Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

Sequoya invites us in. His trailer is covered with posters of metal bands, their names lifted from mythology: Karybdis. Clotho. Lethe. “These are old.” As if he’s embarrassed by the posters. He’s got a record player in his small living room, and he selects some music presumed more appealing to females.

“You ladies like a glass of water?” He sets two glasses of water on the table before us. He takes a seat. Then jumps up quickly again, thinking to wash the deer off his hands. Ruth looks down into her water. Neither of us drinks it.

“You still got a long ways to go?”

I nod my head though I don’t know.

“How come you decided to walk?”

“Well.” I pretend to think hard, as if I can’t remember. We sit there awhile listening to the music. When side A reaches its end, Sequoya doesn’t get up to flip the record. He just lets the automatic arm reset itself. Side A plays again.

Later he makes a bed on the floor of his living room. A couple sheets and a blanket. Ruth climbs in, but I decide to follow Sequoya back to his room.

“You want me to take off my clothes?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “I’d like that.”

I would too, someone to scrub away the traces of Lord. I take the band out of his hair and smooth it over his shoulders. I get myself undressed. Sequoya does the same, leaving his shirt for last. When he finally lifts it, his torso is covered with pockmarks, old scars like gray polka dots on his brown skin.

“What’s that about?” I ask, touching a few of them.

“I had smallpox a long time ago. Don’t worry.” He laughs. “You can’t catch it.” He reaches out to touch the curve of my belly. He stares into my navel, a lighthouse in the night. “I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”

When I kiss him, his mouth tastes like carrots or potatoes or maybe it’s just dirt. Sex with Sequoya is a bit awkward at first. I suppose it is always a bit awkward with a stranger. Sequoya’s inside me and usually that’s a warm thing, but he feels cooler inside than out, an empty box. Maybe the box used to hold ice and the ice has melted. Or maybe the box has always been empty. A box that’s forgotten how to hold things. Sequoya, I think while we’re doing it, and how I haven’t considered any names yet and how, unlike him, I have no idea what Cora even means. I don’t know if my baby’s a boy or a girl or something else entirely, a messed-up conch-shell sort of deformity that won’t live long enough to hear me speak its name.

Sequoya’s body goes rigid, but I pull myself off him quickly before he comes inside me, still thinking about that empty box, still thinking about my baby. Sequoya tries to make me come with his hand, but it doesn’t work because his neck and hair smell like the paraffin wax my mom uses for canning jelly. I can’t come when I’m thinking about my mom.

Sequoya falls asleep just fine, and I’m left alone, thinking of El, parsing through the confusion of motherhood and sex and wondering what shape she’s in right now.

When Ruth wakes me in the morning, I’m confused for only a moment. Then I remember the road, and I’m happy to leave like I have the best job ever, walking across the state of New York with my mute aunt. We slip away before the sun’s up. Sequoya’s grandfather watches us go. Inside his kitchen he’s listening to a religious broadcast. The man on the radio is reminding listeners how years ago a 7.0 earthquake struck an island nation because the island had made a pact with the devil. Sequoya’s grandfather, while surprised by this news, believes it because people will believe just about anything.

We see mountains in the distance. “‘The hills are alive,’” I sing with some idea that Ruth won’t be able to resist joining in the song. She resists.

That night I find a pay phone that still works.

“Momma.”

“Cora?”

“Hi.”

“Oh,” like a heart attack.

“You OK? What are you doing?”

“Watching a movie.”

“Do you want me to call back?”

“No! I’m just telling you what I’m doing. Where are you?”

“With Ruth.”

“Ruth? Ruth who?”

“Your sister.”

“What? How’d you find her?”

“She found me. She came to our house.”

“What? Cora, what does she want with you? Let me talk to her.”

“Mom, it’s fine.”

“Where are you? You’re OK? What’s Ruth up to? When are you coming home?”

“Eventually.”

“Eventually. Eventually.” She says it twice because she’s trying not to yell. “Cora, I need — Can I talk to her? Honey, I was so worried.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Let me talk to Ruth.”

“She’s not talking.”

“What?”

“She doesn’t talk.”

“Where are you? What’s she telling you? Don’t listen. What has she said about me?”

“She really doesn’t talk. Not a word.”

“What? Where are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m coming. Where are you?”

“I really don’t know where we are exactly. New York.”

“The city?”

“No. Farmland.”

“Where?”

“Mom, I’m OK. I’m OK on my own.”

“Where are you?” She screams it this time, and it’s going so badly that I decide it would be best to just hang up. I don’t want to hear her this upset.

Ruth sits on the curb waiting for me.

“I called El.”

She lifts her face to hear more.

“She’s pretty mad. That makes sense. Probably more scared than mad.”

Ruth nods.

“You’re not doing this to get back at her? Right?”

Ruth bites her lip. She hadn’t considered that. No, she shakes her head.

“Because you don’t have to. It wasn’t ever easy for El either.”

Ruth nods again.

We start walking and after an hour she motions, don’t I want to stop?

“Not yet.” We walk farther than we’ve ever gone in one day, following the course of the old canal, unknotting knots, untying a belly button. Every tree we see reminds me of El. There’s sacrifice, antagonism, rebellion, obsession, and adoration, but no properly complex word for what’s between a mother and a daughter, roots so twisted, a relationship so deep, people suffocated it in kitsch and comfort words to pretend it’s easy. I look to the trees. I hold my stomach tightly but I'm not strong enough to stop mothers and daughters from splitting apart.

I see forests and subdivisions. Rednecks slow as they pass, their tongues darting between their pointer and middle fingers. Packs of wild teenage girls and flat, open places where UFOs could land. “Livin’ on a Prayer” becomes “Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart).” We see more men, more lawn mowers mowing lawns that don’t need it. We see a brother and sister tearing around in their grandpa’s electric wheelchair up and down their driveway as if it were a go-kart. Ahead of me, Ruth flips the cassette in her Walkman, and the song she’s listening to, whatever it might be, starts playing again from the start.

RUTH SCREAMS LIKE A DONKEY.Her entire middle is on fire. Everything hurts.

“I will break you to the saddle! Lord Jesus enter in!” The Father prays over her. Nat crouches by the bed. The Father’s been praying for a day and a half to no effect. God will not ease her symptoms. The Father’s begun to curse. Ruth sweats through the night, biting Nat’s fingers when it hurts too much.

Finally the Father drives Ruth to a hospital forty minutes down the road instead of the closest one. A lower price had been negotiated for emergency room services. The Father says he was waiting for the state to call him back with instructions, as if she were a broken DVD player. He comforts her on the drive. “You’d be dead by now if the Lord thought you were ready.”