Daniel Woodrell - Winter's Bone

Teardrop kept his head straight but angled his eyes to watch Baskin in the side mirror. His right hand eased toward the rifle. He said, “Nope. Tonight I ain’t doin’ a fuckin’ thing you say.”

Ree watched Teardrop’s hand close around the rifle and she felt somehow instantly all sweaty on her insides, and her sweaty insides jumped into her throat. She saw Baskin drop a hand to his holster and step nearer the rear of the truck. Ree looked at the sawed-off shotgun on the seat between her uncle and herself and quaked.

In the brightness of lights and swirling colors, Baskin was mostly a shadow wearing a wide-brimmed hat. He said, “Get out, Teardrop. Get out now!”

Teardrop said, “Who’d you tell about Jessup, huh? You fuckin’ prick. Who?”

For several seconds Baskin stood silently, his posture beginning to ebb, then inhaled hugely and drew his pistol from the holster.

Ree slid her fingers toward the shotgun, thinking, This was how sudden things happened that haunted forever.

“I’ve given you… that’s a lawful goddam order. I’ve given you a lawful goddam order.”

Sounds like singed laughter burst from Teardrop, and he jerked the rifle onto his lap, curled his trigger finger. He seemed to have caught Baskin’s eye in the rearview mirror. He looked intently into the mirror, flicked a fingernail repeatedly against the folded wire stock on the rifle, flick, flick, flick, then said, “Is this goin’ to be our time?”

Teardrop lifted his foot from the brake and calmly rolled onto the scraped road and began to drive away toward home. Ree watched Baskin, and he stood alone there in the road behind with his pistol hand dangled to his side, then he crouched to a knee on the thinned snow in the gusting wind, facedown, and his hat popped off his head, but he caught it before it blew away.

THE BOYS had never known Mom when her parts were gathered and she’d stood complete with sparking dark eyes and a fast laugh. Mom only seldom walked farther than the kitchen and never danced during their days. Come morning, Ree saddled her hangover and rode that mood into the forlorn chores of a jittery day, and for over an hour she crouched at the big hall closet, pulling out dusty, tattered boxes of forgotten family flotsam, throwing everything away, until she came across a yellow envelope that held pictures. She spread the pictures on the floor and the boys bent over the snapshots, raising each for closer viewing, then dropping one old vision of Mom for the next. Mom in black-and-white, wearing a striped skirt that twirled aloft as she swung in the arms of Dad, sat on his lap beside a table overflowing with beer bottles and mashed smokes, did a tippy-toe spin on the kitchen floor with a full shot glass raised above her head. Mom in color, wearing a crown of twisted flowers at one of Uncle Jack’s weddings, standing on the porch preened to go out for the night looking gorgeous in a red dress, a blue dress, a green dress, a slick black coat shiny as Sunday shoes. Her lips were ever painted bright and smiling.

Ree said, “She used to be so different from now.”

Harold said, “Pretty. She was so pretty.”

“She’s still pretty.”

“Not like then.”

“And these fellas with her are all Dad.”

Sonny said, “They are? That’s him? Dad had hair like that?”

“Yup. It mostly fell out when he was away. You wouldn’t remember.”

“Nope. I don’t remember him with much hair.”

Her sad slumping task for the day was to begin sorting the house, go through closets and crawl spaces, haul forgotten boxes and bags into the light and decide what old stuff was to be kept and what would be burned in the yard as trash. Bromonts had been in the house for most of a century and some of the old boxes in out-of-the-way nooks had collapsed into fairly tidy heaps of so much rot. Many of the papers became powder in her fingers as she unfolded them for reading. There was a purple velvet jewelry box mice had chewed ragged, and she opened it to find a collection of marbles and a thimble and a Valentine’s card received by Aunt Bernadette during third grade with words of love written large in crayon. She found heelless shoes still wrinkled from the feet of relatives who were dead before she could’ve known them. A large darkened knife with a bent blade. A delicate white bowl holding faded paper shotgun shells and a handful of keys to locks she couldn’t imagine. Straw sun hats with brims torn away from the crowns.

“Carry this to the trash barrel’n start us a fire. Then come back—there’s more.”

Under the stairs she found several battered tools, ax blades, saw blades, awls and hammer shafts, cobwebbed jars of ancient four-sided nails with square heads, metal washers, bent drill bits. Schoolbooks with Mom’s name printed in pencil inside the covers. A porcelain thunder mug cracked around the rim and base. A rusted lunch box lid that said Howdy Doody! and had the name Jack slapped on small with red fingernail polish.

Mom sat in her rocker, and Ree asked, “How much of what you got still fits?”

“These shoes do.”

“I mean in your closet.”

“Some in there never did.”

Mom’s closet was a jumbo mess of her own clothes, plus relics from Mamaw and Bernadette. Mom and Mamaw had both been of a mind to save anything and everything that might possibly be worn by somebody in the family someday or maybe have some other unknown future use. Mamaw had run to sloppy fat for her last many years, Bernadette was made short and scant, Mom long and lean. Not much that fit one ever would fit another, but the closet became stuffed with maybe-someday clothes and stayed that way. Most of the white things had long since yellowed on their hangers. Dust built yokes of grime on the shoulders of dresses and blouses.

Ree called the boys into Mom’s room and both rushed to her side. They had a big jumping fire going in the yard and enjoyed feeding it all this Bromont trash. A circle of melt grew outward from the rusty barrel. Birds sat in black ranks on cozy branches above the gush of heated air. Ash crumbs wafted past the window and sprinkled gray dots across the snow. She said, “Hold your arms out’n I’ll fill ’em with this junk.”

She took a break and stood by the side window to watch the boys feed old family stuff to the fire. Across the creek, Sonya had come into her yard wearing a hooded overcoat and sat on the rock bench under her leafless walnut tree. It was very cold outside and the boys dodged about near the flames. Sonya waved and Harold saw her and waved back. Smoke boiled from the trash barrel, spilling a streaking mess into the valley. The boys held dresses above the barrel until they caught fire near the hem and the flames began to climb the cloth to the waist, the bodice, the neck, then dropped them at the last second before their fingertips blistered. Sonya waved and waved until Sonny finally saw her and waved back. Tiny bits of cloth rode the heat from the trash barrel up into the air, the edges briefly glowing as the last threads burned red, then became ash that matched the sky and disappeared downwind.

THEY CAME with the dark and knocked with three fists. The door shook as the clamor of beating knuckles filled the house. Ree glanced from a window and saw three like women, chesty and jowly, wearing long cloth coats of differing colors and barnyard galoshes. She fetched her pretty shotgun before opening the door. She jabbed the twin barrels toward the belly of Mrs. Thump, Merab, but did not speak. The shotgun felt like an unspent lightning bolt in her hands and trembled. None of the sisters flinched or stepped back or changed expression.

Merab said, “Come along, child—we’re goin’ to fix your problem for you.” Her hands were in her coat pockets. Her hair was swept away from her face in a towering white wave that barely budged in the breeze. “Put that thing down. Show some smarts, child.”