Bloodroot (7 page)

I helped Macon take care of his own pap, Paul Lamb, until he had another stroke and died. Then I took Becky and Jane to raise, until they growed up and married some boys that worked for the railroad. I learnt them how to sew, not just mend socks and put buttons back on, but how to make curtains and dresses. Where they’d been so long without a mammy, there was a lot them girls didn’t know. I learnt them how to make pie crust and how to season their beans and how to make their biscuits fluffy. I wasn’t much older than Becky and Jane and we had a big time together. In the summer worshing clothes we’d bust out in a water fight, or making bread we’d throw flour on one another until we was white-headed and the kitchen was a mess. It was worth cleaning it up for all the fun we had. If the chores was done sometimes we’d run off in the woods and play hide-and-go-seek. Macon would get mad enough to spit when he’d come in from the barn and see me acting like a youngun, but he got over anything pretty quick.

Before the road came through Macon farmed for a living. When the Depression hit, a lot of the men around here went off to work in the mills and coal mines, but Macon stayed with me. The banks started closing in 1929 and nobody on the mountain had two dimes to rub together. It was hard to buy sugar and salt and coffee, but we had a milk cow and laying hens and hogs to render fat for lard. We worked long hours in the hot sun until our fingers was blistered and our backs was sore. Once Roosevelt got in things started looking up for us, but it took years to climb out of the hole we was in.

Macon worked on the road when it came through. Him and the other men got out here and dug it with picks and shovels. I hated to see Macon give up farming, but I reckon he was happier working with his hands on cars for a living, after people in these parts started driving. Before he went to fixing motors down at the filling station in Piney Grove, he liked to whittle and build things out of scrap wood. He’d make birdhouses and whirligigs to put in the yard, and he could
whittle any kind of animal you asked for. Me and him’d set out in the yard as the sun was going down and I’d love to watch him work a block of wood, his fingers moving that knife so swift. I was glad to be his wife.

I didn’t even mind taking care of poor old Paul before he died. Every morning I’d make Paul some mush and spoon it between his lips. Macon’d be down to the barn and Becky and Jane off to school. It was peaceful with just me and Paul in the house. I’d lead him to the front room window and feed him there so both of us could see the mountain and the sky. Then I’d get me a pan of soapy water and worsh him one piece at a time. Some days he’d look at me like he knowed what was going on, but others seemed like he was in a dream. I always believed he was dreaming about his life up here on the mountain, working the land and playing with his younguns. I figured he had it all stored up in his heart, didn’t matter where his body was at or what kind of shape he was in.

I got to where I loved old Paul, but he didn’t live long after me and Macon got married. Wasn’t long after we buried him down at Piney Grove Church that Becky and Jane was gone, too. I cried and cried when they ran off with them railroad boys. They was the only sisters I ever had. They used to come and visit sometimes before their husbands decided to move up north. They still write me letters but they never did come back. I don’t see how they stand it up there where it’s cold and the people’s so different.

Besides Becky and Jane, I had younguns of my own. Not long after me and Macon got married I was expecting, and none of us got too excited about it. It was just how things was. You got married and went to having younguns. The first one was Patricia. She was awful tiny and didn’t want to nurse them first few days, but I never doubted she’d take off. It never entered my head that Patricia might die, or that any of my younguns might not outlive me. Once Patricia took to nursing, she got fat as mud. Becky and Jane helped me with her, and then Jack and Sue when they came along, one right after the other. For a time I was nursing both of them at once, like twins. I used to set in a rocking chair in front of the kitchen door catching the breeze with one in each arm. I felt a contentment when I was nursing my babies that I reckon I’ll never know again.

Then all three of them, Patricia, Jack, and Sue, died of the diphtheria one winter. It was the year that Sue, my littlest, was turning two. I liked to lost my mind. I didn’t take them to the doctor right at first. It was before the road came through and we was snowed in that winter. Sometimes it’s like I dreamt them up, it’s been so long ago. I still can’t figure out how come me and Macon not to catch it. Them first days after the last one, Patricia, passed on, I waited for the fever to come. I wanted so bad to get sick and die. It was like a bridegroom had left me at the altar. I went out of my head and Macon didn’t know how to tend to me. Mammy and Pap came up the mountain to stay a few days but Mammy couldn’t do much with me, either. She tried putting on a cheery face and talking like I hadn’t lost my babies but I laid on the bed I’d birthed them in and wouldn’t get up. I didn’t want to eat and they had to pry my jaws open to force broth down my throat. I’d look past them as they fought me to Pap, standing there watching with bright light shining all around him. I don’t believe I imagined it, even in the state I was in. He never fussed or paced the floor or begged me to eat like Macon and Mammy did. He just stayed there in the room. Day or night I could open my eyes and he’d be setting at the foot of the bed, watching over me. I guess, looking back, I decided to come back to my life because Pap was still in it. I got better, but for a long time I went through my days living over and over that time when my younguns was getting sicker and nothing could be done. I got to where I thought it might not have really happened. I made up my mind they was still alive, just off somewhere playing. I don’t know when I figured out the bridegroom wasn’t coming for me and started putting one foot in front of the other again.

I guess some part of me must have died anyhow because it was easier when my boy Willis got killed. It’s awful to say but it’s the truth. I had Willis in 1924, three years after Patricia, Jack, and Sue was gone. I didn’t want to have no more babies for a long time because I was scared of losing them, but Macon begged me to. I never seen that man beg to nobody before, but he got down on his knees as I was trying to hang the worsh and clung to my legs. “This house is too lonesome, Byrdie,” he said. “I can’t stand it.” People might have thought Macon didn’t have no feelings, but his heart was softer than just about anybody else’s you could find, including mine. He loved younguns
and animals better than anything, and couldn’t be happy unless there was a child or dog underfoot. I gave in because I couldn’t stand to see Macon that way, and we had Willis.

Willis wasn’t no good, from the time he was little. He’d bite my nipple hard as he could soon as his teeth came in, and would fight me with his fists anytime he didn’t get his way. Willis broke my heart every day he was alive. I don’t know what went wrong with that boy. I reckon it had to been something me and Macon done. Someway or another, we wasn’t cut out to raise younguns. That might be how come the Lord took them from us. All I can figure out is we spoiled them too much. I believe we ruint Willis and Clio both by smothering them, and I reckon we did the same thing to Myra when she came along. I treated Willis like a little king, made him sugar cookies every day until nearly every tooth in his head rotted out, and he still hated me and Macon both.

Whatever made Willis that way, he was meaner than a striped snake. He got stabbed in a bar fight when he wasn’t but twenty years old and bled to death. The ones that done it throwed him off of a bluff and he laid there a week until somebody found him. I never did feel like Willis loved me. Maybe that’s how come it was easier to take. Besides that, me and Macon still had Clio. She came to us late in life and you’d think we would have learnt our lesson, but we couldn’t help petting Clio rotten, too, until she growed up and turned against us. I believe she blamed us for being born on a mountain. Why, we didn’t ask for her no more than she asked for us. That was the Lord’s doing.

DOUG

For a while after my fall on the mountain Myra wouldn’t look at my face, even when we were laughing. I wanted to tell her she was forgiven but that would have been like accusing her. I knew she didn’t want to talk about what happened so I kept it to myself, until the day we sat in the barn loft eating peaches. Her eye caught mine and darted away and I couldn’t stand the awkwardness anymore. “We can climb to the top again if you want,” I said. “I bet we could make it this time.” She turned to me, sucking shreds of peach from a wrinkled pit. She took the pit from her mouth and closed her hand tight around it.
I held my breath, waiting for her to speak. After a while she opened her palm, looked down at the peach pit, and said, “Let’s bury this and see if anything grows.” I didn’t bring the subject up again. It would only have made things worse between us.

It’s true that Myra and Wild Rose are two of a kind. That’s why they took to each other so quickly. If I believed that talk I heard about witches, I’d figure Wild Rose was Myra’s familiar. But there’s one difference I can think of between them. Wild Rose never let me within arm’s reach of her, but I got away with touching Myra once. It was because of the poems. All through elementary school Myra and I had the same teachers, and in high school we always had at least one class together. Junior year it was English. Myra loved the poems we studied, especially Wordsworth. “It’s like he’s talking about here,” she said. “He wrote this one a few miles above a place in England called Tintern Abbey, but I can tell he feels the same way as I do about Bloodroot Mountain. Does that make any sense to you?” I said yes, but it didn’t matter to me. I just liked hearing her talk.

Whenever she knew that Mark was away from home, she would come walking up the mountain to find me, carrying one of her books, wearing a floppy old dress with the sun in her eyes. Just to make sure, she always asked, “Where’s Mark?” I’d smile with my lips closed over my broken tooth, knowing she needed to share the poems she loved with somebody quiet. I’d say, “Mark’s gone hunting,” or fishing, or down to the pool hall with some of his friends. Then she’d ask if I wanted to take a walk. She didn’t really have to ask. She knew I’d follow her anywhere, branches slapping my face in her wake.

Most of the time we went to a big rock high on the mountain behind her house and I’d sit there with her for hours, listening to her read. But that day we decided to walk down to the creek branch instead, where it runs downhill beside the road. She was quiet and I thought maybe she had spied an animal or bug she wanted to touch. She could track for hours, shushing Mark and me, telling us to go away, even though we never did. But there was no lizard, no squirrel or frog this time. She was only thinking.

When we came to the creek branch we crawled under the pink rhododendron together, where its low branches made a cave of shadows sprinkled with coins of light. She read for a while, but I could tell
there was something on her mind. Finally, she put down her book and sat on a rock with her feet in the water. I stared at them through the silt-swirling ripples. They were long and slim, smooth on top and leathery on the bottom. “I got a chickadee to eat out of my hand,” she said, dipping her cupped palm in the water.

“How’d you do that?”

“You know that stump behind the house where Granny scatters seed? They come in droves this time of year, all different kinds of birds. I’ve been sitting there every day with my hand out. They’re used to me now.”

“Reckon they think you’re part of the stump?”

“I am,” she said.

She lowered herself off the rock and into the branch, her dress darkening and spreading in the water. She lay back on the rocks with light shifting on her face, fingers of creek water closing across her middle.

“Can I tell you something?” She closed her eyes and propped up on her elbows. The water trickled over her thighs and played with her dress tail. I couldn’t stop looking at her pale body, stretched out long and hard in the creek branch.

“Yeah.”

“I’m afraid you’ll think I’m crazy.”

“I won’t.”

“I thought… it was like …that chickadee was my mother.”

Myra had never mentioned her dead mama to me before. “Like reincarnation?” I asked. “Better not let the church folks hear you talking that way.”

Myra smiled. “Not exactly.”

“Like a ghost or something?”

“More like a spirit. Like she’s still here.”

“The Bible says there’s two places people go when they die.”

I looked at her stomach, the black dress gathering in neat wrinkles where her navel was hidden. I imagined a dark slit filling with water.

“I wonder about her. You know she moved off to town with my father when she was seventeen. I can’t figure out how she could leave this place. She must not have been like me.”

I lowered myself into the water beside Myra. The cold took my breath. “Does it make you sad?”

“Hmm?”

“That she wasn’t like you?”

“I don’t know.” Myra sounded sleepy, drunk on the feel of the creek lapping at her fingers, running like a cool scarf over her elbow bends, gliding under her heels and between her toes, and all the smells of blossoms and muck and mottled toadstools risen like yeast in the shade. Looking at her, a feeling came over me that she might do the same thing her mama had done. I wouldn’t have believed that Myra could leave the mountain, but I hadn’t seen until then how she longed for her mama and wanted to know about her.

“You’ll go, too,” I said, leaning over her.

Myra took in a deep breath, black hair coiling out in all directions, a nest of water snakes. “Never,” she exhaled, and I felt the cool rush of her breath on my face. I put my hand on her wet stomach and it tightened under the slippery fabric of her dress, but she didn’t open her eyes. I leaned in and pressed my mouth, ever concealing the broken tooth, against hers. But I’m no fool. It was Bloodroot Mountain she tasted when I kissed her lips. I might as well not even have been there. I knew it then and I know it now. I never tried to kiss her again, but I’m glad I took my chance when I saw it.