Winter's Bone (14 page)

“Don’t get all excited.”

“She in there?”

The women and the hatted men made way for Teardrop. He had his right hand jammed deep into the pocket of his slashed leather jacket. The sun came from behind so his face was blurred by his own shade. His head was bare and his eyes moved quickly through the crowd. He took a few steps toward Ree and abruptly stopped.

Little Arthur said, “She was told, man, and didn’t listen.”

Teardrop seemed to stand straighter as he looked at Ree but his expression did not change. His gaze lingered on her face, her legs, the fresh and drying blood threads crisscrossing her cheeks and chin and neck. He turned to Little Arthur, spread his feet.

“You hit her?”

Little Arthur draped an arm toward the small of his back. His shirt bunched as he put a hand to his belt. He said, “What’ll you do if I did?”

“Say yes’n see.”

Mrs. Thump stomped back into the barn and stepped up, waving her hands.

“He never! No man here touched that crazy girl!”

“No man did?”

“I drubbed her good myself.”

Teardrop said, “You never drubbed her that way by yourself.”

“Me and my sisters, they were here, too.”

The crowd began to step aside and make way again, and Thump Milton returned to the barn. Buster Leroy and Sleepy John walked beside him and both carried shotguns, barrels pointed up, fingers near the triggers. Thump Milton strode forward with no hesitation to within an arm’s length of Teardrop. His quick pace had stirred the barn dust and he stood in a billow of whirling motes. He looked directly into Teardrop’s eyes and said, “Explain yourself, Haslam.”

Teardrop stared back and did not truckle. He pointed with his left hand as he spoke. “I ain’t never said a single fuckin’ word about my brother. I ain’t asked nobody about my brother, nor looked for him, neither. What Jessup done was against our ways, he knew it and I know it, and I ain’t raised no stink at all about whatever became of him.
But she ain’t my
brother
. She’s my niece, and she’s near about all the close family I got left, so I’ll be collectin’ her now and carryin’ her on out of here to home. That suit you, Thump?”

“You’re willin’ to stand for her, are you?”

“If she does wrong, you can put it on me.”

“Agreed. She’s now yours to answer for.”

“This is a girl who ain’t goin’ to tell nobody nothin’.”

A near wooden post looked useful and Ree crawled to it. The rough wood rasped on her hands as she pulled herself upright and everything she saw moved in slow circles. Moans droned from her chest of bones. Shit leaked from her panties and she felt runnels of yuck on her thighs. She fluffed her wadded skirt loose and down. She swayed on her feet and realized that Thump Milton and Uncle Teardrop had turned to watch her.

Thump Milton said, “Put the girl in Haslam’s truck. Carry her if you got to.” He faced Teardrop again and said, “Is this over now?”

Teardrop did not pull his eyes from Ree to address Thump Milton.

“If anybody lays even just one finger on that girl ever again, they better have shot me first.”

Megan and Spider Milton put Ree between them and shouldered her from the barn. Her feet dragged up dust and pigeons flew from the eaves. The crowd was silent as she was hauled across the pea gravel to the green truck, but that redbone barked once more and those birds in the trees still sang their different songs.

T
HERE WAS
an echo in her eye. She looked from the speeding truck, and everything she saw—house, fence post, goat, cow, songbird, or shining sun—had an echo of itself standing at its side. The echoes all wavered a little, and if the real object moved the echo might fall behind and disappear from sight for a second or two before catching up again to stand close and make shimmering doubles in her eye.

Uncle Teardrop stared into the rearview mirror until the truck crested a hump and on the downside he slammed the brakes, then backed off the pavement onto a vague dirt path. He sped backwards across deep jarring ruts in a fallow field, past a fallen barn and into a thicket of dead apple trees. In the orchard he’d found darkness in daylight, a veiled space between rotting trees with a view of the road from Hawkfall.

He opened his door, stepped from the truck to bend and better reach under the seat. When he got back behind the wheel he held a paratrooper’s rifle with a folding wire stock and a long clip, and a shotgun with the barrel cut short and a small white handgrip. He laid the shotgun beside Ree, tapped a finger on her knee, said, “For if they come.” He leaned to her, turned her face up, and looked inside her mouth. He was sweating and his breaths were short. “That Gail girl really saved your bacon.” He raised her shirttail, twisted the very end into a thick coil and stuck the coil into her mouth. “Put this where you’re bleedin’n chomp down on it. Don’t talk or nothin’, just keep that thing chomped down good ’til the blood lets up.”

She could sense blood driven by heartbeats pulsing from the torn places beneath her skin. She saw four eyes and two ears and a flurry of blue drops on Uncle Teardrop’s face. She eased her hand toward the shotgun, located it by feel rather than by sight. She touched a finger to the cool barrel and clenched her jaw and nearly cried smelling the rising stink of herself.

Teardrop reached across to the glove box and grabbed a baby-food bottle of crank. He unscrewed the lid, set it on the dash, snorted from the bottle twice, banged the steering wheel, and said, “You got to be ready to die every day—then you got a chance.” He sat in shade cast by the limbs of a dry orchard, staring toward the road. “You own me now. Understand? You purty much own me now, girl. You do wrong, it’s on me. You do big wrong’n it’s me that’ll pay big. Jessup, he went’n did wrong, the poor silly shit. Jessup went’n turned snitch, and that’s only the biggest ancient no-no of all, ain’t it? I never thought . . . but he couldn’t face this last bust, couldn’t face a ten-year jolt. Plus there’s your mom, sittin’ home crazy forever. That was heavy on his mind. Them boys. You. He started talkin’ to that fuckin’ Baskin—but I want you to know, Jessup, Jessup wasn’t givin’ up
no
Rathlin Valley men.
Huh-uh, huh-uh. He said he wasn’t. Wouldn’t do it. He said . . . shit, he said all kinds of . . . If I could do any of my days over, girl, that very first asshole I killed’d still be walkin’ around. But . . . hell, never been found and I’m . . . You’re forcin’ me out into the open, girl. Understand? You’re puttin’ me into the exact picture I been tryin’ to dodge. They been waitin’ to see if I’ll do anything. Watchin’. Listen . . . the way it is . . . the way I
feel
. . . is, I can’t
know
who killed Jessup. I can suspicion a man or two, have a hinky feelin’, but I can’t
know
for a certain fact
who
went’n killed my little brother. Even if he did wrong, which he did, why . . . it’ll eat at me if I know who they sent. Eat at me like red ants. Then . . . there’ll come a night . . . a night when I have that one more snort I didn’t need, and I’ll show up somewhere’n see whichever fucker done it sippin’ a beer’n hootin’ at a joke and . . . shit . . . that’ll be that. They’ll all come for me then . . . Buster Leroy . . . Little Arthur . . . Cotton Milton, Whoop Milton, Dog . . . Punch . . . Hog-jaw . . . that droopy-eyed motherfucker Sleepy John. But, anyhow, girl, I’ll help you some, take your back so you can find his bones, but the deal is, even if you find out, you
can’t ever
let me know who did the actual killin’ of my brother. Knowin’ that’d just mean I’ll be toes-up myself purty soon, too. Deal?”

Ree slid her hand from the shotgun barrel across the seat to Uncle Teardrop’s arm, and squeezed, squeezed again. He turned his head away and started the engine. Dead limbs scraped the truck and broke to the ground. He drove out of the orchard and across the bumpy field to the road. He said, “You’re a mess, let’s get your ass home.”

The world rippled in her view until she shut her eye and let her head loll to the window. Teardrop drove the dirt roads, the nigh cut to the house, and as the truck rattled down the rut he began to honk the horn. Ree opened her eye. He stopped just below the undulating porch with the shimmying rails and went around to open Ree’s door. Gail jumped down the porch steps and ran with her echo to the truck and the boys echoed to a four-part stop in the doorway behind her. They appeared stunned to sickness by the sight of Ree’s face. Gail instantly began to cry. She and Teardrop lifted Ree from the bench seat. Ree spit the stained coil from her mouth, rested her head on Gail, and whispered, “Help me wash. Burn my clothes. Please. Help me wash.”

A
LL HER
aches were joined as a chorus to sing pain throughout her flesh and thoughts. Gail stood her straight and naked and cleaned her body as she would a babe’s, using the soiled skirt to swab the spread muck from her ass and thighs and behind the knees. Gail touched her fingers to the revealed welts and bruises and shook between cries. When Ree moved she came loose and sagged as the chorus inside hit fresh sharp notes. Her agony was the song and the song held so many voices and Gail lowered her into the bathtub where sunk to her chin in tepid water she marked a slight hushing of all the chorus but the singers in her head.

T
HE WOMEN
of Rathlin Valley began crossing the creek to view her even as she lay in the tub. Sonya led Betsy and Caradoc Dolly’s widow, Permelia, who owned the third house in the rank of three on the far bank, into the bathroom and closed the door on the paled waiting boys with their stricken faces. Ree lay with her good eye open a peep in water skimmed thinly with suds. The women stood in a cluster looking down at the colored bruises on milk skin, the lumped eye, the broken mouth. Their lips were tight and they shook their heads. Permelia, ancient but mobile, witness to a hundred wounds, said, “There’s never no call to do a girl like that.”

Sonya said, “Merab’s got a short fuse.”

“Done booted her calico.”

“Her sisters helped her.”

Betsy, wife of Catfish Milton, gray young yet handsome, began to shudder with feeling. Betsy had never been chatty, but in the years since she’d lost her sweetest daughter to a tree limb that dropped on a calm blue day she could occasionally be heard in the night shouting threats from her yard at those shining stars that most troubled her. She knelt at the tub side, laid a flat palm on Ree’s belly and rubbed a gentle circle, then stood trembling and fled the room.

The noise of boys sniffling in the parlor carried through the bathroom door.

Uncle Teardrop snapped,
Hush goddammit
, and they did.

Permelia said, “My say is, this is wrong. It can’t ever be right to do a girl that way. Not between our own people.”

Sonya said, “You can see three kinds of footprints stomped on her legs, there. Must’ve took them a while to track her up bad like that.” She shook her head, then handed an orange plastic vial to Gail, and said, “Pain pills from Betsy’s hysterectomy. Give her two to start.”

“Just two?”

“She’ll want more, but just two to start with, then build from there to whatever number lets her rest.”

B
Y DUSK
Ree had three kinds of pain pills sitting on the floor bedside next to her teeth. In her head she was furnishing a cave. Her teeth looked like some sort of baby tubers grown underground behind the shed and yanked out with stiff forked roots yet attached. Victoria came to sit at the foot of her bed and see her stomped so ugly with two teeth on the floor. Ree could feel the dunkle with her tongue. Victoria dwindled to a wan color and said things over her, or didn’t, but left behind two kinds of Uncle Teardrop’s pills and they swaddled her in warm pink clouds. Hauling the furniture up the slope would be the first hard part. Bunch of ropes’d be called for. Lay the beds in the middle room of the cave, maybe, in from the fire but not far. Boys here, Mom there. Take the table and chairs, both guns, Aunt Bernadette’s dresser—or will the cave wet ruin good wooden things, bubble the veneer, warp drawers so they never open easy again?

Could be the good stuff ought to be sold.

Also, get teeth in town.

The boys crept to her side at early dark to sit around her, mournful, with their heads bowed like they wished they knew how to pray the oldest prayers and pray her well. Harold held a cool cloth to her swollen eye. Sonny made fists and said, “What was the fight about?”

“Me bein’ me, I guess.”

“How many was it?”

“A few.”

“Tell us the names. For when we grow up.”

“I feel too good’n pink just now, boys. Let me drift.”

A big-ass rug could be unrolled across the cave floor to smother dust and make smooth footing. Take the potbelly. Lanterns, clothesline, knives. Finish stacking rocks in the mouth. Pack all the thunder mugs and slide them under the beds. Something to cook on . . . can openers . . . hand soap . . . oh, man.

She slept into the darkest hours. She flinched asleep and tried to duck away from fists flying in her dreams. Knuckles out of darkness, boots that never shined, horrid grunts of women who felt righteous beating whatever they did. Thump’s angled face and cold parts . . . the hats . . . Dad’s body hung upside down from a limb to drain blood from his split neck into a black bucket.