Bloodroot

by Amy Greene

  But it seemed nothing could scratch mine. The soles of my feet itched so hard in the night, they almost burned. Whenever Granny saw me squirming, she looked troubled. One night I asked her to scratch my feet. She said, “No use in me scratching them. You took that after me. Ain’t but one cure, and I dread the day that itch gets satisfied.”

  “What day, Granny?”

  “The day you run off from here.”

  “I won’t ever!”

  “I don’t know if you can help it,” she said, reaching under the quilt to take one of my feet in her warm hand.

  She was right about me. I’ve done a lot of things I never thought I’d do. When I was a little girl, I always figured I would marry a mountain man, who knew the sting of briar scratches, the teeth-rattling shiver of cold creek water, the black smell of garden soil that made you want to roll in it. But John was the first thing I ever saw that was prettier than my home. The first time I laid eyes on him, we had gone to Odom’s Hardware after seeds. Granny usually ordered them from a catalogue, but that Saturday we were working in the yard when Mr. Barnett stopped to drop off a red velvet cake from Margaret. He was headed to Millertown for nails and snail bait. He asked if we wanted to come along and I was surprised when Granny said, “Why, I believe I will. Let me run in the house and get my pocket-book.” I could tell by the way she turned her face into the summer wind as we rode down the mountain that she just wanted to go for a ride. I was always up for a trip to town myself. The high school was usually the closest I got, unless I hitched a ride with Doug or Mark or went along with one of my girlfriends. Granddaddy had left behind a truck when he died, but it was rusting in the barn because Granny never learned how to use it. Sometimes it was like being stranded on an island. But I felt free as we drove past the red brick school building, making waves with my arm out the window.

  There were only a few people milling the streets downtown. I drifted behind Granny and Mr. Barnett as they browsed the dim aisles of the hardware store. I was ready to go after we’d picked out the seeds, but Granny and Mr. Barnett stopped to make small talk with the man behind the counter, about weather and farming and inflated prices. I asked Granny if I could walk to the dime store and Mr. Barnett handed me his bag of nails. “Will you put these in the truck on your way down the sidewalk, honey?”

  I stepped into the sun holding the wrinkled brown sack, sharp with nail points, and stopped in my tracks. A boy and girl stood outside the door in a patch of shade, kissing each other in a hungry way I’d never seen before. A tingle darted through me. I couldn’t see much of the boy’s face but I could see his hair, black as pitch, and her pale fingers digging into the dent between his shoulder blades. Then the girl cracked her eyes and noticed me. She broke away from him with a start. He turned around and I dropped the sack, nails spraying everywhere on the cracked cement. I knelt to pick them up, cheeks on fire. I’d seen his face, both sinister and beautiful. Before I could register what was happening, he was coming to kneel beside me. “Let me help you with that, miss,” he said. His voice was like a silk ribbon unrolling. Our fingers touched and when I glanced up, I thought I saw a flicker of interest in his eyes. Then the girl was saying, “I’d better get on back to work, John. My dad will skin me alive.” He rose and went to her as Granny and Mr. Barnett were coming out of the store. “I’ll walk you,” he said. When he looked back over his shoulder at me, my legs felt made of something unreliable.

  I watched them go, taking in the shape of his body, tall with narrow hips and wide shoulders. “Who was that?” I asked, following Granny to the truck.

  “That’s John,” Mr. Barnett said. “One of Frankie’s boys. You don’t want nothing to do with him. I reckon he’s tomcatting around with that Ellen Hamilton now. Her daddy’s got a drugstore down here on the corner. But you ort to hear the stories John’s brothers tells on him. They claim he’s got a girlfriend for every day of the week. I reckon it’s pitiful how he does them girls. They was one tried to kill herself over him.”

  I was so quiet on the way home that Granny asked if I was sick. It didn’t matter what Mr. Barnett had said about John. I couldn’t stop seeing his eyes, the hair that fell across his forehead when he knelt by me, the beauty of his face, like something carved from marble. I never knew there were real people in the world that looked like him.

  Mr. Barnett let us out of his truck at the house. Walking across the yard, Granny said, “Let’s have chicken and dumplings for supper.” I stood under the apple tree while she killed and plucked the chicken, trying to cool my face in the shade. After a while I followed her up the steps and into the kitchen. When I saw the chicken’s carcass laid out on the counter, it seemed like a sign. The instant Granny went to the pantry I tore into the bird’s chest and pulled out its heart. I crammed it into my mouth and it was awful, small and slick, sliding down my throat. I coughed and gagged, the heart struggling to come back up. But, like my great-great-great-aunt Della, I was determined to choke it down. When Granny rushed over to pound on my back, I said, “It’s okay. I just got strangled on spit.”

  I felt guilty for betraying Granny. If she’d known what I had done, she would have been disappointed in me. But there was no going back. I didn’t know if I believed in Lou Ann’s charm, but I knew now what those women had felt. I wasn’t worried about Ellen Hamilton or anybody else. I was only concerned with myself and what I had to have. I went to bed early that night, half sick from the chicken heart, but I couldn’t rest. I tossed and turned, thinking how he’d looked over his shoulder at me as he walked the blond girl back to work. It was like being possessed. When I finally closed my eyes and drifted down toward sleep, I dreamed his face hovered inches from mine in the dark, his long, sculpted body floating over my bed like an angel or a wraith. I opened my eyes with a start, prepared to be kissed like he had kissed Ellen Hamilton on the sidewalk. I promised myself that if he ever did kiss me that way, I’d kiss him back twice as hard.

  Now the ghost of John is different. It has no face or body, just the shine of eyes. Last night, I saw them in a tree and thought he was there. Then something moved along the branch and hissed down at me, a red-eyed possum. But sometimes I wake up smelling sulfur and dead rats and sweet aftershave. My bedroom reeks of him and I know he’s been there watching me sleep. Once I walked in and saw him sitting in the rocking chair. I dropped my book but didn’t scream. He was there for a long second and I thought he would say something. Then I blinked and he was gone, the rocking chair empty. These days John could come to me in any form. Long shadows falling across the yard could be the shape of tree trunks or of his legs, claw-tipped branches could be his arms, dripping water could be his tapping fingers, cold drafts could be his breath. But back then, when I was seventeen, I wanted every noise to be John Odom coming after me in the dark.

  It wasn’t the next day that he came. It was a long four weeks in which I could think of nothing but him. I was guilty about the chicken heart and desperate for it to work at the same time. I had no appetite and Granny kept shooting me troubled looks across the table. I couldn’t concentrate on chores. I broke eggs carrying them in from the barn, cut my finger peeling potatoes, singed one of my good dresses with the iron. Then school started back and my life fell into a familiar routine. I still dreamed of John Odom, but I began to feel foolish for believing that swallowing a heart might bring me love.

  On Monday of the second week of school, John materialized out of the early gloom as I walked to the bottom of the dirt road on my way to catch the bus, eyes and teeth shining. It seemed he had boiled up from the dust of the road.

  “Don’t be scared,” he said. “I just came to drive you to school.”

  “How did you find me?” I asked when my tongue came unstuck.

  “I been asking around.” He fell in step beside me.

  “What makes you think I’d take up with just anybody?” I asked, keeping my eyes straight ahead. I should have been scared but I was only excited.

  “I ain’t just anybody. You
’ve been in my daddy’s store before.”

  “Who’s your daddy?” I asked, pretending ignorance.

  “Frankie Odom.”

  “I thought you had a girlfriend.”

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

  I stole glances at him from the corner of my eye as we went down the hill, heart slamming against my breastbone. He looked at least five years older than me, maybe more. He was a man, not a boy. He was no less beautiful than I remembered. He looked almost foreign, hair and eyes black as soot. I wondered then if his mother had been someone exotic, but not after I saw pictures of her later. She was scrawny with bleached hair and slit eyes under pointy glasses. I remembered his jug-eared father from the store, and his pot-bellied brothers, plainer versions of him. His beauty was inexplicable.

  He wasn’t like the boys at school. He kept his hair short while they grew theirs long. He wore creased trousers, they wore bell-bottoms. His old-fashioned ways made him even more foreign and like home at the same time. Living with Granny on the mountain, the old ways were what I knew best. As we walked I took secret sips of him, unable to find a flaw. His one physical imperfection, I discovered later, was invisible. He was deaf in his left ear since childhood, when his youngest brother, Hollis, had shot a cap pistol beside it. I learned this is what saved him from the war. Later I would come to wish that he had gone to Vietnam, that he had been killed over there, and I had never met him.

  I didn’t let John take me to school. I was too shy to get into his car. I caught the bus instead. But I looked back at him, sitting behind his steering wheel beside the road. All day long I tried to remember the details of his face. After school I had plans to go to the library and study for a test with one of my friends. Her father had offered to pick us up and drive me home when the library closed. I was supposed to meet her in the parking lot but when I walked out the double doors of the high school, shading my eyes against the sun, John was standing at the bottom of the steps. I almost dropped my books.

  “I’m here to take you home,” he said, squinting up at me.

  “I told Granny I was going to the library.”

  He smiled in a crooked way. “I’ll take you to the library.”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  I climbed into the passenger seat of his car and told him to head for Bloodroot Mountain. It was a risk to have him take me home, but I wanted to be somewhere safe with him. As he drove, I cracked the window to let in the September wind. We didn’t talk but he kept glancing over at me. When we finally turned onto the dirt road leading up the mountain, I asked him to pull onto the shoulder so that his car would be hidden in the trees. I led him by the hand along the creek, to a place I had shared with no one else. Not long after Granddaddy died, I had followed the creek up the mountain trying to find its source. I found an abandoned springhouse instead, a little block hut with its foundation covered in weeds and ferns, the arched roof patched with vivid green moss, springwater flowing out the shadowed opening over ledges of rock. Farther up the mountain, I found some rotten poplar logs and the remains of an old stone chimney. When I asked Granny about it, she said Doug Cotter’s great-grandfather had once lived there in a cabin.

  John didn’t ask where I was taking him as we cut a path through the bushes and saplings. We were both out of breath by the time we reached the springhouse. I watched as John hunkered down to drink from his cupped palm. When he looked up at me, chin dripping, all of my shyness disappeared. I got down on my knees in the mud beside the spring, not caring how I would explain my dirty skirt to Granny. We studied each other, a beam of sun lighting his face. After a while I asked, “Why did you come to me?”

  He was quiet, looking up into the tree branches. “It was your eyes,” he said at last. “I never seen a blue like that.” He turned to me and studied them for a long time. He reached out to touch my hair but his hand paused in the air. He was looking at me in a way I had never been seen. I was a girl to everyone else. John Odom saw me as a woman. But I could tell that he was nervous. Like me, he was scared of the spell we were under. “I shouldn’t have come up here,” he said. “I better go on, before I get you in trouble.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want you to go.” I only hesitated an instant before leaning over to kiss him, as hard and wild as I had promised myself to if I ever had the chance. When his arms came around me I was lost, not thinking of Granny or how to behave. The whole thing happened fast but it felt like slow motion, John pushing me down on the leaf-littered mud, the weight of him pressing the breath out of me. If someone had come upon us it might have looked like a fight, our mouths and teeth clashing so that my lips were sore later, my fingers tangled up in his hair as he kissed where the buttons of my blouse had come undone. It was a helpless feeling, like in dreams of diving off the rock over the bluff, those few sweet moments of flight worth the death that was waiting for me. When I groped for his hand and pushed it under the hem of my skirt, I could feel his heart beating in his fingers, or maybe it was mine. I gasped as his palm slid up the length of my leg. But then, without warning, his fingers clamped down on my thigh. Before I could protest, he was wrenching himself out of my arms. “I should have left you alone,” he breathed, getting to his feet. When he rushed off, leaves clinging to his pants, I was too stunned to go after him. I lay on my back trying to catch my breath, the smell of him all over me.

  The next day at school, I could think of nothing but the scrape of his stubble, the hot flesh of his stomach under his shirt, the trail of his hand moving up my leg. I had to close my eyes and put my head down on my desk. I didn’t understand what had happened between us. If the rumors were true, John Odom was no gentleman. It made no sense the way he ran off and left me. I knew that my feelings for him were dangerous, but after what had happened at the springhouse, nothing could have kept me away from him.

  After school let out, I walked over to Main Street. I don’t remember getting there. I only remember standing in the shadows of an awning across the street as dark came early, the sky turning sunset orange between the buildings. I watched the door of Odom’s Hardware for him to come out and when he appeared, stepping onto the sidewalk and turning to lock the door behind him, my chest went heavy and tight. I crossed the street without feeling the ground underfoot. As I drew close to him everything came into sharp focus, his carved face, his shining eyes, his black hair. He stopped when he saw me and drew in a breath. Somewhere distant I heard voices and traffic, but on Main Street we were alone. We stared at each other for a long while in silence. I felt everything inside me threatening to rise to the surface, but I knew it was important to be calm and still. His coat collar was turned up on one side. Without thinking, I reached to smooth it down.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  I tried to smile. “I need a ride.”

  He smiled back. “Mountain’s a long way off.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But it’s a pretty drive.”

  He looked past me into the street. “You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.”

  I stepped closer to him. “Why’d you run off like that?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I came to my senses.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I can’t be with somebody like you.”

  “Somebody like me?”

  His eyes returned to my face. “Somebody good.”

  “Well,” I said. “I think you’re somebody good.”

  He paused. “You don’t even know me.”

  I took another step closer. “I don’t care.”

  He opened his mouth to protest but I didn’t want to hear it. I took a deep breath, mustering my courage, and did what I had wanted to the minute he stepped out of the hardware store and locked the door behind him. I grabbed his coat and stood on tiptoe to kiss him like before. In those long seconds, something happened that I can’t forget. A strong wind came howling down Main Street, a cold blast whirling with dead leaves and trash, whip
ping my hair and plastering a sheet of newspaper to John’s shoulder where it clung before flying off toward the stoplight. I remembered stories of banshees Granny had told me, Irish witches who wailed outside houses at night to warn families of danger. To hear a banshee was always a bad omen. That night in my dreams, when I broke away from John’s kiss, the banshee’s veiled face floated inches from mine, the wind from her scream taking my breath. But on Main Street it was John who broke our kiss. The wind died as fast as it came, letting go of my hair and John’s coattail. He held me for a moment at arm’s length. “Are you sure about this?” he asked. “Because once I get ahold of you, I ain’t turning you loose.” I said yes without a second thought and followed him to his car.

  I wasn’t ready for Granny or anyone else to know about us at first. John continued to park at the bottom of the road, a little inside the tree line, and we took long walks on the mountain. I was careful to choose paths I hadn’t explored. The going was harder, briars clawing at our ankles, but I didn’t want to risk running into Mr. Barnett or Doug Cotter. I wanted to climb to the top of Bloodroot Mountain with John, to stand in the secret meadow with him. I hadn’t tried since I was fourteen, when I caused Doug to fall. But John and I never made it that far. He always wanted to stop and sit, on fallen trees or rocky bluffs, anywhere he could kiss me. Sometimes I smelled another woman’s perfume on his clothes, but I didn’t say anything. I knew I hadn’t fully claimed him. At first I thought if I could be with him the way those other women were, I would have all of him. But each time we got close, his hands under my dress and mine tearing at his shirt, he pulled away again. Then one day, lying on the ground beside the springhouse, he said, “I’ve had plenty of whores, Myra. That ain’t what I want out of you.” His words stung but their meaning made me hope I was different than the ones who left perfume on his clothes. Whenever he got quiet I held my breath, praying that he would propose to me.