Bloodroot (3 page)

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DOUG

I was twelve when Wild Rose came home in a trailer. Daddy opened the door and she burst out like a thunderstorm. I stood back in awe of such a powerful creature of God. It was easy to see that He had made her with love, carving out her velvet nostrils with His most delicate tool, sculpting every muscle under that shining hide. The way Daddy was always dragging something home, I wasn’t surprised when he told us he’d found a horse. He said he’d wanted a paint horse with blue eyes ever since he was a boy. One day he went to see about a tractor a man had cheap in Dalton, Georgia, and found Wild Rose instead. What surprised me was how crazy Daddy was over that horse right from the start. He would stand at the fence for hours just watching her graze. It must have been love at first sight. One morning I looked out the kitchen window and saw them together in the pasture. I was up early and the ground was still stiff with frost. I took my coffee and sat on the back steps watching as Daddy tried to ride Wild Rose. For a minute, she even let him put the saddle on. He crept up to her side, one foot in the stirrup, and hauled himself onto her back. The instant the horse felt Daddy’s weight, she threw him. He landed so hard, it seemed I heard the thud of his body hitting the ground from several yards off. I wanted to go see if he was all right, but I knew his pride would be hurting.

Thinking about Wild Rose coming home in a trailer reminds me of the first time I saw Myra, dropping out of a tree behind the church house at the homecoming dinner. Her dress flew up like a parachute, tiny legs waving and black hair floating out behind her. Myra had been around my whole life, because the Lambs lived down the mountain and went to our church, but that was the first time I took notice of her. Myra didn’t cry when she landed, but Mr. Lamb rushed to her side, dropping his paper plate and splattering food everywhere. He spanked her in front of the whole congregation and I didn’t blame him. He was scared. It was only natural to be protective of something so precious. I knew the feeling myself, even as a small boy. You took extra care of your special things. That’s how I thought of Myra, as something extra special and wild. The wild part was scary to Mr. Lamb and me both, because it meant we were always in danger of losing her.

From the day she dropped out of that tree behind the church, I thought about Myra all the time. I followed her around school once first grade started, even though I was too backward to make friends with any of the other kids. Naturally, once Mark realized how I felt about Myra, he decided he wanted her, too. He set about stealing her attention every chance he got, making her laugh by pulling faces and burping in the library.

When Mark and I were old enough to go off by ourselves, we walked down the mountain to play with Myra as often as we could. She liked to wear dresses in warm weather, even though she was a tomboy, because she couldn’t stand for her legs to be confined. I guess it was easier for her to run away from us with a floppy dress on. Sometimes she disappeared into the woods at the end of the day without a word and we learned not to look for her. She always came back out to play again. The three of us spent nearly every weekend shooting tin cans with my BB gun and catching grasshoppers and wrestling in the mud if we got mad at each other. Myra jumped on my back and bit me once because I beat her at a game of marbles. She was a spoiled brat, but I didn’t mind. I was her fool from the minute she jumped out of that churchyard tree.

It was best when we ran off alone together. I followed her places where Mark wouldn’t go, into dripping caves littered with bones and hollow logs squirming with sow bugs. I wasn’t afraid when I was with her. We played all over the woods, not concerned about trespassing. My family and the Lambs and the Barnetts were the only ones living near the top of Bloodroot Mountain. The women shared their gardens and wherever the hunting was good a neighbor was welcome to shoot what he could. Fences were meant for keeping livestock in and strangers out, not for each other.

Bloodroot Mountain is small as far as mountains go. Daddy says it’s not even a thousand feet at the summit, but as a child it was the whole world to me. I knew that at the bottom of the mountain, a little over twelve miles down winding roads, through farming communities like Piney Grove and Slop Creek and Valley Home, there was Millertown, and about sixty miles beyond that was Chickweed Holler, where Myra’s granny came from. I had traveled that far with Daddy and seen the lay of the land, long stretches of corn and high grass, bridges over
foaming waters, and white farmhouses scattered on hills. But the minute I got back home, with none of those places visible through the trees, I forgot about them. There was only Bloodroot Mountain and I didn’t mind because Myra was up here with me. The whole mountain belonged to us and we knew its terrain like our own bodies, every scar and cleft and fold.

But one fall morning, when I was ten, the three of us found something we hadn’t seen before. It was an abandoned cistern high on the slope behind the Barnetts’ house, half covered in dead vines. Myra pulled back the growth to reveal a stone opening edged with moss. Bright leaves floated on the surface of the murky water collected inside. I held my breath as Myra knelt to look closer. I’d heard tales of children drowning in wells and cisterns. Suddenly the trees I had lived under all my life seemed like giants peering over our shoulders, some so tall a grown man couldn’t have reached the lowest branches. I looked back toward Mr. Barnett’s house, a swatch of dingy white peeking up through the skinny trunks. It seemed so far below us, like there were no grown-ups around for miles.

“Oh,” Myra said. “Poor little thing.”

Mark crouched beside Myra and I took a step forward, not wanting her to think Mark was braver than me. I leaned over and saw a baby chimney swift floating among the leaves. I swallowed hard and inched a little closer.

“Must have fell out of a nest,” Mark said, glancing into the trees overhead.

“Chimney swifts don’t live in trees,” Myra said. “Look, there’s a nest in here.”

When she pointed I saw an empty cradle of straw in the shadows below the cistern’s opening. It made the bird’s death even sadder somehow, that its corpse had been left behind. I lowered myself beside Myra, the earth cold under my knees. I couldn’t look away from the dark clump of feathers, the tiny, sealed-shut eyes. We peered into the cistern for a long time, like mourners at a graveside. I didn’t notice until it was almost too late how far over Myra was leaning, her top half nearly lost in the dank gloom. Then we heard the crack of twigs and the thrash of fallen leaves. Before I had time to wonder who was coming, a big hand hauled Myra away from the cistern’s stone
mouth by the back of her dress. Mark and I scrambled to our feet, eyes wide. It was Haskell Barnett standing there with a crease between his bushy eyebrows, leaning on the handle of his axe.

“Myra Jean Lamb,” he said. “Your granddaddy would skin you alive if he caught you up here messing around. And you boys ought to get a switching, too.”

The three of us stood in a line gaping up at him. I was half afraid he would take matters into his own hands and do the switching himself. He frowned down at us, maybe waiting for one of us to speak up, but my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. Then Myra burst out crying, which was a surprise to me. She wasn’t prone to tears.

“Here, now,” Mr. Barnett said, softening right away. “I didn’t mean to make you squall. But I told Byrdie and Macon I’d always watch over you. What would they think if I let you fall down a dadburn hole?” He put his big hand on top of Myra’s head and she dried her eyes hard on her sleeve. I knew she was embarrassed to have cried.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t tell Granddaddy, okay?”

“I won’t this time,” he said. “But don’t you younguns be messing around that old cistern anymore. Now come on to the house. Margaret’s made banana bread.”

I looked back to where the chimney swift floated, the loneliness of its corpse still tearing at me. I was sorry to leave it behind but I wanted to follow Mr. Barnett. If it was true that he swore to watch over Myra, we were in on something together now.

BYRDIE

One morning I woke up with the thresh. My mouth was broke out so thick with sores I couldn’t hardly swallow. Della said, “Ain’t but one thing’ll take care of this.”

Mammy was standing over my bed looking worried. “What?” she asked.

“A man that’s never laid eyes on his father.”

“Who’ll we take her to?” Myrtle asked, standing in the doorway with her hand on her hip. She looked blurry to me. My mouth hurt so bad I couldn’t see straight.

“Clifford Pinkston’s the closest,” Grandmaw said, leaning over to rub my hair.

“You can’t tell me Clifford Pinkston never seen his daddy,” Mammy said. “I went to school with him and I seen his daddy my own self a hundred times.”

“Howard Pinkston ain’t Clifford’s daddy,” Grandmaw said. She was done getting her headscarf on. “He was an orphan and the Pinkstons took him to raise.” She turned back to me and when she smiled I felt a little better. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll get you fixed up right quick. Clifford just lives down the holler a piece.”

I had seen Clifford’s house before, on the way to other places. It was about two miles from ours, perched on the edge of a bluff near the bottom of the holler, a weathered three-story with a boarded-up window on the top floor and a wraparound porch that sagged down in the back, overlooking a patch of rocky farmland. There was always goats and geese and peacocks strutting around in the yard. In winter I could see his chimney smoke puffing up through the trees. Grandmaw told me on the walk that he lived by hisself because he was too backward to get him a woman. Mammy said she didn’t believe he ever said two or three words when they was in school together.

“What makes you think he’ll help us?” Mammy asked.

“Why, Clifford’s always been a good neighbor,” Grandmaw said.

He was out on the yard splitting wood when me and Mammy and Grandmaw came up. He took off his hat when he seen us. My mouth hurt too bad to think about much but I took note of the fine figure Clifford cut when he stood up straight. He was long and tall with strong brown arms. I could see his muscles with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up. When we got close my nerves went away because of how kind his face was.

“Hello there, Clifford,” Grandmaw said.

“Hidee, Miss Ruth,” he said.

Then he nodded to Mammy. His face and ears turned red.

“How are you making it, Clifford?” Mammy said. “It’s been a long time since we was in school together.” She smiled and I pictured her as a girl. It crossed my mind that Clifford might think she was pretty. It made me feel funny to think of my mammy as a woman and not just the one who bore me. I wasn’t used to seeing her around men her own
age. My daddy died when I was a baby, so I didn’t remember them being together.

“This’n here’s got the thresh,” Grandmaw said, and set me out in front of him by the shoulders. “I was hoping we could trouble you to help us out.”

The way Clifford looked at Mammy, I knowed he wouldn’t refuse her anything. Then he looked down and studied me real good. I felt a warmness spreading in my heart like I never knowed before. He had the kindest eyes I ever seen. He seemed familiar someway. I had the queerest thought that he was my daddy, even though I knowed my daddy was dead. He knelt down before me so our faces was close. I could smell his sweat where he’d been working in the heat. I stood still as I could, waiting to see what would happen. He took hold of my face so gentle, and it was like I always needed to be touched that way by a man’s fingers, after all them years being raised by women.

“Open your mouth, Byrdie,” Mammy said. Her voice was thick and fuzzy, like it sounded when she woke up in the mornings. It seemed to me like the world had quit turning and Mammy must have felt it, too. I did as she said and Clifford leaned in to cover my lips with his own. He blowed warm wind in my mouth and down my swelled-up throat. I could feel my lungs filling up with it. It was such a relief someway that I wanted to squall. He pulled back from me, still holding my face, and we looked for a while in each other’s eyes. It seemed like even the birds in the trees had quit making noise. Then Grandmaw said, “Well, that ort to do it.” I looked up at her and Mammy standing over us. Mammy’s face was white as a sheet. She was staring at Clifford with something like worship in her eyes. She’d felt the power of what he done the same as I did.

“Why don’t you come up and eat supper with us tonight?” Mammy asked. Her voice still sounded far off. “It’s the least we can do to thank ye.”

“Maybe tomorrow night,” Clifford said, and I could tell Mammy was disappointed. She probably figured he never would come.

Sure enough, the next day when I got out of the bed my thresh had cleared up. I was feeling better, setting out on the porch playing with a doll, when I looked up and seen Clifford coming. He waved his hat and I ran to tell Grandmaw and Mammy.

“Well, I’ll be,” Grandmaw said. “I never dreamt he’d turn up.” It was true Clifford was backward, but he was so struck on Mammy he couldn’t resist her. Pretty soon he was coming to supper just about every night, and bringing me and Mammy presents. He took us to town and the fair and all kinds of places. I got to where I loved that man just about better than anything, and so did Mammy. When he asked Mammy to be his wife a few months later, I reckon I was more tickled than she was. I got to wear baby’s breath in my hair to the wedding. After the knot was tied, I figured I had a new daddy. I started calling Clifford “Pap,” and all of us was happy.

DOUG

Besides Myra, Haskell Barnett was my only friend. After he pulled Myra away from that cistern, we were allies in my mind. The Barnetts’ grown children had moved up north and they were lonesome for the sound of small voices, so they treated Myra and me like their own flesh and blood. We loved playing at their house. Mrs. Barnett was always baking and Mr. Barnett showed us how to build forts and shoot with slingshots. Mark stopped visiting once he got older, but Myra and I still went there even after we were grown. Sometimes Myra and Mrs. Barnett embroidered or cooked together while I helped Mr. Barnett with the outside chores. He paid me but he didn’t have to. It was nice being alone with him. He was quiet when I needed him to be, but he also told good stories.