Winter's Bone

6

SHE TOOK to pausing more often to study on things that weren’t usually of interest. She sniffed the air like it might somehow have changed flavors and looked closely at the stone fencerow, touched the stones and hefted a few, held them to her face, saw a rabbit that didn’t try to run until she laughed at it, smelled Victoria on her sleeves and hunkered atop a stump to think. She spread her skirt taut across her knees and tucked the extra under her legs. Those stones had probably been piled by direct ancestors and for a long while she tried to conjure their pioneer lives and think if she saw parts of their lives showing in her own. With her eyes closed she could call them near, see those olden Dolly kin who had so many bones that broke, broke and mended, broke and mended wrong, so they limped through life on the bad-mend bones for year upon year until falling dead in a single evening from something that sounded wet in the lungs. The men came to mind as mostly idle between nights of running wild or time in the pen, cooking moon and gathering around the spout, with ears chewed, fingers chopped, arms shot away, and no apologies grunted ever. The women came to mind bigger, closer, with their lonely eyes and homely yellow teeth, mouths clamped against smiles, working in the hot fields from can to can’t, hands tattered rough as dry cobs, lips cracked all winter, a white dress for marrying, a black dress for burying, and Ree nodded yup. Yup.

The sky lay dark and low so a hawk circling overhead floated in and out of clouds. The wind heaved and knocked the hood from her head. That hawk was riding the heaving wind looking to kill something. Looking to snatch something, rip it bloody, chew the tasty parts, let the bones drop.

Dad could be anywhere.

Dad might think he had reasons to be most anywhere or do most anything, even if the reasons seemed ridiculous in the morning.

One night when Ree was still a bantling Dad had gotten crossways with Buster Leroy Dolly and been shot in the chest clear out by Twin Forks River. He was electric on crank, thrilled to have been shot, and instead of driving to a doctor he drove thirty miles to West Table and the Tiny Spot Tavern to show his assembled buddies the glamorous bullet hole and the blood bubbling. He collapsed grinning and the drunks carried him to the town hospital and nobody thought he’d live to see noon until he did.

Dad was tough enough but not much on planning. At eighteen he’d left the Ozarks planning to work for big dough on the oil rigs of Louisiana but ended up boxing Mexicans for peanuts in Texas. He slugged them, they slugged him, everybody bled, nobody got rich. Three years later he came back to the valley with nothing to show for his adventure but new scars ragged around both eyes and a few stories men chuckled at for a while.

Dad could be anywhere with anybody.

Mom’s mind didn’t break loose and scatter to the high weeds until Ree was twelve and around then is when she learned about Dad’s girlfriend. Her name was Dunahew and she taught kindergarten down across the Arkansas line at Reid’s Gap. Her front name was April and she wasn’t so hot to look at but she had sweet fat ways and a steady paycheck. Ree had once been taken to Reid’s Gap and left there for most of a week to nurse April through a sickness in her stomach. That was two years ago and she’d not heard Dad say April’s name since or smelled her on his clothes. April owned a pretty yellow house just west of the main road down there, and Dad could be anywhere.