Winter's Bone

24

REE WALKED down the Hawkfall hill with nothing watching her back but the sun. She kicked her boots scuffing loudly along the road and looked at thin smoke rails rising from chimneys below. Twice she turned about to stare toward home, but the antique truck was already beyond sight. Snow piles still lined the road, melting, but the fields were fast becoming mud acres with tattering white borders. Cows walking near the fenceline made sucking sounds as each hoof was pulled from the holding mud. Pouring sunlight rubbed the cowhides shiny and raised sweat on Ree’s face. Mamaw’s coat felt too heavy in the turning weather but she kept it on all the way down the slope and into the meadow of old fallen walls.

Disappearing snow left the old tossed stones plain amidst the puny winter weeds and spreading muck. Some stones were stacked two high and some lay in close clusters with stunted oak growing from the narrow spaces between. Cows had been grazed in the meadow and they’d walked bare paths into the grass and around the stones. Here and there small pieces of shattered stained glass glinted surprise colors from the cow-path mud.

The drive up to Thump Milton’s house was wide enough for two cars to pass and coated with pea gravel. The gravel gave way underfoot so that each step sounded like a shovel digging. Trees lined the drive and many birds sang from the limbs but their songs were not the same. Near the dun house there were two cars and two trucks parked. A redbone hound resting in a truck bed stood as she approached and barked.

The house door opened and Mrs. Thump looked out. She closed the door briefly, then came outside carrying a steaming cup. Mams hung to the belly of her stout frame and heaved as she advanced. Two other women stepped onto the porch behind Mrs. Thump and both had postures and chins that suggested they were her close relatives. Mrs. Thump’s white hair was done up in big pink rollers held in place by a mostly yellow scarf.

Ree reached for the steaming cup, smiling, and said, “I’m not really—” And the world flushed upside down in her eyes while her ears rang and she staggered, then the world flushed again and again and she stumbled across the gravel. One of Mrs. Thump’s rollers had jerked loose and dangled springy around her head as she pulled her big hand back to whack Ree another in the face, and Ree swung a fist at those blunt teeth in a red mouth but missed. The other women closed in with boots to the shins while more heavy whacks landed and Ree felt her joints unglue, become loose, and she was draining somehow, draining to the dirt, while black wings flying angles crossed her mind, and there were the mutters of beasts uncaged from women and she was sunk to a moaning place, kicked into silence.