Winter's Bone

12

SHE BECAME ice as she walked. White wads broke on her head and dripped to her shoulders to freeze and thicken. The green hood had become an ice hat and her shoulders a cold hard yoke. The scraped road had been so well iced as to be impassable, no headlights at all in the distance or near, so she walked hunched through the winter fields toward the railroad tracks. Her boots crushed the ice topping and broke into the underlying snow for traction. As long as she stomped each step she could break her way, and when she came to the sheer slope above the tracks she sat on her ass and whooshed toward the rails.

On the tracks she could walk without looking. She kept her face turned to ground, avoiding the mist from drops breaking. Her long legs flew ahead and her boots landed heavily enough. The sleet made flourish upon flourish of small popping sounds. The sleet popped small and her boots crunched through and all else was quiet.

She’d passed the meadow of old fallen walls leaving Hawkfall, and as she considered those furiously tossed stones olden Dollys rushed to mind loud and fractious, bellowing and shaking fists. She knew few details of the old bitter reckoning that erupted inside those once holy walls, but suddenly understood to her marrow how such angers between blood could come about and last forever. Like most fights that never finished it had to’ve started with a lie. A big man and a lie.

The big man and prophet who’d found messages from the Fist of Gods written on the entrails of a sparkling golden fish lured with prayer from a black river way east near the sea was Haslam, Fruit of Belief. The sparkling fish had revealed signs unto him and him alone, and he’d followed the map etched tiny on the golden guts and led them all across thousands of testing miles until he hailed these lonely rugged hollows of tired rocky soil as a perfect garden spot, paradise as ordained by the map of guts sent to his eyes from the Fist of Gods.

Ree left the tracks and crossed a level field to reach the slope of caves. Weeds and grasses were made stiff by a bark of ice, shimmering and fragile, and shattered underfoot. The shimmering grasses tinkled to nothing as she kicked her feet. The caves were easy to see from below but difficult to reach. Ree snatched onto saplings to pull herself through the beating weather and up the steepness toward the slant gaping cave she knew best, the cave with a wall of stones standing in the mouth.

Haslam had been born from a god’s water spit on knacker seed, shaped for manhood by a fugitive faith and sent among the Walking People to rally them and all like tinker flesh and to make a new people he’d guide to that garden place chosen by the Fist, mapped inside the sparkling fish, where they could rest their feet after six thousand years of roaming and become settled people.

The wall of stones stood across half the cave mouth and made a stout shield against the wind. Burnt remnants from many fires were strewn about the dusty cave floor. Ree bent and quickly drew together a mess of fire leavings. Log ends not consumed, charred stubs. Well back inside the cave she found a short stacking of small logs. The logs had been there a long dry while and came apart like hair clumps in her hands. Still, the logs would catch flame, and she collected the shreds.

There had been a map to this paradise, but something happened to Walking People settled with settled gods, and after but thirty years the roof of the new ways fell, walls tumbled and flew, old ways returned ravenous after the decades of slighting, and the Fist of Gods took seats in the clouds to sulk and reconsider. Ree did not know much about the religion or the ruining. The prophecies of Haslam, Fruit of Belief, reached her down the generations as hoarse godly mutterings of a big man spinning a braggish lie that made little sense and had no conclusion. The cause of the old bitter reckoning was not clear, either, and there might’ve been living Dollys who knew the truth but nobody ever said it where she could hear. All they ever said was there’d been a woman.

Ree shed her coat, the hooded sweatshirt, the wet skirt. They landed heavily, lumps of fabric clotted with ice. She had a fair pile of punk wood laid in the corner by the stone wall but no kindling, and once in from the weather she was loath to go back into it. It was those brute ancient ways that broke fresh over her world at every dawn and sent Dollys to let the blood drain from Dad’s heart and dump his flesh somewhere hidden from path and cloud. Her boots felt stiff as iron but she kept them on. She slid her panties down, stepped out of them, then raised her undershirt overhead and off. Bare skin but for boots she crouched to the woodpile and stuck the dry garments beneath the likeliest charred stubs and hairy clumps. She had one book of matches and half a doobie in the coat. She held her breath while striking a match, carefully touched the flame to an edge of her panties and mercifully they browned fast, then puffed into flame.

The fire seemed to have been waiting to be born for it scooted quickly from flickers to a roaring flame. The flames pulsed and brightened the cave mouth. The light met Ree and glowed on her skin and cast her shadow up. She stamped her feet and stared out from the cave onto a forest vista sunk beneath ice. Some trees sagged near to snapping, some snapped.

She peed near the entrance to let animals know she was visiting.

After the bitter reckoning many Dollys fled from Hawkfall to caves, and this slope was where they congregated to live through that first winter of exile. Her Dollys were among those Dollys. Her people had lived hunkered in these caves for a mean winter and late spring, kids breathing rattly, grannies spoiling in the dank, the men with each breath refreshing that great snarling tribal anger that Haslam had tried to preach away from their hearts and habits.

She mended the fire when it faltered with clumps and stubs and grew the flames higher than her knees. As she warmed she moved, shuffle-stepped with arms raised and tossed her hands to jab, jab, hook, overhand right, broad shadows punching against the cave wall. Flick them left jabs to open ’em up, girl, then bang the right to put ’em down.

The cave was long and had two more rooms, at least, deeper down and chill, but the space behind the wall warmed quickly. Ree shook her clothes, batted the ice away, and spread them near the fire. She lit the half doobie. Hunters and lovers had used the cave in recent years and had left their withered litter and bent empties, but there was some ancestral trash made visible by the lifting flames. Parts of several fragile white plates and cup handles, a tarnished long fork with two tines, cracked blue potion bottles and tin cans thinned by time to where a finger could poke through.

They likely buried him somewhere near.

If they buried him.

Or dropped him into a bottomless black hole.

The sleet stopped after night fell. The sky spread low and milky over all that ice. Time and again Ree slipped into Mamaw’s coat and hunted wood on the slope. The milk sky and ice let her see dead wood and she dragged the wood to the fire, made the flames healthy, and hung the coat to dry. The corner by the wall became very warm and Ree sat there bare-butted and oddly comforted, knowing that so many relatives with names she never knew had hunched here in this very spot to renew themselves after a sad spinning time had dropped over their lives and whirled them raw.

Coyotes sang to her and she slept, fed the fire, heard snowplows way in the distance.

Her belly rumbled and pinged and hunger drew her into an aching curl.

Water woke her. The blessing of daylight showed a warmer world and thin rivulets trickled down the slope. The air at dawn was warmer than any day had been for a week. The landscape was softening some but not to mush. A freight passed on the tracks beyond the field and whisked the path clear.

He’d fight if he knew they were comin’ and maybe somebody else’s hurt, too.

She stood in sunlight and stretched, a great long body pale and twisting at the brink of a cave. She walked to water dripping from the rock above the cave mouth, cupped her hands to the trickle and drank and drank deeply of the falling new water.