by Amy Jo Burns
I’m sorry, Ivy wrote at the end of the letter. I’m so sorry.
The next morning Ivy rose before dawn, feeling sicker than she ever had. She wheezed, felt a chill, and tried in vain to ease the rash on her body with beeswax salve and tallow. Even a thick curtain of ointment didn’t quell the itch on her skin. She and her boys walked to Ruby’s cabin in a haze, and when she saw Ruby’s face hovering above the fire pit next to Briar’s snake shed, she wanted so much to fall into the arms of her friend, to lay the lonely burden down, that she tripped over the hem of her dress and found the flame instead.
The words she’d wanted to offer rang in her head as the blaze spread around her and the razorbacks in the distance glowed like the sun.
We should have run that day Briar got struck, Ruby. We should have run and never looked back.
Dear Wren,
I have to tell you—
The only legend that ever really mattered was ours.
IV.
LEGEND’S END
STAY
They say Moses once lost himself on a holy mountain, much the same way my father did after lightning hit him. Moses lasted forty days and forty nights. My father stayed hidden for sixteen years, until his wife got bit. Then it took only three days for his life as a prophet to rot.
Once news of my mother’s death hit the local papers, my father couldn’t hide anymore. His wife now had a death certificate as well as a marriage certificate, both searchable by name, but that wasn’t all. Briar Bird’s faithful had turned on him. After years of silence, his secret keepers began to speak.
Stories of what had happened at Ivy’s funeral leaked off the mountain like water through a sifter. FAMED SNAKE HANDLER MURDERS WIFE, one headline read. WOMAN SLAIN BY HUSBAND’S SERPENT, read another. I couldn’t get enough of them. When my mother married White Eye, she gave her life for his legend. It turned her into a ghost. Ruby Day was nothing but a memory, even before she died. Seeing her name in print brought her to life in a way my father had never allowed. She’d always been flesh to me, but now she was ink and parchment—a weight any stranger could hold. It felt like finding her. It also felt like losing her again.
None of the articles mentioned a daughter. I’d been living as a ghost, too.
Not since the mining boom of the 1930s had our mountain captured the heart of the outside world. Young journalists and retired cops flew down Route 28 by the truckful—this time looking for something more seductive than sorry tales of overdoses. Theirs was a high that only damned heroes like my father could satisfy, but he was nowhere to be found. After his wife’s death, Reverend Briar Bird finally started to draw the attention my mother once thought he should. He hadn’t fooled me. It was simpler than onlookers had charmed it into being. Either he was hiding or he was dead. And for his sake, I hoped he was dead.
He couldn’t survive without my mother. I didn’t think I could, either. We’d lived our days side by side, sunrise to sunset. I promised Flynn I wouldn’t return to the mountain, but my mother was my mountain. I couldn’t leave her behind. She’d been my best friend, even though I wondered now if I’d ever known her. I’d been searching for the real Ruby Bird all my life. I hunted for her even still.
The county library—a shipping container crammed with water-stained paperbacks and three desktop computers—became my sanctuary. It used to be an hour’s drive from my father’s land. Now it took fifteen minutes to walk there from Aunt Bette’s front door. For three days after my mother was buried, I camped at one of the computers and pored over the front page of every news outlet in the state. I’d never learned to type, and my fingers searched for the right keys.
R-U-B-Y D-A-Y B-I-R-D
My mother’s life was sick with untold stories. A scatter of articles from the past fifteen years formed a list on the screen. I discovered things she’d never shared about who she’d been before she fell in love with my father. She’d graduated at the top of her high school class and tutored her schoolmates in math. She’d been a part of 4-H and the hiking club. She and Ivy had written in the school newspaper about their plans to leave town after they received their diplomas.
At first I couldn’t recognize this young woman who became my mother. Then I remembered something I’d forgotten. I’d lost her once before she died.
I was eight years old, and spring had just come. We’d gone hunting for bloodroot around the barracks of an old strip mine. Henry had caught the croup. My mother aimed to cure it with tea made from the plant’s red sap. The torn stems stained her hands crimson, and she went to the river to wash them.
I spun a circle in the sun, and suddenly I couldn’t find her. All I saw were remains. A crooked fence of chicken wire, a crowd of empty mailboxes, and an abandoned auger left in the tall grass. No one had lived here in years. Even then we walked among the dead. I just couldn’t see it until my mother had gone.
She found me quickly and dried my tears. Looked at me square with fists tucked at her hips.
If ever you can’t find your way home, she said, draw a map of the woods on your hand.
She showed me how to follow the ridge of my ring finger to land on the dirt trail that led to our cabin. How to wade through the creek along the crease of my palm to find the clearing where Ivy’s trailer stood. The razorbacks hovered farther north, at the tip of my middle fingernail. If I slid into the pit of my thumb, I’d hit the holler that fed into the only road that escaped the hills.
Your father might be lost here, my mother said to me. But you don’t have to be.
Even then she was trying to tell me she wanted to leave.
After she died, I counted the hours that my father hadn’t come for me. Rumors about him swarmed the parking lot of the Saw-Whet Motel, not more than fifty paces from the library. I turned my mother’s switchblade over in my palm as I walked toward it, stunned I’d never noticed that my hands looked nothing like hers. Her fingers were able and sturdy. Mine were lean and red at the tips. I searched for a trace of her left in me. Ivy had always said I could have been my mother’s twin if it hadn’t been for my daddy’s light eyes, but I couldn’t see it anymore. All I saw when I looked in the mirror was my father staring back at me.
In less than a week, anyone would have sworn I’d washed away my mother’s memory along with the first shower of scalding water I’d ever taken. The water was hot, endless. It smelled like rotten eggs. I wore Emma’s denim skirt and a Dolly Parton T-shirt, and she cut my hair so short I could no longer braid it.
“It’ll be easier for you,” she said as she brushed shorn hair from my shoulders. “Once school starts next month. No one will know who you are.”
My hair settled into a nest on the floor of Aunt Bette’s kitchen. I didn’t want long hair if my mother couldn’t braid it. Emma handed me a compact mirror. The silver earrings she gave me, shaped like two birds with wings outstretched, shimmered in my reflection. I’d gotten what I’d wanted—to look like everyone else. But all I’d become was a series of blank spaces on Aunt Bette’s paperwork. I had no family, no address. No stories of my own.
At the crosswalk by the Saw-Whet, I tucked my mother’s knife into my pocket and watched the town stoplight blink red. Folks like me, ones with nowhere to be, got to talking. Some swore that my father had killed my mother. She’d never loved him, they said. Others figured that Ruby had died a long time ago. They talked about my parents like they knew them, because they did.
“Ruby lasted longer than any of us thought she would,” one man said.
“Briar’s been living on borrowed time,” said another. “For that outsider he killed.”
The first man sucked his teeth. “Ain’t nothing but rumors.”
I stopped at the curb. This was a story I’d never heard. The words sounded nothing like the legends of my father’s life as a man of God—but the truth of them still hovered too close, the way a vulture circles a carcass. Even Moses was a murderer.
/> The onlookers in the parking lot were about my parents’ age, but from a different time. They sat in lawn chairs, drank beer from tin cans. The women wore sunglasses and jeans. Bracelets that jangled. The men held cell phones in rough palms. My father’s hands—those viperous hands—were the softest part of him. His religion kept him pinned to a past century, kept his fingernails clean.
My mother and I had passed these strangers many times on our grocery trips, and they’d stared at us. I thought it was because we looked odd. Now I wondered if they stared because they remembered who Ruby used to be—the tutor, the beauty, the wanderer. Not once did my mother look back at them. She rushed by every time, keeping her eyes hitched to the horizon.
The loggers who passed through town made bets about what had become of the snake handler’s daughter. She was still everyone’s beloved mystery, more lore than ligament or bone.
“She’s here somewhere,” they said, petting their chain saws in the backs of their Dodge Rams. “Waiting to take revenge on her daddy.”
“Snake handler’s daughter?” Caleb said, soft enough to turn their heads. “She’s not here. She spent one night at Aunt Bette’s and then left town.”
“Headed to Kentucky,” Emma added as she took a drag from her Virginia Slim. She and Caleb were my conduits to a world where I didn’t fit. “And she ain’t coming back.”
It was the kindest thing they could have done for me, letting the legend live so I could let it die. I looked up at the billboard of Princess Saw-Whet. Her muted eyes had been shot out by a hunting rifle. This was the spot where Ivy and Ricky had first met, she once told me. It had sounded romantic then. Now, with the princess’s hollowed-out eyes, it sounded like a horror story.
My father remained the mountain’s favorite outlaw, my mother his sacrifice. I hated my part in the myth. I was nameless, faceless. A pause in my father’s tale of glory. Briar Bird was not a man, a father, or a husband. He was a story, and nothing else.
I didn’t want to be a story. I wanted to live.
* * *
In the days after my mother’s burial, living felt like dying. It wasn’t enough to say I missed her. Her absence shredded me. I left pieces of myself everywhere I went—the porch steps, the bathtub drain, the dust on the side of the road.
My father had kept me on the mountain for so long because the mountain he could rule. Men he couldn’t. When I returned to the library on the morning of my fourth day at Aunt Bette’s, I heard Ivy’s fading whisper in my ear as I read her obituary. Men don’t play nice, she used to tell me. And they don’t play fair.
On the computer screen, an etching of Ivy’s young face stared back at me. A few short sentences followed. Birth, death. Wife, mother. Nothing about her that a hospital record wouldn’t reveal. I recognized the photo. It was half of the picture I’d found in my mother’s Bible, she and Ivy sitting beneath a weeper. When I’d found it, the pair looked locked together. With my mother cropped out, Ivy gazed off toward the unseen. She looked torn and unfinished without my mother—just like my father, and just like me.
I used to think Ivy’s warnings about men were meant to save me from what lay beyond our mountain if I ever left. Now I suspected she wanted to protect me from a more intimate threat. Ivy knew that my father had never played fair. On the day I was baptized, he’d clamped his ill, holy hands on my throat and pretended to save my soul. The world inverted as the sky met my feet, and then I started to fight back.
For only a second, before instinct won, I remembered this—
I thought my father had the right.
He had the ear of God. He had the gift, the power. He had it all, and he could do whatever he wanted with me. I was disposable. So was Ivy. That was the battle my mother fought in her final hours, and it had killed her.
When I was a girl, my father taught me that men were bred to hunt, like Samson hunted for jackals in the Book of Judges. Women, like Delilah, only enjoyed the spoils. My father never thought one day I would be the one to hunt for him.
Everyone in our hills underestimated the snake handler’s daughter, my father most of all. The outsiders who came to our mountain, hungry for a piece of my father’s wicked majesty, did not deserve to steal any reckoning with Briar Bird. It rightfully belonged to me.
* * *
I decided to start my search at the Texaco. The old gas station had been my father’s castle, his kingdom come. But I would wait for nightfall. I could walk the hills in my sleep. My father wouldn’t be able to see me coming for him.
I planned to leave for the Texaco at midnight. Caleb and Emma waited with me in Aunt Bette’s backyard. Like the rest of Trap, it was overgrown and apocalyptic. A rusted trampoline rattled in the wind. They tried to convince me to stay as the distant bluffs towered overhead. Once the sun fell, Caleb lit a fire and the highlands danced in the wake of the flames.
“Don’t go,” Emma said. “Nothing good will be waiting for you up there.”
“You’re free now,” Caleb echoed. “There’s no use in going back.”
I knew they were right.
“He doesn’t get to disappear,” I said. “Not this time.”
“Then we’re coming with you,” Caleb said.
“I’ve got a riddle for you.” Emma lit a Virginia Slim and held it up. “What did serpents eat before the fall of man?”
No one gave an answer. There wasn’t one. I wanted to ask my father the same question, to watch him squirm.
“Tell us about him,” Emma said, the edge of her cigarette burning like a tiny star. “Your dad. We only knew him as the snake handler.”
Briar Bird—my villain, my hero. I could spin the tale of Briar’s blighted eye, the lightning bolt, the hands that had cooled Ivy’s burn without ever touching her. I could let the myth continue to comfort and deceive.
“You want to know why life up there was magic?” I asked.
Emma nodded.
“Then I’ll tell you about my mother.”
I told them about the scent of her soap, the lullaby of her voice, the workmanship of her hands. I told them about Ivy, the way she’d been swindled by her own miracle and my father’s hand in it. The clouds cleared as night set in, and the August heat held. Emma drifted to sleep. As the campfire mellowed, Caleb and I sat together in the smoke. We sat side by side after the fire had gone out, this night on the outskirts of town not unlike the one we spent hiding in my father’s snake shed in the woods.
He exhaled. “I don’t like this. It’s not safe.”
I leaned into him. “He won’t know we’re coming.”
“That’s what scares me.”
He looked away. We hadn’t touched each other since the night Ivy died.
“Hey.” I knelt in front of him.
The whites of his eyes cut into the night.
“Stay,” he whispered.
I could almost hear what he hadn’t said—no one who followed my father up the mountain had survived it. Caleb let his hands linger on my waist. I felt his fingers crest the small of my back, and the muscles beneath his shirt rippled as he tensed. He pressed in until our foreheads met, and then he backed away.
“I can’t stay,” I said.
Above us the sky was shuttered with fir trees and scarlet oaks. I didn’t wonder if my father was gazing up at the same stars, and I didn’t wonder if my mother was looking down from them. What did it matter? They’d both still left me alone.
* * *
The old Texaco station loomed larger in the dark than it did in daylight. The country shadows were impenetrable, the mountain’s nights black against the restless flicker of neon lights in Trap. There was a life-and-death romance to these hills, the kind that slit hearts wide open. The kind that had nothing left to lose.
The gas station sat halfway between town and my parents’ cabin, tucked into a holler behind a stand of uprooted hardwoods. Caleb, Emma
, and I had crept into Aunt Bette’s van and drove with the windows down as we wound around the mountain. Only one other pair of headlights passed us. Mostly the night kept quiet. When we pulled off the main drag toward an old towpath, we found the Texaco hidden at a fork in the creek. Emma put the van in park and waited behind the wheel.
Outside the van the air smelled like moss. I slid around the side of the station with Caleb close behind. The boughs of the weeper at the bottom of the hill stretched wide, and they groaned in the wind. Next to the gas meters, my father had stowed a hidden box with a latch. I lifted it and reached in to find a ring with three keys on it.
I fitted the key into the back door’s lock, it unhinged, and we entered my father’s palace.
The truth: My father’s church was the ugliest room I’d ever stood in. The half-light would cast even my mother’s face in a garish glow, a reminder that from dust we came and to dust we would return. The fan above hung like a bat. The room had no spirit in it, but I couldn’t associate the Holy Spirit with anything except this sorry place, with a sweat and a buzz and a fever—and a longing, most of all.
The room still stank like gasoline. And it was empty.
I held up Emma’s lighter and spread it across the room. Folding chairs formed disheveled rows, and an old music stand served as a pulpit. Two old Coke bottles crowded the pulpit’s feet. They’d been filled and refilled so many times the outsides had gone slick. A container of oil, a vial of strychnine. One to anoint and one to poison.
I knelt down and took both vessels in my hands. These, like me, my father had left behind.
“The first thing my father taught me,” I said, “is that a snake is not a snake. It’s an agile tapestry, a piece of the wild you can hold in your hand. It’s opening a lock without a key, it’s speaking in another tongue. It’s the skin beneath your nails and the dreams you forget at night.”