Shiner

by Amy Jo Burns

  I’d never seen my mother open and close her King James Bible as much as she did in the hours after Ivy’s death as she entombed herself in plans for her homegoing service. The book had been stuffed into a bureau full of finer things we had no use for—a chipped tea service, a single silver fork, a pair of nude stockings. The Bible had been unearthed on the kitchen table, but my mother wasn’t reading it. Over the years she’d squirreled away all sorts of things between its pages—phone numbers, lists, photographs, and more twenty-dollar bills than I’d ever seen.

  When she finally fell asleep, I ran to that Bible. Inside it I found my father’s old telephone number, film negatives from a camera I’d never known my mother had, and a picture of her and Ivy sitting beneath a willow, looking not much older than I was. Ivy had that up-to-something expression she was known for, and my mother leaned into her shoulder like they’d always been fastened together. A waterfall of sadness poured over me.

  In a house where my father hunted for proof of his wife’s inner life, this secret Bible had become her diary. My mother’s name—Ruby Elizabeth Day—was scrawled into the opening page, and my father’s had been penciled in beneath it. My name followed in red ink. A few spots sat empty for the other children my parents never had. And between Psalms and Proverbs sat a stack of old envelopes, each filled with at least one rumpled twenty-dollar bill. The oldest letter delivered to Ivy’s mailbox dated back almost twelve years. There was no return address.

  My mother knew her husband so well that she could likely pinpoint where he’d gone to hide. He couldn’t have gone far, maybe to the church to wait out the rain or to the old tobacco barn on Brother Arledge’s land. My father had fasted longer than he’d been separated from my mother. How long could he last without seeing her? At mid-morning I snuck off toward the snake shed to see his serpents. I had a theory. If my father planned to leave, he’d fetch his snakes first.

  I crept around the ravine side of the shed to peek through the tiny window. It was too dark inside for me to see. When I cracked the door, I found my father lying in front of his serpents. I couldn’t tell how long he’d been wasting away inside. His body made an X as he ground his face into the plywood floor. He was dirty. The clothes he’d worn for the baptism were stained, and his hair had spiked into thorns. I tried to back away, but he lifted his head.

  He looked lost. I felt the phantom sensation of his hands at my neck. I’m sorry, Ruby, he’d said. I don’t know what came over me. I wondered if it was dark enough that I might be mistaken for the Ruby he used to know.

  When he glanced up at me, he started to sob. He brushed my foot with his hand, and I pulled it away.

  “You probably ain’t heard,” I said, my voice straight. “Ivy is dead.”

  “Dead?” He wiped his nose. “How?”

  My mother blamed my father. Dr. Ed blamed Ivy herself. Church folks would blame Ricky. Too many kids, they’d say. Can’t nobody survive with a man like that.

  “She died in her bed. That’s all I know.” I couldn’t stop myself. “But it ain’t a mystery. She should have listened to Dr. Ed.”

  My father came to his knees. “So I as good as murdered her, then?”

  I said nothing. He’d already forgotten that it was me he’d tried to kill. Back at the house, the kitchen light flicked on. We both turned toward it, a pair of moths searching for a way out of the night. My mother’s silhouette clung to the curtains above the sink. As I opened my mouth to call to her, my father rose to his feet and fled.

  My mother sang out my name into the dark.

  * * *

  It rained just before the burial, and we left our umbrellas behind. My mother and I each carried a basket of larkspurs for the half-hour hike north to the grassy meadows of Violet’s Run, and my mother had packed her tambourine. It chimed every time her basket nuzzled her side. Don’t wear black, she had commanded earlier that morning when I came inside from the snake shed. Ivy would have hated it. Instead we wore the colors of the sun: marigold and rust and amethyst. Halfway up the hill, our skirts were already soaked to our knees. Soon the high grass would be matted down. My father swore that this was how he knew when someone who died was well loved in this life—their mourners’ feet left a fat trail of slain grass all the way to the cemetery in the top nook of the Run.

  This would be the first homegoing my father had ever missed. Shepherding a flock is a life-and-death sentence, he liked to say. Funerals were fewer and fewer now as our congregation dwindled, and each loss grabbed him by the shoulders and shook.

  We were the first to arrive at the plot where Ivy had been laid. The pit gaped with a mound of fresh earth gone to mud beside it. Down below, Ivy’s body was already tucked neatly into its wooden slot. Whoever had hauled the casket up here had taken care to avoid the rain shower earlier in the day. It looked virgin in the dirt.

  I hadn’t seen Ivy’s dead body for myself. I didn’t think anyone had, aside from my mother. There hadn’t been enough time for a viewing.

  “What did Ivy look like when you last saw her?” I asked.

  The fellow gravestones freckled the hillside. My mother sat at the edge of the grave and let her feet dangle.

  “She looked terrified,” she answered.

  “Of death?”

  Her shoulders cowered. “Of life, I think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  My mother sighed. “Ivy never wanted to live on this mountain. She stayed because she knew I’d never leave it.”

  My mother tossed a flower onto the casket as her eyes scanned the purple hills. I sat beside her, and we cast our glances down like wishes into a well.

  She took her tambourine and rapped it against the heel of her hand. Then she started to sing an old hymn written from a verse in Isaiah.

  Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow;

  though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

  My mother’s alto notes swooped through the hills, and soon the coming mourners joined in the hymn. We could hear them singing from far off, their voices few. By half past ten, not as many folks had gathered as my mother had hoped. There were fewer than a dozen. My mother counted them with her eyes. Folks had clambered toward Ivy’s miracle, and now they ran away from its fall.

  The sun came out, and the shade of the sugar maple above the casket slowly shifted. My mother’s tambourine fell asleep at her side. She opened one of my father’s old Bibles and read aloud from Psalm 23. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

  Beyond our group the hills stood stoic. A rush of violets scattered across the ridge, and a flying eagle mounted the far sky. No one wept, not even my mother. Her voice trailed off until she closed the book, took a handful of dirt, and let it fall from her fingers onto the wooden box below. Together the grievers recited the Lord’s Prayer, each of us taking up a fistful of earth and releasing it over Ivy’s body.

  The last person to approach the grave was my father. No one had seen where he’d come from. He’d been hiding among the graves, and then he came forth, his only copperhead twined around his arms. My mother’s eyes trained not on his face but on mine. Her stare tried to tell me a secret.

  Tell me, Mama, my own eyes said. Just tell me what it is.

  But she didn’t. Instead she thumbed through the Bible to a new passage and started to read aloud.

  In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.

  “Ruby,” my father called to her. The crowd turned toward him, and my mother kept reading.

  I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you . . .

  “Ruby,” he said again. “I’m sorry.”

  . . . I will come again, and receive you unto myself . . .

  “Ruby, please.”

  . . . that where I a
m, there ye may be also.

  My mother’s voice rose above his pleas.

  “I’m sorry she’s dead, Ruby,” he finally said, and my mother stopped.

  The circle of grievers shied away, heading back the way that they had come. None of them wanted to witness their shepherd get rebuked by his wife.

  “It ain’t my fault,” my father said. “If I had Ivy’s blood on my hands, don’t you think God would let this serpent of mine strike me dead? God’s done what He done.”

  My mother’s Bible slipped from her grasp and landed on top of the casket. “God’s done? You think God did this?”

  The copperhead writhed in my father’s grip. “It ain’t like I stood over her bed with a gun in my hands, Ruby. She died, and I’m sorry for it, but it wasn’t my doing.”

  My mother laughed. “She died the day you put your hands on her, Briar.”

  Above us passing clouds caged the coming rain. The air was graveyard still.

  The copperhead had no reason to spook. And yet it did. For the first time in his life, my father could not control his serpent. The snake whipped its tail until its whole body went rigid, and my father dropped it in the high grass beneath the sugar maple. My mother flinched and drew back.

  The copperhead slithered at her feet, orange and black, a fire and its ashes. It slid lazily along the gravestone, toying with the weeds around my mother’s bare ankles.

  “Ruby,” my father said softly. “Don’t you move.”

  She obeyed him. My father lifted his hands, and then my mother spoke.

  “How dare you.” Her voice shook. “How dare you bring that thing here.”

  My father dropped his arms. “I’ll fetch it, Ruby. I swear.”

  As they argued, the copperhead drew me toward itself. Come closer, it seemed to whisper. I crept to the edge of the plot and settled onto my knees. It was a delicate animal, this serpent. Its eyes shone, and its mouth clamped like a treasure chest. I was so close.

  “Wren,” my mother said. “Get on your feet.”

  I coiled my body around the grave, moving slower than the clouds overhead.

  “I’ll get it, Mama,” I whispered. “I can do it.”

  “Step back, now,” my father warned. “It’s a copperhead.”

  “I know what it is.”

  “Just let it be, Wren,” he said.

  I came within spitting distance and hesitated. The snake hedged in the grass. I saw its tongue flit-flat-flit. It paid us no mind as it settled into the shallow shade of the gravestone. I leveled my body against the ground, bit my lip, and reached out.

  Nothing could have prepared me for what I felt when that animal swirled itself around my wrist. My father had always sworn that taking up serpents was like taking a deep breath, but I choked.

  I held it for only an instant before my fingers seized and its head jabbed at me. I screamed. My father didn’t move. Before I could drop it, my mother leaped across the plot and unhooked it from my wrist.

  The serpent charged toward her, yawned back its mouth, and fixed its teeth to the flesh right above her collarbone.

  “Ruby!” my father shouted.

  My mother pitched forward. The snake still clung to her neck as its body twisted into a question mark. My father lunged for her, and she took his arm. Together they fell to their knees. He cinched the serpent by the jaw. Once it released, he tossed it onto Ivy’s casket. It caressed the cover of his Bible before curling itself into a spiral.

  I remained on my hands and knees. My father set about sucking the poison out of the open wound. He spit into the dirt, and my mother’s neck blotched and swelled. Her breathing labored, and a sheen of sweat washed across her forehead. I sprang to my feet.

  “We have to get her to the doctor,” I said.

  “She won’t make it,” he answered, his hands hovering above the bite.

  “You have to go get him, then,” I said. “You’ll run faster than me.”

  If he heard me, he didn’t respond. His lips mouthed private incantations, but he made no sound.

  “Daddy!” I shouted. “Get the doctor. Please.”

  “God’s done what He done,” my father whispered, my mother’s head in his lap. His tears ran rivers over her eyes.

  I took off running down the mud-ridden hill, beyond the rapids where Violet had saved her lovers, through the woods to the bottom of our property. I whipped past the other mourners making their way down the mountain, shouting at them to send for help because my mother had been bit. I kept running until I reached Ivy’s old Pontiac, which Ricky and the boys had left behind. After I cranked the engine with the key hidden beneath the floor mat, I slammed the gas until I reached Dr. Ed’s clinic at the edge of Trap. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know how to drive. I wouldn’t wait for God to decide.

  But God had already made his choice. By the time Dr. Ed and I returned to the top of Violet’s Run, my mother was dead. We found her body lying slack against a tree trunk, the snake still nestled atop Ivy’s casket. My father had disappeared.

  Ivy had looked terrified in her last moments, my mother had said, and I would come to say in the campfire stories I told that my mother looked impatient. Just get on with it, her static face seemed to plead. She and Ivy had done everything else together since they’d been young, and my mother wouldn’t let her beloved die alone without her. I can’t survive here anymore.

  GONE

  Ever since I was young, I’d heard my father preach that God’s will was like the wind. You can’t see it, he said, and you can’t stop it.

  My mother lay at my feet. The rain beckoned, and I couldn’t shield her from it. I sidled up next to her body and put my cheek to her forehead. The air stank like mud and squirrel hides. I buried my face in my mother’s hair and prayed for the truth to somehow become a lie.

  Dr. Ed didn’t need to examine the body to see she was dead. He didn’t have to tell me, either.

  “Death isn’t the end,” I’d heard my mother say to Ivy when she thought I couldn’t hear. “It’s an escape.”

  She never feared the end of her life as much as she feared the length of it.

  The doctor rested a palm on my shoulder before heading back down the mountain to send for someone. That’s what he said: I’m sending for someone. His business was with the living, and I needed a different kind of help now.

  A drizzle had set in by the time a beat-up silver Tacoma swerved up to Ivy’s plot. I knew that truck, the boy in blue-jean overalls ricocheting in the back. The pickup skidded in the mud, and the boy hopped out with an armload of quilts. He draped them over my mother’s corpse like a veil. The driver, the shiner I’d seen at Ricky’s the day Ivy burned, stumbled out and bowed his head.

  “You’re drunk,” I said.

  He didn’t disagree. Instead he stared at the mound of quilts as he steadied himself against the grille of his truck.

  “You can’t tear through this land like that. Folks bury their kin here.”

  It’s what my mother would have said had she been alive. I stood and stretched out my arms as if I needed to defend her.

  He sucked his teeth. “You can if you own it.”

  “You own this land?” I pointed across the valley drowning in violets and headstones.

  “So they tell me.” He looked toward the gray sky.

  “Why would you turn it into a graveyard?” I asked.

  “Dead bodies got to go somewhere.” He rubbed his eyes. “Now, let’s get Ruby Day out of the rain.”

  His words stopped me. My mother had been Ruby Day before she’d met my father, before she’d become a mother and a wife. She hadn’t been called that name in a long time.

  The man sighed. The rain fixed his black hair to the sides of his forehead, and it curled beneath his ears.

  “Listen,” he said. “Where’s your daddy?”

 
“Gone.”

  “Gone?” He squinted.

  “Gone.”

  The rain fell faster. The kid in the overalls tucked the edges of the quilt around my mother as the shiner knelt down to lift her. He was taller than my father, and stronger. I remembered the phone call my mother had made three days earlier.

  “You’re Flynn,” I said.

  “I am.”

  He cradled my mother’s body into his arms and carried her to the Tacoma. As he walked, the quilts sloughed off her like shedding skin.

  “She’ll sit between us,” he said, sliding her in through the passenger-side door. “Get in.”

  I climbed in beside my mother and slipped my arm through hers. Her body fell into mine.

  “Wait here,” Flynn said.

  I watched him from the sideview mirror. He grabbed an ax from the back of the truck, and the boy balanced a long snake pole over his head. At the grave Flynn lifted the pole and told the boy to step back. He crouched down, scooped the snake up just below the jaw, and pinned it to the earth beneath the sugar maple. Then he threw the ax down, cutting its head clean off.

  Aside from my father, I’d never seen someone handle a snake with such grace. He left the snake to twitch beneath the tree, tossed the pole and the ax into the back, and climbed into the front seat. The sky thundered as a wave of rain washed the windshield.

  “What about your boy?” I asked.

  “It’s all right,” Flynn said, turning the engine. “Sonny don’t mind the rain.”

  Sonny sat on top of the wheel well and knocked on the glass of the rear window. Flynn raised his hand in recognition. His arm brushed my mother’s as he shifted gears. We took off down the hill, the tires drawing angry stripes in the grass as the rain started to pour.

  * * *

  Flynn and his boy lived in a dark house in the woods at the base of Violet’s Run, roughly five miles up the mountain from the bottom of our hill. I’d never known that anyone lived any farther north than we did. The cabin crouched behind a congregation of balsams, and it stood as long as it was tall, with a stone chimney and a lookout perch along the top. Fresh lumber lay stacked on either side of the wooden door, a hammer left on the front steps.