Amy Greene - Bloodroot

I rested while she suctioned his mouth and nose with the same orange bulb syringe she had used on me when I had the croup. Then she wrapped him in a towel and placed him for a moment in a bureau drawer lined with a blanket. She came back to stand at the end of the bed and I gave one more hard push. The other child came and Granny shouted, “Praise Jesus, this’n’s a girl!” Both of us wept from relief and happiness.

Then I must have dozed for a while because the next thing I remember is a baby rooting at each breast, their downy black heads poking out of blankets. Granny sat on the edge of the bed leaning back on the pillow with me, sweat glistening on her face. It had taken almost as much out of her to bring my babies into the world as it had out of me. “What will you call them?” she asked, wiping her face with a clean diaper.

“I’ve always liked Laura,” I said, looking down at the baby girl. Granny had found an old pink shawl to wrap her in, so that we could tell the twins apart.

“That’s good,” Granny said. “Like mountain laurel. What about the boy?”

I looked him over for a long time, his button of a nose pressed against my breast. “Johnny,” I said at last. When I spoke the name out loud, it sounded right to me.

Granny was silent. I could tell she didn’t like it. Finally she asked, “How come?”

“Because I loved him once,” I said, gazing down at my baby boy.

“All right,” Granny murmured. But she still looked troubled.

I never told Granny about Ford, but sometimes I was tempted. I knew it disturbed her to think the twins were John’s babies. Maybe she was worried how they would turn out, but I wasn’t. I knew it didn’t matter who their daddy was. When I held them I didn’t think about their fathers. I just looked at them, pink lips suckling, and thought about God.

In the first weeks of their lives, every sudden movement, every creak, every pine knot exploding in the fire made me tense to run or fight. I couldn’t understand why John hadn’t come for me, and if he was dead, why someone else hadn’t. But Granny and the babies made it a precious time. Mr. Barnett brought a crib that had belonged to his own children, cleaned and smelling of beeswax, and moved it into Granny’s bedroom where we slept. Those first nights when I was so weary I could barely lift my head, Granny got up and brought the babies to me whenever they cried, singing hymns to them under her breath. As I grew stronger, we tended the babies together while the rest of the mountain slept, burping and swaddling by the light of Granny’s oil lamp, the only sounds their grunts and cries and swallows as they drank from my breast. Sometimes as Granny rocked the babies, one in the crook of each arm, I pretended to be asleep and watched her in secret through the fringe of my lashes. When she thought I wasn’t looking, her face always fell into a mask of exhaustion. Her ashen color made me sick with worry. I heard how she lost her breath while she worked in the kitchen and the yard. Sometimes when she spoke I saw the blue of her tongue. For a long time, I knew something was wrong.

Then one night Granny didn’t get up to help me when the babies cried. My heart ached with lonesomeness, but she had seemed so tired all day. I told the babies, “We’ll let Granny sleep.” But when I opened my eyes at dawn and she wasn’t making coffee, I knew. The babies were still resting. I crept by their crib into the front room. The house was cold. She hadn’t stoked up the fire. I stood for a moment in the door of my childhood bedroom looking at her, knowing this time it was for real. Winter light fell through the window across her face. Her mouth was open. Her arm dangled off the bed. I crossed the room and crawled under the quilts to be with her, to rest one last time on her shoulder.

This winter it will have been six years since Granny passed away. Sometimes when I think about her, I have to escape the house where she died and take a walk. That’s how I knew the present I wanted to give the twins. They spent most of their sixth birthday rolling down the hill all the way to the road while their chocolate cake rose, running back up with beggar’s lice on their clothes. I heard them laughing and wondered how I had ever wanted anything or anyone else, how a man could have been so important to me. I watched them pushing together a pile of leaves in the yard and dreamed of hiding with them in their fall-colored mountain. Later I stood on the back steps looking into the woods while they ate cake, the smell of woodsmoke drifting down from the Cotter farm. Everything was quiet indoors and out. The boy was solemn-eyed at the table, eating with his hands. The girl sat on her knees licking icing off her fingers. I went and lifted her out of the chair. She looked at me as I wiped the smears from her face with my dress tail, fine wisps of black hair in her eyes. The boy got down on his own, cleaning his mouth on the too-long sleeve of his flannel shirt. He could read me as they did each other and knew we were going somewhere. I knelt and the girl climbed on my back, arms tight under my chin. I knew she could make it because the twins have been all over the mountain, but I liked the weight of her body. When I galloped across the yard she giggled in my ear.

It would take a long time but we had plenty of daylight. The boy traveled his own way alongside us. I watched his black hair passing under the trees and tried to send everything I felt for him between the tall trunks as I had once sent my soul flying out of my body. I tried to tell him that I knew him, whether or not he knew me. I want to believe his spirit was with me, even as his body ranged out of sight. I saw that he’s worn his own paths on the mountain. Maybe he’s already been to the top. I know my twins think their own thoughts and have their own lives. Sometimes I wonder what it’s like inside of them.

The path’s not as treacherous as our elders claimed. For the last half mile the boy came out of the trees and climbed with us. When we passed the springhouse I wouldn’t let him stop for a drink. The waters there are poison now. The girl scrambled onto my back again at the place where Doug Cotter fell. The boy went ahead of us through the fog, surefooted as a mountain goat. After the outcropping, the slope leveled off and we reached the summit. The stories were true. There’s a meadow at the top. I thought John might be waiting there, his shadow face revealed at last, but there was only grass and trees. Doug once told me they called it Cotter Field. I thought it would be grown over, and it’s probably not as open as it once was, but it’s still mostly cleared off. Maybe Mark tends this spot where his ancestors drove their cattle to, or Mr. Barnett, who I think of now as the keeper of Bloodroot Mountain. But it could be Wild Rose who keeps the grasses trampled. I could tell she had been there. I could feel it. I knelt and closed my eyes. She’s part of the mountain now, a spirit in these woods. I know she’s finally free.

The girl slid off my back and went hopping over thatches of grass like dry hair with briars tangled in. The boy bent to chase a cricket over and under the bracken. There was a border of stunted trees, limbs broken and bare, and the hump of a slate-colored rock in the middle of the field like a tortoise unearthing itself. I saw the edge of the mountaintop and moved toward it, remembering a distant relative who had jumped off a cliff here ages ago. My steps quickened until I was almost running for the sky ahead of me, imagining how she might have flown, hair and dress billowing up. Then I tripped over a hole and caught myself on my hands, palms skidding over ridges of rock hidden in the weeds. I stayed on my hands and knees until I felt small fingers parting the black wings of my hair. I looked up and saw the girl between me and the edge. The boy joined her and there was a knowing in their eyes that made them seem old. If I had gone over I would have taken all of it with me, the things I’ve never spoken of, how the rabbit’s back legs kicked and went still, how it smells of grave dirt under old houses, how it feels to bring a hatchet blade down on human flesh. I swiped the hair from my eyes and sat back on my haunches, examining my palms. There were flecks of dirt and shale in the scrapes. I held them up to show the twins. They stepped closer, drawn to my blood.