Authors: Daniel Woodrell
Headlights came into the valley on the rut road. Ree felt a sudden bounce of hope and stood. The car had to be coming here, the road ended here. She pulled the headphones to her neck and slid down the slope toward the road. Her boots left skid tracks in the snow and she fell on her ass near the bottom, then raised to her knees and saw that it was the law, a sheriff’s car. Two little heads looked out from the backseat.
Ree knelt beneath stripped walnut trees, watching as the car cut long scars in the fresh snow, pulled near and stopped. She pushed to her feet and rushed around the hood to the driver’s side, taking firm aggressive strides. When the door cracked open, she leaned and said,
“They didn’t do nothin’! They didn’t do a goddamned thing! What the hell’re you tryin’ to pull?”
A rear door opened and the boys slid out laughing until they heard Ree’s tone and saw her expression. The glee drained from their faces and they became still. The deputy stood, raised his hands, showed her his palms, shook his head.
“Hold your beans, girl—I just brung ’em down from where the bus stopped. This snow has shut the school. Just give ’em a ride is all.”
She felt heat rise in her neck and cheeks, but turned to the boys, hands on her hips.
“You boys don’t need to do no ridin’ around with the law. Hear me? The walk ain’t that far.” She glanced across the creek, saw curtains parted, shapes moving. She pointed up the slope to the woodpile. “Now get up there and bring them splits into the kitchen.
Go.
”
The deputy said, “I was on my way here, anyhow.”
“Now why in hell would that be?”
Ree knew the deputy’s name was Baskin. He was short but wide, said to be a John Law nobody should tangle with unless the stakes were high, quick to draw, quicker to club. These country deputies answered calls alone, with backup help an hour or more away, so dainty rules and regulations were not first on their list of things to worry about. Or second, either. Baskin’s wife was a Tankersly from Haslam Springs, and Mom had gone to school with her from first grade on up and had still been friendly with her until they both married. Baskin had arrested Jessup on the porch late in the summer past.
“Ask me inside,” he said. He dusted snow from his shoulders. “I got to talk some with your momma.”
“She ain’t in the mood.”
“Ask me in, or watch me go in, anyhow. Whichever way you like it best.”
“Goin’ to be like that, huh?”
“Listen, I didn’t drive close on two hours of bad road only just to see your smilin’ face, girl. I got reasons. Ask me in or follow, it’s goddam cold out here.”
He began moving toward the porch and Ree loped ahead of him and stopped him at the door.
“Stomp your shoes. Don’t track melt all over my floor.”
Baskin stalled and hung his head for a moment, like a bull pondering, then nodded and dramatically stomped the snow from his feet. He made porch planks wiggle, snow fall from the railings, sent booms into the valley. “Good enough?”
She shrugged but held the door for him, slammed it shut as his heels cleared the threshold. Clothes were strung in three ranks across the kitchen, shirts drooping to eye level, dresses and pants falling deeper from the lines. Drips formed puddles beneath the thicker garments and trickles followed the slant of the floor to the wall. It was easiest to move about through sections where underthings and socks allowed more headroom. Mom sat in her chair beside the potbelly, humming thoughtlessly until she saw Baskin ducking below her damp panties.
“Not in my daddy’s house!”
She smiled broadly, as if tickled by the surprise antics of a likable idiot. She began to rock her chair and laughed and held her eyes nearly closed. “Huh-uh, huh-uh. No, sir.” She pouted her lips, shook her head, suddenly dulled again. “You can’t bust a girl in her
own daddy’s house
.” She did not look at Baskin, but bowed her head and raised her knees to her chest and folded herself into a posture of tormented penance meekly offered. “I seen it written. Over there, somewhere. Daddy’s house ain’t the one you can do nothin’ in.”
Ree watched Baskin’s face spin through reactions: brief alarm, then confusion, sadness, resignation, pity. She waited until he turned from Mom, stumped and flubbing his lips. She said, “Just tell me.”
The boys came in from the back, cheeks looking scuffed red by cold, hair damp, and dropped armloads of splits that clattered beside the potbelly. Some splits carried snow and thawed more wet onto the floor. The boys went for another load and Baskin nodded after them, saying, “Could be we should talk on the porch.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Not yet. Not for sure. But you never do know.”
The porch was surrounded by a shifting veil of falling snow. Ree and Baskin stood awkwardly and silent for a time, the breath from both rising white toward the passing flakes. Dollys across the creek gathered near the meat trees in their side yards, big knives in hand, slashing at ropes so the hanging meat would drop to ground. Several times Blond Milton and Sonya and the others paused in their slashing and looked toward the porch.
“You know Jessup’s out on bond, don’t you?”
“So what?”
“You know he cooks crank, don’t you?”
“I know that’s the charges you laid against him. But you ain’t proved it on him.”
“Shit, Jessup’s just about the best crank chef these Dollys and them ever have had, girl. Practically half famous for it. That’s why he pulled them years away up in the pen, there, you know. It was sure ’nough proved on him
that
time.”
“That was last time. You got to prove it on him
every
time.”
“That won’t be no hard thing to do. But this noise, this noise ain’t even why I’m here. Why I’m here is, his court date is next week and I can’t seem to turn him up.”
“Maybe he sees you comin’ and ducks.”
“Maybe he does. That could be. But where you-all come into this is, he put this house, here, and those timber acres up for his bond.”
“He
what,
now?”
“Signed it all over. You didn’t know? Jessup signed over everything. If he don’t show for trial, see, the way the deal works is, you-all lose this place. It’ll get sold from under you. You’ll have to get out. Got somewhere to go?”
Ree nearly fell but would not let it happen in front of the law. She heard thunder clapping between her ears and Beelzebub scratchin’ a fiddle. The boys and her and Mom would be dogs in the fields without this house. They would be dogs in the fields with Beelzebub scratchin’ out tunes and the boys’d have a hard hard shove toward unrelenting meanness and the roasting shed and she’d be stuck alongside them ’til steel doors clanged shut and the flames rose. She’d never get away from her family as planned, off to the U.S. Army, where you got to travel with a gun and they made everybody help keep things clean. She’d never have only her own concerns to tote. She’d never have her own concerns.
Ree stretched over the rail, pulled her hair aside and let snow land on her neck. She closed her eyes, tried to call to mind the sounds of a far tranquil ocean, the lapping of waves. She said, “I’ll find him.”
“Girl, I been lookin’, and . . .”
“I’ll find him.”
Baskin waited a moment for another word to be spoken, then shook his head and walked to the top step, turned to look at her again, shrugged and started down. Dollys lugging meat paused to watch him, openly staring. Blond Milton, Sonya, Catfish Milton, Betsy and the rest. He waved to them and none moved a twitch in response. He said, “That’d be the best thing, girl. Make sure your daddy gets the gravity of this deal.”
N
EAR DUSK
the snow let up. The wood of the house tightened in the cold and creaked and both boys had scratchy throats. Their chests jumped pumping out coughs. They had sniffles and voices becoming froggy from sickness. Ree sat them on couch cushions laid beside the potbelly, under the hanging clothes, and threw a quilt over them.
“I told the both of you to put your goddam stocking hats on, didn’t I? Didn’t I say that?”
Mom’s evening pills did not tamp her as far down inside herself as the morning pills did. She did not stumble so wretchedly after concepts that squirted away from her time and again, but had occasional evening thoughts come complete and sit on her tongue to be said, and as the sun faded from a day she might release a few sentences of helpful chat or even lend a hand in the kitchen. She said, “There’s whiskey hid in a ol’ boot on my closet floor. Any honey anywhere?”
The whiskey was Jessup’s, kept hidden from the boys, and Ree fetched it from the old boot. She had to stand on a chair to find a long-forgotten honey jar on a high shelf. The jar held an inch or two of crystallizing honey. She poured whiskey on the honey, then said, “This enough?”
“A dollop more. Stir it good.”
Ree stirred with a tablespoon until the crystals dissolved in bourbon, then raised a gob and held it to Sonny’s mouth.
“Swallow. All of it.”
Then came Harold’s turn, and as he swallowed somebody knocked on the door. Ree glanced at Mom, who got up from her rocker and shuffled away into her dark room without turning on a light. Ree went to the door and opened it with her boot wedged behind as a stopper should a stopper be needed.
“Oh. Hey, Sonya. Come in, why not.”
Sonya carried a large cardboard box that had venison on a long bone jutting above the rim. Sonya was heavy and round, with gray hair and fogged glasses. She had four children grown and gone and a husband who still looked good to plenty of gals in these hills and knew it, so she could never banish suspicion from her face. Blond Milton stood fairly high amongst the Dollys and Ree knew he’d shared some hours on the sly with Mom years back, hurtful hours that Sonya had yet to forgive.
“Didn’t want you-all to fear we’d forgot you for good.” Sonya set the box on a chair. She clasped her hands and peered into the shadows of the house, noted the mess. Her nose wrinkled, her brows arched. There was a snap sermon said in the way she held her hands clasped against her bosom. “Got meat for you. Canned stuff. Some butter and such.”
“We can use it.”
“How’s your mom gettin’ to be?”
“Not better.”
The laundry hung dry and the boys coughed.
“You poor thing. I’ll have Betsy’s Milton haul across a rick of wood for you-all. Looks like your pile’s burned low. We seen the law was over here talkin’ to you this after.”
“He’s huntin’ for Dad. Dad’s got a court day next week.”
“Huntin’ Jessup, is he?” Sonya lowered her glasses and looked up at Ree. “You know where he’s at?”
“No.”
“No? Well. Well, then, you didn’t have nothin’ to tell him. Did you?”
“Wouldn’t never tell if I did.”
“Oh, we know that.” Sonya turned to the door, opened it on the cold night, paused. “If Jessup’s court day ain’t ’til next week, I kind of wonder why was the law out huntin’ him for a talk
today?
Wonder why that would be.”
Sonya did not wait for a response, but spun outside while pulling the door shut and quickly descended the steps. Ree stared from a window until Sonya reached the narrow footbridge and crossed the creek. She picked up the box. Her arms went around it and her hands locked. Good smells long lost to this kitchen returned with the box and spread as she carried it to the counter. Sonny and Harold hacked, sniffed, snorted, but shot up together from beneath the quilt and rushed to the food. They opened sacks, hefted cans, kept croaking, “Oh, boy, oh, boy.”
Ree saw four days inside that box. Four days free from hunger or worrying about hunger returning at daybreak, maybe five. She said, “I’ll be fixin’ deer stew tonight. That sound good? Both of you two need to watch how I make it. Hear me? I mean it. Haul them chairs over here and stand on ’em with your eyes peeled and watch every goddam thing I do. Learn how I make it, then you both’ll know.”
S
HE’D START
with Uncle Teardrop, though Uncle Teardrop scared her. He lived three miles down the creek but she walked on the railroad tracks. Snow covered the tracks and made humps over the rails and the twin humps guided her. She broke her own trail through the snow and booted the miles from her path. The morning sky was gray and crouching, the wind had snap and drew water to her eyes. She wore a green hooded sweatshirt and Mamaw’s black coat. Ree nearly always wore a dress or skirt, but with combat boots, and the skirt this day was a bluish plaid. Her knees kicked free of the plaid when she threw her long legs forward and stomped the snow.
The world seemed huddled and hushed and her crunching steps cracked loud as ax whacks. As she crunched past houses built on yon slopes yard dogs barked faintly from under porches but none came into the cold to make a run at her and flash teeth. Smoke poured from every chimney and was promptly flattened east by the wind. There was deer sign trod below trestles that stood over the creek and thin ice clung around rocks in the shallows. Where the creek forked she left the tracks and walked uphill through deeper snow beside an old pioneer fencerow made of piled stones.
Uncle Teardrop’s place sat beyond one daunting ridge and up a narrow draw. The house had been built small but extra bedrooms and box windows and other ideas had been added on by different residents who’d had hammers and leftover wood. There always seemed to be walls covered by black tarpaper standing alone for months and months waiting for more walls and a roof to come along and complete a room. Stovepipes angled from the house on every which side.