by Amy Greene
I searched for something to clean with until I found a jug of bleach and a scrap of yellowed shirt under the kitchen sink. I did the best I could with what I had to scour away the mildew and rust stains. When I heard the front door open and close an hour later, I hoped it was John coming back for me. I stepped into the gloomy hall and it was Hollis again, standing in a square of light in the foyer. “Got to work and figured out I lost my dadblame wallet,” he said, to no one in particular. Then he saw me and froze, head cocked like a bird of prey. “It’s your day to cook and clean, I guess.” I nodded. We looked at each other. It would have been impolite to go back into the bathroom and pretend to scrub. I stood still as he came creaking down the hall to me, aware of being alone in that foul house with two men I didn’t know and who didn’t feel like family.
“Come to think of it,” he said, “I ain’t seen that pocketbook since yesterday. I bet you it dropped out of my britches when I was out yonder pulling weeds.” He paused, appraising me in a way that made my ears warm. “Are you good at finding things?”
“What?”
“Two pairs of eyes is better than one. Come on out here with me and look for it.”
I stepped blinking into the sun behind him, out the back door and down the steps into the yard. My feet were heavy as if in protest, the bleach-smelling rag still in my fist. I looked down at it numbly and dropped it in the dirt beside the stoop. He stopped, hands on his hips, surveying the yard. I stood a few paces behind him, waiting for him to go on. Finally, I shaded my eyes against the sun and asked, “Where were you pulling weeds at?”
“Out in the garden.”
I saw it across the yard, dry cornstalks leaning over a patch of snarled briars and weeds, a few tomato vines and green bean plants rising out of the ruins. I wondered what good it would do to pull weeds in all that mess. I followed Hollis across the yard and up close it was even more overrun. He stood at the edge and said, “Go ahead, your eyes is keener than mine. A woman pays more attention than a man.” When I didn’t move right away, he took me by the elbow and guided me into the patch. “A man can’t do without his pocketbook,” he said. “My driver license is in there.” He stooped and began to pick his way across the rows. “It’s odd how my eyes works. I can’t find nothing when I’m looking for it, even if it’s right under my nose.” I was relieved when he fell silent. We searched for a while without speaking, but I should have known he wouldn’t keep quiet. I was learning fast about his awkward need to tell me things. “But you take any kind of pattern and my eyes will make a picture out of it,” he blurted, startling me. “Like when I was little, I got to seeing faces. The worst one came out of this water stain over my bed. Had an open mouth with pointed teeth and the meanest eyes you ever seen. You might say I was dreaming it, except I seen it other places. I seen it in the wallpaper and the spots on the mirrors. It got to where it followed me everywhere. Then one day, I told John about it. He was washing the dishes and I was drying them. I was seeing it right then, in the suds of the dishwater. You know what John said to me? He said, ‘I see it, too.’ That was all. Not another word about it to this day. But that was all I needed. After that, we was brothers in a way that went deeper than blood.” I didn’t know how to respond. I concentrated on looking for the wallet, hoping to find it fast. I was beginning to feel frantic, green flies buzzing around my head as I ran my hands over the ground. When my fingers finally passed over the wallet, hidden under the bug-bitten leaves of a melon vine, I almost sighed with relief. I held it up, black cowhide warm from the sun. He laughed and said, “I knowed you’d find it quicker than me. I’m a pretty good judge of people.”
We stood up and I handed him the wallet, thinking I would escape. Then he said, “Let me show you something.” It was all I could do to remain there beside him, half sick from his closeness and the heat. He opened the wallet and reached in with thumb and forefinger to pull out what looked like a clump of gray hair, pressed flat and bound with a rubber band. “I ain’t never showed nobody this,” he said. “But me and you can tell each other things.” He held his hand near my face. “Did John ever say how Mama died?”
I closed my eyes against what lay in Hollis’s palm. “John doesn’t like talking about it,” I said, wishing he wouldn’t talk about it either. But somehow I knew he wouldn’t let me go. I wondered if he’d even left his wallet in the garden on purpose.
“We was boys when it happened. John and Lonnie and Eugene was off to the store with Daddy but I wasn’t old enough yet to go. Mama was sick with the stomach flu. I heard a thump in her room. I went up the stairs and when I opened the door I seen her laying facedown on the floor. I reckon she had fell out of the bed. I turned her over and soon as I seen her face, I knowed she was gone. I don’t know what made me do it, but Daddy had give me a little old pocketknife. I knelt down there and sawed off a hank of her hair before I went in and called anybody.” I stared down at the dull gray clump, a gag rising in my throat. “I like to keep it on me somewheres,” he said. “Blood kin is worth a lot to me.” I looked at his face because I couldn’t stand to look at the hair. He stared into my eyes, as always standing too close. “Just like these dogtags,” he said, not taking his eyes off mine as he pulled them by the chain out of his collar. “My daddy fought in the Second World War. He killed a bunch of Japs with these right here around his neck. I think family’s about the most important thing there is. Don’t you?”
He had edged even closer to me. I stepped backward, turning my ankle. “I better get to work,” I said. My voice came out no more than a whisper.
Hollis reached and took a strand of my hair, held it without looking at it, his black eyes still boring into me. “You reckon you and John’ll have a son one day?”
I didn’t say what came to me. I hope not, if he would turn out anything like you.
I wish I didn’t remember Hollis so well. I used to believe certain houses were haunted but now I think it’s just me. One day not long ago, I saw the tail of Granny’s dress disappearing around a bend, walking along the fencerow with a bag looking for greens to cook. She always soaked them in vinegar to kill the poison. One frozen morning last winter I woke to the sounds of squealing, sure I would find Granddaddy at the barn scraping a hog, the ground beneath steaming from its warm blood. But the barn was empty and shadowed and still. I stood listening for echoes but there was only the rushing creek. If this place is haunted, at least it has good spirits along with the bad.
Not like the house where John grew up, the sulfur smell clinging to windowsills and sink drains and doorsteps. Being away from Granny and the mountain wore on me after so long, did something to my mind. I knew it was probably rats, but sometimes I heard voices behind the walls there, like babbling in a foreign language. Sometimes I saw flashes of John as a boy with a mop of black hair, hooded eyes and white skin, crouching behind doors and peering around corners, disappearing when I turned around. There was, like Hollis said, a feeling of being watched. Part of it was the pictures. Dusting the frames I examined John’s mother, wiping her face clean with my rag. Her eyes were chilling behind her glasses, dead and vacant as a wax dummy’s.
I was less nervous when Frankie left me alone in the house, driving off in his old Cadillac to check on the store. I preferred whatever ghosts or demons there were to my father-in-law, hawking phlegm into his handkerchief and chain-smoking at the kitchen table as he listened to the radio, sleeping in his chair with his mouth open and his head lolling on his shoulder. When Hollis came home for dinner, he leaned on the counter with arms folded and ankles crossed, watching me cook. Sometimes he helped with the dishes and I winced when his fingers met mine under the water, always touching me on purpose.
I had Hollis’s full attention, but it was John’s that I longed for. More and more he seemed preoccupied, his eyes seldom settling on me. If we had conversations, I started them. Sometimes after work on Fridays he didn’t come home and I knew he was at the only bar in town. When his eyes did find me I saw his disappointment. I
wasn’t what he had expected or wanted. Spending my days in haunted houses, I felt like a ghost myself. By the first of September, I was starving for a little bit of life. That’s why when I saw a burning bush sprouting up by the back steps of the Odom house, something moved in me.
The bush was sick and stunted-looking, just beginning to turn red. I had been sweeping the back stoop and stopped to lean on the broom for a closer look, half expecting a voice to come out of it. When a car door slammed somewhere down the street, I woke up and glanced around. The yard was bare, the garden still weed-choked. On impulse, I ran to Frankie Odom’s shed, a lean-to with a rusted tin roof like a half-peeled-off scab. I scraped back the splintery door and saw a shovel against the far wall. I climbed over piles of junk to reach it, a nail from a rotten board scratching my leg in the process. I carried the shovel out, looking left and right to make sure no one saw.
Beside the stoop, I stood on the shovel and dug into the hard ground. When the dirt was loose enough I reached into the hole I had made and lifted the burning bush out by a rich-smelling ball of roots and soil. I took it up the steps and into the kitchen, shedding black crumbs I would sweep up before Frankie or Hollis came home. I leaned the bush in an empty mop bucket while I soaked a dish towel to wrap around its roots. Frankie had left a brown grocery sack of half-rotten tomatoes on the counter, the only yield of his miserable garden. He’d said on his way out the door that morning, “Them’s for you and John to take home.” I unloaded the tomatoes and found the burning bush was small enough to fit inside. One by one I replaced the tomatoes and folded over the sack. I sat for a while looking at my handiwork, feeling guilty and alive. When John came to pick me up I ran out holding the bag by its bottom. “Your daddy gave us some tomatoes,” I said. He looked away, switching a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other.
The next day I didn’t have to go to the Odom house. I watched John eat breakfast, anxious for him to leave. When he was gone I went to the back of the lot beside the tracks where the landlord had a shed much like Frankie Odom’s. I didn’t have to look far for the shovel. It was leaning inside the door shrouded in cobwebs. Until then, I hadn’t tried planting anything where it looked like nothing would grow. But this burning bush was different somehow. If I was careful, maybe it would live. I took the grocery bag around the house, heading for a back corner where John might never see what I had stolen. On the way, I passed the wood stacked under the bedroom window for winter, sprouting fungus and crawling with bugs. That’s when I noticed for the first time a squat door in the house’s block foundation near the woodpile, made of weathered gray boards and fastened shut with a rusty hasp. I paused to inspect it, the shovel in one hand and the grocery bag in the other. Just as I was about to move on, I heard a noise coming from under the house. I froze, not sure I had heard anything. I put down the bag and knelt before the door. Then it came again, a sly shifting. I hesitated before reaching to unlock the hasp. I pulled the door open, hinges groaning, and lowered myself on all fours. What I saw when my eyes adjusted to the gloom made my stomach turn. Under the house it was moldy and earthen and tomblike. The dirt was littered with broken dishes and Mason jar fragments, pipes close overhead with the protective mummy wrappings of winter still clinging to their joints. Thoughts of closed caskets and burial alive flickered through my head. Then, not far from my hand, I saw something from a nightmare. It was a long blacksnake, coiled around what looked like a rabbit’s nest. I gasped and scrambled backward into the light. I sat for a moment catching my breath. I had never been afraid of snakes. Granny had taught me about them. Once I held her hand in a field, looking up at one dangling from a tree branch like a black noose. “It’s just an old rat snake,” she said. “It ain’t poison.” I wasn’t afraid then because she told me not to be. But lately I hadn’t been myself. It felt suddenly important to take another look, if only because I knew Granny would have.
The rabbit’s nest was made from a ring of dried grass and puffs of cottony fur. In the middle were the babies, tiny and almost hairless, eyes still closed, noses and ears the color of flesh. One was caught in the snake’s unhinged mouth, only its back legs left to be consumed. I backed silently out and rose to my feet without taking my eyes off the snake. I reached for the shovel and chopped at the long rope of its body the best I could, until it lay in raw, pink pieces around the nest. I stood back panting and leaned the shovel against the house. Then I got down on my belly and went as far under the house as I was willing to venture. Looking closer, I saw punctures in one of the tiny bodies. I reached over the snake and prodded with my finger at the baby rabbit, dead but still warm. Then the third one began to squeal, a high, piercing alarm that made me scramble out backward again, bumping my head on the pipes. After a while I crawled back under and took the baby rabbit still screaming into my palm, unable to believe something so small could have such a voice. I held it in the sun begging it to stop, whispering into my cupped palms until the cries died away. I took the baby rabbit inside, the burning bush leaning forgotten against the house, one secret traded for another.
I had to hurry so I wouldn’t be late making supper. I put the sightless creature in a shoebox stuffed with strips torn from one of John’s flannel shirts. I searched the kitchen drawers until I found an old medicine dropper and climbed on my bed to feed it drips of warm milk. At first it stiffened like it would choke but after a while it was content. When it was close to time for John to come home I took the shoebox and hid the rabbit in the hall closet, behind the water heater with the box Granddaddy carved for me. I had realized long ago the box was something John would despise and might destroy. Now I knew the rabbit was something he wouldn’t stand for either, because it comforted me.
All that night during supper I worried the rabbit would cry in its shattering way, but the house was still as we sat at the table over our plates. When John was finished he went to drink in front of the television set he’d bought one week with our grocery money. He didn’t question why I was warming milk or why I went to the bathroom so many times. If he noticed me leaving our bed all through the night, he didn’t seem to care. As long as I kept the baby rabbit full, maybe I could have something of my own for a while.
For almost a month, I took the shoebox with me to the Odom house hidden in a bag of cleaning supplies. Once or twice I thought Hollis would find me out, the way he always hovered close. But, as if by instinct, the baby rabbit kept quiet when he was around. It was fattening up, its fur thickening, its eyes opening, thriving despite the cow’s milk and the dark closet where it lived. It liked to nestle under my chin, still and warm and breathing fast. Granny always said I had a touch with animals. Holding the rabbit close to my heart, I promised when it was strong enough I’d find a way to turn it loose on the mountain. I felt more like myself in those few weeks, having something alive that depended on me, something that knew in its blood and bones what it meant to be wild.
Then Hollis showed up on my doorstep one day near the end of September, while I was feeding the baby rabbit from its dropper. When the knock came, I hurried to settle the rabbit in its bed of rags and hide it behind the water heater. I thought it might cry out because its feeding had been interrupted, but it only rooted at the stuffing of its bed. I looked down at myself on the way to answer the door. It was noon but I was still in my nightgown. I wanted to throw on some clothes or at least a housecoat, but the knocking came again, louder and more persistent. When I opened the door and saw Hollis, my shoulders slumped. He took off his cap and scratched at his flattened hair. “I was about to think you was gone somewheres,” he said. When I didn’t respond, he replaced his cap and sighed. “Well. I was on my dinner break and thought I’d look in on you.”
“I’m all right,” I said.
He looked past me into the front room. “Shoo, it’s kindly hot out here. Looks like we’re having Indian summer. Can I trouble you for a drink of water?”
He followed me to the kitchen and sat at the table as I filled a glass from the tap.
I remembered my naked breasts under the thin nightgown fabric and stood at the sink with my arms crossed while he drank the water in long gulps, Adam’s apple bobbing. Then he put down his glass hard and I jumped. He laughed at me. “What’s got you so wound up?”
I glanced toward the kitchen doorway, willing the baby rabbit to stay asleep.
“I bet you thought I was John, coming in for dinner,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Sometimes he eats in town.”
Hollis grinned. “If I had you waiting on me, I’d come home to eat.”
I dropped my eyes, face burning.
Then he said in his awkward way, “Most people thinks me and John favors.”
I decided to ignore him, hoping the less attention I gave him the sooner he would go away. I went to the table and took his glass, not touching where his mouth had been.
“Do you think me and John looks alike?” he asked.
I turned my back to him and rinsed the glass in the sink. “No.”
He fell silent, seeming to think it over. “All right,” he said after a long pause, “I didn’t mean to bother you. I just thought I’d see if you needed anything.”