Winter's Bone

11

CLOUDS LOOKED to be splitting on distant peaks, dark rolling bolts torn around the mountaintops to patch the blue sky with grim. Frosty wet began to fall, not as flakes nor rain but as tiny white wads that burst as drops landing and froze a sudden glaze atop the snow. The bringing wind rattled the forest, shook limb against limb, and a wild tapping noise carried all about. Now and then a shaking limb gave up and split from the trunk to land below with a sound like a final grunt.

Ree crossed the meadow of old fallen walls, climbed uphill to Thump Milton’s, but did not need to knock. A woman waited for her as she came into the yard. The woman stood on her doorstep wearing an apron over a print dress with short sleeves, rubbing her hands together, watching Ree draw near. The woman was past the middle of her years but looked pink in her cheeks, robust, with white hair brushed high into an airy poof and sprayed to stay there. She was burly, stout-boned, and flesh rolled when she moved. She said, “You’ve got the wrong place, I expect. Who might you be?”

Chickens were making a racket in a long low building across the yard. There was a light on inside the coop and footsteps had crushed the snow flat between there and the back door of the house. The house had been made without any frivolous stones of lighthearted colors, but was entirely deep-hued and sober. A short roof covered the woman in the doorway.

“I’m a Dolly.” Ree’s green hood was growing heavy from the wet and molding to her skull while the wind chased her skirt around her chapping legs and her eyes squinted against the spattering weather. “My dad’s Jessup Dolly. I’m Ree.”

“Which Jessup would that be?”

“From Rathlin Valley. Teardrop’s brother. I mean Haslam’s. Teardrop was born a Haslam.”

“I believe I know who Teardrop is. That’d make your Jessup the man who married the pretty Bromont girl.”

“That’s right—Mom used to be Connie Bromont.”

“Jack’s littlest sister. I knew Jack.” The woman gestured for Ree to come up onto the steps, under the roof. She pulled the hood away from Ree’s head, looked into her face. “You ain’t here for trouble, are you? ’Cause one of my nephews is Buster Leroy, and didn’t he shoot your daddy one time?”

“Yes’m, but that ain’t got nothin’ to do with me. They settled all that theirselves, I think.”

“Shootin’ him likely settled it. What is it you want?”

“Ma’am, I got a real bad need to talk with Thump Milton.”

“Ach! Ach! Get away, girl. Away!”

“I need to, I really, really, need to, ma’am. Please—I am a Dolly! Some of our blood at least is the same. That’s s’posed to mean somethin’—ain’t that what is always said?”

The woman stalled at the mention of shared blood, sighed, crossed her arms and pressed her lips together. She reached to touch Ree’s hair, appreciated the cool dampness through her fingertips, then laid the back of her hand to Ree’s winter-blushed cheek. She said, “Ain’t you got no men could do this?”

“I can’t wait that long.”

“Well, he don’t ever talk no more’n he has to, you understand that? He don’t talk too direct when he does talk, neither. He says things so you ought to know what he means, but if you don’t, he’ll just leave it that way. And even when he does talk, he won’t talk much to women.”

“You could say I’m still a girl.”

The woman smiled sadly, touched Ree’s face again.

“I expect I won’t. He’ll see you for himself. You go wait in the yard somewheres by that coop and I’ll tell him you’re here.”

There was no good sheltering spot beside the coop. A twin-trunked mimosa grew near the wall to raise a spot of windbreak and Ree crouched to the dry side of the double trunk. She crouched with her skirt dropped to ground, making a squat tent with herself as the pole. Chickens fussed inside the heated coop and melt grew an outline of ice low along the walls. The mimosa blocked direct wind, but swirls hit Ree from both sides and the bursting white wads of weather cast a mist over her that soon froze.

After most of an hour she saw a different face at the window. The woman had looked at her a few times but now the curtain eased open on a long-jawed man’s face with an iron-shaded spade beard and careful fingers on the curtain. The curtain closed so subtly Ree questioned whether it had truly been open or had she wished it open and sold the wish to her eyes.

Rime of frost thickened where breath fell onto her chest.

Sleet crackled down, laid a cold sheen across everything. The afternoon sky dimmed and lights from the house carried into the yard as gleamings stretched by skidding across the ice. Tree limbs fattened with gathered silver and drooped. Dogs went home to crawl under porches.

The woman came back outside wearing a black overcoat and hat, and walked in loose harrumphing galoshes. She came into the yard but not near. She said, “He ain’t likely to have time for you, child.”

“I’ve got to talk to him.”

“Nope. Talkin’ just causes witnesses, and he don’t want for any of those.”

“I’ll wait.”

“You need to get yourself on home.”

“I’ll make that man weary of me out here waitin’. I’ve just got to talk to him.”

The woman started to say something, then shook her head and returned to the house.

Ree sat chilled inside her squat tent. To occupy her mind, she decided to name all the Miltons: Thump, Blond, Catfish, Spider, Whoop, Rooster, Scrap… Lefty, Dog, Punch, Pinkeye, Momsy… Cotton, Hog-jaw, Ten Penny, Peashot… enough. Enough Miltons. To have but a few male names in use was a tactic held over from the olden knacker ways, the ways that had been set aside during the time of Haslam, Fruit of Belief, but returned to heartily after the great bitterness erupted and the sacred walls tumbled to nothing. Let any sheriff or similar nabob try to keep official accounts on the Dolly men when so many were named Milton, Haslam, Arthur or Jessup. The Arthurs and Jessups were the fewest, not more than five apiece, probably, and the Haslams amounted to double the Arthurs or Jessups. But the great name of the Dollys was Milton, and at least two dozen Miltons moved about in Ree’s world. If you named a son Milton it was a decision that attempted to chart the life he’d live before he even stepped into it, for among Dollys the name carried expectations and history. Some names could rise to walk many paths in many directions, but Jessups, Arthurs, Haslams and Miltons were born to walk only the beaten Dolly path to the shadowed place, live and die in keeping with those bloodline customs fiercest held.

Ree and Mom both had shouted and shouted and shouted against Harold becoming a Milton, since Sonny was already a Jessup. They had shouted and won and Ree’d a thousand times wished she’d fought longer for Sonny, shouted him into an Adam or Leotis or Eugene, shouted until he was named to expect choices.

Her teeth chattered and she tried to put a tempo to the chattering, to control the shivers into a sort of chomping song. She parted her lips and snapped her teeth in step with that happy silly old song they sang in grade school about the submarine that was yellow and had everybody living in it. She snapped her teeth in time and wagged her head as though joyful even inside a shrouding of ice. The hood creaked when she moved her head, and cracked when she stood.

The woman was again in the yard. She carried a wide cup of something steaming, handed it to Ree. She said, “Soup, you crazy girl. I brung you some soup. Drink it down and be on your way.”

Ree raised the cup and drank long, chewed, drank on to empty.

“Thanks.”

Weather burst on the woman’s hat and shoulders, wet spray jumping. She touched Ree’s hood, rapped knuckles against the ice to break it fine, and swiped the pieces away.

“He knows you were in the valley, child. With Megan. And at Little Arthur’s. He knows what you want to ask and he don’t want to hear it.”

“You mean he ain’t goin’ to come out’n say one word to me? Nothin’?”

The woman took the empty cup.

“If you’re listenin’, child, you got your answer. Now, go, get on away from here… and don’t come back’n try’n ask him twice. Just don’t.”

The woman turned her back on Ree, stepped slowly toward the house. Ree watched her broad black back going away and said, “So, come the nut-cuttin’, blood don’t truly mean shit to him. Am I understandin’ right? Blood don’t truly count for diddly to the big man? Well, you can tell the big man for me I hope he has him a long, long life full of nothin’ but hiccups’n the runs, hear? You tell him Ree Dolly said that.”

The woman spun, glowering beneath the hat brim, and hurled the soup cup at Ree’s head but missed close and the cup skipped across the glazed snow, banged into the coop. She pointed a finger and repeated, “Just don’t.”