Hollis spat tobacco juice into a can he was holding. “Nah, she’ll be all right.”
John peeled off one of the wooly socks. “Does that foot look frostbit to you?”
Hollis shook his head. “That girl’s tougher’n she looks.”
John seemed uncertain. “She might have pneumonia.”
Hollis scratched under his cap and resettled it on his head. Our eyes locked. “She ain’t got pneumonia,” he said. “She’s full of meanness, is her problem.”
John still didn’t look convinced. “I don’t know.”
Hollis spat into his can again. “A little bit of cold ain’t going to hurt her. Daddy claimed he used to slip laudanum to Mama whenever she went to messing around.”
“Yeah, well,” John said. “Mama’s dead, ain’t she?”
Hollis laughed and took hold of my foot. His touch burned through the numbness. “That laudanum’s hard to get these days, but I bet Rex Hamilton would give you some.”
John pulled the blanket back over me. “I ain’t giving her no laudanum.”
Hollis grinned. “You might have to before it’s over.”
They looked at me in silence for a long moment. Then Hollis said, “I better head out. Just let her lay here awhile. She’ll be up again trying to run off in no time flat.”
For months I kept a racking cough that hurt my chest. As I cooked and washed dishes I spat gouts of green phlegm into a dishrag. All winter I was weak and tired, face slick with sweat. I was never the same after my time under the house. I began to see things crawling toward me from the corners of my eyes. Once I thought there was a black dog at the foot of the bed but when I sat up it was a pile of dirty clothes. At night I slept beside John under heavy blankets, the fire dead in the stove. I put my feet between his warm calves, unable to hate him in the dark. I pretended he would protect me if a red-eyed thing crept into the room and that he was not the red-eyed thing himself. Sometimes when I heard his boots on the porch I thought of the winter before we got married, when I unwrapped his face from a scarf as if his mouth, his chin, his neck were all presents.
By the end of December, he was seldom home anymore. One morning passing the bathroom door, I heard the splash of him shaving and paused to look in. I stepped behind him and saw a love bite on his naked shoulder, speckles of blood sucked to the surface of his skin. I realized then that I didn’t care anymore. It was hard to remember how jealous I had once been of other women. Our eyes met in the mirror. His razor paused in mid stroke, tongue tucked into his cheek. After a while I turned and walked off. When he was gone to work, I wiped up the ring of soap scum and whiskers he left behind in the basin.
I stopped trying to run away, but he wasn’t satisfied. My complacence angered him somehow. He began to punish me for walking in front of the television or coughing too loud or spilling sugar on the counter. He threw empty beer bottles at the wall near my head,
pressed his cigarettes into my flesh, bent my fingers back, and squeezed my wrists in the vise grip of his hands until I couldn’t feel them anymore. At first I fought back, leaving claw marks on his face and spit dripping from his nose. But as time went on, a stillness stole into me. His violence became something I bore, like when Granny brushed the knots from my hair before school in the mornings. I felt nothing anymore besides regret. But he kept trying to provoke some reaction that I was too sick and tired to give.
In the last months of our marriage, all John wanted to do was drink and eat. He had always loved my cooking, so I made big meals for him. I served him steaming plates heaped with meatloaf, okra, pork chops, soup beans, pickled beets, country fried steak, and cathead biscuits. I stuffed him with banana pudding and coffee cake and cobbler, all the things Granny had taught me to make. I kept him full and quiet as I had the baby rabbit. It was a means of self-preservation, but I didn’t like watching his once chiseled face softening and thickening, his belly beginning to lap over his belt buckle. I looked at pictures I’d taken of him in summer, posing by the car with an open shirt, standing under the trees with his arms crossed over his lean chest, and hardly recognized the man I saw.
John and I didn’t celebrate Christmas. He sat drinking in front of the television and I stood looking out the window at the snow-dusted ground, thinking about Granny. The next day while John was gone, Mr. Barnett drove her down the mountain to see me. It was a relief to feel her arms around me again, but I was too worried John might come home to enjoy her visit. I felt sick the whole time she and Mr. Barnett were sitting on the couch. After that she only came once more, near the end of February. I didn’t mean to cry when I opened the door and saw her standing on the porch, but there was no holding it in. As good as it was to see her, I was still shaking, afraid John might come home for dinner.
Each day it grew harder to bear the dark-paneled walls, the rats scurrying back into their holes when I turned on the lights, the whiskey bottles and charred cigarette butts littering the gulley alongside the tracks. Even when I cooked with the back door thrown open there was no relief from the thick smells of fatback and beans and lard because of the chemical tincture of factory smoke and the squall of
train wheel on rust-colored track. Someone might ask how I lived through those last weeks married to John. The answer is simple. I wasn’t there with him. My body couldn’t hold my soul. It left that smothering place and found its way back to Bloodroot Mountain, like when John trapped me under the house. I whispered those magic lines and they took me right back home. “In darkness and amid the many shapes of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir unprofitable, and the fever of the world, have hung upon the beatings of my heart—how oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee … how often has my spirit turned to thee.” I could say the words and be gone somewhere John couldn’t follow. It didn’t matter what my hands were doing, washing dishes, peeling potatoes, scouring floors. My spirit’s hands were catching minnows darting silver in the shallow part of the creek. John couldn’t touch me where I was.
One morning after I heard the front door slam and John’s car start up, I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and looked up at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. I was stunned by my reflection. It wasn’t just John who had changed. My hair was limp, my face haggard and thin. My eyes had lost their shine. I was still staring at my haunted reflection when I heard a bird twittering outside the bathroom window. It was a strange sound. There were no trees in the yard, so I thought I must have imagined it. I peeled back the curtain to open the window, but it was nailed shut. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care anymore if the bird was real or not. I saw the sun and knew spring had come. That’s when the clouds parted in my head. I began thinking clearer than I had in months. I knew I had to escape, at least for a while. I wasn’t willing to brave going home anymore, after John had threatened to burn it down. But the man at the pool hall had told me where I might find some of my people. I could go to the house and be back before John got home from work. There were a few dollars left in my old coffee can under the kitchen sink. I bathed and dressed and walked to the neighbor’s house to call a cab again.
The same snaggletooth driver as before let me out at the pool hall. I thought it wouldn’t make the right impression to arrive at my relatives’ house in a taxicab. There was no waiting to see my father’s mother. She was sitting on the blue concrete porch when I walked up. She was old and dark-skinned like an Indian woman, with what
appeared to be a large goiter on her neck. The house was white with shutters painted blue to match the porch. It was dull and dirty and smudged, the yard crowded with dark trees and bushes. This was where I had lived with my parents. A cat stretched and rose to greet me on the steps. The old woman squinted down at me where I stood by the mailbox. I thought she would call out to ask who I was or what I wanted, but she only blinked. I went to the bottom step and she still didn’t speak. I wondered if she was blind.
“Hello,” I said. The cat rubbed against my ankles.
“Hidee,” she said. Her voice was deep and flat.
“Are you Kenny Mayes’s mother?”
There was a long silence. She looked at me. She wasn’t blind. “Who’s asking?”
“His daughter. I’m Kenny’s daughter, Myra.”
She fell silent again. I was sick to my stomach. I pushed back my sweaty hair and tried to smile. “Do you remember me?”
She adjusted herself in the green metal chair. I was careful not to stare at her goiter. It looked like a bullfrog’s throat sack. “I reckon,” she said.
“I wanted to see where he and my mother lived. And I wanted to see you.”
For a long moment she didn’t answer, until I thought I would go mad. Then finally she said, “I didn’t figure you wanted nothing to do with us.”
“Well,” I said, flustered. “I always wondered about my parents….”
“Kenny nor Clio neither one was fit to raise a youngun,” she said.
I stared up at her, not sure if I had heard right. I waited for her to go on, but she turned her face to the screen door and bellowed, “Imogene!” I jumped. Her voice was startlingly loud. The door creaked open and a slim woman came out. She had styled hair and tailored clothes. She seemed out of place there. She froze when she saw me.
“Imogene,” my grandmother said, “this girl claims to be Kenny’s youngun.”
Imogene looked at me and touched her face. Then she smiled. “Of course she is, Mother. Of course this is Kenny’s girl. Look at her eyes.”
We sat in a small, dark kitchen that smelled faintly of mellow
garbage. I could hear an old man calling and moaning from another room. “That’s Uncle,” Imogene said to me as she poured coffee. There was a Chihuahua under the table. It trembled and growled at me. “Why don’t you see about him, Mother?”
“He’s all right,” my grandmother said flatly. “He’s always carrying on like that.” The dog stood up and barked at me, showing its teeth. “Hush, Peanut,” the old woman said, and kicked at his flank with her bare foot. I could see dirt caked under her toenails. The dog skittered away and curled up again out of reach.
I sipped the bitter coffee and studied them in the murky light. They didn’t seem related. Imogene’s face was soft and pretty. I liked the veined backs of her hands. “Mother, isn’t she beautiful?” Imogene asked. The old woman didn’t answer. “What have you been doing with yourself, Myra? You were just a baby when I last saw you.”
“I got married and moved down here with my husband, John Odom.”
“Is he any kin to Frankie Odom,” the old woman asked, “has a hardware store?”
“Yes, that’s John’s father,” I said. I was growing impatient. I wasn’t there to talk about myself. “I have some questions, I guess. About Kenny and Clio.”
“We’ll tell you anything we can,” Imogene said, smiling over her coffee. “Won’t we, Mother?” The old woman just went on blinking at me.
I thought hard but all my questions had suddenly evaporated. My mind was blank. They stared at me across the table. I felt my cheeks burning as I groped for something to say. Imogene looked concerned. Then her face brightened.
“Would you like to see some pictures?”
“Yes,” I said, exhaling at last.
“Mother, where are those albums?”
“Under the bed,” the old woman said. She grunted and rose to take a pack of sugar wafers from a bread box on the counter. She stood at the sink eating them as Imogene went for the albums. She looked at me, soggy crumbs falling down her goiter. I was sickened that she had given birth to my father and known my mother as a daughter-in-law. Imogene brought the albums to the table and removed one from the
top of the stack. She wiped dust off its cover and turned the pages slowly, a parade of unfamiliar faces in grainy black and white. Then she stopped. “Here. This is Kenny and me,” she said. Two children stood on a porch with solemn expressions. It was hard to tell how far apart in age they were, but I guessed he was at least six years younger than her. I wanted to feel something. This was my father. But as the pages turned and I watched the progress of his growth from a boy into a young man, I realized I was waiting to see my mother’s face. We flipped through the second album and still no sign. It was like she, and I, had been erased from the history of these people. Granny had pictures of my mother but they were all taken on the mountain. I needed pictures of her there in that house, living a life I didn’t know or understand. Imogene must have seen my disappointment.
“Don’t you have any pictures of Clio around here, Mother?” she asked.
The old woman bit into another sugar wafer. “That girl never set still long enough to make a picture,” she said, spraying crumbs.
“Good Lord, Mother,” Imogene said, brows knitting together. “Do you have to talk so hateful all the time? Myra’s going to think we’re awful.” She turned to me and smiled. “I know I’ve got some at my house. Would you like to come home with me and take a look? I might could tell you some stories, too.”
“I don’t know,” I said, thinking of John for the first time since I got out of the taxi. “I told the cabdriver to be back at the pool hall by three.”
“I don’t live far,” Imogene said. “I can have you back before then.”
In the car she told me things about my mother that I’d never heard before. The time she let me taste ice cream on her finger and how I suckled with such a funny look on my face. The time she brought me in from the car bundled up and when she opened the blanket inside the warm house everyone saw that she had carried me across the yard upside down. But something bothered me about the way Imogene kept her eyes straight ahead as she spoke, the way she laughed nervously. I grew afraid that it was all lies, or at least only part of the story. We pulled up to her house, a nicely landscaped brick duplex. She lived in one side and kept tenants in the other. Getting out of the car, I realized how close we were to the Odom house. I ducked my
head as we crossed the yard. Inside, the windows were hung with trailing plants and curios lined a white mantel. The room was clean but packed with antique furniture. There were mirrors and picture frames propped against one wall and old books stacked against another. “Don’t mind my mess,” Imogene said. “I’m opening myself a little shop next door, when the remodeling is done.” I glanced toward the window, hearing the hammering outside. She followed my eyes and said, “That’s my friend fixing the roof. I’ve been buying things along as I see them. I’ve loved old things since I was a little girl. It’s scary to try something new like this, but I always wanted my own store.” She seemed harried and scattered, talking perhaps to hide her embarrassment. We both knew she was keeping something from me. “You can have a seat, honey,” she said. “I’ll get my albums.”