Bloodroot

BYRDIE

Myra looks like her mama, but prettier because of her daddy mixed in. She got just the right amount of both. The best thing about Myra’s daddy was his eyes, blue as the sky. They’d pierce right through you. Myra ended up with the same blue-blue eyes. I always figured she was too pretty and then John Odom came along. Now I’ll die alone. It’s not that I’m scared of being alone with this mountain. I love it like another person. I just miss my grandbaby. Me and Myra’s mama wasn’t close. Clio had little regard for me or Macon either one. Myra’s the daughter I always wished I had.

I didn’t see nothing wrong with John Odom at first, but even if I’d seen that snake coiled up inside his heart I wouldn’t have tried to stop her. I could tell by her eyes Myra had to have him whatever the outcome. Now I know the outcome is no good. This morning I went to see her and it broke my heart in two. I can’t stand to think about what he might be doing to her beside of them tracks. Through the years I got tougher than a pine knot, but something about getting this old has softened me up. I reckon I have too much time to think about my troubles these days, without Myra here to talk to.

I should have seen what was coming after that time she got in late from the library. She was supposed to have been studying with one of her school friends. But I caught a funny shine in her eyes. “What have you been up to?” I asked.

She went to the sink and got a glass of water, gulped it down like she’d been in a race. She turned around and her cheeks looked hot. She smiled with water shining on her lips. “I’ll tell you later, Granny, I promise. Right now I want to keep it just for me.”

“You’re silly,” I said, but the way her eyes shined made me nervous. Then I got busy tidying up the kitchen before bed and forgot all about it.

When I finally laid down, I fell asleep as quick as my head hit the pillow. Thinking back, it was an unnatural sleep, like I had drunk a sleeping potion. I had a dream that I was standing on a rickety bridge over muddy water. The roar of it was so loud I couldn’t hear nothing else. Then I seen there was things getting carried off in the rapids. It was pieces of our house on Bloodroot Mountain. The leg off of my favorite chair. The quilt I made for Myra when she was a baby. A drawer out of the kitchen buffet. A baby doll Myra used to play with. Some floorboards and a few shingles and even the front door came rolling by. Then there was a crack and my foot went through the boards of that old bridge. It started coming apart, jagged pieces dropping and rushing away, until I was hanging on by a scrap of rotten wood, my feet dangling over the water. If I fell it would carry me off, too. Finally I couldn’t hold on no longer. Just as I was dropping, I jerked awake, wringing wet with sweat. I set up on the side of the bed, heart thudding so hard I was afraid it might give out on me. I should have knowed right then. Grandmaw Ruth always said it’s bad luck to dream of muddy waters.

DOUG

Last night I closed the door to the smokehouse where the bloodroot is kept in cardboard boxes, away from the mice and bugs. I stood there with my back against it, looking across the yard. The house was dark with my parents sleeping and all my brothers gone. Behind barbwire the pasture made a chain of starlit humps. I took the feedbag,heavy with corn, to the barn on quivering legs. The cows are sold and the field was still, but from the barn came fitful knocking sounds. Wild Rose never rests. Daddy had to put her up because she’s been getting loose more often. I think I know why. Myra Lamb is gone from her house down the mountain and Rose has been looking for her.

I went to the black opening of the barn and turned on my flashlight. The knocking sounds stopped at once. I could sense Wild Rose waiting for me in the shadows of her stall. The smells of manure and damp hay turned my stomach. Walking deeper into the barn, I saw the reflective shine of her glassy blue eyes and wanted to turn back.

“Rose,” I said. “I brought you something good to eat.”

The horse didn’t stir as I came down the aisle, like she knew what I was up to. She’s never liked being touched, but she usually lets me strap on the feedbag. I was hoping the taste of sweet corn would hide the bitterness of what I’d laced it with.

“You hungry?” It was hard to hear myself over the thudding of my heart. Part of me couldn’t believe what I was doing. Maybe I was still in bed asleep.

Wild Rose took a few steps toward the front of the stall. I could hear her breath snuffling through the wet channels of her nostrils. Somehow, even before she charged, I knew that she had figured me out. She exploded out of the stall door as she had out of the trailer the first time I saw her, a storm of splintering wood and pounding hooves, with a scream that threatened to split my head in two. I dropped the feedbag and the flashlight and clapped my hands over my ears. I felt the hot passage of her body like a freight train in the dark, the force of it knocking me down. Then she was gone, out the barn opening and across the hills, leaving me to lie in a mess of spilled corn and bloodroot.

BYRDIE

When I was a girl I lived across another mountain in a place called Chickweed Holler. Until I was ten years old, me and Mammy lived with Grandmaw Ruth, and two of Grandmaw’s sisters, Della and Myrtle. I used to crawl up in Grandmaw’s lap to study her face and follow its lines with my finger. She stayed slim and feisty up until the day she died of a stroke, walking home in the heat after birthing somebody’s baby. Myrtle had hair soft and white as dandelion fluff that she liked for me to comb out and roll for her. They was all good-looking women, but Della was the prettiest. Her hair stayed black right up to the end of her life, and she didn’t have as many wrinkles as Grandmaw. I reckon it’s because she didn’t have to work as much in the sun. She was the youngest and Myrtle and Grandmaw still babied her, old as all three of them was.

It was just me and Mammy after my daddy passed away, so Grandmaw took us in. We lived in a little cabin with a porch up on stilts. I liked to play under there, where they kept mason jars and rusty baling wire and all manner of junk for me to mess in. Chickweed Holler was a wild place with the mountains rising steep on both sides. From Grandmaw’s doorstep you could see a long ways, wildflower fields waving when the summer winds blowed. That land was in our family for generations and Grandmaw and my great-aunts loved it as good as they did any of their kin.

All the neighbors thought the world of Grandmaw and her sisters. They was what you call granny women, and the people of Chickweed Holler relied on them for any kind of help you can think of. Each one of them had different gifts. Myrtle was what I’ve heard called a water witch. She could find a well on anybody’s land with her dowsing rod. People sent for her from a long ways off. Sometimes they’d come to get her and she’d fetch the forked branch she kept under her bed and hop in their wagon. She’d be gone for days at a time, depending on how hard of a trip it was. Della was the best one at mixing up cures. She could name any root and herb and flower you pointed at. Another thing she was good for was healing animals. She could set the broke leg of the orneriest hunting dog and it wouldn’t even bite her. One day I seen her in the yard bent over the washtub scrubbing and a bird lit on her shoulder. It stayed for a long time. If she noticed, she didn’t let on. I stood still, trying not to scare it away. When I told Grandmaw about it later, she said animals are attracted to our kind of people, and so are other people of our kind. She winked and said, “Don’t be surprised if the feller you marry has the touch. People with the touch draws one another.” I’ve always remembered that, but I don’t reckon Macon had none of the gifts Grandmaw and her sisters had. I didn’t either. It’s odd how the touch moves in a family. You never can tell who’ll turn up with it.

Grandmaw had the best gift of all. She claimed she could send her spirit up out of her body. She said, “You could lock me up in the jail-house or bury me alive down under the ground. It don’t matter where this old shell is at. My soul will fly off wherever I want it to be.” She told me about a time she fell down in a sinkhole when she was little and couldn’t climb back out. She had wandered far from the house and knowed her mammy and pappy couldn’t hear her. She looked up at the sun between the roots hanging down like dirty hair and wished so hard to fly up out of there that her spirit took off, rose, and soared on back to her little house in the holler. That’s when she figured out what her gift was. She had no memory of being stuck in a hole that day. What she remembered was watching her mammy roll out biscuit dough and romping with her puppy dog and picking daisies to braid a crown. Grandmaw wasn’t even hollering when a man out hunting came along and his dog sniffed her out. That’s the gift I wish I had. I’d go back to Chickweed Holler right now and see if everything still looks the same.

DOUG

It doesn’t take as much to poison a horse as people think. You just have to know what to feed one. A few oleander leaves, a little sorghum grass, a bit of yellow star thistle and a horse can choke faster than the vet can get there. Tie your horse to a black locust or a chokecherry tree and it could be dead within minutes. Bloodroot is dangerous to horses, too. We have a carpet of it growing down the side of our mountain when springtime comes, thriving under the shady tree canopy high above our house. We have to walk quite a piece each year to find it. Daddy says such a lush stand is rare these days. My brother Mark, Daddy, and I used to go up there with hand spades and a sack, noses red in the leftover cold of winter. Bloodroot can be harvested in fall but the leaves have died back, so it’s harder to know where the plants are. That’s why we always made the trip in early spring, when the flowers are spread across the slope like the train of a wedding gown. We had to be careful not to damage the roots. When Mark and I were small, Daddy would yell at us if we were too rough, “That’s money y’uns is throwing away!” He taught us to shake the roots free of clinging black soil and brush off the bugs and pluck away any weeds that might have got tangled in. Then we had to move fast because bloodroot is easy to mold. We’d head back down the mountain with our sacks to spray the roots with the water hose attached to the wellhouse spigot, washing away the dirt. Once the roots were clean we put them in the smokehouse to dry for about a week. Daddy or one of us would check them for mold once in a while, and when they broke without bending they were dry enough to store. Sometimes we got up to ten dollars a pound. I’ve heard bloodroot’s good for curing croup, and it’s even been used for treating certain kinds of cancer. Some of it we kept for ourselves, to use on poison ivy and warts. I’ve known bloodroot to last in a cool, dark place for up to two years. It will also kill a horse. Daddy told me so last spring, the last time we went up the mountain to dig.

It was March and still cold enough to see our breath. Daddy lumbered along beside me and Mark walked on ahead because, even though we’re both grown, he always had to be the fastest. We heard the crack of Wild Rose’s hooves before we saw her.

“Dang horse,” Mark said. He hoisted himself up by a sapling onto a shelf of rock. “She’s loose again.”

Daddy shook his head but I saw a grin ripple under his beard. His beloved Rose could do no wrong. Not far up the mountain we saw the bloodroot, a lacy white patch littered with dead leaves. Wild Rose stepped out of the trees near the scattering of flowers and stood looking down at us, tail switching. Her beauty took my breath away.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen her stray this far from home,” Mark said. “She must be looking for something to eat up here that she’s not getting in the pasture. Do you think she needs a dose of vitamins, Daddy?”

Wild Rose blinked at us indifferently for another second or two, then lowered her head to crop at the mossy grass beside the patch of bloodroot. All of a sudden Daddy sprang forward and threw up his arms. “Hyar, Rose!” he shouted. “Git!” Wild Rose turned and thundered off between the trees, tail high.

“Shoot, Daddy,” Mark said. “You scared me half to death.”

“Wouldn’t take much of that bloodroot to kill a horse,” Daddy said. He straightened his stocking hat and picked up the sack he had dropped. He moved on with Mark but I stood looking after Rose for a long time.

“This here’s a three-man operation, Douglas,” Daddy finally called. I went and joined them on my knees among the flowers.

BYRDIE

There was others in the family that had the touch, but some didn’t use it for good purposes. Grandmaw always said it can draw ugly things to you if you’re not right with the Lord. Whenever she talked like that, I figured she was thinking about her cousin Lou Ann. Most people thought Lou Ann wasn’t all there, but that was no excuse for her to be so hateful. She was a granny woman, too, but the neighbors didn’t go to her unless they was ashamed to go to Grandmaw and Della and Myrtle. Sometimes a girl would go up to Lou Ann’s to get rid of an unwanted child she was carrying. Lou Ann knowed what kind of root to use. She wasn’t above putting a curse on somebody, either. When my great-grandpaw died, he left the best plot of land to Grandmaw and her sisters. It liked to drove Lou Ann off the deep end. She told Grandmaw that she was putting a curse on them that wouldn’t be lifted until there was a baby born in our line with haint blue eyes. Haint blue is a special color that wards off evil spirits and curses. Grandmaw said, “That old devil knows ain’t nobody been born with blue eyes in our family for generations.” It was true, all of us had brown and green eyes. Lou Ann went down to Grandmaw’s house and pronounced her curse, then she climbed back up the hill and shut the door on her little shack perched on a ledge and never spoke to Grandmaw or the great-aunts ever again. I seen her sometimes setting on her porch and even though I couldn’t make out her face from such a distance, it seemed like her mean eyes was piercing right through me. After she laid that curse Grandmaw said awful things started happening to her and her sisters. Grandmaw, Myrtle, and Della all lost their husbands right close together, and two of Della’s grandbabies was stillborn. Myrtle’s house burnt down across the holler, and that’s how come she moved in with Grandmaw. Even though I lost all five of my children, I don’t believe in curses. But I was still glad all the same, the first time I seen Myra and she opened up them big haint blue eyes to look at me.

After Lou Ann died, Grandmaw and the great-aunts painted the doors and windowsills of the house haint blue to keep her mean old spirit out. Anytime that blue started to fade in the weather, they’d get out the paint can and freshen it up. Mammy said they kept it up until the last one of them, Myrtle, died at the age of ninety-two, after I had done married Macon a long time ago and moved off to Bloodroot Mountain.

DOUG

Daddy believes he knows that horse better than anybody, just because he loves her better. But nobody knows Wild Rose better than me, and sometimes I think I hate her. I’ve studied her for years now. Many times I’ve tried to enter her body, wishing to know how to enter Myra Lamb’s. I’ve stood at the fence and watched Wild Rose grazing on the mountain, a dark outline against the pale sky right before the sun is gone, and sent my soul across the rolling green searching for entry, maybe through the tear ducts of the blue glass eyes, maybe through the snuffling channels of the downy nose, or through the grass she rips from the earth and grinds between her big square teeth. Most of the time Wild Rose stands a few yards off with her head lowered, staring back at me. Her tail keeps moving, flicking off flies, but it’s me she’s concentrating on. She’s known for a while that I’m up to something, way before that stunt I tried to pull with the bloodroot last night, when I heard for sure that Myra got married. I guess I’ve wanted to poison Wild Rose for a long time, ever since the day I saw her standing beside the bloodroot patch.

She probably knows everything about me just by looking at my face. I bet she’s noticed how I don’t smile or talk much because of this front tooth, broken off and brown with rot. Daddy didn’t have the money to take us to the dentist when we were kids, and since I’ve been old enough, I haven’t gone. The truth is, this tooth embarrasses me, but I’d be more ashamed to have it fixed. My brothers would say I’m trying to make myself pretty so I can get a girlfriend. A big part of me was glad when all six of them moved off one by one, four of them heading north to work in the factories, two of them fighting in Vietnam. For a long time there was just Mark and me, until he joined the service, too. The house is lonesome now, but at least I’m not the butt of all the jokes anymore.

My tooth got broken when I was seven. It happened one Saturday when Daddy and I went to Millertown after shoelaces. We headed out every week, whether we needed anything or not. Daddy talked more on those Saturday trips than the other six days of the week put together, whistling and tapping the truck’s steering wheel all the way down the mountain. Looking back, he needed that time away from the farm and all the worries that come with it. He’ll never leave Bloodroot Mountain because the Cotters have lived here for generations, but I wonder if he ever wants to dust his hands of this place and move on.

Millertown was the big city to me back then, before I went to Knoxville with Daddy once to buy a washing machine. Now I see it for what it really is, a country town with old houses and glass-sprinkled lots and the smokestacks of dirty-looking factories looming over everything. The buildings on Main Street are falling into disrepair but they still have character, with tall windows and painted brick and arched doorways. Even in 1963, when I was seven, not many people shopped there anymore. Once the Millertown Plaza was built, with a supermarket and a department store, the downtown seemed outdated. There was only Odom’s Hardware, the dime store, the drugstore, a shoe store, a television repair shop, and a shabby restaurant where roaches skittered along the backs of the torn vinyl booths. Some people still feel like Main Street is the heart of the town. There’s a society of blue-haired ladies dedicated to preserving what they call the historic district. Daddy still shopped there when I was small, because it was what he was used to. He’s always been set in his ways and it took a while for the Plaza to win him over.

The Saturday that my tooth got broken, we climbed into the truck and headed out as usual. Ordinarily Mark would have come along, but he was in trouble for misbehaving at church. Daddy and I had been to the dime store for shoelaces and were passing Odom’s Hardware on our way to lunch when I saw a sign in the window advertising a junked car for sale. Daddy stopped to examine the sign and decided he wanted to take a look at the car. He claimed he might want it for parts. That’s the way he is. He goes all over the countryside dickering with other men just like himself, silent and gruff with greasy caps on their heads and plugs of tobacco tucked in their jaws. No matter how Mama fusses, he’ll drive from one end of Tennessee to the other collecting junk, or even out of state if he hears about a bargain. Half the time he brings back things we don’t need and can’t use. Once it was a box of hammers, and another time he hoisted an old unicycle out of the truck bed when he got home. Mama really threw a fit over that one.

We waited until after lunch to see about the car. Daddy took his time and had two cups of coffee. I drank a chocolate milkshake. Coming out of the restaurant, Main Street was deserted because everything closed early on Saturdays. It gave me an empty feeling. We got into the truck and went to a house with dark upper windows and old furniture setting on the porch. It might have been fancy if it hadn’t looked so rundown. When Daddy rang the bell, a man came out and said the car was in the backyard. He called Daddy by name as if they already knew each other, but I couldn’t place the man myself.

We went around the house and saw the car up on blocks in a thatch of weeds with its hood propped open. Daddy crossed the yard behind the man to have a closer look. I stood around with my hands in my pockets, wishing they’d get down to business. There were toys in the backyard, but no sign of the kids they belonged to. It was a sad place and I wanted to go home. I drifted to the edge of the yard and looked at the weedy lot next door. It was littered with junk and trash, almost like a dump. I lingered there for a while, daydreaming about nothing in particular. Then the back screen door of the house screeched open and slapped shut. I turned and saw a boy coming down the concrete steps with a basketball under his arm. He was bigger than me, tall with black hair and white skin. He dribbled the ball a couple of times on a bald spot of ground before noticing me. When he saw me standing at the edge of the yard, he stopped and looked me over with suspicious eyes. I didn’t know how to talk to other kids besides my brothers, so I hoped he would go back to his dribbling. My heart sank when he walked over and spoke to me.

“Hey,” he said, and bounced the ball between us a couple of times.

“Hey.”

He stared at me for a minute, so hard I felt my ears turning red.

“You want to see something?” the boy asked finally.

“What?”

“A skeleton.”

I didn’t answer. I thought he was picking on me.

“Not a human skeleton, dummy. A dog one.”

“Oh.”

“You want to see it?”

“Where’s it at?”

“Over there.” He tilted his head toward the weedy lot.

“I guess.”

He tossed his basketball back into the yard and I watched it bounce a few times before it came to rest by a rusty swing set. To this day, I don’t know why I followed him. I had a bad feeling from the minute he sized me up with his mean black eyes. We walked into the weeds and as we got farther from the house I grew more and more nervous. I looked back over my shoulder at Daddy and the other man, bent under the car’s hood.

“I want to go back,” I told the boy.

“Come on. It’s right over here,” he said.

He took me by the arm and dragged me down a glass-littered path, past a heap of charred garbage and an old mattress spilling stuffing. Finally we came to the edge of the lot, where dark trees crowded close to a rickety board fence. I wanted to cry, but didn’t let myself. I could see the bones ahead, glimmering white in a mess of green vines. The boy steered me roughly by the shoulders until the skeleton was at my toes.

He wanted me to be afraid, but the dog bones weren’t so bad once I saw them close up. They were wound in a shroud of morning glories and the flowers made them almost beautiful. But it turned out a dead dog wasn’t the most interesting thing to be found in the weedy lot. When I knelt down to have a better look at the skeleton, something shiny caught my eye. Glittering in the weeds near the dog’s skull, I saw the tip of a rock poking out of the earth like a headstone. Right away, I lost interest in the bones and reached out to touch the rock. Back then, Mark and I collected quartz. We called the shining chunks we found field diamonds, and this was the biggest one I’d ever seen.

The field diamond was half buried and wouldn’t budge at first. The boy knelt to see what I was doing and soon he was helping me dig out the rock with his fingers. I grew afraid that he would try to claim the treasure since he had done some of the work, so I was determined to be the one who pulled it free. I gave one last yank and suddenly I was holding the quartz in my hand. I brushed off the reddish dirt and we looked at it together, the boy leaning over my shoulder. I always wanted just one precious thing for myself. Ever since I could remember, Mark got everything with his clamoring mouth — more milk, more candy, more toys. He was two years older than me but he acted like a baby, always bellowing until he got his way. Most of the time, I would rather have done without than to be like him. But this once, I wanted the prize all to myself.

“Let me see it,” the boy said.

As soon as he spoke, I knew. He’d steal it and run off as Mark would have done, and I’d never see it again. As much as the boy intimidated me, I clamped my hand down on that dirty chunk of something special and said, “It’s mine.”

“Give it,” the boy said. His voice was calm enough but I can still see the awful look on his face. My guts turned to jelly. I should have given it to him, but I couldn’t bring myself to. He tried to pry open my fingers but I tore my fist away and ran. I heard him chasing and before I knew what was happening, the boy had knocked me down. My head bounced off the ground like his basketball had done and all the wind wheezed out of my lungs. I barely noticed how bad it hurt. All I felt was the rock flying out of my hands. I rolled over and tried to find it in the weeds, but the boy had already snatched it up.

He could have taken it then and left me alone. I was too scared to fight. I would have given it to him. But the boy wasn’t satisfied to steal my rock. He straddled me and I saw something crazy in his eyes, something more than meanness. He drew back with the chunk of quartz and brought it down on my mouth. There was a bright flash of pain and I must have screamed because our daddies came running. It took them forever to reach us.

The boy told them I fell and hit my mouth on a rock. I didn’t contradict his story, mostly because my smashed mouth hurt too much to talk. I don’t know if Daddy and the other man believed him or not. They seemed more concerned with the blood wetting my shirt. I didn’t realize until we were in the car on the way to the doctor’s that my new front tooth was broken. Maybe that’s when I knew, somewhere inside, that I wasn’t meant to have a wild, precious thing like that field diamond all for myself. And even if I could buy it, as Daddy bought Wild Rose years later, it would never really be mine.

BYRDIE

I wish I could remember Chickweed Holler better, but some things happened there I’ll never forget. I liked going dowsing with Myrtle. Sometimes if she traveled on foot to a place not too far, I could leave the holler for a while and see somewhere new. The soles of my feet used to itch at night and Myrtle claimed it meant my feet would walk one day on foreign ground. That’s how come she took me. She thought I ort to travel. One time Mammy let me go to the next county with Myrtle and we had to camp overnight. Mammy was worried but Myrtle said, “Why, we’ll have a big time.”

When the sun went down we stopped to rest under a lonely tree in a wide open field. All day long we had walked and talked. Myrtle was good to ask questions to, because she talked to everybody just the same, didn’t matter what their age was. The whole day it was just like Myrtle told Mammy. We was having a big time. But when we settled down for the night in that long, lonesome field, not a house in sight for miles, I started missing Grandmaw and Mammy. Myrtle must have seen I was fixing to cry. She said, “Come on now, little birdie. Let’s build us a fire. I brung some chestnuts for us to roast.” The idea of roasted chestnuts worked to cheer me up some, and gathering branches took my mind off being homesick. Pretty soon we had a good fire going. We set looking into the flames as the dark came creeping over the field grass. It was hard to look away from the light of it, even though it hurt my eyes. After while Myrtle went to fishing around in her dress pocket. I thought she had the chestnuts in there, but she pulled out a little sprig of something leafy instead. She held it up for me to see in the firelight.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“This is my favorite herb,” she said. “Do you know why?” When she grinned her mouth stretched tight across her toothless gums. Her eyes reflected the flames back at me and I felt a little bit scared of her. I wanted my mammy more than ever.

“It’s called myrtle, like my name.”

“Oh,” I said. “Where’s the chestnuts?”

“Just a minute, little birdie. I want to show you something. If you throw this myrtle in the fire, the face of the one you’re bound to marry will rise out of the smoke.”

I just blinked at her at first. I didn’t want to see a face in the smoke, but I didn’t want to disappoint my great-aunt Myrtle, either. She was always bragging about how big and smart I was. She held out the sprig and after a minute I took it. I looked at the flames and they put me in mind of orange snakes dancing. My heart went to flying. I throwed that myrtle in the fire before I could chicken out of it and the fire dwindled down to just about nothing. Me and Myrtle both watched like we was under a spell, waiting for something to happen. Directly the smoke came rising up, slow and thick and black. At first I couldn’t make nothing out, but then I started seeing it. There was a pair of black eyes looking out at me. I wanted to back away from the fire but my legs wasn’t no use anymore. Then a straight nose and a fine mouth and some waving locks of coal black hair formed out of the smoke. I got so scared I couldn’t breathe. When I finally found my legs I scrambled away from that fire and ran. I yanked down my bloomers and squatted to make water in the grass before I wet all over myself. Myrtle came to check on me and I tried not to cry as we walked back to the fire. She didn’t say nothing but I knowed she felt bad for scaring me that way. She pulled me close and held me against her before we bedded down for the night. I forgot about that face until years later, after I seen John Odom for the first time. It wasn’t my own future husband’s face that came swimming up out of the fire to look at me. It was my granddaughter, Myra’s.

* * *

DOUG

I was twelve when Wild Rose came home in a trailer. Daddy opened the door and she burst out like a thunderstorm. I stood back in awe of such a powerful creature of God. It was easy to see that He had made her with love, carving out her velvet nostrils with His most delicate tool, sculpting every muscle under that shining hide. The way Daddy was always dragging something home, I wasn’t surprised when he told us he’d found a horse. He said he’d wanted a paint horse with blue eyes ever since he was a boy. One day he went to see about a tractor a man had cheap in Dalton, Georgia, and found Wild Rose instead. What surprised me was how crazy Daddy was over that horse right from the start. He would stand at the fence for hours just watching her graze. It must have been love at first sight. One morning I looked out the kitchen window and saw them together in the pasture. I was up early and the ground was still stiff with frost. I took my coffee and sat on the back steps watching as Daddy tried to ride Wild Rose. For a minute, she even let him put the saddle on. He crept up to her side, one foot in the stirrup, and hauled himself onto her back. The instant the horse felt Daddy’s weight, she threw him. He landed so hard, it seemed I heard the thud of his body hitting the ground from several yards off. I wanted to go see if he was all right, but I knew his pride would be hurting.

Thinking about Wild Rose coming home in a trailer reminds me of the first time I saw Myra, dropping out of a tree behind the church house at the homecoming dinner. Her dress flew up like a parachute, tiny legs waving and black hair floating out behind her. Myra had been around my whole life, because the Lambs lived down the mountain and went to our church, but that was the first time I took notice of her. Myra didn’t cry when she landed, but Mr. Lamb rushed to her side, dropping his paper plate and splattering food everywhere. He spanked her in front of the whole congregation and I didn’t blame him. He was scared. It was only natural to be protective of something so precious. I knew the feeling myself, even as a small boy. You took extra care of your special things. That’s how I thought of Myra, as something extra special and wild. The wild part was scary to Mr. Lamb and me both, because it meant we were always in danger of losing her.

From the day she dropped out of that tree behind the church, I thought about Myra all the time. I followed her around school once first grade started, even though I was too backward to make friends with any of the other kids. Naturally, once Mark realized how I felt about Myra, he decided he wanted her, too. He set about stealing her attention every chance he got, making her laugh by pulling faces and burping in the library.

When Mark and I were old enough to go off by ourselves, we walked down the mountain to play with Myra as often as we could. She liked to wear dresses in warm weather, even though she was a tomboy, because she couldn’t stand for her legs to be confined. I guess it was easier for her to run away from us with a floppy dress on. Sometimes she disappeared into the woods at the end of the day without a word and we learned not to look for her. She always came back out to play again. The three of us spent nearly every weekend shooting tin cans with my BB gun and catching grasshoppers and wrestling in the mud if we got mad at each other. Myra jumped on my back and bit me once because I beat her at a game of marbles. She was a spoiled brat, but I didn’t mind. I was her fool from the minute she jumped out of that churchyard tree.

It was best when we ran off alone together. I followed her places where Mark wouldn’t go, into dripping caves littered with bones and hollow logs squirming with sow bugs. I wasn’t afraid when I was with her. We played all over the woods, not concerned about trespassing. My family and the Lambs and the Barnetts were the only ones living near the top of Bloodroot Mountain. The women shared their gardens and wherever the hunting was good a neighbor was welcome to shoot what he could. Fences were meant for keeping livestock in and strangers out, not for each other.

Bloodroot Mountain is small as far as mountains go. Daddy says it’s not even a thousand feet at the summit, but as a child it was the whole world to me. I knew that at the bottom of the mountain, a little over twelve miles down winding roads, through farming communities like Piney Grove and Slop Creek and Valley Home, there was Millertown, and about sixty miles beyond that was Chickweed Holler, where Myra’s granny came from. I had traveled that far with Daddy and seen the lay of the land, long stretches of corn and high grass, bridges over foaming waters, and white farmhouses scattered on hills. But the minute I got back home, with none of those places visible through the trees, I forgot about them. There was only Bloodroot Mountain and I didn’t mind because Myra was up here with me. The whole mountain belonged to us and we knew its terrain like our own bodies, every scar and cleft and fold.

But one fall morning, when I was ten, the three of us found something we hadn’t seen before. It was an abandoned cistern high on the slope behind the Barnetts’ house, half covered in dead vines. Myra pulled back the growth to reveal a stone opening edged with moss. Bright leaves floated on the surface of the murky water collected inside. I held my breath as Myra knelt to look closer. I’d heard tales of children drowning in wells and cisterns. Suddenly the trees I had lived under all my life seemed like giants peering over our shoulders, some so tall a grown man couldn’t have reached the lowest branches. I looked back toward Mr. Barnett’s house, a swatch of dingy white peeking up through the skinny trunks. It seemed so far below us, like there were no grown-ups around for miles.

“Oh,” Myra said. “Poor little thing.”

Mark crouched beside Myra and I took a step forward, not wanting her to think Mark was braver than me. I leaned over and saw a baby chimney swift floating among the leaves. I swallowed hard and inched a little closer.

“Must have fell out of a nest,” Mark said, glancing into the trees overhead.

“Chimney swifts don’t live in trees,” Myra said. “Look, there’s a nest in here.”

When she pointed I saw an empty cradle of straw in the shadows below the cistern’s opening. It made the bird’s death even sadder somehow, that its corpse had been left behind. I lowered myself beside Myra, the earth cold under my knees. I couldn’t look away from the dark clump of feathers, the tiny, sealed-shut eyes. We peered into the cistern for a long time, like mourners at a graveside. I didn’t notice until it was almost too late how far over Myra was leaning, her top half nearly lost in the dank gloom. Then we heard the crack of twigs and the thrash of fallen leaves. Before I had time to wonder who was coming, a big hand hauled Myra away from the cistern’s stone mouth by the back of her dress. Mark and I scrambled to our feet, eyes wide. It was Haskell Barnett standing there with a crease between his bushy eyebrows, leaning on the handle of his axe.

“Myra Jean Lamb,” he said. “Your granddaddy would skin you alive if he caught you up here messing around. And you boys ought to get a switching, too.”

The three of us stood in a line gaping up at him. I was half afraid he would take matters into his own hands and do the switching himself. He frowned down at us, maybe waiting for one of us to speak up, but my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. Then Myra burst out crying, which was a surprise to me. She wasn’t prone to tears.

“Here, now,” Mr. Barnett said, softening right away. “I didn’t mean to make you squall. But I told Byrdie and Macon I’d always watch over you. What would they think if I let you fall down a dadburn hole?” He put his big hand on top of Myra’s head and she dried her eyes hard on her sleeve. I knew she was embarrassed to have cried.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t tell Granddaddy, okay?”

“I won’t this time,” he said. “But don’t you younguns be messing around that old cistern anymore. Now come on to the house. Margaret’s made banana bread.”

I looked back to where the chimney swift floated, the loneliness of its corpse still tearing at me. I was sorry to leave it behind but I wanted to follow Mr. Barnett. If it was true that he swore to watch over Myra, we were in on something together now.

BYRDIE

One morning I woke up with the thresh. My mouth was broke out so thick with sores I couldn’t hardly swallow. Della said, “Ain’t but one thing’ll take care of this.”

Mammy was standing over my bed looking worried. “What?” she asked.

“A man that’s never laid eyes on his father.”

“Who’ll we take her to?” Myrtle asked, standing in the doorway with her hand on her hip. She looked blurry to me. My mouth hurt so bad I couldn’t see straight.

“Clifford Pinkston’s the closest,” Grandmaw said, leaning over to rub my hair.

“You can’t tell me Clifford Pinkston never seen his daddy,” Mammy said. “I went to school with him and I seen his daddy my own self a hundred times.”

“Howard Pinkston ain’t Clifford’s daddy,” Grandmaw said. She was done getting her headscarf on. “He was an orphan and the Pinkstons took him to raise.” She turned back to me and when she smiled I felt a little better. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll get you fixed up right quick. Clifford just lives down the holler a piece.”

I had seen Clifford’s house before, on the way to other places. It was about two miles from ours, perched on the edge of a bluff near the bottom of the holler, a weathered three-story with a boarded-up window on the top floor and a wraparound porch that sagged down in the back, overlooking a patch of rocky farmland. There was always goats and geese and peacocks strutting around in the yard. In winter I could see his chimney smoke puffing up through the trees. Grandmaw told me on the walk that he lived by hisself because he was too backward to get him a woman. Mammy said she didn’t believe he ever said two or three words when they was in school together.

“What makes you think he’ll help us?” Mammy asked.

“Why, Clifford’s always been a good neighbor,” Grandmaw said.

He was out on the yard splitting wood when me and Mammy and Grandmaw came up. He took off his hat when he seen us. My mouth hurt too bad to think about much but I took note of the fine figure Clifford cut when he stood up straight. He was long and tall with strong brown arms. I could see his muscles with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up. When we got close my nerves went away because of how kind his face was.

“Hello there, Clifford,” Grandmaw said.

“Hidee, Miss Ruth,” he said.

Then he nodded to Mammy. His face and ears turned red.

“How are you making it, Clifford?” Mammy said. “It’s been a long time since we was in school together.” She smiled and I pictured her as a girl. It crossed my mind that Clifford might think she was pretty. It made me feel funny to think of my mammy as a woman and not just the one who bore me. I wasn’t used to seeing her around men her own age. My daddy died when I was a baby, so I didn’t remember them being together.

“This’n here’s got the thresh,” Grandmaw said, and set me out in front of him by the shoulders. “I was hoping we could trouble you to help us out.”

The way Clifford looked at Mammy, I knowed he wouldn’t refuse her anything. Then he looked down and studied me real good. I felt a warmness spreading in my heart like I never knowed before. He had the kindest eyes I ever seen. He seemed familiar someway. I had the queerest thought that he was my daddy, even though I knowed my daddy was dead. He knelt down before me so our faces was close. I could smell his sweat where he’d been working in the heat. I stood still as I could, waiting to see what would happen. He took hold of my face so gentle, and it was like I always needed to be touched that way by a man’s fingers, after all them years being raised by women.

“Open your mouth, Byrdie,” Mammy said. Her voice was thick and fuzzy, like it sounded when she woke up in the mornings. It seemed to me like the world had quit turning and Mammy must have felt it, too. I did as she said and Clifford leaned in to cover my lips with his own. He blowed warm wind in my mouth and down my swelled-up throat. I could feel my lungs filling up with it. It was such a relief someway that I wanted to squall. He pulled back from me, still holding my face, and we looked for a while in each other’s eyes. It seemed like even the birds in the trees had quit making noise. Then Grandmaw said, “Well, that ort to do it.” I looked up at her and Mammy standing over us. Mammy’s face was white as a sheet. She was staring at Clifford with something like worship in her eyes. She’d felt the power of what he done the same as I did.

“Why don’t you come up and eat supper with us tonight?” Mammy asked. Her voice still sounded far off. “It’s the least we can do to thank ye.”

“Maybe tomorrow night,” Clifford said, and I could tell Mammy was disappointed. She probably figured he never would come.

Sure enough, the next day when I got out of the bed my thresh had cleared up. I was feeling better, setting out on the porch playing with a doll, when I looked up and seen Clifford coming. He waved his hat and I ran to tell Grandmaw and Mammy.

“Well, I’ll be,” Grandmaw said. “I never dreamt he’d turn up.” It was true Clifford was backward, but he was so struck on Mammy he couldn’t resist her. Pretty soon he was coming to supper just about every night, and bringing me and Mammy presents. He took us to town and the fair and all kinds of places. I got to where I loved that man just about better than anything, and so did Mammy. When he asked Mammy to be his wife a few months later, I reckon I was more tickled than she was. I got to wear baby’s breath in my hair to the wedding. After the knot was tied, I figured I had a new daddy. I started calling Clifford “Pap,” and all of us was happy.

DOUG

Besides Myra, Haskell Barnett was my only friend. After he pulled Myra away from that cistern, we were allies in my mind. The Barnetts’ grown children had moved up north and they were lonesome for the sound of small voices, so they treated Myra and me like their own flesh and blood. We loved playing at their house. Mrs. Barnett was always baking and Mr. Barnett showed us how to build forts and shoot with slingshots. Mark stopped visiting once he got older, but Myra and I still went there even after we were grown. Sometimes Myra and Mrs. Barnett embroidered or cooked together while I helped Mr. Barnett with the outside chores. He paid me but he didn’t have to. It was nice being alone with him. He was quiet when I needed him to be, but he also told good stories.

When I was eleven, we took our first walk together. All afternoon I had handed him tools as he worked under his truck, until he slid out into the springtime sun and said, “I need to stretch my legs. You want to come with me?” We went far up the mountain, but not to the top because the way was too rugged and steep. Not even Daddy ventured to the summit anymore, after breaking his leg as a boy. Daddy said there was a grassy bald on top of Bloodroot Mountain where his grandfather used to drive his cattle to. It was a dangerous trip but the high mountain grass was better for the cows and it was cooler up there in summer. Walking with Mr. Barnett, I wondered if my greatgrandfather’s motivations had less to do with his cows and more to do with spending time alone where it was quiet, away from his duties on the farm. I thought about Daddy’s story, how one day he decided to see the top, even after he’d been forbidden. He fell trying to scale the steep cliffs and lay for a day and a night before he was found. He claimed to have seen some frightening things while he was lying up there but wouldn’t say what, only that if I ever went farther than the big rock over the bluff, he’d skin me alive. I never would have risked it, but sometimes I dreamed of my great-grandfather driving his cows up those rocky slopes to reach a meadow that must have been like paradise to him.

The woods looked different walking with Mr. Barnett than when I was alone. At the time the change was hard to understand, but looking back I see why. It was because he still observed the mountain with wonder, even though he knew it better than I did. As we passed through dark patches of shade into clearings like rooms of light, he paused to touch ridges of fungus growing on bark, stopped to catch a moth and study its wings, bent to pick up an arrowhead. When I was with him I saw it too, how magical everything was.

We came to a place where the cottonwoods were thick, shedding their seeds in drifting white tufts. Small clouds floated all around us like something from a dream, lighting on Mr. Barnett’s shoulders and the top of his head, where the graying hair was still matted down from his cap. We stood watching for a while, faces lifted to the sun. “Look, Douglas,” he said. “How pretty it is. Makes me think about the Lord.”

His words made my arms prickle with goosebumps. I understood what he meant so well that, after a few seconds of holding my breath, I couldn’t resist telling him my secret. “That’s how I feel about Myra,” I said, closing my eyes so I didn’t have to see his face. “She makes me think about Jesus.” I expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. He put his hand on my shoulder. He must have already known. From then on, we took walks together at least once a week. The only thing I couldn’t tell Myra was how much I loved her, so I told Mr. Barnett all about it instead. He never said I was too young to be in love, even though I was only eleven. When I told him how I felt about Myra, he believed me.

I didn’t expect before I started talking how much there was to tell, but Mr. Barnett didn’t mind. He knew I needed our walks and he made time for them. I poured my heart out to him a thousand times over the years, not bothering in those cool autumn evenings or snow-dusted mornings or shade-speckled summer afternoons to cover my broken tooth. He didn’t look at me anyway. That’s what made it so easy to talk to him when I could barely say two words to anyone else but Myra. It was how he reached out to touch a leaf with a worm inching across it, how he bent to examine a hoof mark or paw print, how he plucked a persimmon and popped it into his mouth, as if he wasn’t listening. But he always was. “She’ll come around, Douglas,” he’d say. “One of these days.”

I didn’t do all the talking on our walks. He told me stories, mostly about the times he had with Myra’s grandparents growing up. When Mr. Barnett lost his older brother in the war, Macon Lamb was the closest thing he had to one. Since he was the only boy left in a house full of sisters, he was always at Macon’s heels. “He’s the one taught me how to smoke and chew both,” Mr. Barnett said. “Some people didn’t like him because he was quiet, and they took that for hateful. But I knowed the kind of man he really was. He’d do things you didn’t expect, like whittle something and give it to you for a present. One time I caught him off by hisself hid in the corn patch, reading a book of poems. His face got red as a beet and he flew so mad I thought he was going to fight me, just because I knowed he liked to read poems. But Macon never stayed mad for long.”

Mr. Barnett talked about Myra’s granny, too. He said he could see why Macon was drawn to Byrdie, even though she wasn’t much to look at. She was brash and sassy and tough. “I seen her bury every one of her children and take to her bed for months at a time,” Mr. Barnett said. “But someway she always got back on her feet. It was Macon that never got over it. Since their youngest, Clio, got killed, he’s been scared to death something might happen to the baby she left behind. Myra’s the only thing he’s got left of Clio. That’s why he watches over that youngun like a hawk.”

I loved hearing stories about Myra as a baby, how Macon and Byrdie doted on her. Mr. Barnett said they worked hard to make a good home for her to grow up in, and I can’t think of a better one than what they had. It’s pretty all over Bloodroot Mountain, but the Lambs have the best spot. When the trees are bare you can see far into the woods from their back steps, and from the front window you can look down on the winding dirt road and the creek rushing alongside it. Mr. Barnett still liked to walk up the mountain on summer evenings and sit in Byrdie and Macon’s yard, drinking sweet tea or lemonade and talking about the Bible way into the night. “I can remember watching Myra toddle around when she was a baby, catching lightning bugs,” he told me once. “She’d come running to show us how they lit up her hands.” He stopped walking then to look at me. “I can see why you love her, Douglas,” he said. “That little girl is special.” It seemed like he was trying to tell me something, but I was afraid to ask what it was.

BYRDIE

It was sad to leave our cabin with the haint blue door and go live with Pap on his farm, even as much as I loved him. We still seen Grandmaw and the great-aunts but it wasn’t the same. Me and Mammy lived there on Pap’s farm until I was fifteen years old, when Grandmaw died. It was an awful time and after we buried her we got to where we couldn’t hardly stand Chickweed Holler and all the memories there. Pap said one day maybe we ort to move down to the valley. He’d struggled so long with the rocky soil on his farm, he believed he could do better somewhere else. Me and Mammy agreed to it because we needed to run away from our grief. Much as we cared for Della and Myrtle, it was hard to be around them without missing Grandmaw so bad it liked to killed us. Pap got word of land for sale about sixty miles east, in a little farming community called Piney Grove. He bought ten acres off a man named Bucky Cochran that owned a big dairy farm and everything else along the five-mile stretch of road between our place and his house, a two-story yellow brick with white trim and fancy columns on the porch. Pap built us a log cabin with a loft where I slept in a feather bed Mammy made for me. Every day I’d slip off from my chores to set by the springhouse where we kept a jug of fresh milk tied up in the ice-cold spring. I’d pull it up out of the water and close my eyes and take a long drink and it seemed like nothing in life could taste sweeter. I thought it was the prettiest plot of land I ever seen, too, until I came up here to Bloodroot Mountain.

I took a job cooking and cleaning for Bucky’s wife, Barbara Cochran, and we found us a church not far from the house. That’s where I seen Macon for the first time. I never was good-looking like Myra, even before I got real old. My ears stuck out and I had a good head of hair but it had an ugly color to it, like dirty dishwater. It’s a wonder Macon took to me, but he wasn’t no looker hisself. Had a puckered face and scraggly whiskers and a brown birthmark over his eye shaped like an island off of the globe I seen at the Cochrans’ house. Every chance I got I’d sneak and spin that globe and run my fingers over the shapes. Macon’s birthmark put me in mind of all them shapes that stood for places I’d like to go. Sometimes the soles of my feet still itched in the night. Up until he died I had that island to run my fingers over whenever I wanted to.

Piney Grove Church was about two miles down the road from us, and about the same from the foot of Bloodroot Mountain. I guess you could say me and Macon met in the middle. He caught my eye right off, setting over in the amen corner with suspenders on. I’ve thought about what drawed me to Macon, besides that island birthmark, and I believe it was being able to tell right off that he was a man. He wasn’t but eight years older than me but there was something about the way he carried hisself. He’d give his sisters stern looks when they went to giggling on the back pew, and every time he led prayer his voice rung up in the rafters. I could tell just by setting in the church house with Macon that he’d know how to treat a woman and run a farm and be a good daddy like Pap. Even though I was only fifteen, I knowed I wanted to marry a man like him.

That’s how come I stood close to him every chance I got and tried to get myself noticed. Seemed like it took forever for him to figure out I was around. Then finally at the Easter egg hunt me and him and some of the other older ones was picked to hide the eggs. It was springtime and chilly out. The churchyard grass was bright green and slick with dew. My feet was wet in them thin shoes I had on, but I couldn’t hardly feel it. All I knowed was Macon Lamb being close by. Every once in a while I’d ease up on him, like I was hiding another egg, and catch a whiff of his soapy-smelling skin.

I seen him pass through the gate to the graveyard and finally he was off by hisself. The others headed around back of the church where the trees and outhouses was, so it was just me and Macon. I went with my egg basket amongst the tombstones, some of them old enough to where the names was rubbed off. Such a quiet came over me, with the sky blue and the birds singing. There’s always something peaceful about a graveyard.

Macon was bent over hiding an egg at the base of a stone carved like a lamb. It was a child’s grave and I’ve wondered more than once if that wasn’t the Lord warning me and Macon of things to come. I crept up behind him and said, “I didn’t know we could hide these out here.” I liked to scared him to death. He jumped sky high and both of us laughed. Then he stood there looking at me funny, eyes twinkling like they did when he was up to mischief. “I reckon we can,” he said. “Nobody told me any different.”

“Well,” I said. “Where do you reckon would be a good place to hide this’n?” My mouth was dry as a bone. I was holding up this nice pink egg, I still remember it. That’s when Macon finally noticed me. We hid the rest of them eggs together.

DOUG

In the winter right before I turned twelve, Myra got chicken pox and stayed home from school for a week. At recess I sat by the chain-link fence at the back of the playground poking sticks and brown weeds through the diamonds into the churchyard grass on the other side, my fingers stiff with cold. I looked at the graves and thought of climbing over to lie on top of one where it was quiet and still, away from the thud of basketballs and the screams of my bundled up classmates lunging under the net, white bursts of breath pluming out of their hoods. Without Myra, they intimidated me a little, even though we were all the same. Before the new high school was built, in 1970, kids of all ages from across the county were bused in to Slop Creek where the red brick school building stood beside a Methodist church at the end of a dusty dirt road. We were mostly the children of farmers and I guess I should have related to them. But it wasn’t just my classmates I couldn’t get used to. Myra and I hated everything about school. In first grade, we were always in trouble for hiding. We’d slip into the janitor’s closet, eyes stinging from the bleachy mop water. Once we ran into the field behind the school with the teacher calling after us. We went deep into the high weeds, laughter making us breathless. When the teacher found us she paddled us both, two licks. I was miserable without Myra, half mad at her for being sick. I drew up my knees and tried to be invisible but it didn’t work. A girl from my class named Tina Cutshaw saw me and walked over.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I didn’t look up at her face. I already knew it, pale with slit eyes and a fuzzy ring of dun-colored hair. She sat in the desk next to mine staring at me all day. I looked at her shoes instead, mud-crusted brogans with the laces untied. They were probably hand-me-downs from her brother, a bone-thin boy who was always throwing up. There was a rumor that he needed surgery on his stomach but their parents couldn’t afford it. Tina’s father drew a disability check and her mother had run off with another man. I didn’t answer her. I waited for her to go away, but she sat down in the grass close to me. I scooted over. When she breathed through her mouth I could smell her rotten teeth.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” she asked.

My heart leapt to hear Myra called my girlfriend. I thought at first she was making fun of me, but I glanced at her eyes and they were serious. Maybe Tina Cutshaw wasn’t so bad. I poked a twig through the fence. “She’s got the chicken pox,” I said.

Tina was silent for a minute but I could still feel her watching me. It made my skin crawl. “You oughtn’t to mess with that girl,” she said finally. She plucked a thistle and twirled its stalk between her thumb and forefinger. Part of me wanted to ask what she was talking about, but I didn’t. I glanced at her dirty face. She grinned and tickled herself under the chin with the thistle’s prickly head. “Don’t you know about her people? My mamaw said they’re witches. You better watch out. She’ll put a hex on you.”

I turned away from Tina Cutshaw and stared through the chain link at the silent graves, wishing for her to disappear. I could feel my ears reddening.

“It’s true,” she said. “Mamaw told me. If you keep hanging around with that girl, you’ll be cursed the rest of your life. All kinds of bad things will happen to you.”

I should have got up and walked off but somehow I couldn’t move. Then I felt a touch under my chin, a sly tickling. I jerked away and she dropped the thistle in my lap. I pressed my face into the chain link so hard that my cheeks and forehead hurt. “What’s wrong, Doug?” Tina Cutshaw asked. “I can be your girlfriend if you want.”

After school I walked down the mountain to see Mr. Barnett, chest tightening as I passed the house where I knew Myra was sick in bed. I found Mr. Barnett hammering on his roof, where a storm had blown off some shingles. I waited on the porch until he came down, trying not to think about Tina Cutshaw and the prickle of her thistle’s head.

“What do you say, Douglas?” Mr. Barnett said, coming around the house with his hammer. He stopped grinning when he saw my face. “Lord have mercy, boy. You look like you done lost your best friend.” I stared down at my shoes, not ready yet to talk.

He left the hammer on the steps and I followed him across the yard, hands stuffed deep in my coat pockets against the cold. Halfway up the slope, when I still hadn’t spoken, Mr. Barnett asked what was on my mind. “Something happened at school,” I said. I told him about Tina Cutshaw all in a rush, barely stopping to pause for breath. When I was finished, light-headed and dizzy, I waited for him to say it was nonsense. He moved silently under the winter trees, eyes tracking a red bird, until I began to think he wouldn’t respond at all. Then he startled me by saying, “I figured you’d hear it sooner or later. That talk’s been going around ever since Byrdie came here from Chick-weed Holler.” I stopped and stared but he walked on without me. I hurried to catch up.

“Back when Byrdie and her mama first came to Piney Grove to worship, there was an old busybody in the congregation by the name of Ethel Cox. She had something ill to say about everybody. My mama was in charge of organizing the bake sale that year and she held a meeting at our house. Well, there wasn’t much talk about a bake sale that night. It was stuffy so Mama had opened the windows. I stood outside smoking and heard the whole thing. Big old Ethel got up and said, ‘Before we get started, there’s something important that ort to be addressed.’ She was always trying to sound proper. I peeped in and seen her standing in front of one of the chairs Mama had arranged in a circle, big as a Sherman tank in that flowered dress she wore all the time. She said, ‘I’m talking about that Pinkston woman and her girl that’s been coming to Sunday morning services. I thought I knew that woman the minute I seen her. I got to talking with my second cousin that lives in Chickweed Holler where the Pinkstons come from, and I figured it out.’ Then she took a big pause. The other ladies was getting restless. It was hot and they was fanning theirselves with paper fans Mama got from the funeral home. I could tell they wished Ethel would get on with it. Ethel said, ‘That woman’s mother is Ruth Bell, one of the Chickweed Holler witches.’ I knowed she expected everybody to gasp and carry on, but they just looked at her like she was crazy. She said, ‘Ain’t you all ever heard of the Chickweed Holler witches?’ Her fat cheeks was turning red. Mama asked her what in the world she was talking about. She never could stand Ethel Cox. Ethel said, ‘The women of that family has been practicing witchcraft up in them hills since time out of mind. I been hearing stories about them all of my life.’ Mama said, ‘Now, Ethel, you know there ain’t no such thing as witchcraft.’ Ethel looked mad enough to spit. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and said, ‘Well, them Bell women thinks there is. They’re up yonder making love potions and casting spells, and who knows what all. We can’t have people like that joining our church.’ Then Mama got Ethel’s goat real good. She said, ‘If what you say is the truth, it sounds like they need to be in church just about as bad as you do.’ I believe Ethel would’ve choked Mama dead on the spot if she could have got away with it. She stood there for another minute red in the face, mouth working like a fish on dry land, trying to think of something else to say, before she finally set back down. If it hadn’t been for Mama, Ethel Cox might have got her way and run Byrdie off.”

He fell silent and we walked on for a while, our shadows long on the frozen ground. I listened to the wind stirring through the trees. It sounded like an incantation. “Mr. Barnett,” I said at last. He glanced at me and kept on walking. “Do you believe it?”

He seemed to think it over, maybe deciding if he should go on. “I never did buy that talk about witches,” he said. “But sometimes I thought about it. Like one time I walked up the hill to take Byrdie and Macon a cake Margaret made and seen Myra sleeping under a tree. She was just a little bitty thing then, must have got tuckered out playing and laid down right yonder in the shade to take a nap. I walked up to make sure she was all right before I went in the house. That’s when I seen the butterflies. They was lit all over her arms and legs and in her hair. There was even two or three on her face, all sizes and colors with their wings opening and closing. I shut my eyes, thinking I might be seeing things. But when I opened them up, all of the butterflies was still there and Myra still sleeping away. She looked like a child out of a fairy story. For some reason, I was scared to death. Directly Myra opened her eyes and blinked at me. I kept still and held my breath to see what she would do. It took her a second to notice anything was unusual. Then she raised up her arms and said, ‘Look, Mr. Barnett. Look at the birds.’ I never told anybody this story except for you, Douglas. Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it.”

There was nothing else to say after that. We walked out of the woods and parted without a goodbye. Dark was already falling across the mountain as I headed home. I was late for supper but I stopped in the road for a while anyway to look up at Myra’s house. The front windows glowed and there was smoke rising out of the chimney. I tried to send her a message in case mind reading was one of her powers. I love you, I shouted without words across the rushing creek and the rocky ground and through the walls that kept me out. Then I moved on, feeling empty and lonesome and like someone cursed.

BYRDIE

I never will forget the first time Macon took me up Bloodroot Mountain. It was the spring of 1913, not long after that day we hid Easter eggs. He lived up here and took care of his pap that had a stroke and his two sisters after their mammy died. We had to take a mule and cart, because there wasn’t no roads back then. There was just a dirt track that you could ride a horse or mule on. It was getting to be afternoon and the sun glared in our eyes all the way up the mountain. Shadows fell across the road and I was nervous. Mammy hadn’t wanted to let me go but I had begged Pap. Now I was having second thoughts. It seemed like Macon was taking me off to some hainted place. I pictured all kinds of creatures hiding in them woods, but they was pretty even though they was thick. The creek was pretty, too, rushing down off the mountain alongside the track. I tried to sit back and enjoy the ride but every time I looked down my belly sunk. It was a long ways to the valley below. By the time we got up here I was about half sick. Then we rounded a curve and glimpsed the house up on a hill with a little barn off to the side, the sky bright blue over top of its red tin roof. The sun was shining down on it through the trees, the edges of the leaves tinged with gold. It looked so nice my heart fluttered.

Right when I thought we’d never make it, we started up the path to the house. Macon said, “Yonder it is.” From the minute I seen this place, I knowed I was home. Macon and his sisters had kept it up good. The paint on the house looked fresh and the tin roof had a pretty sheen to it. The barn looked new and there was hogs in the lot. There was flowers of every color and birdhouses in the trees. I didn’t know it yet, but Macon had built them hisself. When we got out of the cart, Macon’s sisters came to meet us, both of them quite a bit younger than him. They looked alike, skinny little things named Becky and Jane. I couldn’t wait to get ahold of them younguns and fatten them up.

Walking across the yard, Becky said, “I got some beans, but they ain’t soft yet.”

Macon asked me, “Why don’t we take a walk before supper?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “These ain’t walking shoes.”

“Surely a country gal like you’s had a few blisters. I believe you’ll be all right.”

Macon took ahold of my hand and led me behind the house, dragging me up through the trees until I was just about give out. He was laughing at me by the time we got there. It took forever and I was starved. I figured dinner was already on the table.

“You crazy thing,” I said to Macon. He pulled me close and kissed me hard.

“Looky here,” he said, pointing at the ground. He was panting, just about out of wind his own self. “This here’s why they call it Bloodroot Mountain.”

“What is?”

Macon knelt and pulled me down with him. “These here flowers.” He rubbed a white petal with his finger and that tenderness made my heart ache. Then he started to dig around the flower with his hands. I didn’t know what he was doing, but I didn’t want to ask. It was so quiet, except for the sounds of mountain woods. It felt like a ceremony, like we was in church down there on our knees. Macon pulled the flower out of the ground and held it in his hands where I could see the root. It was fleshy and about as thick as a finger, looked like part of a human being. I got cold chills all over. Something came whispering through the trees, sounded like voices or a long breath. Just like that day in the churchyard, I smelled Macon, the musk of his whiskers, the clean of his clothes. Then he fished out his knife and cut the root in two pieces. When I seen that blood seeping out it was like everything slowed down. Home rushed through my mind, thoughts of Mammy and Pap and my childhood days in Chickweed Holler. It seemed like my whole life was leading up to this very minute. I had a bad urge to turn around and run fast as I could back down the mountain, but then Macon looked at me and his birthmark darkened like it did when he got excited about anything. I thought of Myrtle saying I’d walk one day on foreign ground and decided this was as foreign a ground as my feet would touch. From then on the soles of them quit itching. I made my choice and that was it. Macon was my home and far as I was concerned any wedding we had was just for show. I’d done cleaved myself to him right yonder under the trees, kneeling over that bloodroot flower. Looking at its red root sap, I was overcome with something that felt like the Holy Ghost. I seen all the generations that would come out of me and Macon. I seen our blood mixed up together, shining there in the gloomy light.

DOUG

The Sunday after Daddy brought Wild Rose home, Mark whispered to Myra during preaching, “We got a horse.” Mama whipped around and shot him a look, so he hushed. Myra didn’t seem that interested, but after the service she was bored enough to come with us up the mountain to see Wild Rose. Walking to the fence, I had an uneasy feeling. I could sense Myra moving away from me. I wanted to grab hold of the floating skein of her hair as if we were in a cave and might get lost from each other. But I hung back as Mark led her on, calling for the horse with a handful of sweet corn.

We had to cross the first hill to find Wild Rose, and Mark and Myra took off chasing each other. She was giggling and out of breath, the belt of her green dress dragging the ground like a dead garter snake. When Mark was around I usually found myself tagging along behind them. I ran to keep Myra in my sight. She skidded to a stop when she saw Wild Rose grazing on the next hill. Mark tripped and went sprawling, the corn flying out of his hand. “Shoot,” he said, still laughing. He tried to look up Myra’s dress as she stood there awestruck. Wild Rose lifted her head and looked at us. I thought she would take off as she always did when people came close to her. But it was different this time. She lengthened her neck toward us and sniffed the air, then walked slowly to where we stood, muscles working under her velvet hide. Even Mark got quiet. The horse kept coming until she stood in front of Myra, close but still out of reach. I wanted to shout or clap my hands, anything to drive Wild Rose away, but I couldn’t move.

“She’s got blue eyes,” Myra said.

“She’s a paint horse,” Mark said, trying to recover a few kernels of corn. “They got eyes like that sometimes.”

“They look like yours,” I said. I don’t know if Myra heard me. Her fingers were trembling at her sides, eager to touch the horse’s white-streaked nose. Wild Rose stared at Myra, hide twitching. When Myra finally reached out her hand, the horse got spooked and galloped away. Myra stared after her for a long time. Like Daddy, she was smitten. But I knew she loved Wild Rose for a different reason than Daddy did. Daddy loved her because she was something different than he was. Myra loved Wild Rose because they were the same. I guess it doesn’t matter why, but both of them loved her better than they loved me. I moved closer to Myra as we stood in the pasture, trying to claim her back somehow.

“That horse is crazy,” Mark said, getting to his feet and knocking clods of dirt from the knees of his good pants. “Ain’t no use fooling with her.”

BYRDIE

If I think too much about John Odom wearing that ring I get mad enough to bite nails in two. The first time I seen it was at the Cochrans’ house the day me and Macon snuck off to get married. I used to walk all the way over yonder to work with my big ears hid under a headscarf. I had to start out when it was still dark if I meant to get there in time to fix the breakfast. Most times I’d show up on the doorstep already wore out.

That dairy farm they lived on stunk to high heaven, but you’d never know it by the way Barbara Cochran put on airs. Bucky was the biggest farmer in three counties and they was the richest people I knowed. Bucky came from money to start with, before he ever decided to farm. His pap was a doctor and I always heard Bucky was a disappointment because he didn’t get none of the family brains. Used to be the church’d hold baptisms over at Slop Creek, which runs down off the mountain and through Piney Grove, but they had to quit after Bucky came in with his spotted heifers and dirtied up the water. Now them boys of his has built chicken houses that’d knock you down in the summertime. I swear I can smell them all the way up here. That’s how them Cochrans are. It don’t matter to them about their neighbors, as long as they’re raking in the money.

Every morning I’d unlock the back door and let myself in the house. Usually I’d get to work while Barbara Cochran was still asleep, but that day she came down the stairs wrapped in her pink chenille bathrobe and said, “Byrdie, honey, would you mind to clean the oven this time? I’ve got people coming in from North Carolina for the weekend.” She always talked to me real sweet, the same way she spoke to her little house dog.

She bustled around all morning and didn’t even eat the breakfast I fixed. Around ten o’clock she lit out for the beauty shop. I was straightening up her room and seen she’d left her jewelry box open, all in a fizz getting ready for her company. That silver box was always setting on her dressing table and I’d run the feather duster over it without thinking twice about what was inside. I was a God-fearing girl and Barbara Cochran never had any reason to mistrust me before. But I’d slipped in the back door that morning with Macon Lamb on my mind. We was running off to get married. Pap didn’t want to let me go being just fifteen, but I couldn’t wait no longer to be Macon’s wife. It was all I could do to concentrate on my chores. The only reason I went to work at all that day was to collect my pay. She left it every Friday on the kitchen table under a candlestick.

I was fixing to close the jewelry box back when that ring caught my eye. It was a man’s ring and what it was doing in a woman’s box I’ll never know. It sure didn’t look like anything Bucky would wear. I don’t know the history of that ring either, or what it meant to Barbara Cochran, but it must not have been much because I don’t believe she ever even noticed it was missing. She never asked me one thing about it. Granted I never did go back to work for Barbara Cochran because Macon was the old-fashioned kind that thinks a woman should keep her place at home, but I did run into her in town a few times over the years. She was just the same as ever, talking to me like she might scratch me behind the ears any minute.

I seen the ring in that tangle of riches and it seemed too dark of a red to be ruby. Might have been garnet, I still don’t know for sure. It was like them blood-colored drops of root sap Macon showed me up on the mountain, a cluster of precious stones the shade of the love that was running all through me dark and deep. I snatched it up before I even thought, like my hand had a mind of its own. I stuffed it in the sole of my shoe and walked on it the whole time I was cleaning Barbara Cochran’s house. End of the day I took my pay out from under the candlestick and left a note in its place, saying I wouldn’t be back to work no more, as I was getting married to Macon Lamb.

I left the Cochran place and limped on that bloodred ring all the way to the cornfield where me and Macon agreed to meet, holding back tears of pain. I reckon I felt too guilty to carry it in my hand. I went fast down the third row of corn like we planned, stopping just long enough to kick off my shoes and take out the ring. I must have sounded like a storm rustling through the corn because Macon was grinning when he stepped out, head and shoulders spangled by the sun falling down through the stalks. When we kissed all of them long, skinny green bodies was like an audience for us. Then I pulled back, heart working overtime, and asked him to hold out his hand. He did and I dropped the ring into it. He opened his eyes and whistled at the beauty in his palm. He studied it closer and said, “Where in the world did you get a thing like this?” and I blurted out, “That old Barbry Cochran gave it to me for a wedding present.” My face was so hot I know it had to been red as fire but he never questioned me, even though it didn’t make a lick of sense given the kind of person we both knowed Barbara Cochran was. I hope he always figured I took that ring and just didn’t say nothing because he wanted to keep it as much as me. I could tell he felt like I did about them red stones. I’d like to believe we was in it together and I had no secrets from him. The guilt of stealing that ring devils me to this day, but back yonder in the cornfield, when Macon tried it on his finger, I didn’t feel as bad. It fit so good, seemed like it had finally been give back to its rightful owner.

DOUG

When school let out the summer of my fourteenth year, it was like being turned loose from prison. All three of us were in high spirits when we got off the bus at the foot of the mountain, laughing and running most of the way up the dusty road. Mark and I waited outside as Myra stopped to ask her granny if she could visit Wild Rose before supper. She came out smiling, cheeks flushed and hair blowing back as she ran to us.

We were panting by the time we made it to our house but Mark wouldn’t let us go in for a drink of water. He said, “I got something better in the chicken coop.” I followed Mark and Myra out to the tree line where the old coop leaned next to the wire fence. Mark had to wrestle the door open and the stink hit us right away. Daddy used to store junk in there but the smell of chicken droppings was still musty and strong. We climbed over the rusted tools and tractor parts and broken dishes and made a place to sit in one corner. Mark reached between some boxes and pulled out a jar of sloshing liquid.

“White Lightning,” he said.

Myra covered her mouth, eyes wide. “Where’d you get that?”

“This old boy at school, Buddy Roach. His daddy makes it.”

“You better hope Mama never finds it,” I said.

Mark grinned and held the dirt-smeared jar up to the light falling through the chicken wire. “I believe I can outrun her,” he said, and took a long swig. He squeezed his eyes shut and coughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his arm. Myra laughed and clapped her hands. I twisted my head away, burning with jealousy.

Mark was laughing, too, trying to catch his breath, eyes streaming water. Then he held out the jar to Myra. “I dare you,” he said. “Just one sup.”

My back stiffened. I wanted to reach out and grab her wrist as she took the jar, halting it on the way to her lips, but my dread of being mocked won out. I knew Mark would tell me not to be a chicken and Myra would probably think less of me, too. I saw how she was looking at him. Even if she liked me best, it was my brother she admired.

At first she thrust the jar back at Mark, spluttering and choking, but he handed it back to her. “First drink always burns going down,” he said. “You’ll get used to it.”

He was right. We passed the jar around a few times and the more we drank, the easier the fiery liquid went down and settled in my stomach, radiating heat. I kept watching Myra and before long her face looked different to me, cheeks and eyes bright in a way I didn’t like. After a few drinks the world tilted each time I moved, but I didn’t refuse the jar when it came to me. Myra and Mark seemed to find everything funny. Pretty soon they were laughing at nothing, looking at each other and busting out in foolish giggles. Moonshine didn’t have the same effect on me. I just felt dizzy and green around the gills. I was about to pretend I heard somebody coming, anything to get out of the stinking heat of the chicken coop, when Myra said, “I want to go somewhere.”

Mark took another long swig from the jar. “There ain’t nowhere to go,” he said. “That’s the trouble with being stuck up here on top of a mountain.”

“This isn’t the top of it,” Myra said. “Granddaddy went to the top and he said you could see all the way to town.” Her words sounded slurry. I took the jar from Mark and forced myself to drink, even though I was heading fast toward being sick.

“It’s not that high,” I said. Myra wobbled getting to her feet. She stood there swaying in the slick-bottomed shoes she’d worn to school, not made at all for climbing.

“My daddy’s been, too,” Mark said. “He claims there’s a field up yonder.”

Myra’s eyes lit up. “There’s a field? Maybe that’s where Wild Rose goes when she gets loose.” I could picture Rose grazing, long neck bent, in my great-grandfather’s mountaintop paradise. I knew Myra would never rest until she saw it.

“Let’s go up there,” she said.

Mark tried to get up and they both laughed when he tripped over the rusty tines of a rake and nearly fell back down again. “I will if you will,” he said.

I couldn’t keep quiet anymore. “Don’t you remember what happened to Daddy?” I asked Mark, trying to sound calmer than I felt. “It’s too steep of a climb.”

Then Myra said something that cut me to the bone. “Why do you have to be such a baby all the time?” I could feel the blood draining out of my face.

Mark slapped me hard on the back and I almost tipped over. My head was swimming. “Buck up, private,” he said. “Have some gumption about you.”

Myra narrowed her eyes at me, as if they were having trouble focusing. “If he’s too yellow,” she said, “we’ll just do it without him.”

I stood there for a minute unable to speak, hating both of them, until Mark said, “If we’re going we better head out, so we can make it back before supper.” I could have told him there was no way we’d be back before supper. We were guaranteeing ourselves a whipping, but I kept quiet. I moved to let them pass and then followed them out of the chicken coop into the sun. We looked over our shoulders as we ducked under the fence, Mark holding the barbed strands apart for Myra, and disappeared into the thick pine trees that marked the beginning of our woods. Mark and Myra stumbled ahead, half leaning on each other, and I wanted to knock their heads together. I thought of turning back and telling Daddy what they were up to, but in the end I stayed my course.

The climb was easy at first. There was a footpath worn up through the trees, but I didn’t feel any better about the fix I was in. It didn’t help how the moonshine sloshed back and forth in my stomach. Several times I had to stop with my hands on my knees until a dizzy spell passed. At first Mark and Myra pretended they were still having fun. I tensed up each time she slid on loose rocks but Mark would get behind her and push, tickling her ribs under her blouse. It wasn’t long, though, before their giddiness wore off.

The terrain wasn’t very rugged but it labored straight up through trees so tall we couldn’t see their tops even when we craned our necks. After we had walked for what seemed like hours, sweating and pale and thirsty, the footpath began to disappear under a scrawl of twisted roots and ferns. I was so sick-feeling, it took every ounce of my will not to give up and sit down. At some point Mark must have realized it was still a long way to the top. I could see our predicament dawning on his face. Now he would be the baby if he suggested turning back. I was heartened a little to see my brother getting his comeuppance, and relieved that the climb wasn’t as dangerous as we had been told.

But just when I began to think Daddy had exaggerated, we came to a place where it seemed the mountain’s rock core had erupted through the pebbled dirt surface of the slope and heaved it almost in two, each side studded with scrubby bushes and tall, thin trees jutting at angles across the divide. It was still daylight and not much cooler in spite of the elevation but there was fog up ahead, curling close to the ground and clinging to the tree trunks. We all stopped and Mark and I exchanged nervous glances. I knew he wanted me to be the yellow baby she had called me, to let on like he was only turning back to appease his cowardly little brother, but he wasn’t going to get away with it. Then Myra started climbing again, maybe imagining Wild Rose grazing in a mountaintop meadow, or maybe just being stubborn. We had no choice but to go on behind her.

I mustered what little strength I had left and pushed myself upward, arms heavy and tongue dry and the rancid taste of moonshine still thick in the back of my throat. The incline was almost vertical and it was a struggle to keep my balance on the rocks. I bit my lip, shaking with exhaustion, trying to see through the sweat in my eyes. When I glanced up, I realized that Myra was out of sight. She had disappeared into the fog and Mark wasn’t far behind. There was nothing between the leaning trees but blank sky and the mist that had risen up to claim her. I went cold with dread and scrambled to catch up with them. That’s when I began to lose my hold, fingernails clawing for purchase in the crumbling dirt. In those slow seconds before dropping, heavy and helpless like in a dream of falling, I turned my head to the side and saw another outcropping. Some of the pines there were broken off with their tops bowing down. Between the rise I clung to and the mountain’s other jagged face a buzzard was circling. Then my arms and legs gave out and I was flailing backward, hands searching in vain for something to grab. The tumble down was fast, a blur of ground and sky, before my head cracked on a stone.

Mark said later I wasn’t out for long because my eyes were open when they got to me. The first thing I remember is Myra bending close and I was glad to see that she was sorry. She never said so but she didn’t have to, the guilt was all over her face. Mark helped me up and my head hurt so bad that I almost passed out again. It felt like a bowling ball on the end of my neck. They dusted me off and examined my scrapes and cuts before we started down. I’ll never forget how Myra looked back over her shoulder into the fog. That night I was so dizzy and sick that I stumbled out of bed and threw up twice. Afterward I lay in my room, head pounding and backside raw from Daddy’s belt, thinking about what Tina Cutshaw had said in fifth grade, that bad things would happen to me if I kept on loving Myra. I guess I knew even back then how things would turn out.

BYRDIE

The summer after we got married, Macon took me home to Blood-root Mountain and I been here ever since. Them was good years when I first came here to live. I’d set on the back steps looking off through the trees, breaking beans or shucking corn, or weaving me a rug for the floors. Sometimes a wind would come along smelling so sweet, like creek bank mud and pine needles and rainy weather. It’d lift my hair off of my shoulders and kiss my forehead the same way Macon did at night, and I’d know for sure I belonged here. But I did get homesick sometimes. I missed Mammy and Pap and our cabin in Piney Grove. They was less than five miles from the foot of the mountain and we still seen each other at church, but it was hard to be away from them during the week. Sunday afternoons Mammy would cook dinner for me and Macon and as much as I loved our house on the mountain, I’d wish sometimes to crawl in my feather bed up in the loft and sleep the day away. I was jealous of my time with Mammy and Pap and it was irksome when our Sunday dinners got interrupted. Word had got around about Pap’s gift for healing and many Sundays there’d be a knock on the kitchen door. He’d get up from dinner and somebody would be standing at the back steps with a baby on their hip. Pap would take the baby around the cabin, I guess for some privacy, and cure its thresh like he done mine. Then he’d come back in and set down at the table like nothing ever happened. Just being around Pap for a little while would set everything right with me and I’d head back up the mountain with Macon, happy as a lark again.

I helped Macon take care of his own pap, Paul Lamb, until he had another stroke and died. Then I took Becky and Jane to raise, until they growed up and married some boys that worked for the railroad. I learnt them how to sew, not just mend socks and put buttons back on, but how to make curtains and dresses. Where they’d been so long without a mammy, there was a lot them girls didn’t know. I learnt them how to make pie crust and how to season their beans and how to make their biscuits fluffy. I wasn’t much older than Becky and Jane and we had a big time together. In the summer worshing clothes we’d bust out in a water fight, or making bread we’d throw flour on one another until we was white-headed and the kitchen was a mess. It was worth cleaning it up for all the fun we had. If the chores was done sometimes we’d run off in the woods and play hide-and-go-seek. Macon would get mad enough to spit when he’d come in from the barn and see me acting like a youngun, but he got over anything pretty quick.

Before the road came through Macon farmed for a living. When the Depression hit, a lot of the men around here went off to work in the mills and coal mines, but Macon stayed with me. The banks started closing in 1929 and nobody on the mountain had two dimes to rub together. It was hard to buy sugar and salt and coffee, but we had a milk cow and laying hens and hogs to render fat for lard. We worked long hours in the hot sun until our fingers was blistered and our backs was sore. Once Roosevelt got in things started looking up for us, but it took years to climb out of the hole we was in.

Macon worked on the road when it came through. Him and the other men got out here and dug it with picks and shovels. I hated to see Macon give up farming, but I reckon he was happier working with his hands on cars for a living, after people in these parts started driving. Before he went to fixing motors down at the filling station in Piney Grove, he liked to whittle and build things out of scrap wood. He’d make birdhouses and whirligigs to put in the yard, and he could whittle any kind of animal you asked for. Me and him’d set out in the yard as the sun was going down and I’d love to watch him work a block of wood, his fingers moving that knife so swift. I was glad to be his wife.

I didn’t even mind taking care of poor old Paul before he died. Every morning I’d make Paul some mush and spoon it between his lips. Macon’d be down to the barn and Becky and Jane off to school. It was peaceful with just me and Paul in the house. I’d lead him to the front room window and feed him there so both of us could see the mountain and the sky. Then I’d get me a pan of soapy water and worsh him one piece at a time. Some days he’d look at me like he knowed what was going on, but others seemed like he was in a dream. I always believed he was dreaming about his life up here on the mountain, working the land and playing with his younguns. I figured he had it all stored up in his heart, didn’t matter where his body was at or what kind of shape he was in.

I got to where I loved old Paul, but he didn’t live long after me and Macon got married. Wasn’t long after we buried him down at Piney Grove Church that Becky and Jane was gone, too. I cried and cried when they ran off with them railroad boys. They was the only sisters I ever had. They used to come and visit sometimes before their husbands decided to move up north. They still write me letters but they never did come back. I don’t see how they stand it up there where it’s cold and the people’s so different.

Besides Becky and Jane, I had younguns of my own. Not long after me and Macon got married I was expecting, and none of us got too excited about it. It was just how things was. You got married and went to having younguns. The first one was Patricia. She was awful tiny and didn’t want to nurse them first few days, but I never doubted she’d take off. It never entered my head that Patricia might die, or that any of my younguns might not outlive me. Once Patricia took to nursing, she got fat as mud. Becky and Jane helped me with her, and then Jack and Sue when they came along, one right after the other. For a time I was nursing both of them at once, like twins. I used to set in a rocking chair in front of the kitchen door catching the breeze with one in each arm. I felt a contentment when I was nursing my babies that I reckon I’ll never know again.

Then all three of them, Patricia, Jack, and Sue, died of the diphtheria one winter. It was the year that Sue, my littlest, was turning two. I liked to lost my mind. I didn’t take them to the doctor right at first. It was before the road came through and we was snowed in that winter. Sometimes it’s like I dreamt them up, it’s been so long ago. I still can’t figure out how come me and Macon not to catch it. Them first days after the last one, Patricia, passed on, I waited for the fever to come. I wanted so bad to get sick and die. It was like a bridegroom had left me at the altar. I went out of my head and Macon didn’t know how to tend to me. Mammy and Pap came up the mountain to stay a few days but Mammy couldn’t do much with me, either. She tried putting on a cheery face and talking like I hadn’t lost my babies but I laid on the bed I’d birthed them in and wouldn’t get up. I didn’t want to eat and they had to pry my jaws open to force broth down my throat. I’d look past them as they fought me to Pap, standing there watching with bright light shining all around him. I don’t believe I imagined it, even in the state I was in. He never fussed or paced the floor or begged me to eat like Macon and Mammy did. He just stayed there in the room. Day or night I could open my eyes and he’d be setting at the foot of the bed, watching over me. I guess, looking back, I decided to come back to my life because Pap was still in it. I got better, but for a long time I went through my days living over and over that time when my younguns was getting sicker and nothing could be done. I got to where I thought it might not have really happened. I made up my mind they was still alive, just off somewhere playing. I don’t know when I figured out the bridegroom wasn’t coming for me and started putting one foot in front of the other again.

I guess some part of me must have died anyhow because it was easier when my boy Willis got killed. It’s awful to say but it’s the truth. I had Willis in 1924, three years after Patricia, Jack, and Sue was gone. I didn’t want to have no more babies for a long time because I was scared of losing them, but Macon begged me to. I never seen that man beg to nobody before, but he got down on his knees as I was trying to hang the worsh and clung to my legs. “This house is too lonesome, Byrdie,” he said. “I can’t stand it.” People might have thought Macon didn’t have no feelings, but his heart was softer than just about anybody else’s you could find, including mine. He loved younguns and animals better than anything, and couldn’t be happy unless there was a child or dog underfoot. I gave in because I couldn’t stand to see Macon that way, and we had Willis.

Willis wasn’t no good, from the time he was little. He’d bite my nipple hard as he could soon as his teeth came in, and would fight me with his fists anytime he didn’t get his way. Willis broke my heart every day he was alive. I don’t know what went wrong with that boy. I reckon it had to been something me and Macon done. Someway or another, we wasn’t cut out to raise younguns. That might be how come the Lord took them from us. All I can figure out is we spoiled them too much. I believe we ruint Willis and Clio both by smothering them, and I reckon we did the same thing to Myra when she came along. I treated Willis like a little king, made him sugar cookies every day until nearly every tooth in his head rotted out, and he still hated me and Macon both.

Whatever made Willis that way, he was meaner than a striped snake. He got stabbed in a bar fight when he wasn’t but twenty years old and bled to death. The ones that done it throwed him off of a bluff and he laid there a week until somebody found him. I never did feel like Willis loved me. Maybe that’s how come it was easier to take. Besides that, me and Macon still had Clio. She came to us late in life and you’d think we would have learnt our lesson, but we couldn’t help petting Clio rotten, too, until she growed up and turned against us. I believe she blamed us for being born on a mountain. Why, we didn’t ask for her no more than she asked for us. That was the Lord’s doing.

DOUG

For a while after my fall on the mountain Myra wouldn’t look at my face, even when we were laughing. I wanted to tell her she was forgiven but that would have been like accusing her. I knew she didn’t want to talk about what happened so I kept it to myself, until the day we sat in the barn loft eating peaches. Her eye caught mine and darted away and I couldn’t stand the awkwardness anymore. “We can climb to the top again if you want,” I said. “I bet we could make it this time.” She turned to me, sucking shreds of peach from a wrinkled pit. She took the pit from her mouth and closed her hand tight around it. I held my breath, waiting for her to speak. After a while she opened her palm, looked down at the peach pit, and said, “Let’s bury this and see if anything grows.” I didn’t bring the subject up again. It would only have made things worse between us.

It’s true that Myra and Wild Rose are two of a kind. That’s why they took to each other so quickly. If I believed that talk I heard about witches, I’d figure Wild Rose was Myra’s familiar. But there’s one difference I can think of between them. Wild Rose never let me within arm’s reach of her, but I got away with touching Myra once. It was because of the poems. All through elementary school Myra and I had the same teachers, and in high school we always had at least one class together. Junior year it was English. Myra loved the poems we studied, especially Wordsworth. “It’s like he’s talking about here,” she said. “He wrote this one a few miles above a place in England called Tintern Abbey, but I can tell he feels the same way as I do about Bloodroot Mountain. Does that make any sense to you?” I said yes, but it didn’t matter to me. I just liked hearing her talk.

Whenever she knew that Mark was away from home, she would come walking up the mountain to find me, carrying one of her books, wearing a floppy old dress with the sun in her eyes. Just to make sure, she always asked, “Where’s Mark?” I’d smile with my lips closed over my broken tooth, knowing she needed to share the poems she loved with somebody quiet. I’d say, “Mark’s gone hunting,” or fishing, or down to the pool hall with some of his friends. Then she’d ask if I wanted to take a walk. She didn’t really have to ask. She knew I’d follow her anywhere, branches slapping my face in her wake.

Most of the time we went to a big rock high on the mountain behind her house and I’d sit there with her for hours, listening to her read. But that day we decided to walk down to the creek branch instead, where it runs downhill beside the road. She was quiet and I thought maybe she had spied an animal or bug she wanted to touch. She could track for hours, shushing Mark and me, telling us to go away, even though we never did. But there was no lizard, no squirrel or frog this time. She was only thinking.

When we came to the creek branch we crawled under the pink rhododendron together, where its low branches made a cave of shadows sprinkled with coins of light. She read for a while, but I could tell there was something on her mind. Finally, she put down her book and sat on a rock with her feet in the water. I stared at them through the silt-swirling ripples. They were long and slim, smooth on top and leathery on the bottom. “I got a chickadee to eat out of my hand,” she said, dipping her cupped palm in the water.

“How’d you do that?”

“You know that stump behind the house where Granny scatters seed? They come in droves this time of year, all different kinds of birds. I’ve been sitting there every day with my hand out. They’re used to me now.”

“Reckon they think you’re part of the stump?”

“I am,” she said.

She lowered herself off the rock and into the branch, her dress darkening and spreading in the water. She lay back on the rocks with light shifting on her face, fingers of creek water closing across her middle.

“Can I tell you something?” She closed her eyes and propped up on her elbows. The water trickled over her thighs and played with her dress tail. I couldn’t stop looking at her pale body, stretched out long and hard in the creek branch.

“Yeah.”

“I’m afraid you’ll think I’m crazy.”

“I won’t.”

“I thought… it was like …that chickadee was my mother.”

Myra had never mentioned her dead mama to me before. “Like reincarnation?” I asked. “Better not let the church folks hear you talking that way.”

Myra smiled. “Not exactly.”

“Like a ghost or something?”

“More like a spirit. Like she’s still here.”

“The Bible says there’s two places people go when they die.”

I looked at her stomach, the black dress gathering in neat wrinkles where her navel was hidden. I imagined a dark slit filling with water.

“I wonder about her. You know she moved off to town with my father when she was seventeen. I can’t figure out how she could leave this place. She must not have been like me.”

I lowered myself into the water beside Myra. The cold took my breath. “Does it make you sad?”

“Hmm?”

“That she wasn’t like you?”

“I don’t know.” Myra sounded sleepy, drunk on the feel of the creek lapping at her fingers, running like a cool scarf over her elbow bends, gliding under her heels and between her toes, and all the smells of blossoms and muck and mottled toadstools risen like yeast in the shade. Looking at her, a feeling came over me that she might do the same thing her mama had done. I wouldn’t have believed that Myra could leave the mountain, but I hadn’t seen until then how she longed for her mama and wanted to know about her.

“You’ll go, too,” I said, leaning over her.

Myra took in a deep breath, black hair coiling out in all directions, a nest of water snakes. “Never,” she exhaled, and I felt the cool rush of her breath on my face. I put my hand on her wet stomach and it tightened under the slippery fabric of her dress, but she didn’t open her eyes. I leaned in and pressed my mouth, ever concealing the broken tooth, against hers. But I’m no fool. It was Bloodroot Mountain she tasted when I kissed her lips. I might as well not even have been there. I knew it then and I know it now. I never tried to kiss her again, but I’m glad I took my chance when I saw it.

Myra drove Mark out of his head, the same as she did me. He tried to kiss her a million times when we were teenagers. She always laughed and wriggled away as if he was playing with her, but I knew it was for real. I saw how his smile dissolved and his eyes flamed up. In high school when we went to the movies he would try to touch her in the dark, his hand sliding onto her ribs and moving up toward her breast. She would bend back his fingers until he cried out and the people behind us fussed at him to be quiet. He’d try to pretend that he wasn’t mad, walking through the lighted lobby to the parking lot where Daddy’s old truck was waiting for us, but I knew what his anger looked like.

Mark hated me when he discovered how Myra sought me out. He caught us one day coming back from a walk. He was home early from a fishing trip because nothing was biting. He watched us as he took his pole and tackle out of the truck bed to put in the smokehouse. Myra waved but he didn’t raise his hand in return. I walked her down to the road and when I came back he was sitting on the porch steps blocking my way.

“She won’t ever have you,” he said, his eyes reminding me of that crazy boy who broke my mouth with a rock when I was seven. “Ugly old snaggletooth thing.”

I climbed up the porch steps and he let me pass. I knew he was right. I couldn’t put into words why I’d never have Myra. It had nothing to do with how I looked. It was something else I couldn’t explain. I wanted to tell Mark that I love Myra’s wildness and hate it at the same time. I’m jealous because I can’t be it, and want it because I can’t have it. The only way to love Myra is from a distance, the same way Daddy loves Wild Rose.

BYRDIE

Pap lived to be a good age, but it still liked to killed me when he died. He never did get sick or feeble. He worked right up until the end, when that tractor he’d had ever since we moved to Piney Grove turned over on him. The doctor said there wasn’t nothing to do but wait for him to die. Thank goodness me and Macon got to the cabin before he passed on. The front room was packed full of people from the community he’d helped down through the years and it touched my heart to see how many had loved him. They parted to let me through and the first thing I seen was Mammy kneeling at his side. When she looked up at me her eyes was like holes and I had to turn my face. I stood at the end of the bed and took hold of Pap’s foot sticking out from under the quilt. I rubbed it through his old sock, feeling the hard corns and thick toenails he’d always pared with a knife. His face was so white it nearly blended in with the pillow. All of us waited, not speaking, for him to go. When he finally breathed his last, the breath went straight up. I seen it with my own eyes, a glow that rose and evaporated against the ceiling like steam. I held on tight to Pap’s sock foot, tears running down my face. Then I closed my eyes and prayed to the Lord that he wasn’t the only one of his kind.

I didn’t get to be there when Mammy died. After Pap was gone I begged her to come and live with us on Bloodroot Mountain but she wouldn’t hear of it. Her and Pap had put a lot into that farm and she meant to keep it going. She took to wearing overalls and every time me and Macon visited she was out in the field or the garden sweating under the hot sun. She was like Pap and Grandmaw Ruth, worked right on up until the day she died. She passed away in 1939, just a few months after Clio was born. A woman from the church found her in the bed and the county coroner said she went peacefully in her sleep. That’s exactly how I want to go, fall asleep one night and wake up in Glory.

With Mammy and Pap gone and the Great Depression on, it was sad times. The only thing that eased my grief was Clio. She was a good baby. It wasn’t until later that she started giving us fits. Most of the time Clio was sassy and full of mischief, but she could get down in the dumps sometimes. She’d let her hair go and not take a bath, and every once in a while she’d act plumb crazy. She got it after Macon’s people. He had a great-aunt that took a notion to fly and jumped off of one of these clifts around here. Sometimes Clio’d go to hollering and clawing at her face and slapping at her head. Some of the church people thought she was possessed with devils, but I knowed what it was. She just couldn’t stand to be pent up. She was worst in the winters when we got hemmed in by snow. She wanted to be out running the roads and if she couldn’t get to town it done something to her mind. One time, when she was seventeen, it came a bad ice storm, so slick even Macon wouldn’t venture out. He tried to go to work the second day, but he’d done fell down three times before he ever got to the truck, and there wasn’t no digging it out. We had a good fire going in the kitchen woodstove and he was setting there beside of it whittling. I set down at the table with him to drink me a cup of coffee. Not long after that I heard Clio’s naked feet on the floorboards. If it wasn’t for that, I would never have knowed she was there. She’d crept up to the kitchen like a haint in her long white nightgown. When I turned around it scared me half to death. I knowed she didn’t look right in the face, standing there not making a peep. It gave me an awful feeling in my belly. “You better put some socks on them feet,” I said, just to be talking. “You’ll get the sore throat.” She stared at me but it was like she didn’t really see me. Then she looked over my head at the kitchen window, frosted over with ice. “I can’t stand it,” she said.

“What?” I asked, but I knowed. The snow was about waist deep. There was great long icicles like fingers with claws hanging off of the eaves. Walking out to the woodpile was a mess and even with a shawl wound around my head, my face’d get so numb I couldn’t hardly talk until I thawed out some by the stove. Wasn’t noplace to go and if we wanted to stay warm we had to crowd together around the stove. All we had was each other and this little house. I had tried since I was fifteen years old to make it pleasant, weaving my rugs and tatting lacy curtains and crocheting doilies. Back in the summer I’d hung flowerdy wallpaper in Clio’s bedroom, but I knowed she still hated it. She was gone somewhere every minute she could be, one excuse to get off of the mountain after another. I didn’t believe she was studying with her girlfriend or practicing for the school play or selling raffle tickets for the church fund-raiser, but I let her go. I knowed she had to be free, and free to her was flying off every chance she got, away from this house and from me and Macon, too. She couldn’t help it. She took them itchy feet after me. It was her nature, and you can’t hardly fight nobody’s nature.

I reckon I always knowed what would happen if Clio got hemmed in for too long. That’s why I followed her when she turned around and padded out of the kitchen on into the front room. I couldn’t see her feet for that gown being so long and it seemed like she was floating. Seemed like she wasn’t even my girl no more, like there was something in the house with us that ort not to be. The front room was quiet and still, lit up cold and gloomy by the snow still falling outside. Clio stopped and stood in front of the window. Neither one of us moved. I was scared to say anything because it was like she was sleepwalking. I’ve heard tell if you wake up one that’s walking in their sleep they’ll die. I don’t know how long Clio stood there in front of the window that way. Then Macon came in to see what was the matter, with the whittling knife still in his hand.

“What’s wrong, girl?” he asked. His voice was like a firecracker going off.

Clio reached around before I knowed it and snatched up the straight chair Paul used to set in when I fed him his breakfast of the mornings. She took that chair and raised it up over her head and smashed out the window pane. At the same time she let out a scream that liked to froze my blood. It was the awfulest crash you ever heard, too, seemed like that racket rung in my ears for a week after it happened. Macon run to Clio, standing in her nightgown with the cold flooding in, and wrapped her up in his arms. I reckon he was so addled he had forgot to drop his whittling knife and she tried to take it away from him. They scuffled over it for a minute and I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was scared somebody was going to get cut, but finally it was like she gave out all at once. She fell and the knife clattered to the floor. Macon picked her up and carried her like a baby to the bed. She slept that whole day away and part of the next. I couldn’t sleep a wink myself, or eat a bite of nothing. I paced the floor outside her room until Macon made me rest. When the sun came out and the eaves started dripping Clio finally perked up some. I swear, we liked to froze to death before that window got fixed.

The spring after that was when I lost Clio for good, even before she died. Soon as the ice melted and she could get down the mountain, we hardly ever seen her no more. She’d still mumble out one of her excuses, but they got feebler and feebler. Even when she was home to eat supper, her eyes was far away. We’d let Clio get by with just about anything, but Macon used to be hard on her about running off to town. Many times he’d held his ground and made her stay home, even though she’d sulk around and pout and look at him like she hated his neck. But after she busted that window out, he let her go. Me and Macon both was scared she’d go out of her head for good the next time.

One day after it got warm I was going across the yard with a bucket of eggs, headed for the kitchen door, when I heard a loud car come up the hill. I stopped and tried to see who it was, but the sun was in my eyes. That old car pulled up next to the barn and blowed the horn two or three times, had the dog barking and the chickens running all over the place. Sounded about as loud as Clio busting out the front room window, and give me the same awful feeling. Next thing I knowed, Clio came flying out the door with her purse on her arm. She didn’t look left or right, just ran across the yard to that car with her hair blowing back. I had a pretty good idea who was driving it. I’d heard from some of the church people that Clio was down at the pool hall in Millertown with a boy named Kenny Mayes. I was hoping it was just rumors because I knowed of the Mayeses. I reckon nary one of them has ever set foot in a church house, but they sure do spend plenty of time in the jailhouse. About every week you’ll see one of their names in the paper, picked up for drunk driving or writing bad checks or shoplifting. Macon said they was lazy, too. He worked with Kenny’s uncle down to the filling station, said he wouldn’t strike a lick at nothing. I knowed Clio and me both was in for trouble, soon as I heard she was courting a Mayes. That was the first time she took off without asking me if she could go, even if she made up the place she was going to. I watched her moving away from me and felt the tie that bound us since she was born stretching out too thin. She slammed that car door and it finally broke in two. The way I see it, that was the end of me and her. Kenny Mayes stole Clio away from me and there was nothing I could do about it.

She came back in the middle of the night, but it never was the same. Them few weeks she stayed on at the house it was like she was checking in and out of a motel. But to tell the truth, she was happier than I ever seen her. Her eyes was bright and she was taking better care of herself, all of that long hair clean and glossy around her shoulders. Then one Saturday Kenny Mayes came to the door to get Clio instead of blowing the horn for her. I’d done figured out something was up, because Clio had hovered around all morning acting skittish. Besides that, she’d took it on herself to make a cake and she hated to cook. It was about noontime that Kenny knocked and Clio wanted me to open it. “Go on, Mama,” she said. I went to the front of the house with a heavy heart because I knowed what was coming. I opened the door and there he stood, with a big old mealy-mouthed grin. I can’t say he was handsome, but his eyes was blue as the springtime sky.

“Hidee,” he said.

Clio went to him and pulled him in the front room. “Mama, this here’s Kenny Mayes,” she said. It looked like her cheeks was on fire.

“Clio said I ought to bring you something,” Kenny said. He fished around in his britches pocket and dug out a string of dime store beads with the tag still hanging off of them. I never wore such a thing in all my life, and didn’t aim to start. I took them beads and laid them on the table beside of Macon’s chair.

“Take you a seat, Kenny,” Clio said. “I’ll go get us a piece of cake to eat so you and Mama can get acquainted.”

Kenny flopped down on the loveseat with them gangly legs sprawled out and his arm slung across the back like he owned the place. I didn’t make no effort to talk, but he didn’t seem bashful about it. “It’s right pretty up here,” he said, looking out the window we’d just got fixed, at the blooming trees and the mowed green hill rolling down to the creek branch. “But it kindly stinks, don’t it? Must be the hog lot.”

We didn’t keep hogs no more, but I didn’t say it. I kept my mouth shut. Macon was gone since he worked every other Saturday at the filling station trying to earn an extra dollar, so the house was quiet besides Clio clattering around in the kitchen.

“Well,” Kenny said when Clio came in with the cake on one of my tole trays. “I aim to take good care of Clio, Miss Lamb, so you ain’t got a thing to worry about.”

“Dangit, Kenny,” Clio said, handing me a saucer of chocolate cake and a fork to eat it with. “I ain’t told her yet. We was supposed to do it together.”

“Shoot, I forgot,” Kenny said, and grinned at me.

Clio set down beside of Kenny on the loveseat. He shoveled in cake, crumbs falling all over the floor for me to clean up later. “Me and Kenny’s getting married,” she said. Her voice cracked some like she might be nervous, but she still sounded sassy as ever. “I didn’t want to tell it in front of Daddy cause I figured he’d pitch a fit.”

“When?” I asked.

“Well … I figured I’d go ahead and settle in this evening over at Kenny’s mama’s house. Then I reckon we’ll go on down to the courthouse Monday morning.”

“What are you telling me for?” I asked. She looked surprised. I couldn’t help but speak my mind. Them was the first words I’d said since that old weasel came to the door, and I didn’t aim to pussyfoot around. “Why didn’t y’uns just run off and do it?”

Clio couldn’t think of nothing to say for a minute. “I don’t know, Mama. It didn’t seem right, I guess.”

I headed for the kitchen with my piece of cake, to rake it in the trash. “Well, I reckon I ort to be thankful for that,” I said. I went back and stood in the front room doorway. “Y’uns best be getting along.” Clio hadn’t took but a few bites of her cake, and Kenny stuffed the rest of his in fast. “You can come back and get your things later.”

“Mama …”

“It’s what you been aiming to do since the day you was born. Might as well get it over with.”

“Now, I never meant to hurt your feelings, Mama….”

“I’ll put your clothes in a bag, if you’d rather do it that way, and send them down with Macon when he goes in to work Monday morning.”

“That’ll be all right,” Clio said. She put down her saucer hard on the end table. The dirty fork rattled off and fell on the floor. “I done got my things packed.”

She stood up and we looked at each other. Her eyes was cold as that snow she hated. She stomped off to the bedroom and left me and Kenny Mayes by ourselves.

“That sure was some good cake,” he said.

“Clio made it,” I told him.

“Well, then,” he leant over and whispered at me, “somebody’s going to have to learn that girl to cook, if she’s fixing to be my wife.” He winked and laughed like a mule. Then Clio came stomping in with her traveling case and took him by the arm.

“Come on, Kenny,” she said, and they left without saying goodbye. I sunk down in Macon’s chair feeling like somebody had laid a rock on my heart. I seen them beads on the end table and it was too much to bear. I snatched them old things up, like a string of shiny black snake’s eyes, and took them and throwed them in the kitchen garbage. Then I leant over the sink and squalled for a long time because my last living youngun was gone.

Clio left with Kenny Mayes when she wasn’t but seventeen. If he ever seen her act crazy like she did that day she busted out the window, he never let on to me. But Clio didn’t ever love this place like me and Myra do. I believe she needed off of this mountain, because she perked up once Kenny took her away from me. Now, Myra’s John Odom had me fooled at first, but I knowed Kenny Mayes was no count from the start. He didn’t beat on Clio or nothing like that, but he was shiftless. She had to keep them both up, working on the assembly line at one of them factories in Millertown. I know she had to been tired of it, standing on her feet all day, but she was too stubborn to let on.

Myra was better off not knowing her daddy. I didn’t tell her nothing about Kenny, not even good stories, like how he always tried to buy me and Macon something nice at Christmas. When he was working he liked to treat Clio, too. He’d buy her perfume and take her out to the restaurants. He’d blow every penny he made, but I reckon he meant well. Course there wasn’t no use telling Myra about her daddy’s mean streak, either, how he liked to scare Clio driving. He’d laugh fit to split, her holding on to the dash and me stomping the brakes in the backseat, them few times I let him take me to the store. I quit going with him after I learnt better, that heathern. Then him and Clio got hit and killed by a train. Nobody knows for sure how it happened, if the car quit or he tried to beat the train or what, but I’d bet anything he was trying to scare Clio like he did.

Something queer happened the night Kenny and Clio got killed. I was taking care of Myra again. I never would say it out loud, but I don’t believe Clio was cut out to be a mama. She never meant to be expecting in the first place, and she was always leaving the baby with me. I had rocked Myra to sleep and fell off to sleep myself with her on my shoulder. I was stiff as a board from setting so long in that chair and I was fixing to get up and take Myra to bed with me when I heard a train whistle off down the mountain. I had the windows open to catch the breeze and that noise made the hair stand up on my arms. I thought, how in the world am I hearing this? Them train tracks is plumb in town. I put my hand on Myra’s little back to feel it going up and down. The house was quiet and dark besides the light of the moon. I don’t know if I was ever more blue in my life, it was the awfulest feeling you could think of. The next morning Bill Cotter knocked on the front door and said Clio had got killed on the train tracks in Millertown. He was a volunteer fireman and helped them pry her and Kenny loose from the car. It liked to killed me to hear it, my last child was gone, but I can’t say I was surprised. Clio died on them same tracks that runs by where Myra lives right now, with that devilish John Odom.

DOUG

Myra and I grew even further apart after that day at the creek. The kiss we shared didn’t seal anything between us, it severed something instead. Myra was only a few months younger than me, but she was growing up faster. Overnight, it seemed, she was full-breasted and long-legged and almost as tall as me. Last summer, before our senior year started, Daddy let me take Myra to town sometimes in his truck. We’d walk across a diner parking lot or step out of a matinee blinking in the sun, and men passing on the street would crane their necks and call out to her and whistle. Myra just laughed but I was always embarrassed and a little bit angry at her, even though it wasn’t her fault.

One Saturday I’d been to the drugstore for Mama and saw Myra coming down the sidewalk with a girl from our church, smiling and whispering behind her hand. She froze when she saw me standing beside the truck, holding Mama’s prescription. She was wearing makeup, I could tell, and it was like being slapped in the face. I stared at her red lips for a long time, until she said in a flustered way, “Don’t you like it?” She puckered up, trying to make me laugh. When I didn’t, she gave up. “Don’t tell Granny, okay?” she said. “It’s not mine. I’m just trying it out.” Then she walked on without saying goodbye. I guess that’s when I knew it wasn’t my imagination. She was slipping away from me.

By the end of the summer she was spending more time with her girlfriends than with me, but I tried not to worry. I thought when school started up things would get back to normal between us, and I did see more of her. But she didn’t wait anymore in front of her house so we could walk down the road and catch the bus together. Without explanation, she began taking off early and leaving me behind, already standing at the bottom of the mountain by the time I got there. I couldn’t make it any earlier myself because I had chores to do on the farm. When Myra and I got on the bus each morning, it was like she wasn’t even really there in the seat beside me. For most of the ride she looked out the window and whenever I spoke she turned to me startled, eyes cloudy and far away.

I thought about her all the time. Pouring water into the troughs, filling the drum-shaped feeder with grain, mucking out the barn stalls, I was devising plans to win her back. I’d find a way to break Wild Rose and come galloping into Myra’s yard. I’d sweep her up onto the horse’s bare back and we’d ride off somewhere together. One morning at breakfast, I looked up from my daydream and realized Mark was staring at me. He had graduated the year before and was supposed to be helping Daddy on the farm, but most days he took off and went to the pool hall. Daddy had already told him to shape up or ship out. It was around that time he started talking about joining the service, even with Mama begging him not to because of the war going on. Vietnam had seemed a long way off until a boy we knew from church was killed over there and the newspapers started reporting protest marches in Knoxville, less than an hour away from us. There was a draft but Mark didn’t want to wait for it. Sometimes I could see on his face how angry and desperate he was to get away. That morning he was sitting across the table from me drinking black coffee, looking hungover. “Hey,” he said, with a glint in his eye. “Guess who I seen the other day?” I lowered my head and stared at my plate. Mark still had a way of getting to me. “Your girl, Myra. She was hanging around with some long tall feller, looked a lot older than her. They seemed to be awful cozy. If I’d stuck around, there ain’t no telling what kind of show they would’ve put on.” I gripped my fork and swallowed a lump of grits that had turned to paste in my mouth.

Later on the bus I tried to ask Myra about it, but when she turned her distant eyes on me I couldn’t go through with it. I didn’t want to hear the truth. Months passed, the weather got colder, and I never mustered the courage to confront her about the rumors I was hearing. I figured her granny didn’t know and wondered if I should tell her. Maybe she could put a stop to it before something broke forever between Myra and me. Even though she’d been my best friend since first grade, I could barely stand to look at her anymore. But it wasn’t all her fault that we drifted apart, and things probably wouldn’t have been any different if I’d fought for her. All winter we still sat together on the bus, but for Myra it was out of habit. I looked past her profile, half hidden behind a dark curtain of hair, at clots of ice rushing down roadside creeks and gullies swollen with melted snow.

Then one day in March, Myra didn’t get on the bus after school. I asked the driver to wait a few minutes, but she never came. I didn’t want to think about who had given her a ride home. I sat in her empty spot with my forehead pressed against the window, mailboxes and ditches racing by in a blur, remembering again what Tina Cutshaw had said. I was cursed to have known Myra, more cursed to have loved her like I did.

As usual, the bus driver didn’t go all the way up the mountain. He let me off at the bottom of the dirt road and I couldn’t stop thinking of Myra as I began walking the rest of the way home. She had made my life a misery since the minute I saw her jumping out of the churchyard tree. Some nights I lay curled on my side, the things I couldn’t tell even Mr. Barnett aching like bruises in me. When I did sleep it seemed Myra sang to me, her breath trembling against my ear. I’d wake up thinking she was in my bed and find a moth batting its wings against my face. Or I’d dream of her warmth on my back and wake to find one of Mama’s cats purring there. Many times I fled my room and went outside to look up at something bigger than Myra and my love for her, something that might make it feel smaller, but it didn’t work. The same God who made that sky full of stars had made this love and I couldn’t wrap my brain around the bigness of either one.

As I walked, scuffing up dirt with the toes of my boots, I was struck by the unfairness. I had been loyal to Myra our whole lives and now I was left behind, like that chimney swift we found floating in the cistern. I felt a pang of sorrow for myself and then blinding anger. I threw my schoolbooks into the road, papers flying everywhere, some of them landing in the creek branch. I tore up the mountain looking for Myra, not sure what I would do if I found her, breaking off saplings and ripping the undergrowth out of my way, briars grabbing at my pant legs and rocks throwing me down.

All the way up the mountain a storm raged in me, until somehow I made it manifest in the world outside. A keen wind rose out of nowhere and shook through the trees. By the time I reached the place where Myra’s rock jutted high over a bluff the wind blew so hard that all I could hear was its screaming whistle. I stepped into the clearing and there she was, hair whipping wild, crouched like an animal on the ledge where she had read to me so many times. All the rage deserted me. The way she was poised on the edge of the rock, I worried for an instant that she might jump. I saw it happening, how she would spring, how she would spread her arms and fly. I thought of a story I’d heard long ago, how one of her ancestors leapt from a cliff on Blood-root Mountain. I had hated her only minutes before, but if she had jumped right then I would have gone flying after her, caught her in the air, and positioned myself to cushion her fall.

I shouted to Myra, screamed her name so hard it felt like something ruptured in my throat. If she hadn’t heard me I might have gone crazy. But she turned around and smiled when she saw me, even though her eyes didn’t light up the way they usually did. She said something and the wind tore the words from her lips, as if she were already fading away, as if she were already half gone. She climbed down from the rock and came to me holding her shoes in her hands, barefoot even though the ground was cold.

“Doug,” she shouted over the wind. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” I said.

“What?” she said. “I can’t hear you!”

“It’s true. You are a witch.”

“I can’t hear you!” she shouted again.

“Nothing,” I said.

She tugged at my arm, smiling. “Come sit with me!”

I didn’t move and Myra’s smile faltered. I thought a moment of sadness passed across her face, but looking back she was probably already too wrapped up in John Odom to care. Since that day, I’ve been thinking about the anger that took hold of me. I didn’t even know it was in there. Now I know it always was and always will be. But I could never have hurt Myra, or gone through with poisoning Wild Rose. I can’t turn my anger loose, even on a horse. I guess it will poison me instead, maybe for the rest of my life.

BYRDIE

Even with Myra there to love, them first few years after Clio died liked to done me in. I volunteered me and Macon to clean up the church and take care of the graveyard so I could at least stay close to her body. Saturdays we’d head down the mountain and while Macon scraped chewing gum off the bottoms of the pews I’d pull weeds from around the headstones with Myra crawling over the grass. Summer evenings I’d drag my lawn chair out of the truck bed and set in front of the graves of my children, watching lightning bugs rise out of the ground like sparks going up in the dark. They was all lined up together, small markers for the babies and a bigger one for Willis and a double headstone for Kenny and Clio. I’d think about their bones down yonder, scraps of the clothes I buried them in still clinging on, and try to feel close to what was left of them. But I couldn’t reach none of my children that way, no matter how long I set there. I couldn’t even picture their bones after a while. Macon wouldn’t come out to disturb me. He waited inside after he was done cleaning the church. I know he thought I was taking comfort, but for a long time being in the graveyard didn’t do me a bit of good. Then one evening I was listening to the tree frogs, thinking about heading back up the mountain, when I felt Myra’s hand on my arm. She was three years old, standing on the grave of one of her aunts that never even made it to her age. She was alive and solid and there with me. I took her fingers and studied them, rubbing over the dirty little fingernails with my thumb. She looked at the graves, decorated with the wild-flowers I had brung, and asked, “Is this Heaven, Granny?” I took a big breath of night air and drawed her close. “No, honey,” I said. “It’s not.” I buried my face in her neck and thought, You are.

Me and Macon suffered a lot of heartbreak, but at least we had one another to lean on. I ain’t going to say it was always peaceful between us, but it was always loving, even when we fought each other. I never cared to fight. In school, I scrapped with boys and girls both. When me and Macon first got married we’d get mad and scrabble around in the floor, smacking each other and pulling hair and grinding our heads together like billy goats. To us, that was all part of being married. There wasn’t no hate in it.

Once we got older we didn’t fight like that no more. Neither one of us had the stomach for it. We figured it was time to rest in our old age. We didn’t talk much either, but it wasn’t out of hatefulness. We just got to where we liked the quiet. We’d set back and watch Myra dart through the house, long red hair ribbon streaming out, chattering like a magpie and pretty as a doll. It was her time now, we’d done had our own.

Macon didn’t show it, but he loved Myra from far off about as much as I did close up. He was always leaving gifts on her pillow, like that red ribbon she wore all the time. When she found it she took it right to the mirror and tied up her hair. Then she ran to find Macon smoking by the stove. He stood there pretending not to wait for her. She throwed herself at his legs and asked, “Am I pretty?” He stroked her head and said, “That red suits you, Myra Jean.” Times like that, I wanted to bust, seeing how much Macon loved to please our grandbaby. He’d stand in the kitchen door while I cooked supper and watch her play in the yard, letting in flies to pester me. In the summertime it was hotter than a firecracker in here, with grease popping and splattering on my arms. I’d finally get plumb ill and say, “Macon, let that youngun alone. How’s she ever going to grow up with you stifling her down?” But I never could get Macon to give that child rest. I knowed what it was. We’d lost so many, he was scared to let the last one left out of his sight. If Macon was out of the bed at night, I knowed he was standing over Myra watching her breathe.

I struggled with them same old demons. It was hard to let Myra loose when I wanted to keep her with me every minute. She was wild, but not as bad as her mama. Sometimes the schoolteacher would send home a note saying Myra wouldn’t set down at her desk. She’d stand up to do her lessons, or wander over to the window and stare out. But she settled down in the later grades. The most trouble we had out of Myra was when she took it in her head to climb to the top of the mountain. She’d slip off and Macon would have to go find her. He’d pepper her legs with a switch but she’d head right back out. Thank goodness she quit doing that, but she never did lose that old restless nature. She didn’t run off once she got bigger, but she’d set on the back steps and chew her fingernails to the bloody quick, looking off in the woods like she didn’t even know she was doing it. I’d feel like squalling, watching her gnaw at herself that way, because I knowed what it meant. Still, Myra was a good girl. She didn’t give me too much grief, but I made up plenty for myself to worry about. If I found a tick in her ear I’d mark the date on the calendar and watch her real close for that spotted fever I’d heard tell of. First sign of a sniffle and I’d have to go off somewhere and collect myself before I let Myra see my nerves all tore up. Only thing that got me through her childhood, with all them croups and stomach bugs and sore throats, was going to the good Lord daily in prayer.

Sometimes Myra tried to tear away from me when I held her, but she’d always come back to be petted and loved on because she knowed how bad I needed to do it. But Macon showed his love in different ways than mine, like buying them trinkets to leave on her pillow and whittling things for her. He carved up a whole set of animals for her to play with, and brung her home I don’t know how many puppies and kittens over the years. I’d get mad enough to wring his neck when I’d see him carrying another mutt up the hill. Sometimes people would set out a dog or cat at the filling station just because they knowed he’d take it home if he found it hanging around the pumps looking hungry.

In 1969, the summer Myra turned twelve, me and her left Macon working in the yard one day and walked up to the Cotters. Oleta Cotter had had female surgery and was laid up for several weeks, so me and Margaret Barnett took turns going up yonder to see about her. The Cotters live the furthest up the mountain and keep the most to theirselves. They don’t poke their nose in nobody’s business, but they’d give you the shirt off of their back if they knowed you was in trouble. I learnt that after Clio got killed. Oleta came down the mountain every day to cook for Macon and take care of Myra until I could stand to get out of the bed. That’s how come I didn’t care a bit to see to her worshing and make sure them boys was fed when she was laid up. It was hot that day and I had sweat dripping in my eyes by the time me and Myra got halfway up to the house. Them two youngest Cotter boys, Douglas and Mark, ran out of the woods to meet us like wild Indians. They stopped in the middle of the road plumb out of breath.

“Hidee, Miss Lamb,” Mark said, pushing his shaggy hair out of his eyes. I don’t believe I ever seen them two that they didn’t need a haircut. Mark was the only one of them boys that’d talk. I don’t reckon I ever heard Douglas say a word. Myra said he knowed how to talk, he was just real quiet. Douglas was in Myra’s class and Mark was two years ahead of her. Both of them boys was struck on Myra and tried to court her all through school, but she never would go with either one of them. Mark and Douglas was nice-looking fellers, even when they was little, had big old brown eyes and gold hair, but I reckon they seemed like brothers to Myra. They was always into something. That day it wasn’t even dinnertime yet and looked like they’d already been rolling in mud. Myra always kept right up with them, climbing trees and shooting marbles and whatever else it was they done. Mark held out his BB gun to show Myra and said, “Let’s go shoot cans.” Then they tore off up the hill ahead of me like their britches was on fire.

I took my time following them on towards the house. Bill and Oleta have a tiny little place with a stone foundation and a covered porch. Not too long ago Bill had put on some cheap gray cardboard siding, supposed to look like brick. He’d poured a cement walk up to the porch, too, but grass had growed over most of it. There was trees and bushes crowded against the house and a line of fence posts sticking up behind it where Bill kept a few cows.

Bill gets rid of his cows every few years, until he takes a notion to buy up some more, but he never does get tired of that horse he bought from a man in Dalton, Georgia. I swear that’s the orneriest creature I ever seen, but Bill loves her like somebody. Now, she’s beautiful, I can’t deny that, and you can see her spirit burning like fire in them blue eyes. She’s a paint mare, and the first time I seen them eyes I liked to jumped out of my skin. I never knowed a horse could have eyes like that. They was just like Myra’s, and that might be why my grandbaby was so fixed on her from the beginning. I knowed that was why she always wanted to go up to the Cotters’ with me, to see Wild Rose. That’s the name the horse had when Bill bought her, and it suits her. His old fence never could keep her in. I don’t know how many times Rose came tearing down the mountain with her tail up, trampling through our garden and leaving manure in the yard. Sometimes I wondered if she was looking for Myra. It was eerie seeing them together. Myra would stand at the fence and Wild Rose kept her distance, but she’d stare Myra straight in the eye, neither one of them moving a muscle. Then Rose’d take off like she was spooked across the hills. Wild as Myra was, I guess in a way them two was sisters.

When I got up to the house I could hear Douglas and Mark and Myra at the barn calling for Wild Rose, but I couldn’t see them. As I was walking up on the porch Bill Cotter opened the front door and came out. I said, “Hidee, Bill.” He tipped his cap at me and went on down the steps to his truck. Bill don’t say much, but he’s a good man.

I went in the front room and seen the linoleum needed mopping. Bill or them boys had tracked mud in. Oleta was laying on the couch and her head nearly wringing wet with sweat. Poor thing looked like she was roasting so I opened some windows for her.

“Where’s that Bill headed off to?” I asked, gathering up some pieces of newspaper he’d left by his chair.

“Laws, I don’t know. He don’t never tell me nothing. Why, he don’t even tell me bye no more when he leaves the house. Does Macon do you thataway?”

“Well,” I said, but Oleta was done off on another subject before I could answer.

There was quite a bit needed doing. I swept and mopped and put a pot of beans on the stove. As I was tidying up, somehow or other I got to feeling funny. I got to studying on what Oleta asked, did Macon do me that way. I reckon the answer would have been yes if she had give me time. He’d head out for work every morning without saying a word, but he didn’t need to. We knowed each other so good after all them years of marriage, there wasn’t no use in saying much. I’d fix his dinner and put it in his bucket and we’d drink us a cup of coffee beside of the stove, then he’d get up and leave. I didn’t see nothing wrong with it, but the way Oleta said it sounded bad. I tried to remember if I said goodbye to Macon when me and Myra left the house that morning. The whole time I was worshing Oleta’s breakfast dishes and sweeping off the back stoop I was retracing my steps, trying to decide if I told Macon bye. In my head I was waking up before first light, Macon already setting on his side of the bed getting his boots on. I was walking across the dewy grass toward the barn to gather eggs. I was frying the eggs in my old iron skillet and calling for Myra to get up before she slept the day away. I was eating breakfast in the kitchen by myself because Macon and Myra was done before I ever set down. I was bringing in some tomatoes before they rotted on the vine. I was telling Myra if she wanted to walk up to the Cotters’ with me she better come on. I was passing Macon on my way down the hill with Myra as he was headed for the barn. “Did you see them dadburn Japanese beetles on my rosebush?” I asked him. “I was fixing to spray,” he said. That was it. I never did say bye. I reckon he knowed where I was going, because he probably heard me holler at Myra, but I started feeling bad just the same.

The longer I was at the Cotters’, the more anxious I got to get back to the house. I allowed to Oleta I better get on home and fix Macon a bite of supper. I had to stand in the yard and holler for Myra a long time, until she finally came out of the woods looking like she’d rolled in the mud with them Cotter boys, sticks and leaves stuck in her hair. I thought how I’d have to check her head for ticks before she went to bed that night.

Since I’d turned seventy-one, I didn’t get around as good as I used to. I was wore out by the time we got home, but Myra never ran out of wind. She took off for the house soon as we made it up the hill and beat me to the door by a mile. She went on in while I was still dragging across the yard. I seen where Macon had done a little bit of weeding around the steps and there was a mess of wood shavings in the grass, too, so I knowed he must have been whittling. He was getting on in years hisself, nearly eighty by then, and couldn’t take the sun for long at a time. He’d take a break and set down if he got too hot working in the yard, but Macon never could stand for his hands to be idle.

I didn’t think nothing of it and went on in the house. First thing I seen was Myra, standing in the middle of the floor with her back to me, hair ribbon hanging crooked where she’d been playing. It took me a minute to see she was looking at Macon. He was slumped over in his chair, the same way he took a nap of the evenings, but it still didn’t hit me that something was wrong. I reckon I was so hot and weary my head was addled.

“What in the world are you doing?” I asked Myra.

She turned around and I never will forget the look in her eyes. She said, “Is Granddaddy sleeping?”

That’s when I knowed. I walked over to his chair and seen how still he was. “No,” I said to Myra. “He ain’t asleep.” I ran my finger across that island birthmark one more time. Then I sent Myra down to the Barnetts’ for Hacky to get word to the coroner. I hated for her to have to do it alone, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave Macon’s side.

I was setting at Macon’s feet waiting for the people to come when I noticed this little wood box, about the size of my hand. It was on a piece of newspaper on the end table beside of his chair, looked like the varnish was still tacky on it. He must have been working on it for a while out in the barn when I thought he was making another bird-house. Once I seen it I smelled the varnish, but I hadn’t even noticed it until then. The lid was laying separate and it was the prettiest piece of carving I ever seen. It was carved with a bloodroot flower, all by itself. I could tell he’d took time with every petal and every vein in the leaves. I figure he made it for Myra’s birthday to hold her trinkets, and meant to hide it someplace once the varnish dried. Then he’d leave it on her pillow without saying nothing and stand off somewhere waiting for her to find it.

I knowed what it meant that he would give Myra that bloodroot flower. I knowed everything he was trying to say to her. I took Macon’s hand and wet it with my tears, wishing I never left him alone that day. After all me and Macon went through together, for him to die by hisself broke my heart. It took a little bit of work to pull that bloodred ring off of his poor old finger, stained black with the oil of all them engines he’d fiddled with down through the years. His knuckles had swole with arthritis as he got older. But then it was in my palm, like I dropped it in his that day in the cornfield. I put the ring in that fine box he whittled like it was a casket, the last thing he ever done. I took the box and Macon’s whittling knife to the back bedroom, where me and him had started sleeping after Clio got killed by that train so we could feel closer to her. I made a cut in the mattress and hid the box before anybody came to see about Macon’s body. I didn’t want Myra to have it before she knowed how to appreciate it. She was too young to understand the preciousness of that bloodroot flower, no matter how pretty it was, and I didn’t know how to tell her. I slept on top of that ring for four years, until the day I gave it to Myra for that snake John Odom. Now I’d do just about anything to have it back.

DOUG

Myra and I didn’t talk again after that day I found her crouched on the rock. She stopped riding the bus and I knew it was about that tall boy Mark claimed he had seen her with. One night near graduation, Mama and Daddy were talking over supper about how Frankie Odom’s son was struck on Myra. They said he’d been taking her to and from school and coming up the mountain to get her every Saturday night. I recognized the name Odom from a long time ago. We used to stop in at Odom’s Hardware when I was small, but Daddy had stopped trading there after Odom raised his prices. I looked across the table at Mark, his cheeks fat with mashed potatoes. He had lost interest in Myra. All he thought about was joining the service and fighting in Vietnam. I wondered how he could eat when my stomach felt like a cauldron of acid. I guess in my heart of hearts I knew he didn’t love her, but I never thought how quickly he’d move on.

After supper we stood having a smoke out behind the barn, hiding even though we were grown, because we didn’t want to hear Mama’s mouth.

“What do you think about Myra and that Odom boy?” I asked, trying to be casual.

Mark pitched his butt into the dark grass. “Shoot, I gave up on that’n a long time ago. If a man’s not crazy, he’ll finally get the picture.” Mark grinned and slapped me on the back. I pitched my butt with shaking fingers and followed him inside.

The next day, for the last time, I went to see Mr. Barnett. He was in the garden pulling weeds. When he saw me he took off his cap and wiped the sweat from his brow. He didn’t ask what I was up to. We stood for a while in silence, looking toward the woods at the edge of the yard where we had walked together so many times. “You were wrong,” I told him at last. “She won’t ever come around.” Then my knees came unhinged and I sank down in the black dirt. Mr. Barnett knelt with me and hugged me tight. “You’re the one she ought to be with, Douglas,” he said. “You and me both know it’s the truth. But Myra’s got a choice. Everybody’s got a choice. She just made the wrong one.”

A week or so later, I saw Myra and John Odom together. He was waiting for her in the school parking lot, leaning against his car. Girls stood around giggling about how pretty he was, but he looked like the devil to me. Long and lean, tall and dark as a shadow, eyes black as pits. It was like he reeled her across the parking lot by an invisible hook in her perfect lip. I was standing close enough to smell her hair as she walked by, but she didn’t even see me. He did an odd thing when she got to the car. He put his hand on the top of her head. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was like a stranger walking up and saddling Wild Rose, swinging up on her back, and riding off across the hills.

John Odom was the one Myra was looking for all along. I guess somewhere there’s somebody that could ride Wild Rose, too. It was Mama who told me that Myra was married. Until I heard it, there was hope she might come back. But the minute the words left Mama’s mouth last night, I knew I was leaving. I haven’t decided where I’ll go, maybe Canada to escape the draft and the memory of her voice. This morning I walked out the back door at first light, duffel bag over my shoulder and a book Myra left behind in my hand. I dropped the book in the trash barrel to be burnt on my way to the pasture. I want the embers to disperse and the words to find her somewhere, in a house beside of the railroad tracks, according to Mama. I picture her standing in some sooty yard looking up at the moon, a flat world with no shine where the trees are black outlines, with a hint of smoke in her nostrils. I know it’s not true, but I want some sadness to enter her when she thinks of me and the mountain. I want her to suffer for my sake. Myra might get back one day up Bloodroot Mountain, but if she does I won’t be here.

After I dropped the book into the trash barrel, I ducked under the fence and went across the pasture to where Wild Rose was grazing. Standing with my bag over my shoulder and bus-ticket money in the breast pocket of my shirt, I got closer to her than I’ve ever been. Now her breath snuffs out in white clouds as she sniffs of me. Maybe she’s letting me close because she knows it’s goodbye. I think she’s not mad about what happened out in the barn last night. I might have won her respect. Or maybe she smells my acceptance of the truth she’s tried to tell me all along. Some creatures are just meant to be left alone. They can’t be held on to, even if we love them more than anything.

BYRDIE

After Macon passed on, I vowed to give Myra some room to stretch her legs. That’s some of the reason I let John Odom court her when she got to be seventeen. She was the same age as Clio was when she ran off with Kenny Mayes, but Myra was different than her mama. I thought she had a better head on her shoulders. I know now I should have been more careful. But it was plain how Myra loved that man and there wasn’t no use fighting her. I didn’t want to lose my grand-baby so I let her go, and ended up losing her anyhow. But I don’t see what I could have done to hang on to her. She was bound and determined to have John Odom, same way I was to have Macon, and Clio was to have Kenny. If Macon was still living he would have went down to them tracks with a shotgun a long time ago and got her out of there. Matter of fact, he wouldn’t have let her go off with John Odom in the first place. Macon might have had it right all along, not letting Myra out of his sight. I guess sometimes a body just don’t know what to do.

I had me a good garden last spring, when John Odom first started coming around. I always plant by the signs. Things that grows in the ground like taters I do on the dark nights of the moon, and things that grows on top of the ground I plant on the light nights. Last year I growed the best sweet corn I ever put in my mouth. I’d planted it earlier than usual and it was real warm weather, so the corn was already high. I was out yonder gathering it in, had my tin tub about half full, when I heard car doors slamming shut. I already knowed Myra was struck on somebody because she told me. She wasn’t one to keep secrets like her mama done. Ever since I knowed it, I’d been dreading the day she’d bring some old boy up Bloodroot Mountain for me to see, and now the day had come.

I didn’t go around the house to meet him and her. I just closed my eyes for a minute, so fagged out it seemed like I couldn’t stand up. I figured it was going to be like it was with Kenny and Clio, and I didn’t know if I could take it this time. I should have knowed to expect more out of my grandbaby. She came around the house pulling John along by the hand. I turned around holding a good ear of corn, the silky tassel hanging down. It was just about sunset and John Odom was the prettiest thing I ever seen, walking across the yard towards me with the light in his eyes. The devil can fool a body that way. Looked like a movie star, with that shiny black hair and them good white teeth. I had feelings standing with him in that garden that I thought was dead in me a long time ago. That’s how the devil works. I knowed right then there wouldn’t be no fighting him and Myra. Neither one of us could have resisted him. I can’t blame her. I fell for it, too.

Myra showed him off to me like a prize she’d won. “Granny, this is John. You know his daddy, Frankie, that owns Odom’s Hardware.”

“Why, is that your daddy?” I said. “Me and Macon done a lot of business with him down through the years.” I hate to admit it, but it crossed my mind that Myra had snagged a good one. I figured she’d be set if she married into the Odoms. I thought when Frankie Odom passed on that store would fall to his boys and she’d be taken care of.

John Odom reached out for my hand. I dropped the corn in the tub and wiped dirt on my apron. His hand was so clean and white, I didn’t want to sully it.

“Daddy speaks well of you and Mr. Lamb. Said you all was good people.”

“Well. We always tried to be.”

John looked down in the tub at my feet. “You got an awful good-looking crop of corn this year, Mrs. Lamb.” He reached out and plucked an ear, held it in his hands. “I like the smell of a garden,” he said, turning to Myra, “don’t you?” She took an ear herself and said, “Let me and John help you get this in, Granny.”

I started to tell them to go on and have a good time, but I didn’t want them to leave me. All of a sudden I felt old and lonesome. It was good to have them working alongside me, the evening sun pouring between the cornstalks and the smell of garden dirt, even the smell of sweat. It had been a long time since I smelled a man’s sweat.

When the tub was full, me and John Odom went to pick it up at the same time. We bumped heads and got tickled. When we looked at each other across that tin tub, there was something about his black eyes that bothered me. I tried to ignore it. I wanted him to be good for Myra. But I should have listened to that small voice inside of me.

Next evening I came upon Myra setting on the steps as I was headed from the barn with a bucket of eggs. “Where you been, little lady?” I asked, gumming my snuff.

“For a walk.”

I looked at her for a long time with my hand on my hip. I could tell her whole self was yearning toward town and the hardware store where John Odom was working. I put my bucket down and she made room for me to sit. I touched her cheek with my finger. Next to the smoothness of her young skin, I seen how old and crooked it was. When she turned to me I searched her eyes for the words it seemed like she couldn’t find.

“Your face is hot,” I said. “Reckon you’ve caught a cold?”

“No. I’m just sitting here thinking.”

“What about?”

“Something I got to tell you.”

“All right,” I said. But I wished she wouldn’t say anything. I looked out across the yard at the shadows gathering under the apple tree.

“Me and John are getting married.”

“Well. I figured you would.”

She smiled and leaned into my shoulder. “How’d you figure?”

“Honey, you look about as lovesick as anybody I ever seen, except maybe for me when I first laid eyes on your granddaddy.”

We both got quiet. I knowed what I wanted to do. I wanted to give Myra her granddaddy’s ring, but I hesitated. Sometimes I still worry it’s what caused this whole blamed mess. Stealing was the worst thing I ever done and for most of my life taking that ring had been my secret. Now I had to tell on myself, because I couldn’t give it to Myra without warning her what came with it. But it felt right for her to have. I seen how deep in love she was. I got up before I could chicken out and said, “Set still here a minute.”

I went inside, the kitchen door slapping behind me, and came back out carrying the box Macon had carved. Myra had never seen it before, but she must have knowed right off it was her granddaddy’s work. I could tell by the way her eyes lit up. Then she got real solemn and traced the bloodroot flower on the lid with her fingertip.

“Open it up,” I said. The wedding ring was inside. I’d seen it many times but it looked different off of Macon’s finger, like a living thing, a beating heart. “I want you to give it to John,” I said. Myra looked up at me with her blue eyes. She opened her mouth to talk but no words came out. She settled her head on my chest and I stroked her hair for a while, the red ribbon Macon bought her a long time ago flowing through my fingers.

“Now I’ve got to tell you a shameful thing,” I finally said. Myra raised her head and I was nervous, because if my grandbaby was to think less of me I didn’t know what I’d do. “I stole this here ring off of a woman I worked for.” I studied Myra’s face close but there was no change in it that I could see. “I never believed I could do a thing like that. But I loved your granddaddy in such a hard way, I didn’t know up from down.”

She just kept looking at me. I couldn’t tell how she was taking it.

“That ain’t no excuse,” I went on. “It’s something I’ll have to answer for on Judgment Day. I’m just saying love can be too deep. It’ll make you do crazy things.”

Myra smiled at me then in a way that made my belly sink down to my feet. “Don’t be sorry, Granny,” she said. “You don’t have to explain. I know why you did it.”

All of a sudden I wanted to snatch Macon’s ring back and my blessing, too. I wondered what she had already done in the name of that deep down love.

It was two weeks later, in June of last year, that Myra and John Odom got married. They was in too big of a hurry for a church wedding, so they went down to the preacher’s house and got married in his kitchen without telling me about it until the next day. I hated for Myra to leave me, but I was relieved at least she was marrying into some money. Macon had done well enough for us and we never went hungry, but it was a struggle sometimes. I wondered if Myra was ashamed, going to school with other boys and girls that had more than we did. I knowed Odom’s Hardware hadn’t got as much business after the Plaza was built, but it seemed from the look of things that Frankie and his sons was still making a good living. That’s part of how come I was so surprised when I seen the house he had Myra in. I rode down yonder with them before they moved in their furniture and I guess it showed plain on my face what I thought of the place. Right off, Myra went to making excuses. She said times was lean at the hardware store and Frankie couldn’t afford to pay his boys as much as he used to. But I still believe John Odom could have done better by my grandbaby than that old dump by the railroad tracks. It had rained the night before and the yard was pure mud, with no trees or flowers. Soon as we stepped out of the car a train went by, big and fast enough to rattle the ground. It was all I could do to keep from squalling, thinking of Myra living in a hole like that.

Back at home without my grandbaby, the mountain looked different to me. The woods was dark and sometimes it seemed like they was creeping up closer to the house. At least when Myra and John first got married they’d come and eat dinner with me every Sunday after church. They’d set across the table and look at each other until it just about made my face red. Sometimes I’d get jealous over how much they loved one another. I’d get sad thinking about how my own youth was gone and my loving days was over.

It wasn’t long, though, before I seen John Odom turning quiet. Wouldn’t hardly look up from his plate, and every once in a while, if me and Myra got to laughing and carrying on, sharing a little bit of gossip, he’d shoot us the evilest look anybody’s ever seen. It made me uneasy, but to tell the truth, I was still trying to ignore it. Like I said, I wanted him to be everything Myra thought he was, for her sake and mine both.

Then John stopped coming to church and Myra would be there by herself. She’d slip in and set on the back pew. I could tell she was troubled. One afternoon she came up to the house looking peaked and her hands shaking. She tried to help me worsh the dishes and they kept slipping back down in the sink. Finally I said, “What is it, honey?”

She said, “John’s started drinking beer.”

“Well,” I said, trying to make me and her both feel better, “I never knowed a young man that wouldn’t take a nip every once in a while.”

“I don’t know, Granny,” she said, and wouldn’t look at me no more.

By November, Myra had quit coming up Bloodroot Mountain altogether. I cooked a ham for Christmas dinner but she never showed up. I set by myself beside of the tree Hacky Barnett drug in and put up for me, worried sick. Her and John Odom didn’t have no phone in that house by the tracks, and me and Macon never had one put in either, so I didn’t know what in the world happened to her. I had Hacky to drive me down yonder but seeing her didn’t make me feel no better. She acted spooked, kept looking at the door the whole time like she was afraid somebody was coming. We tried to talk but seemed like she couldn’t concentrate enough to carry on a conversation. I wept all the way back home and Hacky tried to comfort me by letting on like it wasn’t all that bad. He patted my shoulder and said, “She looks all right, Byrdie. There ain’t no places on her.” But I said, “Hacky, the places might be on the inside.” He didn’t have no argument for that.

Then two months passed without seeing Myra because Margaret Barnett fell off the porch and twisted her back. Hacky’s had a time taking care of her, and I hated to ask him to drive me to town. I thought of asking Bill Cotter, but since his boys are gone it’s all he can do to keep the farm running. This morning I couldn’t stand it no longer and asked Hacky to take me to Myra right away. We didn’t talk in the truck. I guess we both had a lot on our minds. We pulled up in front of the house under a big black storm cloud. It had been spitting ice rain off and on all morning and it was a mess trying to get across that old yard. I climbed up on the stoop huffing and puffing and when I finally did get situated to knock on the door, it took Myra a long time to open it. Soon as she seen me, her mouth fell open. I was shocked myself, to see my grandbaby in such a shape. She was skinny as a rail and looked like she hadn’t combed her hair in a month of Sundays.

“Granny,” she said.

She walked into my arms and we stood there for a long time with tears in our eyes. Finally I heard Hacky clearing his throat behind me. We went on in the house and I never seen such a clutter. I taught Myra better than that, but I reckon she just didn’t have no gumption left in her. She cleared a place on the couch for us. Hacky set there the whole time holding his cap with his ears red, looking like he’d rather be anyplace else.

I told Myra, “I would have come sooner but you know I ain’t got no way around.”

“Have you been getting your medicines?” she asked. I could tell she was worried about me as much as I was about her.

I said, “Hacky runs to the drugstore for me. Him and Margaret’s been so good to me. I don’t know what I would have done.”

Myra smiled at Hacky and looked sad at the same time. I know she wants to be the one taking care of me. That might be why John Odom’s got her trapped someway.

“Honey, why don’t you come home with me?” I begged her. I hadn’t been meaning to say nothing but it just came out. “Don’t let him do you this way.”

“I can’t, Granny,” she said. “I made my bed.” About that time we heard a car out in the driveway and Myra’s eyes got big. It was nearly twelve o’clock and John Odom had come home for dinner. He busted in like an old bull and it was a sight how he had changed in such a short time. His hair was still black and shiny as ever, but he had a gut hanging over his belt buckle and bags underneath his eyes. I could tell Myra was scared to death of what he might do because me and Hacky was there. I wondered myself how he was going to act, but he just looked around at me and Hacky right hateful and didn’t say a word to us. He pitched his car keys on the end table beside of Myra’s chair and knocked off a bunch of clutter. It made a loud racket and she flinched like he’d shot at her. “Fix me something to eat,” he said to Myra. Then he stomped off to the bathroom. Directly Hacky said, without looking at me, “We better get on up the mountain, Byrdie.”

“No, wait here for a minute,” Myra whispered. She dashed off and I could hear her rummaging in the hallway. She was back quick as lightning and I couldn’t make out what she had in her hands at first. When she got close I seen she had that box Macon whittled for her. She leant over where I was setting on the couch and put it in my dress pocket. “I want you to keep it safe for me, Granny,” she said. “This is no place for it.”

Ever since I seen Myra that way, it seems to me I can hear my grandbaby moaning outside in the dark. It’s like when I heard that train whistle blowing the night Clio got killed. I’ve thought many times of putting the law on John Odom, but I don’t know what to accuse him of. Far as I know, he ain’t been beating on her. I never seen no bruises. But like I told Hacky that day in the truck, there’s other ways a woman can get beat up on. All I can do right now is to pray for Myra, that she gets herself out of this fix someway. I might not be around much longer to help her out of it. I’m heading toward seventy-seven years old next month and I’m tired. The doctor says I’ve got congestive heart failure. Here lately just walking around the house wears me out. My eyes has got so weak these old glasses don’t do me much good no more. It’s hard to believe, but a time will come when I won’t be in this house on the mountain. I made Hacky promise to look after Myra if anything happens to me and he said he would. He said he’s always stood by me and Macon and our younguns, and he don’t aim to quit now. That made me feel some better, but I still don’t know how to get my grandbaby away from that devil John Odom.

So all my kids are dead and gone and Myra might be lost forever. People probably wonders how I kept from losing my mind. Seeing one youngun go before you, much less five, is enough to ruin any mammy. I reckon I am ruint in a way. I can’t think straight no more. I forget the names of the craziest things, like flowers and biscuits and chairs. And you know I’ve buried five children and seen their dead bodies, watched them get sicker and sicker and not been able to help them a’tall, but the picture that vexes my mind the most is Myra when she opened the door of that house by the tracks. That’s the thing that’s done broke my heart in two, because she’s the one that saved me after all them others was gone. She’s how come me and Macon to get out of the bed all of them years. Myra’s the one I love the best of all, it don’t matter that I never bore her. She was mine anyhow.