Daniel Woodrell - Winter's Bone

“Yup. Bucket Spring. Remember Bucket Spring? The water here’s good for you.”

“That water’s colder’n hell!”

“That’s what makes it good. That’s what makes it help all your bruises’n bumps’n stuff.”

“It’s colder’n a goddam witch’s tit in there!”

“Trust me.”

Above the springhead there was a space to park, and logs pounded into the slope lengthwise made steps leading down to the clean, clean water. Where the spring boiled from the earth the water was a cool holy blue and rose to make jouncy plashes across the surface. As the water spread downstream the blue dimmed to crystal clarity and watercress grew in swaths of brilliant green along the bed. Boulders had fallen into haphazard stacks near the springhead and a few reached the pool of blue water and made angled sitting spots.

Gail helped Ree from the truck. Ree poked her way down the few dirt steps with their timber edges, leaning on the broomstick, while Gail carried Ned by the swinging handle of his carrier. They stopped on a gravel spit beside the pool.

“I’ll make us a little fire, first. For when we come back out wet. You just rest ’til I get some heat raised, hear, Sweet Pea? Then we’ll doctor you up good.”

“Okey-doke.”

“I’ll set Ned here.”

“Okey-doke.”

The water was a color Ree’d pick for the jewel in a meaningful finger ring. She leaned on her broomstick, the end sinking into gravel, zoned still by pills and staring into the pool of jewel-colored water. Where the stream ran from the pool the water was so clear she could appreciate individual rocks on the bottom, clumps of green that swayed, skittish tiny fish facing upstream.

She sat on the spit next to Ned and stared. There was a metal ladle on a rope hanging from a sapling by the springhead, a ladle the old ones still came and dipped and raised to drink from the freshest of water. At school teachers said don’t do that anymore, stuff has leaked to the heart of the earth and maybe soured even the deepest deep springs, but plenty of old ones crouched and sipped from the ladle yet. The pool of water loosed a scent, a blessed flavorful scent that folks couldn’t often resist, something in the bones and meat made them bend, drink, step out and drop into the flow.

The fire was slow in starting, but Gail fed twigs to the first tiny flicker and calmly raised a fine strapping circle of flame. The smoke bent with the breeze and trailed away downstream, low above the creek. The fire flung heat as wide as two spread arms and Ned was set where the farthest hand would be. Gail said, “On your feet, Sweet Pea. Time to get naked.”

“Other people could come here today, too, you know.”

“Oh, goodness, I sure hope not—they’ll see us both naked if they do.”

Ree stood and dropped Mamaw’s coat to the gravel spit, began to unbutton, and said, “I ain’t swam naked since I don’t know when.”

“I bet the last time was in that pond over the ridge behind Mr. Seiberling’s place. That was a purt-near perfect swimmin’ hole, back before he started runnin’ cattle and they filled it with flops.”

“Yup. That was when.”

Gail stripped to the buff quickly, then crouched to undo the laces of Ree’s boots, tugged them off and set them near the fire. Ree stood bare to the wind, looking up at the tall dour bluffs. Her many bruises were changing colors by the hour, nearly, all of them hurtful to see. Gail took her hand and they stepped into Bucket Spring, waded straddle-deep into the chill water, and shivered and clattered, looking at each other with eyes popped wide until both began to laugh. Gail led on, pulling Ree toward the deeper blue center, feet shifting in the gravel underfoot, cold numbing legs to the hips. She dropped her haunches, water rose to her neck, and she said, “Sit.”

“I already about can’t feel my legs.”

“Sit. Sit all at once’n get the shock over fast.”

Ree let herself drop into the spring, sat cross-legged on the stone bottom. She lowered her face to the water and held her breath, letting the cold embrace her knotted features and sore spots. The cold went through her like wind. When she looked up she said, “Man! It blasts the hurt right out of you!”

“Don’t it, though. Now get out’n get warm awhile. Then we do it again.”

They stepped from the spring, hands rubbing at their skin. The pink on their bodies had become red and the white become pink and ringlets of splashed hair clung to their necks. They squatted near the fire, wore coats like cloaks draped around their shoulders, leaned toward the heat and watched the flames ripple.

Gail said, “I’m gonna go home.”

“Home?”

“The trailer. Back to the trailer.”

“You are? Back? Why?”

“Ned’s gonna need more than me in this life, Ree. You had ought to know that real well yourself. Plus, you got all these troubles, and I sure shouldn’t be in the middle of ’em, not with my baby along.”

“I think most likely they’re done with me.”

“You can’t know what’s gonna happen. Me’n Ned need to get home.”

Ree threw Mamaw’s coat off, flung it at her piled clothes. She walked hunched over into the spring and fell in completely. She held her breath underwater and opened her eye and gained a clean misty view of rocks polished slick by ages and heard the murmur of a living spring in her ears, the mumbles and plops of water from forever rushing past. When she stood up, the breeze instantly made her soaked head too cold and she jumped from the spring toward the fire.

Gail said, “You’re movin’ better already.”

“I forgot where I hurt.”

“Might as well get dressed.”

“Do you really love him or somethin’?”

“I don’t know. My heart don’t exactly bust out the trumpets every time I hear his name or nothin’. Nothin’ like that—but I love Ned. I way, way love Ned.”

Once dressed, Ree raised her broomstick but hardly needed to lean on it. She pegged to the truck, sat on the bench seat and swallowed a yellow pill and a blue pill. Gail drove in silence to the crest of the hill and over, out of the valley, back to the flat road through government trees. Buzzards had massed to peck something fluffy crushed on the road ahead but took off in gawky flapping alarm as the truck neared.

Ree said, “You didn’t like it? You gonna tell me you didn’t like it?”

“I liked it. I liked it, but not enough.”

The glum front from the northwest had seeped gray over much of the sky. Huffing wind made the forest sway, and a brastle of limbs knocking was joined to the soughing. The road seemed three times as long going this way. A grunting timber truck passing slowly forced Gail to wait where the dirt met the blacktop. Red flags were tied to the log ends and foul smoke roiled from the tailpipe.

Ree said, “Think Floyd’n his daddy’d like to buy our timber from me? Huh? ’Cause if we got to sell, I’d rather it to be to you-all.”

“Really? You mean that?”

They crossed the blacktop onto the rut road to home and Ree made herself look out the window the other way. “If I’ve got to sell these woods, Sweet Pea, I’d want it to be to you’n yours.”

TWO KINDS of pills and a bedridden afternoon, evening, on into the night. The sky was dark and whistling, shaking windows and the horizon beyond, but Ree lay there immune to weather. The boys came home early and said, “More snow days!” but Ree merely grunted. The yellow pills had shown qualities worth appreciating, too. Seems like yellow ones shoved away hurt pretty good but left the mind on and lighted, while blue ones shut you down to an utter smooth blackness where time was sheared away in chunks without having to be lived through at all. Sometimes you want the mind on. Stuff dances around in there when the mind’s on, not often the specific dancing memories you tried to call up with actual specific thoughts, but generally even the uninvited dancing stuff tickled or intrigued or at least left a fuzz of feelings behind. Whiteness piled on the windowsill, snowflakes sashayed and darted and plunged past the glass panes, and she reached to the floor bedside, shook loose another blue, and lay back waiting on black.