Bloodroot Read online

  The spring after that was when I lost Clio for good, even before she died. Soon as the ice melted and she could get down the mountain, we hardly ever seen her no more. She’d still mumble out one of her excuses, but they got feebler and feebler. Even when she was home to eat supper, her eyes was far away. We’d let Clio get by with just about anything, but Macon used to be hard on her about running off to town. Many times he’d held his ground and made her stay home, even though she’d sulk around and pout and look at him like she hated his neck. But after she busted that window out, he let her go. Me and Macon both was scared she’d go out of her head for good the next time.

  One day after it got warm I was going across the yard with a bucket of eggs, headed for the kitchen door, when I heard a loud car come up the hill. I stopped and tried to see who it was, but the sun was in my eyes. That old car pulled up next to the barn and blowed the horn two or three times, had the dog barking and the chickens running all over the place. Sounded about as loud as Clio busting out the front room window, and give me the same awful feeling. Next thing I knowed, Clio came flying out the door with her purse on her arm. She didn’t look left or right, just ran across the yard to that car with her hair blowing back. I had a pretty good idea who was driving it. I’d heard from some of the church people that Clio was down at the pool hall in Millertown with a boy named Kenny Mayes. I was hoping it was just rumors because I knowed of the Mayeses. I reckon nary one of them has ever set foot in a church house, but they sure do spend plenty of time in the jailhouse. About every week you’ll see one of their names in the paper, picked up for drunk driving or writing bad checks or shoplifting. Macon said they was lazy, too. He worked with Kenny’s uncle down to the filling station, said he wouldn’t strike a lick at nothing. I knowed Clio and me both was in for trouble, soon as I heard she was courting a Mayes. That was the first time she took off without asking me if she could go, even if she made up the place she was going to. I watched her moving away from me and felt the tie that bound us since she was born stretching out too thin. She slammed that car door and it finally broke in two. The way I see it, that was the end of me and her. Kenny Mayes stole Clio away from me and there was nothing I could do about it.

  She came back in the middle of the night, but it never was the same. Them few weeks she stayed on at the house it was like she was checking in and out of a motel. But to tell the truth, she was happier than I ever seen her. Her eyes was bright and she was taking better care of herself, all of that long hair clean and glossy around her shoulders. Then one Saturday Kenny Mayes came to the door to get Clio instead of blowing the horn for her. I’d done figured out something was up, because Clio had hovered around all morning acting skittish. Besides that, she’d took it on herself to make a cake and she hated to cook. It was about noontime that Kenny knocked and Clio wanted me to open it. “Go on, Mama,” she said. I went to the front of the house with a heavy heart because I knowed what was coming. I opened the door and there he stood, with a big old mealy-mouthed grin. I can’t say he was handsome, but his eyes was blue as the springtime sky.

  “Hidee,” he said.

  Clio went to him and pulled him in the front room. “Mama, this here’s Kenny Mayes,” she said. It looked like her cheeks was on fire.

  “Clio said I ought to bring you something,” Kenny said. He fished around in his britches pocket and dug out a string of dime store beads with the tag still hanging off of them. I never wore such a thing in all my life, and didn’t aim to start. I took them beads and laid them on the table beside of Macon’s chair.

  “Take you a seat, Kenny,” Clio said. “I’ll go get us a piece of cake to eat so you and Mama can get acquainted.”

  Kenny flopped down on the loveseat with them gangly legs sprawled out and his arm slung across the back like he owned the place. I didn’t make no effort to talk, but he didn’t seem bashful about it. “It’s right pretty up here,” he said, looking out the window we’d just got fixed, at the blooming trees and the mowed green hill rolling down to the creek branch. “But it kindly stinks, don’t it? Must be the hog lot.”

  We didn’t keep hogs no more, but I didn’t say it. I kept my mouth shut. Macon was gone since he worked every other Saturday at the filling station trying to earn an extra dollar, so the house was quiet besides Clio clattering around in the kitchen.

  “Well,” Kenny said when Clio came in with the cake on one of my tole trays. “I aim to take good care of Clio, Miss Lamb, so you ain’t got a thing to worry about.”

  “Dangit, Kenny,” Clio said, handing me a saucer of chocolate cake and a fork to eat it with. “I ain’t told her yet. We was supposed to do it together.”

  “Shoot, I forgot,” Kenny said, and grinned at me.

  Clio set down beside of Kenny on the loveseat. He shoveled in cake, crumbs falling all over the floor for me to clean up later. “Me and Kenny’s getting married,” she said. Her voice cracked some like she might be nervous, but she still sounded sassy as ever. “I didn’t want to tell it in front of Daddy cause I figured he’d pitch a fit.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “Well … I figured I’d go ahead and settle in this evening over at Kenny’s mama’s house. Then I reckon we’ll go on down to the courthouse Monday morning.”

  “What are you telling me for?” I asked. She looked surprised. I couldn’t help but speak my mind. Them was the first words I’d said since that old weasel came to the door, and I didn’t aim to pussyfoot around. “Why didn’t y’uns just run off and do it?”

  Clio couldn’t think of nothing to say for a minute. “I don’t know, Mama. It didn’t seem right, I guess.”

  I headed for the kitchen with my piece of cake, to rake it in the trash. “Well, I reckon I ort to be thankful for that,” I said. I went back and stood in the front room doorway. “Y’uns best be getting along.” Clio hadn’t took but a few bites of her cake, and Kenny stuffed the rest of his in fast. “You can come back and get your things later.”

  “Mama …”

  “It’s what you been aiming to do since the day you was born. Might as well get it over with.”

  “Now, I never meant to hurt your feelings, Mama….”

  “I’ll put your clothes in a bag, if you’d rather do it that way, and send them down with Macon when he goes in to work Monday morning.”

  “That’ll be all right,” Clio said. She put down her saucer hard on the end table. The dirty fork rattled off and fell on the floor. “I done got my things packed.”

  She stood up and we looked at each other. Her eyes was cold as that snow she hated. She stomped off to the bedroom and left me and Kenny Mayes by ourselves.

  “That sure was some good cake,” he said.

  “Clio made it,” I told him.

  “Well, then,” he leant over and whispered at me, “somebody’s going to have to learn that girl to cook, if she’s fixing to be my wife.” He winked and laughed like a mule. Then Clio came stomping in with her traveling case and took him by the arm.

  “Come on, Kenny,” she said, and they left without saying goodbye. I sunk down in Macon’s chair feeling like somebody had laid a rock on my heart. I seen them beads on the end table and it was too much to bear. I snatched them old things up, like a string of shiny black snake’s eyes, and took them and throwed them in the kitchen garbage. Then I leant over the sink and squalled for a long time because my last living youngun was gone.

  Clio left with Kenny Mayes when she wasn’t but seventeen. If he ever seen her act crazy like she did that day she busted out the window, he never let on to me. But Clio didn’t ever love this place like me and Myra do. I believe she needed off of this mountain, because she perked up once Kenny took her away from me. Now, Myra’s John Odom had me fooled at first, but I knowed Kenny Mayes was no count from the start. He didn’t beat on Clio or nothing like that, but he was shiftless. She had to keep them both up, working on the assembly line at one of them factories in Millertown. I know she had to been tired of it, standing on her feet
all day, but she was too stubborn to let on.

  Myra was better off not knowing her daddy. I didn’t tell her nothing about Kenny, not even good stories, like how he always tried to buy me and Macon something nice at Christmas. When he was working he liked to treat Clio, too. He’d buy her perfume and take her out to the restaurants. He’d blow every penny he made, but I reckon he meant well. Course there wasn’t no use telling Myra about her daddy’s mean streak, either, how he liked to scare Clio driving. He’d laugh fit to split, her holding on to the dash and me stomping the brakes in the backseat, them few times I let him take me to the store. I quit going with him after I learnt better, that heathern. Then him and Clio got hit and killed by a train. Nobody knows for sure how it happened, if the car quit or he tried to beat the train or what, but I’d bet anything he was trying to scare Clio like he did.

  Something queer happened the night Kenny and Clio got killed. I was taking care of Myra again. I never would say it out loud, but I don’t believe Clio was cut out to be a mama. She never meant to be expecting in the first place, and she was always leaving the baby with me. I had rocked Myra to sleep and fell off to sleep myself with her on my shoulder. I was stiff as a board from setting so long in that chair and I was fixing to get up and take Myra to bed with me when I heard a train whistle off down the mountain. I had the windows open to catch the breeze and that noise made the hair stand up on my arms. I thought, how in the world am I hearing this? Them train tracks is plumb in town. I put my hand on Myra’s little back to feel it going up and down. The house was quiet and dark besides the light of the moon. I don’t know if I was ever more blue in my life, it was the awfulest feeling you could think of. The next morning Bill Cotter knocked on the front door and said Clio had got killed on the train tracks in Millertown. He was a volunteer fireman and helped them pry her and Kenny loose from the car. It liked to killed me to hear it, my last child was gone, but I can’t say I was surprised. Clio died on them same tracks that runs by where Myra lives right now, with that devilish John Odom.

  DOUG

  Myra and I grew even further apart after that day at the creek. The kiss we shared didn’t seal anything between us, it severed something instead. Myra was only a few months younger than me, but she was growing up faster. Overnight, it seemed, she was full-breasted and long-legged and almost as tall as me. Last summer, before our senior year started, Daddy let me take Myra to town sometimes in his truck. We’d walk across a diner parking lot or step out of a matinee blinking in the sun, and men passing on the street would crane their necks and call out to her and whistle. Myra just laughed but I was always embarrassed and a little bit angry at her, even though it wasn’t her fault.

  One Saturday I’d been to the drugstore for Mama and saw Myra coming down the sidewalk with a girl from our church, smiling and whispering behind her hand. She froze when she saw me standing beside the truck, holding Mama’s prescription. She was wearing makeup, I could tell, and it was like being slapped in the face. I stared at her red lips for a long time, until she said in a flustered way, “Don’t you like it?” She puckered up, trying to make me laugh. When I didn’t, she gave up. “Don’t tell Granny, okay?” she said. “It’s not mine. I’m just trying it out.” Then she walked on without saying goodbye. I guess that’s when I knew it wasn’t my imagination. She was slipping away from me.

  By the end of the summer she was spending more time with her girlfriends than with me, but I tried not to worry. I thought when school started up things would get back to normal between us, and I did see more of her. But she didn’t wait anymore in front of her house so we could walk down the road and catch the bus together. Without explanation, she began taking off early and leaving me behind, already standing at the bottom of the mountain by the time I got there. I couldn’t make it any earlier myself because I had chores to do on the farm. When Myra and I got on the bus each morning, it was like she wasn’t even really there in the seat beside me. For most of the ride she looked out the window and whenever I spoke she turned to me startled, eyes cloudy and far away.

  I thought about her all the time. Pouring water into the troughs, filling the drum-shaped feeder with grain, mucking out the barn stalls, I was devising plans to win her back. I’d find a way to break Wild Rose and come galloping into Myra’s yard. I’d sweep her up onto the horse’s bare back and we’d ride off somewhere together. One morning at breakfast, I looked up from my daydream and realized Mark was staring at me. He had graduated the year before and was supposed to be helping Daddy on the farm, but most days he took off and went to the pool hall. Daddy had already told him to shape up or ship out. It was around that time he started talking about joining the service, even with Mama begging him not to because of the war going on. Vietnam had seemed a long way off until a boy we knew from church was killed over there and the newspapers started reporting protest marches in Knoxville, less than an hour away from us. There was a draft but Mark didn’t want to wait for it. Sometimes I could see on his face how angry and desperate he was to get away. That morning he was sitting across the table from me drinking black coffee, looking hungover. “Hey,” he said, with a glint in his eye. “Guess who I seen the other day?” I lowered my head and stared at my plate. Mark still had a way of getting to me. “Your girl, Myra. She was hanging around with some long tall feller, looked a lot older than her. They seemed to be awful cozy. If I’d stuck around, there ain’t no telling what kind of show they would’ve put on.” I gripped my fork and swallowed a lump of grits that had turned to paste in my mouth.

  Later on the bus I tried to ask Myra about it, but when she turned her distant eyes on me I couldn’t go through with it. I didn’t want to hear the truth. Months passed, the weather got colder, and I never mustered the courage to confront her about the rumors I was hearing. I figured her granny didn’t know and wondered if I should tell her. Maybe she could put a stop to it before something broke forever between Myra and me. Even though she’d been my best friend since first grade, I could barely stand to look at her anymore. But it wasn’t all her fault that we drifted apart, and things probably wouldn’t have been any different if I’d fought for her. All winter we still sat together on the bus, but for Myra it was out of habit. I looked past her profile, half hidden behind a dark curtain of hair, at clots of ice rushing down roadside creeks and gullies swollen with melted snow.

  Then one day in March, Myra didn’t get on the bus after school. I asked the driver to wait a few minutes, but she never came. I didn’t want to think about who had given her a ride home. I sat in her empty spot with my forehead pressed against the window, mailboxes and ditches racing by in a blur, remembering again what Tina Cutshaw had said. I was cursed to have known Myra, more cursed to have loved her like I did.

  As usual, the bus driver didn’t go all the way up the mountain. He let me off at the bottom of the dirt road and I couldn’t stop thinking of Myra as I began walking the rest of the way home. She had made my life a misery since the minute I saw her jumping out of the churchyard tree. Some nights I lay curled on my side, the things I couldn’t tell even Mr. Barnett aching like bruises in me. When I did sleep it seemed Myra sang to me, her breath trembling against my ear. I’d wake up thinking she was in my bed and find a moth batting its wings against my face. Or I’d dream of her warmth on my back and wake to find one of Mama’s cats purring there. Many times I fled my room and went outside to look up at something bigger than Myra and my love for her, something that might make it feel smaller, but it didn’t work. The same God who made that sky full of stars had made this love and I couldn’t wrap my brain around the bigness of either one.

  As I walked, scuffing up dirt with the toes of my boots, I was struck by the unfairness. I had been loyal to Myra our whole lives and now I was left behind, like that chimney swift we found floating in the cistern. I felt a pang of sorrow for myself and then blinding anger. I threw my schoolbooks into the road, papers flying everywhere, some of them landing in the creek branch. I tore up the mountain looking
for Myra, not sure what I would do if I found her, breaking off saplings and ripping the undergrowth out of my way, briars grabbing at my pant legs and rocks throwing me down.

  All the way up the mountain a storm raged in me, until somehow I made it manifest in the world outside. A keen wind rose out of nowhere and shook through the trees. By the time I reached the place where Myra’s rock jutted high over a bluff the wind blew so hard that all I could hear was its screaming whistle. I stepped into the clearing and there she was, hair whipping wild, crouched like an animal on the ledge where she had read to me so many times. All the rage deserted me. The way she was poised on the edge of the rock, I worried for an instant that she might jump. I saw it happening, how she would spring, how she would spread her arms and fly. I thought of a story I’d heard long ago, how one of her ancestors leapt from a cliff on Blood-root Mountain. I had hated her only minutes before, but if she had jumped right then I would have gone flying after her, caught her in the air, and positioned myself to cushion her fall.

  I shouted to Myra, screamed her name so hard it felt like something ruptured in my throat. If she hadn’t heard me I might have gone crazy. But she turned around and smiled when she saw me, even though her eyes didn’t light up the way they usually did. She said something and the wind tore the words from her lips, as if she were already fading away, as if she were already half gone. She climbed down from the rock and came to me holding her shoes in her hands, barefoot even though the ground was cold.