Bloodroot

THREE. MYRA ODOM

I can’t stand to hold them. I have to let them go. I don’t want to leave too many marks behind. There were fingerprints all over me when I came back here, and it’s taken a long time to wash them off. I hardly remember the names I gave them. That was another time. I think of them now by their real names. Silver like how her eyes glint in the dark. Cinder like how his eyes look in the white of his face. Woodsmoke, the way he smells passing by me in fall. Lacy, the way leaves pattern her shoulders as she moves under the trees. Their old names mean nothing now. Neither does mine. I am whatever I say I am. Rainy, when I come in dripping after a storm. Bird, when I climb to the ledge and sing down the mountain. Alive, now even more than when I was a child living here. I squat where I please and watch the water I lapped up from my hand run back out of me, spreading and mixing with the dirt of this place, swirling with pine needles as it heads down the mountain toward the creek where it came from. I am part of this place like never before. When I was small, there was always something hindering me.

Granddaddy was too protective, but I believe Granny’s instinct was to let me go. She would allow me to stand for a while in the rain, hair parting soaked down the middle, before making me come in. Once she found me stripped naked facedown in the dirt. She stood watching for a long moment before she pulled me up by the arm, wiping at my blackened tongue with her apron and brushing sow bugs from my chin. “Lord, youngun,” she said, “you’re going to be sick as a dog.” All I wanted was free. Granny seemed to understand. After Granddaddy was gone she let me roam. But every minute in her presence it seemed she was touching me, stroking my hair, pulling me onto her lap.

I still miss her every day. Time is different on the mountain. It stretches out longer. I used to always know what year it was, and how old I would be on my next birthday. But, like names, it seems less important now. There’s a calendar hanging in the kitchen, yellowed and stiff as if something was spilled on it. It has been there on the same rusty nail since before Granny died. It’s a calendar from 1975, the year I came home and my babies were born. If I mark time, it’s by their birthdays. Not the exact date, because I forget sometimes. But I can tell by the weather, how it smells outside and what’s growing out of the ground. One day I’ll wake up and there’s a charge in the air and I’ll know it’s the anniversary of their birth. I’ll get up and see what I have to make a cake for them.

Today I woke to a chill wind blowing colored leaves through the window, scattering them across my bed. I sat up and plucked one from the blanket. I smelled what day it was, a scent I can’t describe. I went to the kitchen knowing they are six. The house was empty. They rise early and go into the woods because morning is their favorite time to play. The floor creaked as I brought flour down from the pantry shelf. My back prickled like there were eyes on me. I froze, sure it was all over, my time with them. It came back to me then, how it felt in that house beside of the railroad tracks with John, listening for the creak of his boot on the floorboards. But I stood still, counting backward, and nothing happened. No arm snaked under my throat, no fingers snagged my hair. I tried to hum as I made the cake, but I was rattled. I couldn’t shake the feeling of an end coming. Not the end of the world that our pastor at Piney Grove preached about, but the end of my world, the one I’ve made on Bloodroot Mountain for my twins and me.

I’m not sorry for the way I live, even when I see how Mr. Barnett looks at me sometimes, and Mark Cotter when I go up the mountain to buy fresh milk from him. He owns the farm since his parents died. I’ve only spoken to him once, when his wife was gone to town. I asked about Wild Rose. He claimed she spends most of her time loose in the woods now. “I don’t even try to pen her up no more,” he said. “She’s more ornery than ever since she’s got old.” He stared at my babies as he spoke to me, one on each hip, but he didn’t ask about them. I know Mark Cotter and I are not friends anymore, but he is still loyal to me. He must remember how it used to be. Whatever Mark and Mr. Barnett think of the way I live, they keep my secret. That’s all that matters. For six years, I’ve managed to hide my twins up here. But stirring the cake batter this morning I couldn’t stop thinking, not just about John, but about my whole life. I remembered myself as a six-year-old girl, when I marked time by my own birthdays and not those of my children.

I thought of Granny and how she liked to talk as she worked. There was a wringer washer by the back steps and I can still see her feeding Granddaddy’s shirts through, telling stories about Chickweed Holler. She talked most about her cousin Lou Ann, who I pictured as a crone with a hump, putting a curse on our family. I saw her with sores eating at her nose and mouth corners, eyes like holes pecked into her face by crows, standing on her high porch handing down love potions and charms to women desperate to bewitch a man, to have a child or lose one, to be granted long life or for someone else to die. I imagined powders in twists of paper, left hind feet of graveyard rabbits, snakeskin bags with toad’s eyes inside. They walked up the holler with their darkest desires and she did what she could to make them real. Even one of Granny’s great-aunts had gone to her.

“When Della was young and silly,” Granny said, “she had dealings with Lou Ann herself. She got struck on an old boy that came around selling Bibles, not that he ever cracked one open. Nothing do her, she had to have him. But he wouldn’t look twice at her. Well, Della went to see Lou Ann, with Grandmaw Ruth and Myrtle both begging her not to. She came back looking peaked. They all still lived at home and she asked her mammy if they could have chicken for supper. Said she’d be the one to cook it. Their mammy said she reckoned so. Della went out in the yard and caught her one right then, wrung its neck and plucked it and took it in the kitchen. She pulled out the innards and Grandmaw and Myrtle thought she was fixing to make chicken livers. But that ain’t what she was up to. She found that chicken’s heart, popped it in her mouth, and swallowed it whole. Grandmaw and Myrtle seen her do it. She hacked and carried on, but she kept it down. Lo and behold, the next day that Bible salesman came calling. Him and Della ran off and got married. It didn’t last long, though. Grandmaw said he beat Della like a mule. I reckon he got shot six months later, messing around with some other man’s wife. Della wouldn’t talk about it much, but she told me all the time, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’”

Granny was always telling stories like that, about Grandmaw Ruth and the great-aunts and Mammy and Pap. I know she was trying to teach me something, but that wasn’t her only reason. After so many years, she still missed her family. As much as she loved Bloodroot Mountain, she talked sometimes about going back to Chickweed Holler and seeing the old homestead again. It belonged now to distant cousins who wrote her letters. Once she went so far as to ask Granddaddy if he would drive her over there, but when the day came to travel she changed her mind. “I reckon I better stick close to home,” she said. “I’m too old to be running off. I used to dream about crossing the ocean on a ship and seeing the world, but it never happened. Your granddaddy scratched that itch.”

But it seemed nothing could scratch mine. The soles of my feet itched so hard in the night, they almost burned. Whenever Granny saw me squirming, she looked troubled. One night I asked her to scratch my feet. She said, “No use in me scratching them. You took that after me. Ain’t but one cure, and I dread the day that itch gets satisfied.”

“What day, Granny?”

“The day you run off from here.”

“I won’t ever!”

“I don’t know if you can help it,” she said, reaching under the quilt to take one of my feet in her warm hand.

She was right about me. I’ve done a lot of things I never thought I’d do. When I was a little girl, I always figured I would marry a mountain man, who knew the sting of briar scratches, the teeth-rattling shiver of cold creek water, the black smell of garden soil that made you want to roll in it. But John was the first thing I ever saw that was prettier than my home. The first time I laid eyes on him, we had gone to Odom’s Hardware after seeds. Granny usually ordered them from a catalogue, but that Saturday we were working in the yard when Mr. Barnett stopped to drop off a red velvet cake from Margaret. He was headed to Millertown for nails and snail bait. He asked if we wanted to come along and I was surprised when Granny said, “Why, I believe I will. Let me run in the house and get my pocket-book.” I could tell by the way she turned her face into the summer wind as we rode down the mountain that she just wanted to go for a ride. I was always up for a trip to town myself. The high school was usually the closest I got, unless I hitched a ride with Doug or Mark or went along with one of my girlfriends. Granddaddy had left behind a truck when he died, but it was rusting in the barn because Granny never learned how to use it. Sometimes it was like being stranded on an island. But I felt free as we drove past the red brick school building, making waves with my arm out the window.

There were only a few people milling the streets downtown. I drifted behind Granny and Mr. Barnett as they browsed the dim aisles of the hardware store. I was ready to go after we’d picked out the seeds, but Granny and Mr. Barnett stopped to make small talk with the man behind the counter, about weather and farming and inflated prices. I asked Granny if I could walk to the dime store and Mr. Barnett handed me his bag of nails. “Will you put these in the truck on your way down the sidewalk, honey?”

I stepped into the sun holding the wrinkled brown sack, sharp with nail points, and stopped in my tracks. A boy and girl stood outside the door in a patch of shade, kissing each other in a hungry way I’d never seen before. A tingle darted through me. I couldn’t see much of the boy’s face but I could see his hair, black as pitch, and her pale fingers digging into the dent between his shoulder blades. Then the girl cracked her eyes and noticed me. She broke away from him with a start. He turned around and I dropped the sack, nails spraying everywhere on the cracked cement. I knelt to pick them up, cheeks on fire. I’d seen his face, both sinister and beautiful. Before I could register what was happening, he was coming to kneel beside me. “Let me help you with that, miss,” he said. His voice was like a silk ribbon unrolling. Our fingers touched and when I glanced up, I thought I saw a flicker of interest in his eyes. Then the girl was saying, “I’d better get on back to work, John. My dad will skin me alive.” He rose and went to her as Granny and Mr. Barnett were coming out of the store. “I’ll walk you,” he said. When he looked back over his shoulder at me, my legs felt made of something unreliable.

I watched them go, taking in the shape of his body, tall with narrow hips and wide shoulders. “Who was that?” I asked, following Granny to the truck.

“That’s John,” Mr. Barnett said. “One of Frankie’s boys. You don’t want nothing to do with him. I reckon he’s tomcatting around with that Ellen Hamilton now. Her daddy’s got a drugstore down here on the corner. But you ort to hear the stories John’s brothers tells on him. They claim he’s got a girlfriend for every day of the week. I reckon it’s pitiful how he does them girls. They was one tried to kill herself over him.”

I was so quiet on the way home that Granny asked if I was sick. It didn’t matter what Mr. Barnett had said about John. I couldn’t stop seeing his eyes, the hair that fell across his forehead when he knelt by me, the beauty of his face, like something carved from marble. I never knew there were real people in the world that looked like him.

Mr. Barnett let us out of his truck at the house. Walking across the yard, Granny said, “Let’s have chicken and dumplings for supper.” I stood under the apple tree while she killed and plucked the chicken, trying to cool my face in the shade. After a while I followed her up the steps and into the kitchen. When I saw the chicken’s carcass laid out on the counter, it seemed like a sign. The instant Granny went to the pantry I tore into the bird’s chest and pulled out its heart. I crammed it into my mouth and it was awful, small and slick, sliding down my throat. I coughed and gagged, the heart struggling to come back up. But, like my great-great-great-aunt Della, I was determined to choke it down. When Granny rushed over to pound on my back, I said, “It’s okay. I just got strangled on spit.”

I felt guilty for betraying Granny. If she’d known what I had done, she would have been disappointed in me. But there was no going back. I didn’t know if I believed in Lou Ann’s charm, but I knew now what those women had felt. I wasn’t worried about Ellen Hamilton or anybody else. I was only concerned with myself and what I had to have. I went to bed early that night, half sick from the chicken heart, but I couldn’t rest. I tossed and turned, thinking how he’d looked over his shoulder at me as he walked the blond girl back to work. It was like being possessed. When I finally closed my eyes and drifted down toward sleep, I dreamed his face hovered inches from mine in the dark, his long, sculpted body floating over my bed like an angel or a wraith. I opened my eyes with a start, prepared to be kissed like he had kissed Ellen Hamilton on the sidewalk. I promised myself that if he ever did kiss me that way, I’d kiss him back twice as hard.

Now the ghost of John is different. It has no face or body, just the shine of eyes. Last night, I saw them in a tree and thought he was there. Then something moved along the branch and hissed down at me, a red-eyed possum. But sometimes I wake up smelling sulfur and dead rats and sweet aftershave. My bedroom reeks of him and I know he’s been there watching me sleep. Once I walked in and saw him sitting in the rocking chair. I dropped my book but didn’t scream. He was there for a long second and I thought he would say something. Then I blinked and he was gone, the rocking chair empty. These days John could come to me in any form. Long shadows falling across the yard could be the shape of tree trunks or of his legs, claw-tipped branches could be his arms, dripping water could be his tapping fingers, cold drafts could be his breath. But back then, when I was seventeen, I wanted every noise to be John Odom coming after me in the dark.

It wasn’t the next day that he came. It was a long four weeks in which I could think of nothing but him. I was guilty about the chicken heart and desperate for it to work at the same time. I had no appetite and Granny kept shooting me troubled looks across the table. I couldn’t concentrate on chores. I broke eggs carrying them in from the barn, cut my finger peeling potatoes, singed one of my good dresses with the iron. Then school started back and my life fell into a familiar routine. I still dreamed of John Odom, but I began to feel foolish for believing that swallowing a heart might bring me love.

On Monday of the second week of school, John materialized out of the early gloom as I walked to the bottom of the dirt road on my way to catch the bus, eyes and teeth shining. It seemed he had boiled up from the dust of the road.

“Don’t be scared,” he said. “I just came to drive you to school.”

“How did you find me?” I asked when my tongue came unstuck.

“I been asking around.” He fell in step beside me.

“What makes you think I’d take up with just anybody?” I asked, keeping my eyes straight ahead. I should have been scared but I was only excited.

“I ain’t just anybody. You’ve been in my daddy’s store before.”

“Who’s your daddy?” I asked, pretending ignorance.

“Frankie Odom.”

“I thought you had a girlfriend.”

“I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

I stole glances at him from the corner of my eye as we went down the hill, heart slamming against my breastbone. He looked at least five years older than me, maybe more. He was a man, not a boy. He was no less beautiful than I remembered. He looked almost foreign, hair and eyes black as soot. I wondered then if his mother had been someone exotic, but not after I saw pictures of her later. She was scrawny with bleached hair and slit eyes under pointy glasses. I remembered his jug-eared father from the store, and his pot-bellied brothers, plainer versions of him. His beauty was inexplicable.

He wasn’t like the boys at school. He kept his hair short while they grew theirs long. He wore creased trousers, they wore bell-bottoms. His old-fashioned ways made him even more foreign and like home at the same time. Living with Granny on the mountain, the old ways were what I knew best. As we walked I took secret sips of him, unable to find a flaw. His one physical imperfection, I discovered later, was invisible. He was deaf in his left ear since childhood, when his youngest brother, Hollis, had shot a cap pistol beside it. I learned this is what saved him from the war. Later I would come to wish that he had gone to Vietnam, that he had been killed over there, and I had never met him.

I didn’t let John take me to school. I was too shy to get into his car. I caught the bus instead. But I looked back at him, sitting behind his steering wheel beside the road. All day long I tried to remember the details of his face. After school I had plans to go to the library and study for a test with one of my friends. Her father had offered to pick us up and drive me home when the library closed. I was supposed to meet her in the parking lot but when I walked out the double doors of the high school, shading my eyes against the sun, John was standing at the bottom of the steps. I almost dropped my books.

“I’m here to take you home,” he said, squinting up at me.

“I told Granny I was going to the library.”

He smiled in a crooked way. “I’ll take you to the library.”

“No,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

I climbed into the passenger seat of his car and told him to head for Bloodroot Mountain. It was a risk to have him take me home, but I wanted to be somewhere safe with him. As he drove, I cracked the window to let in the September wind. We didn’t talk but he kept glancing over at me. When we finally turned onto the dirt road leading up the mountain, I asked him to pull onto the shoulder so that his car would be hidden in the trees. I led him by the hand along the creek, to a place I had shared with no one else. Not long after Granddaddy died, I had followed the creek up the mountain trying to find its source. I found an abandoned springhouse instead, a little block hut with its foundation covered in weeds and ferns, the arched roof patched with vivid green moss, springwater flowing out the shadowed opening over ledges of rock. Farther up the mountain, I found some rotten poplar logs and the remains of an old stone chimney. When I asked Granny about it, she said Doug Cotter’s great-grandfather had once lived there in a cabin.

John didn’t ask where I was taking him as we cut a path through the bushes and saplings. We were both out of breath by the time we reached the springhouse. I watched as John hunkered down to drink from his cupped palm. When he looked up at me, chin dripping, all of my shyness disappeared. I got down on my knees in the mud beside the spring, not caring how I would explain my dirty skirt to Granny. We studied each other, a beam of sun lighting his face. After a while I asked, “Why did you come to me?”

He was quiet, looking up into the tree branches. “It was your eyes,” he said at last. “I never seen a blue like that.” He turned to me and studied them for a long time. He reached out to touch my hair but his hand paused in the air. He was looking at me in a way I had never been seen. I was a girl to everyone else. John Odom saw me as a woman. But I could tell that he was nervous. Like me, he was scared of the spell we were under. “I shouldn’t have come up here,” he said. “I better go on, before I get you in trouble.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want you to go.” I only hesitated an instant before leaning over to kiss him, as hard and wild as I had promised myself to if I ever had the chance. When his arms came around me I was lost, not thinking of Granny or how to behave. The whole thing happened fast but it felt like slow motion, John pushing me down on the leaf-littered mud, the weight of him pressing the breath out of me. If someone had come upon us it might have looked like a fight, our mouths and teeth clashing so that my lips were sore later, my fingers tangled up in his hair as he kissed where the buttons of my blouse had come undone. It was a helpless feeling, like in dreams of diving off the rock over the bluff, those few sweet moments of flight worth the death that was waiting for me. When I groped for his hand and pushed it under the hem of my skirt, I could feel his heart beating in his fingers, or maybe it was mine. I gasped as his palm slid up the length of my leg. But then, without warning, his fingers clamped down on my thigh. Before I could protest, he was wrenching himself out of my arms. “I should have left you alone,” he breathed, getting to his feet. When he rushed off, leaves clinging to his pants, I was too stunned to go after him. I lay on my back trying to catch my breath, the smell of him all over me.

The next day at school, I could think of nothing but the scrape of his stubble, the hot flesh of his stomach under his shirt, the trail of his hand moving up my leg. I had to close my eyes and put my head down on my desk. I didn’t understand what had happened between us. If the rumors were true, John Odom was no gentleman. It made no sense the way he ran off and left me. I knew that my feelings for him were dangerous, but after what had happened at the springhouse, nothing could have kept me away from him.

After school let out, I walked over to Main Street. I don’t remember getting there. I only remember standing in the shadows of an awning across the street as dark came early, the sky turning sunset orange between the buildings. I watched the door of Odom’s Hardware for him to come out and when he appeared, stepping onto the sidewalk and turning to lock the door behind him, my chest went heavy and tight. I crossed the street without feeling the ground underfoot. As I drew close to him everything came into sharp focus, his carved face, his shining eyes, his black hair. He stopped when he saw me and drew in a breath. Somewhere distant I heard voices and traffic, but on Main Street we were alone. We stared at each other for a long while in silence. I felt everything inside me threatening to rise to the surface, but I knew it was important to be calm and still. His coat collar was turned up on one side. Without thinking, I reached to smooth it down.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

I tried to smile. “I need a ride.”

He smiled back. “Mountain’s a long way off.”

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s a pretty drive.”

He looked past me into the street. “You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.”

I stepped closer to him. “Why’d you run off like that?”

“I don’t know. I guess I came to my senses.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I can’t be with somebody like you.”

“Somebody like me?”

His eyes returned to my face. “Somebody good.”

“Well,” I said. “I think you’re somebody good.”

He paused. “You don’t even know me.”

I took another step closer. “I don’t care.”

He opened his mouth to protest but I didn’t want to hear it. I took a deep breath, mustering my courage, and did what I had wanted to the minute he stepped out of the hardware store and locked the door behind him. I grabbed his coat and stood on tiptoe to kiss him like before. In those long seconds, something happened that I can’t forget. A strong wind came howling down Main Street, a cold blast whirling with dead leaves and trash, whipping my hair and plastering a sheet of newspaper to John’s shoulder where it clung before flying off toward the stoplight. I remembered stories of banshees Granny had told me, Irish witches who wailed outside houses at night to warn families of danger. To hear a banshee was always a bad omen. That night in my dreams, when I broke away from John’s kiss, the banshee’s veiled face floated inches from mine, the wind from her scream taking my breath. But on Main Street it was John who broke our kiss. The wind died as fast as it came, letting go of my hair and John’s coattail. He held me for a moment at arm’s length. “Are you sure about this?” he asked. “Because once I get ahold of you, I ain’t turning you loose.” I said yes without a second thought and followed him to his car.

I wasn’t ready for Granny or anyone else to know about us at first. John continued to park at the bottom of the road, a little inside the tree line, and we took long walks on the mountain. I was careful to choose paths I hadn’t explored. The going was harder, briars clawing at our ankles, but I didn’t want to risk running into Mr. Barnett or Doug Cotter. I wanted to climb to the top of Bloodroot Mountain with John, to stand in the secret meadow with him. I hadn’t tried since I was fourteen, when I caused Doug to fall. But John and I never made it that far. He always wanted to stop and sit, on fallen trees or rocky bluffs, anywhere he could kiss me. Sometimes I smelled another woman’s perfume on his clothes, but I didn’t say anything. I knew I hadn’t fully claimed him. At first I thought if I could be with him the way those other women were, I would have all of him. But each time we got close, his hands under my dress and mine tearing at his shirt, he pulled away again. Then one day, lying on the ground beside the springhouse, he said, “I’ve had plenty of whores, Myra. That ain’t what I want out of you.” His words stung but their meaning made me hope I was different than the ones who left perfume on his clothes. Whenever he got quiet I held my breath, praying that he would propose to me.

Every second he was out of my sight, my stomach churned with worry about what he was doing and who he was with. I sat on the back steps chewing my nails, stood at the bottom of the road and looked for his car even when I knew he wasn’t coming, took to my bed sometimes before dark and buried my face in my pillow. I knew Granny saw my misery, but she didn’t comment on it. Sitting at the kitchen table, tension hung like smoke between us, choking our conversations. Finally, I couldn’t take keeping the secret any longer. As scared as I was that she’d deny John and me her blessing, I had to confess.

At the beginning of winter, we were taping sheets of plastic over the house’s old windows to keep in the heat. It was already cold and drafty in the front room. I stood holding the thick silver tape roll for her, realizing how old it seemed she had grown overnight. I tried to memorize the seams and creases of her face, soft and wrinkled as brownish crepe paper. I charted the constellations her age spots made, took in the black brogans she wore for outside chores, Granddaddy’s dingy socks rolled down around her ankles, and the faded flowers of her dress, thin from hundreds of washings. I ached for her then as much or more than I did for John, thought of choosing her and the mountain and never getting married or moving away. But she turned to me, as her fingers smoothed a long strip of tape down the window frame, and said, “I believe my girl’s got something to tell me.” I wasn’t expecting to burst into tears. The flood startled me more than it did Granny. She came and held my face in her arthritis-knotted hands. “I’ve got cataracts,” she said with a sad grin, “but I ain’t blind yet. Now, I done decided I ain’t going to meddle. You’d just end up resenting me for it. But you better be careful, Myra Jean.”

I understand what Granny meant. Like her, I let my twins make their own mistakes. I don’t make them wear shoes, even when locust thorns have blown among the weeds. I don’t stop them from climbing trees or robbing beehives or swimming with snakes. I let them go, as Granny did me, only without warning them to be careful. I know they wouldn’t listen. But I protect them from a distance. I used to spend weeks without John or any of the Odoms entering my mind. I saw my twins out from under a cloud. I taught them how to count and hunt and clean fish. One day lying in the grass I flew them, lifting them up with my feet on their hipbones, holding their hands with their hair hanging down and their small faces shining. They took turns, the girl’s homemade dress swaying over me and the boy’s floppy shirt filling with wind like a sail. They laughed and I laughed with them, until tears leaked out of my eyes. I know they won’t remember it. They might never know me again that way. Lately it’s been hard to think of anything but the past. I carried a disease with me out of that house by the tracks and pieces of me are still coming off. It’s unfair how my fear has grown over time and begun to take me over. Sometimes it feels like John has won. But I’d rather die than trap the twins as I was trapped while I was with him. That’s why I’ll always give them their freedom.

After my talk with Granny, I didn’t hide my relationship with John, but I spent less time on the mountain for the sake of Doug Cotter. I knew he loved me, and I cared for him enough not to flaunt my happiness. John and I mostly went to Millertown. I thought of my mother, running off with my father when she was my age. John showed me places and I imagined her there, the glass-sprinkled lot of a drive-in, the restaurant where I ate pizza for the first time. I wondered if my parents ate it together as John and I did, by the window of a dim place with checked tablecloths and silk daisies in vases.

When spring came, John taught me to drive his car. We spent hours tooling down the back roads of Valley Home and Slop Creek and Piney Grove with the windows down and the radio playing, pulling over for long golden meadows and covered bridges and ponds green with scum. The more time we spent together, the more certain I grew that he would propose. That’s why I pushed aside my nerves and took him up Bloodroot Mountain to meet Granny. I was relieved to see that she was charmed by John, but by then nothing could have kept me from being with him, not even my love for Granny.

One Sunday afternoon we were supposed to meet at the spring-house after church. We hadn’t walked together in a long time and I missed being on the mountain with him. Granny and I always rode to Piney Grove squeezed between the Barnetts in the cab of their truck and I was quiet all the way down the mountain, dreaming of lying with John once again on the bank beside the spring. After the service I waited in the churchyard as Granny and the Barnetts chatted with the preacher, sitting on my mother’s grave with my knees drawn up under my dress tail. I tried to talk to her in my mind. I closed my eyes and conjured her, not bones in a casket six feet under, but the girl I had seen in pictures with somber eyes and long hair parted straight down the middle. I felt closer to her than ever before. I sensed her spirit moving up through the grass and passing over me like a sigh. She of all people would understand how loving John Odom made me feel. She had run off to town with a man herself, left Granny and the mountain behind for him. Now she would lie in her grave beside him forever. I pictured a double headstone with my name carved in granite next to John’s. The image filled me with warmth from head to toe.

When I looked toward the church again, Granny and the Barnetts were finally heading for the truck. I jumped up and ran fast enough to beat them. I leapt over the side of the truck bed into the straw and dirt, dress billowing up. I rode home hugging myself against the keen spring wind, knowing I was late and John was waiting for me. As soon as Mr. Barnett let us out at the house, I vaulted over the side of the truck and took off. I heard Granny saying to the Barnetts, “Lord, I don’t know what’s got into that girl.”

I ran all the way to the springhouse with a stitch in my side, but I couldn’t slow down. It seemed I could already taste his lips, cold from the water he would drink from his palm. I only stopped running when the block hut came into view on a rise above me. When someone stood up out of the bushes on the opposite side of the spring where he had been squatting, I expected it to be John. But I saw the fair hair and the long, skinny legs and the smile I had carried all the way up the mountain wilted. It was Mark Cotter, holding a cane fishing pole in one hand and a string of fish in the other. For a moment we were both too startled to speak. The woods were quiet and still besides the wasps hovering in and out of the springhouse opening. Then he grinned in his lazy way. “Look who it is,” he said. “I ain’t seen you in a long time.” He came down the slope and splashed across the creek to where I stood. I scanned the trees, heart thudding in my ears, hoping his brother hadn’t come with him. “You found my good fishing hole,” he said, standing so close I could smell the salt of his sweat. “Don’t tell nobody and I’ll give you a bluegill.” He held up the string of dripping fish, rainbows shining on their scales.

“That’s all right,” I said, forcing a smile. “I won’t tell.” It was true, Mark and I hadn’t seen each other in a long time. He had become a man since I saw him last. It was more than the scruffy beard he had grown. There was something wiser about his eyes.

“I hope you know you’ve done broke my little brother’s heart,” he said after an awkward silence. “He’s been moping around the house like a sick puppy dog.”

I shifted from foot to foot, wondering how to get rid of him before John came along. “I’ve been meaning to walk up the hill and see Wild Rose.”

Mark shook his head. “Shoot, you’d be just as likely to see her out here running the woods. They never made a fence that could hold that horse.”

There was another silence. I glanced nervously at the pole leaning across his shoulder. “Looks like you’re on your way to the house. Tell Doug hello for me, okay?”

Mark grinned again, but not with his eyes. “What are you doing up here anyway?”

“Nothing. Just taking a walk.”

“Why don’t you set down here and watch me catch a fish?”

“I better not,” I said, looking down at my dress. “I’ve got my church clothes on.”

He held his hand in front of my face, black with soil from baiting hooks. “Since when was you scared of a little dirt?” He lowered his cane pole to the ground. “Here,” he said. “You can blame it on me.” He reached out and took hold of my arm, fingerprinting the sleeve of my dress. I tried to twist away but he wouldn’t let go. I was surprised to see a flash of anger in his eyes. I had never thought he might have wanted me as much as his brother did. That’s when I heard John’s footsteps coming up the slope behind us.

“What’s going on here?” he said. I turned around and the look on his face made my stomach lurch. His eyes seemed almost inhuman, mean and glittering black like a crow’s. I had the urge to take off running for home as fast as my legs would go.

“Who the hell are you?” Mark said.

John stepped between Mark and me. “You better move that hand.”

“It’s okay,” I said, but neither one of them seemed to hear.

Mark let go of my arm. “Watch it, buddy. This is my daddy’s land.”

“I don’t care whose land it is,” John said. “You don’t touch her.”

Mark’s face flushed a deep, ugly red. “She’s on my daddy’s property, too. I reckon I can do whatever I want to with her.”

Before I knew what was happening, John had Mark Cotter by the throat. The string of bluegill slid onto the mud at our feet alongside the fishing pole. “You better get on away from here,” John said through clenched teeth.

After what seemed a lifetime, he turned Mark loose. Mark stood still for a moment gasping for breath, rubbing at his throat where John’s fingerprints were fading. Tears of humiliation stood in his eyes. He looked at me in an accusatory way, as if I were the one to blame. Then he backed off and blundered into the trees, swatting vines and branches out of his path. I looked at the fish he had caught, left behind on the ground to rot in the sun, and felt a wave of pity for him so overwhelming I had to sit down on the bank. John watched Mark until he was gone and then lowered himself beside me.

“You didn’t have to hurt him,” I said, near tears myself. “He’s my neighbor.”

John put his arm around me and pulled me close. “I’m jealous-hearted, Myra. I don’t like nobody else touching you. I don’t even like your granny having you all to herself. It don’t seem right for her to be with you more than I am.” He took hold of my chin and tipped my face up to look at him. “I want to marry you,” he said, growing solemn. “But if you’re going to be with me, you belong to me. I can’t have it no other way.”

My heart leapt, what he had done to Mark forgotten. I stared at him, unable to speak. “I belong to you,” I said after a moment. “But it works both ways. I’m jealous-hearted, too. If we get married, you can’t have another woman for as long as we live.”

John leaned over and touched his nose to mine. “Hell, that’s easy,” he said. “You’ve done ruined me. I can’t even stand to think about nobody else.”

Looking back, we would have said anything to possess one another. If we had known we were making promises we couldn’t keep, it wouldn’t have mattered to us.

For two weeks, I walked around with my steps unburdened and light. I didn’t wonder anymore whether John was seeing Ellen Hamilton or any other woman behind my back. But soon after he proposed, just like that night a banshee wind came screaming down Main Street, I had another glimpse of the darkness to come. Near the middle of June, John picked me up and drove me down the mountain to a part of Millertown I’d never seen.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Will you quit asking me that? I said it’s a surprise.” He smiled, white teeth flashing. He twisted at the radio knobs as we passed pawnshops and seedy restaurants and then the junkyard, big hunks of car metal twinkling in the hot summer sun.

“I hate surprises,” I said, studying his profile. It took a second to realize he was turning into a lot by the railroad tracks, gravel crunching under the tires. I looked out the windshield at the tiny, peeling box of a house, the streetlight high on a pole, power lines hanging like black snakes stretched across the yard. I turned to him and waited, thinking he had pulled over to kiss me as he did sometimes, fingers wrestling through my hair.

“What do you think?” he asked, eyes bright.

“About what?”

“The house, goose. I rented us a place.”

I blinked hard, my chest going tight.

“Come on,” he said, getting out of the car. He dug in his pants pocket and produced a greasy-looking key dangling from a dull silver hoop. I stared out the windshield, mouth open. He laughed. “I got you good, didn’t I?”

He came around to open the passenger door and pulled me out, still laughing at my expression. “Let’s look inside. I ain’t even seen it yet. There was a man came in the store, said he had a place for rent cheap if we knew anybody. I said, as a matter of fact I do know somebody and you’re looking at him. He didn’t even ask for a deposit.”

I followed John across the sooty lot, our feet scuffing up grit. It was so hot it seemed I could hear my skin sizzling. It struck me that these were the tracks where my mother was killed. I thought I might faint. There was no color. I was used to the trees setting the mountain on fire in fall and all the blooming bushes in spring and every shade of green in summer. Even the mountain ground was spotted with shade and light, blanketed with moss and deep trenches of fallen leaves, ridged with cool-colored sparkling rock, springing with mottled toadstools. But this was all still and flat and buzzing with flies. The smell of factory chemicals made my head ache.

There was a chipped concrete stoop and a light fixture beside the door covered in sticky webs. John put the key in the lock and I watched as he jiggled it, turned it, and cursed under his breath. We were both caught by surprise when the door swung in with a whine. In those first seconds my eyes played a trick that I kept to myself but never forgot. I saw the dark shape of a woman standing in the front room, tall and bone thin with wild clumps of hair and no discernible face. I stopped and clutched at the door jamb. John said, “What?” and she was gone. “I thought I saw something,” I said, my voice as creaky as the rusty door hinges. I was still shaking when we went into the hot stink of the house.

But once John was touching me again, his warm hands moving over my skin, it didn’t take long for me to bury my doubts about the place he had rented. I told myself it didn’t matter where we lived, as long as we were together. We got married a few days later in the preacher’s kitchen, a coffeepot slurping on the counter. I could barely wait to kiss him. I smelled his aftershave and his clean black hair even over the coffee. I didn’t realize, putting Granddaddy’s ring on his finger, how fitting it was that Granny had passed it down to me. Like her, I had given in to temptation and done wrong in the name of bloodred love. Outside in the car John and I kissed each other longer and harder before driving away, his flesh hot under the thin white fabric of his dress shirt.

My wedding night was not how I expected. Later on there was pleasure, but that first night alone in our bedroom, it was painful, not just between my legs but in my heart. I would never be Granny’s little girl again. I felt the mountain falling through my fingers, but I was foolish enough to think as I clung to him in the dark that at least we belonged to each other. At least the pact we made by the springhouse was finally sealed.

John took a week off work and we spent most of it at home, leaving only to buy groceries. I came to know his body better than my own, from the peak of his hairline to the arches of his feet. I loved the blue veins of his temples, the tender bracelets of his wrists, the intricate folds of his ears. The house was depressing but I forgot when I saw him sleeping late in a stripe of sun or in the bathtub with his wet knees poking out of soapy water. I worshipped everything about him, even how he took greedy bites at supper and there was always a crumb left on the corner of his mouth. In the night he’d tickle me with the ends of my hair, trailing it up and down my naked arms, along my jaw and chin. Sometimes I read poems to him and I didn’t mind when they put him to sleep. I kept reading after his eyes were closed. All these years later, watching over my twins as they sleep on Granny’s rag rug, I try to remember the first whispers of fear. I try to mark the time when everything changed. It happened the night I asked about his mother. It was almost dawn and the house was still, no trains rattling the bedroom window as they passed. We were lying curled together under the sheet, my head nestled in the hollow of his shoulder, when I realized we had never discussed the thing we had most in common.

“Tell me something about your mother,” I said.

He was breathing slow, almost asleep. “Huh?”

“We never talk about it.”

“Talk about what?”

“Not having a mother.”

He opened his eyes. “I had a mother.”

“But you were just twelve when she died.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t remember much.”

“How did she die?”

There was a long pause. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, what did she die of?”

He paused again. “They said it was a heart attack. But that ain’t what killed her.”

I sat up and pushed back the sheet. The air in the room had changed somehow. Even my legs were sweating in the summer heat. I already knew then that the contented feeling of John and me being the last two people on earth was fading away. I began to wish I’d never brought up his mother, but it seemed too late to turn back. “Then what do you think she died of?”

He looked at the ceiling. “I don’t think. I know. Because I’m the one caused it.”

For a moment I didn’t know how to respond. I leaned over him, trying to see his face in the early morning light falling through the parted curtains, coloring our room the dark blue of an ink stain. “A heart attack is nobody’s fault,” I said at last.

He rolled over to face the wall. “I told you, it wasn’t no heart attack.”

“Whatever it was, it’s not your fault.”

He got quiet again. Then he said, “Tell that to my daddy.”

“He blamed you for your mother dying?”

“No. He never blamed me for it. It’s about the only thing he’s proud of me over.”

“John,” I said, knots forming in my stomach. “What are you talking about?”

A long time passed. I willed him not to go on. Whatever he was trying to tell me, I was afraid to hear it. “Nothing,” he said after a while. “I’m done talking about it.”

I slipped my arms around him. “I’m sorry I brought it up. I didn’t know it would bother you. I just never had anybody to talk about my mother with. Even Granny didn’t talk about her much, and she wouldn’t talk about my father at all. If I asked about the Mayeses, she said, ‘Them people wouldn’t piss on you if you was on fire.’ It’s the closest I ever heard Granny come to cussing.” I paused and there was only the sound of his breathing. I rushed on to fill the silence. “I never tried to see them while I was living at home. Now I figure I can go visit them without Granny knowing about it. They might have pictures I haven’t seen, or stories they can tell me. Granny said the Mayeses owned a pool hall around here.” I stopped again and there was still no response. I began to think he had fallen asleep. I nudged his side. “Do you know where it’s at? The pool hall?”

When he finally answered, his voice was cold. “It’s over on Miller Avenue.”

I hesitated. “Will you take me there?”

“No,” he said, in the same harsh voice. “And you might as well get it out of your head. I ain’t having my wife hanging around no pool hall. I’d be the jackass of the town.”

John was never the same after our talk. The next morning he sat up in the tangled sheets with eyes dead as coal. When I saw the emptiness in his face, I had a flash of Granny and me standing beside the wringer washer. Her story of a black-haired Bible salesman flew over my head like a bird I didn’t allow to nest. I draped my arms over his back and said, “Let’s go for a drive.” He seemed not to hear. “Fix me some coffee,” he mumbled. I tried to hum as he sat with his cup at the kitchen table. I made small talk as I fried the eggs and hovered over him while he ate breakfast. My palms sweated and I kept wiping them on my nightgown. Then John stood up. “Say you want to go for a ride?”

I released the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and hurried to throw on my clothes. I ran out to the car with him chasing after me, sure I had imagined whatever cold had crept between us in the night. Riding with the windows down on familiar roads, John began to talk as usual. I thought he would tell one of his funny stories, about pranks he had pulled on his brothers or trouble he got into in grade school. But he looked out the windshield, brow clouded over, and asked, “You ever feel out of place around here?”

I looked at him. “No,” I said. “I never thought about it.”

He lit a cigarette on the glowing end of the car lighter. “Sometimes I listen to them hicks that comes in the store and wonder what in the world I’m still doing here.”

I turned my face to the fields passing by, high with goldenrod and purplish heather, cows grazing behind barbwire fences. “I guess I can’t imagine anywhere else.”

“You’re just like the rest of them, then,” he said. “A body can’t amount to nothing here. What’s a man going to do, if he don’t want to work in a factory or shovel shit on a farm, or do like my daddy and scrape together a business that don’t make enough to live on. All there is to do around here is break your back and not have a thing to show for it.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I ain’t going nowhere,” he said. “I’m stuck in this hole.”

“How come?”

He turned on me with angry eyes. “You think I’d walk away from that store?”

I fidgeted in the car seat, knees drawn up, wind tearing at my dress.

“People think because I’m Frankie Odom’s boy I’m rich, but they don’t know how he is. He works us like mules for next to nothing. When he’s gone, I mean to have my piece of that place. You know, one time this woman came in with her husband and said, ‘Odom’s Hardware is a landmark. Buildings like this are the heart of our town.’ I wanted to say, ‘Why don’t you come in here at the crack of dawn and choke on dust and sell nails and put up with hicks like you all day, then you’d think, heart of our town.’”

I studied his face for traces of the John I had known just the day before. I’d never heard him talk that way. “I’d go anywhere you wanted to,” I said, desperate to fix him.

He smirked. “You think you’d leave here? You couldn’t get along a day without Granny. You ain’t like I thought. You was the prettiest girl I ever seen. Looked like you didn’t belong around here either. It ain’t took me long to figure you out, though.”

I wiped my sweaty palms on my dress again. “We can leave here anytime you want to,” I said, so low I wondered if he even heard me.

“We ain’t going nowhere,” he said. “You got to have money to go anywhere. What do you think we’d live on?”

I looked down at the floorboard, heart in my throat. “We could find work.”

“I done told you, I ain’t put up with my daddy’s shit all these years for nothing. But I don’t belong around here. You can take one look at my face and see that.”

He drew deep from his cigarette, jetting smoke through his nostrils. There was a long, terrible silence. My chest was so tight I couldn’t breathe. We passed a pond with pollen floating on its surface and I wanted nothing more than to get out of the car and stand beside it. “Can we stop here?” I asked. I was relieved when he pulled over to the shoulder of the road and killed the motor. But he sat with his wrists dangling on the steering wheel looking out the windshield and I didn’t know what to do but sit there with him. After a few minutes he got out of the car and leaned against the hood with his cigarette. I got out and sidled close to him but he didn’t move to touch me. I looked at the pond, feeling frightened and alone. After a while another car pulled alongside us. It was an old man in a junker with mismatching doors. He cranked down his window and called out to John. “Hey there, son.” John turned as if waking up from a dream. I saw his eyes darken and his brows draw together. “Having car trouble?” the old man asked.

John stepped away from the hood. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

The man looked surprised. “Why, I was just trying to be neighborly.”

John bent lightning fast, cigarette clamped between his teeth, and snatched up a rock. Mineral flecks glinted in the mid-morning sun. He stepped toward the junker and the old man’s expression changed from indignation to fear. John charged forward and let the rock fly just as the old man stepped on the gas, spinning a cloud of dust.“Nosy old son of a bitch,” John muttered, breathing hard, smoothing his hair back into place as he stood in the road. I reached out to brace myself on the car hood, spots dancing before my eyes.

Sometimes a week would pass with the John I had first met, sweet and gentle and teasing. Before summer was over he bought an ice cream maker and it took so long to crank that our arms got tired. We stood in the kitchen with the back door open to let in the night air. Our laughter made the tracks and the yard seem not so barren, the smell of homemade ice cream muting the stench of bitter smoke. I still liked making John’s coffee and drinking it with him in the early dark of the mornings. We didn’t say much, just looked at each other over our warm cups. After he left, I sat on the couch waiting for him to come home. Each afternoon when I heard the car door slam, I ran across the scrubby grass and jumped into his arms, locking my legs around his hips. He would groan, pretending I was heavy, and kiss me all the way to the front door.

But the changes were hard to ignore, like the beer and then the whiskey he started drinking. It altered his breath, his speech, even how he kissed me. When he was drunk he slept so hard it was like he had gone away. I felt alone in the house with the scuttling mice. I came to hate being home while John was at work. Most days I sat in the front room looking at the clock, waiting to make supper. Going outside was no better, the sooty lot and the thundering trains and the smell of burning tires drifting over from the junkyard. All I wanted was to drink creek water from my hand, to catch a fish, to suck the juice from a honeysuckle between my teeth. If I couldn’t go home whenever I wanted, I needed at least to get away from that smothering house. Once over supper I asked John about getting a job. He gripped a bottle of beer hard in his hand. “It’s my opinion that a woman should keep at home,” he said. “It’s an outdated way of thinking, I guess, but that’s how it is. I’m supposed to take care of you, and that’s what I’ll do.”

I tried to tell myself maybe John was right about how a wife should be. He was older and wiser than me. At seventeen, I couldn’t be expected to know. Besides, I’d made my bed. I had swallowed a chicken heart, like that long-dead aunt. This was my penance. By the end of August, he made it known that I couldn’t visit Granny so much. He told me I needed to grow up, that even the Bible said you’re supposed to leave behind your family and cleave to your husband. I told him the Bible also says you’re supposed to take care of your old and that Granny needed us. His eyes grew so black and mean that I thought he would hit me. He said, “I don’t know how come you love that old woman better than me.” After that, he stopped taking me to church or back up the mountain at all.

It’s strange the way time makes things different. Back then I always wanted to go somewhere. Now I have to make myself walk to the Cotters’ and the Barnetts’ and down the mountain selling ginseng. When I lived by the tracks I might have hopped a train if I’d had the courage. I thought of it sometimes when the rusty beds came squealing by, heaped with coal as black as John’s eyes. Now I wish there was never a reason to set foot on any ground outside the house and land where Granny raised me. But in those dark days I would have gone anywhere. The first time John said we were eating supper with his daddy, I was relieved. I even sang to myself as I made a yellow cake to take with us.

I learned that every few months, Frankie Odom called a family meeting. Frankie claimed it was important for kinfolks to sit down at the same table together, but John said it was so he could keep his nose in his sons’ business. “Only reason I’m going is because he puts bread in our mouths,” John said. “That’s how it is when you’re under somebody’s thumb.” I didn’t tell him that I was glad to be going. But my enthusiasm waned when I saw the house. Before John told me how stingy his father was, I might have been surprised to see the owner of Odom’s Hardware living in such a place. There was a slumped look about it, tall and peeling with black windows and missing shingles. The lot next door was heaped with trash, a neighborhood dumping ground. There were other vehicles in the driveway and John’s nephews chased each other in the brown grass. When we got out of the car I almost dropped the yellow cake. There was an odor outside like sulfur and dead rats. I knew the smell. One summer after a man had shot his wife at a house down the mountain, Granny and I were in the creek cooling off when a stink rose all around us, like a giant match had been struck. “Get out of that water,” Granny said. “Let’s get on to the house.” She picked up her skirts and I followed. As we hurried through the woods, she said, “Devil’s loose on the mountain, Myra Jean. We better stay in for a while.” Now here the smell was again. I had grown up with the Holy Spirit. I wasn’t the kind to fear things unseen. But standing before the Odom house, I was afraid.

Nobody met us at the door. When we stepped into the foyer a black shadow darted along the baseboard. I told myself it was a mouse. The smell was even more intense inside the house. John led me to the kitchen where Lonnie’s wife Peggy was stirring a pot of soup beans. She looked up, sweat shining above her lip. “Hey,” she said. “You can put that down on the counter.” Eugene’s wife Jewel was filling glasses from a pitcher of tea. I had never seen the other wives before. They were tired and colorless, Peggy rail thin and spattered with freckles, Jewel dumpy with a pockmarked face.

We left the cake with the wives and went to the living room. The curtains were drawn, making the room dark and claustrophobic. I tried to smile but my chest was tightening. Frankie Odom didn’t get up from his recliner. “What do you say, darlin?” he asked. He had always been the friendliest of them. But there was something rotten under his grin, maybe the source of the sulfur smell. The three brothers were sitting on the couch. Only Hollis stood to clap John on the back and tip an imaginary hat at me. I had never seen them outside the store, Eugene and Lonnie both older than John, their foreheads lined and their middles thick. Hollis was the youngest, not much older than me, slighter than his brothers with eyes that flicked all over the room and never landed anywhere. John was strange among them, tall and lithe and ethereal. He was right about not belonging there. The smell seemed to be growing stronger. I counted backward to keep from bolting for the door. Then Peggy called us to the dining room. Most of the chandelier’s lights were blown. It cast lurid shadows on the close walls. At the table I thought they wouldn’t speak, all of them, including the nephews, bent over their plates and stuffing their mouths. I tried to eat with them, despite the knots in my stomach.

Finally, Lonnie said, “I’ll just tell you right off, Daddy. Peggy can’t come by and straighten up for you no more. She’s took a job at the bakery.”

Frankie Odom’s fork halted on the way to his mouth. “What?”

“We ain’t got no choice. They’s bills to pay.”

“Well,” he said. “It’s about like y’uns to let me and Hollis fend for ourselves. I know you boys is just waiting on me to die so you can get this place.”

Lonnie grinned around a mouthful of bread. “What would we want with this old place? Looks to me like it’s fixing to fall down around your ears.”

Frankie Odom slammed his fist on the table. I flinched but the others seemed undisturbed. “That’s because you dadburn boys won’t help me do nothing. I’ve worked like a dog all of my life to keep y’uns up, and what do I get for it?”

“Cheapest labor you can find,” John said. For the first time, I saw how much his eyes were like his father’s. “You think you could get anybody else to work that cheap?”

“Now, Daddy,” Eugene said, wiping his mouth with his hand. “You know times is lean at the store. Jewel’s had to go to work, too, down at the bank.” He pointed his fork in Hollis’s direction. “Hollis is setting right there. Why can’t he do something?”

Frankie jammed a spoonful of mashed potatoes between his lips, a white blob falling onto the table. He looked at Hollis with disdain.

“Why, Hollis can’t do nothing.”

Jewel spoke up sheepishly, without raising her eyes from her plate. “I reckon there’s people you can hire to cook and clean.”

“Hire!” Frankie Odom squawked, crumbs spraying. His face had gone a deep red. “You think I can afford to hire somebody? It takes ever dime I get to keep food on your tables and roofs over your heads.” After a moment of thought, he said, “I reckon I could take some out of you boys’s pay and get a woman to come in once or twice a week.”

There was a long silence. The Odoms looked around at each other, the women’s faces livened with panic. Then their eyes fell on me. It hit me all at once what they were thinking. I turned to John, hoping he could read my expression. “Well,” he said. “I guess Myra could do it. She’s been telling me she’d like to get out of the house.” Peggy and Jewel sagged with relief. They went back to their food, not waiting to see what I would say. After a while Hollis spoke up. “That’d be all right, wouldn’t it, Daddy?”

“I reckon,” Frankie said. “If she knows how to fix soup beans. Long as I’ve got a pot of beans and a pan of cornbread, I’ll be just fine.”

“Myra knows how to cook,” John said. “That’s one thing her granny taught her.”

I sat there like a stone, unable to look at anyone. The Odoms went on eating, the tension gone from the room. When his plate was clean, Frankie Odom said, “How about a cup of coffee?” Peggy stood up and went to the kitchen, like they all expected her to. I felt trapped, the table so crowded my elbows were touching Hollis’s on one side and John’s on the other. When I mumbled I’d be right back, I didn’t think anyone noticed I was leaving. They had begun to argue about the store. Their querulous voices, John’s the loudest among them, chased me out the front door. I sat on the porch steps, grateful for the evening air. I breathed deeply, trying to still my hands. I pictured what Granny might be doing at that hour, reading her Bible, mending old dresses, knitting doilies, eating cornbread and buttermilk. I wanted to forget her warning about being careful what I wished for. I told myself I loved John and it was worth everything to have him. I needed him to come out and check on me. When the door creaked open behind me, I turned around hopefully. But it wasn’t John, it was Hollis. My face must have fallen because he said, “He’s a little bit busy right now. Him and Daddy’s going at it hot and heavy. I’m like you, I don’t like to be in the middle of a fuss.” He sat down on the steps beside me, uncomfortably close. He paused, gazing across the yard. Then he turned and studied me.

“You’re looking kind of sickly,” he said. “You all right?”

I glanced at him. “I’ll be okay in a minute.”

“You know, I used to get sick a lot when I was little. I always thought it was something in this old house making me puny. But I don’t get like that anymore.”

I turned my face, hot and flushed, wanting him to disappear. Sweat trickled under my dress even though the sun had gone down, bats wheeling around the streetlights.

Hollis didn’t take the hint. “I know what happened in yonder,” he said. “Nobody asked you what you wanted to do. But me and Daddy won’t be too much trouble.” He put his hand on my back. It took every ounce of my will not to recoil from his touch. “Don’t you worry about none of it. You got a friend right here. I won’t let them run over you.”

After that night, John began dropping me off at the Odom house twice a week. The first time, Frankie Odom answered the bell and said, “Hey there, darlin.” I followed him with my purse clasped to my side, holding my breath as I walked into the stench. He showed me to a bag of hairy green stalks on the table. “Do you know how to fry okrie?” he asked. I looked at him for a moment without answering. I had fried okra many times, but never for breakfast. “Well, get busy,” he said. “I’m starving plumb to death.” He sat there as I tried to cook, not telling me where the iron skillet was or the lard or the flour or the knife, only talking about everything else as I sweated over the stove. He didn’t comment when I presented a plate of hot fried okra. He fell to eating and I stood fidgeting, not knowing what else to do. After a while he lifted his head from the plate as if remembering my presence and said, “You can give the bathroom a going-over.”

I searched for something to clean with until I found a jug of bleach and a scrap of yellowed shirt under the kitchen sink. I did the best I could with what I had to scour away the mildew and rust stains. When I heard the front door open and close an hour later, I hoped it was John coming back for me. I stepped into the gloomy hall and it was Hollis again, standing in a square of light in the foyer. “Got to work and figured out I lost my dadblame wallet,” he said, to no one in particular. Then he saw me and froze, head cocked like a bird of prey. “It’s your day to cook and clean, I guess.” I nodded. We looked at each other. It would have been impolite to go back into the bathroom and pretend to scrub. I stood still as he came creaking down the hall to me, aware of being alone in that foul house with two men I didn’t know and who didn’t feel like family.

“Come to think of it,” he said, “I ain’t seen that pocketbook since yesterday. I bet you it dropped out of my britches when I was out yonder pulling weeds.” He paused, appraising me in a way that made my ears warm. “Are you good at finding things?”

“What?”

“Two pairs of eyes is better than one. Come on out here with me and look for it.”

I stepped blinking into the sun behind him, out the back door and down the steps into the yard. My feet were heavy as if in protest, the bleach-smelling rag still in my fist. I looked down at it numbly and dropped it in the dirt beside the stoop. He stopped, hands on his hips, surveying the yard. I stood a few paces behind him, waiting for him to go on. Finally, I shaded my eyes against the sun and asked, “Where were you pulling weeds at?”

“Out in the garden.”

I saw it across the yard, dry cornstalks leaning over a patch of snarled briars and weeds, a few tomato vines and green bean plants rising out of the ruins. I wondered what good it would do to pull weeds in all that mess. I followed Hollis across the yard and up close it was even more overrun. He stood at the edge and said, “Go ahead, your eyes is keener than mine. A woman pays more attention than a man.” When I didn’t move right away, he took me by the elbow and guided me into the patch. “A man can’t do without his pocketbook,” he said. “My driver license is in there.” He stooped and began to pick his way across the rows. “It’s odd how my eyes works. I can’t find nothing when I’m looking for it, even if it’s right under my nose.” I was relieved when he fell silent. We searched for a while without speaking, but I should have known he wouldn’t keep quiet. I was learning fast about his awkward need to tell me things. “But you take any kind of pattern and my eyes will make a picture out of it,” he blurted, startling me. “Like when I was little, I got to seeing faces. The worst one came out of this water stain over my bed. Had an open mouth with pointed teeth and the meanest eyes you ever seen. You might say I was dreaming it, except I seen it other places. I seen it in the wallpaper and the spots on the mirrors. It got to where it followed me everywhere. Then one day, I told John about it. He was washing the dishes and I was drying them. I was seeing it right then, in the suds of the dishwater. You know what John said to me? He said, ‘I see it, too.’ That was all. Not another word about it to this day. But that was all I needed. After that, we was brothers in a way that went deeper than blood.” I didn’t know how to respond. I concentrated on looking for the wallet, hoping to find it fast. I was beginning to feel frantic, green flies buzzing around my head as I ran my hands over the ground. When my fingers finally passed over the wallet, hidden under the bug-bitten leaves of a melon vine, I almost sighed with relief. I held it up, black cowhide warm from the sun. He laughed and said, “I knowed you’d find it quicker than me. I’m a pretty good judge of people.”

We stood up and I handed him the wallet, thinking I would escape. Then he said, “Let me show you something.” It was all I could do to remain there beside him, half sick from his closeness and the heat. He opened the wallet and reached in with thumb and forefinger to pull out what looked like a clump of gray hair, pressed flat and bound with a rubber band. “I ain’t never showed nobody this,” he said. “But me and you can tell each other things.” He held his hand near my face. “Did John ever say how Mama died?”

I closed my eyes against what lay in Hollis’s palm. “John doesn’t like talking about it,” I said, wishing he wouldn’t talk about it either. But somehow I knew he wouldn’t let me go. I wondered if he’d even left his wallet in the garden on purpose.

“We was boys when it happened. John and Lonnie and Eugene was off to the store with Daddy but I wasn’t old enough yet to go. Mama was sick with the stomach flu. I heard a thump in her room. I went up the stairs and when I opened the door I seen her laying facedown on the floor. I reckon she had fell out of the bed. I turned her over and soon as I seen her face, I knowed she was gone. I don’t know what made me do it, but Daddy had give me a little old pocketknife. I knelt down there and sawed off a hank of her hair before I went in and called anybody.” I stared down at the dull gray clump, a gag rising in my throat. “I like to keep it on me somewheres,” he said. “Blood kin is worth a lot to me.” I looked at his face because I couldn’t stand to look at the hair. He stared into my eyes, as always standing too close. “Just like these dogtags,” he said, not taking his eyes off mine as he pulled them by the chain out of his collar. “My daddy fought in the Second World War. He killed a bunch of Japs with these right here around his neck. I think family’s about the most important thing there is. Don’t you?”

He had edged even closer to me. I stepped backward, turning my ankle. “I better get to work,” I said. My voice came out no more than a whisper.

Hollis reached and took a strand of my hair, held it without looking at it, his black eyes still boring into me. “You reckon you and John’ll have a son one day?”

I didn’t say what came to me. I hope not, if he would turn out anything like you.

I wish I didn’t remember Hollis so well. I used to believe certain houses were haunted but now I think it’s just me. One day not long ago, I saw the tail of Granny’s dress disappearing around a bend, walking along the fencerow with a bag looking for greens to cook. She always soaked them in vinegar to kill the poison. One frozen morning last winter I woke to the sounds of squealing, sure I would find Granddaddy at the barn scraping a hog, the ground beneath steaming from its warm blood. But the barn was empty and shadowed and still. I stood listening for echoes but there was only the rushing creek. If this place is haunted, at least it has good spirits along with the bad.

Not like the house where John grew up, the sulfur smell clinging to windowsills and sink drains and doorsteps. Being away from Granny and the mountain wore on me after so long, did something to my mind. I knew it was probably rats, but sometimes I heard voices behind the walls there, like babbling in a foreign language. Sometimes I saw flashes of John as a boy with a mop of black hair, hooded eyes and white skin, crouching behind doors and peering around corners, disappearing when I turned around. There was, like Hollis said, a feeling of being watched. Part of it was the pictures. Dusting the frames I examined John’s mother, wiping her face clean with my rag. Her eyes were chilling behind her glasses, dead and vacant as a wax dummy’s.

I was less nervous when Frankie left me alone in the house, driving off in his old Cadillac to check on the store. I preferred whatever ghosts or demons there were to my father-in-law, hawking phlegm into his handkerchief and chain-smoking at the kitchen table as he listened to the radio, sleeping in his chair with his mouth open and his head lolling on his shoulder. When Hollis came home for dinner, he leaned on the counter with arms folded and ankles crossed, watching me cook. Sometimes he helped with the dishes and I winced when his fingers met mine under the water, always touching me on purpose.

I had Hollis’s full attention, but it was John’s that I longed for. More and more he seemed preoccupied, his eyes seldom settling on me. If we had conversations, I started them. Sometimes after work on Fridays he didn’t come home and I knew he was at the only bar in town. When his eyes did find me I saw his disappointment. I wasn’t what he had expected or wanted. Spending my days in haunted houses, I felt like a ghost myself. By the first of September, I was starving for a little bit of life. That’s why when I saw a burning bush sprouting up by the back steps of the Odom house, something moved in me.

The bush was sick and stunted-looking, just beginning to turn red. I had been sweeping the back stoop and stopped to lean on the broom for a closer look, half expecting a voice to come out of it. When a car door slammed somewhere down the street, I woke up and glanced around. The yard was bare, the garden still weed-choked. On impulse, I ran to Frankie Odom’s shed, a lean-to with a rusted tin roof like a half-peeled-off scab. I scraped back the splintery door and saw a shovel against the far wall. I climbed over piles of junk to reach it, a nail from a rotten board scratching my leg in the process. I carried the shovel out, looking left and right to make sure no one saw.

Beside the stoop, I stood on the shovel and dug into the hard ground. When the dirt was loose enough I reached into the hole I had made and lifted the burning bush out by a rich-smelling ball of roots and soil. I took it up the steps and into the kitchen, shedding black crumbs I would sweep up before Frankie or Hollis came home. I leaned the bush in an empty mop bucket while I soaked a dish towel to wrap around its roots. Frankie had left a brown grocery sack of half-rotten tomatoes on the counter, the only yield of his miserable garden. He’d said on his way out the door that morning, “Them’s for you and John to take home.” I unloaded the tomatoes and found the burning bush was small enough to fit inside. One by one I replaced the tomatoes and folded over the sack. I sat for a while looking at my handiwork, feeling guilty and alive. When John came to pick me up I ran out holding the bag by its bottom. “Your daddy gave us some tomatoes,” I said. He looked away, switching a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other.

The next day I didn’t have to go to the Odom house. I watched John eat breakfast, anxious for him to leave. When he was gone I went to the back of the lot beside the tracks where the landlord had a shed much like Frankie Odom’s. I didn’t have to look far for the shovel. It was leaning inside the door shrouded in cobwebs. Until then, I hadn’t tried planting anything where it looked like nothing would grow. But this burning bush was different somehow. If I was careful, maybe it would live. I took the grocery bag around the house, heading for a back corner where John might never see what I had stolen. On the way, I passed the wood stacked under the bedroom window for winter, sprouting fungus and crawling with bugs. That’s when I noticed for the first time a squat door in the house’s block foundation near the woodpile, made of weathered gray boards and fastened shut with a rusty hasp. I paused to inspect it, the shovel in one hand and the grocery bag in the other. Just as I was about to move on, I heard a noise coming from under the house. I froze, not sure I had heard anything. I put down the bag and knelt before the door. Then it came again, a sly shifting. I hesitated before reaching to unlock the hasp. I pulled the door open, hinges groaning, and lowered myself on all fours. What I saw when my eyes adjusted to the gloom made my stomach turn. Under the house it was moldy and earthen and tomblike. The dirt was littered with broken dishes and Mason jar fragments, pipes close overhead with the protective mummy wrappings of winter still clinging to their joints. Thoughts of closed caskets and burial alive flickered through my head. Then, not far from my hand, I saw something from a nightmare. It was a long blacksnake, coiled around what looked like a rabbit’s nest. I gasped and scrambled backward into the light. I sat for a moment catching my breath. I had never been afraid of snakes. Granny had taught me about them. Once I held her hand in a field, looking up at one dangling from a tree branch like a black noose. “It’s just an old rat snake,” she said. “It ain’t poison.” I wasn’t afraid then because she told me not to be. But lately I hadn’t been myself. It felt suddenly important to take another look, if only because I knew Granny would have.

The rabbit’s nest was made from a ring of dried grass and puffs of cottony fur. In the middle were the babies, tiny and almost hairless, eyes still closed, noses and ears the color of flesh. One was caught in the snake’s unhinged mouth, only its back legs left to be consumed. I backed silently out and rose to my feet without taking my eyes off the snake. I reached for the shovel and chopped at the long rope of its body the best I could, until it lay in raw, pink pieces around the nest. I stood back panting and leaned the shovel against the house. Then I got down on my belly and went as far under the house as I was willing to venture. Looking closer, I saw punctures in one of the tiny bodies. I reached over the snake and prodded with my finger at the baby rabbit, dead but still warm. Then the third one began to squeal, a high, piercing alarm that made me scramble out backward again, bumping my head on the pipes. After a while I crawled back under and took the baby rabbit still screaming into my palm, unable to believe something so small could have such a voice. I held it in the sun begging it to stop, whispering into my cupped palms until the cries died away. I took the baby rabbit inside, the burning bush leaning forgotten against the house, one secret traded for another.

I had to hurry so I wouldn’t be late making supper. I put the sightless creature in a shoebox stuffed with strips torn from one of John’s flannel shirts. I searched the kitchen drawers until I found an old medicine dropper and climbed on my bed to feed it drips of warm milk. At first it stiffened like it would choke but after a while it was content. When it was close to time for John to come home I took the shoebox and hid the rabbit in the hall closet, behind the water heater with the box Granddaddy carved for me. I had realized long ago the box was something John would despise and might destroy. Now I knew the rabbit was something he wouldn’t stand for either, because it comforted me.

All that night during supper I worried the rabbit would cry in its shattering way, but the house was still as we sat at the table over our plates. When John was finished he went to drink in front of the television set he’d bought one week with our grocery money. He didn’t question why I was warming milk or why I went to the bathroom so many times. If he noticed me leaving our bed all through the night, he didn’t seem to care. As long as I kept the baby rabbit full, maybe I could have something of my own for a while.

For almost a month, I took the shoebox with me to the Odom house hidden in a bag of cleaning supplies. Once or twice I thought Hollis would find me out, the way he always hovered close. But, as if by instinct, the baby rabbit kept quiet when he was around. It was fattening up, its fur thickening, its eyes opening, thriving despite the cow’s milk and the dark closet where it lived. It liked to nestle under my chin, still and warm and breathing fast. Granny always said I had a touch with animals. Holding the rabbit close to my heart, I promised when it was strong enough I’d find a way to turn it loose on the mountain. I felt more like myself in those few weeks, having something alive that depended on me, something that knew in its blood and bones what it meant to be wild.

Then Hollis showed up on my doorstep one day near the end of September, while I was feeding the baby rabbit from its dropper. When the knock came, I hurried to settle the rabbit in its bed of rags and hide it behind the water heater. I thought it might cry out because its feeding had been interrupted, but it only rooted at the stuffing of its bed. I looked down at myself on the way to answer the door. It was noon but I was still in my nightgown. I wanted to throw on some clothes or at least a housecoat, but the knocking came again, louder and more persistent. When I opened the door and saw Hollis, my shoulders slumped. He took off his cap and scratched at his flattened hair. “I was about to think you was gone somewheres,” he said. When I didn’t respond, he replaced his cap and sighed. “Well. I was on my dinner break and thought I’d look in on you.”

“I’m all right,” I said.

He looked past me into the front room. “Shoo, it’s kindly hot out here. Looks like we’re having Indian summer. Can I trouble you for a drink of water?”

He followed me to the kitchen and sat at the table as I filled a glass from the tap. I remembered my naked breasts under the thin nightgown fabric and stood at the sink with my arms crossed while he drank the water in long gulps, Adam’s apple bobbing. Then he put down his glass hard and I jumped. He laughed at me. “What’s got you so wound up?”

I glanced toward the kitchen doorway, willing the baby rabbit to stay asleep.

“I bet you thought I was John, coming in for dinner,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Sometimes he eats in town.”

Hollis grinned. “If I had you waiting on me, I’d come home to eat.”

I dropped my eyes, face burning.

Then he said in his awkward way, “Most people thinks me and John favors.”

I decided to ignore him, hoping the less attention I gave him the sooner he would go away. I went to the table and took his glass, not touching where his mouth had been.

“Do you think me and John looks alike?” he asked.

I turned my back to him and rinsed the glass in the sink. “No.”

He fell silent, seeming to think it over. “All right,” he said after a long pause, “I didn’t mean to bother you. I just thought I’d see if you needed anything.”

I turned around and looked at him, waiting for him to leave.

“Hope I didn’t bother you,” he said.

“No,” I said. “It was nice of you to stop.”

I thought he would go but he only sat there staring at me, smiling in a way that made my guts draw into a knot, eyes moving over my face, my hair, my breasts, so intent that I almost felt his touch. After a moment he said, “You don’t like me much, do you?”

I froze, caught off guard. Before I could think, I blurted out, “No.”

His smile died. My hand rose to my throat. For a second I wasn’t sure if I had spoken out loud. “You got a smart mouth, girl,” he murmured, the shock plain on his face. I thought to apologize, but nothing came out. Hollis’s neck and ears turned red. “My brother’s run through a lot of women in his day,” he said. “Don’t think you’re any different than the rest of them.” Then he got up from his chair and stalked to the front door, slamming it behind him. I went to the window to make sure he got into his truck and left. I stood for a long time gnawing my fingernails, knowing I had made a mistake.

I would like to pretend that year never happened and enjoy the life I have now with my twins. Sometimes when I sit on the back steps the girl climbs onto my knees, long legs hanging down and bare toes poking at my calves. I bounce her as we watch the boy playing in the yard, peeling bark from a stick in ash-colored strips. He doesn’t come to me the way she does. I can’t remember the last time I held him. In cold months he follows me to the woodpile and takes the heaviest log he can carry, brings it behind me into the kitchen to put in the wood box beside the back door. He lights a fire and stands back as he tosses in kindling, embers shooting out and disappearing like the ghosts of fireflies. Summer nights I put the oil lamp on the table and we eat as moths bat at the blackened glass chimney. In the mornings they come to the kitchen and stand at the stove waiting for a biscuit. I blow on them before setting them down on their small palms.

I wish this was the only life I ever had, light coming in and ceilings high enough to breathe and windows and doors thrown always open. If a lizard skitters in, blue-tailed and fast, I watch him dart up the wall or into a baseboard crack. If the rain blows in, I don’t mop it up. I stand in the door hoping the smell will soak into the boards of the house to keep for days when the sun is shining. Even when it’s cold I leave the house open, letting snow flurries collect on the rugs. The twins are like me, used to all kinds of weather. They’re not sensitive to heat or cold, so I’m not careful with them. I know how it feels to be kept inside and how it will winnow away at your mind until you feel like nothing. Even with the baby rabbit to care for, being pent up in that house by the tracks finally became too much to bear. One gray morning at the beginning of October, rain beating and wind blowing and leaves plastered everywhere, my restlessness came to a head.

It was cold enough to need a fire and I went out to the woodpile, careful to avoid looking at the door in the house’s foundation. I stamped my shoes bringing in the wood and left them on the kitchen mat. John was watching football in the front room. He didn’t look at me as I got a fire going in the stove. I went to sit beside him, drawing a quilt around my shoulders and pressing my chilled body against him where he leaned on the couch arm. I needed his nearness to keep me sane. I needed back the loving John I had married. He stiffened, fingers curled around the glass he drank from, not moving to touch me. I kissed his neck, his jaw, his cheek. My heart sank when he wrenched his face away.

“Let’s go for a ride,” I said.

“Weather’s too bad,” he muttered.

“No it’s not.” I bit down hard on my lip. “You just don’t want to.”

“What if I don’t?” He turned on me, eyes bloodshot.

I rose from the couch and began to pace the floor. “I have to get out of here,” I told him. It was more a plea than a statement. “At least for a while. Give me the keys.”

“Where you going? Back to Granny?”

“I don’t know,” I said, voice cracking. “But I hate it here.”

John put down his drink. He sat forward on the couch. I knew I should hush before it was too late. “What do you mean? There ain’t nothing wrong with this place.”

“It’s too dark in here,” I said, unable to help myself.

“We’ll fix it up, then. I’ll hang you some wallpaper.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing can fix it.”

His jaw tightened. “You better watch yourself, Myra.”

I wanted to stop but I couldn’t. “I want to see Granny,” I said, close to tears.

He slammed his glass on the coffee table. “Quit being a suck baby.”

Something snapped in me then. I snatched his ashtray from the table in a plume of soot, white butts fluttering down like confetti, and threw it against the wall. It bounced off and skidded across the linoleum. We stared at it together, a silence descending over the room. Then John blinked up at me in disbelief, mouth hanging open. I thought it was going to happen at last. He was going to hit me. But just as he got up from the couch, the baby rabbit’s high squeal shattered the stillness. John’s face went pale. He jumped up, knocking over his glass. “What in the hell?” he said, looking toward the sound with big eyes. For a long moment I stood rooted in place. Then I took off running for the end of the hall. John caught up to me at the closet, the rabbit’s pitiful cries trapped inside. I plastered myself against the door but he shoved me out of the way so hard I stumbled and fell. He tore open the closet and followed the sound to the water heater. He knelt and pulled the shoebox out of the shadows. I begged him to give it to me but he didn’t answer. I watched his back as he stared into the box. After what felt like a lifetime, he stood slowly and turned to me. “Have you lost your mind?” he asked softly.

I thought of lying but there was no reason to. “I found it under the house.”

He studied me, face blank and unreadable. “No telling what all diseases you’ve brought in here,” he said at last. “That thing might have rabies.”

“It’s just a rabbit.”

“Looks like a rat to me.”

“It’s not a rat,” I whispered. I tried to get past him but he blocked my way.

“I don’t care what it is,” he said, dangerously calm. “It ain’t living in my house.”

Then he turned, raised his foot, and stomped the box with his boot. The squealing stopped. I stood gaping at it. John passed me, knocking into my shoulder, and walked out of the house. After a few minutes I heard the car start up and spin out of the gravel lot. I went to kneel over the box. Inside the rabbit’s back feet were kicking. I took its broken body into my palm one more time. A childhood memory came to me, of standing in a tobacco field plucking worms from sticky green leaves. At the end of the row I found a quivering mouse, sides laboring with rapid breath. It was sick, maybe poisoned, and small like me. I shut my eyes and twisted the baby rabbit’s neck until its legs were still.

In the days afterward, I thought more about my mother. I went outside one night when John was gone drinking and saw the dark hump of my mountain in the distance, beyond the scattered twinkle of lights. I stood on the tracks she died on, stretching out of sight before and behind me. I looked down at my feet and saw that the rocks were stained. I knelt to pick one up and imagined it was her blood. I closed my eyes and a cold wind came rushing down the tracks. It was a fresh smell, a breath of woodsy air different than cinders and pollution. I opened my mouth and breathed it deep. My kin-folks were so close. I couldn’t go up the mountain, because it would be hard to get back before John came home from work. He might drive up there after me and hurt me in front of Granny. I couldn’t stand that. But I could go to the pool hall and try to find some of my people. I was willing to risk that much. I made up my mind to go when Monday came.

There was no money in my purse but I’d been stealing a few dollars here and there from John’s wallet when he was passed out drunk. I had folded the bills and put them in a coffee can under the sink. I bathed and dressed and walked to the neighbor’s house to call a cab. Pit bulls lunged barking and whining at the ends of their chains when I stepped into the yard. A grizzled man wearing an unbuttoned western shirt opened the door. I asked if he had a phone I could use. For a long, anxious moment I thought he might say no, but then he opened the door wider to let me in. He stood watching suspiciously as I talked on the greasy phone hanging on his kitchen wall. I told the driver I wanted to go to the pool hall on Miller Avenue and went outside to wait in the yard.

The car that came was a dented Oldsmobile with a cracked windshield. The man who opened the back door for me had two missing front teeth. He tried to make small talk on the ride across town, but I ignored him until he gave up. He pulled into a gravel parking lot in front of a low gray building. There was no sign but I knew by the neon inside that this was the pool hall where my parents had met. As I walked across the dusty lot, gravel crunching under my shoes, I tried not to think what John would do if he came home to an empty house. I hesitated for only a moment before pushing open the door.

It was so dim inside after the bright sunlight that I was almost blind. I moved between the shabby pool tables to a snack bar where hot dogs turned in a glass case and fountain drinks gurgled. The man wiping his hands behind the counter had a round belly and great hairy forearms, but little hair on his head. “Help you?” he asked.

“No. Well, nothing to eat. I’m looking for somebody that used to come in here.”

He grinned and took a smoldering cigarette from an ashtray on the counter. “A lot of people come in here, sweetheart. What’s the name?”

“Mayes. Kenny Mayes, or Clio Mayes. Do you remember them?”

“Let me think.” He placed the cigarette between his thick lips and drew deeply. “There’s a lot of Mayeses around here. Now, there’s an old woman by the name of Mayes lives down the street, takes care of her uncle. He’s the one I bought this place from. But I don’t remember no Kenny. Is he a young man or a old man?”

“He died about eighteen years ago. He was … my daddy. I was hoping to find some of my family, maybe, to tell me more about him and my mother.”

“How about that,” the man said. He mashed out his cigarette. “I’ll tell you what. I believe that Mayes woman had a boy, got killed down here on the railroad tracks.”

“That’s him,” I said, suddenly hot and dizzy. “Where did you say she lives?”

“It’s a little old house down here at the stop sign. You can walk right to it. Watch out, though. Some of these boys around here might holler at you.” He laughed at himself so hard that he had a coughing fit. I left him there red-faced, hacking into his fist.

I stepped back out into the autumn sun, the sky overhead a hard, dark blue, and scanned the parking lot. I stopped when I saw Hollis leaning against the hood of his truck picking his teeth. When he saw me he pitched the toothpick into the gravel.

“Looking for ye ride?” he asked with a snide grin.

I glanced back at the door. I could have gone into the pool hall again but thought I might be more easily cornered in there. I couldn’t count on the owner to help, either. I had learned since marrying John and leaving home that men liked to stick together.

“I sent him on,” Hollis said, smile disappearing. He uncrossed his arms and began moving toward me. “My brother told me to keep an eye on you and it’s a good thing I did. I know he don’t want his wife sniffing around no pool hall.”

“I was looking for somebody,” I said, eyes darting left and right. “My family.”

“Why, your family’s right here. Ain’t I your family now?”

“I’ve got some errands,” I said, taking a step to the side. There was a wooded lot behind the building. If I could make it there, he’d never catch me. “Nothing I can’t walk to. You better get on back to the store. John says it gets busy around this time.”

“I’ll get on back to the store,” he said. “But you’re coming with me. I’d say John would like to know what you’ve been up to this morning.” He moved forward again.

I took another step sideways. “I’ll see John when he gets home.”

“You’re coming with me, girl,” Hollis said.

He lunged and before he could close the distance between us I bolted to the left, meaning to buttonhook around the corner of the pool hall and run for the woods. But Hollis was too close. He caught me and wrestled me to the ground. I struggled, kicking and bucking with him on my back. I slung my head and felt it connect with his teeth. He cursed but didn’t loosen his grip. He hoisted me to my feet, one arm clamped around my ribs. I looked desperately toward the pool hall door and saw the fat owner watching, eyes narrowed against the light. I squirmed around in Hollis’s arms, turning until our noses were inches apart. I hawked and spat into his eyes, wetting both of our faces. Then he drove his fist into my diaphragm, knocking the wind out of me. My eyes flew open and my body went limp. I knew then how it felt to drown. I opened my mouth wide, fighting for breath as Hollis dragged me to the truck and pushed me in. I lay against the seat sucking in whoops of air. “If you try to run off again,” Hollis panted, “I swear to God I’ll break your neck.” I couldn’t have run if I wanted to. I sagged against the door, still trying to breathe, as he came around the truck and climbed behind the wheel. He sat still for a few minutes, pulling himself together. He rubbed a finger across his teeth and pulled it out bloody. I rested my heavy head on the window as he started the truck and fishtailed across the parking lot into the street. After a while I tried my voice. “It’s none of your business,” I wheezed. He spat blood into his hand and wiped it on his pants. “My brother is my business,” he said. I didn’t say anything else because he was right. I thought of opening the truck door and jumping out. I didn’t know what my husband would do to me.

When we got to the store, John was leaning on the counter talking to a man whose bottom lip was fat with snuff. “What say, Grady?” Hollis said to the man, who touched the brim of his hat in greeting. Then Hollis looked at John. “Hey, brother,” he said. John glanced up and whatever he had meant to reply died on his tongue when he saw the shape I was in. “Let’s step in the back for a minute,” Hollis said. John hesitated and then called for Lonnie, who appeared from among the aisles to take John’s place behind the counter. I walked between them through the store to the back where there was a stagnant bathroom and one high window lighting shafts of dust like swarming bugs, cobwebs waving in dirty trails from the ceiling tiles. Hollis steered me around the empty boxes on the floor and backed me against a paint-splattered table under the window, knocking off another box spilling styrofoam peanuts. I looked at John but he made no move to stop him. “Why don’t you take a guess where I found your wife this morning?” Hollis said.

John stared at me. “Where have you been, Myra?”

“I found her down yonder at the pool hall. I hope nobody else seen her.”

John folded his arms. “I told you not to go down there,” he said with false patience. I recognized the calm look on his face. “I told you it would embarrass me.”

“I know,” I rasped, stomach still aching from Hollis’s blow.

“Is that all you’re going to say about it?”

“I can’t live the way I have been, John.”

He cocked his head, feigning interest. “How’s that?”

“Cooped up in the house.”

“You married me, Myra, not somebody else,” he said in his condescending way. “You know I expect a woman to keep her ass at home. I done told you that. And I ain’t the only one that believes that way. There’s a lot of men around here that would laugh at me if they seen my wife at the pool hall. Is that what you want?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be hanging around. I was just in and out.” Even as I spoke the words, I knew I was wasting what little breath I had.

“Now, Myra. You’re not understanding what I’m trying to say.” John and Hollis exchanged a glance that made me cold all over. Then John began undoing his belt. I watched his long fingers working, light glinting off the buckle.

“Hold her still, there,” he said to Hollis. I couldn’t bear the thought of Hollis’s hands on me again. I lurched forward, a guttural sound wrenching out of my throat. John intercepted me before I reached the door. He turned me around and clapped his hand over my mouth. I tried to bite but his fingers were too tight. “Dammit, Myra,” he said against my ear, “there’s customers out yonder.” I screamed around his hand. They carried me together back to the table. “You better shut her up or somebody’s going to call the law,” Hollis panted. As soon as John’s hand was gone I screamed again but it came out more like a croak. “Hold her still,” John ordered. I heard his belt slithering free of its loops over their grunting and puffing. Hollis yanked my arms up so far behind my back I thought they would tear loose. My hoarse cries changed from anger to pain, bright flares shooting up behind my eyes. John forced me over the table and Hollis shoved my dress up over my hips. I began to cry hard, snot dangling from my nose. Knowing that Hollis was watching hurt more than the belt licks. When it was over, I fell silent and still, trying to stifle my sobs. Then Lonnie opened the door and poked his head in. “What in the world’s going on back here?” he said. “I thought Grady was fixing to call the sheriff.”

I summoned the last of my strength and tried to run again but John caught me easily. He held me against his chest and laughed. In that moment, I had no love for him left. “Good Lord, Myra,” he said.

“You’re wild as a buck. I hate I had to do you that way, but I can’t let you run around on me. You ought to have more respect for me than that.”

From that day forward, my marriage to John was like a fever dream from a time before I could talk. He didn’t allow me to leave the house for anything, not even to cook and clean for his father. Sometimes I see the twins building something out of sticks and mud and remember walls I was trapped between. I look down at my fingers once slammed in doors and can’t go back inside a house. I have to sit on rocks and climb into trees and stretch out under the arms of flowering bushes. I have to forget Thanksgiving Day of that other life, when I stood at the window wearing the same dress and shoes I got married in, trying to see Bloodroot Mountain through the fog. The sky was steel-colored, the ground frozen hard. John was sitting on the couch. “You’ll have to cook something,” he said. “We can’t go without a dish.” He had already been drinking for hours. Lately he didn’t go anywhere, even to work, without being drunk on whiskey. He thought I would eat Thanksgiving dinner in that awful house with his mean people, but I had other plans.

“Make some of that banana pudding,” he said.

“It’s already made,” I lied. “I wanted to take a sweet potato casserole like your daddy asked for, but this morning I saw we don’t have any pecans.”

John rolled his eyes. “You should have put it on the grocery list and I would have got it for you. I swear, Myra, sometimes I think your mind ain’t right.”

“I could still make it,” I said. “It just takes about fifteen minutes for the top to get bubbly. Why don’t you let me run to the store?”

He paused, maybe suspicious. “Daddy don’t need no sweet potato casserole.”

“I don’t know, John,” I said, not taking my eyes away from the distant outline of the mountain. “Don’t you think we ought to stay on his good side? You know Hollis is the pet. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if Frankie didn’t leave him everything.”

John thought it over. “Daddy ain’t got the smarts to make a will.”

“Well,” I said, turning to look at him. “You’re probably right.”

John was quiet for a minute. Then he sighed. “Aw, hell. I reckon I can run and get some for you. What is it, pecans? But you better have it ready to stick in the oven as soon as I get back. I don’t want them waiting on us to eat. I’d never live it down.”

“It’s already put together in the refrigerator,” I lied again without a pang of remorse. “All I have to do is sprinkle the nuts on top. Be sure to get the chopped ones.”

As soon as John walked out, I grabbed my purse and put on my coat. Since he was taking the car, I would have to go back to the neighbor’s and call Mr. Barnett to pick me up. I hated to do it on Thanksgiving, but a cab to Bloodroot Mountain would cost more than I had. Besides that, I missed Granny too much to be polite. I went to the door, meaning to peek out and see if John had gone. When I opened it, he was standing on the stoop about to reach for the knob. “Myra—” he was saying. He froze, face falling. “I left my keys.” He looked at the purse on my arm. “Where you headed?” I hesitated. The thought of a whipping didn’t scare me much anymore. “Home,” I said. He stared at me for a few seconds. Then his features transformed into something so ugly I’ll never forget.

He grabbed me by the hair and yanked me out the door, pulling me into a headlock. “Don’t tell me where you’re going,” he said against my ear, whiskey breath blasting into my face. “Daddy’s expecting you to eat over yonder and that’s what you’re going to do.” My purse fell and one shoe came off as he dragged me backward across the ground. If he hadn’t been drunk there would have been no chance, but he stumbled over a rock on the way to the car. I twisted out of his loosened grip and took off running. I couldn’t head for the road because he was blocking the way. I swerved around the house, thinking dimly of cutting through the backyard and making it to the neighbor’s. But I wasn’t fast enough limping on one shoe. John caught me at the woodpile, snagging the end of my hair and pulling me as if by a rope back under his arm. This time, I knew, he wouldn’t make a mistake. He forced me to my knees in front of the door in the house’s foundation. I shut my eyes, expecting him to undo his belt, but he held me still instead. I could feel him looking around, chest rising and falling behind me, seeming to think over what to do next. “All right then,” he said at last. “You don’t want to go with me, you don’t have to.” I glanced over at the door and it dawned on me slowly what he meantto do. I began to beg but it was like trying to reason with a demon. He dragged me closer and unlocked the hasp with one hand. He opened the door and shoved my head down with almost superhuman strength. I resisted but it didn’t take long for my body to fold in half. He skidded backward on the seat of his pants and shoved me under the house with his boots. I banged my head hard on the pipes, my hand grating on a shard of Mason jar.

He slammed the door shut behind me with a bang. I flipped over on my back, breathing in ragged shrieks, and beat at the boards of the door with my shoe. He must have been leaning with all his weight against it. Within seconds I heard him locking the hasp and wedging something through its ring, maybe a scrap of wood from the pile. Then there was silence. I called John’s name, voice shrill with panic, but he didn’t answer. I listened for any hint of his presence outside the door. I pounded at the boards again with my feet and screamed until my throat felt bloody. Then I heard the car start up and roar out of the lot. I went rigid, staring up in disbelief. That’s when I saw by the light falling through twin holes in one of the foundation’s cinder blocks how close the house was to my face. A yellowed blouse tied to a pipe hung inches from my nose. There was a stench of decaying earth and mildew and moth balls. I turned my head and saw the skin and bones of the blacksnake I had killed. I struggled to calm myself but it was hard to think.

The house was too low for me to sit up. When I tried to raise on all fours my back bumped against the pipes. I inched through the gloom on my belly and hammered at the door with my fist. Then I searched the dirt and found a chunk of block that crumbled to pieces as I pounded with it. Straining to see, I made out the shape of a rake handle near a stack of dishes. I dragged it back to the door and battered until my hands were raw and full of splinters but it wouldn’t budge. I dropped the handle and crawled over to press my face against one of the cinder block’s holes. I looked out and saw only frozen ground. I fell on my side and huddled in a shivering heap under my coat, unable to stop the tears from pouring out. I wept for a long time, until my eyes hurt and my voice was gone.

Afterward, minutes or hours passed in tomblike silence. My teeth chattered and my bare foot ached from the cold. I dozed and memories came to me of other winters. Once I followed bird tracks to a tree on its side, roots in the air. As I climbed among the branches it began to snow, white drifts piling. For a long time I hid looking up through the branches, watching the flakes sway down. Then I dreamed of another day on the way home from church, sitting between Granny and Granddaddy in the truck. Granddaddy slowed to a stop on the curving road and said, “Looky here, Myra Jean.” I peered over the dashboard and saw a red fox crossing, its coat shouting against the whiteness, bushy tail disappearing up the bank and into the roadside woods. Soon it became less like a memory and more like something that was happening. I smelled the exhaust of the puttering truck and felt the seat bouncing under me, snow scurrying over the hood like something alive.

The slam of John’s car door snapped me awake. I couldn’t tell how long I had been sleeping. I pressed my face to one of the holes again and called to him, begging him to let me out. After a moment I stopped, thinking I heard the approach of his footsteps. I scuttled on stiff elbows and knees for the door, hoping for his fingers to unlock the hasp. Instead I heard the front door slam shut like a gunshot behind him. I could almost follow his progress through the house by the creak of his boots on the floorboards. I scrabbled in the dirt for the rake handle and beat on the moldy wood overhead. Then I heard the muffled groan of mattress springs directly above me, where the bedroom was. My heart sank. I knew he had passed out. He might as well not even be there. But I pounded with the rake handle anyway, until I couldn’t feel my arms and shoulders. Finally I collapsed on my side and pulled my knees up under my dress tail against the cold. After a while, I began to drift off again. I wanted to be with Granny so much it was like searching for her inside myself and floating outward at the same time, over bare trees and brown water splitting the fields in two, fencerows like twigs strung together with thread. For a long time I circled Bloodroot Mountain, watching Granny pluck a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner as the Barnetts came up the hill bringing pumpkin pies for her.

I don’t remember anything else about being under the house. I think I was there for one day but it might have been more. When John opened the door in the morning I didn’t move. I only blinked at him. He knelt there sleepy-headed and rumpled, still half drunk. “Hell, Myra,” he said. “I didn’t mean to leave you out here so long.” When I still didn’t come he pulled me out by the ankles, dress rucking up and glass slicing my back. I barely felt it for the numbness. He hauled my body full length into the wintry sun and bent over me as I stared up blankly, like some creature born to live underground.

Back inside, I couldn’t get warm. John put his wooly socks on my feet and piled blankets on top of me. He sat on the edge of the bed waiting for me to speak. “What can I do to make you mind?” he asked at last. “I don’t understand it. I thought you wanted to be with me. Now you’re all the time trying to run home to your Granny. I ain’t letting you do me this way, Myra. I never took shit off of any woman and I don’t mean to start now.” He took a breath and blew it out. “Am I going to have to go up yonder and burn that place to the ground? If that’s what it takes to keep you from running off every time I turn around, by God I’ll do it.” I looked at his face in the light through the curtains, still sinister and beautiful. I didn’t know if I believed him. But I thought if he ever followed me there, he might hurt me and Granny both. I felt more trapped then in my bed with John than I had been under the house alone. At least there I had been away from him.

For days I shivered coughing under the blankets, burning up with fever. Once I woke from a nightmare and saw Hollis and John like goblins at the foot of my bed. John pulled the covers back from my feet and said, “Reckon I should take her to the hospital?”

Hollis spat tobacco juice into a can he was holding. “Nah, she’ll be all right.”

John peeled off one of the wooly socks. “Does that foot look frostbit to you?”

Hollis shook his head. “That girl’s tougher’n she looks.”

John seemed uncertain. “She might have pneumonia.”

Hollis scratched under his cap and resettled it on his head. Our eyes locked. “She ain’t got pneumonia,” he said. “She’s full of meanness, is her problem.”

John still didn’t look convinced. “I don’t know.”

Hollis spat into his can again. “A little bit of cold ain’t going to hurt her. Daddy claimed he used to slip laudanum to Mama whenever she went to messing around.”

“Yeah, well,” John said. “Mama’s dead, ain’t she?”

Hollis laughed and took hold of my foot. His touch burned through the numbness. “That laudanum’s hard to get these days, but I bet Rex Hamilton would give you some.”

John pulled the blanket back over me. “I ain’t giving her no laudanum.”

Hollis grinned. “You might have to before it’s over.”

They looked at me in silence for a long moment. Then Hollis said, “I better head out. Just let her lay here awhile. She’ll be up again trying to run off in no time flat.”

For months I kept a racking cough that hurt my chest. As I cooked and washed dishes I spat gouts of green phlegm into a dishrag. All winter I was weak and tired, face slick with sweat. I was never the same after my time under the house. I began to see things crawling toward me from the corners of my eyes. Once I thought there was a black dog at the foot of the bed but when I sat up it was a pile of dirty clothes. At night I slept beside John under heavy blankets, the fire dead in the stove. I put my feet between his warm calves, unable to hate him in the dark. I pretended he would protect me if a red-eyed thing crept into the room and that he was not the red-eyed thing himself. Sometimes when I heard his boots on the porch I thought of the winter before we got married, when I unwrapped his face from a scarf as if his mouth, his chin, his neck were all presents.

By the end of December, he was seldom home anymore. One morning passing the bathroom door, I heard the splash of him shaving and paused to look in. I stepped behind him and saw a love bite on his naked shoulder, speckles of blood sucked to the surface of his skin. I realized then that I didn’t care anymore. It was hard to remember how jealous I had once been of other women. Our eyes met in the mirror. His razor paused in mid stroke, tongue tucked into his cheek. After a while I turned and walked off. When he was gone to work, I wiped up the ring of soap scum and whiskers he left behind in the basin.

I stopped trying to run away, but he wasn’t satisfied. My complacence angered him somehow. He began to punish me for walking in front of the television or coughing too loud or spilling sugar on the counter. He threw empty beer bottles at the wall near my head, pressed his cigarettes into my flesh, bent my fingers back, and squeezed my wrists in the vise grip of his hands until I couldn’t feel them anymore. At first I fought back, leaving claw marks on his face and spit dripping from his nose. But as time went on, a stillness stole into me. His violence became something I bore, like when Granny brushed the knots from my hair before school in the mornings. I felt nothing anymore besides regret. But he kept trying to provoke some reaction that I was too sick and tired to give.

In the last months of our marriage, all John wanted to do was drink and eat. He had always loved my cooking, so I made big meals for him. I served him steaming plates heaped with meatloaf, okra, pork chops, soup beans, pickled beets, country fried steak, and cathead biscuits. I stuffed him with banana pudding and coffee cake and cobbler, all the things Granny had taught me to make. I kept him full and quiet as I had the baby rabbit. It was a means of self-preservation, but I didn’t like watching his once chiseled face softening and thickening, his belly beginning to lap over his belt buckle. I looked at pictures I’d taken of him in summer, posing by the car with an open shirt, standing under the trees with his arms crossed over his lean chest, and hardly recognized the man I saw.

John and I didn’t celebrate Christmas. He sat drinking in front of the television and I stood looking out the window at the snow-dusted ground, thinking about Granny. The next day while John was gone, Mr. Barnett drove her down the mountain to see me. It was a relief to feel her arms around me again, but I was too worried John might come home to enjoy her visit. I felt sick the whole time she and Mr. Barnett were sitting on the couch. After that she only came once more, near the end of February. I didn’t mean to cry when I opened the door and saw her standing on the porch, but there was no holding it in. As good as it was to see her, I was still shaking, afraid John might come home for dinner.

Each day it grew harder to bear the dark-paneled walls, the rats scurrying back into their holes when I turned on the lights, the whiskey bottles and charred cigarette butts littering the gulley alongside the tracks. Even when I cooked with the back door thrown open there was no relief from the thick smells of fatback and beans and lard because of the chemical tincture of factory smoke and the squall of train wheel on rust-colored track. Someone might ask how I lived through those last weeks married to John. The answer is simple. I wasn’t there with him. My body couldn’t hold my soul. It left that smothering place and found its way back to Bloodroot Mountain, like when John trapped me under the house. I whispered those magic lines and they took me right back home. “In darkness and amid the many shapes of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir unprofitable, and the fever of the world, have hung upon the beatings of my heart — how oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee … how often has my spirit turned to thee.” I could say the words and be gone somewhere John couldn’t follow. It didn’t matter what my hands were doing, washing dishes, peeling potatoes, scouring floors. My spirit’s hands were catching minnows darting silver in the shallow part of the creek. John couldn’t touch me where I was.

One morning after I heard the front door slam and John’s car start up, I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and looked up at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. I was stunned by my reflection. It wasn’t just John who had changed. My hair was limp, my face haggard and thin. My eyes had lost their shine. I was still staring at my haunted reflection when I heard a bird twittering outside the bathroom window. It was a strange sound. There were no trees in the yard, so I thought I must have imagined it. I peeled back the curtain to open the window, but it was nailed shut. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care anymore if the bird was real or not. I saw the sun and knew spring had come. That’s when the clouds parted in my head. I began thinking clearer than I had in months. I knew I had to escape, at least for a while. I wasn’t willing to brave going home anymore, after John had threatened to burn it down. But the man at the pool hall had told me where I might find some of my people. I could go to the house and be back before John got home from work. There were a few dollars left in my old coffee can under the kitchen sink. I bathed and dressed and walked to the neighbor’s house to call a cab again.

The same snaggletooth driver as before let me out at the pool hall. I thought it wouldn’t make the right impression to arrive at my relatives’ house in a taxicab. There was no waiting to see my father’s mother. She was sitting on the blue concrete porch when I walked up. She was old and dark-skinned like an Indian woman, with what appeared to be a large goiter on her neck. The house was white with shutters painted blue to match the porch. It was dull and dirty and smudged, the yard crowded with dark trees and bushes. This was where I had lived with my parents. A cat stretched and rose to greet me on the steps. The old woman squinted down at me where I stood by the mailbox. I thought she would call out to ask who I was or what I wanted, but she only blinked. I went to the bottom step and she still didn’t speak. I wondered if she was blind.

“Hello,” I said. The cat rubbed against my ankles.

“Hidee,” she said. Her voice was deep and flat.

“Are you Kenny Mayes’s mother?”

There was a long silence. She looked at me. She wasn’t blind. “Who’s asking?”

“His daughter. I’m Kenny’s daughter, Myra.”

She fell silent again. I was sick to my stomach. I pushed back my sweaty hair and tried to smile. “Do you remember me?”

She adjusted herself in the green metal chair. I was careful not to stare at her goiter. It looked like a bullfrog’s throat sack. “I reckon,” she said.

“I wanted to see where he and my mother lived. And I wanted to see you.”

For a long moment she didn’t answer, until I thought I would go mad. Then finally she said, “I didn’t figure you wanted nothing to do with us.”

“Well,” I said, flustered. “I always wondered about my parents….”

“Kenny nor Clio neither one was fit to raise a youngun,” she said.

I stared up at her, not sure if I had heard right. I waited for her to go on, but she turned her face to the screen door and bellowed, “Imogene!” I jumped. Her voice was startlingly loud. The door creaked open and a slim woman came out. She had styled hair and tailored clothes. She seemed out of place there. She froze when she saw me.

“Imogene,” my grandmother said, “this girl claims to be Kenny’s youngun.”

Imogene looked at me and touched her face. Then she smiled. “Of course she is, Mother. Of course this is Kenny’s girl. Look at her eyes.”

We sat in a small, dark kitchen that smelled faintly of mellow garbage. I could hear an old man calling and moaning from another room. “That’s Uncle,” Imogene said to me as she poured coffee. There was a Chihuahua under the table. It trembled and growled at me. “Why don’t you see about him, Mother?”

“He’s all right,” my grandmother said flatly. “He’s always carrying on like that.” The dog stood up and barked at me, showing its teeth. “Hush, Peanut,” the old woman said, and kicked at his flank with her bare foot. I could see dirt caked under her toenails. The dog skittered away and curled up again out of reach.

I sipped the bitter coffee and studied them in the murky light. They didn’t seem related. Imogene’s face was soft and pretty. I liked the veined backs of her hands. “Mother, isn’t she beautiful?” Imogene asked. The old woman didn’t answer. “What have you been doing with yourself, Myra? You were just a baby when I last saw you.”

“I got married and moved down here with my husband, John Odom.”

“Is he any kin to Frankie Odom,” the old woman asked, “has a hardware store?”

“Yes, that’s John’s father,” I said. I was growing impatient. I wasn’t there to talk about myself. “I have some questions, I guess. About Kenny and Clio.”

“We’ll tell you anything we can,” Imogene said, smiling over her coffee. “Won’t we, Mother?” The old woman just went on blinking at me.

I thought hard but all my questions had suddenly evaporated. My mind was blank. They stared at me across the table. I felt my cheeks burning as I groped for something to say. Imogene looked concerned. Then her face brightened.

“Would you like to see some pictures?”

“Yes,” I said, exhaling at last.

“Mother, where are those albums?”

“Under the bed,” the old woman said. She grunted and rose to take a pack of sugar wafers from a bread box on the counter. She stood at the sink eating them as Imogene went for the albums. She looked at me, soggy crumbs falling down her goiter. I was sickened that she had given birth to my father and known my mother as a daughter-in-law. Imogene brought the albums to the table and removed one from the top of the stack. She wiped dust off its cover and turned the pages slowly, a parade of unfamiliar faces in grainy black and white. Then she stopped. “Here. This is Kenny and me,” she said. Two children stood on a porch with solemn expressions. It was hard to tell how far apart in age they were, but I guessed he was at least six years younger than her. I wanted to feel something. This was my father. But as the pages turned and I watched the progress of his growth from a boy into a young man, I realized I was waiting to see my mother’s face. We flipped through the second album and still no sign. It was like she, and I, had been erased from the history of these people. Granny had pictures of my mother but they were all taken on the mountain. I needed pictures of her there in that house, living a life I didn’t know or understand. Imogene must have seen my disappointment.

“Don’t you have any pictures of Clio around here, Mother?” she asked.

The old woman bit into another sugar wafer. “That girl never set still long enough to make a picture,” she said, spraying crumbs.

“Good Lord, Mother,” Imogene said, brows knitting together. “Do you have to talk so hateful all the time? Myra’s going to think we’re awful.” She turned to me and smiled. “I know I’ve got some at my house. Would you like to come home with me and take a look? I might could tell you some stories, too.”

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking of John for the first time since I got out of the taxi. “I told the cabdriver to be back at the pool hall by three.”

“I don’t live far,” Imogene said. “I can have you back before then.”

In the car she told me things about my mother that I’d never heard before. The time she let me taste ice cream on her finger and how I suckled with such a funny look on my face. The time she brought me in from the car bundled up and when she opened the blanket inside the warm house everyone saw that she had carried me across the yard upside down. But something bothered me about the way Imogene kept her eyes straight ahead as she spoke, the way she laughed nervously. I grew afraid that it was all lies, or at least only part of the story. We pulled up to her house, a nicely landscaped brick duplex. She lived in one side and kept tenants in the other. Getting out of the car, I realized how close we were to the Odom house. I ducked my head as we crossed the yard. Inside, the windows were hung with trailing plants and curios lined a white mantel. The room was clean but packed with antique furniture. There were mirrors and picture frames propped against one wall and old books stacked against another. “Don’t mind my mess,” Imogene said. “I’m opening myself a little shop next door, when the remodeling is done.” I glanced toward the window, hearing the hammering outside. She followed my eyes and said, “That’s my friend fixing the roof. I’ve been buying things along as I see them. I’ve loved old things since I was a little girl. It’s scary to try something new like this, but I always wanted my own store.” She seemed harried and scattered, talking perhaps to hide her embarrassment. We both knew she was keeping something from me. “You can have a seat, honey,” she said. “I’ll get my albums.”

I went to the brocade loveseat, lace doilies draped on its arms. I felt outside myself, in this unfamiliar place with this strange woman who was my aunt. When she came back, we spent a long time looking at the pictures. One of my mother holding me, not smiling. One of her surrounded by other people, a cigarette between her fingers. She smoked. I never knew. These are the things people forget to tell you. When all the pages were turned, we sat in silence. I supposed it was time to go but I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t stop thinking of Imogene’s nervous stories in the car, the troubling sense of being lied to. She waited expectantly, probably for me to say that I should be going, so I said it. “I ought to be getting back.” But I didn’t get up. My body resisted and when she was getting her purse I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. I blurted, “What were they really like?”

She turned to me, startled. “Hmm?”

“All I hear are the good stories. I want to hear all of the stories. Good and bad.”

Imogene put down her purse and keys. She came to sit beside me again. She put her hand on my knee. “Oh, honey,” she said.

“I want to know,” I said.

She grew quiet, looking down, biting her lip.

She looked back up. “But what good would it do? What does it matter now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Please tell me.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“All right. I’ll do the best I can.”

She began at the beginning. “I’ve always been different than them,” she said. “I hated growing up in that filthy house. You couldn’t go barefoot unless you wanted black feet. He tracked it in on his boots. We call him Uncle but he’s not. I figure he’s my grandfather. Grandmother moved in with her sister Lucille, who was married to Uncle. About a year later, Mother was born. I don’t know if Uncle raped Grandmother or if she slept with him. Are you sure you want to hear all this?” I nodded and she went on. “Uncle never was any good. I believe that’s part of why Kenny turned out how he did. It was in the blood. Now Grandmother and Lucille are gone and Uncle’s still kicking.

“We moved in with Grandmother and Lucille and Uncle after Kenny was born. Mother was a bastard, and Kenny and I grew up fatherless, too. But I do remember my father. The three of us lived for a while in a room over a storefront. He had a strong, nasty smell and whiskers. Straggly hair and no teeth, tattoos all over his arms. One of them was a dagger. I don’t know what happened to him. He wasn’t Kenny’s father.

“I was eight when Kenny was born. I doted on my brother, toting him around everywhere and letting him pitch tantrums. But he had the finest blond hair and the sweetest blue eyes, just like yours. He was the cutest little boy, until he got spoiled and hateful. He wouldn’t do his schoolwork and Mother didn’t care. I was the only one that ever tried to encourage him, but what was the use? She let him drop out in the eighth grade. He laid around for the rest of his life after that, except to go out drinking on the weekends. He’d take a job here and there, but he ended up quitting every one of them.

“Kenny’s father, your grandfather, was shot in a bar, I believe. Mother settled down after that. She was still mean as a snake on the inside, though. Sometimes I wonder why I still go over there. I wonder why I still love her. But it’s the same reason you love your mother, and will still love her after I say what I’m going to say. Uncle owned the pool hall where Kenny and Clio met. I had married my husband Gerald and moved out, so I wasn’t around much at that time. But I did get to know Clio, at least somewhat. She had hair like yours, even longer. She was a fairly nice-looking girl, but not like you. I’ll be honest. There was something odd about her eyes, like the lights were on and nobody home. She couldn’t stand to hang around the house. She got a job and left you with Kenny. I know you’re wondering if she loved you. I think so. She bought you frilly dresses. Put bows in your hair, which you had a lot of, even as a baby. She played with you like a doll. She wasn’t a bad girl. Just restless, and liked to drink. Kenny, I don’t know. It bothered him when you cried. He wanted to sleep late and you woke him up early. He and Mother didn’t watch you very well while Clio was at work. Some days I’d go over there and find you lying in the crib crying with a dirty diaper. You always had diaper rash where they didn’t change you enough, and I’d take you home with me.”

She paused then and looked down at her hands in her lap. I held my breath because I knew she was about to tell me whatever she had been withholding. I opened my mouth to stop her, to say that she was right, I didn’t want to know. But it was too late.

“She dropped you one time,” Imogene said, the words rushing together. “She and Kenny both were drunk. I believe she was on something, too. Some kind of pills. She said you just slipped through her fingers. You hit your head on the floor and Clio thought you were dead. She was out of her head when she called me. I could barely understand her. She wanted me to help her bury you. Said Kenny couldn’t do it, he was passed out, and Mother and Uncle both worked late at the pool hall on Friday nights so they weren’t home. I rushed over there scared to death what I would find. She was standing in the yard pacing back and forth with you, making this awful moaning noise. I jumped out of the car and snatched you out of her arms. I saw right away that you were just sleeping. I believe she would have buried you alive if I hadn’t gotten there fast. I begged Clio to let me drive you to the emergency room, but she was scared they might take you away from her. She could have been right. They might have. But I believe she did love you the best she knew how.” Imogene pulled a crumpled tissue from behind her watch band and dabbed at her eyes. She didn’t look at me. When she began again, her voice was unsteady.

“After a while Mother got tired of babysitting. She wouldn’t do it anymore. Clio started driving you up the mountain and leaving you with your grandmother when she and Kenny went out. Thank goodness you were with her when your mother and father got killed. Once Kenny and Clio were gone it was like you were gone, too. Your granny didn’t want me to visit, and Mother never tried to. She’s a hard-hearted woman, even being her daughter I can’t deny it. I went up the mountain to see you once anyway. It was a scary place to me, so hidden up there in the woods. But I saw that you were well taken care of. You won’t be able to see this now, and you might be angry at me for saying it, but for you it’s a blessing Kenny and Clio died. Your granny was nice enough to me while I was there. We had peach cobbler and coffee. But she asked me not to ever come back. I understood. So, there’s all of it. I’m your aunt. And I’m glad to see you again.”

I sat staring at her for a long time, unable to speak. A clock ticked loudly in the silence. After a while, it seemed Imogene felt obligated to say something. She looked out the window, where the hammering was still going on at intervals. “You know I told you I’m opening a shop next door?” she asked, voice high with false brightness. I nodded numbly. “Would you like to take a look before we go? These last renters left me with a mess, but it’s a world better now.” I nodded again, feeling like a sleepwalker. “Oh,” she said, glancing toward the kitchen. “I better take Ford a glass of tea. I bet he’s burning up out there.” I waited while she rattled around in the kitchen and came out with a frosty glass. She gathered her purse and keys and I followed her outside on automatic pilot. I went behind Imogene in a daze, the dress I’d put on that morning sticking to my legs in a heat that was uncharacteristic for such an early spring day. She talked with forced enthusiasm about the sign she would have painted with her name in fancy script, and where it would hang above the shop door. I pretended to listen, but her voice was distant and hazy to me.

There was a man coming shirtless down from the roof. “I brought you a drink, Ford,” Imogene said to him. He had long hippie hair, that’s what John would have called it. His chest and belly glistened with sweat. He smiled, showing good white teeth, and drank the tea down with long gulps. “Thank you,” he said.

“How’s it coming?” Imogene asked.

“Nearly finished.” He looked at me with eyes like John’s, but kinder. Then I noticed his hand on the slippery glass. One of the fingers was missing.

“This is my niece,” Imogene said, “Myra Odom. Myra, this is Ford Hendrix.”

We nodded to each other. The sun was in my eyes. Birds twittered. I felt far away. “It’s funny how Ford and I met,” Imogene said. “We were at a garage sale down in Oak Ridge. This woman had a whole table full of old books, and Ford and I were like kids in a candy store. We got to talking and come to find out, Ford has quite a collection. I’ve been out to see them, haven’t I, Ford? You wouldn’t believe it. And Ford writes novels, too. He’s a regular celebrity these days, had a book signing down at the Plaza.”

Ford grinned. There was a silence. I realized he was staring at me, but I couldn’t concentrate on him or on what was being said. Then Imogene looked over her shoulder, toward her house. She frowned back at us. “Is that my telephone? I’d better go check. It might be Mother. Myra, I promise I’ll hurry back. I know you need to be somewhere.”

“You’re white as a sheet,” Ford said the instant she was gone. “Are you sick?”

I took a better look at him. He was older than me, at least late thirties, a handsome man. Not beautiful, as John once was, but good to look at. “No. I’m not sick.”

He wasn’t convinced. “It might be the heat. Let’s go over here in the shade.” When I didn’t move, he took my elbow. His touch startled me. I remembered the missing finger. I let him lead me under the trees. We sat down and I was grateful for the coolness.

“I didn’t know Imogene had a niece,” he said.

“I didn’t know I had an aunt,” I said. “Until today.”

“You and Imogene never met before now?”

“I wanted to know about my mother. She died when I was one.”

“I see. Did Imogene tell you?”

“Yes,” I said, looking down at the damp print of my dress. “She told me.”

“Ah,” he said. “She told you too much.”

I raised my head, startled. His face was very close.

“You have eyes like my husband’s,” I said, without knowing why.

“Well,” he said. “You have eyes like the Aegean Sea.”

“You’ve seen the Aegean Sea?”

“Yes. It’s very blue.”

“Imogene says you have a lot of books.”

“Yes.”

“Do you read poetry?”

“Some.”

“Wordsworth?”

“One of my favorites.”

“Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”

“Tintern Abbey.”

“Yes.”

Looking at him, soft hair, soft eyes, all soft, made me forget. Then Imogene was back and we stood up. She seemed hot and nervous. “That was Mother,” she said. “Uncle’s fell out of bed and she can’t get him up by herself.”

“Did she call for an ambulance?” Ford asked.

“No, he’s not hurt. He does this all the time. Myra, honey, I’m afraid we’ll have to run back by the house. I hope it won’t make you late.”

I remembered John and tried not to show my fear. “That’s okay,” I said.

“I can drive her back,” Ford spoke up. I stared at him mutely.

“Oh … are you sure?” Imogene turned to me, brow creased. “Myra, would that be okay with you? I wouldn’t dream of it if I didn’t trust Ford with my life.”

“No, it’s fine,” I said.

“I’m so sorry about this. Will you come back and see me?”

“Yes,” I said. But I didn’t mean it.

In his car I looked through the bug-splattered windshield, half sick on the smell of exhaust. When Imogene’s words drifted to the front of my mind I snuffed them like candle flames, not ready yet to sort them out. I looked at Ford behind the wheel, long legs in patched blue jeans, unbuttoned shirt blowing, one dark strand of hair trailing across his mouth. When he caught me staring he smiled but didn’t speak, somehow knowing I needed silence. I came back into myself with a start when I saw that we were close to the pool hall, turning onto the street that would take me back to John. Panic fluttered in my guts. “Don’t stop here,” I blurted as we neared the low building. “I don’t want to go home yet.” Ford didn’t seem surprised. He had slowed to turn in but kept on going. I was scared and relieved at the same time. Maybe I would never go back, should never go back, because John would probably kill me. But I didn’t want to think about that. I didn’t want to think about anything. It was easy there in the car with Ford to push it all away.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“I want to see your books.”

He looked at me and lifted his eyebrows. That was all. We drove for a long time with the wind blowing. The landscape reminded me of home, farmland unrolling on both sides of the dirt road and the mountains rising up in the distance, but I didn’t want to think about that either. I wanted to be someone else in a strange car with a strange man.

It was a long trailer with a muddy yard and cinder blocks up to the door. Dogs followed at our heels and one came inside with us, a small white mutt with matted fur. The living room was flooded with sun, dust motes dancing, and books piled everywhere. Ford turned to me and smiled awkwardly. We stood regarding each other in the middle of the cluttered room. “Home sweet home,” he said. I looked him over, so different than what I was used to. John was fastidious, at least in the beginning of our marriage. This man was sloppy, sweaty, and dirty. But he had a good face. “Wordsworth,” he said suddenly, and turned to search through the books. I watched his back moving, the chain of his spine under the open shirt. “Yes, here it is.” He brought a slim volume with yellowed leaves. “I found this in Pennsylvania.” He looked at the table of contents, scanning with one finger, and turned the brittle pages. I closed my eyes and listened as he read. “Five years have past, five summers, with the length of five long winters, and again I hear these waters, rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur. Once again do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, that on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion, and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky….”

The words sounded more beautiful to me than ever before. I focused on his voice, taking me away from everything, taking me back to my mountain. By the time he finished I had sunk down on the carpet. The dog came wagging to sniff my face. Then Ford knelt and I pictured his damaged hand when he put his arm around me. “She dropped me,” I said, beginning to cry, and he didn’t ask questions. He only said, “It’s okay.”

I kissed him first. For so long with John, I hadn’t been loved. I might never have been loved by my mother. If I retaliated against them, it was unconscious. I cared for nothing in that moment. There was no thought of revenge. Ford resisted at first, tried to pull back, but I thrust my whole self against his chest and he gave in. We stayed there on the floor. It felt like there was no time to move to his bed. When it was over we propped our backs against the couch and sat dazed and half naked, sweating in the heat of the stifling trailer. “What if I told you,” he said, “that I knew you were coming?”

“Oh?” I said, heart beating hard but slow. “How is that?”

“I have visions sometimes.”

We looked at each other. I smiled. “Visions.”

He smiled back. “Yes. Do you believe me?”

“No. There are no prophets in this day and age. Except maybe false ones.”

I began to gather my clothes around me, reaching for my shoes.

“Do you have to go? Stay with me for a while.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I’ve done wrong being here.”

“Stay with me forever, then,” he said.

“I’m married.”

“But he doesn’t love you.”

“How do you know?”

“I told you. I have visions.”

“Well. It’s still a sin, being here with you.”

“He’ll hurt you if you go back.”

“Probably. But I still have to go.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s got my granddaddy’s ring.”

Ford reached for me. “Myra. Your life is more important than a ring.”

“I’d never leave John without taking that ring with me.”

“You could sneak in while he’s sleeping and slip it right off.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I had the wild urge to laugh, even though nothing was funny. “John’s put on a few pounds. It might be stuck.”

Ford grinned. “You could grease up his finger,” he said, holding up his left hand. “Or you could do what my ex-wife did. I bet your husband’s a drinker, like I used to be. Nothing will pack on the pounds like beer. My ring was stuck, too. One night she got tired of me blowing our grocery money on booze. I came in drunk as a skunk and passed out cold. She got so mad she chopped off my finger, took my wedding ring and everything else of value we had and ran off with it. Haven’t heard from her since.”

I tossed my shoe at him. “You’re nuts.”

“I’ve heard that before,” he said. “Are you sure you have to go?”

I nodded. He kissed me and smoothed back my hair. For a long moment he studied my face. “Because in my vision,” he said, “we had babies together.”

Ford drove me to the pool hall and let me out. I slammed the door before I could hear his goodbye. I used a pay phone to call the hardware store. I knew John wouldn’t be there anymore, but I didn’t know what else to do. I stood in the parking lot under a streetlight for what seemed like hours, thinking he might come looking for me there. I only prayed he hadn’t been up the mountain. Sometime after dark he wheeled into the lot slinging gravel and leaned over the seat to open the passenger door. I was too numb to be afraid. He didn’t say anything on the drive, didn’t ask where I had been.

When we arrived at home I sat in the car and waited for him to pull me out by the hair, my knees scraping in the dirt. Grunting and puffing, he dragged me across the yard, my scalp screaming. He yanked up my dress and wrestled my legs open. There was no use begging him to stop. I fought hard but I was tired and he was strong. He forced himself on me as I looked up at the stars. I tried to send my soul floating out of my body again, back up to Bloodroot Mountain. Tears ran from the corners of my eyes toward my ears. Whatever wrong I’d done in swallowing that heart, surely this settled the score.

When it was all over, I lay still on the ground, careful not to look at his face. The night was cool. The neighbor’s dogs were barking. I closed my eyes and remembered them lunging at the ends of chains. Then it seemed I caught the scent of mountain woods. For a moment, I felt my mother’s ghost with me. I took in long, slow breaths of her.

My whole body was limp as John dragged me by the arms back to the door in the house’s foundation. I didn’t resist this time as he shoved me inside and locked it behind me. I lay on my back quivering in the blackness, spiders crawling over my arms and shoulders. I felt a warm wetness between my legs, maybe some of it blood. After a while my muscles loosened and I rested on the cool, grave-smelling dirt. Sometime during the night, listening to the thunder of a train that shook the house on top of me, the shine of its light flooding through the cinder block’s holes, I became sure there was life growing inside me. I wasn’t alone in my body anymore. I didn’t question how I could know such a thing. The only question was whether the child was fathered by John or Ford. But it didn’t really matter how it came into the world. All that mattered was the one certainty, that it was mine. I rested my hands on my womb. This baby had never bewitched John with a chicken heart. This baby had nothing to make amends for. I had to set it free.

John didn’t come back and open the door, but I could see better once the sun came up. After I heard his car leaving for work, I kicked with a kind of strength I didn’t have before. I hammered at the boards for hours with my feet, already warped from the last night I spent under the house. Finally there was a loud crack as the door broke loose from its hinges and fell forward onto the ground. I slid out into the sun, squinting against the light. I went inside and took a long, hot bath, carefully washing the throbbing place between my legs. I put on an old blouse and a pair of jeans and prepared to wait. It was Friday and I knew John would come stumbling home drunk in the dark. He would fall across the couch on his face as he did every weekend when his paycheck was spent. I went to the front room and sat thinking of the hours I’d spent there away from home, where I had draped myself in mountain laurel, plaited crowns with this flower, wound myself in that vine, stepped out of green tangles smelling of honeysuckle so that Granny scooped me up and drank my hair like sweet tea in the summertime. It was hard to remember exactly how long I’d been trapped in that house with John, ten months or ten years. I saw the bits of me that had fallen off, the chiseled-off curls of flesh and bone like raw wood he had whittled from me. At some point I stretched my sore body out on the couch and slept, hands folded across the baby I now had to live for. When I woke up later, it was night. I sat up, eyes wide, afraid John had stolen into the house. I tensed and listened to the dark. There was nothing but the hum of the refrigerator.

Then I heard his car engine die out in the gravel lot and a deep calm settled in my guts. Sometimes he was too drunk to find his way home but this night he made it. I had willed him down the one-way streets, past the junkyard to this place, when so many times before I had wished his car wrapped around a telephone pole. As he fumbled with the lock until the door swung open, I got up from the couch and receded into the shadows, crouched in the corner to wait. His footsteps were heavy, a floorboard cracking under his boots. He fell across the couch I had just vacated, springs groaning. He didn’t stumble to the bathroom as he did sometimes when he came home drunk. I was glad because it meant he would lose consciousness faster. He lay there, knuckles trailing along the floor, loose fist finally harmless. I watched the stinking bulk of him rise and fall until he began to snore. I slunk across the floor and knelt before him, the stench of whiskey hanging over him like a cloud. I plucked at his fat pink fingers and he didn’t stir. I pulled his hand up into the weak light and placed it on the coffee table where I could see it better. I took a long look at Granddaddy’s ring and knew that I couldn’t pull it off. It hadn’t been removed since that night we stood in the preacher’s house and I slid it onto the flesh of a hand like carved marble. Now it was part of the ruin John had become.

I licked my lips. My heart began to beat for what felt like the first time in months, blood pumping hot and fast through my cold veins. I slipped into the kitchen and turned on the light and paced back and forth, trying to think. I couldn’t let him keep what was left of Granny and Granddaddy and the home where I ran like a horse through the trees. I wouldn’t give him the color of bloodroot and true love. It was blasphemy on his finger. It was hard to remember how much I once loved seeing it there, how I nibbled, kissed, sucked at that ring-finger tip ten times a day. Once upon a time, seeing his fingers laced through mine and the dark shine of that bloodred ring sent heat racing all over me.

I caught sight of myself reflected in the kitchen window, a white horror mask with black eye sockets and long snarls of matted hair. It was the wild woman I saw when John first opened the door of that place. There was an exhilarating moment when I knew it would end for me one way or another. That’s when I caught sight of the hatchet, leaning against the wood box beside the back door. I stood looking at it for a long time, thinking of the story Ford told about his missing finger. I tried to keep my breathing slow and calm as I crossed the kitchen and picked up the hatchet, its heft comforting in my hands.

I went silently back to the front room. All the time I had spent learning to be invisible was finally paying off. The limp slab of his arm had fallen from the coffee table and I gently replaced it. Granddaddy’s ring glittered in the pale streetlight. I raised the hatchet high and brought it down fast. The sound was loud in my ears, the force of the hatchet whacking through fingers and lodging in wood jarring my arms, causing me to bite down hard on my tongue. John bellowed and rose up, his eyes unfocused and searching. Without thinking, I yanked the hatchet free from the coffee table and brought the blunt end crashing up into his chin. There was a crunch of teeth as he fell backward.

I didn’t wait to see if he was out cold or dead. I grubbed around on the floor until I found the ring under the coffee table. Somehow it was still wedged on John’s finger. After a moment’s hesitation, I scooped up both ring and finger and stuffed them wet and warm in the pocket of my jeans. I ran to the bedroom and slung the bag I had already packed over my shoulder. I left out the back door and as I crossed the kitchen I could hear the terrible gurgling noises he made. I thought they might be his death throes and there was only relief. I fled across the barren yard, away from the tracks and the smothering house and the time I spent there. I’ll never forget that satisfying whack. It still lives in me, still vibrates through my arms. When I open my box it’s not just the ring that comforts me. It’s that scrap of finger, like a shaving I whittled off for myself, carved out of all those months. It was only fair, after the curls of me he left scattered. No matter what I’d done to bewitch him, it was only fair that I take a piece of his hide with me.

I walked out into the night with John’s finger and Granddaddy’s ring in my pocket. I didn’t have to change my clothes. Most of the blood was on John, not me. I walked and walked on those trash-littered roads, busted beer bottles, boarded-up buildings, dark houses. For a while a stray dog traveled alongside me, tail down and eyes watchful. He probably smelled John’s blood in my pocket. Above was the clearest night I’d ever seen, so many stars it made me dizzy to crane my neck and look up. Seeing them eased the ragged pain in my shoulder. Just when I thought I couldn’t go another step, God sent a car to me, a woman coming home from the night shift. She took one look at me and said, “Get in.” She asked if I needed help and I told her I only needed to go home.

She had bleached blond hair, permed tight, and some man’s name tattooed on her wrist. Her long fingernails tapped the cracked steering wheel as she talked on and on, false teeth slipping. She spoke of her no-good husband and her lazy sons and the arrogant foreman at the plant. I dozed with my head against the car window, her disembodied smoker’s voice loud in my exhausted head. She didn’t seem to mind or even notice that my eyes were closed, that I was drifting. She drove me all the way to the foot of Bloodroot Mountain without asking any questions. She said, “I can’t go up yonder. I’ve got to get back to the house before my old man wakes up.” I didn’t mind. I got out of her car and thanked her. It was a fitting way to come home. It was the third day of March, 1975. The sun was rising between the trees, fog low to the ground, the mountain high on both sides of me. I watched the woman’s taillights disappear back toward town.

I’d had time to rest in the woman’s car but my feet and back still wept. I was still sore between the legs and my shoulder felt dislocated where I’d yanked the hatchet free from the wood of the coffee table. It didn’t matter. The mountain looked beautiful, as if dressed up for my homecoming. I could have run when I saw the house. The house of Granny and Granddaddy and me, the house of us at supper in the kitchen, the house of being rocked on Granddaddy’s lap and reading books on the steps, the house, the home, of my soul and spirit. As I went up the hill there was no sound, of leaf or animal or even my feet in the dew-damp grass. It felt like I had been gone for a thousand years. Once I made it across the yard I could finally rest. My blood would run easy and warm from my head to my toes, not because of the mountain, but because of Granny and all that she was to me. I wondered if she would have a fire going. Yesterday’s warm weather seemed to have fled and it was a chilly morning. I thought of Granny bent over stoking the woodstove at night in the yellow-lit kitchen, potatoes sometimes baking in the embers, and how in the winter mornings before school, nestled under the blankets with my cold nose poking out, I’d hear her bringing in the kindling. All my life, she’d kept a good fire going for me. I imagined her pouring coffee, the wispy curl of her hair, the knotty crook of her finger. No matter the curse, no matter the charm, no matter the sins I’d committed, there she was, behind that door, as if she had been there since the world began.

But the closer I got to the house, the more I began to fear that I had returned too late. The place was so still, and Granny was usually up at this hour. She always said her old bones couldn’t rest for long. I noticed there was no smoke from the chimney, no light in the kitchen window. I moved faster to reach the door but hesitated before turning the knob. I pushed it open slowly, not wanting to see. It was like being twelve again, opening the door to Granddaddy’s death, only it was Granny this time, slumped in his chair, eyes closed and mouth slack. Beside her on the table was not a carved box, but a cup of coffee that I was sure had grown cold. Gray light crept across the floor toward her slippered feet. I froze as I had that other day five years ago looking at Granddaddy, no breath coming to fill my lungs. I ran to her and dropped to my knees. I gathered her legs in my arms, covered in broken blood vessels like ugly bruises. I buried my head in her lap and wept out loud. Then I felt a hand on my head, fumbling at my hair. I sucked in a breath and looked up. There was Granny, blinking as if she was still half asleep. “Myra?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s me. I came home.” Her fingers tightened in my hair, tugged at the roots as she stared at me, maybe struggling to comprehend my real presence. Then she said, “Thank Jesus. I thought I was fixing to die up here without you.”

We cried together as I rested with my head on Granny’s knees, her hand tangled up in my hair. She seemed afraid to let go. When she finally released me, I raised my face and smiled at her through my tears. She opened her mouth, maybe to ask questions, but she must have decided against it. She wiped her cheeks with one shaky hand and said, “You’re plumb wore out. Let me put you in the bed and we’ll talk about it later.”

“I can’t sleep,” I said. But even as I dragged myself to my feet, I knew it wasn’t true. I could sleep, but only if she sat in the rocker for a while watching over me.

Granny pulled herself to her feet with a groan but then she stopped short, eyes growing wide. She was looking at the pocket of my jeans. I followed her stare and saw it, too, a stiff patch of dried maroon. She asked sharply, “What’s happened to you?”

“Nothing,” I said, still looking down at my pocket. Somehow I had managed to forget what I’d stuffed inside. I reached in and pulled out John’s finger. I offered it to her in the palm of my hand, the usual shine of Granddaddy’s ring dulled by John’s dark blood. We looked at it together. “They laws,” Granny said softly. “Is he dead?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. That’s when the reality of what I had done crashed down on me. “I ran off in a hurry. If he’s not, Granny, he’ll come up here after me.”

“Well.” She looked toward the bedroom. “I’ve got your granddaddy’s shotgun.”

“Oh no,” I whispered. “Look what I’ve got us into.”

She took hold of my chin. “Don’t you talk like that. I’m just praising the Lord to have you back. Don’t matter to me what it took to get you here.” She glanced down at the finger. “We’ve got to get rid of that thing.”

“No,” I said.

Her eyes flew open wide again. “You can’t keep that, and him might be dead. That’s evidence, girl! Why in the devil would you want to anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I said, crying again. “I can’t throw it away. Not right now.”

“All right.” She reached out to caress my cheek. “Don’t get wrought up. We’ll worry about getting shed of it later. But you can’t hold it like that.” She grimaced and it was the first time I’d ever seen Granny recoil from blood. It had always been natural to us here on the mountain, slaughtering hogs and killing chickens and birthing babies and treating Granddaddy’s various gashes and wounds. But this, I saw, was too much for her.

“Where’s the box?” I asked. “The one Granddaddy made me?”

“Myra—” she began, but something she saw in me, maybe the madness I could barely suppress, caused her to give up. “Come on,” she said, and I followed her to the back room. She knelt in front of her bed and pulled out the box. We stood in the growing sun as she opened it for me to lay the finger inside, still pushed through Granddaddy’s wedding ring. I put both ring and finger into the box and we looked at each other for a long moment across it. Her wrinkled face was blank. It was hard to guess what she was thinking. Then she clapped the lid back on the box and knelt, old joints popping, and replaced it in the cottony grave of the mattress hole. She took me by the arm and led me to the bed. “Get out of them dirty britches,” she said. “I’ll bring you a nightgown.”

“What if he comes?”

“I’ll set up with you.”

I undressed and climbed into bed. I was already half asleep before she returned with the gown. It smelled like her and my home. I slept for what seemed like days, having nightmares that John had come and hurt Granny and one where he ripped the child I was carrying out of my womb and ran away with it. I roused up and saw Granny sitting in the rocking chair watching over me, Granddaddy’s gun across her knees.

“Granny,” I said.

She turned to me, startled. “What, honey?”

“I’m going to have a baby.”

She stopped rocking. “Have you been to the doctor?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

“I just do.”

She looked at me, thinking. Then she nodded. “I’ll make you an appointment with Dr. Weems. He’s old as the hills but he’s got a sound mind. He’ll take good care of you.”

“I’m not going to any doctor,” I said, a little too loud. “I want you to take care of me. You used to help Grandmaw Ruth with babies. You know as much as Dr. Weems.”

“They laws, girl, it’s been sixty-odd years since I seen a baby born.”

“But you still know how to do it.”

Granny came to sit on the edge of the bed. “Quit talking crazy, Myra.”

“I’m not talking crazy. I know what I’m saying. Nobody but you and I will ever lay their hands on this baby. Nobody else will ever even know it’s alive.”

Granny frowned. “Myra Jean, no baby can live like that, and neither can you.”

“It’s the only way my baby can live. If John’s dead, I’m in a world of trouble. It’s a matter of time before they come after me. If you see anybody driving up the hill, you let me know and I’ll slip out the back and take this baby somewhere it’ll never be found.”

“Lord, Myra,” she said. “You know I couldn’t stand for you to leave me again.”

“Maybe it won’t come to that. If he’s alive, I figure he’ll be after me once he’s up and around again. I don’t know what I’ll do then. But no matter what happens, John or his family can’t know about my baby. I’d kill it before I’d let them have it.”

Granny took hold of my shoulders. “Don’t you say that. Don’t you ever.” Then she drew me close. “Ain’t nothing going to happen to this baby. I knowed the minute you opened them eyes miraculous things was going to come out of you.” She rocked me back and forth, like she used to when I was a little girl. “I can feel it all over myself.”

Granny’s faith made me stronger. Days and weeks passed and neither John nor the police came for me. I didn’t understand, but I was thankful for those months with Granny. At first, I didn’t want anyone to know I was home, but it was impossible to keep secrets from Mr. Barnett. He checked on Granny at least twice a week and brought her groceries on Saturdays. There was no use trying to hide from him. I opened the door when he knocked and he looked stunned. Then his eyes lit up. “It’s about time you got away from there,” he said. When my pregnancy began to show, Mr. Barnett eyed my belly but never acknowledged its roundness. I’m sure Granny told him about the baby, but he didn’t mention it to me. Soon the Cotters knew, too. Before Bill died, he stopped by to see about Granny because she hadn’t been at church. I wanted to hide then but Granny swore it would be all right. She trusted our neighbors, and I trusted her.

It was like being a child again but even better, at least when I could forget about John. Time stood still as the baby grew. Granny and I cooked together, washed clothes, read the newspaper and the Bible to each other. On my eighteenth birthday she made a cake and we ate it sitting on a quilt under the trees, looking into the woods as the summer wind blew over us. In the mornings we fed the chickens, brought in the eggs, and made breakfast. At dusk we picked green beans and weeded the flower beds. When fall came, we made apple butter outside over an open fire, taking turns stirring the kettle. All those months, Granny took good care of me, just as I had known she would. It came back to her fast, all that Grandmaw Ruth had taught her. She went up the mountain hunting roots and brewed special teas. She listened for the baby’s heart with her ear pressed to my belly. She examined me so gently I never felt a thing. One day she looked at me as I rolled out dough for a pie crust. “You’re getting awful big, not to be any further along than you are,” she said. “There might be two of them in there.” I put my hands on my swollen stomach. There was a kick, like an affirmation. I imagined two babies curled together inside me. It was comforting to think they weren’t alone in the dark of my womb.

Sometimes I thought of Ford’s soft eyes and gentle hands. I thought how he would love my babies if they belonged to him and maybe if they didn’t. I thought he might even love me, too. But those thoughts fled when I sat on the mattress with a scrap of John rotting inside. I could never be touched and kissed like that again and stay hidden. Sometimes I daydreamed about showing myself to Ford anyway, my growing belly draped in a sundress. I imagined how he might slide the straps down and kiss each shoulder and then the top of each heavy breast, take them in his hands to lighten my load, curl his long body around the babies in my womb and keep them safe with me through the night. Even now I look off the mountain and wish I could see where he is. I wish we could build a fire and sleep in the long field beside of his trailer and fry eggs in an iron skillet when we wake up in the morning. We could live with the twins among piles of books and matted dogs with ticks fattening behind their ears. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to grow up on a farm instead of high on a mountain. That’s one life I could have given my babies. It would have been easier there, better hidden from the Odoms, and I know I would have loved Ford. Part of me still does. But it was not the right life for my twins and me. This mountain is their birthright. It’s what I have to give.

They were born on the fifth day of November in 1975. I was sitting on the back steps with a jam biscuit, colored leaves skittering out of the woods across the yard. I didn’t have to read the poems from a book anymore. I had come to know them by heart. I was saying the verses out loud to my babies when the pains came. As soon as the first sharp contraction cramped low in my belly, all my fears came flooding back. I jumped up so fast that I almost lost my balance but I didn’t know what to do next. I paced in the brown grass in front of the steps, waiting for another pain. When it came I felt the panic welling up big and dark, threatening to wipe me out. Once the babies were outside of me it would be harder to protect them. Granny opened the door to ask if I was hungry and I stared at her with eyes that strained in their sockets. “Is it time?” she asked. I nodded. She spat her snuff into the dirt beside the steps, still holding the door open. “You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital? I can head down yonder and get Hacky right now.”

“No!” I shouted, trying to hold back tears.

“Well, okay. Don’t get all worked up. We’ll do just fine by ourselves.”

“What if John comes?”

“If he ain’t come after you by now, he ain’t going to.”

“He’s got brothers, Granny. The one named Hollis is awful. He—”

“Straighten up, Myra. This is a good day and we’re going to have a big time. Now come on in and put your feet up. It’ll be a long wait yet.”

It was a long wait, just as she said. I drank tea and Granny rubbed my feet and sometimes my back and sometimes my shoulders. She told me all the good stories again and read to me from the Bible and tried to teach me how to knit but it was hard to concentrate. Then she checked me once more and said, “I believe they’re ready.”

I was afraid at first, when the worst pains came, grinding in my abdomen. I couldn’t keep still. My fingers dug into the sheet. Everything was more vivid. Colors shouted and sound had the resonance of a bell. I heard my toes crack as I curled them. The mattress creaked under my writhing. Granny told me to push and there was a moment when I was sure the babies would never come out. I would be giving birth forever. I bore down, head thrashing from side to side, hair plastered to my cheeks and neck and forehead. I felt the babies battling to join me in this life. Everything I was, all that I had done right and wrong seemed far and distant. I gave one last shove, determined to have the babies even if the effort split my body in two. Then the first baby cried and Granny was laughing, shouting like she did sometimes in church, running up and down the aisle with her hands held high in the air. I fell back onto my pillow, the headboard knocking against the wall. “A little boy,” she said. “Lordy, he’s got stout lungs.”

I rested while she suctioned his mouth and nose with the same orange bulb syringe she had used on me when I had the croup. Then she wrapped him in a towel and placed him for a moment in a bureau drawer lined with a blanket. She came back to stand at the end of the bed and I gave one more hard push. The other child came and Granny shouted, “Praise Jesus, this’n’s a girl!” Both of us wept from relief and happiness.

Then I must have dozed for a while because the next thing I remember is a baby rooting at each breast, their downy black heads poking out of blankets. Granny sat on the edge of the bed leaning back on the pillow with me, sweat glistening on her face. It had taken almost as much out of her to bring my babies into the world as it had out of me. “What will you call them?” she asked, wiping her face with a clean diaper.

“I’ve always liked Laura,” I said, looking down at the baby girl. Granny had found an old pink shawl to wrap her in, so that we could tell the twins apart.

“That’s good,” Granny said. “Like mountain laurel. What about the boy?”

I looked him over for a long time, his button of a nose pressed against my breast. “Johnny,” I said at last. When I spoke the name out loud, it sounded right to me.

Granny was silent. I could tell she didn’t like it. Finally she asked, “How come?”

“Because I loved him once,” I said, gazing down at my baby boy.

“All right,” Granny murmured. But she still looked troubled.

I never told Granny about Ford, but sometimes I was tempted. I knew it disturbed her to think the twins were John’s babies. Maybe she was worried how they would turn out, but I wasn’t. I knew it didn’t matter who their daddy was. When I held them I didn’t think about their fathers. I just looked at them, pink lips suckling, and thought about God.

In the first weeks of their lives, every sudden movement, every creak, every pine knot exploding in the fire made me tense to run or fight. I couldn’t understand why John hadn’t come for me, and if he was dead, why someone else hadn’t. But Granny and the babies made it a precious time. Mr. Barnett brought a crib that had belonged to his own children, cleaned and smelling of beeswax, and moved it into Granny’s bedroom where we slept. Those first nights when I was so weary I could barely lift my head, Granny got up and brought the babies to me whenever they cried, singing hymns to them under her breath. As I grew stronger, we tended the babies together while the rest of the mountain slept, burping and swaddling by the light of Granny’s oil lamp, the only sounds their grunts and cries and swallows as they drank from my breast. Sometimes as Granny rocked the babies, one in the crook of each arm, I pretended to be asleep and watched her in secret through the fringe of my lashes. When she thought I wasn’t looking, her face always fell into a mask of exhaustion. Her ashen color made me sick with worry. I heard how she lost her breath while she worked in the kitchen and the yard. Sometimes when she spoke I saw the blue of her tongue. For a long time, I knew something was wrong.

Then one night Granny didn’t get up to help me when the babies cried. My heart ached with lonesomeness, but she had seemed so tired all day. I told the babies, “We’ll let Granny sleep.” But when I opened my eyes at dawn and she wasn’t making coffee, I knew. The babies were still resting. I crept by their crib into the front room. The house was cold. She hadn’t stoked up the fire. I stood for a moment in the door of my childhood bedroom looking at her, knowing this time it was for real. Winter light fell through the window across her face. Her mouth was open. Her arm dangled off the bed. I crossed the room and crawled under the quilts to be with her, to rest one last time on her shoulder.

This winter it will have been six years since Granny passed away. Sometimes when I think about her, I have to escape the house where she died and take a walk. That’s how I knew the present I wanted to give the twins. They spent most of their sixth birthday rolling down the hill all the way to the road while their chocolate cake rose, running back up with beggar’s lice on their clothes. I heard them laughing and wondered how I had ever wanted anything or anyone else, how a man could have been so important to me. I watched them pushing together a pile of leaves in the yard and dreamed of hiding with them in their fall-colored mountain. Later I stood on the back steps looking into the woods while they ate cake, the smell of woodsmoke drifting down from the Cotter farm. Everything was quiet indoors and out. The boy was solemn-eyed at the table, eating with his hands. The girl sat on her knees licking icing off her fingers. I went and lifted her out of the chair. She looked at me as I wiped the smears from her face with my dress tail, fine wisps of black hair in her eyes. The boy got down on his own, cleaning his mouth on the too-long sleeve of his flannel shirt. He could read me as they did each other and knew we were going somewhere. I knelt and the girl climbed on my back, arms tight under my chin. I knew she could make it because the twins have been all over the mountain, but I liked the weight of her body. When I galloped across the yard she giggled in my ear.

It would take a long time but we had plenty of daylight. The boy traveled his own way alongside us. I watched his black hair passing under the trees and tried to send everything I felt for him between the tall trunks as I had once sent my soul flying out of my body. I tried to tell him that I knew him, whether or not he knew me. I want to believe his spirit was with me, even as his body ranged out of sight. I saw that he’s worn his own paths on the mountain. Maybe he’s already been to the top. I know my twins think their own thoughts and have their own lives. Sometimes I wonder what it’s like inside of them.

The path’s not as treacherous as our elders claimed. For the last half mile the boy came out of the trees and climbed with us. When we passed the springhouse I wouldn’t let him stop for a drink. The waters there are poison now. The girl scrambled onto my back again at the place where Doug Cotter fell. The boy went ahead of us through the fog, surefooted as a mountain goat. After the outcropping, the slope leveled off and we reached the summit. The stories were true. There’s a meadow at the top. I thought John might be waiting there, his shadow face revealed at last, but there was only grass and trees. Doug once told me they called it Cotter Field. I thought it would be grown over, and it’s probably not as open as it once was, but it’s still mostly cleared off. Maybe Mark tends this spot where his ancestors drove their cattle to, or Mr. Barnett, who I think of now as the keeper of Bloodroot Mountain. But it could be Wild Rose who keeps the grasses trampled. I could tell she had been there. I could feel it. I knelt and closed my eyes. She’s part of the mountain now, a spirit in these woods. I know she’s finally free.

The girl slid off my back and went hopping over thatches of grass like dry hair with briars tangled in. The boy bent to chase a cricket over and under the bracken. There was a border of stunted trees, limbs broken and bare, and the hump of a slate-colored rock in the middle of the field like a tortoise unearthing itself. I saw the edge of the mountaintop and moved toward it, remembering a distant relative who had jumped off a cliff here ages ago. My steps quickened until I was almost running for the sky ahead of me, imagining how she might have flown, hair and dress billowing up. Then I tripped over a hole and caught myself on my hands, palms skidding over ridges of rock hidden in the weeds. I stayed on my hands and knees until I felt small fingers parting the black wings of my hair. I looked up and saw the girl between me and the edge. The boy joined her and there was a knowing in their eyes that made them seem old. If I had gone over I would have taken all of it with me, the things I’ve never spoken of, how the rabbit’s back legs kicked and went still, how it smells of grave dirt under old houses, how it feels to bring a hatchet blade down on human flesh. I swiped the hair from my eyes and sat back on my haunches, examining my palms. There were flecks of dirt and shale in the scrapes. I held them up to show the twins. They stepped closer, drawn to my blood.

I struggled to my feet and went to the border of bushes at the brink of the plunging rock face. I could almost see the cows grazing and the Cotter man looking over the fields in neat squares, farmhouses and red barns like toys from a train set, roads and fences dividing the green. The world didn’t seem as dangerous from up there. I felt a tug at my hem and saw the boy holding my dress tail, maybe afraid I would jump. For a long time he’s been restless. I told him we’d ride to the co-op with Mr. Barnett, but now I’m having second thoughts. So far I’ve managed not to lose my mind after what happened to me, but I couldn’t stand my twins being found by the Odoms. I have to protect them for as long as I can. If they were older, I know what I would tell them. You might leave but one day your blood will whisper to you. You’ll hear witches making magic in a holler, healing wind blowing down a swollen throat, the song of the woman who came here in a mule-drawn cart and made it home. One of these days, wherever you are, you’ll turn around and look toward the mountain, old and wild and bigger than you. You’ll look this way and know it’s still alive, whether I am or not anymore. I was only thinking the words but the girl came to me as if she had heard them out loud. She reached up and I swung her onto my hip. “Look, Mama,” she said, pointing at the world below. “Can I go down yonder?” I thought of Granny taking my itchy foot in her hand and ached with loneliness. “Yes, honey,” I said. But you’ll come back. Just like me, you’ll always come home.