Winter's Bone

28

THE WOMEN of Rathlin Valley began crossing the creek to view her even as she lay in the tub. Sonya led Betsy and Caradoc Dolly’s widow, Permelia, who owned the third house in the rank of three on the far bank, into the bathroom and closed the door on the paled waiting boys with their stricken faces. Ree lay with her good eye open a peep in water skimmed thinly with suds. The women stood in a cluster looking down at the colored bruises on milk skin, the lumped eye, the broken mouth. Their lips were tight and they shook their heads. Permelia, ancient but mobile, witness to a hundred wounds, said, “There’s never no call to do a girl like that.”

Sonya said, “Merab’s got a short fuse.”

“Done booted her calico.”

“Her sisters helped her.”

Betsy, wife of Catfish Milton, gray young yet handsome, began to shudder with feeling. Betsy had never been chatty, but in the years since she’d lost her sweetest daughter to a tree limb that dropped on a calm blue day she could occasionally be heard in the night shouting threats from her yard at those shining stars that most troubled her. She knelt at the tub side, laid a flat palm on Ree’s belly and rubbed a gentle circle, then stood trembling and fled the room.

The noise of boys sniffling in the parlor carried through the bathroom door.

Uncle Teardrop snapped, Hush goddammit, and they did.

Permelia said, “My say is, this is wrong. It can’t ever be right to do a girl that way. Not between our own people.”

Sonya said, “You can see three kinds of footprints stomped on her legs, there. Must’ve took them a while to track her up bad like that.” She shook her head, then handed an orange plastic vial to Gail, and said, “Pain pills from Betsy’s hysterectomy. Give her two to start.”

“Just two?”

“She’ll want more, but just two to start with, then build from there to whatever number lets her rest.”