Bloodroot

JOHNNY

I spent a long time trying to forget the first eight years of my life. For some it might be easy to shake loose their earliest memories, but not for me. No matter how hard I tried, there was always some reminder of childhood. Today it was seeing my mama’s blue eyes on a baby I was holding for the first time. Over the years there have been other things that took me back, the smells of loam and moss and ferny ground, the taste of ice-cold water. It’s been a while, though, since I saw the mountain outside of memory.

In 1990, when I was fourteen, I went up Bloodroot Mountain again after six years gone. It was a long walk, with Marshall Lunsford behind me and neither one of us saying a word. The mountain looked different than when I was small. A sawmill had carved a bald place in the land and the road was paved where it used to be dirt, but I knew we were getting close when we passed Mr. Barnett’s. His house was nearly buried behind a briar thicket, just a rusty roof with a stub of chimney poking out of the tangled green. The flag was up on his mailbox and the same dented truck parked in the weeds, glinting in what was left of the sun. He was probably too old to drive it anymore. I wondered if he would come out and if he would still know me, but his place was quiet and still.

We kept climbing and it was almost dark by the time we made it to the witch’s house. That’s what Marshall called it. “There’s a witch’s house up yonder,” he said. He caught up and stood panting in the road, head down and eyes shifting toward every sound, but looking up at the house I forgot about Marshall and only remembered. Behind the posts of a ruined fence the creek branch rushed downhill over chunks of rock, between thorny vines and flowering bushes. The trees were parted just enough for me to see it up there, like a toy I could hold in both hands, a dirty white box with black window holes and the roof a flake of blood. It did look like a witch’s house, a haunted place, the hill leading up to it bumpy with stumps and boulders. I could see a cross of fallen trees in the yard and a weathered barn where nothing lived but the smell of hay and animals.

Something splashed in the creek and Marshall jumped. “We better get on before it’s too dark to see the road,” he said.

“You can go by yourself if you want to.”

Marshall grew quiet, shuffled his feet. “They say she killed a man.”

“Is that so?”

Back then, I could have told him I’d guarantee she killed a man. I could have told him the witch was my mama, too, but I kept my mouth shut. I looked at the house and wanted to burn it to the ground, or run up there and find her axe still lodged in a stump and chop the whole place to pieces, barn and all. But first I would tear through the rooms to see what was left, scour the lot for any trace of her and Laura and me, a stray bobby pin or a lost shirt button or a length of fishing line, anything to prove we lived for a time between those trees, with that mountain under our feet and that creek water rushing over us. Then I would burn the whole place down and dance in the light of the flames.

“For real, Johnny, let’s go,” Marshall whined, and it was like a spell was broken. I didn’t need to look anymore. I had seen it one more time. I turned to go with Marshall but he was frozen in the middle of the road, staring into the woods across from the house with his mouth hanging open. Between the crowded trunks there was a greenish glow, a faint ghost light hovering close to the ground. “It’s her spirit,” Marshall whispered. Then he took off running down the mountain, shoes slapping hard on the pavement. I knew it was foxfire but I stood there for a long time anyway, looking into the trees.

LAURA

I had some friends up on the mountain. Sun shined down through the leaves and made fairies for me to play with. I didn’t get sad whenever Johnny went off roaming because when the wind blowed them fairies came alive. If I laid on the ground they darted across my body like minnows in the creek. I miss them now when nighttime comes. I’m a grown woman with a child of my own but I still get lonesome in the dark. I try to remember good things, like how Mama was before she changed. I think about that time she was scaling fish. She dropped a bluegill back in the bucket and held my face in her slimy hands. I walked around the rest of the day wearing that slime on my cheeks. I felt touched by some magic creature, like a mermaid out of one of Johnny’s storybooks.

Once I watched Mama take a bath in the creek when the sun was orange, naked breasts and fuzzy legs and a swarm of gnats around her head. I stood on tiptoe and reached out to touch her long, black hair. It poured down her arms like oil. When she bent to lift me I was draped in it. One time she made us blackberry cobbler. We walked to the Barnetts’ after sugar and I rode on her hip. When I asked Johnny about it later, he said it never happened. He pretended not to remember Mama before she was different. But I can still see our teeth and tongues stained dark with juice. I tried to remember for him, how she turned the radio loud and danced us around, and the chocolate cake she made when we turned six. I reminded Johnny of those things, but he always said I dreamed them.

He didn’t even remember the day we walked down the mountain picking up cans and seen a school bus. There was a child’s face in the window and I asked Mama where they was going. She said they was going to school. Johnny wanted to go with them but Mama said she could teach us all we needed to know. Later she showed us how to read with her finger moving underneath the words. I forgot fast but Johnny loved the storybooks. He read them over and over. She taught us other things, too, like how to dig up the ginseng we sold to a fat man down the mountain, and how to can what we growed. There was hot days in the kitchen washing jars and standing over pots. I liked canning but Johnny didn’t. He wanted to be outside hunting. Mama showed us how to kill rabbits and squirrels and possums with her granddaddy’s rifle. I was no good but Johnny could shoot and him just a little boy. Once he got a deer and we had the meat for a long time.

When she quit paying attention to us, I missed her bad. I thought I must have got too big to fit in her lap. If I tried to climb up she didn’t put her arms around me. Pretty soon I gave up. I still loved her, though. I know Johnny loved her, too. But he got mad when she took herself away. One time he hacked down her little patch of corn with a stick but it didn’t do any good. It was like she didn’t notice. Then he set her scarf on fire, a lacy one that hung on her bedpost and used to belong to her granny. He took it out in the grass and held a match to it. Mama went out to stand with him and they watched it burn together. When the fire dwindled down to ashes she walked away and left him there. I went to him but he jerked away. Pretty soon Johnny gave up like I did.

I know why Johnny didn’t want to remember the good things. Once she started acting different, it was easier to remember the bad. But even in them last two years there was nice times. I got to share her bed whenever I found her there. I’d wind myself in her hair and curl up in the littlest knot I could make against her back. One morning she turned over before I crept off. We stared at each other and I seen all the shades of blue in her eyes. I understood how she loved me the only way she could. If Johnny was ever that close to Mama’s face, smelling her skin and feeling her warmness, he might have been different. I wish I could remember what it was like inside of her. I picture her belly like a moon and me and Johnny living in it. The three of us was a family then, bound up together in her skin. Them nine months is why it don’t matter where we go or what the years turn us into. We’ll always love each other. For a while, we was all part of one body.

JOHNNY

Some of what happened on Bloodroot Mountain has grown foggy in my mind, but most of it I remember well. For a long time, my twin sister Laura and I didn’t know to fear anything. We’d play in bat caves and climb the highest trees and let spiders walk up our arms. Once, a bear came lumbering through as we knelt in the pine needles searching for arrowheads. It stopped a few yards from us and sniffed the air before moving on. We must have smelled familiar. Our mama always said we had inherited a way with animals.

I’ll never forget how she cried when I saved Mr. Barnett’s dog, Whitey. It was the fall Laura and I turned five and we had gone down to the Barnetts’ with our mama to trade apples for a bag of cornmeal. While she was in the house with Mrs. Barnett, Laura and I stood watching Mr. Barnett work on his truck, the three of us bent together under the hood. There was a sudden commotion in the woods and I could tell right away that it was Whitey, yelping over a din of wild barking and growling. Mr. Barnett dropped his wrench and Laura and I went running with him into the trees. Whitey was lying on her back in the middle of a dog pack, all of them fighting her. People in Polk County let their dogs roam loose and they ran together sometimes, causing trouble all over the mountain.

Mr. Barnett lunged at the dogs to scare them off, but they weren’t afraid. He threw a rock but that didn’t work either. I knew those dogs meant to kill Whitey. I could hear Laura crying over the racket, eyes squeezed shut and hands clamped over her ears. While Mr. Barnett looked for something else to throw, I walked without thinking toward the fighting dogs. Mr. Barnett yelled for me to get back but it was too late. He ran to dive in and save me, but I didn’t need his help. The dogs scattered to make a path for me as if someone had fired a shotgun. They slinked off, leaving Whitey shivering and bleeding on the leaves. Then the woods were quiet. Mr. Barnett stood frozen as I knelt beside Whitey and picked her up in my arms. She was so big and heavy that I could hardly rise up with her. That’s when I saw my mama standing at the edge of the trees with tears running down her face. I still don’t know if she was crying out of pride or sadness.

Laura and I were always bringing animals into the house. Once we found a nest of baby skunks in a brush pile and it was the only thing our mama didn’t let us keep. Anything else we could catch, we could bring inside. Once it was a red-eyed terrapin that crawled all over the house until one day it just wasn’t there anymore. I don’t know if it found a way out or if my mama set it free. She let us keep the animals but it troubled her. She said wild things belonged outside and not to forget their true nature. I should have listened to her. One summer morning, when I was seven, I got too brave. Rain had been pouring for two days straight and the sun had come back out hot and bright. The yard was soggy and rainwater splashed up my legs when Laura and I ran into the trees. I can still see her stopping to balance on a mossy log, the dark shawl of her hair parted down the middle and sunburn tracing the bridge of her nose. Even though we were born five minutes apart, we didn’t look alike besides our black hair and eyes. Laura was plainer than our mama but had the same long face and high forehead, features I didn’t inherit.

I chased after her, flushing rabbits out of the brush and sending frogs plopping into the creek. We knew where we were going without saying anything. Further up the mountain there were two big tables of rock in a clearing, one slab like a step leading down to the other, jutting high over the bluff. Both were scabby with lichens and scattered with piles of damp leaves. Sometimes I would read to Laura up there, but she couldn’t be still for long, so that rock step became my spot to sit and think.

On the way up to the rock something caught Laura’s eye in the woods, prisms of light filtering down through the trees. The way they moved along the ground when the wind blew, she always ran off after them, arms outstretched and head thrown back to let them play across her face. I didn’t like her drifting too far out of sight, but when I wanted my twin I could call her back without words. I didn’t question how it was possible. I remembered a time when we were smaller that we didn’t need to speak at all. I could read the set of her mouth and the line of her shoulders and know what she wanted to say.

I went on to the rock, but when I stepped into the clearing I stopped in my tracks. In the place where I usually sat there was a snake. I walked closer for a better look. He wasn’t long but he was fat, a lazy S shape soaking up the heat. I had seen snakes before but this was the prettiest, sun shining on his banded back, patterned with rounded spots. When I hunkered down, he lifted the coppery-red triangle of his head. My heart thudded. I stretched out on my belly to look him in the face. Staring into his eyes, it seemed he knew everything about me. I thought if he could speak, he would call me by name.

Slowly the snake began to coil, scales undulating like magic. I wanted to show Laura, because back then my sister and I shared everything. “Laura, come and see!” I shouted, reaching out for the snake. Just as Laura came into the clearing, he shot up and bit me on the back of the hand. I saw the plush pink lining of his throat, the thin black line of his tongue. Then I felt the pain, hot and fiery, shooting up my arm. I was surprised, but I didn’t feel betrayed. I should have known that he was untouchable.

I woke the next day with a headache, hand bloated and bruised nearly black. The stiffness worked its way up my arm to the shoulder and the throbbing lasted for weeks, but it wasn’t all that bad. I couldn’t find the words to tell Laura, but there was something good about it, driving out the other aches inside that vexed me all the time. When I got better I thought that copperhead might have turned me into what he was, like vampires and werewolves do. The idea didn’t trouble me. I almost wished it would happen.

LAURA

I’ve had a long time to think about what made Mama how she was. I know now she never was like other mamas, but them last two years with her was harder. I figure it had something to do with that day in town when me and Johnny was six. It was the only time we ever left the mountain with her. We’d walk to the bottom of it selling ginseng, but she always made us hide in the weeds. The fat man leaned over the rail of his porch and counted the money down into her hand. She never set foot on his steps that I can remember. Sometimes we rode up and down the dirt road in the back of Mr. Barnett’s truck with the wind in our hair, but she wouldn’t let him take us anywhere else. I never wanted to go off the mountain anyway. I seen Mama’s fear of whatever was down there. I figured out she was trying to hide us from something dangerous. Johnny probably did, too. But he was different than me. He always wondered what else there was to see.

It took until we was six for Mama to give in. The leaves had fell and she was building fires in the stove. That meant it was time for Mr. Barnett to go to the co-op. Mama gave him money and he brung things back for us. Mr. Barnett was our good friend. Mama didn’t talk to him much, but I could tell he didn’t make her nervous. Not like that Cotter man we bought fresh milk from up the mountain. His wife would stand at the door with her arms crossed and look down at our dirty feet. Mama would hand over the money and take the milk fast as she could. Mostly we had powdered milk. That’s one thing she bought before winter. Powdered milk, flour, sugar, and cornmeal in big sacks. That year, when it was time for Mr. Barnett to go to the co-op, Johnny begged Mama for us to go with him. She said no at first but he started to cry. Worried as Mama was, she loved Johnny more. I believe it hurt her to deny him anything he wanted so bad.

Mama wouldn’t let us go by ourselves with Mr. Barnett so we all piled in the truck together, me and Johnny crowded between Mr. Barnett and Mama. Mr. Barnett smelled like liniment and dampish flannel. I liked riding in his truck with the heater blowing on my face. Mr. Barnett must have seen Mama shaking. He said, “You remember where the co-op is, honey. It’s in Slop Creek, not all the way to town. They won’t be many there this time of morning.” He put his big hand on top of my head. “These younguns need to see a little piece of the countryside anyhow. Don’t you?” I nodded, even though I didn’t really think so. I was nervous when Mr. Barnett first turned his truck right at the bottom of the mountain, but after a while I got excited. There was long fields with pinwheels of hay and silos and bridges over rolling water. I looked out the back window and seen the mountain getting left behind. But I still felt safe. Johnny and Mama was with me.

Then we was at the co-op and it was the most people I ever seen in one place. I stood still with Johnny, watching the men with caps and coveralls on, buying things for their farms. The lights there was a dirty color and sometimes they buzzed and blinked. There was heavy sacks stacked nearly to the ceiling and people rolled them out on long carts. I stayed close to Mama’s legs. After she paid, Mr. Barnett bought me and Johnny a bag of candy. We stood in the parking lot sucking peppermint while he helped Mama load the truck. A man got out of the car beside us and stopped to light a cigarette. When he seen Mama his eyebrows flew up. Then they growed together like he was angry.

“Hey there,” he said to Mama. I felt Johnny’s body get stiff beside me. Mama put a sack of flour in the truck like she didn’t hear.

“I said hey there, gal.” The man’s voice was loud and ugly. “You going to let on like you don’t know me?” Mama lifted her face then and looked at him. The red spots went out of her cheeks. “It’s been a long time,” the man said, “but I knowed it was you the minute I seen all that damn hair.”

Mama stared. It was like she couldn’t move. Mr. Barnett put down his dog feed and stepped toward the man. I knowed Mr. Barnett would protect Mama.

“What’s wrong, Myra?” the man asked. The way he grinned at her made me feel funny. “Do I look too much like my brother?” Mama didn’t say anything. He turned his mean eyes on me and Johnny, like he just noticed us. His face got white as Mama’s. “What’s this?” he said in a different voice. “Are these your younguns?”

“Get on in the truck, honey,” Mr. Barnett said to Mama. Then he looked at me and Johnny and said, “Y’uns, too.”

“If I recall, you was a churchgoing girl, Myra,” the man said. He stepped toward the truck and it was like Mama woke up from a dream. She opened the passenger door and got in fast, just as me and Johnny was climbing in the driver’s side. Mr. Barnett said, “Watch it there, feller,” but the man kept on coming. I squeezed close to Mama. She was pressed up against the window staring straight ahead.

“You ever read that part in the Bible,” the man asked as Mr. Barnett got in behind the wheel, “that says your sins will find you out?” Mr. Barnett pulled the door shut but I could still hear the man’s voice. “I know what you done!” he hollered, slapping the hood as Mr. Barnett backed out of the parking lot. “I know what you done to my brother!”

Looking back, it don’t make sense about that man being at the co-op the first time Mama ever let us off the mountain. She probably figured it was the Lord punishing her, but I don’t think He works that way. Sometimes the world is just hard to understand. I don’t believe it was seeing that man that ruint Mama. I think it was her worst fear coming true, of that man seeing Johnny and me. On the way back from the co-op she whispered, “I knew better.” It was the last words she spoke for a long time. After that, I never wanted to leave the mountain again. I seen what she had tried to hide us from.

JOHNNY

In the early spring of my eighth year, I ended up with ringworm. We kept a few chickens and Whitey had puppies, but wherever the fungus came from it was ugly, traveling up my leg in big scabby loops that looked like burns. That morning while my mama was sewing a rip in Laura’s dress, she happened to glance up and notice. It was one of those days she would come to life and see what needed replacing in the pantry and picking in the garden and what needed to be washed. Those were the times she would silently note the holes in our shoes, slip off for a day or so, and come back with new things in a brown paper sack for us to take whenever we found them. Laura and I seldom got sick or hurt in those last two years on Bloodroot Mountain, but when we did we looked after ourselves. She never made mention of my copperhead bite, as if she didn’t even notice how bad off I was. It was up to me to get better alone. Later that same year, when Laura ate the wrong berries and got sick to her stomach, I was the one who took care of her. But for some reason, my mama happened to see the ringworm that morning and it must have reminded her of the way her granny used to cure ailments like mine.

She finished sewing Laura’s ripped dress and slipped it back over my sister’s head. We followed her out the back door and up behind the house where the mountain was steeper and wilder. It was hard to keep up with her, ducking under branches and climbing over fallen trees. Now and again her hair would get hung on a twig or bush and she would push on without caring. I tried to help Laura along and we both slipped a few times on the wet, slimy rocks. More than once we came across swampy puddles and trickles of ice-cold water running down the mountain because it was early spring and the woods were thawing out. By the time we reached the spot on a slope where she wanted to stop, we were all three briar-scratched and muddy. There were shreds of low fog and the air was colder so far up the mountain. It hurt my throat to breathe, but it tasted sweet.

Our mama pointed to a scattering of white flowers along the ground, peeking up through a leftover litter of winter’s dead leaves. She got down on her knees and dug one up with a trowel she had brought in her dress pocket, then held up the root for us to see. It was thick and fleshy, like a finger under a mess of thin, wiry hair. She snapped it with her long, strong hands and I was scared when I saw the red sap because it looked like splattered blood. I didn’t know much better than to think she had wounded a living thing, made a sacrifice for my ringworm. “The Cotter boys used to gather up this bloodroot and sell it,” she said. “But it might die out if we take too much. Granny used bloodroot to treat everything. Warts, headaches, sore throats. When Granddaddy’s gums would bleed she’d put it in his toothpaste. You know he still had most of his teeth when he died, and him an old man. Granny said, too, the Indian warriors used to paint their faces with it.”

Laura took hold of my shirttail. We hadn’t heard our mama speak so much in a long time and didn’t know what to make of it. If we stayed close while she hung sheets on the line or split wood or scaled fish we could hear her reciting verses sometimes that I thought might be from the Bible. Otherwise, we seldom heard her voice anymore. I held still and willed Laura not to move either, afraid of breaking the spell. Then our mama turned on us with those wild blue eyes and I had a crazy fear that she was going to eat us up. But she just reached out her fingers, stained red with bloodroot sap, and smeared some high on my cheekbone. She did the other side, too, and I must have looked funny because she laughed. I’d heard my mama laugh before, but that day it felt like a miracle. She knelt in the leaves and dipped her finger in the sap again and again until my whole face was painted. It tickled and soon all three of us were laughing, scaring up birds from the trees. Then suddenly it was over, her laughter dried up like turning off a spigot. She went back to the business of gathering bloodroot as if nothing had happened.

On the way back to the house I fell behind and stopped to look at my reflection in the creek water. She had given me the face of a warrior, anointed my cheeks with birds in flight and marked my forehead with snakes coiled to strike. I thought, “She must know that I’m a copperhead now.” Or maybe she knew I was bitten all along.

LAURA

I might never know for sure who that man at the co-op was, or what Mama done to his brother. Me and Johnny was little then and didn’t talk about it much. All we knowed was how Mama changed after she seen him. First she started forgetting to make me and Johnny breakfast. The house didn’t smell like ham and eggs anymore when we woke up. Mama would still be laying in the bed with her eyes wide open and the covers pulled up to her chin. When I touched her shoulder she’d flinch. I cried because she looked at me like she didn’t know who I was anymore. Johnny said, “It’s okay. I’ll fix you something.” He tried to make biscuits but they was flat and hard like crackers.

Them first weeks after the co-op it was like Mama was waiting on somebody to come. She’d pace the floor and look out the window. One evening we was setting in the front room listening to the radio and heard a bump at the side of the house. Then the lilac bush by the kitchen door started rustling. Mama jumped up and went after her granddaddy’s shotgun. Me and Johnny stood in the kitchen holding hands. She went out and the gun shot off. Me and Johnny ran down the back steps and seen one of the Cotter man’s cows had got loose. It ran back in the woods bawling and Mama turned to us with the shotgun still in her hand. Johnny said, “Don’t worry. It was just a cow.” But Mama started crying so hard she couldn’t stop. All me and Johnny could do was stand in the light of the kitchen door and stare at her. We didn’t know how to make her get better.

The winter was even harder. It came a storm and I found her laying in the snow, so cold her lips was blue. I throwed myself across her to warm her up. “What’s wrong, Mama?” I asked, but she didn’t say. After that she got worse. Some days she acted more like her old self. But on the worst days she stood in one place for hours without moving. It was like her soul flew off someplace. Mama never had talked much, and she always liked being outdoors better than indoors. But after that trip to the co-op she hardly ever said a word. Sometimes she even slept outside in the woods under piles of fallen leaves.

Me and Johnny did the best we could for ourselves. Mr. Barnett and his wife was worried about us. He brung us food and clothes and one day he said they might ought to tell somebody how Mama was acting, but I knowed he didn’t want to get her in trouble. It got so bad on the end that Johnny’s ribs was poking out. I hated seeing him so skinny. He was the one that held me when I was hungry and made me laugh when I got scared.

It was good to have Johnny but I needed Mama. One time she was gone all day and I slipped off from the house and went far up the mountain to Johnny’s rock. I pressed myself flat and stretched out my arms. The rock was smooth and cool and a wind was blowing, raising bumps along my arms. I closed my eyes and prayed hard for Mama to come home. I still had my eyes shut when I heard feet coming. My heart went faster. I never had a prayer answered the minute I said it before. I was afraid to look. Somebody was standing over me. I heard breathing and knowed it was Mama. It seemed like something magic was about to happen. Finally I got the courage to look. It was a big brown and white horse with Mama’s blue eyes, staring down at me. I never seen anything so pretty. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t move. I just laid there and shivered. Whatever it was, God sent it to me. I opened my mouth to say something, but before I could get out any words, the horse had done walked off in the trees. That’s one memory I never told Johnny about. I didn’t want him to say it was another one of my dreams.

JOHNNY

I watched my mama sometimes at night, peering around the door-jamb into her bedroom. There was no door and she used to tack a ragged blanket up, but eventually it fell down and she never bothered to put it back. She would kneel by the bed with her back to me and though I couldn’t see her mouth moving, it seemed I could hear the creak of her tongue, the snap of her opening and closing lips like dry twigs underfoot.

I always bowed my head and prayed with her, asking God for the same thing every night. I wanted my father to come for me. I realized at some point that I must have one. I only asked my mama about him once. She was rolling out dough and I was sitting at her feet, flour sifting down on my head as I cut pictures from an old catalogue. I asked, “Do I have a daddy?” Her rolling pin stilled. “Of course,” she said. “Everybody does.” I thought for a second. “What’s his name?” When she answered, her voice was small and hoarse. “John. His name is John.” It didn’t occur to me until later that I had been named after him. Then I asked, “Where did he go?” She put down the rolling pin and stared at the dough. “Far away,” she said. “Across the ocean, to another country where there were children who needed him more than you do.” She stood there for a second longer before turning and walking out the kitchen door. I was sorry without knowing what I had done. I never brought it up again. But even as small as I was, I didn’t believe her. I had my own idea of a father, one who was closer to home and easier to find. Hiding there in the dark I saw him best, a taller version of me with black eyes like mine and nothing like the wild blue of my mother’s. Sometimes I saw him sitting behind a desk in an office wearing a tie. Sometimes I saw him bent over a hoe tending his garden, at a house in the valley where the mountains were a distant, smoky dream. He lived alone, waiting, preparing a place for Laura and me. When we got there, he would let us sip strong black coffee before we left for school on a yellow bus. At night the three of us would sit together watching a television set like the one the Barnetts had in their living room.

One summer I hid in the woods and watched a man walk up the road, shirt off and slung over his shoulder, naked back gleaming with sweat. From a distance I couldn’t distinguish his features, and some object I couldn’t make out dangled from his hand. As he got closer my mouth went dry. I thought maybe God had answered my prayer.

The man stopped in the road near my hiding place to wipe sweat from his brow. He didn’t look the way I had imagined, but I thought he could still be my father. I wanted him to be so badly that I couldn’t keep quiet. I burst out of the trees and skidded down the embank ment. I stood panting before the man and he took a few step-back ward.

“Hey, buddy,” he grinned, eyes wide. “Where’d you come from?”

I wanted to answer but my tongue was numb. I was convinced that I had been saved. The man waited for me to respond. When he saw that I didn’t intend to speak, he held up the big can in his hand and shook it.

“You know where I can get me a little gas? My pickup quit on me back yonder.”

That’s when all the hope drained out of me in a puddle at the stranger’s feet. Standing there in the middle of the road, staring sorrowfully up at the empty gas can, I had no idea how soon I would find my father, or at least a piece of him.

The moon was full that night and I could see everything in my mama’s bedroom, long curls of flowered wallpaper coming down in places and the corners netted with cobwebs, a rocking chair with missing slats. There was a rag rug on the floor, like others scattered all over the house that she would take out and beat in the sun, dust flying around her head in a brown swarm. Under the window was a bureau with yellowed glass knobs that held her nightgowns and the few graying shifts she wore every day. Sometimes I watched her slip them over her naked body before she left the house to wander the mountain or fish along the creek and I never knew when she would be back.

So many nights I had watched my mama kneeling beside the old iron bed, but this time she leaned her back against it so that I could see her face, bowed and silvered in the moonlight. I can only think she must have wanted me to know about the box. I couldn’t tell much about it in the shadows, a small, blackish square that she held open in her hands. Then she turned and looked in my direction. She seemed to stare straight through me. If she had spoken a word, I might have bolted away from there and never gone back. I’m still not sure whether she really caught me spying that night, or if my mind was just playing tricks on me. Even then, with cold shivers running down my spine, I was making plans. The minute I knew she was gone in the woods, I would steal back into her room. I would take the box and look inside. Finally, I would know something about her.

LAURA

At the beginning of our last summer on the mountain, I was outside trying to catch a salamander with a blue tail that kept disappearing under the back steps. It was getting dark and Johnny came to me with a peaked face. I got up quick and dusted off my knees. It worried me if Johnny got upset. My eyes was stinging before he said anything.

“Is she still gone?” he asked.

I nodded.

Johnny’s throat clicked when he swallowed. “I was spying on her last night.”

I balled up my hands into tight fists. Part of me wanted to hear more but the biggest part wished he’d turn around and go back in the house without me.

“I found something,” Johnny said. I couldn’t bring myself to ask what it was. He stood there for a minute trying to work up the nerve to tell me before he finally gave up and said, “Just come on.” I followed him because that’s how it was with us. I would have followed him anywhere. The house was full of gold twilight, brown shadows in the corners. I shivered because it seemed like this was a stranger’s house and not ours anymore. We went in Mama’s bedroom and it felt wrong being in there. I was a little bit scared of her ever since she had changed toward me and Johnny, even though she never hurt us. I thought about her shadow moving in the yard at night. I thought about her arms splitting wood and her teeth tearing at whatever needed tore, fabric or thread or a sealed-up bag.

I snuck with Johnny to her bed. He knelt down like he was fixing to say prayers. I was already crying when I got down beside him. For a minute I couldn’t see where his hand disappeared to. It was gone inside Mama’s mattress. Then I seen there was a slit, puckered around Johnny’s wrist like a mouth with thread teeth. The whole time he was rooting around in the mattress I was begging him in my head not to show me. Sometimes we could hear each other that way, maybe because of being twins. But this time he didn’t hear, or else he ignored me because he didn’t want to know whatever it was by hisself.

His hand came out holding a wood box. It was whittled and I knowed who made it. It was Mama’s granddaddy. She had a whittled bear and a turtle he made setting on the kitchen windowsill that she showed me and Johnny one time. Johnny held out the box to me. I shook my head, so he opened it hisself instead. I didn’t understand at first what I was seeing. It was three hard yellowish pieces pushed through a red ring. I swallowed and my tongue tasted like pennies, like that blood-colored ring was in my mouth.

“What is it?” I asked Johnny. My voice sounded muffled to my ears like when I covered them with my hands. Me and him looked at each other for a second.

“It’s a finger,” he said.

A choking sound came out of my throat. I wished it was possible for Johnny to lie to me, but in my heart I knowed he was telling the truth, even though I’d never seen a human bone. There was a rotted scrap of somebody in the house with me. It had been there before I knowed about it, maybe before me or Johnny ever drawed breath. The whole room was filled with it, a little piece broke off of death. I screamed and Johnny about dropped the box. I scooted back but he put his hand out to keep me from going.

“I think it’s our daddy’s,” he said. I covered my eyes and peeked through the cracks. I couldn’t stop staring at that bone. I had never thought much about our daddy. His face was dark in my mind. Once I was sleeping in the little room Johnny and me shared and a shadow shaped like a man was sitting in the straight chair in the corner. I laid there all night beside of Johnny not moving a muscle, wishing it would go away. To me that was our daddy. But now I imagined him a flesh and blood man without a finger.

“She killed him,” Johnny said.

“Don’t say that!” I yelled. Johnny got quiet, but I knowed he still believed it. I was mad at him for thinking she could do such a thing. But later that night I laid there looking at the wall wondering if he was right. I started thinking maybe there’s times when you have to kill somebody. But if she didn’t do it, that meant he was alive someplace. Then the man from the co-op parking lot came into my mind. I got to feeling like our daddy had something to do with whatever Mama was hiding us from. I started worrying he might be coming back, as a ghost or a real-life person. Either way, I figured he meant to do us harm. I don’t know if it was something I picked up from Mama or something I made up in my mind, but I didn’t like thinking about mine and Johnny’s daddy, whether he was dead or alive. I tried not to whenever I could help it.

But right then, standing in Mama’s bedroom, I didn’t know what to think. We heard a clang under the window and Johnny clapped the box shut. He stuffed it back through the slit in the mattress and tried to smooth the mouth hole and its raggedy thread teeth to look like it hadn’t been bothered. We went to the window and watched Mama drag out the tin tub. She had caught a catfish and was fixing to scald it. Johnny wiped off my runny nose with his shirttail and leaned over to press his forehead against mine.

JOHNNY

Sometimes in the heat of the day Laura and I slept naked in the musty shadows of the house, wherever we found a cool spot. We liked the rug in the front room best, one of those woven by our mama’s granny, its bright colors faded by years of dirt and sun. Before she fell silent our mama had rocked us, one on each knee, and told stories about our great-granny and other ancestors from Chickweed Holler, who called birds down from the sky and healed wounds and made love potions and sent their spirits soaring out of their bodies. When I asked if it was all true, she said, “It’s not for me to tell you what’s true. It’s your choice to believe it or not.” I know now it was more than just stories she was talking about. It was a whole world of things I could choose to believe or not.

Our mama used to show us family pictures and I always wished as she turned the pages of the photo album to have known my great-granny, to have met her at least once. There were pictures of other relatives, too, posed portraits that must have been made in town. Like the one of my grandmother Clio, who died when my mama was still a baby. She had a solemn face with haunted eyes that I didn’t like. It was almost like seeing a ghost. Nobody smiled in the old pictures, except for my mama when she was a little girl. She seemed to have been much happier then. When I was around five, I noticed for the first time the blank squares in the photo album, empty corner pieces where they had once been tucked. I knew there were pictures of my father somewhere, maybe even of my parents together. That’s when I began to imagine him, to think of him almost all the time.

I didn’t like those blank spaces, or the haunted eyes of my long-dead grandmother, but I took the album down to look at my great-granny again and again. In my favorite picture she was standing on the back steps, squinting against the sun with her hands on her hips, her mouth a sunken line. I liked to imagine that same old woman weaving her rags as she watched my mama playing in the yard, never knowing that one day Laura and I would sleep on her rug and wake up with its pattern printed on our skin.

We were curled on that rug like cats when the church ladies came. It was during our last summer together, in early August, when we were still eight. I thought I was dreaming the sound of their car and the murmur of voices approaching the house, but then there was a loud knocking. I sat up fast, sweaty and dazed in the hot sun streaming through the windows. Laura rose beside me, a silvery thread of drool on her chin. I felt her fear in my own stomach. Our mama once said that I was born first, so I was the oldest. I knew it was my duty to protect Laura, no matter how small I was myself.

“Hello,” a woman’s voice called out. “Is there anybody home?”

Laura got to her feet but I jumped up and held her back. I looked to the room where our mama was sleeping and thought of waking her up. But after finding that finger bone in her box, part of me was more afraid of her than I was of these strangers.

“Don’t,” I said to Laura, and the church ladies must have heard.

“Hello?” one of them repeated, rapping sharply.

My mama stirred, the bedsprings groaning. I turned toward the gloomy opening of her room, wanting so badly for her to come out that for an instant I saw her there, arms held open like wings for us to hide under. But it was only a shadow on the wall. When I looked back there was a face in the front room window, with little stone eyes under a mound of stiff gray hair. My stomach dropped. The woman caught sight of Laura and me, holding hands in the middle of a dusty room strung with cobwebs and littered with humps of sad-looking furniture, wearing nothing but underpants. Her stone eyes widened and she pecked on the window glass. “Is your mama and daddy home?” she hollered. I shook my head, alarm bells going off inside me. She stared for a minute more and then was joined by another face, younger and leaner with bright orange lipstick. The second one took us in, painted-on eyebrows raised, and shouted through the glass, “Where’s your mommy at, honey?” I shook my head again and the two women turned to each other, maybe considering what to do, before finally disappearing from the window.

Laura wanted to look outside but I stopped her. I could still hear them out there in the yard, talking about us. There was a scuffling sound on the stoop and Laura’s grip tightened on my fingers. Then we heard their ugly voices going away and the slam of doors and the hum of a car starting up. We went to the window and watched it lurching down the hill. When the car was out of sight, I found Laura’s dress pooled on the floor and tossed it into her arms, then pulled on the blue jeans Mrs. Barnett had sent in a trash bag full of her grandson’s outgrown clothes. Laura and I opened the door carefully and went outside. There was a stack of pamphlets on the top step, weighted down with a rock. We stood for a long time looking at them, thin manila papers with crosses on the front, but didn’t touch or move them. Then we stepped around the rock and went into the yard.

The sky was bright blue with fat clouds sailing over. A squirrel darted across the clothesline into the weeds. It all looked the same but everything had changed. I imagined I could see brown foot shapes where our grass had died under the trespassers’ shoes.

Laura and I walked halfway down the drive to where their tire tracks stopped in the muck. They had only made it part of the way, the dirt path still nearly impassable from the last rain. I couldn’t understand why they would go to such trouble to bother us, or how they even knew we were there. Looking up the hill toward the house it seemed abandoned, one shutter hanging crooked and a vine growing up the soot-blackened chimney. The grass was almost knee high, overrun with dandelions and purple clover. There was an old wringer washer beside the back steps and a rusty tub filled with rainwater under the apple tree. It chilled me to think of those coiffed and powdered ladies creeping like monsters up to our window. I stood for a long time examining their tracks. When Whitey came sniffing into the yard she startled me so that I whirled and chucked a rock at her without even thinking. She yelped and ran off and I was sorry.

I looked for Mr. Barnett to come along behind her, but there was no sign of him. It would have made me feel better, the way he always smiled down at me with his kind eyes. I used to sit on the porch for hours waiting for him to come walking with a bag full of clothes or oranges or candy. Mrs. Barnett was always sending him up the hill with something she thought we needed. The Barnetts were good people and Laura and I had love for them, but we never trusted them completely. Sitting next to Mrs. Barnett on their living room couch as she read us picture books, I always made sure no part of us was touching. Even Laura remained guarded. I think both of us were afraid of betraying our mama by learning too much about the world she had tried to hide us from. Now that world had come knocking on our door, and we didn’t know what to do about it.

We tried to play. Laura found a funny-looking toad and we sat on the ground beside the stoop poking at him with a stick, making him jump in the grass between us, but our hearts weren’t in it. Our eyes kept returning to those papers on the step. When our mama opened the front door at last, our backs stiffened but our faces turned to her. She stood in the doorway looking down at the pamphlets with eyes that didn’t belong on some rawboned mountain woman with sleeptangled hair. Then she bent and lifted the rock, crumpled the tracts in her hand and tossed them into the weeds.

She went down the steps, probably meaning to disappear into the woods, but I couldn’t let her this time. As she stepped onto the grass and turned her back, I reached out to her. I would have said “stay” if my voice had worked. She turned back and looked down at me without expression. Then she stooped to pry my fingers loose with no more feeling than if her dress had been caught on a nail. Laura and I watched as our mama walked off into the trees. Later, when she finally came to gather us close, it was too late.

LAURA

Three days after them church ladies looked in our window, two other cars came up the hill, one with a light on top. The man who got out looked a little bit like Mr. Barnett so I thought he might be nice. Johnny grabbed my arm and said, “Let’s hide.” He tried to drag me off but I was hungry. I stayed in case that man had oranges like Mr. Barnett brung at Christmastime. There was a heavyset woman with papers, too. I watched them walk toward the house. Johnny stood beside me. The man went up to the front door and knocked. Then he noticed us and came over. I seen too late his hands was empty.

“Is your mother home?” he asked, bending down to talk to us.

Right when he asked, I seen her stepping out of the woods with a string of fish. Her legs was wet and specked with grass. There was a leaf stuck to her ankle. When she seen the car she froze in her tracks. The man followed my eyes and turned around. He asked, “Are you Myra Odom?” That’s the first time I knowed our last name. When Mama didn’t answer, he went on talking. “We’re with the Department of Children’s Services, ma’am. I need to speak with you for a minute.”

Mama let the fish slither to the ground. Their bellies flashed in the sun. Then she was running toward us. “Don’t let them touch you,” she said to me and Johnny, her voice jogging up and down. Before them people knowed what was happening, she had took me and Johnny by the shoulders and herded us in the house. The man and woman tried to follow us but Mama was too quick. She slammed the door shut in their faces.

Mama knelt on the floor and gathered me and Johnny up. I could feel her shaking. We watched the door as the man pounded on it. “Open up, Mrs. Odom. I got an order here from the court.” We knelt for a long time in the front room with the furniture left from some life Mama had without us. We hardly ever set on that couch or them chairs but they was ours. Someway it felt like that knocking was taking our things away from us.

It was the longest I could remember Mama holding me and Johnny in a long time. Her body heaved up and down. Her smell, like fish and creek water, filled the room. When the knocking quit she got still between us. Her arm clamped tighter around me but Johnny slipped out of her grip. She snatched after him but he didn’t come back. She stayed on her knees with me. He stood at the window, white and thin with hair like a pile of blackbird wings. I asked, “Are they gone, Johnny?” He said, “No,” and that was all. We waited some more. Johnny finally came back to wait with us. He crouched beside Mama, but not close enough to touch. I don’t know how much time went by. But the knocking came again, then another voice. “This is the police, Mrs. Odom. You’d better come on out.” For a while it was quiet again. This time I didn’t ask if they was gone.

Mama stood up and started walking back and forth. Her bare feet creaked on the floorboards. She cracked her knuckles and tore at her fingernails with her teeth. After a while she got to muttering under her breath. I couldn’t make out the words but she didn’t sound like a person anymore. Johnny and me hugged each other. Her voice got bigger and bigger. Slobber strung down her chin. She walked back and forth faster and faster until she was just about running. Then she was yanking at her hair. Clumps of it trailed from her fingers. I wanted to close my eyes but someway I couldn’t. I called on the fairies but they didn’t come. Johnny got mad and screamed, “Stop it! Stop it!” He covered his eyes like I wanted to. But my eyes kept following Mama back and forth.

Then the loudest pounding came. A different voice hollered, “This is the Polk County Sheriff’s Department. Open the door!” Mama rushed at me and Johnny and swooped us up, one under each arm. She ran with us to the back room. She put us down rough and my sides felt sore. She throwed open the window. The smell of outside and birdsong came in. “Go on,” she whispered at Johnny. Her eyes was red and her mouth was wet. I thought Johnny wouldn’t go. He was shaking his head but he must have got scared not to mind Mama. He climbed up on the dresser. He looked back at me once and disappeared out the window. I was bawling out loud then. The pounding hurt my ears.

Mama turned and knelt down by her bed. She reached into the mattress and pulled out the box. A puff of dirty stuffing came out behind it. She shoved the box in my hand but my fingers didn’t want to close around it. Mama made them. She pressed them so hard around the wood it hurt. That’s when I heard the front door breaking open. She lifted me under the arms and pushed me towards the window. “Run,” she said.

Johnny wasn’t gone. He was crouched under the window. I knelt down with him. We listened to Mama’s screams and things breaking as she fought. We couldn’t leave her, even if she had left us so many times. After the fighting was over, it didn’t take them long to find me and Johnny huddled there. By then, Mama was gone from us forever.

JOHNNY

All that happened after we were found under our mama’s bedroom window is like a blur in my memory. A social worker took us to a house in Valley Home, about ten miles from Bloodroot Mountain. She left us with a couple named Ed and Betty Fox and their two children. The man owned a carpet-cleaning business and drove a white van with a fox painted on the door. The woman was obese and Laura and I couldn’t stop staring at her. She asked us to call her Mother Betty as she led us to the kitchen, where it smelled like cookies baking. We stopped in the doorway gaping at the shiny appliances, the row of cabinets, the plants hanging in the window. The bright rooster wallpaper hurt my eyes.

Laura and I never ate the cookies. We stood at the table staring at the plate while the Foxes talked to the social worker. When we were sure they weren’t paying attention we slipped out through the sliding glass doors into the street-lit yard. Laura said, “Let’s run away,” but our feet didn’t move. We stood paralyzed with fear of the houses on both sides and the cars passing by and of being unable to see the mountain. That’s when it sank in that we were stuck, maybe for a long time. Laura whispered, “Look.” She raised her blouse and showed me our mama’s box, stuffed behind the waistband of her corduroy pants. She glanced back at the house and asked, “What if they take it away from us?”

I looked around in a panic until I saw the garden, its tomato-vine stakes rising up in the dark. I took Laura’s arm and we ran across the cut grass into the rows, trampling the plants under our shoes still caked with mud from Bloodroot Mountain. I dropped to my knees and dug with my fingers the best I could, rocks jabbing under my fingernails. Laura put the box in the ground and we used our hands to cover it over. I stamped the mound down and Laura tried to hide the spot with a curling green cucumber vine. She was panting, a mess of sweaty hair in her eyes. I reached out to touch her back. “We’ll come back in the daylight and do it better,” I promised. Then I looked to the house and saw a silhouette in the glass door. We ran back across the yard with black dirt on our hands and staining the knees of our pants. Mother Betty opened the door to let us in.

I never closed my eyes that first night, lying in the top bunk above the Foxes’ fat son. All I could think about was Laura’s face when they led her away from me to sleep in another room. For most of the next day Laura and I stood silent and wide-eyed in the hall. Sitting down made our situation seem more permanent so we stayed on our feet, lurking in corners and hidden spaces, hoping to be forgotten about. Mother Betty was talking on the kitchen telephone as she cleared the breakfast dishes. I heard her say we were found living like animals in the woods and our mama was locked up in a Nashville crazyhouse. I prayed Laura hadn’t heard, but when I turned her face was pale and still. “Is that true?” she whispered. “What she said about Mama?” I couldn’t answer but she knew anyway. A light went out of her eyes then and never came back. I had the urge to destroy something, like the time I burned my mama’s scarf. I took a pair of bronzed baby shoes from the console table and flung them against the wall but they didn’t break. Mother Betty came thundering, rattling dishes in the cabinets, the phone still in her hand with its long cord stretched tight. When she saw my face her plump cheeks reddened. She stood staring, mouth hanging open. I stared back at her. Neither one of us said we were sorry.

At least there was plenty to eat at the Foxes’ house. At the edge of the backyard there was a high bank overlooking a newly built gas station, with the main road running in front of it. Not long after Laura and I moved in, the Foxes’ children, Pamela and Steven, asked us to climb down to the gas station parking lot with them. I wouldn’t have gone if Laura hadn’t wanted me to. I went to protect her, but standing inside among the aisles, the racks of powdered doughnuts and fruit pies and cakes, the humming dairy case against the wall, my palms were sweating. We had gone hungry so many times on the mountain, unable to sleep at night for the pain in our empty stomachs. Pamela and Steven offered to share what they bought. We followed them out and stood facing each other in the hot parking lot, stuffing candy into our mouths. Laura’s cheeks were packed tight and when she smiled around a mouthful of wet chocolate I couldn’t help smiling back. Soon Laura and I were going to the gas station by ourselves with the quarters we earned doing chores. It was a ritual with a meaning only we could know. The Foxes’ children could never understand how it felt to be Laura and me, what a relief it was to eat until we were full.

Almost a month after she left us with the Foxes, the social worker came back to visit. Her name was Nora Graham. Her hair was a frizzy tumbleweed and she wore half glasses low on her nose. She sat between us on a green glider out by the garden, as sloppy and disheveled as the night we were taken from the mountain. “We’re trying to find your father,” she had told us then, searching for something in a folder on top of her cluttered metal desk. “Are you sure you don’t know where he is?” When I shook my head she had smiled at me. “That’s okay. We’ll find him.” She was trying to be comforting, but if my father was dead, I hoped she was wrong. Now she sat with us beside the garden, asking questions to determine how well we were getting along. After a while Laura spoke up. “I reckon you never found our daddy.” I stopped breathing and Nora’s pen stopped moving on her clipboard. There was a long silence. Then she said, “No. We never found him.”

That night in the bunk bed with Steven snoring over me, I thought of my father, the imaginary man whose presence had been with me on the mountain. I realized I might be close to where my mama had once lived with him, to where they had made Laura and me together. Even if he was dead, there might be a way to know something about him. I might find another piece of him and of myself. I wasn’t like Laura or my mama. In my heart, I knew I was like him. I had other people than the ones in my mama’s photo album and I could look for them. The question was whether or not I wanted to. I had a chance now to leave behind the mountain and my missing father and my crazy mama for good. I shut my eyes, trying not to picture her locked up somewhere dark and far from home.

When summer ended Laura and I started elementary school. It was a long brick building across a two-lane highway from a patch of deep woods. Seeing Laura among the other schoolchildren, silent and awkward with her pale skin and black hair, I understood that I must look the same way to my classmates. They didn’t laugh at me. They only stared. I made myself look back until they dropped their eyes, but I was scared of them.

Sometime during those first days of school, my fear turned into hatred. I taught the other children not to stare. I bent back fingers and twisted arms and pinched tender baby fat. It didn’t hurt when the teacher paddled me. Nothing did after my copperhead bite. If they had fought back I wouldn’t have felt it. I never got used to being among them, but Laura had an easier time. She was different away from the mountain. My separation from her began long before what happened with Steven. I could see in small gestures how she was adapting. The way she fastened her hair back with barrettes each morning before school, how she chewed with her mouth closed and clipped her toenails and said please as she had been taught by Mother Betty. I knew she wanted to play with Pamela and Steven. I tried to make them leave her alone. I hid behind the living room curtains and chopped up the windowsill with a knife. I threw rocks at the carpet van’s windshield, leaving pings in the glass. I tore the heads off Pamela’s dolls, smashed Steven’s model cars. I warned them but they wouldn’t stop reeling Laura in.

Then one evening it was my turn to wash the supper dishes. When I was finished, I felt Laura gone from the house. I checked outside and the yard was empty, no sister sitting in the garden glider. Finally, I heard her voice and forced myself not to run toward the sound. It was coming from the old doghouse near the edge of the yard, grass still worn away and a metal stake where a beagle had been chained. Pamela and Steven said he was given away because he warbled all night. I knelt before the doghouse and what I saw knocked the wind out of me. Laura was wedged between Pamela and Steven in the dog-smelling shadows, crowded close to them with her knees gathered up. The smile died on her face when she saw me. Pamela said, “We got a clubhouse.” Laura said, “Come on. You can fit.” But her eyes said something else. I sat on my knees in the dust staring in at her. The others kept playing but Laura stopped. For her it was ruined and I was glad.

When I finally lost Laura, it was like my mama prying my fingers loose from her dress tail all over again. We had been with the Foxes for a year and another summer had come. I still remember how it felt, watching Laura’s back disappear into a downpour. She was holding Steven’s hand, water running down their faces. Sneaking off with him, the shelter of rain meant to keep me out. To see her fingers laced in someone else’s, not her twin, not her blood, was too much. If I had caught up to them then I might have killed him. Whether or not my nine-year-old hands were able, my heart was capable of it.

I followed them, moving through the rain toward the white haloes of the gas station floodlights. They were running and I hurried to match their pace. When I reached them they were sitting at the edge of the grass, looking as if they were planning to slide down on their bottoms. I thought how fast it would be and how much fun. I pictured Mother Betty’s neck turning blotchy and red when she saw her mud-streaked boy, her disgust for Laura and me showing plain on her face for an instant before she hid it again.

I watched Laura and Steven from a few yards away, cold drops tapping my shoulders like slugs from a slingshot, plastering my shirt to my skin. Their heads were bent close, water dripping from the ends of their hair. I could hear them laughing under the beat of rain. Then she put her hand on his cheek and left a muddy print there. Such an intimate gesture made me sick. I charged at them, feet tramping in standing water. Laura leapt up, face a white smudge in the misty light. Steven knew they had betrayed me. I saw it in his eyes. I covered the mark Laura had made on his face with one hand and shoved him backward. He went over the edge of the embankment and Laura screamed. It was a fairly long drop to the parking lot below. She stared at me openmouthed, disbelieving. Then we went to the edge and looked down. Steven was at the bottom, slick with mud. After a moment he sat up and blinked at us. Then the blubbering started, loud and panicked. He struggled to his feet, slipping and sliding in the muck. I had a sinking feeling when I saw how his arm was hanging. Not because I was sorry, but because I knew it was over for Laura and me. I stood there watching him struggle to climb up as Laura went to get Mother Betty. When she joined me at the edge of the bank she froze for a moment with the rain wilting her beauty-shop curls. Then she pressed her hand to her throat and burst into tears. Laura and I ran off to hide in the musty dark of the doghouse while Steven was at the hospital having his dislocated shoulder moved back into place.

Mother Betty wanted us gone as soon as she got back from the emergency room with Steven, but it took nearly a week for the state to find homes for us. On our last day together we sat in the garden, rich with the smell of loam. Many times over the past year we had slipped off to look at the spot where our mama’s box was buried, with the ring and our father’s finger bone hidden inside. Now Laura sat across from me in the red dress she would wear to the new foster home. We were both leaving, but she was going first.

“We have to run,” Laura said. “Mother Betty won’t see us if we go right now.”

I stared down at the ants crawling over her knuckles. “We can’t.”

“Yes we can. We can go find Mama. We’re bigger now and you’re smart.”

I shook my head. “You heard it the same as I did. They’ve got her locked up in Nashville. And even if they let her out, I don’t want to be with her.”

“Johnny, hush,” she said. “Don’t you love Mama anymore?”

“You know there’s something wrong with her.” Laura’s fingers curled into fists. “No there ain’t.”

“She didn’t take good care of us. She’s not able to.” Laura fell silent. “We can still run away,” she said after a while, but with less conviction. “We don’t have to find Mama. We can just go off someplace else.”

“Laura,” I said. “I can’t take care of us either.” Her shoulders sagged. “What about Mama’s box?”

“You keep it. She gave it to you.”

She looked at me then, studied my face. “Okay,” she said. But it wasn’t.

When Nora Graham came, I followed Laura down the walk to the curb where the car waited, keeping my eyes on the ground. If I looked at her my heart might stop beating. I stared down at her feet, small and square in the dress shoes Mother Betty had bought her. I would never know them again that size. I saw through the patent leather, through the sock to her toes, the nails outlined in dirt because the mountain was never scrubbed out of them. I made myself examine her face, the curve of her nostrils, the wet rims of her eyes. I unwrapped a piece of bubble gum from my pocket and stuffed it into my mouth. I didn’t know what else to do with my hands. “Bye, Johnny,” Laura said. She knew me better than to say anything more. She was letting me go because she thought I wanted her to. I swallowed and strangled on the sweet juice. A cough rose in my throat. Laura looked at me one last time before she got into Nora Graham’s car. When she was gone, I spat the gum onto the sidewalk. From then on, the taste of candy sickened me.

LAURA

At school, me and Johnny started out in the same classroom. I was scared but my brother was in the desk in front of me. The way he held up his shoulders made me feel better. Then we started having to take these tests in a little room. There was a woman with coffee breath. She figured out how smart Johnny was and put him two grades ahead of me. I seen right then he might be gone from me for good someday, just like Mama. When they made us live in different houses, I asked Nora Graham if I could go with Johnny. She claimed it’s hard to keep siblings together in foster care, even twins like us.

That’s how come I went to live with a preacher and his wife. The preacher’s name was Larry Moffett and his wife was Pauline. They was Church of God people. I put on the dresses they gave me and let my hair grow long like they wanted me to. I didn’t mind. It made me more like Mama. When I looked in the mirror it was easier to remember her.

But it was hard at first getting used to living there. I had chores to share with other foster kids. The house was crowded and always loud. The only quiet place was the basement. I went down there to do laundry. It had a washer and dryer under a dirty little window. There was a moldy carton of dishes shoved back in the shadows beside the washer. I took Mama’s box from where it was hid under my mattress and carried it down to the basement in a basket of towels. I pulled the dishes out of the shadows and sorted through them, bowls and gravy boats and teacups with the husks of dead bugs inside. I put the box in a big blue willow soup tureen and shoved the carton back against the wall.

I didn’t get to know the other foster kids that came and went. None of us made friends. We hardly ever talked to each other. We just did the chores and tried to get along with Pauline. I didn’t get to know the preacher either. He didn’t have much to do with us foster kids. We mostly answered to Pauline. She had the longest hair I ever seen, brown and thin with jaggedy ends, and her eyes was two different colors. One was green and one was brown. She had two different ways of acting, too. Sometimes she was nice and sometimes she was mean. One time she was making pies for homecoming. I dropped them trying to put them in a box. Pauline hit my arm with a wet dishrag until it bled. She drove me in the corner calling me names. I thought she wouldn’t quit, until Larry asked where his dress socks was. She turned around and hollered, “They’re on the bed with the rest of your clothes! I swear, Larry, you’re blind as a bat!” I hurried to clean up the mess. When she came back from finding Larry’s socks it was like nothing ever happened.

Pauline said the Lord had laid it on Larry’s heart to take in orphans, not hers. She said she wasn’t sorry she married him, but she never asked for the foster kids, or his mama, Hattie, having a stroke and moving in with them. I felt sorry for Pauline over Hattie. Hattie thought Larry was too good for Pauline. She said it all the time. She talked out of one side of her mouth where she had a stroke. She was real fat under her housecoat. Her belly had puckered white lines all over. I seen it because I had to wash her sometimes. It was scary to go in Hattie’s room. The first time I almost turned around and ran right back out. She was watching her black-and-white television set with rabbit ears, fussing at the people on her stories. Her words was hard to figure out because of the stroke, but not the meanness of them. I was standing there with her tray. She said, “Well, bring it here, dingbat. I’m fixing to perish.” I was shaking so bad the glass rattled against the plate. “Where’d they find you?” she asked. I couldn’t answer. I just stared. “Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” she said. Her belly shook when she laughed. I froze. “They laws, girl, you’re dumb as a post, ain’t you?” I couldn’t think. I nodded. She laughed again. Then she turned back hateful. “Get along,” she said. “I can’t stand somebody watching me eat.” I backed out of there as she was slopping soup down her chin.

After that I was taking care of Hattie all the time. Pauline taught me how to give her permanents. The smell burnt my nose. I hated rolling her greasy hair. Her scalp was yellow and scaly. The first one came out bad. She called me a little hussy. She would have hit me if I hadn’t got away. I had to cut her toenails and shave her legs. They was like white tree trunks. The one time I cut her she hit me upside the head so hard my eyes watered. I never could do anything to suit her. She hated all of us foster kids, but not more than Pauline. I don’t know how Pauline put up with her. I guess because they both loved Larry. That was one thing they had in common. The other thing was Percy.

Pauline told us how they found him. Back when Hattie still got around on a cane, they was having coffee in the kitchen. It was early and still half dark. They heard a meowing sound outside. They went out the back door and found him in the bushes beside the steps. He was shivering in the dew. Pauline wrapped him in her sweater while Hattie warmed him a saucer of milk. For a while there was a truce between them. But the next day they went back to fighting. Now they just had one more thing to fight about. They couldn’t agree on what to feed him or what kind of litter to use or what to name him. Hattie won that fight. Percy was short for Percival, after Hattie’s ancestor that was a hero in the Civil War. Pauline said Hattie was a liar. Her people was white trash and always had been. Pauline lost that one, but there was others. They still fought over whether or not to have him fixed. Pauline said it keeps a cat from running off. Hattie said it was cruel. She asked Pauline, “How would you like it if somebody cut off Larry’s balls?”

I hated their fighting, but I understood how come they loved Percy. He was heavy and warm like a baby in my arms. Sometimes he got out of Hattie’s room if she left the door cracked and came to me. He hopped on the bed and curled up under my chin. For the first time since Johnny I didn’t feel alone. There was another heart beating close to mine. Percy was my only friend. All of us girls in the house spoiled him. Pauline brushed him every night. Hattie fed him off her plate. I made him aluminum foil balls to play with. The other foster kids liked petting him, too. He gave us a kind of love we needed.

Then one day we was getting supper ready before the evening church service and Hattie screamed, “Oh Lord! Percy’s fell out the window!” Me and Pauline ran in. The window was open and the screen was gone from it. Percy had leaned against the screen and pushed it out. I ran to the window and seen the screen on the grass but no sign of Percy. He must have got scared and darted off. Hattie was bawling and carrying on. “Oh Lord, Pauline, you know he can’t make it outdoors! Quit standing around and get out yonder!” I didn’t waste a minute. It wasn’t far to the ground. I dropped right out the window myself. Pauline ran out the front door and we started calling for him.

My heart was flying. I couldn’t lose Percy. I knowed Pauline was thinking the same thing. We searched all over the yard. We got down and looked under Larry’s church van. We looked under the house and turned over the wheelbarrow. We looked in all the empty boxes on the carport. Even Larry came out for a while because Hattie made him. Then he had to go back in and study for his sermon. Me and Pauline spent a long time in the shed going through the junk. We was both wet with sweat. Pauline was crying. I was sorrier for her than I was for myself. I knowed what Percy meant to her. It was getting dark. Larry came out to holler for Pauline. “We got to go,” he said. “I can’t be late.” Pauline stopped and looked at me. We both knowed Larry wouldn’t let her miss church over a cat. “Reckon I could stay?” I asked. I could tell she was relieved. “Okay,” she said. “It won’t hurt you to miss this once. Go in and get a flashlight.”

They piled in the van and took off. The house got quiet besides Hattie sniffling in her room. I went to the kitchen drawer and found the flashlight under the phone book. I turned it on to test the battery. Then I closed my eyes and prayed the Lord would guide me to Percy. I went down the back steps. The stars was out. I tried to open my eyes and ears. I didn’t call for Percy so I could hear every noise. I walked around the yard moving my flashlight over the chain-link fence. I knowed I was going to find him. I had faith. I knelt and poked around in the azalea bushes. I looked up in the trees. I walked around the whole length of the fence and checked the carport again. Must have been two hours passed without me finding Percy. I was getting discouraged. I decided to stop and take a deep breath. I thought about the mountain and how quiet it was in the woods. I pretended I was laying on Johnny’s rock over the bluff. Then I started hearing a little ticking in my ears, like what a cat’s heart might sound like. I went to the shed again and stood for a minute. I moved the light up and down the side of it. I seen the flash of eyes close to the ground. The shed was up on blocks and Percy was underneath it. I got down on my knees and shined the light. I seen him crouching there. There was spiderwebs in his whiskers. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, Lord.” I got down on my belly and reached for him. He hissed and bit me on the hand. I didn’t draw back. I was worried he would get away. I dragged him out by the scruff of the neck. He was growling and wrestling. I seen an old feed sack under the shed. I drug it out with my other hand and put it over him. He was wrestling too much to put him inside of it. He calmed down after a minute under there. I carried him across the yard bundled up in the sack. My hand was hurting. I opened the front door and hollered to Hattie, “I found him!” It was the first time I ever talked to her on purpose. “Praise Jesus!” she hollered and started crying again. Percy wrestled loose and darted off. About that time Pauline opened the door with the others behind her. She took one look at me and knowed. She came to me and hugged me tight. I didn’t know how to act. I hadn’t been touched that way in a long time. “Where’s he at?” she asked.

“Under the couch.”

“Well,” she said, “I guess he’ll come out when he’s ready.” We looked at each other one more time. Her eyes was shiny. Then she went about getting Larry’s coffee. I could tell by her humming that she was happy. The next day when my hand swelled up she let me stay out of school. She took me to the doctor. After that we had milkshakes and she bought me a purse. From then on, it was easier to live at the Moffetts’ house.

JOHNNY

After what I did to Steven, I was sent to the Briar Mountain Children’s Home. It was a red-brick building with a bell tower behind iron gates, nestled in a grove of pine woods. On the highway there, past fields and gas stations and through dark tunnels, I felt home receding. Our empty house, my mama in the asylum, my father’s finger bone, and most of all Laura. It was like I didn’t fully exist without her. I drifted among the other boys and girls, around the main building where we slept in a dorm, the chapel where we sat through the sermons of the pastor who ran the home, the fellowship hall where we ate tasteless meals, the room with folding chairs where the pastor’s son counseled us in groups. I spent the whole hour looking out the window at the mountains wreathed in fog. They were not the same mountains I had grown up with. I was almost certain somewhere among those hazy blue ridges was Chickweed Holler, where my great-granny had come from. I pictured shady thickets and cool ledges of rock, tree bark wriggling with bugs. Soon I began skipping the counseling sessions and disappearing into the woods outside the iron fence for hours at a time. Whenever I came wandering back, the pastor’s son always took me by the arm and asked if I wanted to be living there forever, if I never wanted to have a real home. I didn’t say what I was thinking, that there’s no such thing.

Some of the boys whispered that the grounds were haunted, telling ghost stories after the lights went out. They said it was once a Civil War hospital where many soldiers had died, but I never saw or felt the presence of anything there. The main building was the oldest, its corroded pipes spitting brown water when we washed our hands. All night in the dorms we heard the drip-drip of the leaky showers down the hall. In the summer opening windows gave no relief from the heat and in winter the boiler always went out, leaving our teeth to chatter on frozen mornings, making the other children sick so that I couldn’t sleep for their coughing. But I never caught their croups and colds and bouts of bronchitis. I was an outsider among them, made of something different than they were.

In the five years I lived at the children’s home, I saw my sister twice. Nora Graham said visits were hard to arrange because we lived in separate counties. On our twelfth birthday, she drove Laura an hour from Millertown to see me. She left us alone on the playground behind the main building, a patch of worn grass with swings hanging limp at the ends of their chains. Laura was taller and her face was longer. She had grown up behind my back. Sitting on the swings together, I was reminded of things I’d tried hard to forget. I heard my mama’s screams, saw Laura’s handprint on Steven’s cheek. When she gave me the present she had made, a drawing of our house on the mountain, I crumpled it in my fist. She studied me with sad eyes. Then she reached out and guided a lock of my hair back into place. For a long time I could still feel the brush of her fingers on my brow.

When Laura was gone I climbed the iron fence and got lost between the pines. I ran through the woods half blind with unshed tears, clambering across gullies and over rises, tripping and falling again and again. It was almost dusk when I came to a bluff of stacked rock shelves with more pines perched high on top. Near the ground I saw a crack under an overhang. When I ducked inside, the cave smelled of algae and minerals and wet stone. Within the sun’s reach the limestone walls were mottled with moss, shaggy near the top with russet-colored roots like the pelt of some mythical forest animal. Farther in, I found what looked at first like three old trash barrels leaning on uneven piles of rock. On closer inspection I realized it was an abandoned moonshine still. There was a tin tub with a pipe running down from its rust-eaten lid into a weathered barrel made of rotten gray boards, and from it a length of tubing coiled into another metal barrel, brittle and fiery orange with rust. Not far from the still, I noticed something glinting on the ground. I bent down, startling a lizard up the stone wall, and found a silver cigarette lighter. I held it in the sun falling through the cave’s opening and saw initials engraved on one side. I stopped breathing. The initials were J.O., like mine. But I didn’t think of my own name. I thought of my father’s. It was like somebody had left the lighter there for me to find.

A few months after I discovered the cave, a girl named Libby came to live at the children’s home. Boys and girls ate together in the fellowship hall and one morning at breakfast I caught her staring at me. She had brown hair and green eyes and a chicken pox scar on her forehead. I learned later that she was fourteen but she was built like a woman, breasts straining at the buttons of her blouse. When I saw her later at the middle school, I almost didn’t know her. There was a dumpster out back where I went to smoke. She was standing with a group of boys wearing blue eye shadow and blowing smoke rings through the shiny oval of her lips. She asked how old I was. When I told her, she smiled and said, “You don’t look no thirteen.” On the bus back to the children’s home she was the same plain girl from breakfast again, no trace of teased bangs or lip gloss.

That afternoon she followed me into the woods. I heard her footfalls on the pine needles behind me but I didn’t turn around. I let her trail me all the way to the cave. When we reached the opening I turned and she almost bumped into me, face flushed and pulse fluttering in her throat. I took her by the arm and we ducked into the crack in the rocky bluff. For what seemed a long time, we knelt facing each other in the murky gloom. Then her hand slid up my thigh. My muscles tensed under her touch. The black holes of her pupils widened to draw me in, opening to show me what was inside of her, heaps of cinder and mud and things left out in the rain, wells where living things fell inside and drowned. I pulled her close by the nape of the neck, kissing her so hard I tasted blood. I twisted my hands up in her hair, bit her shoulders, sank my fingers into her flesh. She didn’t pull away. She was drawn to me in spite of or maybe because of my darkness. She was only there for a month, but after her there were others that I lay tangled with on the cool dirt floor of the cave, pinning them down with my body, pulling their hair until they cried out. Like Libby, they always wanted more, as if they craved my meanness.

Not long before I left the Briar Mountain Children’s Home, when we were fourteen, the state arranged another visit with Laura. It was an overcast day in March so we sat at a table in the fellowship hall, where the windows faced the mountains. I wasn’t prepared for how much she looked like our mama. She was wearing a skirt down to her ankles and had hair to her waist because her foster parents were Church of God people.

“You look skinny,” she said.

“So do you,” I said.

She smiled. “I learnt how to make biscuits. I wish I could fix you some.”

I turned my head. “I don’t like biscuits.”

There was an awkward silence. We sat listening to the clanking radiator, smelling the dampness of the long, drafty room. She pulled her cardigan tighter around her. When she spoke again it startled me. “What’s it like in here, with all these other kids?”

I thought about it. “Like being by myself.”

She fidgeted in her folding chair. “Are you lonesome?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t mind it.”

She got quiet again. I felt her studying me and looked down at the floor tiles, the same dingy color as the weather outside. “I guess there’s something I ought to tell you,” she said. “I meant to keep it to myself, but I can’t do you that way.”

I waited for her to go on, not sure if I wanted to hear.

“There’s a store in Millertown with our name on it.”

My eyes moved to her face. “What?”

“There’s a building on Main Street that says Odom’s Hardware on the side. I seen it when I was downtown with Pauline. The woman I stay with.”

I leaned closer to her. “Did you go inside?”

Laura shook her head. “Pauline don’t trade there. But she knows who owns it. She said his name’s Frankie Odom.” She bit her lip. “I reckon he’s our granddaddy.”

I blinked at her. “How do you know that?”

“Pauline said so.”

“Then how does she know?”

Laura looked down at her scuffed shoes. “Everybody knows it.”

“You didn’t go in the store and ask any questions?”

She shook her head again. “Pauline said Frankie Odom ain’t in his right mind anyway. She said he’s got old and senile. His boy runs the store now.”

My stomach dropped. “His boy?”

“Not our daddy,” Laura said quickly. “Our uncle. Pauline called him Hollis.”

“Hollis,” I repeated, so I wouldn’t forget.

Laura twisted her hands in her lap. “Pauline said the Odoms are bad people and I believe her, Johnny. I don’t want any part of them. For Mama to do something like what she might have done to our daddy, he must have been mean.”

My eyes began to sting. “We have people who knew our dad and you don’t care?”

“Can’t we talk about something else?” she asked. “I been missing you so bad.”

“You want to find our mama, though. You’d talk to her, after the way she did us.”

“I don’t know about that, either,” she said. “I used to want us to run away and go find her but I’ve give up on that. I’ve quit believing we’ll all be together again.”

“Don’t lie,” I said. “I know how it is. You’d go to her right now if you could.”

“What do you mean, how it is?”

“I mean you’re just like her.”

“How’s that true? I don’t even know her anymore.”

I clenched my teeth trying to keep in the words, but in the end I couldn’t stop them from tumbling out. “You walked off and left me, just like she did.”

Laura’s eyes widened. “Johnny, you know I never wanted to be away from you.”

I looked down at the floor again. “I don’t know anything.”

Laura spent a long moment thinking. Then she said, “I guess I can’t help being something like Mama, on account of having her blood. But so do you.”

I grabbed her arm. “Don’t say that. I’m not like her.”

Laura looked into my eyes. “Okay, Johnny,” she said. “I wish you’d let me go.”

I took my hand away from her arm and stared down at it. Laura turned her face to the window and the distant blue chain of the mountains, where Chickweed Holler was hidden from us. She rubbed at my fingerprints fading on her skin. I was sorry but I couldn’t take it back. Then Nora Graham cracked the door of the fellowship hall and my time with Laura was over. I didn’t know it would be five years until I saw her again.

LAURA

For a long time I looked forward to Johnny getting out of the children’s home. Nora Graham said she’d place him with a foster family as close to me as she could. I thought even though I was still in middle school and he was starting high school, we might at least get to ride the same bus. When he finally did get out, he lived for a while at a foster home in Millertown and went to the ninth grade. He was on the other side of town so we didn’t ride the same bus, but Nora Graham arranged a visit. Then, before I even got to see him, she said he done something bad and got sent off again. My heart was broke in two. No matter what Johnny thought of me, I loved him better than anything.

When I started high school myself, the girls there was still talking about Johnny. They said he done them wrong in the short time he was there. He’d go with one until he got tired of her and then move on to the next. It wasn’t just the girls Johnny left his mark on, either. This boy named Marshall Lunsford asked if I was Johnny’s sister. He claimed Johnny was his best friend and had been to his house. He said Johnny had lived with his mama’s cousin so they was like family. I couldn’t see Johnny being friends with anybody. He said when Johnny got out of jail they was going hunting together. I figured that boy would be better off to never see Johnny again. It was a sad thing to think about my own brother, but I knowed something was broke in Johnny, the same as it was in me.

I didn’t like high school. The only good thing about it was Clint Blevins. A bunch of us used to stand around and wait for the bus to take us home. One day I felt a finger winding up in my hair. I whipped around and Clint said, “Sorry about that. I couldn’t help it.” Clint was in some classes with me and he was always getting called to the office. Seemed like every week Clint Blevins was in a fight. One time I walked up right after the gym teacher pulled him off of a boy. There was blood all over the hall. It made my belly hurt. I thought Clint was just another mean boy. But when I turned around, I knowed he wasn’t. He had eyes like Mama’s and his hair had fat yellow curls like rings of sunshine. Then I seen something peeking out of his shirt collar, flashing in the sun. He had a chain around his neck, a silver rope. I didn’t know I was fixing to talk until I opened my mouth.

“Your name is Clint,” I said.

“Yeah, but I can’t remember yourn.”

“Laura Odom.”

“You’re a pretty girl, Laura.”

“I favor my mama some. But she has blue eyes like you got. Not black like mine.”

“I like black eyes the best,” Clint said, and followed me up on the bus.

He sat down with me. He said he’d moved back in with his mama, that’s why he rode my bus now. He said, “Me and Daddy was living in a little green trailer beside of the lake. I don’t get along too good with Mama, but Daddy finally drunk hisself to death. She thinks I ortn’t to live out yonder by myself and me still in school.” Clint looked out the window. I felt sorry for him. I could tell how sad he was. “You should’ve seen poor old Daddy there on the last. He was shrunk down to nothing and yeller as a punkin where his liver was bad.” Clint looked up at the bus ceiling. I moved my hand closer to his on the seat between us. I think that made him feel better.

“Where’d you get that silver necklace?” I asked to change the subject.

“From Louise,” he said. I got jealous. Later I found out she was just the gray-headed cashier down at the grocery store where he worked.

Clint got off the bus at a house behind the laundrymat. After that, we set together every day. He told me all about his life. I seen the stories in my mind. Clint couldn’t remember things being any different. His daddy held down a janitor job before he started drinking, and his mama worked in the school lunchroom before she went on welfare. When he was a baby they rented a farmhouse beside of a pond. But the first thing Clint remembered was living in that house behind the laundrymat. When he talked about it, I could smell warm clean clothes drifting across the yard. He said when he was real little it was like being wrapped in a blanket. But later on the smell of laundry got to where it gagged him. Too many times Clint had set in the weeds out behind the house, with the cinder blocks and busted glass, smelling that laundrymat and listening to his mama holler and carry on. Then after while he would see his daddy plod off down the street holding a whiskey bottle with a cut place over his eye where she throwed something at him.

Clint said sometimes he used to slip in the laundrymat and watch the clothes float in them glass portholes. He’d listen to the blue jean buttons and loose change clinking around. He’d watch that round and round motion and get sad, thinking about a circle that kept going and didn’t end up anywhere. Sometimes his daddy found him and bought him a Coke in a glass bottle and a pack of peanuts to pour in it. Then Clint said that old laundrymat life was finally over, at least for a while. His daddy got a job driving the garbage truck long enough to put back some money. One day he came out of the house with a paper sack in his arms. Clint’s mama was screaming and throwing his things out behind him. Clint followed his daddy in the street and asked, “Where are we going?” His daddy said, “I got us a little spot by the lake.” Clint said when they got down to the water, it was the prettiest place he ever seen. Him and his daddy was happy there from the start.

Clint spent every day he could in the lake until it got cold, trying to be a fish. He’d sink as far as he could and stay down for as long as he could hold his breath, because he knowed it was all going to end. He said it was like time stopped when he was under the water and he wanted to stretch it out. He could see his daddy getting sicker and sicker. He remembered what his mama said when his daddy left. “That’s all right. You’re just slinking off to die, like a dog does. Mark my words. It won’t be long.” Clint hated his mama having the last laugh, about as bad as he hated that his daddy was fixing to die.

But while his daddy lived, they had a nice life by the lake. Clint came and went as he pleased. He didn’t have to do homework. He failed three years in a row. Only reason he went to school any was because the truant officer threatened to put his daddy in jail. He never had to take a bath either and got dirtier and dirtier. He said them dirty smells was the ones he liked best, greasy hair and black feet bottoms and most of all fishy lake water. I thought that might have been what brung us together, the way we both loved fish. We must have seen each other’s secret scales glinting under our skins. There was something the same inside of us. Clint talking about his life always made me think about my own. I seen we could take care of each other in a way our mamas didn’t know how to.

After Clint went back with his mama he thought every day about running off. But he said there was a part of hisself that would always be afraid of her. It was like her shrill voice froze him up, especially with his daddy gone. Clint told me, “If it wasn’t for Daddy, I never would have been brave enough to get away from her in the first place.”

She made Clint go to work at the grocery store and help pay the bills. He didn’t mind about that. The store wasn’t as good as the lake, but it was still someplace to go. He said he liked the people there. He looked forward to going to work at night, but during the day at school he’d set around in class and get mad at his mama. It was like she won, and he couldn’t stand it. He’d beat up other boys the same way he wanted to beat on his mama. He was sorry after he fought them, but he said he couldn’t help it until he met me. “All that black hair of yourn looked like a big old pool of lake water,” he leaned over and whispered in my ear one day. “When I was standing behind you out yonder, I just wanted to dive right in it.” Hearing him talk that way made me feel like I was worth something.

Clint told me all them things on the bus. Then he started bringing me presents, mostly barrettes and combs. I knowed he wanted them done up in my hair. I’d fix myself in the school bathroom and take it down before I got off the bus. I figured Pauline might not like my hair done up that way, but Clint sure did. Before long, we loved each other.

JOHNNY

After my visit with Laura, I made up my mind to attend the counseling sessions, as much as I hated the pastor’s son. Seeing her took something out of me. I couldn’t stand being at the children’s home any longer. Each meal at the fellowship hall soured on my stomach and the smell of wet limestone began to hurt my head. I was too tired to climb the iron fence anymore. I knew the only way to earn my freedom was to do as I was told, so I sat with the others in a circle of folding chairs and pretended to listen. The summer before I turned fifteen, the pastor’s son decided I was ready to have foster parents again. Nora Graham took me in late August to Wanda and Bobby Lawsons’ old clapboard house outside of Millertown. They worked long hours at the gas station they owned and when they got home they went to bed. They seemed more interested in the check the government provided for my upkeep than in being my parents and I was grateful for it. At the end of five years living among so many strangers, all I wanted was to be left alone.

Like the children’s home, the Lawsons’ house was ringed in woods. It wasn’t the same wilderness I was used to, with craggy bluffs and limestone caves. These woods were flat and crowded with tall, skinny trees, the ground humped with snaking roots. I could walk for hours without the scenery changing, save a random piece of rusty junk here and there. Once I saw an old stove on its side, half buried in kudzu, and once a car bumper shaggy with honeysuckle. I traveled so far that I came out behind the high school, standing on a rise overlooking the football field. I saw how close I was to Millertown, how easy it would be to find Main Street and Odom’s Hardware. But I still didn’t know whether I wanted to forget who I was or go looking for the man I came from.

Then I met Marshall Lunsford on the first day of high school and everything changed. At lunchtime I went through the line and took my tray to the first empty seat. There was a boy sitting across from me eating a greasy square of yellow cornbread. He was gawky and long-necked with dirty fingernails and a head full of cowlicks.

“You’re lying through your teeth, Marshall,” the fat boy beside him was saying. “There ain’t even no coyotes around here.” He looked across the table at me. “You should’ve heard what all this retard said.”

“I ain’t retarded,” Marshall said. “Me and my daddy went hunting up on the mountain and I seen a coyote.”

“That ain’t all he told,” the fat boy piped up. “Why don’t you tell him the rest of it, see if he believes you any more than I do.”

Marshall’s face turned red. “It ain’t no lie. Me and Daddy got separated. Then I heard this growling noise. There was a female coyote coming out of a cave. I guess it must’ve had pups. Well, I stood right still and it kept coming at me.” Marshall was enjoying himself, getting carried away. He leaned forward. “I figured I ort not to run, cause if I fell it would’ve ripped my throat out. I stood my ground and the next thing I knowed, that coyote was jumping at me. Then I caught hold of its head and gave it a twist. That thing fell down dead with its neck broke, hit the ground like a rock.”

“You’re full of it,” the fat boy said, shaking his head.

“What mountain was it?” I asked.

Marshall’s eyebrows shot up. He seemed startled that I had spoken to him. “Bloodroot Mountain.”

“You live on Bloodroot Mountain?”

“Down at the bottom of it,” he said, and went back to stuffing his mouth with great hunks of cornbread.

“You really believe this retard killed a coyote?” the fat boy asked smugly, as if he already knew what my answer would be.

I looked Marshall over, cold settling around my heart. “He might have.”

Marshall looked up from his tray at me with surprise and gratitude. I could tell that he thought I was an ally. It was just what I wanted him to think.

After school, I walked into the late summer woods with Marshall Lunsford on my mind. If I befriended him, I could go home whenever I wanted. I knew he’d be glad if I asked to sleep over. I had seen the hero worship in his eyes. He even claimed to know the Lawsons. He said Bobby was a distant cousin of his mother’s. But I remembered how hard it was seeing Laura. It would be even harder to see our house on the mountain.

I walked a long way under the rustling green leaves, head down and hands in my pockets. After a while, I came to a wire fence with a sign that said “No Trespassing.” I slid under and kept going. The terrain was mostly the same except for the evergreens crowded now among the leafy trees. I topped a rise littered with pine needles and saw, not far off in a clearing, a leaning shack no bigger than an outhouse. My heart sped up, some crazy part of me wondering if this was my father’s house. Maybe he would even be waiting there for me. I walked fast, breathing hard, but when I reached the shack I was afraid to look. The woods had grown eerily silent. I held my breath and peeked inside. I saw a mildewed blanket and piles of damp leaves rotting in the corners. In the middle of the floor were three water-swollen books. Like the lighter in the cave, they seemed to have been left there for me to find. I stepped inside and knelt to pick them up. They appeared to be old poetry books. I stacked the volumes in the crook of my arm, leaving square shapes in the grime where they had been. I walked back to the house and crawled under the porch to read by the diamond-shaped light through the lattice until dark.

My fingers shook as I turned the mold-spotted pages. It was like hearing my mama’s voice in my head, the lilting way she recited her verses, the rhythm and music of all those poems bringing her back to me. Then, about halfway through the last volume, I dropped it in the dirt. I’d seen my mama’s words, those she whispered so often I thought they were from the Bible or maybe something she made up, printed there in smeary ink.

“These beauteous forms, through a long absence, have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man’s eye, but oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din of towns and cities, I have owed to them, in hours of weariness, sensations sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart….” I picked up the book and read the poem over and over. It had been written by William Wordsworth about a place called Tintern Abbey. I whispered it out loud and my mama’s presence came creeping over me. I looked down and saw a dark blot with crawling tendrils like long, black hair spreading over the dirt and pooling around my feet. I know now it must have been my imagination, but it seemed like she was more with me there under the Lawsons’ front porch than she had ever been on Bloodroot Mountain.

I crawled out from under the porch and went inside, holding tight to the books from the woods. Wanda had left my plate wrapped in a dish towel on the stove. I ate in the darkened kitchen and put my plate in the sink and took the books to my room along the back of the house. I switched on the naked bulb overhead and wrote my first poem sitting on the bed. I scribbled until pale light seeped under the window shade and my fingers were numb and the arm once stiffened by a copperhead bite sang with pain. It was clear now what I needed to do. This was a sign I couldn’t ignore. I had to see our house on the mountain one more time. Then, whether he was alive or dead, I had to find my father.

When I went to Odom’s Hardware a week later, I didn’t have to fake being sick to get out of school. The Lawsons left for work at dawn and I waited in my bed, thinking a hardware store wouldn’t be open so early. I brought my notebook from under the mattress and wrote again until my mind was empty and the sun was higher in the sky. Somehow getting the thoughts out calmed me. My hands were steady as I pulled on my shoes and ran a comb through my hair. I left the house and cut through the woods until I came out behind the high school. It wasn’t a long walk from there to Main Street. The buildings were abandoned looking, display windows crammed with junk, some cracked and repaired with tape. When I saw Odom’s Hardware, my own name painted on the dull red bricks of the building, my stomach clenched. It felt like someone or something else piloted my body down the sidewalk to the propped-open door. I stepped inside and the floor was made of wide, grimy planks that creaked under my feet. Once my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw long aisles of shelves holding dusty cardboard boxes spilling bolts and screws and hinges. By the dirty light of the smeared plate-glass window I saw him perched on a stool behind the counter, just inside the door. It seemed as if he’d been waiting for me all along. I walked closer to see my uncle better, a smallish man with cigarettes in the breast pocket of his shirt, sitting in a shaft of whirling dust. He was unremarkable, with slicked-back hair, a plain, ruddy face, and ears too large for his head.

“Help you?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said, taking another step closer. He rose from the stool and placed his hands on the counter, leaning forward. The way his eyes narrowed made my heart race.

“What are you looking for today?” he asked. I could see his mind working as he took me in, trying to decide where he knew me from.

“My father,” I said.

He stared at me hard for a long moment, face strangely still. He touched something metal hanging from his neck, gleaming dully in the gloom. I saw that it was a pair of dogtags. He rubbed his thumb over them as if for comfort. Then he laughed but his eyes didn’t change. “Your father, huh? Are you pulling my leg?”

“No.”

The man stopped laughing. That’s when we remembered each other at the same time. I could see the light coming on in his eyes. In my head, he was standing in the parking lot of the co-op all over again. I could hear the slap of his palm on Mr. Barnett’s hood. I stepped closer and put my hands on the counter so we were almost nose to nose.

“What’s your name, boy?” he asked softly, although I suspected he already knew. I could smell cigarettes on his breath, in his clothes.

“Odom,” I said. “Just like yours.”

The redness crept up from his neck to set his lined face on fire. “I know you,” he said, calmly enough. “I knowed your mama, too.”

I pressed my palms harder into the counter and stared at his throat, imagining how it would feel between my fingers. My voice was surprisingly even when I opened my mouth. “You said you knew what she did to your brother. Is he dead or alive?”

“You think I’d tell you a damn thing about my brother?” Hollis Odom asked through gritted teeth. A dot of spittle landed under my eye. It burned there but I didn’t move to wipe it away. “Hell, you probably ain’t even his. I didn’t know that whore had any babies. I would have called the human services on her after I seen you all at the co-op but I figured they’d come around with their hands stuck out, wanting us to take responsibility. We don’t owe you nothing, boy. You been signed over to the state a long time ago. You ain’t no Odom. And you ain’t got no business sniffing around here, so you might as well get along, before I put you out.”

“What was it you called her?” I asked, jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached. My hand shot out to seize his throat as if of its own volition. His eyes bulged and his face went plum. He pried at my fingers and I dug in deeper, the dogtags pressing into his flesh. I can’t say when I would have let go if he hadn’t scrambled around with one hand under the counter, knocking things onto the floor, and come up with a gun. He thrust its long barrel into my face. It didn’t even look real. I let go of his throat and watched, heart drumming in my ears, as he whooped and coughed and spat, leaning on the counter for support, still clutching the gun in his hand. When he was finally able to speak he croaked between hectic breaths, “You get out of here before I shoot you right between the eyes. I ever see your face in here again I’ll have you throwed under the jail. You hear me?”

I backed out of the store and into the sun. I stood looking at the building, breathing hard, thinking what to do next. It was only then that I realized I had somehow ripped the dogtags from around his neck. I was squeezing them tight in my hand, their notched edges biting into my palm. I opened my fingers and saw how old the tags looked, maybe from the Second World War. The name pressed into the metal was Franklin J. Odom. I knew they had belonged to Frankie Odom, my grandfather. I didn’t wonder what the middle initial stood for, either. It was John, like my father. It was Johnny, like me.

LAURA

I told Clint things on the bus, too. He’s the only one I ever told what happened to Mama. It was hard to say out loud. I told him about the mountain and our old house up there. The only thing I didn’t tell him about was Mama’s box with a finger bone inside. I’d look out the bus window and talk about how I wanted to go back. I told Clint first I’d visit the Barnetts and their dog, Whitey, and thank them for being so good to me and Johnny and Mama. Then I’d go in the house and lay in Mama’s bed, like she used to let me of the mornings. After that I’d wade in the creek and try to catch minnows like me and Johnny used to do. I’d climb up to Johnny’s rock where he got snake bit and look off down the bluff. Then I’d go high enough to find that white ghost flower and show Clint how it bled. One time he asked, “What about your mama?” I didn’t understand. He said, “Don’t you want to go visit her in Nashville?” I wanted to answer but I didn’t know how to say I’d got to where I’d just as soon see her dead than to see her locked up. I believe he felt bad for asking. I knowed he didn’t mean anything by it. He never brung it up again.

Clint understood how bad I missed the mountain. He said, “Soon as I get me a car, I’m driving you there.” I knowed he was saving up money from his job. Going home seemed like something way off in the future that might never happen. Then one day Clint came to me grinning after school. It was spring already, close to the end of my freshman year. He led me out to the parking lot and there it was, a long green car with a busted place on the windshield. First thing Clint said was, “Now I can take you home.” I knowed he wasn’t talking about Larry and Pauline’s house. I hugged Clint tight and felt like crying, but not with happy tears. My heart was beating loud in my ears.

That Saturday I told Pauline I was going to the library to write a paper for school. I hated to lie, but she never would have let me go off with a boy. I walked to the end of the street. It was a nice day. The neighbor kids was out playing with water guns. I ought to felt good, but I was scared. When I got in Clint’s car, he pulled me across the seat and kissed me. Then he leaned back and looked me over. “What’s wrong, baby?” he asked, starting up the car. It was loud and the exhaust just about made me sick. I couldn’t say anything. When we got to the stop sign, Clint asked, “Which way?” I started getting even more tore up. I never thought about it before, but I couldn’t remember how to get there. I was just eight when I got took away. Clint must have seen the worry on my face. He said, “That’s all right. We’ll just head for the country until you see something you know.”

We drove for a long time, past the city limits. We went down the two-lane highway, through Valley Home and Slop Creek. I had lived in them places. I should have knowed my way around. The mountains got closer but nothing looked familiar. I set against the door twisting my hands. Every once in a while Clint would pat my knee. “See anything you know?” he’d ask, and I’d shake my head. Finally when we got to Piney Grove he said, “Let me pull over here to this store and ask somebody.” It seemed like he was in there a long time. I kept looking at the mountains, getting hotter and sicker.

I don’t know how long I set there until Clint came back. He opened the door and grinned at me. “That feller said we ain’t got far. Just hang a right here at the corner and keep going about five miles, then hang another right and I reckon that road goes straight up the mountain. Won’t be long.” He rubbed the back of my hair and I tried to smile, but my belly was hurting. I needed to use the toilet but I didn’t want to get out of the car.

After Clint took that first right, it seemed like we was driving forever. It was the crookedest road I ever saw. There was thick trees on either side and a lot of dead groundhogs and possums along the ditch. I wanted to be happier about going home, but I kept seeing Mama in my head, how she pulled out her hair and slobbered and screamed like a wildcat when she was fighting them people. I don’t know how long it was before we came to that second right, and a sign that said “Bloodroot Mt. Road.” Beside of the turn there was an old white house with a man in the yard fixing his truck. He looked up when we slowed down. He had a long, stringy beard and mean eyes. He didn’t wave back when Clint lifted his hand. I had a bad feeling. Clint turned onto the road and it looked like new blacktop. The road to our house was dirt, that much I remembered for sure.

We started the climb up and Clint’s car was laboring. Leaf shadows fell across the road and right away I knowed something was wrong. First I seen a trailer set back in the hill, so new it didn’t have any underpinning. The trees had been cleared to make room for it. Big muddy gashes had been cut in the ground for a driveway. On the other side of the road there was a house under construction. Men without shirts was hammering on the roof. There was a yellow machine parked in the mud beside a heap of dirt. Then there was a long stretch of bald land with just a few scattered tree stumps here and there. Cold started spreading over me. It was like we had took a wrong turn into some hainted place.

“This ain’t it,” I said to Clint.

“Huh?”

“This ain’t the right mountain.”

“Baby, it said so on the sign.”

“Sign must be mixed up,” I said. I didn’t want the tears to come out but what I was seeing didn’t look a thing like home. The mountain I came from was wilder than this.

“This ain’t it,” I said again. I couldn’t hold back the crying any longer.

“It’s got to be,” Clint said, real quiet.

“But it ain’t!” I hollered. I couldn’t hardly see out the window through my tears. We was passing a place that seemed like the Barnetts’, only it was growed up with briars and weeds. It couldn’t have been the same house or the same land, rundown as it was.

“Stop the car, Clint!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, so hard it hurt my throat. “Stop the car and turn around!”

Clint didn’t hardly know what to do. “Okay, okay,” he said, looking over at me with big eyes. “Just quit that squalling, honey. You’re fixing to make yeself sick.”

He backed into the driveway of the place that looked something like the Barnetts’. I cried even harder, thinking he meant to take me there. When he seen how worried I was, he turned the car around and drove off so fast the wheels slung gravel everywhere.

Before long Clint had to pull over for gas, at the same store where he got them bad directions. While he was pumping gas I thought of my real home. I felt better when I closed my eyes and seen it how it really looked, cool and green and wild with no trailers and no muddy gashes in the land, no chopped-down trees and scruffy bald patches, no half-built houses peeking out of the trees with satellite dishes on their roofs.

When Clint went in to pay, I watched him walk across the parking lot. Just looking at him, tall and lanky with all that sunny hair, made me feel safe. He came back and opened the door real careful, like he was afraid of what he might find. He poked his head in and looked me over, trying to judge what kind of shape I was in. He tossed something wrapped in plastic across the seat and it landed in my lap. It was chocolate cupcakes with cream in the middle. He knowed how much I liked them. I smiled and tore them open. He squinted at me to see if I was okay before he got in the car. I pulled him close and hugged him tight. I don’t believe I ever loved anybody that much, even Johnny. I scooted next to him. We set in the parking lot of that store while I ate my cupcakes. We never did talk any more about going home. I reckon I was scared we’d get lost again.

JOHNNY

In my cell at the Polk County Juvenile Detention Center, I relived many times what I had done to get there. The night I burned down Odom’s Hardware, I was carrying a rock and a whiskey bottle stuffed with a gas-soaked rag in a duffel bag I stole from Bobby Lawson, the fumes traveling with me through the dark. In front of the store, I stood before the dirty plate-glass window and tested the rock’s weight for a moment before launching it through the stenciled letters of my last name. There was a satisfying shattering sound, a spray of shards that glinted in the streetlight. Somewhere distant, a dog began to bark. I waited for an alarm to go off or someone to come into the street or a car to cruise by but there was only silence. I pulled the bottle from under my arm and reached for the silver lighter in my pocket. When I lit the rag, the flame was sudden and hot. I lobbed it through the hole I had smashed and stood there waiting. For what seemed like hours, there was only a faint orange glow. I stepped closer to the window and saw a line of flame dancing across one floor plank. I watched hypnotized as another branched off and then another. After a while, I could smell the fire. Smoke began to rise, thick and black, behind the broken window. I was too tired to wait and see what happened. I turned and walked off, down deserted streets and back through the woods to the Lawsons’.

A few days later, crossing the parking lot of the detention center handcuffed, I still wasn’t sorry for what I had done. If I thought of my mama’s face when she saw Hollis Odom at the co-op, or of his voice calling her a whore, or of those two years we spent suffering on the mountain over the wrong he must have done for the sight of him to have driven her out of her mind, I wanted to burn the place down all over again. That building was the representation of everything I had wanted to destroy since our mama took herself away from us. But when I saw my cell, a closet-sized room with chips and gouges gone from its dreary beige cinder blocks, a metal toilet and a bunk with a thin mattress bolted to the wall, I almost went mad like she did. I thought I wouldn’t make it four days locked up, much less four years. I worried if Laura would be told where I was. I needed her to know, but I made it clear that I didn’t want to see her. Not in that place.

I seldom looked at the other boys there. I can’t remember their faces, even though I sat with them on crowded benches for hours in the classroom. I only had to fight once, when a boy tripped over my foot and rounded on me with his fists. I aimed for his throat with the sharpened pencil I was holding and missed, skidding it along the hard ridge of his jaw to tear through the soft pink meat of his earlobe. I spent two days on lockdown and after that I was left mostly alone. I kept my head down and did as I was told, the way I had learned at the children’s home. I saw what happened to some of the others who made trouble, the boy whose eardrum was busted when a guard kicked him in the head, the one whose nose was broken when he was slammed against the wall, the one I heard crying when they came after lights out to beat him with their sticks. There was only the library for escape, and my poetry books from the woods. I read them over and over. But it was my notebook that saved me. When my thoughts of home and freedom were too much, I emptied them onto the pages, containing them like poison. They did no good inside my head, memories of Laura and my mama and the mountain. It was better to hide them under my mattress, to sleep on top of them as my mama had done, keeping a piece of her old life to take out and examine from time to time. That part of her I understood.

I wrote the ink out of hundreds of pens, a callus forming on the middle finger of my right hand. Sometimes rubbing the callus while I sat trapped in the classroom was enough to settle me. By the end of my time at Polk County I had filled stacks of notebooks, most of them thrown out so they could never be read. I was glad to see them go. I might have burned them if I had been allowed to strike a match. It was a way of purging that the others didn’t have. Fights broke out over nothing among them. The detention center was old and not big enough to house forty of us, a tall fortress of dirty white brick with banks of dark windows behind chain link and razor wire. Even the basketball court was claustrophobic, enclosed on three sides by the building’s outer walls. In all weather but hard rain we went outside in the afternoons, a guard leaning in the door keeping watch. That’s where I first noticed the one who didn’t seem to belong there.

The basketball goal was a netless rim with a flaking backboard, rotten and graying in the shadow of the building. The boys dribbled and shot the ball, chuffing and grunting as brown birds hopped on the pavement around their feet. One afternoon I noticed a boy trying to catch one, stalking it along the edge of the court. I understood his need to hold a bird. I stood against the wall admiring his stealth. He had a harelip and a lumpy skull under dirt-colored bristles of hair. His orange jumpsuit hung on the broomstick of his body, arms and legs poking out of its folds. I’d seen him hunched over his lunch tray as the others slapped the back of his head. There were rumors about what he had done. Some said he had raped a little girl, some said murdered. He didn’t look capable of either.

At the start of winter I saw him sitting on a slat bench patterned with crystals of frost, snow flurries blowing over the pavement. He was talking to a boy who stood a head taller than the rest of us, with pockmarked skin and an undershot jaw. When he strode among the others with his hands in loose fists, they dropped their heads and gave him room. It seemed unlikely that he would befriend the harelip. I stood as close to them as I could without being noticed, hands numb in the pockets of my jumpsuit. After a while, the tall boy bent and untied his shoes. They looked brand-new, stark white in the gunmetal light. Then the harelip slipped out of his own, the shabby color of dirty mop strings. Even from a few yards away, I saw how the rubber sole was coming loose. They made the switch, the harelip tying on the new shoes as the tall boy, wide shoulders bent, wedged his feet into the old ones. Later, when the tall boy had taken the basketball to shoot, the others keeping a respectful distance, I approached the harelip for the first time. I stood over him, my shadow falling across the bench where he sat. He looked up and waited for me to speak. My voice, when it came, was rusty. I had seldom used it there.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“What,” the harelip said, “you can talk?” His own speech was strange and nasal, the repaired cleft of his lip like a razor slash.

“Why did you trade shoes?”

The ugliness of his smile startled me. “His was better than mine.”

I studied him. Up close, his eyes were glittering slits.

“His mama lives down at the end of my road.”

“So?”

“So I know his family.” He glanced over at the boys playing basketball. The snow had begun to flurry faster, dotting the bristles of his hair and the shoulders of his jumpsuit. “I’m getting out of here next week. I told him I’d kill his little sister.”

My fists clenched inside my pockets. “Why would he believe that?”

The boy flashed his ugly smile again. “He knows what I’m in here for.”

“You killed a little girl?”

“Naw. I just burnt some of her hair off. But I would have if she hadn’t squealed that way. It made the neighbor man come out of his house.”

I stared at him, speechless. After a while, he turned to watch one of the brown birds pecking at a crack in the pavement, as if he had forgotten I was standing there.

That night I lay looking at the shine of the metal toilet in the dark, thinking not of the harelip but of the tall boy. I decided it was his blood that had made him weak in that moment on the bench. His love for his sister had given the harelip power over him, and maybe I was no different. It was my kin that had landed me where I was. If I hadn’t cared what Hollis Odom did to my mama, I wouldn’t have burned down his store and he could never have had me locked up. But I couldn’t take hearing my mama disparaged, as much as it felt like I hated her. I couldn’t let him get by with ruining her the way he had. He was the reason for what happened to us on the mountain and the reason I was in a cell. He had seen to it that I was put away for a long time. But my own moment of weakness had passed. I would be smarter when I finally got out of Polk County, more in control of myself. I wouldn’t give Hollis Odom power over me. I hadn’t forgotten that day in the hardware store, the panic in his eyes and the feel of his throat in my hands. I kept all of it with me. I grew even more determined to know about my father because Hollis Odom didn’t want me to. As soon as I got out, I would go back to Millertown, maybe to my grandfather’s house this time. I would only have to look up his name in a phone book to know his address. I would only have to call and hang up to find out if he was still alive.

I learned on the day before the harelip was to be released that the tall boy’s moment of weakness had passed, too. It happened so fast I only saw the aftermath. He was being wrestled away by two guards, another running to them across the basketball court. He knelt over a twisted body, lips skinned back and mouth leaking ropes of foam. It was the harelip, lying facedown, arms broken and ears bleeding onto the pavement.

LAURA

Them years Johnny was at Polk County, I couldn’t sleep at night. I had nightmares about him and Mama locked up together in the dark. Sometimes it seemed like I was stuck in a cell myself. I could still feel my brother every day, even after all of our time apart. I wanted to go visit him, but he sent word for me to stay away. I didn’t much want to see him like that anyhow, same as I couldn’t have stood to see Mama.

Me and Clint decided not to stay in school and graduate. I found out I could quit when I turned seventeen, so I done it as soon as my birthday came. With Johnny gone and not coming back, there was no reason for me to be there anymore. I never had fit in right anyway. I still lived with Pauline and Larry. I didn’t tell them I dropped out. I hated lying to them, but Pauline wouldn’t have let me quit. So I took a job at a hamburger place and Clint still worked at the grocery store. We knowed one day we would marry, but we never talked about when.

At the end of April, we was at the breakfast table and Clint drove up. He didn’t have to tell me he was coming or why. Someway I already knowed. I didn’t make him wait. I got up from the table and flew out the back door. I ran across the ground to the driveway without any shoes on and none of my things except Mama’s box. I had took to carrying it in my skirt pocket because I was afraid I was starting to forget her face. Just like school, there was no reason to stay. Percy was gone. Ever since he fell out the window he kept trying to get away. It was like he got a taste of freedom and wanted more. Every time the door opened he darted out. Then one day Larry came home from visiting the sick and found Percy dead in the street. Pauline and Hattie hugged each other and cried. I never thought I’d see them loving on each other. I remembered how Percy felt like a baby in my arms. We buried him out behind the shed. I pictured him under there with spiderwebs in his whiskers. Pauline and Hattie never was the same. They both got quiet. They didn’t fuss much anymore. It was a sad house. Clint was the only one left that loved me. Percy was dead and Mama was gone and whatever love Johnny had for me was buried deep. I’m not dumb as everybody thinks. I went where love was and that was with Clint.

When I got in the car his blue eyes was shining. He pulled me on top of him and kissed my face all over. Backing out of the driveway he seen my feet curled up on the seat. “Lord, baby,” he said. “You ain’t got no shoes on.” The way he laughed made chills all over me. He turned up the radio and we drove off. That was the best day of my life.

“Clint,” I said halfway down the road, “what made you finally come and get me?”

His ears got red. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. I didn’t know if he ever was going to tell. Finally he said, “Well, Mama found this set of hair combs I bought for you. I had my eye on them for a long time, ever since I seen them down at Belk’s. They was carved real nice with these jumping dolphins.” Clint cleared his throat and wiggled around in the seat. I could tell he was embarrassed. “When I come in from work I seen Mama had busted them combs all to pieces. Soon as I walked in the door, she went to beating me over the head and shoulders with the box they come in. She said … she said, ‘You ain’t spending another cent on some old girl and us needing groceries.’”

I knowed Clint had cleaned up what his mama said. There was no telling what all she really called me. I didn’t care. All I cared about was me and Clint being together.

“She claimed I’m just like Daddy,” Clint said. “Why, I’d rather be like Daddy than her any day of the week. I swear, Laura, I bellered like a bull, I’s so mad. I snatched her up by the hair of the head and for once she didn’t have a thing to say for herself. I got to feeling sorry for her then and let her go. I reckon I couldn’t hurt a woman, even one as mean as her. But I ain’t never going back to that house.”

“You don’t never have to, Clint,” I said. I put my head on his shoulder. “There ain’t a thing to worry about.” I believed what I told him. I thought our worries was over.

We drove straight to that green trailer beside of the lake. The trees was thick and the water lapped right up to the grass of the yard. Clint carried me down to the sand at the bottom of the hill because I didn’t have any shoes on. He held me there for a long time looking out across the lake. “I ain’t got to swim since Daddy died,” he said. “I stayed in the water so much he said I ort to been borned a fish.” I felt sorry for him. I knowed he was missing his daddy. Then we went up to the trailer. Clint opened the door and the carpet stunk where it got damp and mildewed. We spent most of the day cleaning out garbage. A lot of it was beer cans his daddy left behind. Whenever I seen Clint getting sad I snuck up behind him and tickled the back of his neck. That always made him smile.

Mr. Thompson, the manager at the grocery store, had a cousin that’s a preacher. He said me and Clint could get married at his house, on the back porch overlooking a creek. I asked Larry to perform the ceremony first, but him and Pauline didn’t approve of what I was doing. Clint’s mama didn’t want us to marry either, but I was eighteen and he was twenty, so we didn’t need anybody’s permission. It didn’t matter what they thought.

Me and Clint decided to have the wedding on the first of May. It took a while to get to Mr. Thompson’s house, little and white at the end of a long driveway. Mr. Thompson’s wife met us at the door. She said, “You can call me Zelda, honey.” She led me through the hall to the bedroom. It was cool in there, with thick carpet and roses on the wallpaper. There was a dress laid out on the bed. “Now, this is new with the tags on it,” Zelda said. “I bought it for my daughter-in-law to wear to church, but she was too big for it.” She held it up to me and frowned. “It might be loose, but we could safety-pin it.” It was long and cream with scratchy lace. I didn’t care if it was loose. I liked it anyway.

Louise, the cashier from the grocery store, set me down on the toilet seat and fixed my hair with a curling iron. She put some lipstick on my mouth and rubbed a little on my cheeks to make them rosy. She dusted my face with powder and said, “Your skin’s so pretty, you don’t need much.” Then Zelda and Louise led me through the kitchen out to the deck, where Zelda had arranged her begonia pots in a circle. All of Clint’s friends from the grocery store was gathered around. Somebody had brought their children, two little girls and a boy dressed up in bright colors. They whispered and giggled when I came out but they got shushed. All the talking stopped. Clint was standing with the preacher, a short man with glasses. When I stepped out on the deck in them too-big shoes that belonged to Zelda, Clint turned and looked at me. His face lit up with a grin. Then he did something I didn’t expect. He busted out with great big sobs. They was like sobs of relief, the way somebody might cry if they made it through a bad accident. The preacher patted Clint on the back while he tried to hush. I was embarrassed, but I was happy.

I didn’t cry myself because I wanted to be tough for Clint. I went to him and wiped his tears while his hiccups went away. I tried to listen to the preacher when he read from his book, but all I could hear was blood rushing in my ears. I looked at Clint in that ring of begonias and all them people crowded around to watch us get married. The sky was so blue and the grass so green, and down at the end of the yard a creek was running over rocks that was round and furry with moss, like the ones I used to step on at home.

We had to use the Thompsons’ rings, but that was okay. Clint was saving up for the rings we really wanted. When the ceremony was over, we had a kiss that seemed too short for the mountains that was moving inside of me. Zelda took pictures and the flash was bright. Clint led me down the deck steps and everybody else poured into the yard behind us. The kids chased each other off looking like butterflies in their summer clothes.

Mr. Thompson was done firing up the grill for hamburgers. I closed my eyes and drunk in the charcoal smell of the rolling black smoke when he opened the lid. The others gathered up for a game of horseshoes. I drifted down the creek a little ways, to where I could breathe and take it all in. The wind picked up and blowed the smell of the grill toward me. The children came running along the bank and before I knowed it one of them, a girl with plaits, crashed into my knees. The shock ran all through me. I looked down and her face was like a little sun. She hugged my legs hard before she ran off. I shut my eyes and felt hot tears. I hadn’t been touched by a child in a long time. Someway it made me think of Johnny. It seemed like the Lord’s way of saying the day was blessed.

It was getting evening by the time I walked back toward the house. Clint had left me alone, even though I seen him looking for me. He knowed I needed to take it all in by myself for a while. Everybody else was full but there was plenty of food left over. I was too tired to eat. I sunk down in a lawn chair on the grass beside of Louise. Me and her watched Clint up on the deck. He was talking with Mr. Thompson and drinking iced tea out of a plastic cup. I could tell Louise cared for Clint by the way she looked at him. “That boy’s had a hard time of it,” she said. “But he’s been better since he found you.” Louise reached out for my hand to squeeze. Her fingers shocked me, like the touch of that child had done. She looked back at Clint and said, “He’s like one of my own sons. You know, I gave him my youngest boy’s clothes after he got killed on that motorcycle. It makes me cry just about every time I see Clint wearing something of Randy’s.”

I didn’t say anything, but I hated the thought of Clint in a dead boy’s clothes. I wondered which ones belonged to Louise’s son. Was it that knitted sweater I loved to see in winter, with deers leaping in a line across the front of it? Or them corduroy pants with a tiny hole in the knee that gave me little peeks of Clint’s curly leg hair? It bothered me something awful to think about. All of them fabrics, wools and flannels and cottons, that I touched and pressed and ran my hands over when I kissed Clint, wasn’t even his. They belonged to a dead boy. Then I thought of the worst thing of all. Clint said that silver rope chain I loved came from Louise. He wore it all the time, even in the water. I loved to see it shining on his collarbone. Now that chain would make me sick every time I looked at it, like a noose around Clint’s neck. I wanted to throw it away and burn all them clothes. Maybe he was even wearing some of them right then. That white dress shirt that was yellowed at the armpits, them jeans that was faded at the knees, that old belt threaded like a poison snake through the belt loops might have belonged to Louise’s dead son. I didn’t want to ask. I couldn’t stand to know. Clint was the only one that ever loved me right. Then I seen him laughing under the porch light with moths in his hair. His eyes shined whenever he smiled. I couldn’t believe I was his wife. Finally, I had a family again.

JOHNNY

I hitchhiked from the detention center to Millertown with everything I owned in a duffel bag, the books from the woods, my notebook, the silver lighter, and an address written on a scrap of paper. On the highway I watched the shopping centers and motels and rest stops go past, taking in how the scenery had changed while I was gone. When the man who had picked me up let me out of his truck, I paused in the street to look at the Odom house. It was tall and weathered and seemed to be leaning. A spring wind picked up and flapped the shingles, a few scattered over the rotten roof. I went up the porch steps and stopped at the door listening for movement. I heard the slow creak of floorboards somewhere inside. I had decided on the way to the house that if nobody was home I would break in, but it sounded as though someone was there. I reached toward the doorbell and then changed my mind. I went to a moldering couch under the window and sat down to rest instead, dropping the duffel bag at my feet. I had waited a long time. I could take another minute to catch my breath. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

When I opened them there was a station wagon pulling up to the curb, its engine dying with a rattle. A heavy woman struggled out from behind the wheel with a grocery bag in her arms. She came up the walk breathing hard, frowning up at me. She was wearing what looked like hospital scrubs, the top patterned with teddy bears. I couldn’t see her eyes for the shine off her glasses. I rose from the couch and looked down at her.

“Didn’t you see the sign?” she asked.

“Pardon me?”

“Sign right yonder over the doorbell. Says no solicitors.”

“Oh,” I said, putting on a smile. “I’m not selling anything.”

She smiled back, still sizing me up. “What do you want then?”

“I’m looking for Frankie Odom. Is this the right house?”

“Depends on what you’re after him for.”

I came down the steps to her. “Let me get that for you, ma’am,” I said.

“I can get it,” she said, letting me take the bag. “What do you want with Frankie?”

“We’re kin,” I said, climbing the porch steps ahead of her.

“Kin? I been taking care of Frankie two years now and I never laid eyes on you. You’re awful handsome. I believe I would’ve remembered.” She snorted laughter.

“Are you Frankie’s daughter-in-law?”

“Lord, no. I wouldn’t have none of them turkeys. I just set with Frankie while his boys are gone to work. Name’s Diane.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Diane,” I said, shifting the bag to offer my hand. She looked down at it, flustered, then gave my fingers a quick, moist squeeze.

“What kind of kin are you?”

I smiled again, standing close. “I’m Frankie’s grandson.”

“Huh. I thought I done met all of Frankie’s grandkids.”

I only paused for a second. “Did you ever hear of Frankie’s son named John?”

Diane stepped back and studied me. “I’ve heard tell of him. From what I know, none of the Odoms has seen hide nor hair of him for going on twenty years now.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s him.” I willed the smile to stay on my face.

“You saying you belong to John?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

She looked at me for a long time, lips pale and nostrils flaring. “Now, you didn’t come over here meaning to cause any trouble did you? I reckon they had trouble out of some of their people back a few years ago, before I started coming around.”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “Did Hollis tell you something bad about me?”

Her face flushed. “I don’t pay much mind to anything that comes out of that man’s mouth. I reckon I can judge anybody for myself.”

“All right,” I said. “Can I see Frankie then?”

She paused, looking me over again. I tensed, waiting. “If you start anything, I’ll put the law on you in a heartbeat. County jail is right down the street.”

“I promise you,” I said. “I just want to visit my grandfather one time.”

“Well,” she said, eyes softening behind the glasses. “I reckon anybody can understand that. If you’re John’s boy, Frankie will want to see you. But I ought to warn you, he’s been getting senile these last few years. He might go to talking out of his head.”

She pushed open the door and we stepped into a dim foyer onto humped and scarred linoleum. There was a stack of damp-looking newspapers against one wall and a smell of ancient cooking grease. I followed Diane down the hall into a kitchen with a ceiling so bowed it looked in danger of caving. In front of the sink there was a hole in the floor showing chewed-looking boards. Sun-faded curtains hung limp and mildewed on the window above it. Sitting in a wheelchair near the table was a birdlike man with tufts of hair standing up in corkscrews, wearing a yellowed undershirt and a pair of boxer shorts that bagged around his skinny thighs, holding a cigarette with a long ash.

Diane said, “I brung you somebody, Frankie.”

Frankie Odom blinked at her and coughed wetly. “Did you get my cigarettes?”

“There’s somebody here to see you,” she shouted. “This here is John’s boy.”

I gave Diane her grocery bag and crossed the floor to stand before the wheelchair. His eyes were black and somehow familiar. Closer up, I saw dark threads left in his hair.

“John?” he said, bushy eyebrows lifting.

“Yes, this is John’s boy. Your grandson,” Diane said.

“I didn’t bet on you ever coming back.”

“He ain’t never been here before, Frankie,” Diane shouted patiently. “This is the first time you ever seen him.”

“Some of them thought I might ort to report you a missing person but Hollis reckoned you didn’t want to be found.”

“See, I told you,” Diane said to me. “He ain’t all there.”

“Eugene and Lonnie wanted me to call the sheriff,” he went on. “Said she might have done something to you.”

“Now, Frankie,” Diane scolded. “You’re talking about this boy’s mother.”

“It’s all right,” I said, not looking away from his eyes.

“She was a pretty girl. Sweet little old girl. But some of them that come in the store said it might surprise you what a woman will do.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Frankie,” Diane said, “this is your grandson. This ain’t John. If you don’t behave, you ain’t getting these cigarettes.” She put the bag on the counter.

“It’s all right, ma’am,” I said. “Can I ask you a favor?”

She paused, brows knitting together. “I reckon.”

“Do you know if Frankie has any pictures of John?”

She hesitated. “Let me think. They’re not much of a picture-taking family. I believe he might have some pictures in a box back here in one of these closets.”

“Would you mind finding me one?” I asked. “Not to keep, or anything. It would mean a lot to me just to see what he looked like.”

I waited, careful to keep my face relaxed. “Okay,” she said. “There might be one of all the brothers together. But it’ll take me a minute to locate anything in this mess.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll just stay here and wait.”

I watched her leave the kitchen, footsteps heavy on the rotting floorboards. Then I went to Frankie Odom and knelt before his wheelchair. The stench of him was powerful.

“Dad,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”

“Hollis figured you run off, but some of them said you might be killed.”

“What did you think?”

“I never did think that little old girl would kill anybody.”

My jaw tightened. “So you thought I was alive somewhere.”

He took a puff from his cigarette. “She made good coffee.”

“Where did you think I would run off to?”

“She always done a good job on the bathroom, made them faucets shine.”

“Where did you think I was for all these years?”

He plucked a shred of tobacco from his fat, purplish tongue. “I figured you went up north. You always did think you was borned in the wrong place.”

“Did you ever try to find me?”

“No, I never did try to find you. None of the rest of them did neither. They probably figured they’d divide your share. Greedy sons of bitches.”

“What about you?” I asked softly. “Why didn’t you look for me?”

“Shitfire, boy,” he said, fumbling at the baggy lap of his boxers where the ash of his cigarette had fallen. “You know you always was the meanest one of the bunch.”

I heard the creak of Diane’s feet and turned to see her watching us warily from across the room, holding a square of picture. “This is the only one I found,” she said. She came to me and I reached up from where I knelt to take it. I paused for a long time staring down at the creased black and white, a young boy with pitch hair and eyes, not smiling. I couldn’t tell if he looked like me. I tried to hand it back but she said, “You can keep it.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate it.” When I tucked the picture into my pocket I felt something else there, carried with me for a long time, its metal warm against my hip. “There’s something I’d like to give Frankie before I go. I believe it belongs to him anyway.” I pulled out the dogtags. “The chain was broken but I had it fixed.” I rose to my feet, the chain dangling suspended between us, and dropped it over Frankie Odom’s head. He blinked up at me with owlish surprise. The dogtags hung limp from his neck, down his stained and rumpled undershirt. He stared at me for a long, uncomprehending moment. Then he said, “You can’t let a woman run over you, son. She gets to acting up, you got to straighten her out, just like we done your mammy.” He paused, still blinking up at me. “I ain’t never told nobody what we done to her. By God, you better not either.”

LAURA

Clint’s daddy was right. He should have been born a fish. I never knowed before how Clint loved to swim because we started out so far from the lake. All summer long, he swimmed every morning before work at the grocery store. At night when his shift was done, he pulled hisself with long strokes under the moon. Once me and Clint went out to the lake and took off our clothes. We got in the water and sunk like rocks. I wasn’t scared, even though I can’t swim. My hair floated up like a sea plant. I opened my eyes and it was dim. Clint had murky light all around him. His long legs and arms waved like tentacles. I wanted to live down yonder with him forever. Finally he took my hands and we floated back up. I was sad when we broke the surface. I could tell he felt like plain old Clint again, sputtering water with his hair plastered down. I missed him when he was out swimming, but I never made any fuss about it. I knowed he needed his time in the lake, like Mama needed her time in the woods. When he was ready to come in he’d dry off and climb in our bed smelling like fish and muddy water, the smells I like best in the world.

At the end of June, Clint asked me to quit my job at the hamburger place because he wanted to take care of me. We made out all right on his salary and I didn’t mind staying home. While Clint was at work I buried Mama’s box under a cedar tree in the woods beside the lake. I didn’t want to risk Clint finding it in the trailer. I hated keeping a secret from him, but showing anybody that box would have seemed like betraying Johnny and Mama. Sometimes I’d take the shovel and dig it up because holding it made me feel closer to Mama. Them’s the times I’d cry for her and Johnny. But then Clint would come home and we’d wrestle all over the trailer. He’d make me laugh so hard I couldn’t breathe.

Pretty soon, summer was gone and fall had come again. At the end of September, when it was too chilly to swim, Clint got nervous. Every night after work he paced around the edge of the water. When Mr. Thompson said he had a junked car for sale, I told Clint he ought to buy it. It was three hundred dollars, but I thought fixing it up might occupy his mind. It was an old orange Pinto that barely ran enough for Clint to drive it back to the trailer, but he loved it. He was always coming home with a new part for it. He’d stay under the hood some nights until way after dark. I’d get bored while he was working on the Pinto. There was a sadness growing in me and I couldn’t pick one thing that caused it. I’d set on the cinder-block steps for hours looking out at the water, feeling lonesome.

Then one morning, I got sick. I hung over the toilet wishing for Clint, but he was gone to work. After a few minutes it finally dawned on me. That whole time I was lonesome, mine and Clint’s child was already with me. I seen what had been causing my sadness. I just needed a brand-new little baby. I already knowed it was a boy, too, the way I know things sometimes. Later being pregnant was like a dream, because I couldn’t touch or see him. It was like my womb was another planet off in the sky. But right then he was real to me. I closed my eyes and thought of Mama. I wondered if I was ever this real to her when me and Johnny was in her belly. I imagined my baby, warm and heavy like Percy in my arms. Me and Clint was close, but it would be even better to have a child inside my body. I needed to be that close with somebody. I wanted a chance to be the kind of mama mine wasn’t to me.

When Clint got home from the grocery store I was standing on the trailer steps. He came up whistling and jingling his keys. He stopped as soon as he seen me, halfway across the grass with a big patch of yard still between us. I blurted out, “I’m fixing to have a baby.” Clint turned white and dropped his keys. We had a time finding them later. Then he came to me like he was sleepwalking. He fell down on his knees and hugged my belly for a long time. I looked out across the lake. His hair smelled like the water.

Them first weeks, Clint would lay his sunshiny head on my belly and try to hear the baby’s heart beating. Louise from the grocery store gave us a book of names. We stayed up late looking but never found one we liked. He’d rub my feet and we’d try to think up what the baby was going to look like. Clint wanted him to have black eyes, I wanted blue. Sometimes we’d even fight about silly things like that. Clint would get mad and stomp off. He’d slam the door so hard things would fall off the walls. I knowed he was going to swim, even though it was fall and getting cooler outside. He seemed glad about the baby, but someway it made him nervous, too. I figure he was thinking about his parents, and the bad times he had when he was a little boy. He always came back in the trailer and said, “I’m sorry for being hateful. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Sometimes he was happy but sometimes he got quiet. He started staying outside more, working on his car. It helped Clint having something to work on. He still loved that Pinto.

Then one afternoon while he was at work and I was getting ready to cook supper, I heard a car door slam and a loud shrill voice. “You come on out of there, Clint!” the voice was saying. “I swear I’ll burn that place to the ground with both of y’all in it!” I knowed right away it was Clint’s mama, even though I never met her. I rushed around in a panic, looking for my shoes. “You ain’t no better than that sorry daddy of yours!” Clint’s mama was hollering. “I always knowed it!” Her voice was getting closer. I hurried through the living room and opened the front door just as she was fixing to pound on it.

“Where’s Clint?” she screamed at me. She was swaying on her feet. I could tell she was drunk or maybe on pills. She didn’t have any teeth and there was blue tattoos all over her arms. Her eyes was nothing like Clint’s.

“He’s gone to work,” I said. I pulled the door shut behind me. It was a chilly day outside and I hugged myself, wishing I had put on a sweater.

“You’re a liar,” she said.

“No. He’s at the store.” I came down the steps and she backed up. “He’ll be home around five-thirty if you want to come back then.”

“Listen to you,” she said. Her words was hard to make out for the slurring. “Trying to run me off from my own property. This place belongs to me, not you.”

I didn’t say anything, just stood still hoping she’d leave. She stared at me. Then she went to crying. “People’s always doing me this way,” she said. It was even harder to understand her words through the tears. “I ain’t never had nobody. When I was little they was always passing me around. Didn’t none of them want me.” She wiped tears away with the back of her hand. “D’you know they took my first babies I had away from me? Put them with my ex-husband’s people and they never would come back to live with me. Then I had Clint and he picked his sorry old daddy over me every time.”

I didn’t know what to say. I wished I could make her feel better. I reached out my hand to her. I opened my mouth to ask her to come on in the trailer, but she went back to mad again. I never seen anybody act so mixed up since I left Pauline behind.

“But I’ll fight for him this time, little girl!” she hollered. “You better believe it!” She stumbled backward into Clint’s Pinto and fell. It was pulled up close to the trailer so he could work at night by the porch light. He never took it to the store. It was still in bad shape, so he drove the green car. “I been fighting people my whole life!” she screamed, spit flying off of her lips. “I been in fights all over this state!” When she got up I seen there was something in her hand. It was the jack handle Clint used to change the Pinto’s tires. “I always win, too,” she said. Then she raised the jack handle and I thought she was going to come after me with it. She crashed it into one of the Pinto’s headlights instead. Then she beat out the other one. I couldn’t stand to see her hurting Clint’s car. I ran at her faster than I thought I could move. There was noises coming out of my throat that didn’t seem like me. Clint’s mama had her back to me, busting out the Pinto’s windshield. I jumped on her from behind and grabbed hold of her face. My fingers was hooked into claws. They dug at her cheeks. I yanked her backward until she dropped the jack handle. She tried to sling me off but I hung on tight. She pried at my fingers but I wouldn’t turn loose. She dropped to her knees and tried to crawl away. I couldn’t let her go. I beat her head and bit her shoulders, put my whole weight on top of her. I wanted her to bear it all. “Don’t you hurt Clint’s car!” I yelled in her ear. “Don’t you ever hurt Clint’s car!” That’s all I could make myself say, even though there was a lot more that I wanted to.

Pretty soon I felt tired and rolled off of her. I laid in the yard breathing so hard it hurt my throat. She stumbled up and started limping to her car. “You crazy little bitch!” she tried to holler, but her voice was nearly gone. “I’ll call the law on you!” I laid there in the grass shaking for a long time after she took off. I couldn’t believe what I had done to her. I asked the Lord to forgive me. I was sorry but most of all I was worried about my baby. I thought something had broke inside me, the way it broke in Mama.

JOHNNY

I left the Odom house in a daze, duffel bag over my shoulder. I had meant to search for my father after seeing Frankie Odom, but there was a weight on me when I walked out the door. I didn’t know what to make of all I had heard, especially the last thing my grandfather had said to me. I wandered down the street and paused at the stop sign to look around, head heavy and muddled. I noticed a house on the corner that seemed out of place in such a seedy neighborhood. It was white with two stories, set back from the curb on a manicured lawn. Urns with ivy topiaries flanked the front door and a sign above it read “Imogene’s” in fancy script. It was obviously a shop, not a residence. I crossed the grass thinking dimly of calling a cab to somewhere. When I opened the door I was standing in what looked like a living room crowded with musty-smelling furniture, price tags dangling off everything. A woman appeared out of nowhere, small with dyed hair and a powdered face. I assumed that she was Imogene. When I noticed the book in her hand my whole body tensed. Like always, a sign. But this time I would rather not have seen it. She was holding a slim volume, forefinger marking her place. It was a book of poems like one I had found in the woods but in better condition, not swollen with moisture or specked with mildew. She smiled at me. “Can I help you with something?”

“What’s that book you have?” I asked, buying some time to collect myself.

She looked at her hand. “Oh,” she said. “I have a friend by the name of Ford Hendrix who travels all over the place hunting old books. The ones he doesn’t keep, he brings to me.” She paused, maybe deciding if I was dangerous. I must have passed inspection because she smiled at me again. “I’ve got more upstairs if you’re interested.”

I thanked her then excused myself and hurried up the stairs. At the end of a narrow hall there was a room with books shelved from floor to ceiling. I ran my fingers over the spines, closed my eyes and took in the good smell. There were no others like those I found in the woods, but if I hadn’t been broke I would have bought one anyway.

I went quietly back downstairs, meaning to sneak out, but a square of door in a nook behind the stairwell caught my eye. It looked inviting with light falling through its cracks. I glanced over my shoulder as I turned the knob, feeling like an intruder even though the shop was a public place, and stepped out into the sun. There was a deck with garden furniture and more topiaries in pots. At the edges of the property a tall wood fence blocked out the neighboring duplex on one side and hid an overgrown lot behind it. I stood there among the plants, pots crowded under glass hothouses and bell jars, ivy and fern leaves trailing everywhere, and had a moment of disbelief that I was free. I would never see my cell at Polk County again. I needed to think about finding work and a place to stay, but the deck was so peaceful, I couldn’t resist sitting down for a while in one of the flaking wicker chairs. My whole body sagged, my arms and legs going limp with exhaustion. I hadn’t realized how bone tired I was, not just from that morning at the Odom house, but over the past four years locked up in prison. I looked at my duffel bag resting on my lap and thought of my notebook inside. If I could clear my head, maybe it would come to me what to do next. I took out the notebook and a pen, but after only a few lines my eyelids grew heavy. A cool wind stirred through the plants and blew over me like a spell from a fairy tale. I felt my fingers loosening on the pen as I nodded off. I don’t know how long I dozed before Imogene’s voice jerked me suddenly awake, the notebook sliding off my lap and landing at my feet.

“Didn’t find one you liked?” she asked, standing in the doorway behind me.

I jumped up as if I’d been caught stealing. “Not this time,” I said.

Imogene smiled. “Well, my friend said he’d probably be by sometime today with another load of books. You ought to come back later and see what he brings.”

I had no intention of going back. But when I left the shop, I still didn’t know where I was headed. I could have tried to find Laura, but I wasn’t ready to see her yet. It would have been like facing up to all I had done and seen since we were together last. I thought of the Law-sons, who had been good to me when I lived with them. Not far down the street from Imogene’s, I saw a phone booth outside a convenience store. I hesitated and then went inside to buy cigarettes first, a habit I’d picked up at the detention center. There was a long line at the counter and the cashier was slow. I stood under the buzzing fluorescents shifting from foot to foot, something nagging at me. After paying for the cigarettes, I walked out to the phone booth, tucking the pack into my breast pocket.

I was looking up the Lawsons’ number when it hit me that I’d left my notebook behind. I froze, dropping the phone book to dangle at the end of its cord. I ran all the way back to Imogene’s with my heart threatening to give out on me. When I got there, throat raw and side aching, I barely registered the red truck parked at the curb. I didn’t bother to go inside the shop. I went around the house to where the garden deck was, praying the notebook would still be where I’d left it. I stopped in my tracks on the bottom step. There was a man sitting in the wicker chair, with long white hair under a greasy baseball cap. He was holding the notebook in his hands, so absorbed in his reading that he didn’t notice me. It took a second to comprehend what I was seeing. Then I crossed the deck in a few leaping steps, knocking over a flower pot, and snatched the notebook away from him. The man stared at me with wild eyes. I was assaulted by the stink of his sweat.

“Hey, sorry,” he said, holding up his hands as if to prove they were empty. I saw that his ring finger was missing, a smooth, pink nub where it should have been. I backed off a few paces. “I assume that belongs to you,” he said. Standing, he was a striking figure in spite of his dirtiness, tall with broad shoulders and a sunken belly. His hair was white but his face was smooth. It was impossible to guess how old he was.

“You should mind your own business,” I said over the thud of my heart.

“I know, I know,” the man said. “But I had a good reason.”

I looked down at the notebook, gripping it so tightly my fingertips were purple. Slowly, it sank in that someone had read the words between the covers. “You had a good reason,” I repeated. I thought of lunging at him again, but the image of that smooth, pink nub on his hand held me back. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“It’ll take some time to explain.”

“Explain what?”

“I needed to read your poems.”

I stared at him blankly, unable to speak.

The man grinned, teeth bright in his sun-browned face, and stepped toward me. I tensed, prepared to fight. “Listen, are you hungry?” he asked.

“What?”

“Let me buy you a hamburger and I’ll tell you all about it.” He thrust out his hand but I didn’t take it. “Name’s Ford Hendrix.”

“Do you know me somehow?”

“You could say so.”

My mouth went dry. I looked at his damaged left hand, now dropped at his side, and back at his bloodshot eyes. “What do you want with me?”

“I want to help you, that’s all.”

“What makes you think I need helping?”

“I had a vision,” he said. “You were in it.”

I stood gaping at him for a long time, wondering if it was pos sible that I was having a dream. Then I followed him like a sleepwalker to his truck, because he had read my poems. He knew me better than anyone else on earth now, even Laura. But there was another reason I went. It was the missing ring finger. I needed to know how he lost it.

We didn’t speak as he drove with the windows down, bits of trash whirling everywhere. I couldn’t have carried on a conversation if he’d tried to talk. I still wasn’t sure if all that had happened since I’d left the detention center that morning was real or one long hallucination. He took me to a bar and grill on the outskirts of town and we went inside where it was dim and hot. He stood at the counter and ordered cheeseburgers from a man in a stained apron. Two men drinking coffee by the window nodded as we passed. We sat down and stared at each other across the table. A fly buzzed between us.

“You say you had a vision about me.”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“I take after my grandfather. People called him the Prophet of Oak Ridge.”

“So you’re a prophet?”

Ford grinned like all of this was funny. “I was born fifteen years after he died, but my mother told me stories about him. He was always roaming the woods and one day, after he had been missing for a few weeks, he showed up at the general store in town and told his neighbors he’d seen a vision. Said a voice told him to sleep with his head on the ground for forty days and nights and he’d see the future. He predicted Bear Creek valley would be filled with factories that would help this country win the greatest war ever fought. People thought he was crazy. They locked him up for a while at the county farm, but now they know he was right. Twenty-eight years after he died, the factory was built in Bear Creek valley where they made the uranium for the first atomic bomb.”

“What’s any of that got to do with me?” I asked, working to keep my composure. The man in the apron brought our food on a tray and left without speaking.

“Nothing, except he’s the reason I see visions. It never happened until after I lost this finger.” He held up his hand. “That’s when I found God and the voice started speaking to me.” He took a bite of cheeseburger, mustard squirting down his chin. My food sat untouched on the table. Smelling it turned my stomach.

“How’d you lose it?” I asked.

He raised his eyebrows. “You mean my finger? It happened while I was noodling for catfish. Some people call it grabbling. That’s where you wade out in the water and feel along the bank for holes where catfish go to spawn. The female lays her eggs in there and then the male moves in to guard them. If you stick your hand in his hole, he’ll bite it and you can pull him out. I was in the lake up to my neck, water so cloudy I couldn’t see a thing, even when I ducked under. The trouble with noodling is you never know what you’re going to get. That time it was a snapping turtle, bit my finger clean off.”

I felt a vein pulsing in the middle of my forehead. I knew that he was lying. It was something about the way his eyes shifted. “That’s not what happened,” I said.

“Well, I wish that’s what happened.” He grinned again in that maddening way.

For a while I watched him eat in silence, smearing ketchup on his plate with his french fries, looking out the window as if I wasn’t even there.

“What did you see?” I asked.

“Hmm?”

“In the vision.”

“Not much. Just that you were coming to us.”

“Who’s us?”

“Me and my wife, Carolina.”

I shook my head and laughed for what felt like the first time in years. “You’re one crazy son of a bitch.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But so are you. Because you believe me.”

He was wrong. I didn’t believe him, but I felt like I needed to know who he was. When we finally walked out of the bar and grill, it seemed we had been there for decades. Ford fished around in his pocket for his keys and asked, “Where can I drop you off?”

I thought about it. “I don’t know. Just take me back to town.”

“Where you staying?”

I took out a cigarette. “Nowhere right now. But I’ll figure it out.”

Ford fell silent, leaning on his truck. I lit the cigarette and smoked, watching cars pass on the road. Finally he said, “Why don’t you come and stay with me for a while?”

I turned to him, startled. “Huh?”

“I’ve got a shed with electricity. It’s quiet out there. No kitchen or toilet, but all you have to do is walk across the yard. You can eat with us.”

“What about your wife?”

“She’s expecting you.” I pretended not to notice another allusion to visions.

“I’m not going to sponge off of you and your wife.”

He laughed. “I don’t expect you to. I’ve got trees that need trimming, a tractor to fix, tobacco to set out. Me and Carolina can’t handle all that land by ourselves. I was planning on hiring a man this summer. It might as well be you.”

I shook my head, part of me still not believing what was happening. I wondered if he would be inviting me into his home if he knew I was fresh out of prison. “I can’t.”

“Just for a while. You can’t get any writing done without somewhere to stay. I’ll give you a few minutes to decide. You can let me know when you make up your mind.”

“Well,” I said, taking a last draw from my cigarette and pitching it into the parking lot gravel. “If you’re a prophet, I guess you already know what I’m going to do.”

Ford smiled and opened the truck door. “Carolina will be glad to see you.”

LAURA

As time went by, Clint got more and more nervous about the baby. Every chance I had, I told him how happy our son would be. “He’s going to grow up right here in the fresh air, beside of the water.” Clint acted like he believed me, but I knowed he was worried because of his mama. I didn’t think she’d ever come back after what I done to her, but I was wrong. Every once in a while she’d get mad about Clint leaving her and drive over to the trailer to let him know about it. Once it was the middle of the night. We was in the bed asleep. Next thing we knowed, she was out in the driveway laying on her car horn. Every dog for miles was barking. It scared me and Clint half to death. He jumped up and ran outside with just his drawers on. I got up to look and there was Clint’s mama, yelling at the top of her lungs. “Clint,” I called out the front door. “Are you all right?”

“It’s okay,” he said over top of her screaming. “Go on in the house.”

I was real proud of Clint. He came back in and left her out yonder cussing by herself. Before she went home she drove over in our grass and spun her tires. She tore the yard all to pieces. I held Clint in my arms the rest of the night. He was shaking like a leaf.

Next time she came, me and Clint had been to the store to buy ice cream. It was dusk, and she was setting out by the water in the December cold, waiting on us when we got back. We had been laughing all the way down the road, but when we pulled in and seen her there, our day was ruint. Clint said, “Just stay in the car. I’ll run her off.”

I rolled the window down so I could hear them fussing. “Me and your daddy never was divorced,” she hollered in Clint’s face. “Every last thing that son of a bitch had belongs to me.” Clint took her by the arm and started steering her back to her old beat-up car. “This place belongs to me!” she shrieked, trying to get away from him.

After he forced his mama back in her car she finally drove off, slinging mud and gravel everywhere. I got out of our car and Clint went on to the trailer with his head down. One of his arms was bleeding where she’d scratched him. I took the ice cream in and made us each a bowl. We set down at the little kitchen table to eat. Clint wouldn’t speak or look at me. I didn’t want to make him feel worse, but I was too worried to keep my mouth shut. “What your mama said, about this place belonging to her …”

“Don’t pay no attention,” he said, staring into his bowl. “She’s all talk.” I could tell he wasn’t too sure, but, like always, he kept his worries quiet.

After that run-in with his mama, Clint quit eating as much and started losing weight. I’d take hold of his sharp hipbones and say, “I got to fatten you up. I can’t get big as a house all by myself!” I acted like I was kidding, but he went around with dark rings under his eyes not smiling near as much, and I didn’t know how to make him feel better. It should have been a happy time for us. One night I couldn’t help crying beside of him in the bed. He knowed why I was upset. He said, “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

I asked if he didn’t want the baby, but he swore that wasn’t it. He said it was hard to say out loud what was wrong. I realized laying there I didn’t want him to tell, because what if it was me. But looking back I don’t believe it was. Clint loved me and the baby.

Then one night he went swimming and didn’t climb back in the bed smelling like fish and muddy water. I woke up and his side was empty. Dawn was coming under the curtains. I put on my coat and went down to the water with my hands on my belly. I looked across the lake, like me and Clint did when we first came there. Fog hung over the still blue. Everything was quiet. Me and the baby knowed he wasn’t coming back.

I set by the water for two days like a sailor’s wife anyway, hardly ever going back in the house. I wanted to believe Clint was just holding his breath extra long this time. Pretty soon he would break the surface, hung with algae and sputtering water. I had a blanket to wrap him in just in case. It was cold outside and I’d have to warm him up.

On the third day, not long after the sun rose, I saw red and blue lights twinkling through the trees on down the shore. I tried to get up but I was too stiff. I stumbled around for a long time on the sand. When I finally got to where I could walk, I followed them swooping lights, dragging Clint’s blanket behind me. I picked my way along the edge of the water, climbing over fallen trees and rocks. Seemed like the blanket got snagged every few feet, but I kept going. Weak and cold as I was, I don’t know how I made it. Them lights got brighter the closer I got. Finally the woods thinned out and it got easier to walk. Not far ahead, I seen the neighbor man’s dock and people standing on it. Me and Clint didn’t know him too well. I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup. I came out of the trees and onto his grass. I meant to ask him what the lights was for, if I could figure out which one he was. That’s when I seen the police cars and the ambulance with its back doors throwed open. Two men was rolling a stretcher across the yard with a lumpy shape strapped to it. Even under a wet-spotted cover, I knowed the shape well.

I wandered toward the people standing around. I didn’t have any more questions. I just needed help for my baby. I was fixing to fall down.

“Hey, little gal,” the neighbor man said, coming to meet me. He had a toothpick in his mouth. He didn’t look too tore up about what was going on. “I found that feller there drownded under my dock, skinny boy with right longish hair. Had a silver chain around his neck. Reckon you know him?”

“I know him,” I said. Then my legs gave out.

JOHNNY

It was a long drive with the windows down, subdivisions and warehouses and restaurants turning to long stretches of farmland. The farther we went, the more the spring smell of cut grass replaced the stink of factory smoke. We traveled west for at least an hour on a two-lane highway, the afternoon heading toward evening. Then he turned off the highway onto a narrow back road that wound and twisted through a patch of thick, dark woods, onto another stretch of cracked asphalt that led us through the trees and petered out, turning into a dusty gravel lane with rolling hills on both sides.

The whole time, Ford talked about his life. He said he was born on a farm outside of Oak Ridge and all those years hearing about his grandfather’s visions had given him a lust to see things for himself. He got an inheritance from an aunt he’d never met and ran off to travel the world. He claimed he had seen it all, the Highlands of Scotland, the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China. He said he’d lived on just about every continent and in every state of the union but nothing he saw satisfied him. “What I really wanted to see,” he said, “was the future. Like my grandfather did.” I didn’t ask about his visions, although he probably wanted me to. I kept quiet, waiting for him to slip up and reveal who he really was. He said that even as he roamed, he knew he’d return someday. When he finally went home to the farm where he was born, his parents had been dead for three years and the house they had left him was falling down. He demolished the remains by himself, breaking off chunks of crumbling plaster, tearing off shingles, knocking down walls with a sledgehammer. Then he mentioned the books he found in the rubble.

“I moved some rotten boards I was hauling off and there they were, had been hidden in the house for who knows how long, waiting for somebody to find them. They weren’t rare or valuable, just old. One of them was Great Expectations. It must have been a gift to somebody, because there was a name written on the inside cover and a date, June 20, 1889. Well, it was the twentieth day of June in 1957 when that book turned up. I think finding those books got me reading and writing. I know it’s what made me a collector.”

I looked out the window, trying to keep my face neutral. He couldn’t have known about the poetry books, hidden in the duffel bag at my feet. It felt like proof that we were connected. He went on talking, telling me how he camped out on the farm until he had enough money to buy a trailer. He did all kinds of work, pulling tobacco, roofing houses, cleaning chimneys, mowing yards. It took a while to save enough and during that time he built bonfires in the field and read and wrote and played his guitar every night under the stars. He said an odd thing happened while he was living outdoors. One by one stray dogs had come out of the woods into the light of his fire and by the time his year of camping was done he had six of them, sleeping at his side and sharing the meat of the animals he hunted. “I still keep a pack of dogs around,” he said with a smile. “They seem to like my company.” He also claimed he had finished the first of several novels he’d written that year. I wasn’t sure if I believed any of what he was telling me, much less that he was a writer. He never let it slip how he really lost his finger, but I knew I had to find out.

After what seemed like miles of bottomland with not a house in sight, Ford grinned and said, “I bet you thought we were never going to get here.” From the road I saw his trailer at the end of a dirt driveway, surrounded by hills and woods and grassy fields. It had been built onto, with a long porch across the front hung with plants and wind chimes. When we got out of the truck, a pack of dogs just as Ford had described came running. There were at least eight of them, mutts of all sizes and colors, tongues hanging and tails wagging. Ford patted their heads as they jumped on him, muddying his jeans with their paws. Then I looked across the yard and saw the wife, Carolina. There was no way to hide my surprise. I had been expecting a graying older woman but this was a girl of no more than eighteen, wearing a floppy T-shirt and cutoff shorts. She was standing barefoot in the balding grass by the clothesline. She paused to watch me cross the yard and her eyes never left my face, even as Ford went to kiss her cheek. “He looks different than I imagined,” she said.

It was hard to stop looking at Carolina as she went back to the laundry. She wasn’t beautiful, but there was something about the geography of her face. She had dirty blonde hair, olive skin, and light eyes under heavy brows. Climbing the porch steps behind Ford, I nearly stumbled looking back at her. Then I was inside the trailer and the clutter was hard to walk through. There were books everywhere, spilling out of cardboard boxes, piled on the matted shag carpet, stacked against the dark paneling walls, their dusty smell mingling with mildew and woodsmoke and cooking grease.

Ford showed off his collection proudly, like a father. “Look,” he said, holding up one of the books. “This is a first edition, John Steinbeck’s Burning Bright. It’s in good condition, still got the dust jacket. It’s probably worth around two seventy-five, but I couldn’t part with it.” He replaced it carefully and took the next book off the pile. “Here’s another first edition. Harriet Beecher Stowe, We and Our Neighbors. I had somebody offer me eighty dollars for this one.” I began picking through the books myself, turning them over, enjoying the weight and heft of them in my hands. Finally, I lifted a thick hardcover from the coffee table and saw Ford’s name on the spine.

“You really are a writer,” I said, tracing the faded gold letters.

Ford laughed. “You mean you didn’t believe me?”

Then Carolina was standing in the door with a clothes basket on her hip. “He’s been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize,” she said.

Ford went to her and took the basket. “Carolina likes to brag on me, don’t you, honey?” He sat down on the flowered velvet couch and began folding clothes. I felt awkward, standing there with my hands in my pockets.

“Do you want something to drink?” Carolina asked, heading into a small kitchen divided from the living room by a bar with mismatching stools.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Have a seat and I’ll fix you boys some supper.”

Ford looked up from the clothes basket. “You don’t have to cook, Carolina. Me and Johnny had a bite to eat in town.”

“That was a long time ago,” she said. “I bet Johnny’s starving by now. I’ve got some pork chops thawing out anyway.” Reaching into an upper cabinet for the frying pan, she looked over her shoulder and smiled at me. A tingle raced along my spine.

I moved a stack of books from an old recliner and sat down. It was so comfortable that I nearly dozed, listening to the sound of pork chops frying and Carolina talking about her garden and the fruit trees she was nursing. A contented feeling washed over me, an ease sinking into my limbs as she talked and Ford sorted through his books, dividing them into piles according to those he would keep and those he would sell.

When Carolina called us to supper, we ate around a small table with our knees and elbows touching. Carolina lit candles and passed around a cheap bottle of wine. “We’re not always this fancy,” she said. “This is a special night.” It took a minute to realize she meant because I was there. I wondered how long it would take her to slip me a note or brush against me or make some excuse to get me alone, like girls at the children’s home and at school always had. I waited for the greediness in her eyes, but it never came. She was only friendly and comfortable with one leg tucked beneath her in the chair.

At some point I noticed that Carolina wasn’t eating her own cooking. When I asked about it, she said, “I can’t hardly stand to eat meat.” Ford claimed it was because her heart was too tender. He reached out to touch her hair. “It doesn’t bother me for other people to eat it,” she said. “I just can’t hardly stand to myself.” I wondered what she would think if she knew that I had skinned rabbits and squirrels for my mama to cook, ripped the greasy flesh from their small bones without a pang of remorse.

When Ford’s plate was clean, he pushed back from the table and said, “I’ve got to go check my mole traps. They’re tearing the garden all to pieces this year. Carolina, will you show Johnny where he’s bunking tonight?”

I followed her across the grass with my duffel bag slung over my shoulder. She carried a blanket and pillow in her arms. It was turning dark and the yard was a chorus of crickets and tree frogs. There was no sign of Ford checking his traps and the dogs were gone. They had probably followed him to the garden. It seemed Carolina and I were the only people for miles. There was a light burning in the shed and the door was propped open. It was tidier inside than I had imagined, the concrete floor swept with cardboard boxes and gar den tools moved to one side. There was a lone army cot in the corner.

“Ford brought this bed out here a long time ago,” Carolina said, her voice startling me. I wished she hadn’t mentioned Ford’s vision. There was an awkward silence.

“Was he really nominated for a Pulitzer?” I asked.

“Twice. I seen it in a magazine. People don’t believe it because of the way he lives, but this is the life Ford chooses for hisself. Sometimes people come out here and ask him to sign a book. Once there was a man from the newspaper who wanted to write an article. Ford talked to them, but he doesn’t like being found.” She paused, looking down at the blanket and pillow she was holding. She seemed tired, and maybe sad. “He’s got an agent that sends him letters sometimes. She wants him to write another book, but Ford’s stubborn. You can’t make him do anything before he’s ready to.”

We fell silent again, standing in the middle of the shed looking at each other. I wondered what she was doing there with some crazy old man. I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking about me. Finally she said, “Well, here’s you a pillow and blanket.” She delivered them into my arms and then, without warning, her hands were on me, moving quick and fluttery over my abdomen and ribs like butterflies. My scalp prickled at her touch. I couldn’t move. Her face was still, as if nothing unusual was happening. It was the manner of a doctor giving an examination. “You got a pain somewhere, Johnny,” she said. I could smell her hair, like the woods after a thunderstorm. Then the small hand settled on my chest. She nodded as if she had suspected all along. “It’s right in here.”

I opened my mouth, tried to think what to say. “No. I’m all right.”

“Since I was a little girl,” she said, “whenever I lay my hands on somebody, it’s like they know right where to go to help that person.”

I was about to tell her that I didn’t feel any different when I noticed a loosening in my chest, a lightening, as if someone had taken a rock off it. I took a deep breath and it was like I hadn’t been breathing at all before. Then immediately I felt foolish and weak, having fallen so easily for some kind of hypnotic suggestion. It wasn’t as much of a mystery anymore what this girl was doing with Ford. She was every bit as crazy as he was. I plucked her hand off my chest but she didn’t seem to notice. She smiled and said, “I guess I’ll go on and give you some privacy.” She paused and turned back before closing the door. “Sometimes in the spring it still gets chilly at nighttime. I’ve got a little heater I can bring out if you get to needing one.” Then she was gone. I stood in the middle of the shed for a long time, wondering what I was doing there myself.

LAURA

People said Clint did it on purpose but I think he was just trying to stay down where it was peaceful a little while longer. Maybe he sunk too far and couldn’t get back up before he ran out of breath. But I don’t believe he wanted to leave me. I think he wanted to see our baby get born and be a good father to him. Right after he drowned, I worried things had been passed down from Mama that I didn’t want. I thought I might be cursed to live out the same awful things that happened to her. I knowed from the stories she told there’s been a lot of sadness in our family. Bad times seem to follow our people around. For a minute I wished I was born to somebody else. Then I got to thinking about Mama and cried again. It wasn’t her fault that Clint drowned. It wasn’t anybody’s.

Not long after they found Clint, there was a knock on the trailer door. I snuck a peek out the window and seen Clint’s mama smoking a cigarette on the step. I opened the door and looked at her. Since Clint was gone, I didn’t hardly have any feelings.

“Well, are you going to let me in?” she asked real hateful. She came in and looked around. “This place looks like a hogpen.” I didn’t answer her. I just wanted her to leave. “I’ll get right down to it,” she said, tapping ashes in her palm. “This place never did belong to Clint. When his sorry old daddy died, it fell to me. You can’t stay here.”

I could have told her that I didn’t care. Clint might have wanted our baby to live by the water, but the lake scared me now. Instead I asked Clint’s mama, “You’re going to set your own grandbaby out?” Not because I wanted to stay, just because I didn’t understand what kind of person she was. I couldn’t figure out how anybody could be like that.

“I ain’t setting out my grandbaby,” she said. “I’m setting out you.”

“But the baby’s inside of me.”

“It won’t always be,” she said. She had a glint in her eyes that made me feel sick.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing,” she said. But I seen a smirk at the corners of her mouth. She was wary of me since that time I jumped on her, but she must have hated me so bad she couldn’t resist saying something else mean. “You ain’t fit to raise no youngun.”

I took a step toward her. I felt something coming loose in me again. It was a bad feeling, like somebody else taking over. “Don’t you say that,” I warned her. Even my voice didn’t sound right to my ears. She took a step back and I seen her hand searching behind her for the door handle. “Don’t you say a thing like that to me.”

I put my hands on my belly and balled up the cotton shirt stretched across it. She opened the door and I followed her to it. She backed down the cinder-block steps, keeping her eyes on me. “You better be off my property by tomorrow morning,” she said. “If you ain’t, I’m coming back with the law.” It was all I could do not to take after her. I couldn’t stand to be threatened that way. I seen what happened to Mama. She hollered before she got in the car, when she was too far away for me to come after her, “You ain’t fit!”

Like I said, I didn’t care to leave the trailer. It was too sad without Clint. I couldn’t quit thinking about them fat yellow curls I’d never touch again. I didn’t care if I ever seen water again the rest of my life. I was too tired to care about much of anything. The next day, I took the shovel out to that cedar tree in the woods. It was early and fog hung low to the ground. No birds was singing. I dug up the box’s grave. The ground was soft under the cedar tree needles, easy to loosen up. The sound of the dirt sifting was like Clint whispering to me. Then it turned into Clint’s baby whispering inside my belly. Then it turned into Mama whispering to herself all them miles away, wherever they put her. I couldn’t make out the words. It didn’t take long to reach the box. It wasn’t buried deep. I knelt and took it in my hands. This time it didn’t comfort me. At least I had Clint’s baby. I was sad, but I wasn’t alone.

I took one scratched-up suitcase with some clothes and Mama’s box in it. I walked to the bait shop and called Mr. Thompson to pick me up. I hated to, but him and Zelda and Louise was the only friends I had. We didn’t talk much in the car. We’d never been together by ourselves before. It was a pretty long drive down the interstate, back toward Millertown, before I was at the house where me and Clint got married. I was glad the baby could be there. Maybe while he was inside me he could see through my eyes. I tried to send him a memory of me and Clint standing on the deck in a circle of begonias. Zelda came out to the car to walk me across the yard. “Now, I ain’t staying long,” I told her.

She laughed. “Surely me and Ralph ain’t that bad.”

“I just mean me and the baby will have our own place, soon as I get a job.”

Mr. Thompson took my suitcase as we climbed up the porch steps. He reached across my shoulder and held open the front door for me. “You know you can stay as long as you want. Clint Blevins was like a son to me. But I’ve already got the job situation figured out for you. We’ve been shorthanded over at the store for a while now. I’ve just been putting off hiring anybody. Louise can show you how to work the cash register.”

Mr. Thompson stood there with my suitcase holding the door open as Zelda put her arms around my shoulders and tried to comfort me. I wished I could explain to them what it felt like to know kindness like that, after all the bad times I’d lived through.

I stayed with the Thompsons for two more months. I slept in that room with roses on the wallpaper where my wedding dress was laid out on the bed. When it was warm enough I stood out on the deck and looked off at the creek. Seemed like I could feel Clint beside me, slipping a ring on my finger all over again. When the ache in my chest got too big, I’d go back inside. I worried it wasn’t good for the baby, for me to hurt like that.

Mr. Thompson had sweet eyes and a nice face, and being around him made me think it might be all right to have a daddy. When he noticed a hole coming in the toe of my shoe he said to Zelda, “Get that youngun something decent to put on her feet.” One day he got worried because Zelda’s blood used to get low when she was expecting. He made me liver and onions and I choked it down to ease his mind. He made sure I got plenty of milk, too. My belly growed bigger and marks striped my breasts. Sometimes I seen the baby’s fist or foot ripple across my middle. I talked to him in my head, about his daddy and Mama and Johnny. I told him all Mama’s stories about our people, even about the curse and the haint blue eyes. One time Mama had said, “Granny thought I broke the curse.” But I wondered if she had. If there was any such thing as curses, I knowed this baby would be the one to break it. He’d bring an end to the suffering all of us had lived through, going all the way back to them great-aunts Mama used to tell us about. Whatever it was in our blood that brought bad things down on us, this baby would chase it away.

It was all right working at the grocery store, even though my ankles swelled up from being on my feet. It made me feel closer to Clint, spending my days how he did when I wasn’t around. Mr. Thompson had hired a new bagboy after Clint drowned named Roy. His face turned red when I stared at him. I liked to watch him work because I knowed it was what Clint used to do. There was sad times, but mostly it was a comfort being there. Louise and Mr. Thompson and the other cashier Debbie was always cutting up. It was a happy place, with people bustling around. I seen why Clint liked working there.

One day Louise hollered at me from her cash register. “Hey, Laura, I just about forgot. There’s a house come open for rent right down the street from me. It’s little but it don’t cost much, and you and the baby won’t need a lot of room.” That evening me and Zelda rode out with Louise to take a look at it. Right off I knowed it would be fine, even though one of the front windowpanes was cracked. It was bright yellow, my favorite color in the world. Down the bank from its yard there was a car wash. Louise said, “Now, it might get noisy over yonder during the day.” I didn’t mind because I’d be at the store and the baby would be there with me. Zelda had offered to fix up Mr. Thompson’s office in the back with a bassinet and a playpen. She said she’d keep him in there while I worked. She liked to hang around the store anyway, and she didn’t have any grandbabies yet. When I tried to say no, she said, “Please let me do this for you.” So the noise from the car wash wouldn’t bother the baby’s naps. Another good thing was Louise being my neighbor, we could ride to and from work together and I’d help pay for the gas.

My only worry was the high porch. It had a trellis around it but I could see junk and weeds underneath. Climbing up and down them steps might be dangerous for a toddler. But I’d been saving a little bit of money out of my paycheck since I’d been working. It wasn’t much but I hoped by the time the baby was walking I’d be able to rent a better house for us, maybe something away from town. The door was locked but I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked in the window. There was spots on the carpet but the room looked all right. I could picture my baby playing there on the floor. It was next to a car wash but not a laundrymat. I thought Clint would be proud of me.

JOHNNY

I couldn’t get my mind off what had happened with Carolina. I pulled the chain on the lightbulb overhead and lay listening to the sounds outside. The blanket and pillowcase smelled like rainwater and I imagined that’s what she washed them in. The cot was more comfortable than it looked. I didn’t know I was asleep until a knock on the shed door woke me up. I rose and looked around, disoriented in the dark. Ford opened the door without permission and stood on the threshold like something from a dream, a tall figure with white hair flowing out. He looked clean for the first time since we’d met. He was holding a guitar, his dogs circling behind him. “Sorry to wake you,” he said. “I got me a good fire going. Thought you might want to come out and sit for a while.”

We walked to the mowed field on the other side of the trailer, dogs slinking at our heels. In the middle, a fire writhed and popped. There were three lawn chairs pulled close to the flames. Carolina sat in one of them with her legs drawn up. She looked up and smiled, face bathed in orange. We took our seats and Ford strummed absently at his guitar. “Something about a fire helps me think,” he said. Ford’s fire had the opposite effect on me. It helped me not to think. I leaned back my head and looked up at the stars and my mind was clear. Ford played and for a while Carolina sang along in a high, sweet voice. Then she trailed off, seeming to drowse, and there was only the clumsy music of Ford’s guitar. The two of us talked softly over his strumming, and all the while I looked at his left hand moving on the guitar’s neck, the smooth pink remains of his ring finger.

“So what really happened to it?” I asked.

He smiled, still strumming. “My finger? Well, I was staggering home from this country bar at the crack of dawn one morning. I was getting sleepy, so I slipped off the road into a cornfield. I passed out and when I came to it was later in the day. First the sun was glaring in my eyes but then something blocked it out. A bird came swooping out of the sky. Looked like a crow but I swear it was at least the size of a condor, maybe bigger. All I can figure is that it wanted my wedding ring. You know how crows like anything shiny. It swooped down and pecked off my finger, ring and all, and disappeared with it.”

I laughed. “You’re full of it.”

He grinned down at his guitar and went back to strumming.

“You said it wanted your wedding ring.”

“Yes.”

“So you were married once.”

“I’m married now.”

“I mean before Carolina.”

“There was nothing before Carolina.”

We looked at her together. She was sound asleep in the chair, lips parted and head resting on her knees. “Where’d you find her?” I asked.

“Close to Asheville, North Carolina. About this time last year, I was out book hunting. There was this tall blue house with a sign next to the road that said ‘Antiques.’ Carolina’s dad was selling junk out of his barn. I had an odd feeling when I pulled in the driveway, like before one of my visions comes. I knew something was waiting for me.”

Ford said it was like being pulled along the dirt track to the barn by some invisible line. Tied in the shade of a chokecherry tree near the barn door there was a white German shepherd barking with its ears laid back. Ford had never seen a white German shepherd before. It seemed like an omen. He entered the musty shadows of the barn looking for something remarkable, but there was only junk, trunks and battered picture frames and chipped dishes stacked on a plywood table. He was about to climb a ladder to the loft in search of books when the dog’s barking dissolved into whimpers. He turned and there she stood in the barn’s opening with radiant light all around her. In a way, it was a kind of vision. But Ford had never experienced one so vivid. “It was awful hot in there,” he said, “and I’m no spring chicken. I thought maybe I was having a stroke.” Then she stepped into the barn and he saw that she was human, a barefoot girl in a swaying sundress eating a wedge of watermelon, the juice pinking her lips and fingers. Ford didn’t say what happened next, only that he went back for Carolina at dusk of the following day and found her standing at the road by the “Antiques” sign with a folded-over grocery sack at her feet. He stopped the car and she got in. She had been with him ever since.

Right away Carolina began taking care of Ford. On their first morning together she trimmed his hair out on the porch, lathered his face and shaved off the coarse veil of his whiskers, drew his head into her lap and massaged his temples until he fell asleep. She was goodness, she was rest. Carolina, like the images her name evoked, of high mountains and cool hollows, mists rising off of slow-running creeks, acres of rolling green farmland, and sometimes, carried on the wind, the tang of ocean salt.

Ford insisted he had never taken an interest in young girls before. He swore he wasn’t a dirty old man. “This is different,” he said. “It’s Carolina. I know it sounds like an excuse, but she’s ageless to me.” It was unsettling the way he talked about her. He claimed to have seen her walk through a flock of birds that descended on the yard without even disturbing them. According to Ford, Carolina had her own special gift. He called her an empath. “One time the dogs got to fighting in the yard and Carolina doubled over in pain. Then we saw a woman hit her baby in the grocery store. On the way home Carolina wept so hard I thought she was going to be sick.” Ford believed he and Carolina had some divine purpose together. “Before long,” he said, “God will reveal it to me.”

I looked over at Carolina, still sleeping, and felt sorry for her, to have been so idealized. Then I saw that the fire was dying to embers and the dogs were stirring, preparing to follow Ford back to the trailer. He put down his guitar and the night was over. It was time to go back to bed, but there was something I had to know first.

“What did you think?” I blurted out, heat rushing to my cheeks.

“Of what?”

“My writing.”

“Oh,” Ford said. He looked at me for a long moment before rising stiffly out of his lawn chair. “I think the whole world should read your poems.”

Walking across the field, breathing in the night air, my chest felt light again, as if Carolina had placed her hand on it. I went back to the shed and wrote in my notebook all night long. When the sun came up, I had to step outside to cool my burning hand.

Weeks passed and the days grew hotter. At the end of May, Ford and I fixed his old tractor together and I learned to mow the field. We set out tobacco, repaired a fence in the woods, and trimmed the trees crowded close to the trailer. My muscles grew sore and my skin turned brown. The shed became a sanctuary for me. Carolina brought out an old rug for the floor and a metal fan to make the heat more bearable. In the mornings sun flooded through the shed’s cracks and at night moths circled and bounced off the lightbulb overhead. There was always the sound of crickets and tree frogs and dogs panting outside. I went with Ford to flea markets and auctions but mostly I stayed home with Carolina. I helped her paint the porch posts and plant flowers by the front steps. One day we made birdhouses out of gourds. On the weekends Ford built a fire and the three of us talked until the wee hours. Soon I came to trust them both. I began to feel a contentment that I didn’t know if I deserved. Maybe a life like theirs wasn’t meant for me. Sometimes it felt wrong being there, like I was fooling them. I would think as I worked with Ford in the field or helped Carolina in the garden how they’d hate me if they knew what I had done and who I really was, what kind of curse had been passed down to me in my blood.

Then Ford walked into the woods one evening and didn’t come back. I knew he was gone when I stepped out of the shed the next morning because the dogs had vanished with him, leaving the yard silent and empty. I found Carolina pulling weeds in the garden, wearing Ford’s big work gloves. “He didn’t come back last night?” I asked.

She glanced up at me, the sun in her eyes. “No.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

“Not really. He does this sometimes. He might not be back for a week or two.”

“He stays gone that long?”

“He has before.”

“Do you think he really has visions?”

“I know Ford makes up stories,” she said, “but I’ve seen a lot of his visions come true. Like when he said you was coming into our lives.” She smiled. “Ford’s not like everybody else, Johnny. He’s closer to God. You ought to hear him pray sometime.”

“Did he ever tell you what happened to his finger?”

She laughed. “He said he went to a whorehouse in New Orleans and met this voodoo woman. She gave him a concoction to drink that got him so high he didn’t even feel it when she cut his finger off. Said she needed it for a spell. Every time I ask about his finger, he tells me another made-up story. I guess I’ll never know.”

I knelt down beside her in the dirt and we pulled weeds together for a while in silence. After a while, I asked, “Do you think … does Ford have any children?”

“I don’t know a thing about Ford except what he’s told me,” she said. “He might have kids all over the country, for all I know.” Then she went back to weeding.

For the first couple of days and nights, I watched the woods at the edge of the yard for Ford and the dogs to come walking back. But it wasn’t long before I forgot that he was gone. It was peaceful being alone there with Carolina. Sometimes I stood at the shed door and watched her for long stretches sitting on the top step of the porch, looking straight ahead at nothing in particular. She didn’t wiggle her feet, which must have been falling asleep, or shift to a more comfortable position. She didn’t move so much as a finger to scratch her nose. She was utterly still. The more time I spent with her, the easier it was to see why Ford was so taken with her. She cooked for me, in the mornings biscuits and gravy and in the evenings fried green tomatoes and potato cakes and greasy chicken legs. One Sunday morning we made a chocolate cake together, rain drumming on the trailer’s tin roof. I taught her to play poker and she taught me gin rummy. Sitting on the porch one afternoon, she spent almost an hour drawing a splinter out of my palm. When she left to take a bushel of beans to the neighbors down the road I found myself standing at the end of the driveway watching and waiting for her to come back, like that white German shepherd tied outside her father’s barn in North Carolina. I didn’t want those days to be over. But then Ford was home again, as suddenly as he had disappeared.

The first sign of his return was the dogs. They came straggling out of the woods before him, as if to signal his coming, and loped to the porch where Carolina and I sat playing cards. We stood watching the trees expectantly and when Ford finally came into view there was a strange sensation in me, of mixed relief and disappointment. He walked slowly down the wooded slope and into the grass, a bedroll on his back, shirt hanging almost in shreds. Carolina and I hurried across the yard to meet him. He was weak but smiling. He kissed Carolina and leaned against her small body as if for support.

“What did you see this time?” she asked as we headed back to the trailer.

His smile faltered. “Something I didn’t want to,” he said. Carolina and I exchanged a glance but didn’t press him. Once he was clean and fed I expected him to tell, but he didn’t. I felt ashamed for wanting to hear, when Carolina seemed not to care. I realized then how much I wanted to stay there, how much I longed for nothing to change.

LAURA

Before Clint died, when I first figured out I was expecting, Zelda got me an appointment at the Health Department. When you don’t have much money, there’s not a lot of choice where you go to the doctor. I sure didn’t like the one I seen there. That first appointment he didn’t look at me, not even when he was telling me things. I felt like he was there just because he had to be. Zelda said that was probably true, because sometimes the government lets new doctors work at places like the Health Department to pay back their school loans. I missed some of my appointments after Clint drowned because I was too tore up over him to remember anything. Then I got kicked out of the trailer and it felt like everything was upside down. But soon as I got settled in the yellow house, I went back for my appointment. It was the same doctor. This time he did something he called an ultrasound. He squirted warm jelly on my lower belly and moved a wand around. I didn’t like him standing over me, with my shirt up and my pants down around my hips, but I liked seeing the baby’s dark shape on a television screen. His heartbeat filled the whole room. I was proud my baby was strong. I wanted to laugh and clap my hands but the doctor had a stern face. After the ultrasound the nurse left. He set down on his stool and talked to me. “You know,” he said, “you should have kept your appointments, Miss Blevins. It’s important for both mother and baby to have the proper prenatal care.” He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “You’re lucky there are no complications.”

“The baby’s okay?” I asked. He was making me nervous.

“Fortunately, yes. But it was very irresponsible of you. Any number of things could have gone wrong.”

“But they didn’t?”

The doctor’s face didn’t change much but I could tell he was getting miffed. “I don’t think you understand the potential seriousness of your negligence, Miss Blevins.”

That word “negligence” gave me a bad feeling, like when I found out Clint had been wearing a dead boy’s clothes all along. “But the baby’s okay, right?” I asked again. The doctor gave me another hateful look over his glasses, then he got up and walked away. I felt sick as I gathered up my purse and went to the waiting room to find Zelda.

On the way home she kept asking what was wrong but I couldn’t talk. It seemed like somebody was always threatening to separate me from my baby. Zelda let me out and I went up the steep porch steps, straight inside to the bathroom. I splashed cold water on my face and neck. When I seen myself in the medicine cabinet mirror with my face dripping and my eyes big, I looked more like Mama than ever. All of a sudden that scared me more than anything. I rushed to the kitchen looking for scissors but I came to a butcher knife first. I couldn’t stand having Mama’s hair for a second more. I stood right yonder at the sink and sawed it off. It looked awful. I could tell by how everybody stared at me at work the next morning. But I didn’t care. My head felt lighter. I was still worried but it made me feel better to have the weight of Mama’s hair off of my shoulders. Louise said she used to cut all of her kids’ hair. She asked if she could come over later and shape mine up some. When she was done it was like seeing a new person in the mirror.

But my nerves was still ragged. The bigger my belly growed, the worse I felt, and the more I worried over how I was going to raise a baby without Clint. Zelda said I could get help if I needed it. She offered to get me an appointment to talk to somebody about welfare but I couldn’t hardly stand to think about it. The state had been keeping me up just about all my life and I wanted to provide for the baby on my own. That’s why I didn’t quit working, even though Louise and Zelda thought I needed rest. They made me at least take a day off. It was the third of March. I was laying on the couch when the twinges came low in my belly. I should have got up and called the hospital but I couldn’t face the thought of that doctor. I decided I’d wait and see if it got to hurting any worse. It was mostly cramps. Then all of a sudden I felt the baby weighing down like I needed to use the bathroom the worst I ever had to. I got afraid I had been stupid and waited too late. I made myself call the ambulance. I’d seen enough books with pictures to know there was going to be a mess if the baby came before they got there. I climbed in the bathtub to wait for them. It was cold in there. I was more scared than ever in my life.

I don’t remember much about the ambulance coming. The ride to the hospital was like a dream. The first thing I remember is being in the delivery room with my baby moving out of me. I heard myself hollering but it was like somebody else’s voice. He was gushing out fast between my legs. When the doctor put him on my belly, the first thing I seen was his hair. Even matted down, I could tell what color it was. There was a lot of it, too. It was just like Clint’s. Then something crazy happened. My eyes was so blurry, I got to seeing things. They came back to me, them friends I had on the mountain. There was a window in the delivery room. That’s where they came from. They was pretty as ever, flitting across my belly on their shiny wings. Them fairies danced a crown around my baby’s head, dropping their blessings and kisses. That’s how come I named him Sunny.

It was nice in the hospital, with everything white and clean. I got to stay longer because Sunny was born three weeks early and they had to make sure we was okay. I was happy there with him. I liked the sounds of nurses’ shoes and carts rattling up and down the hall. I didn’t even mind when they took my blood. I tried to mark every minute of it, even the parts that hurt. I’d take Sunny to the window and show him the parking lot two stories below. I imagined he would like cars, maybe even work on them when he growed up. I wondered what kind of man he would make. But even though he looked like Clint, I’d let him be his own person. I knowed he was Sunny, with a life of his own.

The nurse showed me how to swaddle him. I slept with him in a bundle in the crook of my arm. His yellow curls always peeked out of the blanket. When his eyes started opening more, I seen they was the color of Mama’s. Clint had blue eyes, but there was no other blue like Mama’s anywhere. I knowed Sunny took his eyes straight from her. He was a content baby. He only cried when he was hungry or wet. I’d lean close to his open mouth to smell the newness of his breath. I liked them tiny pearls on the roof of his mouth and all the pink ridges and folds inside it. I even liked when his diaper needed changing, after that sticky black tar went away. The nurse called it meconium. I liked the sound of it, even if it was trouble to wipe off. I liked every part of being Sunny’s mama.

The only thing I didn’t like about the hospital was when the doctor came around. It wasn’t the same one from the Health Department but I didn’t like him any better. He looked at us funny. He’d set on his stool with his leg crossed and his pants riding up, showing his long sock. He’d ask me slow questions, like I wouldn’t understand if he didn’t form the words real careful with his mouth. I knowed he thought I was dumb, like the teachers at school did. Whatever I said, he’d lift his eyebrows and write on his chart.

Louise and the Thompsons and Debbie and Roy came to visit me. They brought flowers and some chocolate cupcakes with cream in the middle. That made me cry a little bit, thinking about Clint, but I was glad to see them. They all thought Sunny was beautiful. Louise cried, too, and I knowed she was thinking about Clint like me. They stayed for quite a while, until I got too tired. I fell asleep with Sunny in my arms.

The only other visitor me and Sunny had was Clint’s mama. When I seen her peeking around the curtain I covered Sunny’s little ears. I thought she might go to screaming and carrying on. I didn’t know if she meant to cuss me out or what, but she just walked across the room and leant over the bed. She smelled like cigarettes. When I seen she wasn’t going to make a fuss, I pulled back the blanket so she could see Sunny better. She jumped like a snake bit her. “They laws,” she said. “He looks just like Clint.” Then she busted out crying. I didn’t know what to think. As mean as she was, I felt sorry for her. After a minute I asked her if she might pour me a cup of water, to get her mind on something else. She gave me a drink and switched the channel on the television for me. She stayed for about an hour. I was relieved that she didn’t ask to hold the baby.

For that short time at the hospital, it was like there was a truce between me and Clint’s mama. Then she got her purse and stood up to go. She stopped at the foot of the bed and stared hard at Sunny. I didn’t like the look on her face. I seen it had been a mistake to ever let my guard down with her. “If they wouldn’t put me in jail,” she said, “I’d snatch that baby up this minute and run out of here with him.” My blood turned into ice water. I opened my mouth to scream for the nurse but all that came out was a tiny squeak. “You finally killed Clint but you ain’t getting this one. It might not happen today. But if it’s the last thing I ever do in this life, I’ll get that baby away from you.”

JOHNNY

There was a change in Ford after those two weeks in the woods. He was quieter and sometimes I caught him staring at me. As we worked together on the farm and spent time peddling books and selling produce from Carolina’s garden, it was hard to ignore the strain. Before long, nights in the shed grew cooler and Carolina brought a heater out. Ford and I helped her with the canning because it was more than one person could handle, the windowsills lined with half-rotten tomatoes and the kitchen floor crowded with tubs of corn and gallon buckets of green beans. When the canning was done, I helped Carolina plant the garden with fall greens, kale, spinach, turnips, and mustard. Once the tobacco was curing there was brush to clear from the fields and wood to split. I worked harder than usual on my birthday, not telling them when it came and went because I didn’t want to think about Laura. On Thanksgiving, Ford cooked a wild turkey he had shot in the woods. After we were full and Ford had fallen asleep on the couch, I left Carolina washing dishes and stepped outside to smoke. The ground was glittering with frost and the dogs huddled together for warmth, barely raising their heads when I came out. After a while the door opened again and Carolina came to sit on the top step, drawing her knees up into Ford’s coat. I lowered myself beside her and thought we would be silent together. Then I startled myself by saying, “My mama’s locked up in the state mental hospital.” For a second I wasn’t sure I had spoken out loud. I looked at Carolina and her face hadn’t changed. I tried my voice again. “She didn’t love me.” I hadn’t known how badly I wanted to say it. I told Carolina everything and she listened with her calm face. When I finished she put her hand on my forehead then moved it down over my eyes. In the darkness under her palm I felt healed, if only for a minute. I took her hand and held it in both of mine. There was no ring. She wasn’t married to Ford, not really.

The next day, Ford and I helped Carolina decorate a store-bought Christmas tree. She said that back at her house in North Carolina, they always put up their tree the day after Thanksgiving. She strung some popcorn but we ate most of it, and I helped her cut out chains of white paper doves. It was a good day, but after that the weather grew colder and Ford grew even quieter and more preoccupied. I suspected he was trying to convince himself that his troubling vision had been wrong. One morning after breakfast when he had gone off to the dump, his truck bed loaded with garbage bags, Carolina said, “I think he’s hearing the voice again. I wish he would wait for warmer weather.” But he didn’t.

At the beginning of December, I stepped out of the shed and saw that the dogs were missing. I knew Ford was gone again. I walked across the yard, up the porch steps, and opened the front door without knocking. The trailer was dim, lit by the colored lights of the Christmas tree in the living room. Carolina was sitting at the bar in her nightgown, peeling an orange. She had the same placid look on her face as when she sat on the step and I couldn’t resist going to her. I climbed onto the other bar stool as silently as I could. I wanted to be still with her, to think about nothing in particular. I focused on her long, thin fingers pulling off strips of orange skin. She separated the sections and brought them to her mouth one by one. We didn’t speak of Ford and the tree lights blinked and outside snow flurried and the morning was gray and silent. She looked down at her feet on the bar stool rung. For a minute we examined them together, ridged with small bluish veins.

“My toes are ugly,” Carolina said.

“I like them,” I told her.

She looked up at me and smiled. Then she slid her hand across the bar counter and slipped her fingers between mine. I looked down at our laced fingers. Hers felt just like I had imagined they would. “You might as well move in here with me,” she said. “It’s too cold for you to be out yonder. I’ve been having bad dreams about you freezing to death.” But I could see in her eyes that it wasn’t just me she was worried about.

She put a clean sheet on a mattress in the junk room at the end of the hall. It was so cluttered that I could barely squeeze through the door when it was time for bed. I liked the shed better, but I wanted to be closer to Carolina. I wanted to sleep under the same roof as her, where I could hear every cough, every creak of the bedsprings when she turned over in her room at the other end of the trailer. The next day I brought in kindling and kept a good fire going in the stove. Sometimes I saw Carolina shivering, teeth rattling, when the trailer was almost too hot for me to stand, but I knew she was just feeling the same cold that was freezing Ford. We tried for a while to play cards but her mind was too far away. When the wind howled she glanced toward the window with big eyes. “I can go look for him,” I told her. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s acres of woods. You’d never find him. Besides that, you know he doesn’t want to be found.”

On the fifth night that Ford was gone, I heard Carolina weeping and couldn’t help going to her, feeling my way to her room in the dark. I climbed into the bed she had shared with Ford and took the curled ball of her body into my arms. As much as I wanted her, I didn’t try to make anything happen. She was nothing like the girls I had been with on the floor of the cave. I couldn’t even remember their faces, but I knew every inch of Carolina’s. I held her until her sobs quieted and we both fell asleep. Then there was a scratching sound on the porch, dragging me out of a dream. I opened my eyes and sun was shining through the curtains. Carolina rose, too. We looked at each other bleary-eyed for an instant before scrambling out of bed. We ran to the front door and it was one of Ford’s favorite dogs, an ugly dachshund mix. There were two others whining and circling in the yard, looking from us to the wooded slope at the edge of the snow-dusted grass. Carolina wanted to go right then in her nightgown, but I made her stop to put on a coat.

The dogs moved fast and we hurried to keep up, a thin layer of white powder gritting under our shoes. We walked for what seemed a long time, over a hill into thicker woods, the dogs stopping once in a while to look back at us. Then suddenly they were running forward, tails wagging. I saw Ford lying on his face under the trees, with the rest of the dog pack huddled close around him. When they rose to greet us, there were melted spots in the snow where their bodies had been. Carolina made a strangled noise and ran to Ford, falling on her knees at his side. I followed and when I knelt down with them I could see that Ford’s hair was frozen to the ground, a stiff white ring around his head. I was sure that he was dead. The dogs barked as we turned him over. The sound of his hair tearing free sent shivers racing over me. Carolina cried out when she saw his face, taut and gray and covered with sores. Then his eyes opened. They were glazed but somehow still aware. I saw that his mouth was working. He was trying to speak. I leaned close, my ear almost touching his cracked lips. “What?” I asked. “What is it, Ford?” He said in a broken voice that was barely there, like the scrape of a pencil stroke on paper, “You will be a great man.” For a long second I couldn’t move, even though Carolina was begging, “Help me, Johnny, help me, we’ve got to get him down from here.”

Somehow we carried him between us, panting and struggling, out of the wooded hills. We took him inside the trailer and lowered him into bed. Carolina said, “Where’s the truck keys, I’ve got to get to a phone,” but Ford shook his head, even in his delirium. “Don’t you do it, honey,” he mumbled. “Don’t you get those doctors after me.” Maybe it was because he was so much older, or because in her heart she believed that he wasn’t human, but she didn’t call anyone. I told her that he needed an ambulance, that he might have frostbite, but she wouldn’t go against Ford’s wishes and I wouldn’t go against hers. As Carolina ran for blankets I stood over him and prayed for the first time in years.

Carolina sat in a straight chair at his side for the rest of the night. As worried about Ford as I was, I was surprised to find myself jealous of the attention she gave him. But there was something else on my mind, as I made coffee and soup and tried to feed them both. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Ford had said when he opened his eyes. I knew that Ford only saw in the visions what he wanted to see, but some part of me wanted to prove him right. There was an old desk in the bedroom and a manual typewriter. I’d never used one before and it took me forever to pick out the right letters. The keys were loud and I worried that the noise would disturb Ford’s rest, but Carolina said it was okay. She thought it would be good for him to know that I was close by. Hunched over Ford’s desk, I began typing up the poems from my notebook.

In the night Ford seemed to grow even sicker. The dogs sat outside the bedroom window howling until the sound was too terrible to stand. We had to let them in, even though their stink was suffocating in the small room. Ford sweated under blankets and ice rain pattered against the windows and by morning he was struggling to breathe. Carolina placed her hands on his chest and throat and burning forehead, but couldn’t make him well. I told her that we should take him to the hospital, that he was too weak to fight us, but she refused to betray him, even if it meant risking his life. She began to look sick herself, ashen and glassy-eyed. For a week she stayed in her nightgown, the knobs of her spine and the points of her hipbones poking at the worn flannel. She wasn’t eating, and it was hard for me to watch. But it was even harder to see how much she loved Ford. Somehow without knowing when it happened, I had come to wish she loved me instead.

Then one morning, nearly a month after we’d found Ford sprawled on his face in the woods, Carolina woke up beside him and placed her hands on his chest. “He’s getting better,” she said. As if on cue, he propped himself up and asked for coffee. It was the first thing he had wanted. The dachshund mix curled at Ford’s feet lifted its head and thumped its tail. Ford asked for a few of his books and flipped through them as he sipped the coffee. He was too weak to sit up long, but I knew Carolina was right. He was getting better. The dogs knew it, too. They went to the door and scratched to be let out. Carolina opened it for them and we stood watching as they chased each other off across the yard.

Later that day, I typed the last word of the last poem in my notebook. I pushed back from the desk, feeling light-headed. I was about to go for a walk in the cold when Ford sat up and said, “What’s that racket? Sounds like machine-gun fire.”

I smiled and turned to see him leaning back on the pillows. He was pale and there were still scabs on his face, but he looked much stronger. “Typing my poems,” I told him.

“The ones I read?”

“And some you haven’t.”

Ford glanced at the desk, at the stack of white pages. “Can I see them?”

“I want you to have them,” I said. “I did this for you.” My hands shook when I took the pages from the desk and dropped them into his lap. I wanted to say something, but I was too tired. I walked away, out of the hot trailer into the cold. The dogs stood, wagging their tails. There was a new one among them, long-haired and skinny with ticks behind its ears. I knelt down and held out my hand. It sniffed and licked at my fingers.

I walked out to the field, bare and dead under a hard blue sky. I sat in one of the lawn chairs where the burned spot was, imagining bonfires rising up toward the stars and Carolina’s sweet voice singing over the notes of Ford’s guitar. I stayed in the field for what seemed like hours, getting colder and colder, watching brown winter birds peck around in the grass, until Carolina came. She put her hand on my head, my cheek, the side of my neck. My heart stopped and for an instant the copperhead that still existed in me, even here, with Carolina, was disappointed that Ford had lived. I folded her into my coat and pressed my lips against her temple. I couldn’t tell her how much I loved her.

As the weather grew warmer and Ford grew stronger, I moved back into the shed. I didn’t like hearing Ford and Carolina murmuring to each other in the night. I should have gone back to Millertown but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Another week passed and I began to imagine that Ford and Carolina wanted me gone. I sat huddled in the shed for a full day, not even walking across the yard to eat. They didn’t come out to check on me, which seemed to prove my suspicions. The next morning I heard their voices outside but they didn’t knock on the shed door. After a while, I stepped out into the sun. There was no sign of Ford but I saw Carolina kneeling by the front steps with her back to me. She was pulling up the dead things of winter, ripping up the ruins of what we had planted together to make room for the new growth of spring. I crept up on her, not sure exactly what I meant to do. I knelt down and slipped my arms around her from behind. She stiffened at first, but then she melted into me. I could feel her heart beating under my hands. “Why didn’t you come out to see about me?” I asked into her hair.

“We thought you wanted to be by yourself.” She turned around in my arms and her face was inches from mine. She smelled like dewy grass.

“You want me to go,” I said, trying to control my breathing.

“No, Johnny.” There was an eyelash on her cheek, a tiny black crescent. I raised my hand slowly between our bodies and Carolina caught her breath. I brushed delicately at the eyelash with my finger. Then her eyes widened a little. She was looking over my shoulder. I stood up and turned to see Ford standing there, holding the gas can he kept under the trailer. It was March and time to mow. The look on his face was not one of anger but of fear. Carolina stood up, too, and moved away from me. I reached out and took hold of her arm instinctively, pulling her back, not wanting her to leave my side.

“Let go of her, Johnny,” Ford said. When I didn’t release Carolina’s arm his eyes hardened. My possessive gesture must have said it all. Carolina looked down at my hand on her arm and then up at me, her face sad and pleading at the same time.

“What have you two been doing?” Ford asked.

Carolina turned to him, shocked. “Nothing, Ford.”

He stared at me. “I saw in a vision you’d betray me. I didn’t want to believe it.”

Carolina looked stricken. “He never betrayed you, Ford.”

Ford took a step toward me. “I’ve treated you like a son,” he said.

I was stunned when he launched himself at me, knocking my breath out against the porch. We grappled and fought and it was strange to feel him on top of me, to be that close, the stink of his sweat, the heat of his breath, and the weight of his bones. As much as I had always wanted to hurt someone, it was no good. We couldn’t best one another. He was surprisingly strong for an old man, especially one who had been so sick. We wrestled in the yard for what seemed an eternity, the dogs barking and snarling all around us, and Carolina wailing like a wounded animal herself. I don’t know which one of us caught sight of her first, but she was the reason we both gave in at the same time. She was crouched by the porch steps, hives like bright red welts covering her face and neck and chest. I had the thought that we were killing her. We staggered to our feet, panting and spitting blood. She gaped at us, clutching at her middle, and then ran into the trailer.

Ford and I stood in silence for a long time. The dogs circled around our legs, growling and snapping at each other. “Shit, Johnny,” Ford said at last. “I can’t blame you. I know better than anybody what it’s like to be around her.”

I took off my shirt and wiped my throbbing face with it. I looked down at the blood smeared there. When I raised my head and saw the look in Ford’s eyes, I knew he’d answer me this time. “How’d you lose it?” I asked. “How’d you lose that finger?”

“All right, Johnny,” he said softly. “Here’s the truth. I was working at a furniture factory down in Oliver Springs. Damn drill press cut it off. That’s all it was.” We stared at each other for a few seconds. Then he turned and limped across the yard, back into the woods with the dogs at his heels.

I watched Ford’s sagging back until he disappeared from view. Now I knew the story of his missing finger, the one I had hoped might somehow be rotting to yellowed bone in my mama’s box. Like always, the truth had turned out to be disappointing. But in that moment I didn’t care who my father was or what kind of curse I carried in my blood. I turned around and walked back to the trailer. As soon as I opened the door, I knew that it was empty. There was a note on the kitchen table. It said, “I can’t stand this. Don’t forget I love you both.” I heard Ford’s truck starting up and bolted outside. She was pulling out of the driveway as I leapt off the porch and skidded in the grass. I ran to the road and watched as her taillights disappeared around a curve. The land looked deserted for miles. I had a familiar feeling that the whole past year had been a dream, one long hallucination. Maybe I had been there by myself all along, having a vision of my own.

LAURA

I still don’t know if the hospital or Clint’s mama sent that woman. As soon as I seen her, I knowed what she came for. I had gone to the door with Sunny in one arm and a wet dishrag in the other. The house was a mess where I’d been feeling bad them last few weeks of being pregnant. The day that woman came I had been working on a pile of dirty dishes in the sink.

I was expecting Louise. She’d cooked spaghetti and was bringing me the leftovers. She was always dropping off food for me that way. She knowed how tired I was. When I opened the door my belly was growling, but soon as I seen that woman I got sick. My legs got weak. The only thing that held me up was Sunny in the crook of my arm. If I fell it might have hurt him. Right off that feeling of going wild came over me. She said, “Are you Laura Blevins?” I didn’t answer. My mind was racing, trying to figure out what I was going to do. There was black spots in front of my eyes but I still seen her badge necklace. She had on a blue pantsuit. There was a big purse on her shoulder and a clipboard in her hands. She looked hard and rocky. Not like creek rocks, but jaggedy ones. Her eyes was empty. I could tell she didn’t care about me and Sunny. She wouldn’t notice how cute it was when he sucked his fingers. She wouldn’t see his cheeks like two fuzzy peaches. “I’m Pat Blanchard, with the Department of Children’s Services,” she said. “We had a call that you might be having some trouble taking care of your baby.”

If she said anything else, I never heard it. Because that’s when she turned her eyes on Sunny. She moved her hand toward him, the one not holding a clipboard. Looking back on it now, she might have just meant to touch him. Maybe she wanted to tickle his foot that had come out of the blanket. Or she might not have been meaning to touch him at all. She might have just been gesturing toward him. But her movement broke something inside of me that was loose for a long time. It’s hard to tell exactly what happened. I wasn’t in my right mind. I just wanted her to go away. From what I remember, I did the best I could to drive her off with the arm that wasn’t holding Sunny. I raised up the wet dishrag and started whacking her with it. I slapped that woman Pat Blanchard over and over, across the face and hands and arms. I believe I was screaming and crying. She tried to cover her face. There was a big red welt across her nose and cheeks. Then the worst thing happened. She stumbled backward trying to get away from me and fell down them steep porch steps. After that, it got quiet. She laid there groaning at the bottom, like she wasn’t all the way awake. It’s awful, but I wasn’t worried if she was okay. I was just worried about how to get out of there with Sunny and where to go.

The first person that came to mind was Louise. I went down the porch steps and stepped over Pat Blanchard. I headed down the street toward Louise’s. I don’t remember how long I ran with Sunny, both of us crying, before Louise’s car slowed down and stopped beside of me. She rolled down the window and said, “Lordy mercy, what’s happened?” I yanked open the door and nearly set down in the spaghetti she was bringing me. I said, “Take me to Zelda’s.” It was a comforting place where the best day of my life happened. I’d think better if I could stand on that deck where me and Clint got married. Louise didn’t ask any questions. She just drove me there. I cried the whole way, still half out of my head. Sunny slept in my arms, even though Louise had a car seat in the back she’d found at a yard sale. I couldn’t stand to let go of him. We pulled up in the Thompsons’ driveway and Louise had to help me to the door. Zelda answered it with her hair rolled up in pin curls. I seen all the color go out of her cheeks. Louise said, “She won’t tell me what’s wrong.” They led me inside to set down with Sunny. Zelda brought me a glass of water. I told them as much as I remembered about Pat Blanchard coming to the door and what I did to her. They looked at each other with big eyes. Mr. Thompson had come in from somewhere. He was standing in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. He said, “Somebody’s got to call an ambulance for that woman.”

Zelda said, “We can’t, Ralph. She’ll get in trouble with the law.”

Mr. Thompson said, “Think about what you’re saying.”

Louise said, “He’s right, Zelda. She might be hurt bad.”

Zelda said, “Laura heard her making noise. I bet she’s all right.”

“Why don’t you talk sense?” Mr. Thompson hollered. I’d never heard him raise his voice that way. It made me feel like crying again. “We can’t let somebody lay over there with bones broke and their head busted and no telling what all else.”

Zelda turned to me. I seen her trying to be calm. “Listen, honey. I believe you’re in shock. Why don’t you take Sunny in my bedroom and rest until you’re feeling better.”

I didn’t want to rest but my head was too addled to argue. I let her lead me down the hall to the bed with Sunny in my arms. I gave him to her while I climbed on the bedspread with roses on it. She put him down beside of me and he snuggled up to my belly. He was rooting around for my breast in his sleep. I pulled up my shirt for him. Feeding him made me calmer. It was almost like nothing bad had happened. I dozed off looking at the scissors on the nightstand, where Zelda had been clipping coupons in bed.

I must have slept quite a while. The room was dark when I woke up. I heard a strange man’s voice in the living room and switched on the lamp. I got out of the bed, careful not to wake up Sunny, and cracked the door to hear better. He was saying, “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to take her in. Miss Blanchard is pressing charges.”

“She’s resting right now,” Zelda said.

“Will you have to use the handcuffs?” Louise asked. I could tell she was crying.

“She’s a good girl,” Zelda said. “She was just scared for her baby.”

“I can’t help it, ma’am,” the policeman said. “I’ve got a warrant.”

I looked at the window and then at Sunny. It was too high off the ground and I might drop him. I would have to go out the kitchen door, onto the deck. I thought of the children at my wedding, fluttering down the steps like butterflies. I wanted to cry but there wasn’t time. I got Sunny up from the bed. He whined a little bit, but he was a heavy sleeper and he didn’t wake up. I opened the door as quiet as I could. It was going to be hard because it was a small house, but I could go through the dining room to get to the kitchen. It was right across the hall from the bedroom. I crept across the hall and into the dining room. The mahogany hutch was shining in the dark. I headed for the light of the kitchen. I could already see the black panes of the door leading to the deck with the kitchen’s reflection in them. If I could make it there, me and Sunny would be free. But as soon as I stepped on the kitchen tiles I seen Mr. Thompson by the sink. It was like he’d been expecting me. My heart dropped to my feet. He said, “Honey, you won’t get very far with that baby. It ain’t no kind of life for him anyhow, running from the law.”

That’s when I heard another strange voice in the living room, a woman that sounded so much like Pat Blanchard I thought for a second it might be her. Then I figured Pat Blanchard wouldn’t be in any shape to get out and take somebody’s baby after what I done to her. I knowed they’d sent somebody else to take Sunny. There was probably twenty more just like her. Zelda asked, “Can the baby stay with me or Louise until we get this mess straightened out? We’re the only family Laura’s got.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “In a case like this, the baby always goes to a blood relation. The paternal grandmother will be taking him.”

She might as well have shot me through the heart. It was all I could do to keep from sinking down right yonder in the floor. I had to make myself get moving again. I lunged for the door but Mr. Thompson stepped in front of it. I crashed into his belly and bumped my head on his chin. Sunny started crying so loud it hurt my ears. It hit me that Mr. Thompson was probably the one that called the police on me. Then all of a sudden they was in the kitchen, the policeman and the woman that sounded like Pat Blanchard and looked something like her, too. I was still trying to get around Mr. Thompson. I’ll never speak to him again, even though I know he just wanted to do the right thing. The policeman was moving toward me saying, “You’ll have to come with me, Miss Blevins.” Zelda was begging, “Now, wait just a minute.” Louise was standing with her hands over her eyes, bawling out loud. I was looking around, trying to find an escape route and hold on to what was left of my mind at the same time. Then the policeman had ahold of my arm that wasn’t holding Sunny. I hollered out, “Wait, he’s hungry! He’s hungry!” trying to be heard over Sunny’s and Louise’s crying. It was all I could think of to do.

The woman came forward and said, “We have formula.”

“I’ll just take him back here to the bedroom and nurse him right quick,” I said.

“You can sit down here and do it,” she said.

“Please,” I said. “I need privacy.” I turned to the policeman. He had kinder eyes.

“All right,” he said. “Go on.” Then he looked at her. “I’ll wait outside the door.”

I was fixing to bust out fighting again. But then I remembered how awful it was for me and Johnny, seeing Mama go wild. I didn’t want to mark Sunny like Mama done me. I forced myself to be calmer. The policeman followed me down the hall. I thought of the window again, wondering if I could make it to the ground without hurting Sunny. But Mr. Thompson was right. I couldn’t go on the run with such a small baby. I was cornered. My mind went blank. I went in Zelda’s bedroom and shut the door in the policeman’s face. Under the lamp on the nightstand, Sunny’s hair was even more yellow. I held him and gave him my breast. At home I nursed him all through the nights. I didn’t wear anything so he could find my breast in the dark. I knowed they’d put a bottle in his mouth, after I had tried to make sure no rubber nipple ever touched it. I knowed my breasts would get hard and leaky when he was gone. I vowed not to cry in front of them people.

Then I seen the scissors glinting on the nightstand. They was laying on top of a stack of bright colored coupons. I reached over and took the scissors in one hand. The other hand was curled around Sunny’s bottom. He was sleeping as he drunk from me. His long eyelashes made shadows on his soft round cheeks. I dipped my head to smell of him and went to the end of the bed. It creaked when I set down. That’s the same sound the bed made at home when I bounced Sunny. We’d bounce up and down when he got fussy, until pretty soon both of us was smiling. The scissors shined when I brought them close to Sunny’s head. He liked anything shiny. I looked at all that pretty yellow hair. I could hear the policeman pecking on the bedroom door. I knowed I would have to do it fast.

JOHNNY

After I left the farm, I went back to Millertown. The Lawsons gave me a job at their gas station, a sooty building with pumps out front and a room over the garage. Bobby rented me the room while I saved money and decided what to do next. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ford’s prophecy. Sometimes I heard the scrape of his voice saying the words in my head. “You will be a great man.” A week after I got back, I was having a cigarette in the rocking chair on the gas station’s porch while Bobby was gone running errands. When a hatchback with missing hubcaps slowed down and turned in, I thought it would pull up to the pumps but it came across the dusty lot and parked in front of the porch instead. I remembered Marshall Lunsford as soon as he got out of the car and shuffled up to me grinning. His face hadn’t changed much but his eyes seemed older.

“Bobby said you was around.”

“Yes.”

“I ain’t seen you since the ninth grade.”

“I know. It’s been a while.”

Marshall looked down at his shoes. The morning was warm and the old T-shirt he wore had dark rings at the armpits. “I just got back in town not long ago myself.”

“Huh.”

“I took off on the Greyhound, lit out for Texas. I always did want to see Texas.”

I took a long draw from my cigarette. “How was it?”

“Not how I thought.”

I smiled. “It figures.”

“Yeah. I stayed in a hostel down yonder while I was looking for work. I swear, all I could think about was getting back home. I wouldn’t have bet on that, would you?”

“No,” I said, “I guess not.”

“I always wondered if you’d be back.”

“I didn’t think I ever would.”

Marshall looked down at his shoes again. “Neither did I.”

We were quiet for a while, watching a bag float end over end toward the used car dealership across the highway. Then he said, “Well, I come to tell you something.”

I pitched my cigarette, still smoking, over the porch edge. “What’s that?”

“I seen your sister.”

I stopped rocking and sat there frozen.

“I remembered her cause of how she favors you.”

“Where did you see her?”

“That’s what I thought you’d want to know. She was down at the county jail. Some man claimed Daddy was trespassing, digging ginseng on his property. I was in the office trying to bail Daddy out when they brung her in.”

“What did she do?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I had other things to tend to.”

The wind freshened, flapping the faded plastic pennants strung over the parking lot and blowing dirt across the planks at my feet. I sat thinking, listening to the hum of the drink machine, as Marshall watched patiently. Then I stood up. “Can I get a ride?”

At the county jail, I was shown to a place where there were booths with phones and windows. I sat on a stool between cinder-block walls. It seemed I was floating outside myself, watching from above, when the door opened and a guard let Laura into the room on the other side of the glass. She was swallowed up in a blue jumpsuit, rail thin and ghastly pale, her skin like curdled milk. Worst of all, her long black hair had been cut off. I couldn’t bear knowing she had spent even one night in a cell like the one I was in for four years at Polk County. I thought in those first seconds I would get up and leave. But when she approached the window to sit on the stool opposite me, the feeling passed.

Laura took the phone and I looked at the one on my side without picking it up. I had forgotten what I could possibly say to her after so long. The guard who had opened the door for Laura crossed the room behind the glass and let himself into where I was. Without speaking, he brought a white envelope and handed it to me. Then he walked out another door, the one I had come through, where there was an office with a desk and filing cabinets and a water cooler. I sat blinking after him for a second and then turned to pick up the phone. “I told them I wanted to give you a letter,” she said. At the sound of her voice, an unexpected warmth bloomed in my chest. It was filled with images of home, high cliffs and light-gilded leaves and groundhog holes on the muddy creek bank.

“Are you okay?” I asked at last. It was a stupid question, and not what I wanted to say to her, but there were no words close enough to what I was feeling.

Laura smiled weakly. “They’re always trying to lock us up, ain’t they, Johnny?”

I tried to smile back but couldn’t.

There was a silence. Then she said, “Where have you been?”

“I guess I could ask the same of you.”

“Well, here lately I been in jail.”

“Laura,” I said. “What did you do?”

“I done a lot of things since I seen you last.”

I glanced around the room, toward the office where the guard was, down the line of empty booths, at the polished floor reflecting the lights overhead. “Yes,” I said. “Me, too.” Then I made myself look back at her. “I don’t have enough money to get you out.”

She took a ragged breath. “There’s a way you can get some more.”

I gripped the phone tighter. “How?”

“Go to my house on Miller Avenue. It’s bright yellow, beside of a car wash. I got a key hid in a watering can under the porch.”

“A yellow house?”

“Yes. I want you to go in yonder and get that ring from out of Mama’s box.”

I only hesitated for a second. “Where is it?”

She smiled her tired way again. “You know where I would keep it.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll find it.”

Then her smile faltered. “Johnny.”

“What?”

“I throwed that finger bone away.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. I didn’t know what I wanted to say.

“Wasn’t no use hanging on to it.”

“No,” I said after a moment. “I guess not.”

“It don’t seem right for that box to be empty, though.”

“No,” I said.

“There’s something I want you to put in it for safekeeping.” She looked at the envelope still in my hand. “I wouldn’t quit squalling until they gave it back to me.”

I looked down at the envelope, too, the sweat on my forehead turning cold.

“Open it,” she said.

I fumbled at the unsealed flap and reached inside. What I found there wasn’t paper. It was a lock of glossy hair, yellow as the sun, tied neatly with a length of string.

“I had a baby, Johnny,” she said. “I named him Sunny.”

For a few seconds I thought I hadn’t heard her right. I closed my eyes, trying to make sense of her words. I didn’t know if I could stand to hear more. If I was going to turn my back on her, now was the time. But I didn’t leave.

I bent closer to the window and asked, “Where is he?”

Her eyelids reddened. “He got took away from me.”

“No, Laura,” I said, even though I already knew it was true.

“I got to get him back,” she said.

“We will.” My voice cracked. “We’ll get him back.”

I opened my fingers and we looked down together at the lock of yellow hair in my palm. It seemed I could feel some old part of myself dissolving into smoke and ash.

After a while, Laura asked, “Do you still believe there’s such a thing as curses?”

I didn’t have to think about it. “No,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“I don’t either.” She looked up into my face. “I’m ready now, Johnny.”

“Ready for what?”

“To go see Mama. Let’s get Sunny and leave out of here for good.”

I looked into her eyes. They were like they used to be, only sadder. But I saw something alive in them that might be rescued. She didn’t belong in that room so I put her back in our woods, shrunk her down and grew her hair into long black sheaves again, stood her on a mossy log with her arms held out for balance. I was beginning to see then what I have learned now. It’s not forgetting that heals. It’s remembering. I swallowed hard, wetness blurring my eyes. I hadn’t felt tears in so long I barely knew what they were. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll go see her.” I knew Laura was right. We were both ready. She looked startled. Then she smiled and I couldn’t help smiling back. I leaned over to press my forehead against the glass. I shut my eyes and pretended we were high on a rock over a bluff again, my tongue singing with the tartness of the berries she brought me.