Bloodroot

by Amy Greene

  As soon as my jaw didn’t have to be wired shut no more I got out of that hospital. I packed my things and burned hers up in a barrel out behind the house and took off, with no intention of ever coming back. I cleaned out the bank account and got me a motel room until I could figure out what to do next. I decided to come up here to Rockford in Illinois, a city I’d been to with Daddy on a buying trip. It was hard to make ends meet at first. Nobody would hire me, looking the way I did and with my hand not working right. Finally a foreigner let me manage his motel. I’ve lived for decades in this tiny room with just a television for company. The cold has been hard to get used to. My jaw pains me all through the winters. The nights are so long, I don’t know whether to curse Myra or wish she was here to warm my back. The only person I let know I was alive was Hollis. I needed some cash so I told him what happened and where I was. He came to see me several times. He wanted to go up Bloodroot Mountain and cut Myra’s throat, or at least put the law on her, but I told him to leave her alone. He didn’t understand it, but he never fought me on anything. He said Daddy was fixing to call the sheriff and report me a missing person, but I got him to convince Daddy I’d finally dusted my hands of Myra and run off like I was always threatening to. Hollis was the one who let me know when Daddy died and left me a little inheritance. After him holding that store over our heads all them years, it ended up being worth next to nothing. But I needed the money, so I took it.

  Running off to Illinois don’t mean I got away from the place and the people I came from, though. It ought to be easy here where it’s cold and the sky is like a blank slate. But something, maybe God, won’t let me forget. I could avoid the mirror. I could wear a glove, but I’ve learned the past would still find me. Like what happened today. The foreigner I work for subscribes to the national newspapers. Every morning I make a pot of coffee and read the paper in my office behind the curtains. I have to keep up with the world someway, since I don’t get out much. I opened the newspaper and saw a face I knew, even though I only laid eyes on it once. Right there above a black-and-white picture I saw my own last name. My hand shook so bad I sloshed coffee on my lap. Hollis told me a long time ago Myra had twin babies. I didn’t know what to think when I heard it. Back then, I hoped they wasn’t mine. Now the boy has won a prize for a book he wrote. If he was mine, I’d be proud. But I could never get in touch with them. They wouldn’t want to look at me and see on my face how bad it was between me and their mother. Besides that, if they are mine, it’s sad how they came into the world. Best thing for me to do is let them alone, like I should have done Myra.

  All day I’ve been nervous after seeing my name in the newspaper. Maybe God’s trying to tell me that a man can’t run away from who he is and where he comes from. It’s like when that man came here looking for me once, about ten years after Myra took off. There was an ice storm coming and I was out salting the parking lot. The sky over the motel looked like sheet metal. He came walking across the highway from over at the truck stop. He could have used a haircut and a shave, had on a tatty old coat and a flannel shirt with holes in it. The heels of his boots was run down, like they’d seen a lot of traveling. He headed straight for me. I knew by the way he stared me down that he wasn’t looking for a room. I quit salting and we stood there sizing each other up. I figured he was caught off guard by my face, but that didn’t seem like all it was. I didn’t ask what I could help him with. I waited for him to talk first.

  “I been working on the bank building they’re putting up downtown,” he said finally. I seen he had a rotten front tooth. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

  “So what?”

  “I heard from the men there’s somebody works here by the name of John Odom.”

  I got to feeling dizzy-headed. I could tell where he was from by the way he talked.

  “What if there is?”

  “Is that you?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Doug Cotter. I believe we come from the same neck of the woods. You ever been to a place called Bloodroot Mountain?” I saw in his eyes that he knew I had been. He took a step toward me. He was tall. I didn’t know if I could take him or not.

  “Well, what in the hell do you want?” I asked, trying not to show my nerves.

  He looked me over again, seemed like he was thinking. Then he said, “I came here meaning to put you in the hospital. But it looks like somebody beat me to it.”

  I forced myself to laugh. “What, did Myra send you here to finish the job?”

  His eyes changed when he heard her name. It took him a second to collect his cool. Then he smiled in a way that hid his rotten tooth. He looked toward the truck stop where he came from. “Why don’t you let me buy you a cup of coffee?”

  I went on across the highway with him. He didn’t seem to want a fight anymore. We sat at the counter and I ordered pie to go with my coffee, since he was paying. We both got quiet. I didn’t want to talk first but I couldn’t help it. The ice had started ticking on the window of the truck stop. I looked at the weather instead of his face. “I guess Myra left her mark on you, too,” I said. “Not on the outside, but I can still see it.” I looked back at him. My jaw had started aching. “Have you seen her?”

  He shook his head and looked down into his coffee cup. “No. But I know where she is. Mental hospital over in Nashville. I thought you put her there, but now I don’t know.” I had already been told where Myra was. Before Hollis died, he kept me informed. But I wondered how she was surviving in a place like that, as bad as she’d hated being cooped up. “They auctioned off her house on the mountain,” he said. “My brother bid on it.” He smiled in his odd way. “I guess she left her mark on him, too.”

  “What is it that woman does to people?” I said. All of a sudden the pie didn’t look good to me anymore. I dropped my fork on the plate.

  “It’s funny you would ask that.” He looked out at the ice rain with me. “I’ve always thought I was cursed for loving Myra. Everywhere I go, bad luck follows me.”

  I shook my head. “You and me both.”

  “I don’t know.” He turned back to me. “I feel different now that I’ve seen you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “There’s nothing supernatural about what she did to your face, is there? It’s not right, what we’ve put on her. She’s made out of flesh and blood, just like anybody else.”

  I forced myself to laugh again. “Glad to be of service, buddy.”

  He hung his head for a minute, like he was wore out. “I’m trying as hard as I can to forget about her,” he said. “But sometimes I still think I’d give anything to have her.”

  Then he got up and paid the bill and left the truck stop. I never saw him again. Whenever I passed the new bank building downtown I didn’t look over there. I didn’t want to think about Myra anymore. I doubt he ever did manage to forget about her. I got to mulling over the things he said and wondering myself if I’d ever really get over her. Sometimes it seemed like she was crying out to me when winter storms came. I’d cover my ears to drown out her screams, begging me to rescue her from that old asylum. It drove me out one night into the snow and I fell on the ice in the parking lot. I thought I was dying of a heart attack and maybe I was having one, because the weight on my chest was so bad I couldn’t get up. I laid out yonder freezing for a long time, and all I could think was if I died right then I’d never see her again. I knew someday I had to find her.

  But I didn’t go see her until Hollis had that aneurysm in 1996. I took a week off of work at the motel and went to Millertown to visit his grave. I knew it was time to look for Myra, too, while I was back down south. By then I didn’t want revenge for what she did to me, even though seeing her locked up would be the next thing to seeing her in hell. All I wanted from Myra was to look in her eyes one more time before I died.

  It turned out I had to stay around Nashville longer than I meant to, since there was only certain visiting days. When it finally came time to see her, my guts w
as churning all the way up the road to the asylum. There was stone pillars marking the entrance and behind them I saw the shape of the building through a piece of woods. At first it looked like a big brick mansion, but closer up I saw how old and shabby it was, one or two trees shading a little patch of grass in front of the door. The parking lot was half empty, like the patients didn’t get many visitors. I could see why. I knew as soon as I passed through the steel doors it wasn’t a place I wanted to hang around long. It stunk like piss and bleach and I nearly gagged just walking to the nurse’s booth. When I went up the stairs to the third floor, there was crazy people everywhere. It was a din of shouting and laughing and crying and begging. One woman was slumped against the wall with her hair hanging in her face and I had to step over her legs on my way down the hall. Another one kept asking if I had brought her cigarettes. I liked to never shook her off of my arm.

  When I found the room they told me was Myra’s, I tapped on the door with my good hand. It was quiet in there but seemed like I heard something moving, so I opened the door and went in. There was two beds and somebody curled up on their side in one of them, under the cover so all I could see was a half-bald head with a few strings of white hair. I thought surely that couldn’t be Myra. Then I saw her sitting in a plastic chair pulled up to the radiator under the window, looking down at a concrete path in the grass out in front of the asylum. It was a jolt to see how short her hair had been cut. I guess it was hard to take care of, as long as it used to be. It was limp as a dishrag and just a streak of black here and there left in it, even though she wasn’t no more than forty then. She had on clean pajamas but they was buttoned up wrong. When I came in she didn’t even turn her head. I walked over and stood in front of her and she still didn’t move her eyes. Then I knelt down beside of her chair and she turned away from the window with a pleasant look on her face, like she was coming out of a good dream. She might have been doped up, but I don’t think so. I looked in her eyes like I had been wanting to for so long. They was still blue, but not the same kind. I thought of my life in Rockford, how I’d stare across the empty lot behind the motel remembering her hair on the pillow and her legs under the sheet and forget what she did to me, wishing things had turned out different.

  “It’s John,” I said. “I didn’t die.” It sounded stupid, but it was all that came out.

  “Are you really here?” she asked. She didn’t seem afraid of me.

  “Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t get over the shape she was in. I’d never seen nobody so skinny except in pictures. “Lord, Myra. I used to think I wanted to see you like this.”

  She smiled a little but didn’t say anything.

  “How do you stand it in here?”

  She looked back at the window. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “I might.”

  She turned back to me. Her eyes gave me shivers. “I can be anywhere I want to. Even home on the mountain.”

  I cleared my throat. “You’ve been here a long time. Why ain’t they let you out?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  We both got quiet. It was a four-hour drive from Millertown to Nashville, plenty of time to figure out what I wanted to say to her, but all of a sudden my mind was blank. Finally I came up with something. “I heard you had a baby after … after we was through.”

  She nodded. “Twins. A boy and a girl. I don’t think they’re yours.”

  I felt my face get red. “Yeah. Well. Don’t they ever come and see you?”

  “No. But I’m waiting.”

  “What if they don’t ever come?”

  “They will.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They can’t help it. We’re bound together.”

  “I guess I couldn’t help it either,” I said. “But we was bad for each other.”

  She nodded again. “It’s a shame we’re not the only ones who got hurt.”

  I looked down at my bad hand. “Like Hollis. You might have heard your boy set fire to the store several years back. He rebuilt that place but it took a lot out of him. He never was well after that. Back in July he had a blood vessel to bust in his head. That’s what I’m doing down this way. I came home to see his grave. Lonnie claimed there wasn’t many at the funeral. He never got married or nothing. It’s kind of pitiful.”

  We both got quiet again. I looked around the room to keep from looking at her face. The ceiling was high with cobwebs in the corners. I figured it was drafty there in the winters. There was flowered wallpaper but it didn’t do nothing to brighten up the place. I seen there was a desk between the two beds, bare with a layer of dust on top. It made me think about how long she’d been in there. She wasn’t acting all that crazy but I could tell something wasn’t right with her. I had the feeling if I’d come another day, she might have been different. I pictured her slumped against the wall with her legs sticking out, or maybe like one of them that shuffled around screaming and crying. My skin crawled, imagining her strapped down to a bed and put in a straitjacket and getting shock treatments. Then she asked, “John?”

  I looked back at her eyes. “Yeah?”

  “Why didn’t you come after me sooner?”

  I tried to smile. “I’ve not come after you.”

  “I thought you would come after me. I kept waiting. Why didn’t you come?”

  I thought about it for a second. “Because I loved you once.”

  She looked away. “Maybe. But it’s like you said. We were bad for each other.”

  I couldn’t think of nothing else. I thought surely there was more I could say after driving so far and waiting so long, but I was tapped out. Then all of a sudden Myra reached out with her bony hand and touched my jaw where she had broke it. I quit breathing for a second. Her fingers moving over them lumps and scars done something to my heart. Nobody had touched me that way since I seen her last. It hurt me just about too much to take. I grabbed her fingers to stop them but once I had ahold of her I couldn’t let go. I closed my eyes and we stayed still for a while, me holding her hand on my ugly face. Finally she took it away and it was like losing her all over again. “I’m tired, John,” she said. “Please don’t come back.” I was relieved. She didn’t have to tell me twice. I never went back. But I know me and Myra will never be shed of each other. It don’t matter what I saw in that asylum, she’s still in my head with that long, long hair and them heaven blue eyes and legs that are always running away from me. I love and hate Myra Lamb now the same as I did then. There’s some things the years can’t do nothing about.

  After I left Myra’s room I went and stood for a minute beside of the front doors under a tree, not feeling like driving. The wind was stirring up a whirl of leaves and the sky was turning stormy. I never thought much about God before what happened in them next few minutes. Some nights I still lay in the dark and doubt I ever saw or felt anything at all. I go back to figuring my life and all that’s happened in it has been an accident. But times like this morning, seeing that newspaper, I know it was real and no coincidence.

  Standing in the shade beside of the asylum entrance, I looked out at the parking lot and saw them walking toward me from several yards away. They must have just got out of whatever car they had come in, a boy and girl that favored so much they had to be twins, with black hair and eyes like every other Odom’s down through time. Myra said they wasn’t mine but that boy was like an old picture of me come to life, only a different me that got out of the hills and made something of myself. I could tell by the proud way he carried hisself that one day he’d shake the dust of the mountains off his coat and walk away from there without looking back, if he hadn’t done it already. The girl was like a plainer version of Myra, pale with long hair blowing out behind her. There was a yellow-haired baby on her hip, stretching his arm up over his head to grab at the leaves fluttering down. It was easy to see by the way she smiled at him what kind of a mother she was. When they finally got near enough, that baby looked over and noticed me standing under the
tree. His eyes was the same blue as Myra’s used to be. Then the hand that was grabbing at leaves reached for me. I wanted more than anything to touch him but I couldn’t move. I watched him disappear through the doors and stood there feeling like all that mattered in the world had left me behind. I felt the closeness of another life I might have had.

  I used to think I was born worthless, considering the people I come from. But when I saw that blue-eyed baby years ago, it made me wonder. I ain’t done everything I wanted to, but looking at the picture in the newspaper today, I know I was right about that boy in the parking lot. He’s carried me and his mama off into the world and that girl has been the kind of mother neither one of us ever had, and who knows what all that baby is capable of. Ever since I seen them three, I’ve had a little bit of peace. The wind don’t sound as much like cries anymore. Knowing they’re out there makes me feel better about all the wrong I’ve done. At least some good came out of the mess me and Myra made. Sometimes I wish the boy and girl had seen me but there’s nothing I can do now to make them stop and turn around. There ain’t no changing what’s already been. I know I’ll never see them again. They passed me by like they ought to have done. But I was there and nothing can change that, either. I’m still with them, whether they know it or not, part of how they came to be. Before I drove away from that asylum, we was all together there like a family for a while. I wonder if they felt the same thing I did in them few minutes, my blood moving in their veins and passing through their hearts.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANKS to the Greene, Oler, and McCoy families, especially Adam, Emma, Taylor, Mom, Dad, Stephanie, Mickey, Allen, Arela, Carl, Linny, Sis, Earl, Travis, Dena, Justin, Isaiah, Tommy, Cathy, Brittaney, Colton, Julyanna, and Conner, for love and support.

  Thanks to Vermont College and to my teachers and professors, Kathy Levine, Bonnie Oakberg, John Cranford, Bernice Mennis, Peaco Todd, and the late Dick Hathaway.

  Thanks to the Sewanee Writers’ Group, the Lakeway Area Writers’ Group, and all those who have given feedback and advice, especially Ashlee Adams Crews, Jennifer Dickinson, Marsha McSpadden, Chad Simpson, Hank Grezlak, Leslie Gathings, Cathy Wilson, Brenda Key, Regina King, Gary Hamrick, Sue Regier, and Suzanne Kingsbury.