Every Bone a Prayer

by Ashley Blooms

  Not when there were so many things happening.

  Not when she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to get back into her skin this time.

  All night Misty reached out to the garden, to Caroline, searching through the dark for any hint of her voice, but there was nothing, nothing to be found.

  Thirty-Six

  By the next nightfall, Misty’s trailer was packed with family.

  Two cookers boiled on the stove, filled with Misty’s mother’s favorite vegetable beef soup. Dolly’s husband, Wayne, sat on the end of the couch with his hands spread apart while Charlene threaded different colors of yarn through his fingers. Every now and then he looked up from the baseball game on television to tell her how nice the braid would look on his key chain. Watching them made Misty’s chest feel tight so she looked away.

  Jem’s sons, Jerry and Jamie, sat by the back door with loose-leaf paper and markers scattered between them. Sam sat outside on the concrete steps, flicking a lighter on and off. Misty climbed behind Jerry and stretched out across the washing machine and dryer. She pulled the hem of her T-shirt up so her back could rest against the cool metal. Even with both doors propped open, the house was muggy with the damp heat of too many bodies held too close together. The heat made Misty feel small, like there wasn’t enough room in her body to hold her. Her skin weighed on her with such dogged insistence, demanding every moment that she be aware of this weight, these bends, these empty palms. She stretched herself as far as she could so that no part of her might be touching any other part of her. She tried again to reach out to Caroline, but there was nothing but silence in her head.

  “Did you hear about Jerry’s art award?” Jamie asked.

  “Jem told us,” Misty said. “I’m real glad you won.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Jerry said. “I was surprised.”

  “No he wouldn’t.” Sam leaned his head back. “Don’t let him pretend to be modest.”

  “He beat the rest of them by a mile,” Jamie said. “You should have seen the girl who got second place. Drew a bunch of lopsided cats with people teeth. Teeth just like mine and your’n.”

  Sam laughed.

  “Them poor cats,” Misty said.

  “Them poor cats is right. And my poor eyes. I dreamed about them cats for a week straight afterwards. Probably won’t ever be the same.” Jamie shook his head. “They put Jerry’s pictures in the hallway down at the courthouse for a whole month. Mom about pitched a fit, thinking they was going to keep them.”

  “She wants to hang them in the living room,” Jerry said.

  “Where?” Jamie asked. “There ain’t a spare inch of wall that woman ain’t hung something from. It’s hard to think something is precious when she puts every damn thing she owns on display.”

  Sam leaned back and looked up at Jerry. “Well, one good thing came out of it. Tyler Bowling told Jerry that he thought he was the most talented person in the school.”

  “Nay,” Jamie said, “the whole county.”

  “Country!” Sam yelled.

  Jerry’s cheeks pinked. “Come on now. Wayne might hear.”

  Jamie rolled his eyes. “Who cares what Wayne thinks. I’m almost broad enough to take him now.”

  “Take him where?” Sam asked. “Out for a nice steak dinner? He’d wipe the floor with you and your toothpick arms.”

  “I just don’t want anybody giving me another speech,” Jerry said, “about how hard it is to be quare and why can’t I just meet a nice girl. I keep thinking one day they’ll wake up and see that it’s not bad.”

  Sam snorted. “Don’t hold your breath, bub.”

  “Well, something has to give, because I ain’t leaving just because of a bunch of ignorance.” Jerry scribbled out an errant line, then grabbing a fresh piece of paper, started over. “Even if I have to show them myself.”

  “I ain’t showing them nothing but the back of my head when I finally move out of here,” Sam said. “I’m taking my quare ass up north.”

  “We shouldn’t have to, though,” Jerry said. “I don’t want to leave.”

  They all fell quiet. Sam leaned back and cupped Jerry’s elbow with his hand, held it gently in place as Jerry drew mountains across the page.

  “You know,” Misty said. “I don’t understand why it has to be bad. ‘Quare’ sounds like a nice thing, don’t it? Like…like…”

  “Some kind of diamond or something,” Sam said.

  Misty smiled. “Yeah.”

  “Or one of them far-off places nobody can find on a map,” Jamie said.

  Jerry smiled. “I like it better the way y’all say it.”

  Jamie scooted closer to his brother, stopping only when their bare ankles touched, their shoulders resting against each other. Sam rested his head on a stack of fresh paper, and Misty rolled onto her side so she could watch Jerry drawing. His hand swept across the page and a dark line followed, smooth and even. He paused now and again, the ink bleeding a dark spot where his hand had stayed too long. The line curled back and around until he’d drawn the trailer where they sat, right down to the glob of tar that had dripped above Misty’s window years before and dried there, big as a hornet’s nest. He handed the drawing to Jamie, who rested it against the linoleum and began to color it in. Jamie’s hand scrawled, scratched, and jerked. The marker squeaked under the pressure as he mixed yellow with red and brown. The colors he chose seemed to make no sense—the blue streaks in the grass and gray in the windows—but when he was finished, he pushed the drawing across the floor toward another pile of paper, and it looked right somehow. It looked like the way Misty imagined the trailer when she’d spent the whole day at school, some combination of solid lines and shifting colors, part memory and part truth.

  “Can I have that one?” she asked.

  “Huh?” Jerry said. “The trailer one? Sure, but I could do a whole lot better. Here, let me have your hand.” Jerry reached for the nearest blue pen and Misty held out her hand. The tip of the pen felt cold against her skin, a little scratchy. Jerry switched pens a few times before he finally leaned back and squinted at her palm. “It smeared a little, but it looks all right. What do you think?”

  “Not bad,” Jamie said, “but you forgot something.” He added his own marks, his tongue stuck between his teeth. “See now, that’s just about perfect.”

  “My ass,” Sam said. “Give me that purple one there. No, the darker one.”

  Misty tried to imagine what her cousins were drawing, but it was impossible to tell. The lines blurred together, overlapped, until Sam leaned back and smiled.

  “There,” he said.

  “What’re you all doing?” Penny asked. She had a biscuit in one hand and the television remote in the other.

  “We’re making art,” Jamie said.

  Penny walked over and inspected Misty’s hand. A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Can I add something?”

  “Why not?” Jerry said. “Everybody else has.”

  Penny took a pen from the floor and added her own careful lines, though they trailed past Misty’s palm and onto her wrist. “There now. Come on. William’s at the door. I told him to get lost, but he says he needs to talk to you.”

  Misty turned her hand toward herself but Jerry grabbed her wrist. “You have to wait ’til we leave to look at it, all right? Until all this is over and your mom is back home. Then you can look at it.”

  “But—”

  “It’ll be better that way,” Jamie said. “Like a surprise.”

  “You promise?” Jerry asked.

  Misty slid from the dryer and onto the floor. She gripped her hand into a fist. “I promise.”

  “Hey,” Jerry said. “I think your mom’s going to be okay. From what my mom’s told me, she’s real tough, like the rest of them.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “It’ll take more than the Holy Ghost to take a
Combs woman down.”

  Misty smiled and followed Penny through the warm air of the kitchen and living room to the front door. William stood on the porch. His eyes were rimmed red from crying.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” Misty said.

  “Well.” Penny frowned. “He said he needed to talk to you.”

  “Just for a minute.” William glanced inside at all the people glancing out at him. “On the steps, maybe.”

  Penny crossed her arms over her chest. “I can come, too.”

  “Why for?” William said. “I just want to talk to my friend. You know, my mom’s in the hospital, too, the same as yours.”

  “Go on,” Misty said. William wouldn’t try to hurt her with so much family around. And there were some things Misty wanted to say to him, too. She pushed Penny toward the couch. “I won’t be long.”

  Jem called that supper was ready as Misty followed William outside. Everyone piled into the kitchen except for her. William walked past the steps and across the yard and didn’t stop until he reached the garden fence. He sat on the grass, leaving enough space for Misty to sit beside him, but she kept standing.

  The statues had just finished their firelight burn, but they still held a faint glow of light at their very centers. The ax’s blade glowed at the edges like it had just been pulled from the forge, and the tree’s branches shimmered golden.

  William said, “Have you talked to your mom?”

  Misty shook her head. “No. Jem and Dolly talked to Dad. They said nothing’s changed.”

  “That’s what the doctor told Earl. Somebody called my aunt Rose and she’s supposed to come and get me in the morning. She’s going to take me to her house with her two rotten boys.”

  “I’m sorry,” Misty said.

  “I wish they’d just let me stay here by myself. I can’t fix nothing if I ain’t here with the statues. We have to do something to make this right.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I figure it’s got to be you.”

  “What’s got to be me?” Misty asked.

  “Everything. All this started with that bottle I planted, and you touched it. You’re what made the difference.”

  Misty’s eyes prickled with tears. “Did you ever once think that the statues wasn’t a good thing? Or what you did in the barn?”

  “We did that stuff in the barn. Both of us.”

  “No.”

  William scowled. “It was the only thing to keep the statues growing. We had to do that. It can’t be bad if something good came from it.”

  “Nothing good did! Nothing good ever did!”

  Misty backed toward her trailer. Her feet sank into a hollow that the crawdads had made and cold water splashed across her calves, her toes sinking between blades of grass to the soggy earth beneath, something like mud, but thicker, congealed. Her bones shifted inside her foot, her skin sagging, because even when she didn’t mean it to, her body was begging to be gone.

  Caroline knocked at the back of Misty’s mind and she answered, frantic.

  “You should be careful,” Caroline said.

  William stood and took a step toward Misty. “What’ll we do then? We could try going back to the barn. That might help.” He reached for her hand, but the skin slipped right through his grip.

  “No,” Misty said.

  “We got to try something. We could… We could bury something else in the garden. Something bigger. Something I ain’t tried before. I thought about… Well, I thought about—” He took a step closer. “What do you think would happen if we went under there? What do you think the garden could do for us if we planted ourselves instead of some stupid bottle. It took everything I gave it, and it gave me something back most every time. It made them better, too. What do you think it could do for us if we gave it a chance?”

  “Tell him to try,” Caroline whispered. “I’ll take care of him.”

  “No,” Misty said aloud.

  “But we have to. We have to fix my mom.” William caught the hem of Misty’s shirt between his fingers and pulled. He wrapped his hand around her shoulder, his fingers sliding under the collar of her shirt. He was crying again, his chest heaving up and down like there was something inside him that was fighting its way out. “Misty, you have to fix this. You got to.”

  “Run,” Caroline said. “Now, Misty. Run!”

  Misty pried William’s hand from her shirt. She pushed him away, turned, and ran. She curved right at the bank of the creek, her feet sliding in the grass, and darted for the trees at the back of her trailer. William followed. He called her name softly, not loud enough that her aunts might hear through the open door. The light from the trailer poured into the backyard, and Misty caught a glimpse of everything as she turned her head—William running behind her, her aunts silhouetted in the light from the small kitchen window, the empty back room with the drawings scattered across the floor.

  Then the trees blocked her vision. Branches whipped against her face. Twigs pulled at her hair, and she ran, ripping them loose, not watching where she went. She stumbled over a dip in the ground, scratched her palms on an upturned rock, kept running. William was faster than her, and all he had to do was follow. He didn’t have to clear the path or know the woods. He only had to know her, the pale cloth of her shirt floating in the darkness.

  “Don’t let him catch you,” Caroline said.

  And Caroline’s memories burned through Misty’s vision. They flashed in front of her eyes, blotting out the trees, eating away her path. In one blink there were the woods she was running through, and in the next blink were the woods that Caroline knew, the woods that Earl would buy and cut and change. Ahead of her, a dogwood tree stood in a little clearing, its blooms glowing under the moonlight, and Misty knew that it must have been Caroline’s tree, Caroline’s memory. And even though the image was years gone, she could recognize the place where the garden would be, the place that would become her home, and she ran toward it through the dark.

  Something inside the tree moved like water. The bark rippled and shifted until a face emerged from the trunk, its cheeks whittled with dark wood and light, its eyes sunken. There was no long brown hair, no bruises on her arms, but Misty still recognized Caroline as she rose from the trunk like a dark wave. Above her, in the branches, were dozens of birds of all shapes and colors. They crowded together, their wings rustling and shifting.

  William called Misty’s name just behind her, but she didn’t turn her head. She kept running toward Caroline’s memory.

  But Earl was there, too.

  A younger Earl, taller and broader than Misty remembered.

  Earl with an ax in his hand.

  “Please,” Misty said.

  She pried the door in her chest open and called out to everything in the woods. Everything she’d ever spoken to. The poplar and maple and elm, the little rocks grown smooth at the bottom of the creek, the kudzu stealing along the bank, the wildflowers bobbing in the shadows with their dim faces turned toward the sky. She called the earth, the dirt, the underneath. Called the worms and all the skittering bugs, called every bird in every nest.

  “Please,” Misty said. “Help me.”

  And Earl said something to Caroline as Misty ran closer. Sweat beaded on his skin. His mouth twisted in a snarl as he drew the ax over his head. The birds screeched in the branches, their beaks opening and shutting, their feathers splayed. They swarmed at him, trying to chase him away. One of the birds scratched the palm of his raised hand, drawing blood, but it didn’t stop him. Nothing could stop him.

  Misty closed her eyes and jumped over a fallen log just as Caroline sank down the tree, down, down to the roots, where she could hide.

  Where she could wait.

  The ground swelled beneath Misty. The ground sank and spread, made a space just big enough for her. Above her, Earl swung the a
x in the memory as Misty landed with a jolt hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs. The ground rushed in around her. It sealed her up inside itself until only a small circle of light remained a few feet ahead, like the entrance to a crawdad burrow. A few specks of earth fell onto her cheeks and Misty brushed them away. William’s footsteps pounded the earth above her, but he sounded hollow from underneath.

  “Misty!” he called. “Misty!”

  A crawdad wriggled through the soft earth beside her and plopped onto the tunnel where she lay. It paused in front of her mouth for a moment, just long enough for the water in its burrow to seep through into Misty’s. The water was cold and dark and sweet-smelling. It trickled inside, wetting Misty’s knees and elbows, splashing against her cheek. The crawdad started digging a new hole into the earth, a new place for the water to follow, and she wondered, for the first time, how much of the bottom was left. All those long days of digging and tearing, all those burrows, all those chimneys. The potholes and the hollows in the yard, the trailer sinking like everything beneath them had been replaced by darkness, by cold, sweet water.

  Above her, William’s footsteps receded, then vanished. His voice was replaced by the whirring of the crickets. Misty crawled along her tunnel until she reached the round circle of light at the end.

  She climbed out over the damp leaves piled high from last year’s fall. She looked behind her. A little mound was there that hadn’t been there before, the ground rising up to meet Misty’s fall, forming a hill the exact shape of her body as she curled on her side in the dark.

  As she watched, the hill collapsed.

  The earth crumbled and fell and the mound deflated again. The earth returned to the shape it had been before.

  “Are you okay?” Caroline asked.

  Misty shook her head. She didn’t have a name for the feelings twisting through her. If she did, she might have called them away.

  “Misty!” A woman’s voice called from somewhere between the trees, though it was hard to tell if it was Jem or Dolly. Misty wiped the dirt from her cheeks.

  If she turned back home, William would still be there, just across the yard. He wouldn’t leave until his aunt came in the morning. Until then, Misty’s house was filled with people. Her house was too loud, too bright, too warm. Penny would ask what had happened. She’d want to know why Misty had been crying. Her aunts would want to know, too, with their warm hands and their concerned faces. Her cousins would crowd around her, taking up all her space, breathing up all the air. There’d be nowhere to turn without touching somebody and nowhere to go where she might find quiet. It would be like the church all over again, all those hands weighing her down. And she didn’t know how to answer them. She didn’t know how to make any of it stop. Her father was gone and her mother was lying in the hospital alone. She might never wake up again, and there was no way that Misty knew to fix it. There was nothing she could think to make things right again.