Pauline said the Lord had laid it on Larry’s heart to take in orphans, not hers. She said she wasn’t sorry she married him, but she never asked for the foster kids, or his mama, Hattie, having a stroke
and moving in with them. I felt sorry for Pauline over Hattie. Hattie thought Larry was too good for Pauline. She said it all the time. She talked out of one side of her mouth where she had a stroke. She was real fat under her housecoat. Her belly had puckered white lines all over. I seen it because I had to wash her sometimes. It was scary to go in Hattie’s room. The first time I almost turned around and ran right back out. She was watching her black-and-white television set with rabbit ears, fussing at the people on her stories. Her words was hard to figure out because of the stroke, but not the meanness of them. I was standing there with her tray. She said, “Well, bring it here, dingbat. I’m fixing to perish.” I was shaking so bad the glass rattled against the plate. “Where’d they find you?” she asked. I couldn’t answer. I just stared. “Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” she said. Her belly shook when she laughed. I froze. “They laws, girl, you’re dumb as a post, ain’t you?” I couldn’t think. I nodded. She laughed again. Then she turned back hateful. “Get along,” she said. “I can’t stand somebody watching me eat.” I backed out of there as she was slopping soup down her chin.
After that I was taking care of Hattie all the time. Pauline taught me how to give her permanents. The smell burnt my nose. I hated rolling her greasy hair. Her scalp was yellow and scaly. The first one came out bad. She called me a little hussy. She would have hit me if I hadn’t got away. I had to cut her toenails and shave her legs. They was like white tree trunks. The one time I cut her she hit me upside the head so hard my eyes watered. I never could do anything to suit her. She hated all of us foster kids, but not more than Pauline. I don’t know how Pauline put up with her. I guess because they both loved Larry. That was one thing they had in common. The other thing was Percy.
Pauline told us how they found him. Back when Hattie still got around on a cane, they was having coffee in the kitchen. It was early and still half dark. They heard a meowing sound outside. They went out the back door and found him in the bushes beside the steps. He was shivering in the dew. Pauline wrapped him in her sweater while Hattie warmed him a saucer of milk. For a while there was a truce between them. But the next day they went back to fighting. Now they just had one more thing to fight about. They couldn’t agree on what
to feed him or what kind of litter to use or what to name him. Hattie won that fight. Percy was short for Percival, after Hattie’s ancestor that was a hero in the Civil War. Pauline said Hattie was a liar. Her people was white trash and always had been. Pauline lost that one, but there was others. They still fought over whether or not to have him fixed. Pauline said it keeps a cat from running off. Hattie said it was cruel. She asked Pauline, “How would you like it if somebody cut off Larry’s balls?”
I hated their fighting, but I understood how come they loved Percy. He was heavy and warm like a baby in my arms. Sometimes he got out of Hattie’s room if she left the door cracked and came to me. He hopped on the bed and curled up under my chin. For the first time since Johnny I didn’t feel alone. There was another heart beating close to mine. Percy was my only friend. All of us girls in the house spoiled him. Pauline brushed him every night. Hattie fed him off her plate. I made him aluminum foil balls to play with. The other foster kids liked petting him, too. He gave us a kind of love we needed.
Then one day we was getting supper ready before the evening church service and Hattie screamed, “Oh Lord! Percy’s fell out the window!” Me and Pauline ran in. The window was open and the screen was gone from it. Percy had leaned against the screen and pushed it out. I ran to the window and seen the screen on the grass but no sign of Percy. He must have got scared and darted off. Hattie was bawling and carrying on. “Oh Lord, Pauline, you know he can’t make it outdoors! Quit standing around and get out yonder!” I didn’t waste a minute. It wasn’t far to the ground. I dropped right out the window myself. Pauline ran out the front door and we started calling for him.
My heart was flying. I couldn’t lose Percy. I knowed Pauline was thinking the same thing. We searched all over the yard. We got down and looked under Larry’s church van. We looked under the house and turned over the wheelbarrow. We looked in all the empty boxes on the carport. Even Larry came out for a while because Hattie made him. Then he had to go back in and study for his sermon. Me and Pauline spent a long time in the shed going through the junk. We was both wet with sweat. Pauline was crying. I was sorrier for her than I was for myself. I knowed what Percy meant to her. It was getting dark.
Larry came out to holler for Pauline. “We got to go,” he said. “I can’t be late.” Pauline stopped and looked at me. We both knowed Larry wouldn’t let her miss church over a cat. “Reckon I could stay?” I asked. I could tell she was relieved. “Okay,” she said. “It won’t hurt you to miss this once. Go in and get a flashlight.”
They piled in the van and took off. The house got quiet besides Hattie sniffling in her room. I went to the kitchen drawer and found the flashlight under the phone book. I turned it on to test the battery. Then I closed my eyes and prayed the Lord would guide me to Percy. I went down the back steps. The stars was out. I tried to open my eyes and ears. I didn’t call for Percy so I could hear every noise. I walked around the yard moving my flashlight over the chain-link fence. I knowed I was going to find him. I had faith. I knelt and poked around in the azalea bushes. I looked up in the trees. I walked around the whole length of the fence and checked the carport again. Must have been two hours passed without me finding Percy. I was getting discouraged. I decided to stop and take a deep breath. I thought about the mountain and how quiet it was in the woods. I pretended I was laying on Johnny’s rock over the bluff. Then I started hearing a little ticking in my ears, like what a cat’s heart might sound like. I went to the shed again and stood for a minute. I moved the light up and down the side of it. I seen the flash of eyes close to the ground. The shed was up on blocks and Percy was underneath it. I got down on my knees and shined the light. I seen him crouching there. There was spiderwebs in his whiskers. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, Lord.” I got down on my belly and reached for him. He hissed and bit me on the hand. I didn’t draw back. I was worried he would get away. I dragged him out by the scruff of the neck. He was growling and wrestling. I seen an old feed sack under the shed. I drug it out with my other hand and put it over him. He was wrestling too much to put him inside of it. He calmed down after a minute under there. I carried him across the yard bundled up in the sack. My hand was hurting. I opened the front door and hollered to Hattie, “I found him!” It was the first time I ever talked to her on purpose. “Praise Jesus!” she hollered and started crying again. Percy wrestled loose and darted off. About that time Pauline opened the door with the others behind her. She took one look at me and knowed. She came to me and hugged me
tight. I didn’t know how to act. I hadn’t been touched that way in a long time. “Where’s he at?” she asked.
“Under the couch.”
“Well,” she said, “I guess he’ll come out when he’s ready.” We looked at each other one more time. Her eyes was shiny. Then she went about getting Larry’s coffee. I could tell by her humming that she was happy. The next day when my hand swelled up she let me stay out of school. She took me to the doctor. After that we had milkshakes and she bought me a purse. From then on, it was easier to live at the Moffetts’ house.
JOHNNY
After what I did to Steven, I was sent to the Briar Mountain Children’s Home. It was a red-brick building with a bell tower behind iron gates, nestled in a grove of pine woods. On the highway there, past fields and gas stations and through dark tunnels, I felt home receding. Our empty house, my mama in the asylum, my father’s finger bone, and most of all Laura. It was like I didn’t fully exist without her. I drifted among the other boys and girls, around the main building where we slept in a dorm, the chapel where we sat through the sermons of the pastor who ran the home, the fellowship hall where we ate tasteless meals, the room with folding chairs where the pastor’s son counseled us in groups. I spent the whole hour looking out the window at the mountains wreathed in fog. They were not the same mountains I had grown up with. I was almost certain somewhere among those hazy blue ridges was Chickweed Holler, where my great-granny had come from. I pictured shady thickets and cool ledges of rock, tree bark wriggling with bugs. Soon I began skipping the counseling sessions and disappearing into the woods outside the iron fence for hours at a time. Whenever I came wandering back, the pastor’s son always took me by the arm and asked if I wanted to be living there forever, if I never wanted to have a real home. I didn’t say what I was thinking, that there’s no such thing.
Some of the boys whispered that the grounds were haunted, telling ghost stories after the lights went out. They said it was once a Civil War hospital where many soldiers had died, but I never saw or felt the
presence of anything there. The main building was the oldest, its corroded pipes spitting brown water when we washed our hands. All night in the dorms we heard the drip-drip of the leaky showers down the hall. In the summer opening windows gave no relief from the heat and in winter the boiler always went out, leaving our teeth to chatter on frozen mornings, making the other children sick so that I couldn’t sleep for their coughing. But I never caught their croups and colds and bouts of bronchitis. I was an outsider among them, made of something different than they were.
In the five years I lived at the children’s home, I saw my sister twice. Nora Graham said visits were hard to arrange because we lived in separate counties. On our twelfth birthday, she drove Laura an hour from Millertown to see me. She left us alone on the playground behind the main building, a patch of worn grass with swings hanging limp at the ends of their chains. Laura was taller and her face was longer. She had grown up behind my back. Sitting on the swings together, I was reminded of things I’d tried hard to forget. I heard my mama’s screams, saw Laura’s handprint on Steven’s cheek. When she gave me the present she had made, a drawing of our house on the mountain, I crumpled it in my fist. She studied me with sad eyes. Then she reached out and guided a lock of my hair back into place. For a long time I could still feel the brush of her fingers on my brow.
When Laura was gone I climbed the iron fence and got lost between the pines. I ran through the woods half blind with unshed tears, clambering across gullies and over rises, tripping and falling again and again. It was almost dusk when I came to a bluff of stacked rock shelves with more pines perched high on top. Near the ground I saw a crack under an overhang. When I ducked inside, the cave smelled of algae and minerals and wet stone. Within the sun’s reach the limestone walls were mottled with moss, shaggy near the top with russet-colored roots like the pelt of some mythical forest animal. Farther in, I found what looked at first like three old trash barrels leaning on uneven piles of rock. On closer inspection I realized it was an abandoned moonshine still. There was a tin tub with a pipe running down from its rust-eaten lid into a weathered barrel made of rotten gray boards, and from it a length of tubing coiled into another metal barrel, brittle and fiery orange with rust. Not far from the still, I
noticed something glinting on the ground. I bent down, startling a lizard up the stone wall, and found a silver cigarette lighter. I held it in the sun falling through the cave’s opening and saw initials engraved on one side. I stopped breathing. The initials were J.O., like mine. But I didn’t think of my own name. I thought of my father’s. It was like somebody had left the lighter there for me to find.
A few months after I discovered the cave, a girl named Libby came to live at the children’s home. Boys and girls ate together in the fellowship hall and one morning at breakfast I caught her staring at me. She had brown hair and green eyes and a chicken pox scar on her forehead. I learned later that she was fourteen but she was built like a woman, breasts straining at the buttons of her blouse. When I saw her later at the middle school, I almost didn’t know her. There was a dumpster out back where I went to smoke. She was standing with a group of boys wearing blue eye shadow and blowing smoke rings through the shiny oval of her lips. She asked how old I was. When I told her, she smiled and said, “You don’t look no thirteen.” On the bus back to the children’s home she was the same plain girl from breakfast again, no trace of teased bangs or lip gloss.
That afternoon she followed me into the woods. I heard her footfalls on the pine needles behind me but I didn’t turn around. I let her trail me all the way to the cave. When we reached the opening I turned and she almost bumped into me, face flushed and pulse fluttering in her throat. I took her by the arm and we ducked into the crack in the rocky bluff. For what seemed a long time, we knelt facing each other in the murky gloom. Then her hand slid up my thigh. My muscles tensed under her touch. The black holes of her pupils widened to draw me in, opening to show me what was inside of her, heaps of cinder and mud and things left out in the rain, wells where living things fell inside and drowned. I pulled her close by the nape of the neck, kissing her so hard I tasted blood. I twisted my hands up in her hair, bit her shoulders, sank my fingers into her flesh. She didn’t pull away. She was drawn to me in spite of or maybe because of my darkness. She was only there for a month, but after her there were others that I lay tangled with on the cool dirt floor of the cave, pinning them down with my body, pulling their hair until they cried out. Like Libby, they always wanted more, as if they craved my meanness.
Not long before I left the Briar Mountain Children’s Home, when we were fourteen, the state arranged another visit with Laura. It was an overcast day in March so we sat at a table in the fellowship hall, where the windows faced the mountains. I wasn’t prepared for how much she looked like our mama. She was wearing a skirt down to her ankles and had hair to her waist because her foster parents were Church of God people.