking care of me. That might be why John Odom’s got her trapped someway.

“Honey, why don’t you come home with me?” I begged her. I hadn’t been meaning to say nothing but it just came out. “Don’t let him do you this way.”

“I can’t, Granny,” she said. “I made my bed.” About that time we heard a car out in the driveway and Myra’s eyes got big. It was nearly twelve o’clock and John Odom had come home for dinner. He busted in like an old bull and it was a sight how he had changed in such a
short time. His hair was still black and shiny as ever, but he had a gut hanging over his belt buckle and bags underneath his eyes. I could tell Myra was scared to death of what he might do because me and Hacky was there. I wondered myself how he was going to act, but he just looked around at me and Hacky right hateful and didn’t say a word to us. He pitched his car keys on the end table beside of Myra’s chair and knocked off a bunch of clutter. It made a loud racket and she flinched like he’d shot at her. “Fix me something to eat,” he said to Myra. Then he stomped off to the bathroom. Directly Hacky said, without looking at me, “We better get on up the mountain, Byrdie.”

“No, wait here for a minute,” Myra whispered. She dashed off and I could hear her rummaging in the hallway. She was back quick as lightning and I couldn’t make out what she had in her hands at first. When she got close I seen she had that box Macon whittled for her. She leant over where I was setting on the couch and put it in my dress pocket. “I want you to keep it safe for me, Granny,” she said. “This is no place for it.”

Ever since I seen Myra that way, it seems to me I can hear my grandbaby moaning outside in the dark. It’s like when I heard that train whistle blowing the night Clio got killed. I’ve thought many times of putting the law on John Odom, but I don’t know what to accuse him of. Far as I know, he ain’t been beating on her. I never seen no bruises. But like I told Hacky that day in the truck, there’s other ways a woman can get beat up on. All I can do right now is to pray for Myra, that she gets herself out of this fix someway. I might not be around much longer to help her out of it. I’m heading toward seventy-seven years old next month and I’m tired. The doctor says I’ve got congestive heart failure. Here lately just walking around the house wears me out. My eyes has got so weak these old glasses don’t do me much good no more. It’s hard to believe, but a time will come when I won’t be in this house on the mountain. I made Hacky promise to look after Myra if anything happens to me and he said he would. He said he’s always stood by me and Macon and our younguns, and he don’t aim to quit now. That made me feel some better, but I still don’t know how to get my grandbaby away from that devil John Odom.

So all my kids are dead and gone and Myra might be lost forever. People probably wonders how I kept from losing my mind. Seeing
one youngun go before you, much less five, is enough to ruin any mammy. I reckon I am ruint in a way. I can’t think straight no more. I forget the names of the craziest things, like flowers and biscuits and chairs. And you know I’ve buried five children and seen their dead bodies, watched them get sicker and sicker and not been able to help them a’tall, but the picture that vexes my mind the most is Myra when she opened the door of that house by the tracks. That’s the thing that’s done broke my heart in two, because she’s the one that saved me after all them others was gone. She’s how come me and Macon to get out of the bed all of them years. Myra’s the one I love the best of all, it don’t matter that I never bore her. She was mine anyhow.

JOHNNY ODOM
AND
LAURA ODOM BLEVINS

JOHNNY

I spent a long time trying to forget the first eight years of my life. For some it might be easy to shake loose their earliest memories, but not for me. No matter how hard I tried, there was always some reminder of childhood. Today it was seeing my mama’s blue eyes on a baby I was holding for the first time. Over the years there have been other things that took me back, the smells of loam and moss and ferny ground, the taste of ice-cold water. It’s been a while, though, since I saw the mountain outside of memory.

In 1990, when I was fourteen, I went up Bloodroot Mountain again after six years gone. It was a long walk, with Marshall Lunsford behind me and neither one of us saying a word. The mountain looked different than when I was small. A sawmill had carved a bald place in the land and the road was paved where it used to be dirt, but I knew we were getting close when we passed Mr. Barnett’s. His house was nearly buried behind a briar thicket, just a rusty roof with a stub of chimney poking out of the tangled green. The flag was up on his mailbox and the same dented truck parked in the weeds, glinting in what was left of the sun. He was probably too old to drive it anymore.
I wondered if he would come out and if he would still know me, but his place was quiet and still.

We kept climbing and it was almost dark by the time we made it to the witch’s house. That’s what Marshall called it. “There’s a witch’s house up yonder,” he said. He caught up and stood panting in the road, head down and eyes shifting toward every sound, but looking up at the house I forgot about Marshall and only remembered. Behind the posts of a ruined fence the creek branch rushed downhill over chunks of rock, between thorny vines and flowering bushes. The trees were parted just enough for me to see it up there, like a toy I could hold in both hands, a dirty white box with black window holes and the roof a flake of blood. It did look like a witch’s house, a haunted place, the hill leading up to it bumpy with stumps and boulders. I could see a cross of fallen trees in the yard and a weathered barn where nothing lived but the smell of hay and animals.

Something splashed in the creek and Marshall jumped. “We better get on before it’s too dark to see the road,” he said.

“You can go by yourself if you want to.”

Marshall grew quiet, shuffled his feet. “They say she killed a man.”

“Is that so?”

Back then, I could have told him I’d guarantee she killed a man. I could have told him the witch was my mama, too, but I kept my mouth shut. I looked at the house and wanted to burn it to the ground, or run up there and find her axe still lodged in a stump and chop the whole place to pieces, barn and all. But first I would tear through the rooms to see what was left, scour the lot for any trace of her and Laura and me, a stray bobby pin or a lost shirt button or a length of fishing line, anything to prove we lived for a time between those trees, with that mountain under our feet and that creek water rushing over us. Then I would burn the whole place down and dance in the light of the flames.

“For real, Johnny, let’s go,” Marshall whined, and it was like a spell was broken. I didn’t need to look anymore. I had seen it one more time. I turned to go with Marshall but he was frozen in the middle of the road, staring into the woods across from the house with his mouth hanging open. Between the crowded trunks there was a greenish glow, a faint ghost light hovering close to the ground. “It’s her spirit,”
Marshall whispered. Then he took off running down the mountain, shoes slapping hard on the pavement. I knew it was foxfire but I stood there for a long time anyway, looking into the trees.

LAURA

I had some friends up on the mountain. Sun shined down through the leaves and made fairies for me to play with. I didn’t get sad whenever Johnny went off roaming because when the wind blowed them fairies came alive. If I laid on the ground they darted across my body like minnows in the creek. I miss them now when nighttime comes. I’m a grown woman with a child of my own but I still get lonesome in the dark. I try to remember good things, like how Mama was before she changed. I think about that time she was scaling fish. She dropped a bluegill back in the bucket and held my face in her slimy hands. I walked around the rest of the day wearing that slime on my cheeks. I felt touched by some magic creature, like a mermaid out of one of Johnny’s storybooks.

Once I watched Mama take a bath in the creek when the sun was orange, naked breasts and fuzzy legs and a swarm of gnats around her head. I stood on tiptoe and reached out to touch her long, black hair. It poured down her arms like oil. When she bent to lift me I was draped in it. One time she made us blackberry cobbler. We walked to the Barnetts’ after sugar and I rode on her hip. When I asked Johnny about it later, he said it never happened. He pretended not to remember Mama before she was different. But I can still see our teeth and tongues stained dark with juice. I tried to remember for him, how she turned the radio loud and danced us around, and the chocolate cake she made when we turned six. I reminded Johnny of those things, but he always said I dreamed them.

He didn’t even remember the day we walked down the mountain picking up cans and seen a school bus. There was a child’s face in the window and I asked Mama where they was going. She said they was going to school. Johnny wanted to go with them but Mama said she could teach us all we needed to know. Later she showed us how to read with her finger moving underneath the words. I forgot fast but Johnny loved the storybooks. He read them over and over. She taught
us other things, too, like how to dig up the ginseng we sold to a fat man down the mountain, and how to can what we growed. There was hot days in the kitchen washing jars and standing over pots. I liked canning but Johnny didn’t. He wanted to be outside hunting. Mama showed us how to kill rabbits and squirrels and possums with her granddaddy’s rifle. I was no good but Johnny could shoot and him just a little boy. Once he got a deer and we had the meat for a long time.

When she quit paying attention to us, I missed her bad. I thought I must have got too big to fit in her lap. If I tried to climb up she didn’t put her arms around me. Pretty soon I gave up. I still loved her, though. I know Johnny loved her, too. But he got mad when she took herself away. One time he hacked down her little patch of corn with a stick but it didn’t do any good. It was like she didn’t notice. Then he set her scarf on fire, a lacy one that hung on her bedpost and used to belong to her granny. He took it out in the grass and held a match to it. Mama went out to stand with him and they watched it burn together. When the fire dwindled down to ashes she walked away and left him there. I went to him but he jerked away. Pretty soon Johnny gave up like I did.

I know why Johnny didn’t want to remember the good things. Once she started acting different, it was easier to remember the bad. But even in them last two years there was nice times. I got to share her bed whenever I found her there. I’d wind myself in her hair and curl up in the littlest knot I could make against her back. One morning she turned over before I crept off. We stared at each other and I seen all the shades of blue in her eyes. I understood how she loved me the only way she could. If Johnny was ever that close to Mama’s face, smelling her skin and feeling her warmness, he might have been different. I wish I could remember what it was like inside of her. I picture her belly like a moon and me and Johnny living in it. The three of us was a family then, bound up together in her skin. Them nine months is why it don’t matter where we go or what the years turn us into. We’ll always love each other. For a while, we was all part of one body.