Daniel Woodrell - Winter's Bone

Sonny asked, “Will you see good again out of that swole eye?”

“They say.”

“Is it still all the way blind now?”

She spoke mushmouth sentences through bloused lips. “I can tell the sun is up. Catch a shadow movin’.”

Harold said, “There’s two Miltons from over towards Hawkfall in my grade—want I should fight the both of ’em?”

“No, Harold.”

“I’m friends with one, but I’ll still fight him anyhow if you say.”

“ No. None of that. Don’t do that. Not now.”

Sonny said, “When, then?”

“If there comes a when, I’ll tell you.”

The boys split to catch their bus. Morning sun shined everything wooden to gold and made a garish molten puddle across the tabletop. Ree felt a dash of wooziness staring into the puddle and pushed back from the table, rose, and sat in Mom’s comfy rocker. She swallowed the last white hysterectomy pills and hummed along with the fiddlers. The music belonged to a ballad that the words to had been lost but was still easy to hum. Gail stood in Ree’s spot at the sink and washed dishes slump-shouldered while staring out the window at the steepness of limestone and mud. Ree watched Gail’s strong back and scrubbing hands, then snapped to a vision of herself idled by morning pills, beside the potbelly, humming along with unseen fiddlers, and instantly began to shake in Mom’s rocker, shake and feel weak in her every part. Weakened parts of her were crumbling away inside like mud banks along a flood stream, collapsing inward and splashing big flopping feelings she couldn’t stand. She gripped fiercely on the rocker arms and pushed and pushed until she gained her feet, moved to a chair at the table, laid her head flat in the molten puddle.

I ain’t never goin’ to be crazy!

Gail draped the dishrag over the faucet, turned around and said, “Done.”

“You’re awful good to pitch in.”

Gail stood over Ned, adjusted his blankie, pulled his skull cap snug. “I’ve got someplace I want to take you, Sweet Pea. Someplace they say’ll make you feel better in your bruises’n all.”

“I don’t know. I feel so stiff.”

“Here. Take this.” Gail reached into a near corner for a broom, an old grimy broom, the straw bristles trimmed short and made dull by long use. “You can lean on this ol’ broom like a crutch, kind of. We’ll be drivin’, but there’s some walkin’.”

The broom helped. Ree put the straw end under her armpit and leaned. She tapped the broomstick to the floor and walked with a peg-leg sound to Mom’s doorway. She rested against the jamb and squinted into the shadows.

“Mom, you might as well come out of your room. This is how I look now. I know it troubles you to see, but you might as well come out of your room’n get some sun. Your rocker’s all warmed up for you. I’ll only be lookin’ this way for a while, then I’ll be just almost like I was again.”

Gail said, “You about ready?”

There was no response from the shadowed bed, no words or movement, and Ree turned away and thrust the broomstick down hard and creaked toward the front door. She took Mamaw’s coat off the wall hook, slipped into the sleeves.

“Reckon I should bring my shotgun?”

“I would. If it happens you do need it, there ain’t gonna be no time to send home for it.”

“I about wouldn’t mind needin’ it today. I got me some targets picked out.”

“Well, I hope to hell it don’t come to that while Ned’s along, that’s all I can say.”

“Aw, don’t worry, they’re probly done with me.”

Ree carried the shotgun, Gail carried the baby. Ree limped on her broom down the porch steps to the old truck and noted a flurry of women watching from across the creek. Sonya, Betsy, and Permelia standing with two Tankersly wives from Haslam Springs and two women Ree didn’t exactly recognize. Gail started the truck and eased down the rut road. She waved when level with the women across the creek.

Ree said, “What’s up with them over there?”

“You, I bet. That’s Jerrilyn Tankersly and, I think, Pam’s her name.”

“I know them two some—who’s the other two?”

“One’s a Boshell. I’m purty sure that’s a Boshell. And one’s a Pinckney girl who married a Milton. The tall gal’s the Boshell. Both of ’em’re from around Hawkfall.”

“Think they’re askin’ shit about me?”

“Looks more like Sonya’s tellin’ ’em shit, from here. Their lips ain’t movin’ much.”

Ree laughed, then winced when her hurt lips spread, and said, “Heck, none of the ones I’d like to shoot is standin’ in the open over there. I could pot ’em from here if they was.”

Gail twisted her neck to see the gathered women.

“Looks to me like Sonya’s took up for you, Sweet Pea.”

“Huh. She’s got a soft spot for Sonny. Can’t help herself.”

At the hard road Gail continued south, straight across the blacktop to regain the dirt rut. Barbed wire nailed to tilting timber posts made a slack fenceline along the western side of the rut. A roadkill armadillo had been tossed at the fence and snagged on a barb, tail up and eaten down to an eyeless husk that wiggled in the breeze. Gail said, “Does he know? Sonny?”

“Not from us. If he knows, it’s from somebody else blabbin’, ’cause we never.” The eastern side of the rut belonged to the government and a wall of trees grew near the road. Branches overhead rent the sunlight into jigsaw pieces that fell to ground as a jumble of bright shards and deckled crescents. Beer cans and whiskey bottles and bread bags uglied the gully between the rut and the woods. Ree said, “The army’ll still take you even without the full amount of teeth, won’t they?”

“I don’t know. I imagine they would. Why wouldn’t they?”

Ned stretched and mewed, opened his eyes and puckered his lips, then was instantly asleep again. He smelled sweet and the trees stood tall and the truck jostled across furrows in the rut. Heavy clouds rimmed the northwestern distance, a warning border of bustling gray creeping into the plain sky.

“Blond Milton said him’n Sonya’d take Sonny. I tell you that? Raise him on up from here for me.”

“He did? That might help some.”

“But he’ll make Sonny what I hoped he wouldn’t be.”

“Of course he will. That’s why he wants him. That’s why they all want sons. What about Harold?”

“Harold don’t shine for him. Mom neither.”

“Well, what else can you do? You thought about that? ”

Pills shunted the pain aside from her body but did nothing for her pained thoughts but slow them to a yawning pace, make them linger. The shotgun was upright between her knees and she choked the double barrels with both hands. She said, “Carry Mom to the booby hatch’n leave her on the steps, I guess. Beg Victoria’n Teardrop to take Harold in.”

Gail shook her head slowly, touched two fingers to Ned’s chest.

“Oh, god, I hope that ain’t the way it goes, Sweet Pea. I hope to hell it ain’t. I don’t believe Harold’ll be the type can hack prison.”

Ree stared ahead down the loose dirt rut while low dust dogs appeared alongside and chased the truck tires. The road was mostly straight and fairly smooth through the government trees. The truck crested a ridge and rolled downhill into a stark valley that narrowed to a springwater creek. Bluffs of dour stone shrugged above the bottoms, streaked black by ages of drip, with like boulders knocked low to the water’s edge. The bluffs kept the creek shadowed but for two hours on either side of noon. Turkey buzzards spanned their wings and wafted in patient tightening circles high above the creek bed.

“Is this where you’re takin’ me?”