by Amy Jo Burns
When I stepped out of the Tacoma, my foot snagged a wire of strung soup cans.
“Watch your step,” Flynn said as he hoisted my mother from the front seat.
“You trying to keep raccoons away?” I asked.
“Something like that.”
He kicked the front door open with his boot, and the house looked like it had been expecting me. The floor was freshly swept, and a mason jar of violets graced the tabletop next to a thin line of clear glass carboys.
Sonny lifted the rug on the floor and then the wide wooden plank beneath it. He stored the bottles in the hole dug into the earth below, next to some horsehair brushes and cans of white paint. Flynn took my mother’s body and laid it gently on his bed. Then he took a towel and set about blotting the water from her face.
“Here,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
He scratched his rasp of a beard and handed me the towel.
“You got any coffee?” I asked. “You could use it.”
Flynn dragged himself toward the kitchen, and I sat down on the bed with my mother. Her eyelashes drooped with water. The switchblade at her hip glinted, pearlescent in the dim light. I took it from its loop, placed it in my pocket.
Flynn returned holding twin cups of coffee.
“I don’t drink it,” I said.
“Start,” he answered.
I sat up and took a sip.
“The boy,” I said. “He yours?”
Flynn nodded.
“Where’s his mother?”
“Gone,” Flynn answered.
“Gone?” I asked.
“Gone,” Sonny repeated from the doorway.
The boy blinked at me with a blank gaze, the blond cowlick on his head spraying upward as it dried from the rain. Flynn asked me what I planned to do with the body. The body.
“A plot right beside Ivy’s. So neither of them will be alone.” I paused. “If you could get my mother’s tambourine for me—and remove that snake carcass—I’d appreciate it.”
Flynn braced himself against the doorframe. He stared at me in a fraught way that made me suspect he was thinking about money.
“I’ll find a way to pay your fee,” I said.
He looked startled. “You ain’t got any money.”
“I have to pay,” I said. “She’d want me to.”
He took a long sip of coffee and wiped his upper lip. I waited for him to ask about my father, but he didn’t.
“You got a place to stay tonight?” he asked.
“Home.” Tears slithered down my face as I said it.
He frowned. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
He sighed. “Well, shit.”
A strain of guilt reared up in me. My mother would hate being beholden to this man. I remembered the money she’d stashed in her King James Bible and wondered how much was left.
“Take us home,” I said. “I’ll pay you for your trouble.”
“Wait.”
He sauntered out of the room with his empty coffee cup dangling from his grasp to make a phone call in the next room. I looked at my mother, who still had that restless expression on her face.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” I whispered. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
I’d never sounded more like my father. Flynn reappeared just as I was wiping my face with the hem of my skirt. He sat down next to me on the bed and rubbed the holes in his jeans with his hand.
“I want you to come with me,” he said. His voice was kind.
“Where?”
His eyes fastened to mine. “Aunt Bette’s. You’ll be cared for there.”
He exhaled, and then I understood. Folks resorted to Aunt Bette’s when there was no one left, no kin who wanted you. I glanced over at my mother.
“I can’t leave her,” I said.
“You don’t have to worry about her now,” he said. “She won’t be alone.”
Sonny slipped in and dragged a large rocking chair next to the bed, and set about tilting back and forth in it.
“You can’t leave her here,” I said.
“Just till I get back,” he said. “Sonny knows how to keep good company.”
A round of thunder boomed outside, and I clenched a fist.
“Drive me home,” I said. “I can take care of myself.”
He sighed. “No.”
“Why?”
“Because your daddy ain’t around. And I ain’t sure he’s fit to care for you anyhow.”
I looked down at the corduroy quilt on his bed, remembering how my father had held me underwater, the luster of his damp shirt, the brooding of the current.
“You heard,” I said.
“Everybody heard,” Sonny answered as he rocked, never once lifting his eyes from my mother’s face.
“Ain’t you been lonely up there anyhow?” Flynn asked.
I didn’t want him to know the truth. “I’ll stay here till she’s buried.” I clutched my mother’s hand. “You can grant me that.”
“You can’t.” Flynn sighed again. “I got business.”
“I don’t care about your business.”
“That’s just fine.” His voice rocked like a lullaby. “But I do.”
I watched my mother, waiting for her to tell me what to do.
Wren, she’d written, I have to tell you—
I knew what would happen next. These were the stones from which mountain myths were built. Word would spread, and soon there would be stories swapped among the hills about the day the drunkard drove down Violet’s Run with a dead woman buckled into the passenger seat. She looked just like a puppet, the raconteurs would swear, and the audience would feast on it until the story became theirs to share. But that story would be a lie, because Ruby Bird had never been the puppet, not once in her life. I only wished the same could be said of me.
HOME
The first night at the home, I sat on a top bunk in the dark and listened to the gaggle of girls below me. I thought of my mother’s stories about growing up as the oldest of seven girls, how she and her sisters pushed their bunk beds together. Closest to the sky, she’d said, but she’d meant farthest away from her father, from the mice on the floor, from her own mother, who always carried a baby and the flu. Her family had scattered across the state since my parents’ wedding, and the only time my mother heard from them was when her father asked for money. It was no wonder she’d married my father and hadn’t looked back.
Before leaving me at Aunt Bette’s, Flynn had taken me to my parents’ cabin to gather my things. The sun had already set. I took all the dresses my mother had sewn for me. Each one was a story from her past. I’d heard about the sweltering afternoons she and Ivy spent in matching floral skirts, lounging on a picnic bench by the school playground while Ivy flipped through magazines and my mother studied. Before my father whisked her away, she’d lived a life apart from him. She loved math, she loved to measure and sew fabric into beautiful things. Every stitch was exact, strung and restrung until it matched all the others.
She’d fashioned my dresses out of her old ones from her sixteenth birthday, from Ivy’s wedding, and from the high school graduation ceremony they both had skipped.
As I stood in the hallway, I realized I wouldn’t be back for a long time. I felt the grooves in the wall with my fingers, letting them lead me to my mother’s door. At her dressing table, I found the mason jar she’d used as a jewelry box. It held nothing but bobby pins and loose buttons. She had treasured only one earthly thing, besides Ivy and me—the knife that Ivy had given her.
I glanced at my dark figure in the mirror. Behind me a specter hovered in the reflection. Flynn, coming to urge me along.
“Come on, now,” he said, his voice a hush. “Before it gets too late.”
Aunt Bette had waited up for me, a lit can
dle melting into a small pond on the mantel. Flynn didn’t come inside. I turned to look behind me before entering the silent house. Already the Tacoma’s headlights receded as he backed out of the lot.
Aunt Bette’s house smelled like old milk and older yarn. One hallway vaulted into the next. She ushered me up the stairs and through the first door into a room crowded with bunk beds.
The girl with the glittery nails appeared by candlelight from the top bunk.
“I’m Emma,” she said, “Dump your bag, and I’ll give you an arm up.”
I left my things and gave Emma my hand. There were six beds, all but one of them filled.
“You can have the one next to me,” Emma said as she settled back into bed.
She found a flashlight in the bottom of her sleeping bag and thumbed the switch. Her skin glinted against the shadows.
“Whatever happened to you must have been bad. Aunt Bette never takes anybody in the middle of the night,” she said.
“It’s my mama,” I said. “She’s dead.”
We sat with the flashlight between us, the gruff breathing of the girls growling down below.
“My first night here, I did this.” Emma showed me three piercings along the ridge of her right earlobe. “One to remember each brother I left behind. You won’t forget tonight,” she said. “But soon one day will run into the next. Then it won’t hurt so bad.”
“Where’s your family?” I asked.
“Farmed out across the county. My mom has three other kids, and our house got condemned after the chemical spill in Elk River a few years back. State of West Virginia said we had to go.” She pushed her lips together. “For a long time, I didn’t know who I was without my brothers.”
I thought of Ivy’s boys, the mothers we’d lost.
“Emma,” I said. “Pierce my ears.”
My mother had never owned a pair of earrings. A name like Ruby is jewelry enough, my mother’s mother had told her when she was thirteen and asked for a necklace. A preacher’s wife needs no decoration, my father had assured her when she walked down the wedding aisle without a veil.
“You done it before?” I asked Emma.
She nodded. “I did my own. I got just the pair for you, too. Come on.”
We slipped off the beds, and she pulled out a sock full of earrings from the top drawer in the corner bureau.
“Here.” She withdrew two tiny silver birds and shone the flashlight on her palm. “Perfect for a Wren.”
Their wings had deep grooves, stretching them out in flight.
Emma sat me in a folding chair by the stove in the kitchen while she boiled two safety pins. When it was time, she sank a pin through my right ear, then my left. I closed my eyes. The piercing came quick and strong and silent, like the quiet fangs of a copperhead. She smoked one of Aunt Bette’s Virginia Slims as she worked. The sweet smolder nested in my nostrils as Emma clasped the back on each earring.
“Done,” she said.
I opened my eyes and saw Caleb standing in front of me with a cube of ice in his palm. He held it to one ear, then the other, while Emma took pulls from the cigarette. A secret conversation passed between Caleb and me about all the things we both had lost. I was someone different now. My mother was gone, and I had no fire left.
* * *
I waited three days for my father to come for me. On the third day, I stood in the front yard in a marigold dress, looking just like my mother. Even my hair was plaited, her switchblade at my hip. Aunt Bette had promised someone would take me to my mother’s grave. I had dressed like my mother in the hope that it might lure my father back to me. I waited, still as a crucifix, for him to crest the hill. Come, I willed him. Come, come, come.
Flynn came instead. Sonny ate kernels of dried corn in the bed of the truck.
“My father didn’t show, did he?” I asked as I climbed in.
He scratched the back of his head. “No.”
Flynn stared at me a long time. Before he pulled onto the road, Emma rushed out the front door, clutching the neck of her guitar. She hopped into the back, and we wound our way up toward Violet’s Run, where Flynn parked at the bottom of the hill. The sun sat low, the grass grew tall, and I knew that my father wasn’t coming. Grief hadn’t kept him away. Shame had. His daughter’s lack of faith had made him mortal, like that moment Adam first felt shame at his own nakedness in the Garden of Eden, even though he’d been naked all along.
“I’ll wait here till it’s done,” Flynn said as Emma and I left the truck.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll walk with you.”
She hooked one arm through her guitar strap and the other through mine, and together we climbed the hill. The trail of flattened grass was wider than any serpent outstretched, and it would have given my father an empty satisfaction to see it. So many folks had gathered that I couldn’t even see the plot until I reached the line of maples. Ivy’s grave was covered over now.
The silence of the crowd felt sharp, wintry. I closed my eyes and remembered my mother in the morning, standing in the dewy grass and staring out beyond our fields. The silence hung. I opened my eyes and found the crowd fixed on me, not fussing to hide their stares. It took time to realize that the quiet wasn’t out of respect for the dead. They were waiting for the burial rite to begin. Without my father there to lead it, folks looked to me instead. I couldn’t handle my father’s snakes, I couldn’t perform his miracles, and I couldn’t slay his audience.
Emma strummed a somber melody on her guitar as the tree limbs above us sagged in the heat.
“My mother was a seeker,” I said to the crowd. “She wanted the truth, even if it hurt.”
“Amen,” someone said. “Your mama’s gone home now.”
My skin prickled. She couldn’t be at home so far away from me.
“When Ivy died,” I continued, “my mama knew that something was wrong here. She just didn’t know how to stop it.”
I looked across the field, searching for violets. They’d closed up after getting beaten down by the rain.
“So I’m stopping it,” I said. “Go home. Behead your serpents. Bury your strychnine.”
Brother Arledge came forward. “Briar says that—”
“Do you see any Briar here?” I shouted. “Why defend a man who can’t be bothered to bury his own wife?”
He stepped back.
“There ain’t nothing wrong with being a sheep,” I said. “But find yourselves a better shepherd.”
I turned away from my mother’s body and started down the hill. I should have stayed. I should have been the last to leave. That’s what my mother would have done. But I’d never been as pure as her, as noble, as strong. I was my father’s daughter.
* * *
The Tacoma growled to life when Flynn spotted Emma and me in the rearview mirror.
“You went back to my cabin, right?” I asked him as he drove us toward the main road. “To look for my father?”
He nodded.
“The snakes,” I said. “Were they still in the shed?”
He thought on it. “No.”
“Then he ain’t coming back.”
One of Flynn’s hands slipped from the wheel. “I suppose not.”
He said it like he already knew. The pines blurred past us as we sped down the mountain.
“I’ll pay you back for the headstone,” I said. “The plot, too.”
He sighed and tapped the gas. Neither of us spoke until he pulled back into Aunt Bette’s dirt drive. It still had pocks of mud from the storm. He threw the truck into park and rested an elbow on the wheel. Then he reached across my lap and opened the glove compartment, where he’d stowed my mother’s tambourine.
“Can I say something?” he asked as he handed it to me. It jittered in his grasp.
I waited.
“Let the dead bury their dead,”
Flynn said, quoting Jesus himself.
“I’ve heard that verse before,” I said. “Many times.”
“It’s sound advice all the same.” He rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “You can leave all this behind now. Get yourself away from that cabin in the marshes and don’t look back.”
“That’s what my father did,” I said. “And I hate him for it.”
He twisted the ring of copper around his finger. “Your daddy is a fool.”
When I didn’t answer, Flynn arched his back and fiddled with the gearshift.
“Well,” he said.
“You’ve got business.”
He nodded. “But promise me—stay at Aunt Bette’s, and stay off the mountain.”
I didn’t ask why. All my life I’d been hiding, and I didn’t have the strength for anything else. I slid myself out of the car and slouched toward Aunt Bette’s porch. Caleb stood on the bottom step and leaned against the railing.
“Welcome home,” he said to me.
Home. It was the one place I yearned for—the place that haunted all my stories—and it had never been a place at all.
Dear Wren,
I have to tell you—
I’ve started this letter a hundred times, only to throw each of them away. I thought my silence would keep you safe, keep you happy. But I was wrong.
I’ve been wrong about so many things.
II.
MOONSHINER’S LOVE SONG
PRELUDE
If there was one sadness in Flynn Sherrod’s life, it was this: He’d been in love with Ruby Day long before the moment he realized she was falling for his best friend. Every girl on the mountain fell a little bit in love with Briar Bird at one time or another—his lopsided grin caught between two dimples, his bachelor-button-blue eyes, his sweet tenor voice as it belted old church hymns. Flynn had never been called handsome by anyone but his mother, even if he did have a heart stronger than the first fruits of whiskey that dripped out of his daddy’s copper still. With a square jaw, gray eyes, and feet almost twice the size of his father’s, Flynn was taller—and sharper—than every other seventeen-year-old boy he knew. He had a mountaineer’s hands, no smoother than bark, that corralled his black hair behind his ears and shielded his eyes from the sun. Every night before he rested his head, Flynn offered his own kind of prayer to the sky, that Ruby might be a woman willing to look past appearances.