Amy Greene - Bloodroot

I didn’t get to be there when Mammy died. After Pap was gone I begged her to come and live with us on Bloodroot Mountain but she wouldn’t hear of it. Her and Pap had put a lot into that farm and she meant to keep it going. She took to wearing overalls and every time me and Macon visited she was out in the field or the garden sweating under the hot sun. She was like Pap and Grandmaw Ruth, worked right on up until the day she died. She passed away in 1939, just a few months after Clio was born. A woman from the church found her in the bed and the county coroner said she went peacefully in her sleep. That’s exactly how I want to go, fall asleep one night and wake up in Glory.

With Mammy and Pap gone and the Great Depression on, it was sad times. The only thing that eased my grief was Clio. She was a good baby. It wasn’t until later that she started giving us fits. Most of the time Clio was sassy and full of mischief, but she could get down in the dumps sometimes. She’d let her hair go and not take a bath, and every once in a while she’d act plumb crazy. She got it after Macon’s people. He had a great-aunt that took a notion to fly and jumped off of one of these clifts around here. Sometimes Clio’d go to hollering and clawing at her face and slapping at her head. Some of the church people thought she was possessed with devils, but I knowed what it was. She just couldn’t stand to be pent up. She was worst in the winters when we got hemmed in by snow. She wanted to be out running the roads and if she couldn’t get to town it done something to her mind. One time, when she was seventeen, it came a bad ice storm, so slick even Macon wouldn’t venture out. He tried to go to work the second day, but he’d done fell down three times before he ever got to the truck, and there wasn’t no digging it out. We had a good fire going in the kitchen woodstove and he was setting there beside of it whittling. I set down at the table with him to drink me a cup of coffee. Not long after that I heard Clio’s naked feet on the floorboards. If it wasn’t for that, I would never have knowed she was there. She’d crept up to the kitchen like a haint in her long white nightgown. When I turned around it scared me half to death. I knowed she didn’t look right in the face, standing there not making a peep. It gave me an awful feeling in my belly. “You better put some socks on them feet,” I said, just to be talking. “You’ll get the sore throat.” She stared at me but it was like she didn’t really see me. Then she looked over my head at the kitchen window, frosted over with ice. “I can’t stand it,” she said.

“What?” I asked, but I knowed. The snow was about waist deep. There was great long icicles like fingers with claws hanging off of the eaves. Walking out to the woodpile was a mess and even with a shawl wound around my head, my face’d get so numb I couldn’t hardly talk until I thawed out some by the stove. Wasn’t noplace to go and if we wanted to stay warm we had to crowd together around the stove. All we had was each other and this little house. I had tried since I was fifteen years old to make it pleasant, weaving my rugs and tatting lacy curtains and crocheting doilies. Back in the summer I’d hung flowerdy wallpaper in Clio’s bedroom, but I knowed she still hated it. She was gone somewhere every minute she could be, one excuse to get off of the mountain after another. I didn’t believe she was studying with her girlfriend or practicing for the school play or selling raffle tickets for the church fund-raiser, but I let her go. I knowed she had to be free, and free to her was flying off every chance she got, away from this house and from me and Macon, too. She couldn’t help it. She took them itchy feet after me. It was her nature, and you can’t hardly fight nobody’s nature.

I reckon I always knowed what would happen if Clio got hemmed in for too long. That’s why I followed her when she turned around and padded out of the kitchen on into the front room. I couldn’t see her feet for that gown being so long and it seemed like she was floating. Seemed like she wasn’t even my girl no more, like there was something in the house with us that ort not to be. The front room was quiet and still, lit up cold and gloomy by the snow still falling outside. Clio stopped and stood in front of the window. Neither one of us moved. I was scared to say anything because it was like she was sleepwalking. I’ve heard tell if you wake up one that’s walking in their sleep they’ll die. I don’t know how long Clio stood there in front of the window that way. Then Macon came in to see what was the matter, with the whittling knife still in his hand.

“What’s wrong, girl?” he asked. His voice was like a firecracker going off.

Clio reached around before I knowed it and snatched up the straight chair Paul used to set in when I fed him his breakfast of the mornings. She took that chair and raised it up over her head and smashed out the window pane. At the same time she let out a scream that liked to froze my blood. It was the awfulest crash you ever heard, too, seemed like that racket rung in my ears for a week after it happened. Macon run to Clio, standing in her nightgown with the cold flooding in, and wrapped her up in his arms. I reckon he was so addled he had forgot to drop his whittling knife and she tried to take it away from him. They scuffled over it for a minute and I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was scared somebody was going to get cut, but finally it was like she gave out all at once. She fell and the knife clattered to the floor. Macon picked her up and carried her like a baby to the bed. She slept that whole day away and part of the next. I couldn’t sleep a wink myself, or eat a bite of nothing. I paced the floor outside her room until Macon made me rest. When the sun came out and the eaves started dripping Clio finally perked up some. I swear, we liked to froze to death before that window got fixed.

The spring after that was when I lost Clio for good, even before she died. Soon as the ice melted and she could get down the mountain, we hardly ever seen her no more. She’d still mumble out one of her excuses, but they got feebler and feebler. Even when she was home to eat supper, her eyes was far away. We’d let Clio get by with just about anything, but Macon used to be hard on her about running off to town. Many times he’d held his ground and made her stay home, even though she’d sulk around and pout and look at him like she hated his neck. But after she busted that window out, he let her go. Me and Macon both was scared she’d go out of her head for good the next time.

One day after it got warm I was going across the yard with a bucket of eggs, headed for the kitchen door, when I heard a loud car come up the hill. I stopped and tried to see who it was, but the sun was in my eyes. That old car pulled up next to the barn and blowed the horn two or three times, had the dog barking and the chickens running all over the place. Sounded about as loud as Clio busting out the front room window, and give me the same awful feeling. Next thing I knowed, Clio came flying out the door with her purse on her arm. She didn’t look left or right, just ran across the yard to that car with her hair blowing back. I had a pretty good idea who was driving it. I’d heard from some of the church people that Clio was down at the pool hall in Millertown with a boy named Kenny Mayes. I was hoping it was just rumors because I knowed of the Mayeses. I reckon nary one of them has ever set foot in a church house, but they sure do spend plenty of time in the jailhouse. About every week you’ll see one of their names in the paper, picked up for drunk driving or writing bad checks or shoplifting. Macon said they was lazy, too. He worked with Kenny’s uncle down to the filling station, said he wouldn’t strike a lick at nothing. I knowed Clio and me both was in for trouble, soon as I heard she was courting a Mayes. That was the first time she took off without asking me if she could go, even if she made up the place she was going to. I watched her moving away from me and felt the tie that bound us since she was born stretching out too thin. She slammed that car door and it finally broke in two. The way I see it, that was the end of me and her. Kenny Mayes stole Clio away from me and there was nothing I could do about it.