Amy Greene - Bloodroot

“I don’t know. I guess I came to my senses.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I can’t be with somebody like you.”

“Somebody like me?”

His eyes returned to my face. “Somebody good.”

“Well,” I said. “I think you’re somebody good.”

He paused. “You don’t even know me.”

I took another step closer. “I don’t care.”

He opened his mouth to protest but I didn’t want to hear it. I took a deep breath, mustering my courage, and did what I had wanted to the minute he stepped out of the hardware store and locked the door behind him. I grabbed his coat and stood on tiptoe to kiss him like before. In those long seconds, something happened that I can’t forget. A strong wind came howling down Main Street, a cold blast whirling with dead leaves and trash, whipping my hair and plastering a sheet of newspaper to John’s shoulder where it clung before flying off toward the stoplight. I remembered stories of banshees Granny had told me, Irish witches who wailed outside houses at night to warn families of danger. To hear a banshee was always a bad omen. That night in my dreams, when I broke away from John’s kiss, the banshee’s veiled face floated inches from mine, the wind from her scream taking my breath. But on Main Street it was John who broke our kiss. The wind died as fast as it came, letting go of my hair and John’s coattail. He held me for a moment at arm’s length. “Are you sure about this?” he asked. “Because once I get ahold of you, I ain’t turning you loose.” I said yes without a second thought and followed him to his car.

I wasn’t ready for Granny or anyone else to know about us at first. John continued to park at the bottom of the road, a little inside the tree line, and we took long walks on the mountain. I was careful to choose paths I hadn’t explored. The going was harder, briars clawing at our ankles, but I didn’t want to risk running into Mr. Barnett or Doug Cotter. I wanted to climb to the top of Bloodroot Mountain with John, to stand in the secret meadow with him. I hadn’t tried since I was fourteen, when I caused Doug to fall. But John and I never made it that far. He always wanted to stop and sit, on fallen trees or rocky bluffs, anywhere he could kiss me. Sometimes I smelled another woman’s perfume on his clothes, but I didn’t say anything. I knew I hadn’t fully claimed him. At first I thought if I could be with him the way those other women were, I would have all of him. But each time we got close, his hands under my dress and mine tearing at his shirt, he pulled away again. Then one day, lying on the ground beside the springhouse, he said, “I’ve had plenty of whores, Myra. That ain’t what I want out of you.” His words stung but their meaning made me hope I was different than the ones who left perfume on his clothes. Whenever he got quiet I held my breath, praying that he would propose to me.

Every second he was out of my sight, my stomach churned with worry about what he was doing and who he was with. I sat on the back steps chewing my nails, stood at the bottom of the road and looked for his car even when I knew he wasn’t coming, took to my bed sometimes before dark and buried my face in my pillow. I knew Granny saw my misery, but she didn’t comment on it. Sitting at the kitchen table, tension hung like smoke between us, choking our conversations. Finally, I couldn’t take keeping the secret any longer. As scared as I was that she’d deny John and me her blessing, I had to confess.

At the beginning of winter, we were taping sheets of plastic over the house’s old windows to keep in the heat. It was already cold and drafty in the front room. I stood holding the thick silver tape roll for her, realizing how old it seemed she had grown overnight. I tried to memorize the seams and creases of her face, soft and wrinkled as brownish crepe paper. I charted the constellations her age spots made, took in the black brogans she wore for outside chores, Granddaddy’s dingy socks rolled down around her ankles, and the faded flowers of her dress, thin from hundreds of washings. I ached for her then as much or more than I did for John, thought of choosing her and the mountain and never getting married or moving away. But she turned to me, as her fingers smoothed a long strip of tape down the window frame, and said, “I believe my girl’s got something to tell me.” I wasn’t expecting to burst into tears. The flood startled me more than it did Granny. She came and held my face in her arthritis-knotted hands. “I’ve got cataracts,” she said with a sad grin, “but I ain’t blind yet. Now, I done decided I ain’t going to meddle. You’d just end up resenting me for it. But you better be careful, Myra Jean.”

I understand what Granny meant. Like her, I let my twins make their own mistakes. I don’t make them wear shoes, even when locust thorns have blown among the weeds. I don’t stop them from climbing trees or robbing beehives or swimming with snakes. I let them go, as Granny did me, only without warning them to be careful. I know they wouldn’t listen. But I protect them from a distance. I used to spend weeks without John or any of the Odoms entering my mind. I saw my twins out from under a cloud. I taught them how to count and hunt and clean fish. One day lying in the grass I flew them, lifting them up with my feet on their hipbones, holding their hands with their hair hanging down and their small faces shining. They took turns, the girl’s homemade dress swaying over me and the boy’s floppy shirt filling with wind like a sail. They laughed and I laughed with them, until tears leaked out of my eyes. I know they won’t remember it. They might never know me again that way. Lately it’s been hard to think of anything but the past. I carried a disease with me out of that house by the tracks and pieces of me are still coming off. It’s unfair how my fear has grown over time and begun to take me over. Sometimes it feels like John has won. But I’d rather die than trap the twins as I was trapped while I was with him. That’s why I’ll always give them their freedom.

After my talk with Granny, I didn’t hide my relationship with John, but I spent less time on the mountain for the sake of Doug Cotter. I knew he loved me, and I cared for him enough not to flaunt my happiness. John and I mostly went to Millertown. I thought of my mother, running off with my father when she was my age. John showed me places and I imagined her there, the glass-sprinkled lot of a drive-in, the restaurant where I ate pizza for the first time. I wondered if my parents ate it together as John and I did, by the window of a dim place with checked tablecloths and silk daisies in vases.

When spring came, John taught me to drive his car. We spent hours tooling down the back roads of Valley Home and Slop Creek and Piney Grove with the windows down and the radio playing, pulling over for long golden meadows and covered bridges and ponds green with scum. The more time we spent together, the more certain I grew that he would propose. That’s why I pushed aside my nerves and took him up Bloodroot Mountain to meet Granny. I was relieved to see that she was charmed by John, but by then nothing could have kept me from being with him, not even my love for Granny.

One Sunday afternoon we were supposed to meet at the spring-house after church. We hadn’t walked together in a long time and I missed being on the mountain with him. Granny and I always rode to Piney Grove squeezed between the Barnetts in the cab of their truck and I was quiet all the way down the mountain, dreaming of lying with John once again on the bank beside the spring. After the service I waited in the churchyard as Granny and the Barnetts chatted with the preacher, sitting on my mother’s grave with my knees drawn up under my dress tail. I tried to talk to her in my mind. I closed my eyes and conjured her, not bones in a casket six feet under, but the girl I had seen in pictures with somber eyes and long hair parted straight down the middle. I felt closer to her than ever before. I sensed her spirit moving up through the grass and passing over me like a sigh. She of all people would understand how loving John Odom made me feel. She had run off to town with a man herself, left Granny and the mountain behind for him. Now she would lie in her grave beside him forever. I pictured a double headstone with my name carved in granite next to John’s. The image filled me with warmth from head to toe.