by Laura Hunter
Inside, damp air hit Anna hard. The room smelled like time trapped in a tomb, dirty and musky. The intake of air as the door opened swayed soot tags that hung from the ceiling. It moved corner spider webs in and out, as if the room itself had taken a long-needed deep breath of fresh air.
Light blue flecks of paint peeled off walls of the main room, left from where a former inhabitant had painted to ward off spirits. Wood grains held the paint so deeply embedded that, even without a fresh coat, Anna felt the room might still be safe.
Lily bounded in and hopped on one foot, leaving tracks in the thick dust. Dry boards popped under her weight. “Feet! Feet!” Lily squealed.
Little furniture made the room seem overly large. A white iron bed and its mattress covered with blue and white ticking stood against the eastern window. Anna rubbed her hand over the headboard and flicked a sliver of paint off with her fingernail. Rust beneath the curling paint had etched a thick coat of umber. Across the room, a mid-sized bureau with four deep drawers sat on ball feet. What Anna saw as a possible hidden drawer ran across the bottom. It had been varnished so long ago that Anna’s hand stuck to the blackened top when she touched it. The bureau was so like the one she had left in Covington when she ran away with Clint she might have sworn they were the same.
An iron stove, two eyes for cooking and a warming oven next to the flue, filled the wall opposite the bed. An iron kettle and pot had been left on the stove; a box for firewood, on the plank floor. Near one front window stood a thick, oak table made of two wide boards, worn low in spots and scratched from use. The table had a slat bench on each side. A kerosene lamp sat at the far end of the table, its globe black with unwashed soot. Breakline’s electricity had come from generators Rafe installed to run the tipple. The lamp told Anna she had not thought this move through: no electricity, no heat, no water.
One poorly constructed rocking chair rested on rockers far from parallel. One look told Anna it would walk across the room if she tried to use it. Two cane-bottomed chairs were propped against box shelves for storing. Against the west wall, next to the stacked river rock fireplace, a primitive ladder leaned toward an open loft area for sleeping. A closed door hid a small side room.
Except for the few flecks of blue paint, Boone Station was brown. Outside and inside. Brown rocks and planks. Brown wooden furniture. Anna had no means to change it.
She opened shuttered windows and took a broom to cobwebs and dirt daubers’ nests on the far wall. Lily followed her mother about. She checked each bureau drawer and under the mattress. She started up the ladder to the loft, but Anna pulled her down by her dress tail. “Help me take this mattress out to air.”
Lily pulled against her mother’s attempt to get the cotton mattress out the door. Anna gave a jerk and said, “Be strong, girl. We got to make a place for ourselves here.” A push from Lily and a tug from Anna popped the mattress out the door. Anna draped it over the porch rail. “Now the broom.” As Anna beat the mattress, long embedded filth settled on the porch floor.
From the carton Gabe had placed on the table, Anna took out a waxed box of lard, a bag of sugar, cans of shuck beans, corn, tomatoes, and baking powder. She struggled but could not grasp the sack of flour. She left it lying in the bottom of the crate and lifted a basket of eggs to the table. Heavier than she expected, she set it down with a thump.
Anna came inside and laid the broom across the doorsill. “Get us a couple of goats soon.”
Lily picked up the broom.
“Leave that broom be. We don’t need witches coming in here.”
Lily dropped the broom with a resounding whack. “Witches.”
Anna could have bitten her tongue. “Not really,” she said. She had sworn off superstitions when her daddy set her and Ruth on the first bench of Covington Pentecostal Church and told them to believe. His girls’ presence verified his household control; but, more importantly, their attendance proved his faith to the people of Covington. If he believed, they believed.
Anna had always attended church without fail, until one revival night, when a visiting preacher, dressed in a black coat so old it was shiny, appeared with a long, rectangular wooden box. Anna had watched him come up the aisle. His hair hung low on his back. He wore no collar like other men did when dressed for meeting. “He must be a mountain man,” Anna whispered to Ruth. She thought the box was a little coffin, but something inside the box jangled as the preacher walked past her pew toward the pulpit. Anna went back to counting the tongue and groove slats on the ceiling.
After a time of talking and shouting, the mountain man screeched open the box lid. He dropped the box with a thud. In his hands squirmed an Eastern diamondback rattlesnake as long as Anna was tall. Anna lifted her feet, convinced other rattlers slithered over the floor. She jumped up on the slat bench and screamed, “Run, Ruth! Run for your life!”
With no back to stabilize it, the bench overturned with a crash. Youngsters squealed and oldsters waved their hands toward the ceiling, crying for salvation. Both girls ran for the double doors, high stepping as if they were dancing on hot coals.
Neither child expected the fury their father brought home.
“It’s superstition, them snakes,” Anna said between sobs. “You said not to believe superstition. It’s pagan.”
“It’s God’s own truth,” he said. “You will believe the Word of God.”
“That don’t sound fair to me, God having different opinions for different folks,” Anna countered.
“God is all wise, all powerful, and all knowing, and don’t you doubt it, young lady.” Her father stood with his hands on his hips. “Get me my belt and hold on to the bedstead.”
But no amount of whipping got Anna back to the church. Her mother said to let her be and she meant it. Ruth tromped after her father Sunday after Sunday. Anna stayed home with her mother and made her own religion. A little superstition, a bit of pagan, and a lot of the Old Testament Bible, all stirred into one. Her mind would later get so jumbled with it all that she could not determine one from the other. Out of deference to her father, she had tried to avoid superstitions, unless they slapped her hard in the face.
Lily stopped swishing the broom from side to side and dropped it near the door. Anna put it behind the door. With time, she would find reaching for the broom from behind the door was more convenient than stooping to lift it from the floor, so there it stayed.
Patting the quilts she had laid on the floor, Anna called Lily over to rest.
“No.” Lily crossed her arms over her chest. “Bear.” She reached her hand to Anna.
“Today you rest. I’ll be there soon to lay with you.”
After she put Lily down for her nap, she set tinned foods on a plank shelf near the stove. Their colorful paper labels brightened the wall. She took the wooden statues from her coat pockets and set the buck and bear figures on the fireplace mantle. She searched through her clothes and brought out the bird she had taken three years before when she went to Flatland. She put the three in a line: buck, bear, and bird.
Time had embedded a chill through the limestone. Anna lit a small flame in the fireplace. She sat in the rocker and gave the fire time to break the cold. Lily slept an easy sleep on the floor. Anna lifted the box from her pocket and turned it several times before she opened it. Inside the box lid were printed black letters: Best Jewelry, Bristol, Tennessee. On a square of cotton lay a bracelet with a half-inch puffed heart dangling from a thick, woven snake chain, both marked fourteen-karat gold.
“Winston,” she whispered. “Why now?” She opened the clasp and put the bracelet on her left wrist. The gold felt so cold on her arm that she removed the bracelet. She caressed the heart between her fingers. Winston’s gift warmed to meet the temperature of her body. She slid the bracelet back on her wrist and left it there. One day if Lily asked, she could think it was a gift from her father.
After a long rocking and thinking time, Anna moved to the pallet and lay down beside her daughter. She pulled a single w
hite sheet over them and stared at the ceiling. Lily stirred with her mother’s movement and muttered, “Bear.”
Anna told her she could have the bear tomorrow. As she moved her arm under the sheet, the bracelet’s clasp scratched her wrist. She worked her arm out to see if the bracelet had drawn blood, but it had not. She closed her eyes, but sleep never came.
She rose and threaded a thin leather strip through the hole in the bear’s head and tied a double knot. She slipped the necklace over Lily’s head so the child would find it when she awoke. If this, and Lily, had to be what she had left of Winston Rafe, so be it.
Chapter 16
On Monday morning before the fog lifted, Anna awoke to a humming sound coming up the road from Breakline Camp. No other car sounded like Winston’s hefty Buick Riviera.
She drew back the front window curtain as the car emerged from the mist. Its rounded grill, filled with a row of what resembled silver teeth, came into sight, its green so dark it required sunshine not to look black. Two headlights shone like pasty eyes toward Boone Station. Within a moment, the white-walled spare tire that set over the polished back chrome bumper disappeared down the road.
Anna dropped on the bed and held her breath. Winston had passed so close that, had she been in the doorframe, she could have stuck out her broom and stopped him. But he had not stopped. As best she saw, he had not glanced her way. Voices from the past spoke in a wind so high it touched only the tops of trees, and the creek cried and then laughed as it worried sharp rocks into smooth stones. Anna refused to listen. She had to settle her mind in her own way.
By mid-morning she decided that, with no lights burning, he would have thought she was still asleep. Three years he would be gone, and he had not mentioned the going. Had not bothered to say good-bye nor catch a glimpse of his daughter. Leaving Breakline, she thought, would make for a clean split. Now she caught herself listening, moving to the door at each new sound. She lost her resolve. All it had taken was the passing of one car.
That day, Winston returned after dark, his headlights breaking through her windows like cold sunshine. Anna watched the spare tire’s circle of light move toward Breakline, then closed the door. Shame and sorrow need something or someone to blame. Anna blamed Winston Rafe for her misery.
Yet it made sense that he would go to Covington. That had to have been his destination. He had not been gone long enough to drive to Bristol. Big Mama and Big Mama #2 opened at the foot of Spencer’s Mountain, a long fat rise of land that rounded the eastern side of Covington. As self-appointed president of Breakline Mining Company, he would need someone in charge to see that all three mines, Breakline #1, Big Mama, and Big Mama #2, had someone in charge who would best serve the company. Some things he would give up. Being Big Boss Man was not one of them.
Winston passed Boone Station every day for two weeks, precisely on time. Anna could set her clock by the purr of the approaching Buick. Within this time, bitterness rooted itself in Anna’s mind, deeper than had her anger. She had given this fool of a man more than six years of her life. She had given him a perfect girl-child, and he acted as if this daughter were invisible. Resentment grew as fast as a poison oak vine, winding itself around and over and squeezing her emotions into a tangled knot.
She threw herself into preparing a home for herself and Lily. Gabe brought chickens and Lily held stakes while he built a pen. “They run free.” She spoke over the hammering.
“Foxes and wolves will eat them for dinner as soon as dark comes in,” Gabe said. “Hold that stake straight.”
“Don’t eat me.” Lily dropped her stake. “Run wolves away.”
“Only a powerful magic could do that.” Gabe smiled and picked up Lily’s stake.
“I learn a powerful magic. Mama says witches might come in the house. I run them away. My magic keep them away.”
Gabe took a nail from his mouth. “Who told you that?”
“The wind. It come in the window and tell me.”
“Oh,” said Gabe. “Well.”
Days rose and fell, and spring heated itself into summer. Though exhausted, Anna filled shelves with canned beans and corn Gabe brought from Breakline. As she worked, she found herself wondering on which day Winston had stopped loving her. Was it on a day when she had said the wrong thing? Or a night when he thought her less attentive? Or had he let her slip away a little at a time without her noticing?
Days dragged long. Nights spoke sounds Anna did not recognize. Days she fought with herself to stay awake, yet she dozed. Sometimes days. Sometimes nights. Rotations of the earth could not encourage her to honor cycles of day versus night. A dark pall dropped over her and hid any reason for her to cast it off. Memories of Winston grew more vivid as time passed. Anna fed on broken promises that nurtured her hostility, not only toward Winston, but toward all the world that touched her. Each dynamite reverberation from Breakline #1 reminded her of demolished hope. Every train whistle announcing coal cars leaving the valley told her again that she had no place to go.
Anna chewed the inside of her cheek until she drew blood. Her anguish spilled over onto Lily. The child watched her mother and mimicked her gnawing. “Stop that chewing,” Anna would say.
“You do,” Lily said.
“You got no reason to chew yourself from the inside out,” Anna said. “Don’t start that. Here.” She handed Lily a long straw she pulled from the broom. “Chew on this.”
One day Lily dropped a jar of the granny’s honey and tried to clean it off the floor before Anna saw. But Anna did see, and she screamed at her child.
“No,” Lily said through tears.
“No,” Anna chastised herself for her reaction. “You didn’t ask to be born the child of a self-centered man either.” It was then Anna forced herself to look around and set her mind to caring for Lily. She knelt to face her child. “You didn’t ask for your mother to take an unfaithful man as her god.”
“What man?” Lily whimpered. Anna hugged away the question.
The child’s whimper opened a door within, and pride long pushed aside grasped Anna. She took the child in her arms to lessen Lily’s trembling. Lily’s frail body chided Anna for her neglect. Her grief had led her to abandon an innocent child for a run-away man. But in time her resolve would weaken. It would soon pass with the wind, and Winston Rafe would move back into her mind.
Up Turtleback, in her converted church building, Granny Slocomb heard a child’s whimper on each new wind. The spirit of a budding Beloved Mother called. The time had come. She picked up a gallon can of kerosene, its spout corked with a small Irish potato, and stepped out the door.
Granny had found a flawless cedar, six-feet tall, during her second year on Turtleback. Its perfection, its poignant smell, proved it a prime choice for reverence. Oak, black walnut and sour persimmon closed in on the cedar and would eventually block its light from Sister Sun. Within a few years, these larger trees would crimp it into a deformation not worthy of honor.
The cedar’s salvation came to Granny at the commissary during the Month of Flower Moon as she watched Gabe Shipley pour kerosene on a patch of new blackberry vines that had grown so close to the building that they threatened to invade the steps.
“Vines still small enough that a dousing or two will take them out,” he explained. “Be gone in a couple of weeks.”
“Work on trees?” she asked.
“Yep. Pure poison.”
“Take long?”
“A while. But it works.” He recapped his can with the potato, now black where the poison had leached into its core. “Why not let me hew it down, if it’s a tree you ain’t needing.”
“Too many,” she said. “Too close.” She ordered kerosene to be delivered each week, along with her regular gallon of alcohol, for the remainder of spring and summer.
Granny detoured from the road and climbed the high ridge where her revered cedar grew. As Beloved Mother, her purpose was to preserve life. Life today meant creating space for the cedar so that Great Spirit wou
ld be grateful. Removing the potato from the kerosene spout, she walked a circle around each surrounding tree, pouring kerosene as she went. She hummed a quiet song she had composed for every tree, asking for the death of each so the cedar might thrive.
Finished, Granny walked the woods to the road. She turned up the grade to Boone Station. A woman’s shrill scream startled Granny from her self-gratification. She clamped her medicine basket to her bosom and ran uphill as fast as her heavy work boots allowed. When she reached Boone Station, she dropped her kerosene can on the porch and pushed open the door. Anna’s broom fell to the floor with a plop.
There beside the oak table, Anna squatted next to Lily. The tatting on Anna’s thin dress absorbed fresh red blood as it leached up the hem.
With one hand, Anna clutched her throat. The other she had balled into a fist and crammed into her mouth, as if trying to hold in another shriek. Lily sat cross-legged, Indian style, her right hand squeezing her left forearm. Blood oozed through her fingers. She stared at the granny, her mouth frozen in an O. On the floor lay a butcher knife, an overturned glass of milk and a blood-splattered block of rat cheese.
Granny placed a light hand on Anna’s shoulder. “Get up,” she said.
Anna clasped her arms around her calves and rocked back and forth. “God, help me,” she moaned. Granny lifted Anna from the floor, surprised by the absence of weight, and carried Anna to the bed. She left her lying on the quilt, staring at the ceiling.
Lily had not moved since Granny entered the room. The front skirt of Lily’s calico dress held a full circle of blood. A chilling air rushed in the open door, and Lily shivered.