Jonah, though, the one she’d run off with, hardly even noticed her anymore. The earth could open up and swallow her, for all he was concerned. He was always out in the shed cooking candy, and even when he was present physically, he was in a world of his own. But then, that was nothing new.
Jonah had always been different. He wasn’t like the other boys around home who lived for football and hunting. He’d never had any patience for their foolishness, their big cars, their silly social games, and he hadn’t minded saying so. When she remembered Jonah, the image that appeared was his back disappearing into the woods. That seemed to be how she’d most often glimpsed him—mysterious and slightly out of touch, like someone born in the wrong century. Jonah, silent and intense, roaming over the hills and hollows, coming back with pockets full of arrowheads, ginseng plants with roots neatly wrapped in his handkerchief, a handful of sparkling rocks carefully picked from the red dirt. His best friend had been that great-uncle of his who lived in the cabin up on the ridgetop. That old man’s hands had been thick as leather from all the stings he’d gotten through his years of keeping bees, but he’d made the best sourwood honey you could ever hope to taste. It was sweet and fragrant and a clear light amber. Jonah had gotten his solitary ways from him.
He looked like him, too, the shadow of the old man appearing in the young. Both had the same roughhewn features, reminding her of the mountains they loved. Both had high, broad foreheads, sharp cheeks, and broad, sharp-angled jaws. Like his uncle’s, Jonah’s face was plain and straight, just as if it had been cut from stone. Even his eyes were like the mountain’s gray granite, and just like those rocks, they were flecked with little bits of white.
Jonah’s movements had alway been easy and fluid, amazingly graceful for such a tall, lanky man. He’d moved through the woods silently and quickly, or stood still, only his eyes moving, watching some creature, taking note of whatever had changed since the last time he’d passed through. He knew the location of every beehive and squirrel’s nest. There was nothing on that mountain he didn’t see.
“He’s peculiar,” her father would say flatly, watching with narrowed eyes whenever Jonah passed by. She twisted her mouth into a bitter smile. If Papa had thought Jonah was peculiar then, she wondered what he would say about him now.
He probably wouldn’t even recognize him. Jonah’s skin had become pasty white, his face gaunt and haggard. And it wasn’t just his body that had changed. It was as if his personality, that indefinable thing that made Jonah himself, had been slowly eaten away, edged out an inch at a time by his bitterness and the steadily increasing diet of methamphetamine. She had a sudden vision of Jonah’s soul looking like a piece of Swiss cheese. Whoever lived in his body now was paranoid and wild in the head. He’d go off about nothing at all, typical of the hardcore meth user he’d become.
Dwayne prided himself that he only used occasionally, but Mary knew that’s how it had started with Jonah, too. She used some milder things from time to time, but nothing really touched that empty spot inside of her. Whenever she wondered why she bothered to restrain herself, a quick look at Jonah reminded her.
He went through the same cycle over and over again. Get high, higher, higher, using a little more each time, becoming crazier and crazier. He would yell and scream and see things, and that phase could go on for days, even weeks. Then he’d come down with a crash, sometimes having a few hours or minutes of sanity as he plummeted, finally sleeping for days, almost comatose. He would wake up hungry for more, and off he’d go again.
She’d heard about a man in New Mexico who’d been tweaking—at the peak of the cycle of highs. He’d become convinced his son was possessed and had cut off the boy’s head and tossed it out the window of his truck. Lately Jonah had been having those kinds of paranoid fits, staring at her and Dwayne, then suddenly going silent, as if voices inside his head were saying things that scared even him. She was afraid of him and had gone to hiding the knives and razors, anything he could use to hurt himself or someone else. Last week he’d burst into the living room of the trailer, shotgun raised to his shoulder, talking about somebody stealing his brain.
“Give me that thing before you kill somebody,” Dwayne had said, wrenching the gun away from Jonah, who’d stared at him, wild-eyed and panting, his sharp features even more pronounced since he’d lost weight. “Here.” Dwayne had handed the gun to her. “You better keep ahold of that. Jonah’s been sampling too much of the product. Getting into the candy a little too often.”
She’d taken the gun, and as soon as she felt the smooth stock under her hand, the realization had come to her like a long awaited dawn. Dwayne trusted her. But then, just as if he’d read her mind, he settled himself onto the broken-down couch beside her, lifted one of those tattooed hams of his, and rested it around her shoulders. She’d done her best not to flinch.
“There was an old boy down in Boone’s Mill tried to cheat us out of some money a while back,” he said conversationally. “Know what happened to him?”
She shook her head and pretended to be uninterested.
“Somebody doused him with gasoline and set him afire while he was sleeping.”
She hadn’t responded. It was probably just more of his foolishness. That was just Dwayne. Always bragging. But Jonah. Well, these days there was no telling what Jonah might do. She hadn’t said anything after that, just pointed her eyes toward the television, but the little spark of hope had died out just the same.
She’d gone to her room after a while, when all the traffic started coming in and out, when the music started pounding the walls. She’d read a magazine for a while and then finally fallen asleep. Around five in the morning she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom. Everyone had finally gone home, and someone had turned off the stereo. She could hear Dwayne snoring from the couch. She headed back to her room, but Dwayne roused himself, got up, and followed her down the hall. She hurried into her bedroom, pressed the door quietly until it latched, then hooked the pitiful lock. Not that it would do much good if he decided to come in. He lumbered closer, and she heard him pause outside the door. She had held her breath, and after a few minutes the floor creaked, and she heard his bedroom door open and shut. But it wouldn’t be long. She had rested her forehead against the bedroom door that night and tried to pray, but no words would come.
Now she turned her face toward the truck window, barely taking note of the beauty of the mountains, the flaming leaves on the trees. How was it that her life had become such a dry, hot desert? A canyon of stone and dust where every turn just led her farther in instead of out into grassy valleys with shady trees and quiet ponds. She felt weary all the way to her bones. She leaned her head against the window glass.
Who was she, really? Surely not this person she’d become. She tried to remember the last time she’d caught a glimpse of her real self. She focused her thoughts, not playing with the idea, but really wanting to remember, and her mind went to a place she’d tried hard not to visit. She was twelve years old. Her little-girl face beamed back at her from memory’s hiding place. Her teeth were a shade too big for her features, her hair silky white, spilling down around her shoulders. Her legs were thin and still bruised from play, her shining eyes lit with a light that hadn’t yet gone out. Mary Bridget smiled, remembering the high point of that year. She had memorized one hundred verses in Sunday school and won a brand-new white leather Bible with her name embossed on the front in curly golden letters.
The scene shifted. Another tableau came into focus, and she was with her mama at Grandma’s, snapping beans and going over those verses. She could almost smell the fragrance of Grandma’s kitchen—a mix of coffee and biscuits and apples and woodsmoke and whatever she was cooking for supper. She could almost hear the energetic hissing of the pressure cooker, the murmur of their conversation, the creaking of their chairs, the strains of Grandma’s gospel music in the background.
Mama and Grandma had both come to the church the night she’d been awarded her Bible. She s
tared straight ahead, and instead of the dusty dash of the truck she saw the two of them, starched and pressed, sitting in the front row, their pride beaming toward her so strongly she could still feel its warmth. She held on to the bittersweet picture as long as she could, but after a few moments it faded.
She stared bleakly out the smudged window of the truck. Where had that girl gone? What had happened to change her? It was a question she never allowed herself to ask. And the only reason she was asking now was the gnawing, growling torment that had come upon her lately. Something in her that she’d managed to keep sleeping all these years was coming awake, twisting and struggling to be free. And it hurt. She hadn’t felt such misery since the first days, since that first morning when she’d awakened next to Jonah and realized what she’d done. Shame had spread through her chest and stomach, like something cold and poisonous. It had felt so bad she hadn’t thought she could live. So she had learned how to make it go away.
You just didn’t think, that was all. You just kept your face pointed straight ahead and you didn’t think, and you didn’t feel, and you just did the next thing, and whenever something made you feel bad, you looked away, or closed the cover, or turned it off, or found something to distract you.
But she must be wearing out or the presence getting stronger, because it wasn’t working any longer. More and more, when she was lying on her bed almost asleep, when she was staring out the window, her mind unguarded, that presence would come, that voice would speak. Who are you? it would ask. Whose are you? And when it did, that little girl’s face would appear in memory, and Mary couldn’t tell if she was being taunted or beckoned back to something still possible.
Was it possible? Did that person still exist inside her somewhere, or was she lost forever? As the question echoed, long forgotten words came to her mind. They suddenly seemed right, a perfect description of what her life had become. She closed her eyes and whispered them to herself. “Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me… .”
There was more to it, but she couldn’t remember. All the way home she repeated the first part, trying to recall the rest of the verse. Finally, as Dwayne turned the truck off the highway onto the snaking back roads, the rest of the passage came to her. “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!” she whispered. “I would fly away and be at rest.”
“Fly away and be at rest,” she repeated to herself as they turned onto the long dirt drive up to the trailer. “Fly away and be at rest,” she whispered as she gazed at the meth trash mounds in the ditch—mountains of empty antifreeze and drain cleaner containers, spent cans of lantern fuel. She murmured the words over and over again, and somehow, by the time the truck pulled up in front of the rusted trailer and shuddered to a stop, something had changed. They had become a plan rather than a prayer.
Two
She knew enough to bide her time. A day went by, then another, then a week, then two. Finally, when all the necessary pieces came together, it took her a few minutes to realize that this was it. The chance she’d been waiting for.
She and Dwayne spent another long day visiting stores to buy ingredients. They drove up to the ragged trailer about six o’clock. Jonah came out of the smokehouse just long enough to get what he needed, then went back to work. Mary Bridget went into the kitchen. She washed up the dirty dishes, threw out the empty beer cans. When Dwayne went out to the truck and came back with two quarts of home brew, her heart thumped. This was her chance.
“I did some business in Franklin County today.” Dwayne grinned and sniffed the cap of the bottle. “A mild fragrance with just a hint of battery acid and the tiniest aftertaste of lead pipe.”
Mary Bridget laughed like he’d said something clever. She took the chickens she’d bought yesterday from the refrigerator and breathed another prayer of thanksgiving that she hadn’t cooked them. She made a big, heavy meal—fried chicken and biscuits and gravy—the kind of meal where Dwayne always ate three times what even he needed, then fell asleep on the couch while watching TV.
She finished the dishes, even sat down beside him and watched television—show after show. Dwayne swigged from the bottle every minute or two. Finally, just when she was losing hope in her plan, his head lolled back, and he started snoring.
She sat there for a minute, making sure he was out, then slipped out from under his arm and forced herself to walk down the hall just as normally as possible. It wouldn’t do to have him wake up and find her tiptoeing around. She checked her watch. She had about an hour before the cars would start pulling in. Evening shoppers looking to buy what they needed. She went into the bathroom and looked out the window. It was dark, but she could see a sliver of light edging past the black plastic over the window in the smokehouse. She quietly went back into the hall. Dwayne was still sawing logs.
Jonah’s door wasn’t locked. He never slept in his room. In fact, he never slept at all, and she prayed he kept the money here instead of with him in the makeshift lab. She glanced toward the living room one more time, then turned the bedroom doorknob and went inside.
It looked like a bomb had exploded. The bed was unmade, and there was a strong smell of dirty clothes. Jonah had given up bathing some time ago, and she’d noticed little bloody scabs on his arms where he’d taken to picking at them. She wrinkled her nose and thanked God she would get used to the odor in a minute. There was money everywhere. Tens and twenties balled up on the top of the dresser, with wadded-up receipts and coins strewn among them. She glanced past them, knowing there must be a bigger pile somewhere. They took in thousands every day, and she knew for a fact Jonah hadn’t marched into the bank and opened an account. She looked through a drawer or two and found only gray underwear and socks and a snake’s nest of old dungarees and Tshirts.
She heard the dogs start baying, and her heart thumped. She went to the window and peered out. The lights were still on in the shed, and she didn’t see a thing or hear a sound other than their hoarse cries. Sometimes they went off like that, and there was no telling why. Perhaps a raccoon or a possum had passed by in the night. She eased open the bedroom door, craned her neck, and looked down the hall. Dwayne was still snoring.
The fright galvanized her to more speed. She became methodical in her search, opened and closed each drawer quickly and quietly, went to the closet and looked underneath the pile of dirty clothes and the smelly boots and shoes. Finally she had searched the whole room. Nothing. The money wasn’t here. She leaned against the wall, then slumped down onto the dirty carpet and felt like dissolving into tears. She covered her face.
“Help me, God,” she prayed, not missing the irony. She had to get out of here, though. That was all there was to it. The money had to be with Jonah out back. She opened her eyes and wondered how she could get him away from the smokehouse. She stared straight ahead, not seeing the messy room, trying to come up with an answer, but as she stared, her attention was snagged by something. Between the yellowed box spring and mattress was an edge of green paper. She crawled to the bed and gingerly pulled it out. It was a hundred-dollar bill. She hauled up the mattress, and sure enough, there it was. The stash of money, piles of raggedly banded bills nearly covering the entire box spring. She stared for a second longer, then took the green duffel and began raking it in. She jammed in the wads of hundreds and fifties until the zipper was stretched tight. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
She hoisted up the bag, and not wanting to risk passing Dwayne by exiting through the front door, she went into the bathroom. She opened the window and tossed out the duffel bag and her backpack. She climbed out herself, dropped onto the soft ground underneath the window, then lowered it slowly. She carefully crept toward the truck, opened the door as quietly as she could, and shoved the duffel across the gearshift to the passenger seat. She was just easing herself in, hoping the truck would compression-start as she coasted down the hill and wondering what she would do if it didn’t, when the dogs started up again. He heart froze, not beating at all for a
second, then thumping down hard and taking off racing.
A slice of light cut through the darkness as Jonah threw open the door of the smokehouse. He blinked, hair and eyes wild. He had the shotgun on his shoulder again, and the flashlight lurched wildly over the yard, finally coming to rest on her in the driver’s seat of the truck. Mary took a deep breath and decided to go down fighting.
“Turn that blamed thing off of me before I go blind.”
The light continued to blaze for a moment, then swung down toward her feet. She could see him, awful and frightening, framed in the light of the shed, and even though it terrified her to do so, she began walking toward him, for the last thing she wanted was for him to come to her and see the duffel on the seat beside her. As she drew closer she could see that his sharp face was gaunt, and he was biting his lip and moving his jaw around in that strange way he’d taken since he’d started using. She got closer and could smell the odor even before she saw the array of Mason jars, Pyrex glasses, and tubing on the tables behind him. She tried not to breathe. It smelled like fingernail polish remover, only a hundred times stronger. She planted herself in front of him and spoke before he could ask her a question.
“Give me the truck keys,” she demanded, keeping her voice calm and sure.
“What for?” His eyes were thin circles of gray around black discs.
“I need to run to town.” She purposely made herself sound impatient.
He stared at her suspiciously, his jaw working. His hand started picking at the scab on his arm. The top came off, and it began to bleed.
“Well, for mercy’s sake.” She made a sound of irritation. “I need something. Some feminine products.”
“Oh.” Jonah looked perplexed.
“Give me the keys,” she demanded again.
He stared at her for a minute, tilted his head.
“The keys,” she said again, and finally he dug in his pocket and handed them over.
Not a Sparrow Falls Page 2