Bloodroot (18 page)

“You look skinny,” she said.

“So do you,” I said.

She smiled. “I learnt how to make biscuits. I wish I could fix you some.”

I turned my head. “I don’t like biscuits.”

There was an awkward silence. We sat listening to the clanking radiator, smelling the dampness of the long, drafty room. She pulled her cardigan tighter around her. When she spoke again it startled me. “What’s it like in here, with all these other kids?”

I thought about it. “Like being by myself.”

She fidgeted in her folding chair. “Are you lonesome?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t mind it.”

She got quiet again. I felt her studying me and looked down at the floor tiles, the same dingy color as the weather outside. “I guess there’s something I ought to tell you,” she said. “I meant to keep it to myself, but I can’t do you that way.”

I waited for her to go on, not sure if I wanted to hear.

“There’s a store in Millertown with our name on it.”

My eyes moved to her face. “What?”

“There’s a building on Main Street that says Odom’s Hardware on the side. I seen it when I was downtown with Pauline. The woman I stay with.”

I leaned closer to her. “Did you go inside?”

Laura shook her head. “Pauline don’t trade there. But she knows who owns it. She said his name’s Frankie Odom.” She bit her lip. “I reckon he’s our granddaddy.”

I blinked at her. “How do you know that?”

“Pauline said so.”

“Then how does she know?”

Laura looked down at her scuffed shoes. “Everybody knows it.”

“You didn’t go in the store and ask any questions?”

She shook her head again. “Pauline said Frankie Odom ain’t in his right mind anyway. She said he’s got old and senile. His boy runs the store now.”

My stomach dropped. “His boy?”

“Not our daddy,” Laura said quickly. “Our uncle. Pauline called him Hollis.”

“Hollis,” I repeated, so I wouldn’t forget.

Laura twisted her hands in her lap. “Pauline said the Odoms are bad people and I believe her, Johnny. I don’t want any part of them. For Mama to do something like what she might have done to our daddy, he must have been mean.”

My eyes began to sting. “We have people who knew our dad and you don’t care?”

“Can’t we talk about something else?” she asked. “I been missing you so bad.”

“You want to find our mama, though. You’d talk to her, after the way she did us.”

“I don’t know about that, either,” she said. “I used to want us to run away and go find her but I’ve give up on that. I’ve quit believing we’ll all be together again.”

“Don’t lie,” I said. “I know how it is. You’d go to her right now if you could.”

“What do you mean, how it is?”

“I mean you’re just like her.”

“How’s that true? I don’t even know her anymore.”

I clenched my teeth trying to keep in the words, but in the end I couldn’t stop them from tumbling out. “You walked off and left me, just like she did.”

Laura’s eyes widened. “Johnny, you know I never wanted to be away from you.”

I looked down at the floor again. “I don’t know anything.”

Laura spent a long moment thinking. Then she said, “I guess I can’t help being something like Mama, on account of having her blood. But so do you.”

I grabbed her arm. “Don’t say that. I’m not like her.”

Laura looked into my eyes. “Okay, Johnny,” she said. “I wish you’d let me go.”

I took my hand away from her arm and stared down at it. Laura turned her face to the window and the distant blue chain of the mountains, where Chickweed Holler was hidden from us. She rubbed at my fingerprints fading on her skin. I was sorry but I couldn’t take it back. Then Nora Graham cracked the door of the fellowship hall and my time with Laura was over. I didn’t know it would be five years until I saw her again.

LAURA

For a long time I looked forward to Johnny getting out of the children’s home. Nora Graham said she’d place him with a foster family as close to me as she could. I thought even though I was still in middle school and he was starting high school, we might at least get to ride the same bus. When he finally did get out, he lived for a while at a foster home in Millertown and went to the ninth grade. He was on the other side of town so we didn’t ride the same bus, but Nora Graham arranged a visit. Then, before I even got to see him, she said he done something bad and got sent off again. My heart was broke in two. No matter what Johnny thought of me, I loved him better than anything.

When I started high school myself, the girls there was still talking about Johnny. They said he done them wrong in the short time he was there. He’d go with one until he got tired of her and then move on to the next. It wasn’t just the girls Johnny left his mark on, either. This boy named Marshall Lunsford asked if I was Johnny’s sister. He claimed Johnny was his best friend and had been to his house. He said Johnny had lived with his mama’s cousin so they was like family. I couldn’t see Johnny being friends with anybody. He said when Johnny got out of jail they was going hunting together. I figured that boy would be better off to never see Johnny again. It was a sad thing to think about my own brother, but I knowed something was broke in Johnny, the same as it was in me.

I didn’t like high school. The only good thing about it was Clint Blevins. A bunch of us used to stand around and wait for the bus to take us home. One day I felt a finger winding up in my hair. I whipped around and Clint said, “Sorry about that. I couldn’t help it.” Clint was in some classes with me and he was always getting called to the office. Seemed like every week Clint Blevins was in a fight. One time I
walked up right after the gym teacher pulled him off of a boy. There was blood all over the hall. It made my belly hurt. I thought Clint was just another mean boy. But when I turned around, I knowed he wasn’t. He had eyes like Mama’s and his hair had fat yellow curls like rings of sunshine. Then I seen something peeking out of his shirt collar, flashing in the sun. He had a chain around his neck, a silver rope. I didn’t know I was fixing to talk until I opened my mouth.

“Your name is Clint,” I said.

“Yeah, but I can’t remember yourn.”

“Laura Odom.”

“You’re a pretty girl, Laura.”

“I favor my mama some. But she has blue eyes like you got. Not black like mine.”

“I like black eyes the best,” Clint said, and followed me up on the bus.

He sat down with me. He said he’d moved back in with his mama, that’s why he rode my bus now. He said, “Me and Daddy was living in a little green trailer beside of the lake. I don’t get along too good with Mama, but Daddy finally drunk hisself to death. She thinks I ortn’t to live out yonder by myself and me still in school.” Clint looked out the window. I felt sorry for him. I could tell how sad he was. “You should’ve seen poor old Daddy there on the last. He was shrunk down to nothing and yeller as a punkin where his liver was bad.” Clint looked up at the bus ceiling. I moved my hand closer to his on the seat between us. I think that made him feel better.

“Where’d you get that silver necklace?” I asked to change the subject.

“From Louise,” he said. I got jealous. Later I found out she was just the gray-headed cashier down at the grocery store where he worked.

Clint got off the bus at a house behind the laundrymat. After that, we set together every day. He told me all about his life. I seen the stories in my mind. Clint couldn’t remember things being any different. His daddy held down a janitor job before he started drinking, and his mama worked in the school lunchroom before she went on welfare. When he was a baby they rented a farmhouse beside of a pond. But the first thing Clint remembered was living in that house behind the laundrymat. When he talked about it, I could smell warm clean
clothes drifting across the yard. He said when he was real little it was like being wrapped in a blanket. But later on the smell of laundry got to where it gagged him. Too many times Clint had set in the weeds out behind the house, with the cinder blocks and busted glass, smelling that laundrymat and listening to his mama holler and carry on. Then after while he would see his daddy plod off down the street holding a whiskey bottle with a cut place over his eye where she throwed something at him.

Clint said sometimes he used to slip in the laundrymat and watch the clothes float in them glass portholes. He’d listen to the blue jean buttons and loose change clinking around. He’d watch that round and round motion and get sad, thinking about a circle that kept going and didn’t end up anywhere. Sometimes his daddy found him and bought him a Coke in a glass bottle and a pack of peanuts to pour in it. Then Clint said that old laundrymat life was finally over, at least for a while. His daddy got a job driving the garbage truck long enough to put back some money. One day he came out of the house with a paper sack in his arms. Clint’s mama was screaming and throwing his things out behind him. Clint followed his daddy in the street and asked, “Where are we going?” His daddy said, “I got us a little spot by the lake.” Clint said when they got down to the water, it was the prettiest place he ever seen. Him and his daddy was happy there from the start.

Clint spent every day he could in the lake until it got cold, trying to be a fish. He’d sink as far as he could and stay down for as long as he could hold his breath, because he knowed it was all going to end. He said it was like time stopped when he was under the water and he wanted to stretch it out. He could see his daddy getting sicker and sicker. He remembered what his mama said when his daddy left. “That’s all right. You’re just slinking off to die, like a dog does. Mark my words. It won’t be long.” Clint hated his mama having the last laugh, about as bad as he hated that his daddy was fixing to die.

But while his daddy lived, they had a nice life by the lake. Clint came and went as he pleased. He didn’t have to do homework. He failed three years in a row. Only reason he went to school any was because the truant officer threatened to put his daddy in jail. He never had to take a bath either and got dirtier and dirtier. He said them dirty smells was the ones he liked best, greasy hair and black feet bottoms
and most of all fishy lake water. I thought that might have been what brung us together, the way we both loved fish. We must have seen each other’s secret scales glinting under our skins. There was something the same inside of us. Clint talking about his life always made me think about my own. I seen we could take care of each other in a way our mamas didn’t know how to.

After Clint went back with his mama he thought every day about running off. But he said there was a part of hisself that would always be afraid of her. It was like her shrill voice froze him up, especially with his daddy gone. Clint told me, “If it wasn’t for Daddy, I never would have been brave enough to get away from her in the first place.”

She made Clint go to work at the grocery store and help pay the bills. He didn’t mind about that. The store wasn’t as good as the lake, but it was still someplace to go. He said he liked the people there. He looked forward to going to work at night, but during the day at school he’d set around in class and get mad at his mama. It was like she won, and he couldn’t stand it. He’d beat up other boys the same way he wanted to beat on his mama. He was sorry after he fought them, but he said he couldn’t help it until he met me. “All that black hair of yourn looked like a big old pool of lake water,” he leaned over and whispered in my ear one day. “When I was standing behind you out yonder, I just wanted to dive right in it.” Hearing him talk that way made me feel like I was worth something.

Clint told me all them things on the bus. Then he started bringing me presents, mostly barrettes and combs. I knowed he wanted them done up in my hair. I’d fix myself in the school bathroom and take it down before I got off the bus. I figured Pauline might not like my hair done up that way, but Clint sure did. Before long, we loved each other.

JOHNNY

After my visit with Laura, I made up my mind to attend the counseling sessions, as much as I hated the pastor’s son. Seeing her took something out of me. I couldn’t stand being at the children’s home any longer. Each meal at the fellowship hall soured on my stomach and the smell of wet limestone began to hurt my head. I was too tired
to climb the iron fence anymore. I knew the only way to earn my freedom was to do as I was told, so I sat with the others in a circle of folding chairs and pretended to listen. The summer before I turned fifteen, the pastor’s son decided I was ready to have foster parents again. Nora Graham took me in late August to Wanda and Bobby Lawsons’ old clapboard house outside of Millertown. They worked long hours at the gas station they owned and when they got home they went to bed. They seemed more interested in the check the government provided for my upkeep than in being my parents and I was grateful for it. At the end of five years living among so many strangers, all I wanted was to be left alone.

Like the children’s home, the Lawsons’ house was ringed in woods. It wasn’t the same wilderness I was used to, with craggy bluffs and limestone caves. These woods were flat and crowded with tall, skinny trees, the ground humped with snaking roots. I could walk for hours without the scenery changing, save a random piece of rusty junk here and there. Once I saw an old stove on its side, half buried in kudzu, and once a car bumper shaggy with honeysuckle. I traveled so far that I came out behind the high school, standing on a rise overlooking the football field. I saw how close I was to Millertown, how easy it would be to find Main Street and Odom’s Hardware. But I still didn’t know whether I wanted to forget who I was or go looking for the man I came from.

Then I met Marshall Lunsford on the first day of high school and everything changed. At lunchtime I went through the line and took my tray to the first empty seat. There was a boy sitting across from me eating a greasy square of yellow cornbread. He was gawky and long-necked with dirty fingernails and a head full of cowlicks.

“You’re lying through your teeth, Marshall,” the fat boy beside him was saying. “There ain’t even no coyotes around here.” He looked across the table at me. “You should’ve heard what all this retard said.”