Bloodroot (39 page)

I kissed him first. For so long with John, I hadn’t been loved. I might never have been loved by my mother. If I retaliated against them, it was unconscious. I cared for nothing in that moment. There was no thought of revenge. Ford resisted at first, tried to pull back, but I thrust my whole self against his chest and he gave in. We stayed there on the floor. It felt like there was no time to move to his bed. When it was over we propped our backs against the couch and sat dazed and half naked, sweating in the heat of the stifling trailer. “What if I told you,” he said, “that I knew you were coming?”

“Oh?” I said, heart beating hard but slow. “How is that?”

“I have visions sometimes.”

We looked at each other. I smiled. “Visions.”

He smiled back. “Yes. Do you believe me?”

“No. There are no prophets in this day and age. Except maybe false ones.”

I began to gather my clothes around me, reaching for my shoes.

“Do you have to go? Stay with me for a while.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I’ve done wrong being here.”

“Stay with me forever, then,” he said.

“I’m married.”

“But he doesn’t love you.”

“How do you know?”

“I told you. I have visions.”

“Well. It’s still a sin, being here with you.”

“He’ll hurt you if you go back.”

“Probably. But I still have to go.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s got my granddaddy’s ring.”

Ford reached for me. “Myra. Your life is more important than a ring.”

“I’d never leave John without taking that ring with me.”

“You could sneak in while he’s sleeping and slip it right off.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I had the wild urge to laugh, even though nothing was funny. “John’s put on a few pounds. It might be stuck.”

Ford grinned. “You could grease up his finger,” he said, holding up his left hand. “Or you could do what my ex-wife did. I bet your husband’s a drinker, like I used to be. Nothing will pack on the pounds like beer. My ring was stuck, too. One night she got tired of me blowing our grocery money on booze. I came in drunk as a skunk and passed out cold. She got so mad she chopped off my finger, took my wedding ring and everything else of value we had and ran off with it. Haven’t heard from her since.”

I tossed my shoe at him. “You’re nuts.”

“I’ve heard that before,” he said. “Are you sure you have to go?”

I nodded. He kissed me and smoothed back my hair. For a long moment he studied my face. “Because in my vision,” he said, “we had babies together.”

Ford drove me to the pool hall and let me out. I slammed the door before I could hear his goodbye. I used a pay phone to call the hardware store. I knew John wouldn’t be there anymore, but I didn’t know what else to do. I stood in the parking lot under a streetlight for what seemed like hours, thinking he might come looking for me there. I only prayed he hadn’t been up the mountain. Sometime after dark he wheeled into the lot slinging gravel and leaned over the seat to open the passenger door. I was too numb to be afraid. He didn’t say anything on the drive, didn’t ask where I had been.

When we arrived at home I sat in the car and waited for him to pull me out by the hair, my knees scraping in the dirt. Grunting and puffing, he dragged me across the yard, my scalp screaming. He yanked up my dress and wrestled my legs open. There was no use begging him to stop. I fought hard but I was tired and he was strong. He forced himself on me as I looked up at the stars. I tried to send my soul floating out of my body again, back up to Bloodroot Mountain. Tears ran from the corners of my eyes toward my ears. Whatever wrong I’d done in swallowing that heart, surely this settled the score.

When it was all over, I lay still on the ground, careful not to look at his face. The night was cool. The neighbor’s dogs were barking. I closed my eyes and remembered them lunging at the ends of chains. Then it seemed I caught the scent of mountain woods. For a moment, I felt my mother’s ghost with me. I took in long, slow breaths of her.

My whole body was limp as John dragged me by the arms back to the door in the house’s foundation. I didn’t resist this time as he shoved me inside and locked it behind me. I lay on my back quivering in the blackness, spiders crawling over my arms and shoulders. I felt a warm wetness between my legs, maybe some of it blood. After a while my muscles loosened and I rested on the cool, grave-smelling dirt. Sometime during the night, listening to the thunder of a train that shook the house on top of me, the shine of its light flooding through the cinder block’s holes, I became sure there was life growing inside me. I wasn’t alone in my body anymore. I didn’t question how I could know such a thing. The only question was whether the child was fathered by John or Ford. But it didn’t really matter how it came into the world. All that mattered was the one certainty, that it was mine. I rested my hands on my womb. This baby had never bewitched John with a chicken heart. This baby had nothing to make amends for. I had to set it free.

John didn’t come back and open the door, but I could see better once the sun came up. After I heard his car leaving for work, I kicked with a kind of strength I didn’t have before. I hammered at the boards for hours with my feet, already warped from the last night I spent under the house. Finally there was a loud crack as the door broke loose from its hinges and fell forward onto the ground. I slid out into the sun, squinting against the light. I went inside and took a long, hot bath, carefully washing the throbbing place between my legs. I put on an old blouse and a pair of jeans and prepared to wait. It was Friday and I knew John would come stumbling home drunk in the dark. He would fall across the couch on his face as he did every weekend when his paycheck was spent. I went to the front room and sat thinking of the hours I’d spent there away from home, where I had draped myself in mountain laurel, plaited crowns with this flower, wound myself in that vine, stepped out of green tangles smelling of honeysuckle so that Granny scooped me up and drank my hair like sweet tea in the summertime. It was hard to remember exactly how long I’d been trapped in that house with John, ten months or ten years. I saw the bits of me that had fallen off, the chiseled-off curls of flesh and bone like raw wood he had whittled from me. At some point I stretched my sore body out on the couch and slept, hands folded across the baby I now had to live for. When I woke up later, it was night. I sat up, eyes wide,
afraid John had stolen into the house. I tensed and listened to the dark. There was nothing but the hum of the refrigerator.

Then I heard his car engine die out in the gravel lot and a deep calm settled in my guts. Sometimes he was too drunk to find his way home but this night he made it. I had willed him down the one-way streets, past the junkyard to this place, when so many times before I had wished his car wrapped around a telephone pole. As he fumbled with the lock until the door swung open, I got up from the couch and receded into the shadows, crouched in the corner to wait. His footsteps were heavy, a floorboard cracking under his boots. He fell across the couch I had just vacated, springs groaning. He didn’t stumble to the bathroom as he did sometimes when he came home drunk. I was glad because it meant he would lose consciousness faster. He lay there, knuckles trailing along the floor, loose fist finally harmless. I watched the stinking bulk of him rise and fall until he began to snore. I slunk across the floor and knelt before him, the stench of whiskey hanging over him like a cloud. I plucked at his fat pink fingers and he didn’t stir. I pulled his hand up into the weak light and placed it on the coffee table where I could see it better. I took a long look at Granddaddy’s ring and knew that I couldn’t pull it off. It hadn’t been removed since that night we stood in the preacher’s house and I slid it onto the flesh of a hand like carved marble. Now it was part of the ruin John had become.

I licked my lips. My heart began to beat for what felt like the first time in months, blood pumping hot and fast through my cold veins. I slipped into the kitchen and turned on the light and paced back and forth, trying to think. I couldn’t let him keep what was left of Granny and Granddaddy and the home where I ran like a horse through the trees. I wouldn’t give him the color of bloodroot and true love. It was blasphemy on his finger. It was hard to remember how much I once loved seeing it there, how I nibbled, kissed, sucked at that ring-finger tip ten times a day. Once upon a time, seeing his fingers laced through mine and the dark shine of that bloodred ring sent heat racing all over me.

I caught sight of myself reflected in the kitchen window, a white horror mask with black eye sockets and long snarls of matted hair. It was the wild woman I saw when John first opened the door of that
place. There was an exhilarating moment when I knew it would end for me one way or another. That’s when I caught sight of the hatchet, leaning against the wood box beside the back door. I stood looking at it for a long time, thinking of the story Ford told about his missing finger. I tried to keep my breathing slow and calm as I crossed the kitchen and picked up the hatchet, its heft comforting in my hands.

I went silently back to the front room. All the time I had spent learning to be invisible was finally paying off. The limp slab of his arm had fallen from the coffee table and I gently replaced it. Granddaddy’s ring glittered in the pale streetlight. I raised the hatchet high and brought it down fast. The sound was loud in my ears, the force of the hatchet whacking through fingers and lodging in wood jarring my arms, causing me to bite down hard on my tongue. John bellowed and rose up, his eyes unfocused and searching. Without thinking, I yanked the hatchet free from the coffee table and brought the blunt end crashing up into his chin. There was a crunch of teeth as he fell backward.

I didn’t wait to see if he was out cold or dead. I grubbed around on the floor until I found the ring under the coffee table. Somehow it was still wedged on John’s finger. After a moment’s hesitation, I scooped up both ring and finger and stuffed them wet and warm in the pocket of my jeans. I ran to the bedroom and slung the bag I had already packed over my shoulder. I left out the back door and as I crossed the kitchen I could hear the terrible gurgling noises he made. I thought they might be his death throes and there was only relief. I fled across the barren yard, away from the tracks and the smothering house and the time I spent there. I’ll never forget that satisfying whack. It still lives in me, still vibrates through my arms. When I open my box it’s not just the ring that comforts me. It’s that scrap of finger, like a shaving I whittled off for myself, carved out of all those months. It was only fair, after the curls of me he left scattered. No matter what I’d done to bewitch him, it was only fair that I take a piece of his hide with me.

I walked out into the night with John’s finger and Granddaddy’s ring in my pocket. I didn’t have to change my clothes. Most of the blood was on John, not me. I walked and walked on those trash-littered roads, busted beer bottles, boarded-up buildings, dark houses.
For a while a stray dog traveled alongside me, tail down and eyes watchful. He probably smelled John’s blood in my pocket. Above was the clearest night I’d ever seen, so many stars it made me dizzy to crane my neck and look up. Seeing them eased the ragged pain in my shoulder. Just when I thought I couldn’t go another step, God sent a car to me, a woman coming home from the night shift. She took one look at me and said, “Get in.” She asked if I needed help and I told her I only needed to go home.

She had bleached blond hair, permed tight, and some man’s name tattooed on her wrist. Her long fingernails tapped the cracked steering wheel as she talked on and on, false teeth slipping. She spoke of her no-good husband and her lazy sons and the arrogant foreman at the plant. I dozed with my head against the car window, her disembodied smoker’s voice loud in my exhausted head. She didn’t seem to mind or even notice that my eyes were closed, that I was drifting. She drove me all the way to the foot of Bloodroot Mountain without asking any questions. She said, “I can’t go up yonder. I’ve got to get back to the house before my old man wakes up.” I didn’t mind. I got out of her car and thanked her. It was a fitting way to come home. It was the third day of March, 1975. The sun was rising between the trees, fog low to the ground, the mountain high on both sides of me. I watched the woman’s taillights disappear back toward town.

I’d had time to rest in the woman’s car but my feet and back still wept. I was still sore between the legs and my shoulder felt dislocated where I’d yanked the hatchet free from the wood of the coffee table. It didn’t matter. The mountain looked beautiful, as if dressed up for my homecoming. I could have run when I saw the house. The house of Granny and Granddaddy and me, the house of us at supper in the kitchen, the house of being rocked on Granddaddy’s lap and reading books on the steps, the house, the home, of my soul and spirit. As I went up the hill there was no sound, of leaf or animal or even my feet in the dew-damp grass. It felt like I had been gone for a thousand years. Once I made it across the yard I could finally rest. My blood would run easy and warm from my head to my toes, not because of the mountain, but because of Granny and all that she was to me. I wondered if she would have a fire going. Yesterday’s warm weather seemed to have fled and it was a chilly morning. I thought of Granny
bent over stoking the woodstove at night in the yellow-lit kitchen, potatoes sometimes baking in the embers, and how in the winter mornings before school, nestled under the blankets with my cold nose poking out, I’d hear her bringing in the kindling. All my life, she’d kept a good fire going for me. I imagined her pouring coffee, the wispy curl of her hair, the knotty crook of her finger. No matter the curse, no matter the charm, no matter the sins I’d committed, there she was, behind that door, as if she had been there since the world began.

But the closer I got to the house, the more I began to fear that I had returned too late. The place was so still, and Granny was usually up at this hour. She always said her old bones couldn’t rest for long. I noticed there was no smoke from the chimney, no light in the kitchen window. I moved faster to reach the door but hesitated before turning the knob. I pushed it open slowly, not wanting to see. It was like being twelve again, opening the door to Granddaddy’s death, only it was Granny this time, slumped in his chair, eyes closed and mouth slack. Beside her on the table was not a carved box, but a cup of coffee that I was sure had grown cold. Gray light crept across the floor toward her slippered feet. I froze as I had that other day five years ago looking at Granddaddy, no breath coming to fill my lungs. I ran to her and dropped to my knees. I gathered her legs in my arms, covered in broken blood vessels like ugly bruises. I buried my head in her lap and wept out loud. Then I felt a hand on my head, fumbling at my hair. I sucked in a breath and looked up. There was Granny, blinking as if she was still half asleep. “Myra?”