Daniel Woodrell - Winter's Bone

The woman started to say something, then shook her head and returned to the house.

Ree sat chilled inside her squat tent. To occupy her mind, she decided to name all the Miltons: Thump, Blond, Catfish, Spider, Whoop, Rooster, Scrap… Lefty, Dog, Punch, Pinkeye, Momsy… Cotton, Hog-jaw, Ten Penny, Peashot… enough. Enough Miltons. To have but a few male names in use was a tactic held over from the olden knacker ways, the ways that had been set aside during the time of Haslam, Fruit of Belief, but returned to heartily after the great bitterness erupted and the sacred walls tumbled to nothing. Let any sheriff or similar nabob try to keep official accounts on the Dolly men when so many were named Milton, Haslam, Arthur or Jessup. The Arthurs and Jessups were the fewest, not more than five apiece, probably, and the Haslams amounted to double the Arthurs or Jessups. But the great name of the Dollys was Milton, and at least two dozen Miltons moved about in Ree’s world. If you named a son Milton it was a decision that attempted to chart the life he’d live before he even stepped into it, for among Dollys the name carried expectations and history. Some names could rise to walk many paths in many directions, but Jessups, Arthurs, Haslams and Miltons were born to walk only the beaten Dolly path to the shadowed place, live and die in keeping with those bloodline customs fiercest held.

Ree and Mom both had shouted and shouted and shouted against Harold becoming a Milton, since Sonny was already a Jessup. They had shouted and won and Ree’d a thousand times wished she’d fought longer for Sonny, shouted him into an Adam or Leotis or Eugene, shouted until he was named to expect choices.

Her teeth chattered and she tried to put a tempo to the chattering, to control the shivers into a sort of chomping song. She parted her lips and snapped her teeth in step with that happy silly old song they sang in grade school about the submarine that was yellow and had everybody living in it. She snapped her teeth in time and wagged her head as though joyful even inside a shrouding of ice. The hood creaked when she moved her head, and cracked when she stood.

The woman was again in the yard. She carried a wide cup of something steaming, handed it to Ree. She said, “Soup, you crazy girl. I brung you some soup. Drink it down and be on your way.”

Ree raised the cup and drank long, chewed, drank on to empty.

“Thanks.”

Weather burst on the woman’s hat and shoulders, wet spray jumping. She touched Ree’s hood, rapped knuckles against the ice to break it fine, and swiped the pieces away.

“He knows you were in the valley, child. With Megan. And at Little Arthur’s. He knows what you want to ask and he don’t want to hear it.”

“You mean he ain’t goin’ to come out’n say one word to me? Nothin’?”

The woman took the empty cup.

“If you’re listenin’, child, you got your answer. Now, go, get on away from here… and don’t come back’n try’n ask him twice. Just don’t.”

The woman turned her back on Ree, stepped slowly toward the house. Ree watched her broad black back going away and said, “So, come the nut-cuttin’, blood don’t truly mean shit to him. Am I understandin’ right? Blood don’t truly count for diddly to the big man? Well, you can tell the big man for me I hope he has him a long, long life full of nothin’ but hiccups’n the runs , hear? You tell him Ree Dolly said that.”

The woman spun, glowering beneath the hat brim, and hurled the soup cup at Ree’s head but missed close and the cup skipped across the glazed snow, banged into the coop. She pointed a finger and repeated, “Just don’t.”

SHE BECAME ice as she walked. White wads broke on her head and dripped to her shoulders to freeze and thicken. The green hood had become an ice hat and her shoulders a cold hard yoke. The scraped road had been so well iced as to be impassable, no headlights at all in the distance or near, so she walked hunched through the winter fields toward the railroad tracks. Her boots crushed the ice topping and broke into the underlying snow for traction. As long as she stomped each step she could break her way, and when she came to the sheer slope above the tracks she sat on her ass and whooshed toward the rails.

On the tracks she could walk without looking. She kept her face turned to ground, avoiding the mist from drops breaking. Her long legs flew ahead and her boots landed heavily enough. The sleet made flourish upon flourish of small popping sounds. The sleet popped small and her boots crunched through and all else was quiet.

She’d passed the meadow of old fallen walls leaving Hawkfall, and as she considered those furiously tossed stones olden Dollys rushed to mind loud and fractious, bellowing and shaking fists. She knew few details of the old bitter reckoning that erupted inside those once holy walls, but suddenly understood to her marrow how such angers between blood could come about and last forever. Like most fights that never finished it had to’ve started with a lie. A big man and a lie.

The big man and prophet who’d found messages from the Fist of Gods written on the entrails of a sparkling golden fish lured with prayer from a black river way east near the sea was Haslam, Fruit of Belief. The sparkling fish had revealed signs unto him and him alone, and he’d followed the map etched tiny on the golden guts and led them all across thousands of testing miles until he hailed these lonely rugged hollows of tired rocky soil as a perfect garden spot, paradise as ordained by the map of guts sent to his eyes from the Fist of Gods.

Ree left the tracks and crossed a level field to reach the slope of caves. Weeds and grasses were made stiff by a bark of ice, shimmering and fragile, and shattered underfoot. The shimmering grasses tinkled to nothing as she kicked her feet. The caves were easy to see from below but difficult to reach. Ree snatched onto saplings to pull herself through the beating weather and up the steepness toward the slant gaping cave she knew best, the cave with a wall of stones standing in the mouth.

Haslam had been born from a god’s water spit on knacker seed, shaped for manhood by a fugitive faith and sent among the Walking People to rally them and all like tinker flesh and to make a new people he’d guide to that garden place chosen by the Fist, mapped inside the sparkling fish, where they could rest their feet after six thousand years of roaming and become settled people.

The wall of stones stood across half the cave mouth and made a stout shield against the wind. Burnt remnants from many fires were strewn about the dusty cave floor. Ree bent and quickly drew together a mess of fire leavings. Log ends not consumed, charred stubs. Well back inside the cave she found a short stacking of small logs. The logs had been there a long dry while and came apart like hair clumps in her hands. Still, the logs would catch flame, and she collected the shreds.

There had been a map to this paradise, but something happened to Walking People settled with settled gods, and after but thirty years the roof of the new ways fell, walls tumbled and flew, old ways returned ravenous after the decades of slighting, and the Fist of Gods took seats in the clouds to sulk and reconsider. Ree did not know much about the religion or the ruining. The prophecies of Haslam, Fruit of Belief, reached her down the generations as hoarse godly mutterings of a big man spinning a braggish lie that made little sense and had no conclusion. The cause of the old bitter reckoning was not clear, either, and there might’ve been living Dollys who knew the truth but nobody ever said it where she could hear. All they ever said was there’d been a woman.