But right then, standing in Mama’s bedroom, I didn’t know what to think. We heard a clang under the window and Johnny clapped the box shut. He stuffed it back through the slit in the mattress and tried to smooth the mouth hole and its raggedy thread teeth to look like it hadn’t been bothered. We went to the window and watched Mama drag out the tin tub. She had caught a catfish and was fixing to scald it. Johnny wiped off my runny nose with his shirttail and leaned over to press his forehead against mine.
JOHNNY
Sometimes in the heat of the day Laura and I slept naked in the musty shadows of the house, wherever we found a cool spot. We liked the
rug in the front room best, one of those woven by our mama’s granny, its bright colors faded by years of dirt and sun. Before she fell silent our mama had rocked us, one on each knee, and told stories about our great-granny and other ancestors from Chickweed Holler, who called birds down from the sky and healed wounds and made love potions and sent their spirits soaring out of their bodies. When I asked if it was all true, she said, “It’s not for me to tell you what’s true. It’s your choice to believe it or not.” I know now it was more than just stories she was talking about. It was a whole world of things I could choose to believe or not.
Our mama used to show us family pictures and I always wished as she turned the pages of the photo album to have known my great-granny, to have met her at least once. There were pictures of other relatives, too, posed portraits that must have been made in town. Like the one of my grandmother Clio, who died when my mama was still a baby. She had a solemn face with haunted eyes that I didn’t like. It was almost like seeing a ghost. Nobody smiled in the old pictures, except for my mama when she was a little girl. She seemed to have been much happier then. When I was around five, I noticed for the first time the blank squares in the photo album, empty corner pieces where they had once been tucked. I knew there were pictures of my father somewhere, maybe even of my parents together. That’s when I began to imagine him, to think of him almost all the time.
I didn’t like those blank spaces, or the haunted eyes of my long-dead grandmother, but I took the album down to look at my great-granny again and again. In my favorite picture she was standing on the back steps, squinting against the sun with her hands on her hips, her mouth a sunken line. I liked to imagine that same old woman weaving her rags as she watched my mama playing in the yard, never knowing that one day Laura and I would sleep on her rug and wake up with its pattern printed on our skin.
We were curled on that rug like cats when the church ladies came. It was during our last summer together, in early August, when we were still eight. I thought I was dreaming the sound of their car and the murmur of voices approaching the house, but then there was a loud knocking. I sat up fast, sweaty and dazed in the hot sun streaming through the windows. Laura rose beside me, a silvery thread of
drool on her chin. I felt her fear in my own stomach. Our mama once said that I was born first, so I was the oldest. I knew it was my duty to protect Laura, no matter how small I was myself.
“Hello,” a woman’s voice called out. “Is there anybody home?”
Laura got to her feet but I jumped up and held her back. I looked to the room where our mama was sleeping and thought of waking her up. But after finding that finger bone in her box, part of me was more afraid of her than I was of these strangers.
“Don’t,” I said to Laura, and the church ladies must have heard.
“Hello?” one of them repeated, rapping sharply.
My mama stirred, the bedsprings groaning. I turned toward the gloomy opening of her room, wanting so badly for her to come out that for an instant I saw her there, arms held open like wings for us to hide under. But it was only a shadow on the wall. When I looked back there was a face in the front room window, with little stone eyes under a mound of stiff gray hair. My stomach dropped. The woman caught sight of Laura and me, holding hands in the middle of a dusty room strung with cobwebs and littered with humps of sad-looking furniture, wearing nothing but underpants. Her stone eyes widened and she pecked on the window glass. “Is your mama and daddy home?” she hollered. I shook my head, alarm bells going off inside me. She stared for a minute more and then was joined by another face, younger and leaner with bright orange lipstick. The second one took us in, painted-on eyebrows raised, and shouted through the glass, “Where’s your mommy at, honey?” I shook my head again and the two women turned to each other, maybe considering what to do, before finally disappearing from the window.
Laura wanted to look outside but I stopped her. I could still hear them out there in the yard, talking about us. There was a scuffling sound on the stoop and Laura’s grip tightened on my fingers. Then we heard their ugly voices going away and the slam of doors and the hum of a car starting up. We went to the window and watched it lurching down the hill. When the car was out of sight, I found Laura’s dress pooled on the floor and tossed it into her arms, then pulled on the blue jeans Mrs. Barnett had sent in a trash bag full of her grandson’s outgrown clothes. Laura and I opened the door carefully and went outside. There was a stack of pamphlets on the top step,
weighted down with a rock. We stood for a long time looking at them, thin manila papers with crosses on the front, but didn’t touch or move them. Then we stepped around the rock and went into the yard.
The sky was bright blue with fat clouds sailing over. A squirrel darted across the clothesline into the weeds. It all looked the same but everything had changed. I imagined I could see brown foot shapes where our grass had died under the trespassers’ shoes.
Laura and I walked halfway down the drive to where their tire tracks stopped in the muck. They had only made it part of the way, the dirt path still nearly impassable from the last rain. I couldn’t understand why they would go to such trouble to bother us, or how they even knew we were there. Looking up the hill toward the house it seemed abandoned, one shutter hanging crooked and a vine growing up the soot-blackened chimney. The grass was almost knee high, overrun with dandelions and purple clover. There was an old wringer washer beside the back steps and a rusty tub filled with rainwater under the apple tree. It chilled me to think of those coiffed and powdered ladies creeping like monsters up to our window. I stood for a long time examining their tracks. When Whitey came sniffing into the yard she startled me so that I whirled and chucked a rock at her without even thinking. She yelped and ran off and I was sorry.
I looked for Mr. Barnett to come along behind her, but there was no sign of him. It would have made me feel better, the way he always smiled down at me with his kind eyes. I used to sit on the porch for hours waiting for him to come walking with a bag full of clothes or oranges or candy. Mrs. Barnett was always sending him up the hill with something she thought we needed. The Barnetts were good people and Laura and I had love for them, but we never trusted them completely. Sitting next to Mrs. Barnett on their living room couch as she read us picture books, I always made sure no part of us was touching. Even Laura remained guarded. I think both of us were afraid of betraying our mama by learning too much about the world she had tried to hide us from. Now that world had come knocking on our door, and we didn’t know what to do about it.
We tried to play. Laura found a funny-looking toad and we sat on the ground beside the stoop poking at him with a stick, making him jump in the grass between us, but our hearts weren’t in it. Our eyes
kept returning to those papers on the step. When our mama opened the front door at last, our backs stiffened but our faces turned to her. She stood in the doorway looking down at the pamphlets with eyes that didn’t belong on some rawboned mountain woman with sleeptangled hair. Then she bent and lifted the rock, crumpled the tracts in her hand and tossed them into the weeds.
She went down the steps, probably meaning to disappear into the woods, but I couldn’t let her this time. As she stepped onto the grass and turned her back, I reached out to her. I would have said “stay” if my voice had worked. She turned back and looked down at me without expression. Then she stooped to pry my fingers loose with no more feeling than if her dress had been caught on a nail. Laura and I watched as our mama walked off into the trees. Later, when she finally came to gather us close, it was too late.
LAURA
Three days after them church ladies looked in our window, two other cars came up the hill, one with a light on top. The man who got out looked a little bit like Mr. Barnett so I thought he might be nice. Johnny grabbed my arm and said, “Let’s hide.” He tried to drag me off but I was hungry. I stayed in case that man had oranges like Mr. Barnett brung at Christmastime. There was a heavyset woman with papers, too. I watched them walk toward the house. Johnny stood beside me. The man went up to the front door and knocked. Then he noticed us and came over. I seen too late his hands was empty.
“Is your mother home?” he asked, bending down to talk to us.
Right when he asked, I seen her stepping out of the woods with a string of fish. Her legs was wet and specked with grass. There was a leaf stuck to her ankle. When she seen the car she froze in her tracks. The man followed my eyes and turned around. He asked, “Are you Myra Odom?” That’s the first time I knowed our last name. When Mama didn’t answer, he went on talking. “We’re with the Department of Children’s Services, ma’am. I need to speak with you for a minute.”
Mama let the fish slither to the ground. Their bellies flashed in the sun. Then she was running toward us. “Don’t let them touch you,”
she said to me and Johnny, her voice jogging up and down. Before them people knowed what was happening, she had took me and Johnny by the shoulders and herded us in the house. The man and woman tried to follow us but Mama was too quick. She slammed the door shut in their faces.
Mama knelt on the floor and gathered me and Johnny up. I could feel her shaking. We watched the door as the man pounded on it. “Open up, Mrs. Odom. I got an order here from the court.” We knelt for a long time in the front room with the furniture left from some life Mama had without us. We hardly ever set on that couch or them chairs but they was ours. Someway it felt like that knocking was taking our things away from us.
It was the longest I could remember Mama holding me and Johnny in a long time. Her body heaved up and down. Her smell, like fish and creek water, filled the room. When the knocking quit she got still between us. Her arm clamped tighter around me but Johnny slipped out of her grip. She snatched after him but he didn’t come back. She stayed on her knees with me. He stood at the window, white and thin with hair like a pile of blackbird wings. I asked, “Are they gone, Johnny?” He said, “No,” and that was all. We waited some more. Johnny finally came back to wait with us. He crouched beside Mama, but not close enough to touch. I don’t know how much time went by. But the knocking came again, then another voice. “This is the police, Mrs. Odom. You’d better come on out.” For a while it was quiet again. This time I didn’t ask if they was gone.
Mama stood up and started walking back and forth. Her bare feet creaked on the floorboards. She cracked her knuckles and tore at her fingernails with her teeth. After a while she got to muttering under her breath. I couldn’t make out the words but she didn’t sound like a person anymore. Johnny and me hugged each other. Her voice got bigger and bigger. Slobber strung down her chin. She walked back and forth faster and faster until she was just about running. Then she was yanking at her hair. Clumps of it trailed from her fingers. I wanted to close my eyes but someway I couldn’t. I called on the fairies but they didn’t come. Johnny got mad and screamed, “Stop it! Stop it!” He covered his eyes like I wanted to. But my eyes kept following Mama back and forth.
Then the loudest pounding came. A different voice hollered, “This is the Polk County Sheriff’s Department. Open the door!” Mama rushed at me and Johnny and swooped us up, one under each arm. She ran with us to the back room. She put us down rough and my sides felt sore. She throwed open the window. The smell of outside and birdsong came in. “Go on,” she whispered at Johnny. Her eyes was red and her mouth was wet. I thought Johnny wouldn’t go. He was shaking his head but he must have got scared not to mind Mama. He climbed up on the dresser. He looked back at me once and disappeared out the window. I was bawling out loud then. The pounding hurt my ears.
Mama turned and knelt down by her bed. She reached into the mattress and pulled out the box. A puff of dirty stuffing came out behind it. She shoved the box in my hand but my fingers didn’t want to close around it. Mama made them. She pressed them so hard around the wood it hurt. That’s when I heard the front door breaking open. She lifted me under the arms and pushed me towards the window. “Run,” she said.
Johnny wasn’t gone. He was crouched under the window. I knelt down with him. We listened to Mama’s screams and things breaking as she fought. We couldn’t leave her, even if she had left us so many times. After the fighting was over, it didn’t take them long to find me and Johnny huddled there. By then, Mama was gone from us forever.
JOHNNY
All that happened after we were found under our mama’s bedroom window is like a blur in my memory. A social worker took us to a house in Valley Home, about ten miles from Bloodroot Mountain. She left us with a couple named Ed and Betty Fox and their two children. The man owned a carpet-cleaning business and drove a white van with a fox painted on the door. The woman was obese and Laura and I couldn’t stop staring at her. She asked us to call her Mother Betty as she led us to the kitchen, where it smelled like cookies baking. We stopped in the doorway gaping at the shiny appliances, the row of cabinets, the plants hanging in the window. The bright rooster wallpaper hurt my eyes.
Laura and I never ate the cookies. We stood at the table staring at the plate while the Foxes talked to the social worker. When we were sure they weren’t paying attention we slipped out through the sliding glass doors into the street-lit yard. Laura said, “Let’s run away,” but our feet didn’t move. We stood paralyzed with fear of the houses on both sides and the cars passing by and of being unable to see the mountain. That’s when it sank in that we were stuck, maybe for a long time. Laura whispered, “Look.” She raised her blouse and showed me our mama’s box, stuffed behind the waistband of her corduroy pants. She glanced back at the house and asked, “What if they take it away from us?”