Winter's Bone

21

MOM STOOD when asked and Ree dressed her in a white winter coat that was puffy and slick and a yellow stocking hat that had a floppy yellow ball knit at the peak. Ree opened the side door and ushered her outside into the yard. Mom seldom left the house and her face looked anxious. She stepped uncertainly onto the thin snow, first tapping about with a toe before letting her heel come down. Ree held her by the elbow and led her to the steep trail on the north slope. The sun was dropping behind the far ridges, and in such light ice on the trail looked like spilled milk frozen hard.

After each step up the trail Mom would pause and lean back on Ree until Ree boosted her forward again. The routine acquired a working rhythm when Ree began boosting Mom along in that brief second before her pause could become a lean. Brittle ice snapped as boots fell and toes pressed forward. Mom’s breath washed back in gusts to break across Ree’s face. The warmth and flavor of Mom’s breath held sweetness and opened memories. Mom before she was all the way crazy, lolling with Ree on a blanket between the pines, telling windy tales of whiffle-birds, the galoopus, the bingbuffer, and other Ozark creatures seldom seen in these woods but known for generations to live there. The whiffle-bird, a jolly feathered mystery just waiting to be born from shadows hatching to spark aloft quick as thought and fly backwards like a riddle across the sky, or the galoopus that might come roost deep down your well and lay perfectly square eggs of stiff yellow taffy inside your water bucket, or the taunting spooky bingbuffer that would creep close on the darkest of dark stormy nights to flex a huge hinged tail and peg rocks banging against your house while you pulled the blankets over your head and waited for the sun. Mom’s words had tickled and her close breaths had soothed.

At the crest they began to walk gingerly through the Bromont acres. Ree linked arms with Mom and steered a course between stout trunks, carefully stepping over thick roots and blurs of ice. They walked near the rim of the knob and could see distant spots in the valley while heavy trees loomed over their shoulders. A band of crows sat on limbs high above and gabbed as the women passed below. The knob was bare slab rock in some spots, and the slab rocks were yet too slickery to walk across. Ree moved between gray slabs, squeezing with her arm to prompt Mom in one direction or another. At a breakneck bluff above a wet-weather creek they paused to stare to the next knob over, where the first Bromont house had been built. The walls and such had been carted away long ago but the square rock foundation still gave a base of ordered shapeliness to the barrage of runt oak and creeper vines that had overgrown the place.

Ree turned to walk along the north slope and up into the pines. Mom tripped on a root and slipped to her knees, and her expression jolted almost alert. She said, “How long has this snow been here?”

“Days and days now.”

“I saw when it came.”

Beneath the pines the ground was kept clear by falling needles, a soft carpet of browned needles spread under the low branches, a natural rumpus space for short scampering youngsters. The pines could easily be imagined into a castle or a sailing ship or serve merely as an ideal picnic spot. The trees broke any wind that came and lent a good scent to any season.

Mom held on to a branch and paused. “This is where I used to play.”

“Me, too.”

“Plus Bernadette.”

Ree pulled Mom snug to her side, walked between the pines, the sharp needles and swishing branches, then downhill and across the wet-weather creek to the next wooded mound. There were footprints in the snow, raccoons and rabbits and a pair of coyotes that had prowled near for a sniff. Ree pulled Mom along uphill into the dense hardwood. Many pauses were required, and deep sucks of air, before the crest was reached. The trees were large and august and faithful. A huge oak stump sawed level made a sitting place overlooking the valley. The stump had become frayed and squishy from rot but made a wide pleasant seat.

Mom sat and Ree sat beside her. Ree held Mom’s hand a moment, then came off the stump to kneel. She squeezed with both hands and tilted her face to look up at Mom.

“Mom, I need you. Mom—look at me. Look at me, Mom. Mom, I’m goin’ to need you to help. There’s things happenin’ that I don’t know what to do about. Mom? Look at me, Mom. Mom?”

The going sun chucked a vast spread of red behind the ridgeline. A horizon of red light parsed into shafts by standing trees to throw pink in streaks across the valley snow.

Ree waited kneeling for several minutes, kneeling as raised hopes fell to modest hopes, slight hopes, vague hopes, kneeling until any hope at all withered to none between her pressing hands. She released Mom, stood and walked away into the shadows behind the stump. She returned in a minute and looked closely at her from above, then sat on the stump again. Mom’s skin was sallow, her face was blank and her soul was sincerely given over to silence and the approximate refuge offered by incomprehension. Mom stared into the sunset, then pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around herself and held tight.

“Mom?”

During the next minutes Ree leaned to look into her face a few times. Mom’s gaze stayed unwaveringly on the glowing distance, chin to her kneecaps, hands clasped around her shins. Ree scooted away on the old stump and studied Mom’s face in profile, the rounding features and sagged cheeks, then sighed and looked west. Sunlight shriveled to a red dot beyond the ridge, night swallowed the dot in a gulp, and the vista quickly began to sink from sight. Ree stood, pulled Mom to her feet, and arm in arm they started the darkened walk downhill to home.