Bloodroot Page 6

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

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

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

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

  DOUG

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

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

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

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

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

  “How’d you do that?”

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

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

  “I am,” she said.

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

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

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “I won’t.”

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

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

  Myra smiled. “Not exactly.”

  “Like a ghost or something?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Hmm?”

  “That she wasn’t like you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  BYRDIE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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