Clio couldn’t think of nothing to say for a minute. “I don’t know, Mama. It didn’t seem right, I guess.”
I headed for the kitchen with my piece of cake, to rake it in the trash. “Well, I reckon I ort to be thankful for that,” I said. I went back and stood in the front room doorway. “Y’uns best be getting along.” Clio hadn’t took but a few bites of her cake, and Kenny stuffed the rest of his in fast. “You can come back and get your things later.”
“Mama …”
“It’s what you been aiming to do since the day you was born. Might as well get it over with.”
“Now, I never meant to hurt your feelings, Mama….”
“I’ll put your clothes in a bag, if you’d rather do it that way, and send them down with Macon when he goes in to work Monday morning.”
“That’ll be all right,” Clio said. She put down her saucer hard on the end table. The dirty fork rattled off and fell on the floor. “I done got my things packed.”
She stood up and we looked at each other. Her eyes was cold as that snow she hated. She stomped off to the bedroom and left me and Kenny Mayes by ourselves.
“That sure was some good cake,” he said.
“Clio made it,” I told him.
“Well, then,” he leant over and whispered at me, “somebody’s going to have to learn that girl to cook, if she’s fixing to be my wife.” He winked and laughed like a mule. Then Clio came stomping in with her traveling case and took him by the arm.
“Come on, Kenny,” she said, and they left without saying goodbye. I sunk down in Macon’s chair feeling like somebody had laid a rock on my heart. I seen them beads on the end table and it was too much to bear. I snatched them old things up, like a string of shiny black snake’s eyes, and took them and throwed them in the kitchen garbage. Then I leant over the sink and squalled for a long time because my last living youngun was gone.
Clio left with Kenny Mayes when she wasn’t but seventeen. If he ever seen her act crazy like she did that day she busted out the window, he never let on to me. But Clio didn’t ever love this place like me and Myra do. I believe she needed off of this mountain, because she perked up once Kenny took her away from me. Now, Myra’s John Odom had me fooled at first, but I knowed Kenny Mayes was no count from the start. He didn’t beat on Clio or nothing like that, but he was shiftless. She had to keep them both up, working on the assembly line at one of them factories in Millertown. I know she had to been tired of it, standing on her feet all day, but she was too stubborn to let on.
Myra was better off not knowing her daddy. I didn’t tell her nothing about Kenny, not even good stories, like how he always tried to
buy me and Macon something nice at Christmas. When he was working he liked to treat Clio, too. He’d buy her perfume and take her out to the restaurants. He’d blow every penny he made, but I reckon he meant well. Course there wasn’t no use telling Myra about her daddy’s mean streak, either, how he liked to scare Clio driving. He’d laugh fit to split, her holding on to the dash and me stomping the brakes in the backseat, them few times I let him take me to the store. I quit going with him after I learnt better, that heathern. Then him and Clio got hit and killed by a train. Nobody knows for sure how it happened, if the car quit or he tried to beat the train or what, but I’d bet anything he was trying to scare Clio like he did.
Something queer happened the night Kenny and Clio got killed. I was taking care of Myra again. I never would say it out loud, but I don’t believe Clio was cut out to be a mama. She never meant to be expecting in the first place, and she was always leaving the baby with me. I had rocked Myra to sleep and fell off to sleep myself with her on my shoulder. I was stiff as a board from setting so long in that chair and I was fixing to get up and take Myra to bed with me when I heard a train whistle off down the mountain. I had the windows open to catch the breeze and that noise made the hair stand up on my arms. I thought, how in the world am I hearing this? Them train tracks is plumb in town. I put my hand on Myra’s little back to feel it going up and down. The house was quiet and dark besides the light of the moon. I don’t know if I was ever more blue in my life, it was the awfulest feeling you could think of. The next morning Bill Cotter knocked on the front door and said Clio had got killed on the train tracks in Millertown. He was a volunteer fireman and helped them pry her and Kenny loose from the car. It liked to killed me to hear it, my last child was gone, but I can’t say I was surprised. Clio died on them same tracks that runs by where Myra lives right now, with that devilish John Odom.
DOUG
Myra and I grew even further apart after that day at the creek. The kiss we shared didn’t seal anything between us, it severed something instead. Myra was only a few months younger than me, but she was growing up faster. Overnight, it seemed, she was full-breasted and
long-legged and almost as tall as me. Last summer, before our senior year started, Daddy let me take Myra to town sometimes in his truck. We’d walk across a diner parking lot or step out of a matinee blinking in the sun, and men passing on the street would crane their necks and call out to her and whistle. Myra just laughed but I was always embarrassed and a little bit angry at her, even though it wasn’t her fault.
One Saturday I’d been to the drugstore for Mama and saw Myra coming down the sidewalk with a girl from our church, smiling and whispering behind her hand. She froze when she saw me standing beside the truck, holding Mama’s prescription. She was wearing makeup, I could tell, and it was like being slapped in the face. I stared at her red lips for a long time, until she said in a flustered way, “Don’t you like it?” She puckered up, trying to make me laugh. When I didn’t, she gave up. “Don’t tell Granny, okay?” she said. “It’s not mine. I’m just trying it out.” Then she walked on without saying goodbye. I guess that’s when I knew it wasn’t my imagination. She was slipping away from me.
By the end of the summer she was spending more time with her girlfriends than with me, but I tried not to worry. I thought when school started up things would get back to normal between us, and I did see more of her. But she didn’t wait anymore in front of her house so we could walk down the road and catch the bus together. Without explanation, she began taking off early and leaving me behind, already standing at the bottom of the mountain by the time I got there. I couldn’t make it any earlier myself because I had chores to do on the farm. When Myra and I got on the bus each morning, it was like she wasn’t even really there in the seat beside me. For most of the ride she looked out the window and whenever I spoke she turned to me startled, eyes cloudy and far away.
I thought about her all the time. Pouring water into the troughs, filling the drum-shaped feeder with grain, mucking out the barn stalls, I was devising plans to win her back. I’d find a way to break Wild Rose and come galloping into Myra’s yard. I’d sweep her up onto the horse’s bare back and we’d ride off somewhere together. One morning at breakfast, I looked up from my daydream and realized Mark was staring at me. He had graduated the year before and was
supposed to be helping Daddy on the farm, but most days he took off and went to the pool hall. Daddy had already told him to shape up or ship out. It was around that time he started talking about joining the service, even with Mama begging him not to because of the war going on. Vietnam had seemed a long way off until a boy we knew from church was killed over there and the newspapers started reporting protest marches in Knoxville, less than an hour away from us. There was a draft but Mark didn’t want to wait for it. Sometimes I could see on his face how angry and desperate he was to get away. That morning he was sitting across the table from me drinking black coffee, looking hungover. “Hey,” he said, with a glint in his eye. “Guess who I seen the other day?” I lowered my head and stared at my plate. Mark still had a way of getting to me. “Your girl, Myra. She was hanging around with some long tall feller, looked a lot older than her. They seemed to be awful cozy. If I’d stuck around, there ain’t no telling what kind of show they would’ve put on.” I gripped my fork and swallowed a lump of grits that had turned to paste in my mouth.
Later on the bus I tried to ask Myra about it, but when she turned her distant eyes on me I couldn’t go through with it. I didn’t want to hear the truth. Months passed, the weather got colder, and I never mustered the courage to confront her about the rumors I was hearing. I figured her granny didn’t know and wondered if I should tell her. Maybe she could put a stop to it before something broke forever between Myra and me. Even though she’d been my best friend since first grade, I could barely stand to look at her anymore. But it wasn’t all her fault that we drifted apart, and things probably wouldn’t have been any different if I’d fought for her. All winter we still sat together on the bus, but for Myra it was out of habit. I looked past her profile, half hidden behind a dark curtain of hair, at clots of ice rushing down roadside creeks and gullies swollen with melted snow.
Then one day in March, Myra didn’t get on the bus after school. I asked the driver to wait a few minutes, but she never came. I didn’t want to think about who had given her a ride home. I sat in her empty spot with my forehead pressed against the window, mailboxes and ditches racing by in a blur, remembering again what Tina Cutshaw had said. I was cursed to have known Myra, more cursed to have loved her like I did.
As usual, the bus driver didn’t go all the way up the mountain. He let me off at the bottom of the dirt road and I couldn’t stop thinking of Myra as I began walking the rest of the way home. She had made my life a misery since the minute I saw her jumping out of the churchyard tree. Some nights I lay curled on my side, the things I couldn’t tell even Mr. Barnett aching like bruises in me. When I did sleep it seemed Myra sang to me, her breath trembling against my ear. I’d wake up thinking she was in my bed and find a moth batting its wings against my face. Or I’d dream of her warmth on my back and wake to find one of Mama’s cats purring there. Many times I fled my room and went outside to look up at something bigger than Myra and my love for her, something that might make it feel smaller, but it didn’t work. The same God who made that sky full of stars had made this love and I couldn’t wrap my brain around the bigness of either one.
As I walked, scuffing up dirt with the toes of my boots, I was struck by the unfairness. I had been loyal to Myra our whole lives and now I was left behind, like that chimney swift we found floating in the cistern. I felt a pang of sorrow for myself and then blinding anger. I threw my schoolbooks into the road, papers flying everywhere, some of them landing in the creek branch. I tore up the mountain looking for Myra, not sure what I would do if I found her, breaking off saplings and ripping the undergrowth out of my way, briars grabbing at my pant legs and rocks throwing me down.
All the way up the mountain a storm raged in me, until somehow I made it manifest in the world outside. A keen wind rose out of nowhere and shook through the trees. By the time I reached the place where Myra’s rock jutted high over a bluff the wind blew so hard that all I could hear was its screaming whistle. I stepped into the clearing and there she was, hair whipping wild, crouched like an animal on the ledge where she had read to me so many times. All the rage deserted me. The way she was poised on the edge of the rock, I worried for an instant that she might jump. I saw it happening, how she would spring, how she would spread her arms and fly. I thought of a story I’d heard long ago, how one of her ancestors leapt from a cliff on Blood-root Mountain. I had hated her only minutes before, but if she had jumped right then I would have gone flying after her, caught her in the air, and positioned myself to cushion her fall.
I shouted to Myra, screamed her name so hard it felt like something ruptured in my throat. If she hadn’t heard me I might have gone crazy. But she turned around and smiled when she saw me, even though her eyes didn’t light up the way they usually did. She said something and the wind tore the words from her lips, as if she were already fading away, as if she were already half gone. She climbed down from the rock and came to me holding her shoes in her hands, barefoot even though the ground was cold.
“Doug,” she shouted over the wind. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” I said.
“What?” she said. “I can’t hear you!”
“It’s true. You are a witch.”
“I can’t hear you!” she shouted again.
“Nothing,” I said.
She tugged at my arm, smiling. “Come sit with me!”
I didn’t move and Myra’s smile faltered. I thought a moment of sadness passed across her face, but looking back she was probably already too wrapped up in John Odom to care. Since that day, I’ve been thinking about the anger that took hold of me. I didn’t even know it was in there. Now I know it always was and always will be. But I could never have hurt Myra, or gone through with poisoning Wild Rose. I can’t turn my anger loose, even on a horse. I guess it will poison me instead, maybe for the rest of my life.
BYRDIE
Even with Myra there to love, them first few years after Clio died liked to done me in. I volunteered me and Macon to clean up the church and take care of the graveyard so I could at least stay close to her body. Saturdays we’d head down the mountain and while Macon scraped chewing gum off the bottoms of the pews I’d pull weeds from around the headstones with Myra crawling over the grass. Summer evenings I’d drag my lawn chair out of the truck bed and set in front of the graves of my children, watching lightning bugs rise out of the ground like sparks going up in the dark. They was all lined up together, small markers for the babies and a bigger one for Willis and a double headstone for Kenny and Clio. I’d think about their bones
down yonder, scraps of the clothes I buried them in still clinging on, and try to feel close to what was left of them. But I couldn’t reach none of my children that way, no matter how long I set there. I couldn’t even picture their bones after a while. Macon wouldn’t come out to disturb me. He waited inside after he was done cleaning the church. I know he thought I was taking comfort, but for a long time being in the graveyard didn’t do me a bit of good. Then one evening I was listening to the tree frogs, thinking about heading back up the mountain, when I felt Myra’s hand on my arm. She was three years old, standing on the grave of one of her aunts that never even made it to her age. She was alive and solid and there with me. I took her fingers and studied them, rubbing over the dirty little fingernails with my thumb. She looked at the graves, decorated with the wild-flowers I had brung, and asked, “Is this Heaven, Granny?” I took a big breath of night air and drawed her close. “No, honey,” I said. “It’s not.” I buried my face in her neck and thought, You are.