Bloodroot

EPILOGUE. JOHN ODOM

Sometimes I get to missing the hills. I never thought I would when I first cut out and headed up north, but here in Rockford there’s buildings instead of trees everywhere you look and cars honking even in the dead of night. Living in a motel like I do, I can always hear somebody talking through the walls. It’s like I’m alone but I can’t ever get off by myself. If I think about the mountain where Myra came from, it don’t seem all that bad to me anymore. I understand now why she was so homesick being in Millertown. It’s took me a long time, but I’ve got to where I don’t hold a grudge against her. Since I’ve quit drinking and got a few decades older, I can look back and see how mean and crazy I was myself. I figure I ain’t nobody to judge the way Myra acted or where she ended up.

It’s lonesome how time passes. The world’s ten years into the second millennium and it’s been more than thirty since what Myra did to me. Sometimes I pass a mirror and expect to see myself whole. I get surprised by what I look like, even after so long. The doctor said I ought to have surgery, she’d busted my face up so bad. But I couldn’t hang around where people knew me any longer. Whenever my reflection surprises me, it’s like waking up without fingers all over again. I go right back to that night Myra ran away.

I don’t know how long I was out before I came to. My head and face hurt so bad I couldn’t think. First thing I knew was that I couldn’t move my jaw. I remember trying to call Myra, but I couldn’t say anything. I was half choking on blood and some of my teeth was broke out. What was left of them wouldn’t line up because she’d knocked my jaw crooked. I know how it sounds, but it took a few minutes to see that my fingers was gone. There was blood all over the place and I guess I was out for quite a while because it was tacky, not fresh. It was all over my shirt and the couch and the coffee table. That’s when I saw the fingers, one there on the table and one on the floor almost underneath it. It took a minute to understand they was my own fingers. I held up my left hand and saw that only my thumb and pinky was left, with the pinky hanging on by a string. I can’t say exactly what went through my head. I lurched around looking for Myra and bawling out in the yard. A train came up about that time and I couldn’t even hear myself hollering anymore.

What I kept seeing in my mind was her offering me that red ring like Eve giving Adam the apple, how her eyes was beautiful and shining, how wild her hair was around her face. The day she gave it to me, she led me up the steepest path I ever saw, a narrow dirt trail, and I nearly tripped I don’t know how many times over tree roots and rocks. One spot, we had to walk across a rotten tree trunk over a mud-hole and I nearly fell in. I was wore out before she was ready to rest. We came to a clearing where there was two big slabs of rock hanging over the bluff. It was a long way down. I was weak in the knees standing out on that ledge, but it was a pretty sight. It was summer and the trees was bright green. A breeze fluttered leaves around and lifted Myra’s hair off of her shoulders. She sat down with her long legs curled under her dress and I sat facing her. She was like a little girl. She said, “Close your eyes and hold out your hand.” I said, “It better not be poison ivy.” She said, “Just do it.” I put out my hand and she placed something in my palm. What she put there was a heavy lump, still warm from where she held it all the way up the mountain. It felt kind of like a lug nut. I opened my eyes and there it was, stones glimmering in the sunshine. I didn’t know if they was rubies or what, but I could tell that ring had cost a lot of money. I looked at her and she was excited, breathing fast and face rosy. “Put it on,” she said. “I know we’re not married yet, but I want you to have it.”

“I ain’t had time to get you one,” I said.

She said she didn’t care, so I went ahead and slipped it on my finger. It was loose but it fit better than I expected it to. She picked up my hand and held it against her cheek.

Standing in the yard that night, covered in blood with a train going by, it was hard to think about what to do next. I did have the sense to go back in the house and wrap my cut-off fingers in a dishrag and take them with me to the emergency room, in case they could be re-attached. The doctor told me later it was too late for that, but I didn’t know it at the time. I can’t say how I made it to the hospital. I don’t even remember driving over there. I kind of remember stumbling through the automatic doors at the emergency room and throwing up on the floor. I believe some boys came to help me up. Next thing I knew, I was laid out on a table and someway I had hung on to my fingers wrapped up in that dishrag. There was a young doctor standing over me, had blood on his scrubs, probably mine. I held the fingers out to him. I couldn’t talk. My mouth was busted all to pieces. The doctor took the rag and opened it up and stared into it. All of a sudden it came to me that one finger was missing and I understood then why she did it.

The doctor looked in my eyes and said, “What happened to you?”

That’s when I knew even if I could’ve answered him, I wouldn’t have. I’d never tell anybody. I was laid up sucking soup through a straw for a long time. I didn’t let the hospital call none of my people because I couldn’t stand for them to know what Myra did to me. At first I plotted how to kill her and get away with it. I knew right where she’d go, back home to her granny’s place. But in my heart, I didn’t want her dead or hurt like I was. She crawled under my skin the first time I saw her and she’s been there ever since.

Myra probably thinks I was the devil, but I loved her. I used to watch her sleeping and something about her hair against the white of the sheet pained my heart. Looking at her made me think about my mama, the only other woman I ever lived with. Once I stepped on a broke bottle and me and Mama sat on the front steps together while she dug it out. For a long time that was my best memory, her prying something out of me. I remember wishing she’d keep that glass, with my blood on it. I wanted her to have it but she pitched it in the weeds. That’s how it was for me. Pitched in the weeds. But after a while I got to where I didn’t feel a thing when I thought about that bloody glass, bitter or sweet. I got used to not being touched. She wasn’t no kind of mother. One time Hollis and me was wrestling and laughing on the kitchen floor while she was trying to talk on the telephone. She took off her shoe and threw it and hit Hollis right between the eyes. He had a knot there for a long time. She wasn’t much of a wife to my daddy, either. Once before city water came through and we still had a well, I remember a man coming in the yard and asking for a drink of water. He went behind the wellhouse to the spigot where Mama was rinsing specks of grass off of her feet after Eugene had mowed. I was outside throwing a baseball up and catching it. After a while I didn’t hear Mama or the man talking. I went around the wellhouse and saw them knelt down with the water still running, making a mud puddle under the spigot, and that man with his hand inside of Mama’s blouse. I never told Daddy, but he suspected her of running around anyway. One night after she came in drunk he broke down the bathroom door and dragged her out. I was watching on the stair landing. He beat her and kicked her and pulled her out the door by the hair of the head, out through the mud and into the street. He got down and straddled her and beat her some more, slapping her over and over in the face. Then he got up and come on back in the house, not even breathing hard. But after I got older, she quit going out all the time with her perfume on and her mouth smeared up. She got to where she stayed in the bed all day long. Daddy used to snigger and hint around that he was slipping something in her drinks to keep her at home. I still don’t know if he was just kidding or if he was being serious. There’s a lot of things about them times that I still ain’t figured out. Like whether or not my mama died of heart trouble or if I poisoned her.

I remember it was fall in a windstorm, leaves whirling up in little tornadoes and the sky gray with clouds skidding over. Dark was coming and Mama was stumbling around the kitchen trying to make supper, tanked up on nerve pills or whatever she was drinking. Finally she dropped a hot pan out of the oven and I went out the back door. I couldn’t stand being around her when she was like that. From outside, the house was cozy looking. Somebody passing on the street might have smelled the supper and seen the yellow kitchen window and wanted to come in out of the cold. But they didn’t know about Mama, puffy-eyed and hair sticking up from being in the bed all day, slumped over the stove in her old housecoat smoking a cigarette. They hadn’t heard the stories Daddy told at the supper table either, bragging about all the men he killed in the war. He talked about human life like it wasn’t worth a plug nickel, not even his own. He didn’t want to be stuck in Millertown with a wife and kids, he wanted to be in the Philippines with a gun on his shoulder, hunkered down waiting for somebody else to kill. He’d go on and on about how many arms and legs and skulls he’d shot off. Me and my brothers would just look down at our plates and keep on chewing, trying to be like him and not feel anything.

After I left Mama in the kitchen, I went down the steps and knelt to look under the porch. There was a stray dog under there, a black mutt with a white ruff that had showed up the day before. I thought it might have been hit by a car or something. It wagged its tail when I made kissing sounds but it wouldn’t come to me. It just laid down and cowered, ears back and licking its lips when I tried to lure it out. Daddy came over, wiping his grease-blacked hands on a rag where he’d been working on the car. “Is that thing still under there?” he asked. His coveralls smelled like cold weather and kerosene, leaves blowing across the yard behind him. I wanted to say no but he’d already seen it. “You better leave that old thing alone,” he said. “It might have rabies.” I looked at the dog, huddled beside the gas can, and knew it didn’t have rabies. Daddy went off for a minute and came back with a pie tin and a dirty white jug of something. I watched as he unscrewed the cap and poured thick green liquid into the tin. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Antifreeze. It’s supposed to taste good to dogs and cats. I bet you he’ll lap this right up.” He pushed the pie tin under the porch. The dog showed no interest at first but I figured it would later, when we was gone. It was probably pretty hungry and thirsty. We went in for supper and the whole time I was eating I kept praying that dog would be able to resist. When we got done I offered to take out the garbage, but Daddy said the can wasn’t full yet. I wanted to sneak and throw away that poison before the dog could take it, but Daddy watched me like a hawk all night. He must have suspected what I meant to do. The next morning I went out and looked under the porch. The pie tin was empty and the dog was gone. I don’t know if it went off somewhere else to die or if Daddy drug it off, but I knew it was dead one way or another. Just like one of them Japs Daddy killed.

A few weeks later, my mama got sick. She was upstairs in the bedroom hacking and coughing with a fever. She always had a smoker’s cough, but this was different. It might have been the flu or even pneumonia but nobody went to the doctor much at our house. It had got to be winter and Eugene and Lonnie was gone. A man had come in the store and offered them ten dollars apiece to saw up a tree that had fell in his yard. Me and Hollis was setting in front of the television when Daddy hollered for me to come in the kitchen. I could hear Mama having another coughing fit upstairs. Daddy glanced at the ceiling and held out a medicine cup to me, full to the top. “Take this cold medicine to your mammy.” He shook his head. “That racket’s fixing to run me nuts.” I took the cup and looked down into it. “Go on,” he said. “Before she hacks up a lung.” I was halfway up the stairs before I thought about the dog. I stopped and looked in that cup again. The liquid inside was kind of green, just like the antifreeze. My heart was knocking so hard I liked to lost my breath. But I thought about my daddy down yonder, telling me to do something. I’d had my backside striped with a belt enough times to know what would happen if I disobeyed him. So I went on up the stairs in the dark, into their room where the lamp was on. I hated going in there because it always smelled like the perfume she used instead of taking a bath. She rolled her eyes over at me and I saw she looked half drunk besides being sick. When she reached for the cup I held it back. I thought surely it was medicine and that was all. But I knew Daddy was liable to do anything. I had time to turn around and walk out of there. I could have poured whatever it was down the bathroom sink. Daddy never would have known the difference and Mama probably wouldn’t even have remembered me coming. Then I looked at her and thought of all the times she was mean to me and my brothers and how she let that man put his hand inside her blouse behind the wellhouse. She coughed again and motioned for me to give her the cup, like I was trying her patience. I watched her drink it down without a bit of complaint. I’d say she didn’t even know where she was, much less what it was she might be drinking.

Next day was a Saturday and I went to work with Daddy and Eugene and Lonnie. For once I was glad to go. I wanted to be as far away from that house and my mama as I could get. I’d heard her stumbling down to the bathroom in the night, back and forth until she finally must have slept down yonder on the floor. At first light I heard Daddy leading her back up to the bed. He made breakfast for us before work, fried eggs and baloney. Eugene was sitting across the table from me, mopping up runny egg yolk with a piece of light bread. “What’s wrong with Mama?” he asked, without looking up from his food.

Daddy was wolfing down his breakfast standing at the sink. He said, “I reckon she’s got the stomach flu. Hollis, you better keep an eye on her while we’re gone.” Then he looked at me and our eyes locked. I wish it was my imagination but later on when Hollis called, Daddy said, “You boys watch the store. I got to get on home.” Then his eyes locked on mine again. “Something’s happened to your mammy.” My bowels got hot and loose. He never said a word about giving me that cup. But for as long as I lived at home he’d give me a secret look every once in a while, like we was in cahoots together.

I can’t say for sure if I helped my daddy poison my mama, but thinking I might have weighs on me. Not a day goes by, and me getting to be an old man, that I don’t think about handing her that cup. I should’ve snatched it away from her and drunk it down myself. The world probably would have been better off. I know Myra would have been. For a while with her, I thought I could forget about it. I thought loving her could chase off whatever evil there was in me, but I was wrong. Someway, Myra brought out my bad side. I wanted to be good to her, but I didn’t know how. I never felt in control of myself around her. I got to drinking just to get my head back on straight. We made a promise before we got married to change for each other. Come to find out, there wasn’t no taming either one of us down. She couldn’t be the kind of wife I wanted, and I wasn’t cut out to be a husband. You can’t fight that old nature, at least that’s what I thought when I was younger. I figured there wasn’t no use, I might as well give up.

As soon as my jaw didn’t have to be wired shut no more I got out of that hospital. I packed my things and burned hers up in a barrel out behind the house and took off, with no intention of ever coming back. I cleaned out the bank account and got me a motel room until I could figure out what to do next. I decided to come up here to Rockford in Illinois, a city I’d been to with Daddy on a buying trip. It was hard to make ends meet at first. Nobody would hire me, looking the way I did and with my hand not working right. Finally a foreigner let me manage his motel. I’ve lived for decades in this tiny room with just a television for company. The cold has been hard to get used to. My jaw pains me all through the winters. The nights are so long, I don’t know whether to curse Myra or wish she was here to warm my back. The only person I let know I was alive was Hollis. I needed some cash so I told him what happened and where I was. He came to see me several times. He wanted to go up Bloodroot Mountain and cut Myra’s throat, or at least put the law on her, but I told him to leave her alone. He didn’t understand it, but he never fought me on anything. He said Daddy was fixing to call the sheriff and report me a missing person, but I got him to convince Daddy I’d finally dusted my hands of Myra and run off like I was always threatening to. Hollis was the one who let me know when Daddy died and left me a little inheritance. After him holding that store over our heads all them years, it ended up being worth next to nothing. But I needed the money, so I took it.

Running off to Illinois don’t mean I got away from the place and the people I came from, though. It ought to be easy here where it’s cold and the sky is like a blank slate. But something, maybe God, won’t let me forget. I could avoid the mirror. I could wear a glove, but I’ve learned the past would still find me. Like what happened today. The foreigner I work for subscribes to the national newspapers. Every morning I make a pot of coffee and read the paper in my office behind the curtains. I have to keep up with the world someway, since I don’t get out much. I opened the newspaper and saw a face I knew, even though I only laid eyes on it once. Right there above a black-and-white picture I saw my own last name. My hand shook so bad I sloshed coffee on my lap. Hollis told me a long time ago Myra had twin babies. I didn’t know what to think when I heard it. Back then, I hoped they wasn’t mine. Now the boy has won a prize for a book he wrote. If he was mine, I’d be proud. But I could never get in touch with them. They wouldn’t want to look at me and see on my face how bad it was between me and their mother. Besides that, if they are mine, it’s sad how they came into the world. Best thing for me to do is let them alone, like I should have done Myra.

All day I’ve been nervous after seeing my name in the newspaper. Maybe God’s trying to tell me that a man can’t run away from who he is and where he comes from. It’s like when that man came here looking for me once, about ten years after Myra took off. There was an ice storm coming and I was out salting the parking lot. The sky over the motel looked like sheet metal. He came walking across the highway from over at the truck stop. He could have used a haircut and a shave, had on a tatty old coat and a flannel shirt with holes in it. The heels of his boots was run down, like they’d seen a lot of traveling. He headed straight for me. I knew by the way he stared me down that he wasn’t looking for a room. I quit salting and we stood there sizing each other up. I figured he was caught off guard by my face, but that didn’t seem like all it was. I didn’t ask what I could help him with. I waited for him to talk first.

“I been working on the bank building they’re putting up downtown,” he said finally. I seen he had a rotten front tooth. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

“So what?”

“I heard from the men there’s somebody works here by the name of John Odom.”

I got to feeling dizzy-headed. I could tell where he was from by the way he talked.

“What if there is?”

“Is that you?”

“Who’s asking?”

“Doug Cotter. I believe we come from the same neck of the woods. You ever been to a place called Bloodroot Mountain?” I saw in his eyes that he knew I had been. He took a step toward me. He was tall. I didn’t know if I could take him or not.

“Well, what in the hell do you want?” I asked, trying not to show my nerves.

He looked me over again, seemed like he was thinking. Then he said, “I came here meaning to put you in the hospital. But it looks like somebody beat me to it.”

I forced myself to laugh. “What, did Myra send you here to finish the job?”

His eyes changed when he heard her name. It took him a second to collect his cool. Then he smiled in a way that hid his rotten tooth. He looked toward the truck stop where he came from. “Why don’t you let me buy you a cup of coffee?”

I went on across the highway with him. He didn’t seem to want a fight anymore. We sat at the counter and I ordered pie to go with my coffee, since he was paying. We both got quiet. I didn’t want to talk first but I couldn’t help it. The ice had started ticking on the window of the truck stop. I looked at the weather instead of his face. “I guess Myra left her mark on you, too,” I said. “Not on the outside, but I can still see it.” I looked back at him. My jaw had started aching. “Have you seen her?”

He shook his head and looked down into his coffee cup. “No. But I know where she is. Mental hospital over in Nashville. I thought you put her there, but now I don’t know.” I had already been told where Myra was. Before Hollis died, he kept me informed. But I wondered how she was surviving in a place like that, as bad as she’d hated being cooped up. “They auctioned off her house on the mountain,” he said. “My brother bid on it.” He smiled in his odd way. “I guess she left her mark on him, too.”

“What is it that woman does to people?” I said. All of a sudden the pie didn’t look good to me anymore. I dropped my fork on the plate.

“It’s funny you would ask that.” He looked out at the ice rain with me. “I’ve always thought I was cursed for loving Myra. Everywhere I go, bad luck follows me.”

I shook my head. “You and me both.”

“I don’t know.” He turned back to me. “I feel different now that I’ve seen you.”

“Why’s that?”

“There’s nothing supernatural about what she did to your face, is there? It’s not right, what we’ve put on her. She’s made out of flesh and blood, just like anybody else.”

I forced myself to laugh again. “Glad to be of service, buddy.”

He hung his head for a minute, like he was wore out. “I’m trying as hard as I can to forget about her,” he said. “But sometimes I still think I’d give anything to have her.”

Then he got up and paid the bill and left the truck stop. I never saw him again. Whenever I passed the new bank building downtown I didn’t look over there. I didn’t want to think about Myra anymore. I doubt he ever did manage to forget about her. I got to mulling over the things he said and wondering myself if I’d ever really get over her. Sometimes it seemed like she was crying out to me when winter storms came. I’d cover my ears to drown out her screams, begging me to rescue her from that old asylum. It drove me out one night into the snow and I fell on the ice in the parking lot. I thought I was dying of a heart attack and maybe I was having one, because the weight on my chest was so bad I couldn’t get up. I laid out yonder freezing for a long time, and all I could think was if I died right then I’d never see her again. I knew someday I had to find her.

But I didn’t go see her until Hollis had that aneurysm in 1996. I took a week off of work at the motel and went to Millertown to visit his grave. I knew it was time to look for Myra, too, while I was back down south. By then I didn’t want revenge for what she did to me, even though seeing her locked up would be the next thing to seeing her in hell. All I wanted from Myra was to look in her eyes one more time before I died.

It turned out I had to stay around Nashville longer than I meant to, since there was only certain visiting days. When it finally came time to see her, my guts was churning all the way up the road to the asylum. There was stone pillars marking the entrance and behind them I saw the shape of the building through a piece of woods. At first it looked like a big brick mansion, but closer up I saw how old and shabby it was, one or two trees shading a little patch of grass in front of the door. The parking lot was half empty, like the patients didn’t get many visitors. I could see why. I knew as soon as I passed through the steel doors it wasn’t a place I wanted to hang around long. It stunk like piss and bleach and I nearly gagged just walking to the nurse’s booth. When I went up the stairs to the third floor, there was crazy people everywhere. It was a din of shouting and laughing and crying and begging. One woman was slumped against the wall with her hair hanging in her face and I had to step over her legs on my way down the hall. Another one kept asking if I had brought her cigarettes. I liked to never shook her off of my arm.

When I found the room they told me was Myra’s, I tapped on the door with my good hand. It was quiet in there but seemed like I heard something moving, so I opened the door and went in. There was two beds and somebody curled up on their side in one of them, under the cover so all I could see was a half-bald head with a few strings of white hair. I thought surely that couldn’t be Myra. Then I saw her sitting in a plastic chair pulled up to the radiator under the window, looking down at a concrete path in the grass out in front of the asylum. It was a jolt to see how short her hair had been cut. I guess it was hard to take care of, as long as it used to be. It was limp as a dishrag and just a streak of black here and there left in it, even though she wasn’t no more than forty then. She had on clean pajamas but they was buttoned up wrong. When I came in she didn’t even turn her head. I walked over and stood in front of her and she still didn’t move her eyes. Then I knelt down beside of her chair and she turned away from the window with a pleasant look on her face, like she was coming out of a good dream. She might have been doped up, but I don’t think so. I looked in her eyes like I had been wanting to for so long. They was still blue, but not the same kind. I thought of my life in Rockford, how I’d stare across the empty lot behind the motel remembering her hair on the pillow and her legs under the sheet and forget what she did to me, wishing things had turned out different.

“It’s John,” I said. “I didn’t die.” It sounded stupid, but it was all that came out.

“Are you really here?” she asked. She didn’t seem afraid of me.

“Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t get over the shape she was in. I’d never seen nobody so skinny except in pictures. “Lord, Myra. I used to think I wanted to see you like this.”

She smiled a little but didn’t say anything.

“How do you stand it in here?”

She looked back at the window. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“I might.”

She turned back to me. Her eyes gave me shivers. “I can be anywhere I want to. Even home on the mountain.”

I cleared my throat. “You’ve been here a long time. Why ain’t they let you out?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

We both got quiet. It was a four-hour drive from Millertown to Nashville, plenty of time to figure out what I wanted to say to her, but all of a sudden my mind was blank. Finally I came up with something. “I heard you had a baby after … after we was through.”

She nodded. “Twins. A boy and a girl. I don’t think they’re yours.”

I felt my face get red. “Yeah. Well. Don’t they ever come and see you?”

“No. But I’m waiting.”

“What if they don’t ever come?”

“They will.”

“How do you know?”

“They can’t help it. We’re bound together.”

“I guess I couldn’t help it either,” I said. “But we was bad for each other.”

She nodded again. “It’s a shame we’re not the only ones who got hurt.”

I looked down at my bad hand. “Like Hollis. You might have heard your boy set fire to the store several years back. He rebuilt that place but it took a lot out of him. He never was well after that. Back in July he had a blood vessel to bust in his head. That’s what I’m doing down this way. I came home to see his grave. Lonnie claimed there wasn’t many at the funeral. He never got married or nothing. It’s kind of pitiful.”

We both got quiet again. I looked around the room to keep from looking at her face. The ceiling was high with cobwebs in the corners. I figured it was drafty there in the winters. There was flowered wallpaper but it didn’t do nothing to brighten up the place. I seen there was a desk between the two beds, bare with a layer of dust on top. It made me think about how long she’d been in there. She wasn’t acting all that crazy but I could tell something wasn’t right with her. I had the feeling if I’d come another day, she might have been different. I pictured her slumped against the wall with her legs sticking out, or maybe like one of them that shuffled around screaming and crying. My skin crawled, imagining her strapped down to a bed and put in a straitjacket and getting shock treatments. Then she asked, “John?”

I looked back at her eyes. “Yeah?”

“Why didn’t you come after me sooner?”

I tried to smile. “I’ve not come after you.”

“I thought you would come after me. I kept waiting. Why didn’t you come?”

I thought about it for a second. “Because I loved you once.”

She looked away. “Maybe. But it’s like you said. We were bad for each other.”

I couldn’t think of nothing else. I thought surely there was more I could say after driving so far and waiting so long, but I was tapped out. Then all of a sudden Myra reached out with her bony hand and touched my jaw where she had broke it. I quit breathing for a second. Her fingers moving over them lumps and scars done something to my heart. Nobody had touched me that way since I seen her last. It hurt me just about too much to take. I grabbed her fingers to stop them but once I had ahold of her I couldn’t let go. I closed my eyes and we stayed still for a while, me holding her hand on my ugly face. Finally she took it away and it was like losing her all over again. “I’m tired, John,” she said. “Please don’t come back.” I was relieved. She didn’t have to tell me twice. I never went back. But I know me and Myra will never be shed of each other. It don’t matter what I saw in that asylum, she’s still in my head with that long, long hair and them heaven blue eyes and legs that are always running away from me. I love and hate Myra Lamb now the same as I did then. There’s some things the years can’t do nothing about.

After I left Myra’s room I went and stood for a minute beside of the front doors under a tree, not feeling like driving. The wind was stirring up a whirl of leaves and the sky was turning stormy. I never thought much about God before what happened in them next few minutes. Some nights I still lay in the dark and doubt I ever saw or felt anything at all. I go back to figuring my life and all that’s happened in it has been an accident. But times like this morning, seeing that newspaper, I know it was real and no coincidence.

Standing in the shade beside of the asylum entrance, I looked out at the parking lot and saw them walking toward me from several yards away. They must have just got out of whatever car they had come in, a boy and girl that favored so much they had to be twins, with black hair and eyes like every other Odom’s down through time. Myra said they wasn’t mine but that boy was like an old picture of me come to life, only a different me that got out of the hills and made something of myself. I could tell by the proud way he carried hisself that one day he’d shake the dust of the mountains off his coat and walk away from there without looking back, if he hadn’t done it already. The girl was like a plainer version of Myra, pale with long hair blowing out behind her. There was a yellow-haired baby on her hip, stretching his arm up over his head to grab at the leaves fluttering down. It was easy to see by the way she smiled at him what kind of a mother she was. When they finally got near enough, that baby looked over and noticed me standing under the tree. His eyes was the same blue as Myra’s used to be. Then the hand that was grabbing at leaves reached for me. I wanted more than anything to touch him but I couldn’t move. I watched him disappear through the doors and stood there feeling like all that mattered in the world had left me behind. I felt the closeness of another life I might have had.

I used to think I was born worthless, considering the people I come from. But when I saw that blue-eyed baby years ago, it made me wonder. I ain’t done everything I wanted to, but looking at the picture in the newspaper today, I know I was right about that boy in the parking lot. He’s carried me and his mama off into the world and that girl has been the kind of mother neither one of us ever had, and who knows what all that baby is capable of. Ever since I seen them three, I’ve had a little bit of peace. The wind don’t sound as much like cries anymore. Knowing they’re out there makes me feel better about all the wrong I’ve done. At least some good came out of the mess me and Myra made. Sometimes I wish the boy and girl had seen me but there’s nothing I can do now to make them stop and turn around. There ain’t no changing what’s already been. I know I’ll never see them again. They passed me by like they ought to have done. But I was there and nothing can change that, either. I’m still with them, whether they know it or not, part of how they came to be. Before I drove away from that asylum, we was all together there like a family for a while. I wonder if they felt the same thing I did in them few minutes, my blood moving in their veins and passing through their hearts.