Amy Greene - Bloodroot

I can’t stand to hold them. I have to let them go. I don’t want to leave too many marks behind. There were fingerprints all over me when I came back here, and it’s taken a long time to wash them off. I hardly remember the names I gave them. That was another time. I think of them now by their real names. Silver like how her eyes glint in the dark. Cinder like how his eyes look in the white of his face. Woodsmoke, the way he smells passing by me in fall. Lacy, the way leaves pattern her shoulders as she moves under the trees. Their old names mean nothing now. Neither does mine. I am whatever I say I am. Rainy, when I come in dripping after a storm. Bird, when I climb to the ledge and sing down the mountain. Alive, now even more than when I was a child living here. I squat where I please and watch the water I lapped up from my hand run back out of me, spreading and mixing with the dirt of this place, swirling with pine needles as it heads down the mountain toward the creek where it came from. I am part of this place like never before. When I was small, there was always something hindering me.

Granddaddy was too protective, but I believe Granny’s instinct was to let me go. She would allow me to stand for a while in the rain, hair parting soaked down the middle, before making me come in. Once she found me stripped naked facedown in the dirt. She stood watching for a long moment before she pulled me up by the arm, wiping at my blackened tongue with her apron and brushing sow bugs from my chin. “Lord, youngun,” she said, “you’re going to be sick as a dog.” All I wanted was free. Granny seemed to understand. After Granddaddy was gone she let me roam. But every minute in her presence it seemed she was touching me, stroking my hair, pulling me onto her lap.

I still miss her every day. Time is different on the mountain. It stretches out longer. I used to always know what year it was, and how old I would be on my next birthday. But, like names, it seems less important now. There’s a calendar hanging in the kitchen, yellowed and stiff as if something was spilled on it. It has been there on the same rusty nail since before Granny died. It’s a calendar from 1975, the year I came home and my babies were born. If I mark time, it’s by their birthdays. Not the exact date, because I forget sometimes. But I can tell by the weather, how it smells outside and what’s growing out of the ground. One day I’ll wake up and there’s a charge in the air and I’ll know it’s the anniversary of their birth. I’ll get up and see what I have to make a cake for them.

Today I woke to a chill wind blowing colored leaves through the window, scattering them across my bed. I sat up and plucked one from the blanket. I smelled what day it was, a scent I can’t describe. I went to the kitchen knowing they are six. The house was empty. They rise early and go into the woods because morning is their favorite time to play. The floor creaked as I brought flour down from the pantry shelf. My back prickled like there were eyes on me. I froze, sure it was all over, my time with them. It came back to me then, how it felt in that house beside of the railroad tracks with John, listening for the creak of his boot on the floorboards. But I stood still, counting backward, and nothing happened. No arm snaked under my throat, no fingers snagged my hair. I tried to hum as I made the cake, but I was rattled. I couldn’t shake the feeling of an end coming. Not the end of the world that our pastor at Piney Grove preached about, but the end of my world, the one I’ve made on Bloodroot Mountain for my twins and me.

I’m not sorry for the way I live, even when I see how Mr. Barnett looks at me sometimes, and Mark Cotter when I go up the mountain to buy fresh milk from him. He owns the farm since his parents died. I’ve only spoken to him once, when his wife was gone to town. I asked about Wild Rose. He claimed she spends most of her time loose in the woods now. “I don’t even try to pen her up no more,” he said. “She’s more ornery than ever since she’s got old.” He stared at my babies as he spoke to me, one on each hip, but he didn’t ask about them. I know Mark Cotter and I are not friends anymore, but he is still loyal to me. He must remember how it used to be. Whatever Mark and Mr. Barnett think of the way I live, they keep my secret. That’s all that matters. For six years, I’ve managed to hide my twins up here. But stirring the cake batter this morning I couldn’t stop thinking, not just about John, but about my whole life. I remembered myself as a six-year-old girl, when I marked time by my own birthdays and not those of my children.

I thought of Granny and how she liked to talk as she worked. There was a wringer washer by the back steps and I can still see her feeding Granddaddy’s shirts through, telling stories about Chickweed Holler. She talked most about her cousin Lou Ann, who I pictured as a crone with a hump, putting a curse on our family. I saw her with sores eating at her nose and mouth corners, eyes like holes pecked into her face by crows, standing on her high porch handing down love potions and charms to women desperate to bewitch a man, to have a child or lose one, to be granted long life or for someone else to die. I imagined powders in twists of paper, left hind feet of graveyard rabbits, snakeskin bags with toad’s eyes inside. They walked up the holler with their darkest desires and she did what she could to make them real. Even one of Granny’s great-aunts had gone to her.

“When Della was young and silly,” Granny said, “she had dealings with Lou Ann herself. She got struck on an old boy that came around selling Bibles, not that he ever cracked one open. Nothing do her, she had to have him. But he wouldn’t look twice at her. Well, Della went to see Lou Ann, with Grandmaw Ruth and Myrtle both begging her not to. She came back looking peaked. They all still lived at home and she asked her mammy if they could have chicken for supper. Said she’d be the one to cook it. Their mammy said she reckoned so. Della went out in the yard and caught her one right then, wrung its neck and plucked it and took it in the kitchen. She pulled out the innards and Grandmaw and Myrtle thought she was fixing to make chicken livers. But that ain’t what she was up to. She found that chicken’s heart, popped it in her mouth, and swallowed it whole. Grandmaw and Myrtle seen her do it. She hacked and carried on, but she kept it down. Lo and behold, the next day that Bible salesman came calling. Him and Della ran off and got married. It didn’t last long, though. Grandmaw said he beat Della like a mule. I reckon he got shot six months later, messing around with some other man’s wife. Della wouldn’t talk about it much, but she told me all the time, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’”

Granny was always telling stories like that, about Grandmaw Ruth and the great-aunts and Mammy and Pap. I know she was trying to teach me something, but that wasn’t her only reason. After so many years, she still missed her family. As much as she loved Bloodroot Mountain, she talked sometimes about going back to Chickweed Holler and seeing the old homestead again. It belonged now to distant cousins who wrote her letters. Once she went so far as to ask Granddaddy if he would drive her over there, but when the day came to travel she changed her mind. “I reckon I better stick close to home,” she said. “I’m too old to be running off. I used to dream about crossing the ocean on a ship and seeing the world, but it never happened. Your granddaddy scratched that itch.”

But it seemed nothing could scratch mine. The soles of my feet itched so hard in the night, they almost burned. Whenever Granny saw me squirming, she looked troubled. One night I asked her to scratch my feet. She said, “No use in me scratching them. You took that after me. Ain’t but one cure, and I dread the day that itch gets satisfied.”