When I was eleven, we took our first walk together. All afternoon I had handed him tools as he worked under his truck, until he slid out into the springtime sun and said, “I need to stretch my legs. You want to come with me?” We went far up the mountain, but not to the top because the way was too rugged and steep. Not even Daddy ventured to the summit anymore, after breaking his leg as a boy. Daddy said there was a grassy bald on top of Bloodroot Mountain where his grandfather used to drive his cattle to. It was a dangerous trip but the high mountain grass was better for the cows and it was cooler up there in summer. Walking with Mr. Barnett, I wondered if my greatgrandfather’s motivations had less to do with his cows and more to do with spending time alone where it was quiet, away from his duties on
the farm. I thought about Daddy’s story, how one day he decided to see the top, even after he’d been forbidden. He fell trying to scale the steep cliffs and lay for a day and a night before he was found. He claimed to have seen some frightening things while he was lying up there but wouldn’t say what, only that if I ever went farther than the big rock over the bluff, he’d skin me alive. I never would have risked it, but sometimes I dreamed of my great-grandfather driving his cows up those rocky slopes to reach a meadow that must have been like paradise to him.
The woods looked different walking with Mr. Barnett than when I was alone. At the time the change was hard to understand, but looking back I see why. It was because he still observed the mountain with wonder, even though he knew it better than I did. As we passed through dark patches of shade into clearings like rooms of light, he paused to touch ridges of fungus growing on bark, stopped to catch a moth and study its wings, bent to pick up an arrowhead. When I was with him I saw it too, how magical everything was.
We came to a place where the cottonwoods were thick, shedding their seeds in drifting white tufts. Small clouds floated all around us like something from a dream, lighting on Mr. Barnett’s shoulders and the top of his head, where the graying hair was still matted down from his cap. We stood watching for a while, faces lifted to the sun. “Look, Douglas,” he said. “How pretty it is. Makes me think about the Lord.”
His words made my arms prickle with goosebumps. I understood what he meant so well that, after a few seconds of holding my breath, I couldn’t resist telling him my secret. “That’s how I feel about Myra,” I said, closing my eyes so I didn’t have to see his face. “She makes me think about Jesus.” I expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. He put his hand on my shoulder. He must have already known. From then on, we took walks together at least once a week. The only thing I couldn’t tell Myra was how much I loved her, so I told Mr. Barnett all about it instead. He never said I was too young to be in love, even though I was only eleven. When I told him how I felt about Myra, he believed me.
I didn’t expect before I started talking how much there was to tell, but Mr. Barnett didn’t mind. He knew I needed our walks and he
made time for them. I poured my heart out to him a thousand times over the years, not bothering in those cool autumn evenings or snow-dusted mornings or shade-speckled summer afternoons to cover my broken tooth. He didn’t look at me anyway. That’s what made it so easy to talk to him when I could barely say two words to anyone else but Myra. It was how he reached out to touch a leaf with a worm inching across it, how he bent to examine a hoof mark or paw print, how he plucked a persimmon and popped it into his mouth, as if he wasn’t listening. But he always was. “She’ll come around, Douglas,” he’d say. “One of these days.”
I didn’t do all the talking on our walks. He told me stories, mostly about the times he had with Myra’s grandparents growing up. When Mr. Barnett lost his older brother in the war, Macon Lamb was the closest thing he had to one. Since he was the only boy left in a house full of sisters, he was always at Macon’s heels. “He’s the one taught me how to smoke and chew both,” Mr. Barnett said. “Some people didn’t like him because he was quiet, and they took that for hateful. But I knowed the kind of man he really was. He’d do things you didn’t expect, like whittle something and give it to you for a present. One time I caught him off by hisself hid in the corn patch, reading a book of poems. His face got red as a beet and he flew so mad I thought he was going to fight me, just because I knowed he liked to read poems. But Macon never stayed mad for long.”
Mr. Barnett talked about Myra’s granny, too. He said he could see why Macon was drawn to Byrdie, even though she wasn’t much to look at. She was brash and sassy and tough. “I seen her bury every one of her children and take to her bed for months at a time,” Mr. Barnett said. “But someway she always got back on her feet. It was Macon that never got over it. Since their youngest, Clio, got killed, he’s been scared to death something might happen to the baby she left behind. Myra’s the only thing he’s got left of Clio. That’s why he watches over that youngun like a hawk.”
I loved hearing stories about Myra as a baby, how Macon and Byrdie doted on her. Mr. Barnett said they worked hard to make a good home for her to grow up in, and I can’t think of a better one than what they had. It’s pretty all over Bloodroot Mountain, but the Lambs have the best spot. When the trees are bare you can see far
into the woods from their back steps, and from the front window you can look down on the winding dirt road and the creek rushing alongside it. Mr. Barnett still liked to walk up the mountain on summer evenings and sit in Byrdie and Macon’s yard, drinking sweet tea or lemonade and talking about the Bible way into the night. “I can remember watching Myra toddle around when she was a baby, catching lightning bugs,” he told me once. “She’d come running to show us how they lit up her hands.” He stopped walking then to look at me. “I can see why you love her, Douglas,” he said. “That little girl is special.” It seemed like he was trying to tell me something, but I was afraid to ask what it was.
BYRDIE
It was sad to leave our cabin with the haint blue door and go live with Pap on his farm, even as much as I loved him. We still seen Grandmaw and the great-aunts but it wasn’t the same. Me and Mammy lived there on Pap’s farm until I was fifteen years old, when Grandmaw died. It was an awful time and after we buried her we got to where we couldn’t hardly stand Chickweed Holler and all the memories there. Pap said one day maybe we ort to move down to the valley. He’d struggled so long with the rocky soil on his farm, he believed he could do better somewhere else. Me and Mammy agreed to it because we needed to run away from our grief. Much as we cared for Della and Myrtle, it was hard to be around them without missing Grandmaw so bad it liked to killed us. Pap got word of land for sale about sixty miles east, in a little farming community called Piney Grove. He bought ten acres off a man named Bucky Cochran that owned a big dairy farm and everything else along the five-mile stretch of road between our place and his house, a two-story yellow brick with white trim and fancy columns on the porch. Pap built us a log cabin with a loft where I slept in a feather bed Mammy made for me. Every day I’d slip off from my chores to set by the springhouse where we kept a jug of fresh milk tied up in the ice-cold spring. I’d pull it up out of the water and close my eyes and take a long drink and it seemed like nothing in life could taste sweeter. I thought it was the prettiest plot of land I ever seen, too, until I came up here to Bloodroot Mountain.
I took a job cooking and cleaning for Bucky’s wife, Barbara Cochran, and we found us a church not far from the house. That’s where I seen Macon for the first time. I never was good-looking like Myra, even before I got real old. My ears stuck out and I had a good head of hair but it had an ugly color to it, like dirty dishwater. It’s a wonder Macon took to me, but he wasn’t no looker hisself. Had a puckered face and scraggly whiskers and a brown birthmark over his eye shaped like an island off of the globe I seen at the Cochrans’ house. Every chance I got I’d sneak and spin that globe and run my fingers over the shapes. Macon’s birthmark put me in mind of all them shapes that stood for places I’d like to go. Sometimes the soles of my feet still itched in the night. Up until he died I had that island to run my fingers over whenever I wanted to.
Piney Grove Church was about two miles down the road from us, and about the same from the foot of Bloodroot Mountain. I guess you could say me and Macon met in the middle. He caught my eye right off, setting over in the amen corner with suspenders on. I’ve thought about what drawed me to Macon, besides that island birthmark, and I believe it was being able to tell right off that he was a man. He wasn’t but eight years older than me but there was something about the way he carried hisself. He’d give his sisters stern looks when they went to giggling on the back pew, and every time he led prayer his voice rung up in the rafters. I could tell just by setting in the church house with Macon that he’d know how to treat a woman and run a farm and be a good daddy like Pap. Even though I was only fifteen, I knowed I wanted to marry a man like him.
That’s how come I stood close to him every chance I got and tried to get myself noticed. Seemed like it took forever for him to figure out I was around. Then finally at the Easter egg hunt me and him and some of the other older ones was picked to hide the eggs. It was springtime and chilly out. The churchyard grass was bright green and slick with dew. My feet was wet in them thin shoes I had on, but I couldn’t hardly feel it. All I knowed was Macon Lamb being close by. Every once in a while I’d ease up on him, like I was hiding another egg, and catch a whiff of his soapy-smelling skin.
I seen him pass through the gate to the graveyard and finally he was off by hisself. The others headed around back of the church where the
trees and outhouses was, so it was just me and Macon. I went with my egg basket amongst the tombstones, some of them old enough to where the names was rubbed off. Such a quiet came over me, with the sky blue and the birds singing. There’s always something peaceful about a graveyard.
Macon was bent over hiding an egg at the base of a stone carved like a lamb. It was a child’s grave and I’ve wondered more than once if that wasn’t the Lord warning me and Macon of things to come. I crept up behind him and said, “I didn’t know we could hide these out here.” I liked to scared him to death. He jumped sky high and both of us laughed. Then he stood there looking at me funny, eyes twinkling like they did when he was up to mischief. “I reckon we can,” he said. “Nobody told me any different.”
“Well,” I said. “Where do you reckon would be a good place to hide this’n?” My mouth was dry as a bone. I was holding up this nice pink egg, I still remember it. That’s when Macon finally noticed me. We hid the rest of them eggs together.
DOUG
In the winter right before I turned twelve, Myra got chicken pox and stayed home from school for a week. At recess I sat by the chain-link fence at the back of the playground poking sticks and brown weeds through the diamonds into the churchyard grass on the other side, my fingers stiff with cold. I looked at the graves and thought of climbing over to lie on top of one where it was quiet and still, away from the thud of basketballs and the screams of my bundled up classmates lunging under the net, white bursts of breath pluming out of their hoods. Without Myra, they intimidated me a little, even though we were all the same. Before the new high school was built, in 1970, kids of all ages from across the county were bused in to Slop Creek where the red brick school building stood beside a Methodist church at the end of a dusty dirt road. We were mostly the children of farmers and I guess I should have related to them. But it wasn’t just my classmates I couldn’t get used to. Myra and I hated everything about school. In first grade, we were always in trouble for hiding. We’d slip into the janitor’s closet, eyes stinging from the bleachy mop water. Once we
ran into the field behind the school with the teacher calling after us. We went deep into the high weeds, laughter making us breathless. When the teacher found us she paddled us both, two licks. I was miserable without Myra, half mad at her for being sick. I drew up my knees and tried to be invisible but it didn’t work. A girl from my class named Tina Cutshaw saw me and walked over.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I didn’t look up at her face. I already knew it, pale with slit eyes and a fuzzy ring of dun-colored hair. She sat in the desk next to mine staring at me all day. I looked at her shoes instead, mud-crusted brogans with the laces untied. They were probably hand-me-downs from her brother, a bone-thin boy who was always throwing up. There was a rumor that he needed surgery on his stomach but their parents couldn’t afford it. Tina’s father drew a disability check and her mother had run off with another man. I didn’t answer her. I waited for her to go away, but she sat down in the grass close to me. I scooted over. When she breathed through her mouth I could smell her rotten teeth.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” she asked.
My heart leapt to hear Myra called my girlfriend. I thought at first she was making fun of me, but I glanced at her eyes and they were serious. Maybe Tina Cutshaw wasn’t so bad. I poked a twig through the fence. “She’s got the chicken pox,” I said.
Tina was silent for a minute but I could still feel her watching me. It made my skin crawl. “You oughtn’t to mess with that girl,” she said finally. She plucked a thistle and twirled its stalk between her thumb and forefinger. Part of me wanted to ask what she was talking about, but I didn’t. I glanced at her dirty face. She grinned and tickled herself under the chin with the thistle’s prickly head. “Don’t you know about her people? My mamaw said they’re witches. You better watch out. She’ll put a hex on you.”
I turned away from Tina Cutshaw and stared through the chain link at the silent graves, wishing for her to disappear. I could feel my ears reddening.
“It’s true,” she said. “Mamaw told me. If you keep hanging around with that girl, you’ll be cursed the rest of your life. All kinds of bad things will happen to you.”