Bloodroot

by Amy Greene

  The girl slid off my back and went hopping over thatches of grass like dry hair with briars tangled in. The boy bent to chase a cricket over and under the bracken. There was a border of stunted trees, limbs broken and bare, and the hump of a slate-colored rock in the middle of the field like a tortoise unearthing itself. I saw the edge of the mountaintop and moved toward it, remembering a distant relative who had jumped off a cliff here ages ago. My steps quickened until I was almost running for the sky ahead of me, imagining how she might have flown, hair and dress billowing up. Then I tripped over a hole and caught myself on my hands, palms skidding over ridges of rock hidden in the weeds. I stayed on my hands and knees until I felt small fingers parting the black wings of my hair. I looked up and saw the girl between me and the edge. The boy joined her and there was a knowing in their eyes that made them seem old. If I had gone over I would have taken all of it with me, the things I’ve never spoken of, how the rabbit’s back legs kicked and went still, how it smells of grave dirt under old houses, how it feels to bring a hatchet blade down on human flesh. I swiped the hair from my eyes and sat back on my haunches, examining my palms. There were flecks of dirt and shale in the scrapes. I held them up to show the twins. They stepped closer, drawn to my blood.

  I struggled to my feet and went to the border of bushes at the brink of the plunging rock face. I could almost see the cows grazing and the Cotter man looking over the fields in neat squares, farmhouses and red barns like toys from a train set, roads and fences dividing the green. The world didn’t seem as dangerous from up there. I felt a tug at my hem and saw the boy holding my dress tail, maybe afraid I would jump. For a long time he’s been restless. I told him we’d ride to the co-op with Mr. Barnett, but now I’m having second thoughts. So far I’ve managed not to lose my mind after what happened to me, but I couldn’t stand my twins being found by the Odoms. I have to protect them for as long as I can. If they were older, I know what I would tell them. You might leave but one day your blood will whisper to you. You’ll hear witches making magic in a holler, healing wind blowing down a swollen throat, the song of the woman who came here in a mule-drawn cart and made it home. One of these days, wherever you are, you’ll turn around and look toward the mountain, old and wild and bigger than you. You’ll look this way and know it’s still alive, whether I am or not anymore. I was only thinking the words but the girl came to me as if she had heard them out loud. She reached up and I swung her onto my hip. “Look, Mama,” she said, pointing at the world below. “Can I go down yonder?” I thought of Granny taking my itchy foot in her hand and ached with loneliness. “Yes, honey,” I said. But you’ll come back. Just like me, you’ll always come home.

  JOHN ODOM

  Sometimes I get to missing the hills. I never thought I would when I first cut out and headed up north, but here in Rockford there’s buildings instead of trees everywhere you look and cars honking even in the dead of night. Living in a motel like I do, I can always hear somebody talking through the walls. It’s like I’m alone but I can’t ever get off by myself. If I think about the mountain where Myra came from, it don’t seem all that bad to me anymore. I understand now why she was so homesick being in Millertown. It’s took me a long time, but I’ve got to where I don’t hold a grudge against her. Since I’ve quit drinking and got a few decades older, I can look back and see how mean and crazy I was myself. I figure I ain’t nobody to judge the way Myra acted or where she ended up.

  It’s lonesome how time passes. The world’s ten years into the second millennium and it’s been more than thirty since what Myra did to me. Sometimes I pass a mirror and expect to see myself whole. I get surprised by what I look like, even after so long. The doctor said I ought to have surgery, she’d busted my face up so bad. But I couldn’t hang around where people knew me any longer. Whenever my reflection surprises me, it’s like waking up without fingers all over again. I go right back to that night Myra ran away.

  I don’t know how long I was out before I came to. My head and face hurt so bad I couldn’t think. First thing I knew was that I couldn’t move my jaw. I remember trying to call Myra, but I couldn’t say anything. I was half choking on blood and some of my teeth was broke out. What was left of them wouldn’t line up because she’d knocked my jaw crooked. I know how it sounds, but it took a few minutes to see that my fingers was gone. There was blood all over the place and I guess I was out for quite a while because it was tacky, not fresh. It was all over my shirt and the couch and the coffee table. That’s when I saw the fingers, one there on the table and one on the floor almost underneath it. It took a minute to understand they was my own fingers. I held up my left hand and saw that only my thumb and pinky was left, with the pinky hanging on by a string. I can’t say exactly what went through my head. I lurched around looking for Myra and bawling out in the yard. A train came up about that time and I couldn’t even hear myself hollering anymore.

  What I kept seeing in my mind was her offering me that red ring like Eve giving Adam the apple, how her eyes was beautiful and shining, how wild her hair was around her face. The day she gave it to me, she led me up the steepest path I ever saw, a narrow dirt trail, and I nearly tripped I don’t know how many times over tree roots and rocks. One spot, we had to walk across a rotten tree trunk over a mud-hole and I nearly fell in. I was wore out before she was ready to rest. We came to a clearing where there was two big slabs of rock hanging over the bluff. It was a long way down. I was weak in the knees standing out on that ledge, but it was a pretty sight. It was summer and the trees was bright green. A breeze fluttered leaves around and lifted Myra’s hair off of her shoulders. She sat down with her long legs curled under her dress and I sat facing her. She was like a little girl. She said, “Close your eyes and hold out your hand.” I said, “It better not be poison ivy.” She said, “Just do it.” I put out my hand and she placed something in my palm. What she put there was a heavy lump, still warm from where she held it all the way up the mountain. It felt kind of like a lug nut. I opened my eyes and there it was, stones glimmering in the sunshine. I didn’t know if they was rubies or what, but I could tell that ring had cost a lot of money. I looked at her and she was excited, breathing fast and face rosy. “Put it on,” she said. “I know we’re not married yet, but I want you to have it.”

  “I ain’t had time to get you one,” I said.

  She said she didn’t care, so I went ahead and slipped it on my finger. It was loose but it fit better than I expected it to. She picked up my hand and held it against her cheek.

  Standing in the yard that night, covered in blood with a train going by, it was hard to think about what to do next. I did have the sense to go back in the house and wrap my cut-off fingers in a dishrag and take them with me to the emergency room, in case they could be re-attached. The doctor told me later it was too late for that, but I didn’t know it at the time. I can’t say how I made it to the hospital. I don’t even remember driving over there. I kind of remember stumbling through the automatic doors at the emergency room and throwing up on the floor. I believe some boys came to help me up. Next thing I knew, I was laid out on a table and someway I had hung on to my fingers wrapped up in that dishrag. There was a young doctor standing over me, had blood on his scrubs, probably mine. I held the fingers out to him. I couldn’t talk. My mouth was busted all to pieces. The doctor took the rag and opened it up and stared into it. All of a sudden it came to me that one finger was missing and I understood then why she did it.

  The doctor looked in my eyes and said, “What happened to you?”

  That’s when I knew even if I could’ve answered him, I wouldn’t have. I’d never tell anybody. I was laid up sucking soup through a straw for a long time. I didn’t let the hospital call none of my people because I couldn’t stand for them to know what Myra did to me. At first I plotted how to kill her and get away with it. I knew right where she’d go, back home to her granny’s place. But in my heart, I didn’t want her dead or hurt like I was. She crawled under my skin
the first time I saw her and she’s been there ever since.

  Myra probably thinks I was the devil, but I loved her. I used to watch her sleeping and something about her hair against the white of the sheet pained my heart. Looking at her made me think about my mama, the only other woman I ever lived with. Once I stepped on a broke bottle and me and Mama sat on the front steps together while she dug it out. For a long time that was my best memory, her prying something out of me. I remember wishing she’d keep that glass, with my blood on it. I wanted her to have it but she pitched it in the weeds. That’s how it was for me. Pitched in the weeds. But after a while I got to where I didn’t feel a thing when I thought about that bloody glass, bitter or sweet. I got used to not being touched. She wasn’t no kind of mother. One time Hollis and me was wrestling and laughing on the kitchen floor while she was trying to talk on the telephone. She took off her shoe and threw it and hit Hollis right between the eyes. He had a knot there for a long time. She wasn’t much of a wife to my daddy, either. Once before city water came through and we still had a well, I remember a man coming in the yard and asking for a drink of water. He went behind the wellhouse to the spigot where Mama was rinsing specks of grass off of her feet after Eugene had mowed. I was outside throwing a baseball up and catching it. After a while I didn’t hear Mama or the man talking. I went around the wellhouse and saw them knelt down with the water still running, making a mud puddle under the spigot, and that man with his hand inside of Mama’s blouse. I never told Daddy, but he suspected her of running around anyway. One night after she came in drunk he broke down the bathroom door and dragged her out. I was watching on the stair landing. He beat her and kicked her and pulled her out the door by the hair of the head, out through the mud and into the street. He got down and straddled her and beat her some more, slapping her over and over in the face. Then he got up and come on back in the house, not even breathing hard. But after I got older, she quit going out all the time with her perfume on and her mouth smeared up. She got to where she stayed in the bed all day long. Daddy used to snigger and hint around that he was slipping something in her drinks to keep her at home. I still don’t know if he was just kidding or if he was being serious. There’s a lot of things about them times that I still ain’t figured out. Like whether or not my mama died of heart trouble or if I poisoned her.

  I remember it was fall in a windstorm, leaves whirling up in little tornadoes and the sky gray with clouds skidding over. Dark was coming and Mama was stumbling around the kitchen trying to make supper, tanked up on nerve pills or whatever she was drinking. Finally she dropped a hot pan out of the oven and I went out the back door. I couldn’t stand being around her when she was like that. From outside, the house was cozy looking. Somebody passing on the street might have smelled the supper and seen the yellow kitchen window and wanted to come in out of the cold. But they didn’t know about Mama, puffy-eyed and hair sticking up from being in the bed all day, slumped over the stove in her old housecoat smoking a cigarette. They hadn’t heard the stories Daddy told at the supper table either, bragging about all the men he killed in the war. He talked about human life like it wasn’t worth a plug nickel, not even his own. He didn’t want to be stuck in Millertown with a wife and kids, he wanted to be in the Philippines with a gun on his shoulder, hunkered down waiting for somebody else to kill. He’d go on and on about how many arms and legs and skulls he’d shot off. Me and my brothers would just look down at our plates and keep on chewing, trying to be like him and not feel anything.

  After I left Mama in the kitchen, I went down the steps and knelt to look under the porch. There was a stray dog under there, a black mutt with a white ruff that had showed up the day before. I thought it might have been hit by a car or something. It wagged its tail when I made kissing sounds but it wouldn’t come to me. It just laid down and cowered, ears back and licking its lips when I tried to lure it out. Daddy came over, wiping his grease-blacked hands on a rag where he’d been working on the car. “Is that thing still under there?” he asked. His coveralls smelled like cold weather and kerosene, leaves blowing across the yard behind him. I wanted to say no but he’d already seen it. “You better leave that old thing alone,” he said. “It might have rabies.” I looked at the dog, huddled beside the gas can, and knew it didn’t have rabies. Daddy went off for a minute and came back with a pie tin and a dirty white jug of something. I watched as he unscrewed the cap and poured thick green liquid into the tin. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Antifreeze. It’s supposed to taste good to dogs and cats. I bet you he’ll lap this right up.” He pushed the pie tin under the porch. The dog showed no interest at first but I figured it would later, when we was gone. It was probably pretty hungry and thirsty. We went in for supper and the whole time I was eating I kept praying that dog would be able to resist. When we got done I offered to take out the garbage, but Daddy said the can wasn’t full yet. I wanted to sneak and throw away that poison before the dog could take it, but Daddy watched me like a hawk all night. He must have suspected what I meant to do. The next morning I went out and looked under the porch. The pie tin was empty and the dog was gone. I don’t know if it went off somewhere else to die or if Daddy drug it off, but I knew it was dead one way or another. Just like one of them Japs Daddy killed.

  A few weeks later, my mama got sick. She was upstairs in the bedroom hacking and coughing with a fever. She always had a smoker’s cough, but this was different. It might have been the flu or even pneumonia but nobody went to the doctor much at our house. It had got to be winter and Eugene and Lonnie was gone. A man had come in the store and offered them ten dollars apiece to saw up a tree that had fell in his yard. Me and Hollis was setting in front of the television when Daddy hollered for me to come in the kitchen. I could hear Mama having another coughing fit upstairs. Daddy glanced at the ceiling and held out a medicine cup to me, full to the top. “Take this cold medicine to your mammy.” He shook his head. “That racket’s fixing to run me nuts.” I took the cup and looked down into it. “Go on,” he said. “Before she hacks up a lung.” I was halfway up the stairs before I thought about the dog. I stopped and looked in that cup again. The liquid inside was kind of green, just like the antifreeze. My heart was knocking so hard I liked to lost my breath. But I thought about my daddy down yonder, telling me to do something. I’d had my backside striped with a belt enough times to know what would happen if I disobeyed him. So I went on up the stairs in the dark, into their room where the lamp was on. I hated going in there because it always smelled like the perfume she used instead of taking a bath. She rolled her eyes over at me and I saw she looked half drunk besides being sick. When she reached for the cup I held it back. I thought surely it was medicine and that was all. But I knew Daddy was liable to do anything. I had time to turn around and walk out of there. I could have poured whatever it was down the bathroom sink. Daddy never would have known the difference and Mama probably wouldn’t even have remembered me coming. Then I looked at her and thought of all the times she was mean to me and my brothers and how she let that man put his hand inside her blouse behind the wellhouse. She coughed again and motioned for me to give her the cup, like I was trying her patience. I watched her drink it down without a bit of complaint. I’d say she didn’t even know where she was, much less what it was she might be drinking.

  Next day was a Saturday and I went to work with Daddy and Eugene and Lonnie. For once I was glad to go. I wanted to be as far away from that house and my mama as I could get. I’d heard her stumbling down to the bathroom in the night, back and forth until she finally must have slept down yonder on the floor. At first light I heard Daddy leading her back up to the bed. He made breakfast for us before work, fried eggs and baloney. Eugene was sitting across the table from me, mopping up runny egg yolk with a piece of light bread. “What’s wrong with Mama?” he asked, without looking up from his food.

  Daddy was wolfing down his breakfast standing at the sink. He said, “I reckon she’s got the stomach flu
. Hollis, you better keep an eye on her while we’re gone.” Then he looked at me and our eyes locked. I wish it was my imagination but later on when Hollis called, Daddy said, “You boys watch the store. I got to get on home.” Then his eyes locked on mine again. “Something’s happened to your mammy.” My bowels got hot and loose. He never said a word about giving me that cup. But for as long as I lived at home he’d give me a secret look every once in a while, like we was in cahoots together.

  I can’t say for sure if I helped my daddy poison my mama, but thinking I might have weighs on me. Not a day goes by, and me getting to be an old man, that I don’t think about handing her that cup. I should’ve snatched it away from her and drunk it down myself. The world probably would have been better off. I know Myra would have been. For a while with her, I thought I could forget about it. I thought loving her could chase off whatever evil there was in me, but I was wrong. Someway, Myra brought out my bad side. I wanted to be good to her, but I didn’t know how. I never felt in control of myself around her. I got to drinking just to get my head back on straight. We made a promise before we got married to change for each other. Come to find out, there wasn’t no taming either one of us down. She couldn’t be the kind of wife I wanted, and I wasn’t cut out to be a husband. You can’t fight that old nature, at least that’s what I thought when I was younger. I figured there wasn’t no use, I might as well give up.