Bloodroot

by Amy Greene

  LAURA

  People said Clint did it on purpose but I think he was just trying to stay down where it was peaceful a little while longer. Maybe he sunk too far and couldn’t get back up before he ran out of breath. But I don’t believe he wanted to leave me. I think he wanted to see our baby get born and be a good father to him. Right after he drowned, I worried things had been passed down from Mama that I didn’t want. I thought I might be cursed to live out the same awful things that happened to her. I knowed from the stories she told there’s been a lot of sadness in our family. Bad times seem to follow our people around. For a minute I wished I was born to somebody else. Then I got to thinking about Mama and cried again. It wasn’t her fault that Clint drowned. It wasn’t anybody’s.

  Not long after they found Clint, there was a knock on the trailer door. I snuck a peek out the window and seen Clint’s mama smoking a cigarette on the step. I opened the door and looked at her. Since Clint was gone, I didn’t hardly have any feelings.

  “Well, are you going to let me in?” she asked real hateful. She came in and looked around. “This place looks like a hogpen.” I didn’t answer her. I just wanted her to leave. “I’ll get right down to it,” she said, tapping ashes in her palm. “This place never did belong to Clint. When his sorry old daddy died, it fell to me. You can’t stay here.”

  I could have told her that I didn’t care. Clint might have wanted our baby to live by the water, but the lake scared me now. Instead I asked Clint’s mama, “You’re going to set your own grandbaby out?” Not because I wanted to stay, just because I didn’t understand what kind of person she was. I couldn’t figure out how anybody could be like that.

  “I ain’t setting out my grandbaby,” she said. “I’m setting out you.”

  “But the baby’s inside of me.”

  “It won’t always be,” she said. She had a glint in her eyes that made me feel sick.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing,” she said. But I seen a smirk at the corners of her mouth. She was wary of me since that time I jumped on her, but she must have hated me so bad she couldn’t resist saying something else mean. “You ain’t fit to raise no youngun.”

  I took a step toward her. I felt something coming loose in me again. It was a bad feeling, like somebody else taking over. “Don’t you say that,” I warned her. Even my voice didn’t sound right to my ears. She took a step back and I seen her hand searching behind her for the door handle. “Don’t you say a thing like that to me.”

  I put my hands on my belly and balled up the cotton shirt stretched across it. She opened the door and I followed her to it. She backed down the cinder-block steps, keeping her eyes on me. “You better be off my property by tomorrow morning,” she said. “If you ain’t, I’m coming back with the law.” It was all I could do not to take after her. I couldn’t stand to be threatened that way. I seen what happened to Mama. She hollered before she got in the car, when she was too far away for me to come after her, “You ain’t fit!”

  Like I said, I didn’t care to leave the trailer. It was too sad without Clint. I couldn’t quit thinking about them fat yellow curls I’d never touch again. I didn’t care if I ever seen water again the rest of my life. I was too tired to care about much of anything. The next day, I took the shovel out to that cedar tree in the woods. It was early and fog hung low to the ground. No birds was singing. I dug up the box’s grave. The ground was soft under the cedar tree needles, easy to loosen up. The sound of the dirt sifting was like Clint whispering to me. Then it turned into Clint’s baby whispering inside my belly. Then it turned into Mama whispering to herself all them miles away, wherever they put her. I couldn’t make out the words. It didn’t take long to reach the box. It wasn’t buried deep. I knelt and took it in my hands. This time it didn’t comfort me. At least I had Clint’s baby. I was sad, but I wasn’t alone.

  I took one scratched-up suitcase with some clothes and Mama’s box in it. I walked to the bait shop and called Mr. Thompson to pick me up. I hated to, but him and Zelda and Louise was the only friends I had. We didn’t talk much in the car. We’d never been together by ourselves before. It was a pretty long drive down the interstate, back toward Millertown, before I was at the house where me and Clint got married. I was glad the baby could be there. Maybe while he was inside me he could see through my eyes. I tried to send him a memory of me and Clint standing on the deck in a circle of begonias. Zelda came out to the car to walk me across the yard. “Now, I ain’t staying long,” I told her.

  She laughed. “Surely me and Ralph ain’t that bad.”

  “I just mean me and the baby will have our own place, soon as I get a job.”

  Mr. Thompson took my suitcase as we climbed up the porch steps. He reached across my shoulder and held open the front door for me. “You know you can stay as long as you want. Clint Blevins was like a son to me. But I’ve already got the job situation figured out for you. We’ve been shorthanded over at the store for a while now. I’ve just been putting off hiring anybody. Louise can show you how to work the cash register.”

  Mr. Thompson stood there with my suitcase holding the door open as Zelda put her arms around my shoulders and tried to comfort me. I wished I could explain to them what it felt like to know kindness like that, after all the bad times I’d lived through.

  I stayed with the Thompsons for two more months. I slept in that room with roses on the wallpaper where my wedding dress was laid out on the bed. When it was warm enough I stood out on the deck and looked off at the creek. Seemed like I could feel Clint beside me, slipping a ring on my finger all over again. When the ache in my chest got too big, I’d go back inside. I worried it wasn’t good for the baby, for me to hurt like that.

  Mr. Thompson had sweet eyes and a nice face, and being around him made me think it might be all right to have a daddy. When he noticed a hole coming in the toe of my shoe he said to Zelda, “Get that youngun something decent to put on her feet.” One day he got worried because Zelda’s blood used to get low when she was expecting. He made me liver and onions and I choked it down to ease his mind. He made sure I got plenty of milk, too. My belly growed bigger and marks striped my breasts. Sometimes I seen the baby’s fist or foot ripple across my middle. I talked to him in my head, about his daddy and Mama and Johnny. I told him all Mama’s stories about our people, even about the curse and the haint blue eyes. One time Mama had said, “Granny thought I broke the curse.” But I wondered if she had. If there was any such thing as curses, I knowed this baby would be the one to break it. He’d bring an end to the suffering all of us had lived through, going all the way back to them great-aunts Mama used to tell us about. Whatever it was in our blood that brought bad things down on us, this baby would chase it away.

  It was all right working at the grocery store, even though my ankles swelled up from being on my feet. It made me feel closer to Clint, spending my days how he did when I wasn’t around. Mr. Thompson had hired a new bagboy after Clint drowned named Roy. His face turned red when I stared at him. I liked to watch him work because I knowed it was what Clint used to do. There was sad times, but mostly it was a comfort being there. Louise and Mr. Thompson and the other cashier Debbie was always cutting up. It was a happy place, with people bustling around. I seen why Clint liked working there.

  One day Louise hollered at me from her cash register. “Hey, Laura, I just about forgot. There’s a house come open for rent right down the street from me. It’s little but it don’t cost much, and you and the baby won’t need a lot of room.” That evening me and Zelda rode out with Louise to take a look at it. Right off I knowed it would be fine, even though one of the front windowpanes was cracked. It was bright yellow, my favorite color in the world. Down the bank from its yard there was a car wash. Louise said, “Now, it might get noisy over yonder during the day.” I didn’t mind because I’d be at the store and the baby would be there with me. Zelda had offered to fix up Mr. Thompson’s office in the back with a bassinet and a playp
en. She said she’d keep him in there while I worked. She liked to hang around the store anyway, and she didn’t have any grandbabies yet. When I tried to say no, she said, “Please let me do this for you.” So the noise from the car wash wouldn’t bother the baby’s naps. Another good thing was Louise being my neighbor, we could ride to and from work together and I’d help pay for the gas.

  My only worry was the high porch. It had a trellis around it but I could see junk and weeds underneath. Climbing up and down them steps might be dangerous for a toddler. But I’d been saving a little bit of money out of my paycheck since I’d been working. It wasn’t much but I hoped by the time the baby was walking I’d be able to rent a better house for us, maybe something away from town. The door was locked but I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked in the window. There was spots on the carpet but the room looked all right. I could picture my baby playing there on the floor. It was next to a car wash but not a laundrymat. I thought Clint would be proud of me.

  JOHNNY

  I couldn’t get my mind off what had happened with Carolina. I pulled the chain on the lightbulb overhead and lay listening to the sounds outside. The blanket and pillowcase smelled like rainwater and I imagined that’s what she washed them in. The cot was more comfortable than it looked. I didn’t know I was asleep until a knock on the shed door woke me up. I rose and looked around, disoriented in the dark. Ford opened the door without permission and stood on the threshold like something from a dream, a tall figure with white hair flowing out. He looked clean for the first time since we’d met. He was holding a guitar, his dogs circling behind him. “Sorry to wake you,” he said. “I got me a good fire going. Thought you might want to come out and sit for a while.”

  We walked to the mowed field on the other side of the trailer, dogs slinking at our heels. In the middle, a fire writhed and popped. There were three lawn chairs pulled close to the flames. Carolina sat in one of them with her legs drawn up. She looked up and smiled, face bathed in orange. We took our seats and Ford strummed absently at his guitar. “Something about a fire helps me think,” he said. Ford’s fire had the opposite effect on me. It helped me not to think. I leaned back my head and looked up at the stars and my mind was clear. Ford played and for a while Carolina sang along in a high, sweet voice. Then she trailed off, seeming to drowse, and there was only the clumsy music of Ford’s guitar. The two of us talked softly over his strumming, and all the while I looked at his left hand moving on the guitar’s neck, the smooth pink remains of his ring finger.

  “So what really happened to it?” I asked.

  He smiled, still strumming. “My finger? Well, I was staggering home from this country bar at the crack of dawn one morning. I was getting sleepy, so I slipped off the road into a cornfield. I passed out and when I came to it was later in the day. First the sun was glaring in my eyes but then something blocked it out. A bird came swooping out of the sky. Looked like a crow but I swear it was at least the size of a condor, maybe bigger. All I can figure is that it wanted my wedding ring. You know how crows like anything shiny. It swooped down and pecked off my finger, ring and all, and disappeared with it.”

  I laughed. “You’re full of it.”

  He grinned down at his guitar and went back to strumming.

  “You said it wanted your wedding ring.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you were married once.”

  “I’m married now.”

  “I mean before Carolina.”

  “There was nothing before Carolina.”

  We looked at her together. She was sound asleep in the chair, lips parted and head resting on her knees. “Where’d you find her?” I asked.

  “Close to Asheville, North Carolina. About this time last year, I was out book hunting. There was this tall blue house with a sign next to the road that said ‘Antiques.’ Carolina’s dad was selling junk out of his barn. I had an odd feeling when I pulled in the driveway, like before one of my visions comes. I knew something was waiting for me.”

  Ford said it was like being pulled along the dirt track to the barn by some invisible line. Tied in the shade of a chokecherry tree near the barn door there was a white German shepherd barking with its ears laid back. Ford had never seen a white German shepherd before. It seemed like an omen. He entered the musty shadows of the barn looking for something remarkable, but there was only junk, trunks and battered picture frames and chipped dishes stacked on a plywood table. He was about to climb a ladder to the loft in search of books when the dog’s barking dissolved into whimpers. He turned and there she stood in the barn’s opening with radiant light all around her. In a way, it was a kind of vision. But Ford had never experienced one so vivid. “It was awful hot in there,” he said, “and I’m no spring chicken. I thought maybe I was having a stroke.” Then she stepped into the barn and he saw that she was human, a barefoot girl in a swaying sundress eating a wedge of watermelon, the juice pinking her lips and fingers. Ford didn’t say what happened next, only that he went back for Carolina at dusk of the following day and found her standing at the road by the “Antiques” sign with a folded-over grocery sack at her feet. He stopped the car and she got in. She had been with him ever since.

  Right away Carolina began taking care of Ford. On their first morning together she trimmed his hair out on the porch, lathered his face and shaved off the coarse veil of his whiskers, drew his head into her lap and massaged his temples until he fell asleep. She was goodness, she was rest. Carolina, like the images her name evoked, of high mountains and cool hollows, mists rising off of slow-running creeks, acres of rolling green farmland, and sometimes, carried on the wind, the tang of ocean salt.

  Ford insisted he had never taken an interest in young girls before. He swore he wasn’t a dirty old man. “This is different,” he said. “It’s Carolina. I know it sounds like an excuse, but she’s ageless to me.” It was unsettling the way he talked about her. He claimed to have seen her walk through a flock of birds that descended on the yard without even disturbing them. According to Ford, Carolina had her own special gift. He called her an empath. “One time the dogs got to fighting in the yard and Carolina doubled over in pain. Then we saw a woman hit her baby in the grocery store. On the way home Carolina wept so hard I thought she was going to be sick.” Ford believed he and Carolina had some divine purpose together. “Before long,” he said, “God will reveal it to me.”

  I looked over at Carolina, still sleeping, and felt sorry for her, to have been so idealized. Then I saw that the fire was dying to embers and the dogs were stirring, preparing to follow Ford back to the trailer. He put down his guitar and the night was over. It was time to go back to bed, but there was something I had to know first.

  “What did you think?” I blurted out, heat rushing to my cheeks.

  “Of what?”

  “My writing.”

  “Oh,” Ford said. He looked at me for a long moment before rising stiffly out of his lawn chair. “I think the whole world should read your poems.”

  Walking across the field, breathing in the night air, my chest felt light again, as if Carolina had placed her hand on it. I went back to the shed and wrote in my notebook all night long. When the sun came up, I had to step outside to cool my burning hand.

  Weeks passed and the days grew hotter. At the end of May, Ford and I fixed his old tractor together and I learned to mow the field. We set out tobacco, repaired a fence in the woods, and trimmed the trees crowded close to the trailer. My muscles grew sore and my skin turned brown. The shed became a sanctuary for me. Carolina brought out an old rug for the floor and a metal fan to make the heat more bearable. In the mornings sun flooded through the shed’s cracks and at night moths circled and bounced off the lightbulb overhead. There was always the sound of crickets and tree frogs and dogs panting outside. I went with Ford to flea markets and auctions but mostly I stayed home with Carolina. I helped her paint the porch posts and plant flowers by the front steps. One day we made birdhouses out of gourds. On the weeke
nds Ford built a fire and the three of us talked until the wee hours. Soon I came to trust them both. I began to feel a contentment that I didn’t know if I deserved. Maybe a life like theirs wasn’t meant for me. Sometimes it felt wrong being there, like I was fooling them. I would think as I worked with Ford in the field or helped Carolina in the garden how they’d hate me if they knew what I had done and who I really was, what kind of curse had been passed down to me in my blood.

  Then Ford walked into the woods one evening and didn’t come back. I knew he was gone when I stepped out of the shed the next morning because the dogs had vanished with him, leaving the yard silent and empty. I found Carolina pulling weeds in the garden, wearing Ford’s big work gloves. “He didn’t come back last night?” I asked.

  She glanced up at me, the sun in her eyes. “No.”

  “Aren’t you worried?”

  “Not really. He does this sometimes. He might not be back for a week or two.”

  “He stays gone that long?”

  “He has before.”

  “Do you think he really has visions?”

  “I know Ford makes up stories,” she said, “but I’ve seen a lot of his visions come true. Like when he said you was coming into our lives.” She smiled. “Ford’s not like everybody else, Johnny. He’s closer to God. You ought to hear him pray sometime.”

  “Did he ever tell you what happened to his finger?”

  She laughed. “He said he went to a whorehouse in New Orleans and met this voodoo woman. She gave him a concoction to drink that got him so high he didn’t even feel it when she cut his finger off. Said she needed it for a spell. Every time I ask about his finger, he tells me another made-up story. I guess I’ll never know.”

  I knelt down beside her in the dirt and we pulled weeds together for a while in silence. After a while, I asked, “Do you think … does Ford have any children?”