Amy Greene - Bloodroot

“What day, Granny?”

“The day you run off from here.”

“I won’t ever!”

“I don’t know if you can help it,” she said, reaching under the quilt to take one of my feet in her warm hand.

She was right about me. I’ve done a lot of things I never thought I’d do. When I was a little girl, I always figured I would marry a mountain man, who knew the sting of briar scratches, the teeth-rattling shiver of cold creek water, the black smell of garden soil that made you want to roll in it. But John was the first thing I ever saw that was prettier than my home. The first time I laid eyes on him, we had gone to Odom’s Hardware after seeds. Granny usually ordered them from a catalogue, but that Saturday we were working in the yard when Mr. Barnett stopped to drop off a red velvet cake from Margaret. He was headed to Millertown for nails and snail bait. He asked if we wanted to come along and I was surprised when Granny said, “Why, I believe I will. Let me run in the house and get my pocket-book.” I could tell by the way she turned her face into the summer wind as we rode down the mountain that she just wanted to go for a ride. I was always up for a trip to town myself. The high school was usually the closest I got, unless I hitched a ride with Doug or Mark or went along with one of my girlfriends. Granddaddy had left behind a truck when he died, but it was rusting in the barn because Granny never learned how to use it. Sometimes it was like being stranded on an island. But I felt free as we drove past the red brick school building, making waves with my arm out the window.

There were only a few people milling the streets downtown. I drifted behind Granny and Mr. Barnett as they browsed the dim aisles of the hardware store. I was ready to go after we’d picked out the seeds, but Granny and Mr. Barnett stopped to make small talk with the man behind the counter, about weather and farming and inflated prices. I asked Granny if I could walk to the dime store and Mr. Barnett handed me his bag of nails. “Will you put these in the truck on your way down the sidewalk, honey?”

I stepped into the sun holding the wrinkled brown sack, sharp with nail points, and stopped in my tracks. A boy and girl stood outside the door in a patch of shade, kissing each other in a hungry way I’d never seen before. A tingle darted through me. I couldn’t see much of the boy’s face but I could see his hair, black as pitch, and her pale fingers digging into the dent between his shoulder blades. Then the girl cracked her eyes and noticed me. She broke away from him with a start. He turned around and I dropped the sack, nails spraying everywhere on the cracked cement. I knelt to pick them up, cheeks on fire. I’d seen his face, both sinister and beautiful. Before I could register what was happening, he was coming to kneel beside me. “Let me help you with that, miss,” he said. His voice was like a silk ribbon unrolling. Our fingers touched and when I glanced up, I thought I saw a flicker of interest in his eyes. Then the girl was saying, “I’d better get on back to work, John. My dad will skin me alive.” He rose and went to her as Granny and Mr. Barnett were coming out of the store. “I’ll walk you,” he said. When he looked back over his shoulder at me, my legs felt made of something unreliable.

I watched them go, taking in the shape of his body, tall with narrow hips and wide shoulders. “Who was that?” I asked, following Granny to the truck.

“That’s John,” Mr. Barnett said. “One of Frankie’s boys. You don’t want nothing to do with him. I reckon he’s tomcatting around with that Ellen Hamilton now. Her daddy’s got a drugstore down here on the corner. But you ort to hear the stories John’s brothers tells on him. They claim he’s got a girlfriend for every day of the week. I reckon it’s pitiful how he does them girls. They was one tried to kill herself over him.”

I was so quiet on the way home that Granny asked if I was sick. It didn’t matter what Mr. Barnett had said about John. I couldn’t stop seeing his eyes, the hair that fell across his forehead when he knelt by me, the beauty of his face, like something carved from marble. I never knew there were real people in the world that looked like him.

Mr. Barnett let us out of his truck at the house. Walking across the yard, Granny said, “Let’s have chicken and dumplings for supper.” I stood under the apple tree while she killed and plucked the chicken, trying to cool my face in the shade. After a while I followed her up the steps and into the kitchen. When I saw the chicken’s carcass laid out on the counter, it seemed like a sign. The instant Granny went to the pantry I tore into the bird’s chest and pulled out its heart. I crammed it into my mouth and it was awful, small and slick, sliding down my throat. I coughed and gagged, the heart struggling to come back up. But, like my great-great-great-aunt Della, I was determined to choke it down. When Granny rushed over to pound on my back, I said, “It’s okay. I just got strangled on spit.”

I felt guilty for betraying Granny. If she’d known what I had done, she would have been disappointed in me. But there was no going back. I didn’t know if I believed in Lou Ann’s charm, but I knew now what those women had felt. I wasn’t worried about Ellen Hamilton or anybody else. I was only concerned with myself and what I had to have. I went to bed early that night, half sick from the chicken heart, but I couldn’t rest. I tossed and turned, thinking how he’d looked over his shoulder at me as he walked the blond girl back to work. It was like being possessed. When I finally closed my eyes and drifted down toward sleep, I dreamed his face hovered inches from mine in the dark, his long, sculpted body floating over my bed like an angel or a wraith. I opened my eyes with a start, prepared to be kissed like he had kissed Ellen Hamilton on the sidewalk. I promised myself that if he ever did kiss me that way, I’d kiss him back twice as hard.

Now the ghost of John is different. It has no face or body, just the shine of eyes. Last night, I saw them in a tree and thought he was there. Then something moved along the branch and hissed down at me, a red-eyed possum. But sometimes I wake up smelling sulfur and dead rats and sweet aftershave. My bedroom reeks of him and I know he’s been there watching me sleep. Once I walked in and saw him sitting in the rocking chair. I dropped my book but didn’t scream. He was there for a long second and I thought he would say something. Then I blinked and he was gone, the rocking chair empty. These days John could come to me in any form. Long shadows falling across the yard could be the shape of tree trunks or of his legs, claw-tipped branches could be his arms, dripping water could be his tapping fingers, cold drafts could be his breath. But back then, when I was seventeen, I wanted every noise to be John Odom coming after me in the dark.

It wasn’t the next day that he came. It was a long four weeks in which I could think of nothing but him. I was guilty about the chicken heart and desperate for it to work at the same time. I had no appetite and Granny kept shooting me troubled looks across the table. I couldn’t concentrate on chores. I broke eggs carrying them in from the barn, cut my finger peeling potatoes, singed one of my good dresses with the iron. Then school started back and my life fell into a familiar routine. I still dreamed of John Odom, but I began to feel foolish for believing that swallowing a heart might bring me love.

On Monday of the second week of school, John materialized out of the early gloom as I walked to the bottom of the dirt road on my way to catch the bus, eyes and teeth shining. It seemed he had boiled up from the dust of the road.

“Don’t be scared,” he said. “I just came to drive you to school.”