Bloodroot Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You keep it. She gave it to you.”

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

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

  LAURA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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