Bloodroot

  “Make some of that banana pudding,” he said.

  “It’s already made,” I lied. “I wanted to take a sweet potato casserole like your daddy asked for, but this morning I saw we don’t have any pecans.”

  John rolled his eyes. “You should have put it on the grocery list and I would have got it for you. I swear, Myra, sometimes I think your mind ain’t right.”

  “I could still make it,” I said. “It just takes about fifteen minutes for the top to get bubbly. Why don’t you let me run to the store?”

  He paused, maybe suspicious. “Daddy don’t need no sweet potato casserole.”

  “I don’t know, John,” I said, not taking my eyes away from the distant outline of the mountain. “Don’t you think we ought to stay on his good side? You know Hollis is the pet. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if Frankie didn’t leave him everything.”

  John thought it over. “Daddy ain’t got the smarts to make a will.”

  “Well,” I said, turning to look at him. “You’re probably right.”

  John was quiet for a minute. Then he sighed. “Aw, hell. I reckon I can run and get some for you. What is it, pecans? But you better have it ready to stick in the oven as soon as I get back. I don’t want them waiting on us to eat. I’d never live it down.”

  “It’s already put together in the refrigerator,” I lied again without a pang of remorse. “All I have to do is sprinkle the nuts on top. Be sure to get the chopped ones.”

  As soon as John walked out, I grabbed my purse and put on my coat. Since he was taking the car, I would have to go back to the neighbor’s and call Mr. Barnett to pick me up. I hated to do it on Thanksgiving, but a cab to Bloodroot Mountain would cost more than I had. Besides that, I missed Granny too much to be polite. I went to the door, meaning to peek out and see if John had gone. When I opened it, he was standing on the stoop about to reach for the knob. “Myra—” he was saying. He froze, face falling. “I left my keys.” He looked at the purse on my arm. “Where you headed?” I hesitated. The thought of a whipping didn’t scare me much anymore. “Home,” I said. He stared at me for a few seconds. Then his features transformed into something so ugly I’ll never forget.

  He grabbed me by the hair and yanked me out the door, pulling me into a headlock. “Don’t tell me where you’re going,” he said against my ear, whiskey breath blasting into my face. “Daddy’s expecting you to eat over yonder and that’s what you’re going to do.” My purse fell and one shoe came off as he dragged me backward across the ground. If he hadn’t been drunk there would have been no chance, but he stumbled over a rock on the way to the car. I twisted out of his loosened grip and took off running. I couldn’t head for the road because he was blocking the way. I swerved around the house, thinking dimly of cutting through the backyard and making it to the neighbor’s. But I wasn’t fast enough limping on one shoe. John caught me at the woodpile, snagging the end of my hair and pulling me as if by a rope back under his arm. This time, I knew, he wouldn’t make a mistake. He forced me to my knees in front of the door in the house’s foundation. I shut my eyes, expecting him to undo his belt, but he held me still instead. I could feel him looking around, chest rising and falling behind me, seeming to think over what to do next. “All right then,” he said at last. “You don’t want to go with me, you don’t have to.” I glanced over at the door and it dawned on me slowly what he meantto do. I began to beg but it was like trying to reason with a demon. He dragged me closer and unlocked the hasp with one hand. He opened the door and shoved my head down with almost superhuman strength. I resisted but it didn’t take long for my body to fold in half. He skidded backward on the seat of his pants and shoved me under the house with his boots. I banged my head hard on the pipes, my hand grating on a shard of Mason jar.

  He slammed the door shut behind me with a bang. I flipped over on my back, breathing in ragged shrieks, and beat at the boards of the door with my shoe. He must have been leaning with all his weight against it. Within seconds I heard him locking the hasp and wedging something through its ring, maybe a scrap of wood from the pile. Then there was silence. I called John’s name, voice shrill with panic, but he didn’t answer. I listened for any hint of his presence outside the door. I pounded at the boards again with my feet and screamed until my throat felt bloody. Then I heard the car start up and roar out of the lot. I went rigid, staring up in disbelief. That’s when I saw by the light falling through twin holes in one of the foundation’s cinder blocks how close the house was to my face. A yellowed blouse tied to a pipe hung inches from my nose. There was a stench of decaying earth and mildew and moth balls. I turned my head and saw the skin and bones of the blacksnake I had killed. I struggled to calm myself but it was hard to think.

  The house was too low for me to sit up. When I tried to raise on all fours my back bumped against the pipes. I inched through the gloom on my belly and hammered at the door with my fist. Then I searched the dirt and found a chunk of block that crumbled to pieces as I pounded with it. Straining to see, I made out the shape of a rake handle near a stack of dishes. I dragged it back to the door and battered until my hands were raw and full of splinters but it wouldn’t budge. I dropped the handle and crawled over to press my face against one of the cinder block’s holes. I looked out and saw only frozen ground. I fell on my side and huddled in a shivering heap under my coat, unable to stop the tears from pouring out. I wept for a long time, until my eyes hurt and my voice was gone.

  Afterward, minutes or hours passed in tomblike silence. My teeth chattered and my bare foot ached from the cold. I dozed and memories came to me of other winters. Once I followed bird tracks to a tree on its side, roots in the air. As I climbed among the branches it began to snow, white drifts piling. For a long time I hid looking up through the branches, watching the flakes sway down. Then I dreamed of another day on the way home from church, sitting between Granny and Granddaddy in the truck. Granddaddy slowed to a stop on the curving road and said, “Looky here, Myra Jean.” I peered over the dashboard and saw a red fox crossing, its coat shouting against the whiteness, bushy tail disappearing up the bank and into the roadside woods. Soon it became less like a memory and more like something that was happening. I smelled the exhaust of the puttering truck and felt the seat bouncing under me, snow scurrying over the hood like something alive.

  The slam of John’s car door snapped me awake. I couldn’t tell how long I had been sleeping. I pressed my face to one of the holes again and called to him, begging him to let me out. After a moment I stopped, thinking I heard the approach of his footsteps. I scuttled on stiff elbows and knees for the door, hoping for his fingers to unlock the hasp. Instead I heard the front door slam shut like a gunshot behind him. I could almost follow his progress through the house by the creak of his boots on the floorboards. I scrabbled in the dirt for the rake handle and beat on the moldy wood overhead. Then I heard the muffled groan of mattress springs directly above me, where the bedroom was. My heart sank. I knew he had passed out. He might as well not even be there. But I pounded with the rake handle anyway, until I couldn’t feel my arms and shoulders. Finally I collapsed on my side and pulled my knees up under my dress tail against the cold. After a while, I began to drift off again. I wanted to be with Granny so much it was like searching for her inside myself and floating outward at the same time, over bare trees and brown water splitting the fields in two, fencerows like twigs strung together with thread. For a long time I circled Bloodroot Mountain, watching Granny pluck a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner as the Barnetts came up the hill bringing pumpkin pies for her.

  I don’t remember anything else about being under the house. I think I was there for one day but it might have been more. When John opened the door in the morning I didn’t move. I only blinked at him. He knelt there sleepy-headed and rumpled, still half drunk. “Hell, Myra,” he said. “I didn’t mean to leave you out here so long.” When I still didn’t come he pulled me out by the ankles, dress rucking up and glass slicing my back. I barel
y felt it for the numbness. He hauled my body full length into the wintry sun and bent over me as I stared up blankly, like some creature born to live underground.

  Back inside, I couldn’t get warm. John put his wooly socks on my feet and piled blankets on top of me. He sat on the edge of the bed waiting for me to speak. “What can I do to make you mind?” he asked at last. “I don’t understand it. I thought you wanted to be with me. Now you’re all the time trying to run home to your Granny. I ain’t letting you do me this way, Myra. I never took shit off of any woman and I don’t mean to start now.” He took a breath and blew it out. “Am I going to have to go up yonder and burn that place to the ground? If that’s what it takes to keep you from running off every time I turn around, by God I’ll do it.” I looked at his face in the light through the curtains, still sinister and beautiful. I didn’t know if I believed him. But I thought if he ever followed me there, he might hurt me and Granny both. I felt more trapped then in my bed with John than I had been under the house alone. At least there I had been away from him.

  For days I shivered coughing under the blankets, burning up with fever. Once I woke from a nightmare and saw Hollis and John like goblins at the foot of my bed. John pulled the covers back from my feet and said, “Reckon I should take her to the hospital?”

  Hollis spat tobacco juice into a can he was holding. “Nah, she’ll be all right.”

  John peeled off one of the wooly socks. “Does that foot look frostbit to you?”

  Hollis shook his head. “That girl’s tougher’n she looks.”

  John seemed uncertain. “She might have pneumonia.”

  Hollis scratched under his cap and resettled it on his head. Our eyes locked. “She ain’t got pneumonia,” he said. “She’s full of meanness, is her problem.”

  John still didn’t look convinced. “I don’t know.”

  Hollis spat into his can again. “A little bit of cold ain’t going to hurt her. Daddy claimed he used to slip laudanum to Mama whenever she went to messing around.”

  “Yeah, well,” John said. “Mama’s dead, ain’t she?”

  Hollis laughed and took hold of my foot. His touch burned through the numbness. “That laudanum’s hard to get these days, but I bet Rex Hamilton would give you some.”

  John pulled the blanket back over me. “I ain’t giving her no laudanum.”

  Hollis grinned. “You might have to before it’s over.”

  They looked at me in silence for a long moment. Then Hollis said, “I better head out. Just let her lay here awhile. She’ll be up again trying to run off in no time flat.”

  For months I kept a racking cough that hurt my chest. As I cooked and washed dishes I spat gouts of green phlegm into a dishrag. All winter I was weak and tired, face slick with sweat. I was never the same after my time under the house. I began to see things crawling toward me from the corners of my eyes. Once I thought there was a black dog at the foot of the bed but when I sat up it was a pile of dirty clothes. At night I slept beside John under heavy blankets, the fire dead in the stove. I put my feet between his warm calves, unable to hate him in the dark. I pretended he would protect me if a red-eyed thing crept into the room and that he was not the red-eyed thing himself. Sometimes when I heard his boots on the porch I thought of the winter before we got married, when I unwrapped his face from a scarf as if his mouth, his chin, his neck were all presents.

  By the end of December, he was seldom home anymore. One morning passing the bathroom door, I heard the splash of him shaving and paused to look in. I stepped behind him and saw a love bite on his naked shoulder, speckles of blood sucked to the surface of his skin. I realized then that I didn’t care anymore. It was hard to remember how jealous I had once been of other women. Our eyes met in the mirror. His razor paused in mid stroke, tongue tucked into his cheek. After a while I turned and walked off. When he was gone to work, I wiped up the ring of soap scum and whiskers he left behind in the basin.

  I stopped trying to run away, but he wasn’t satisfied. My complacence angered him somehow. He began to punish me for walking in front of the television or coughing too loud or spilling sugar on the counter. He threw empty beer bottles at the wall near my head, pressed his cigarettes into my flesh, bent my fingers back, and squeezed my wrists in the vise grip of his hands until I couldn’t feel them anymore. At first I fought back, leaving claw marks on his face and spit dripping from his nose. But as time went on, a stillness stole into me. His violence became something I bore, like when Granny brushed the knots from my hair before school in the mornings. I felt nothing anymore besides regret. But he kept trying to provoke some reaction that I was too sick and tired to give.

  In the last months of our marriage, all John wanted to do was drink and eat. He had always loved my cooking, so I made big meals for him. I served him steaming plates heaped with meatloaf, okra, pork chops, soup beans, pickled beets, country fried steak, and cathead biscuits. I stuffed him with banana pudding and coffee cake and cobbler, all the things Granny had taught me to make. I kept him full and quiet as I had the baby rabbit. It was a means of self-preservation, but I didn’t like watching his once chiseled face softening and thickening, his belly beginning to lap over his belt buckle. I looked at pictures I’d taken of him in summer, posing by the car with an open shirt, standing under the trees with his arms crossed over his lean chest, and hardly recognized the man I saw.

  John and I didn’t celebrate Christmas. He sat drinking in front of the television and I stood looking out the window at the snow-dusted ground, thinking about Granny. The next day while John was gone, Mr. Barnett drove her down the mountain to see me. It was a relief to feel her arms around me again, but I was too worried John might come home to enjoy her visit. I felt sick the whole time she and Mr. Barnett were sitting on the couch. After that she only came once more, near the end of February. I didn’t mean to cry when I opened the door and saw her standing on the porch, but there was no holding it in. As good as it was to see her, I was still shaking, afraid John might come home for dinner.

  Each day it grew harder to bear the dark-paneled walls, the rats scurrying back into their holes when I turned on the lights, the whiskey bottles and charred cigarette butts littering the gulley alongside the tracks. Even when I cooked with the back door thrown open there was no relief from the thick smells of fatback and beans and lard because of the chemical tincture of factory smoke and the squall of train wheel on rust-colored track. Someone might ask how I lived through those last weeks married to John. The answer is simple. I wasn’t there with him. My body couldn’t hold my soul. It left that smothering place and found its way back to Bloodroot Mountain, like when John trapped me under the house. I whispered those magic lines and they took me right back home. “In darkness and amid the many shapes of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir unprofitable, and the fever of the world, have hung upon the beatings of my heart—how oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee … how often has my spirit turned to thee.” I could say the words and be gone somewhere John couldn’t follow. It didn’t matter what my hands were doing, washing dishes, peeling potatoes, scouring floors. My spirit’s hands were catching minnows darting silver in the shallow part of the creek. John couldn’t touch me where I was.

  One morning after I heard the front door slam and John’s car start up, I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and looked up at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. I was stunned by my reflection. It wasn’t just John who had changed. My hair was limp, my face haggard and thin. My eyes had lost their shine. I was still staring at my haunted reflection when I heard a bird twittering outside the bathroom window. It was a strange sound. There were no trees in the yard, so I thought I must have imagined it. I peeled back the curtain to open the window, but it was nailed shut. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care anymore if the bird was real or not. I saw the sun and knew spring had come. That’s when the clouds parted in my head. I began thinking clearer than I had in months. I knew I had to escape, at least for a while.
I wasn’t willing to brave going home anymore, after John had threatened to burn it down. But the man at the pool hall had told me where I might find some of my people. I could go to the house and be back before John got home from work. There were a few dollars left in my old coffee can under the kitchen sink. I bathed and dressed and walked to the neighbor’s house to call a cab again.

  The same snaggletooth driver as before let me out at the pool hall. I thought it wouldn’t make the right impression to arrive at my relatives’ house in a taxicab. There was no waiting to see my father’s mother. She was sitting on the blue concrete porch when I walked up. She was old and dark-skinned like an Indian woman, with what appeared to be a large goiter on her neck. The house was white with shutters painted blue to match the porch. It was dull and dirty and smudged, the yard crowded with dark trees and bushes. This was where I had lived with my parents. A cat stretched and rose to greet me on the steps. The old woman squinted down at me where I stood by the mailbox. I thought she would call out to ask who I was or what I wanted, but she only blinked. I went to the bottom step and she still didn’t speak. I wondered if she was blind.

  “Hello,” I said. The cat rubbed against my ankles.

  “Hidee,” she said. Her voice was deep and flat.

  “Are you Kenny Mayes’s mother?”

  There was a long silence. She looked at me. She wasn’t blind. “Who’s asking?”