Amy Greene - Bloodroot

I struggled to my feet and went to the border of bushes at the brink of the plunging rock face. I could almost see the cows grazing and the Cotter man looking over the fields in neat squares, farmhouses and red barns like toys from a train set, roads and fences dividing the green. The world didn’t seem as dangerous from up there. I felt a tug at my hem and saw the boy holding my dress tail, maybe afraid I would jump. For a long time he’s been restless. I told him we’d ride to the co-op with Mr. Barnett, but now I’m having second thoughts. So far I’ve managed not to lose my mind after what happened to me, but I couldn’t stand my twins being found by the Odoms. I have to protect them for as long as I can. If they were older, I know what I would tell them. You might leave but one day your blood will whisper to you. You’ll hear witches making magic in a holler, healing wind blowing down a swollen throat, the song of the woman who came here in a mule-drawn cart and made it home. One of these days, wherever you are, you’ll turn around and look toward the mountain, old and wild and bigger than you. You’ll look this way and know it’s still alive, whether I am or not anymore. I was only thinking the words but the girl came to me as if she had heard them out loud. She reached up and I swung her onto my hip. “Look, Mama,” she said, pointing at the world below. “Can I go down yonder?” I thought of Granny taking my itchy foot in her hand and ached with loneliness. “Yes, honey,” I said. But you’ll come back. Just like me, you’ll always come home.

Sometimes I get to missing the hills. I never thought I would when I first cut out and headed up north, but here in Rockford there’s buildings instead of trees everywhere you look and cars honking even in the dead of night. Living in a motel like I do, I can always hear somebody talking through the walls. It’s like I’m alone but I can’t ever get off by myself. If I think about the mountain where Myra came from, it don’t seem all that bad to me anymore. I understand now why she was so homesick being in Millertown. It’s took me a long time, but I’ve got to where I don’t hold a grudge against her. Since I’ve quit drinking and got a few decades older, I can look back and see how mean and crazy I was myself. I figure I ain’t nobody to judge the way Myra acted or where she ended up.

It’s lonesome how time passes. The world’s ten years into the second millennium and it’s been more than thirty since what Myra did to me. Sometimes I pass a mirror and expect to see myself whole. I get surprised by what I look like, even after so long. The doctor said I ought to have surgery, she’d busted my face up so bad. But I couldn’t hang around where people knew me any longer. Whenever my reflection surprises me, it’s like waking up without fingers all over again. I go right back to that night Myra ran away.

I don’t know how long I was out before I came to. My head and face hurt so bad I couldn’t think. First thing I knew was that I couldn’t move my jaw. I remember trying to call Myra, but I couldn’t say anything. I was half choking on blood and some of my teeth was broke out. What was left of them wouldn’t line up because she’d knocked my jaw crooked. I know how it sounds, but it took a few minutes to see that my fingers was gone. There was blood all over the place and I guess I was out for quite a while because it was tacky, not fresh. It was all over my shirt and the couch and the coffee table. That’s when I saw the fingers, one there on the table and one on the floor almost underneath it. It took a minute to understand they was my own fingers. I held up my left hand and saw that only my thumb and pinky was left, with the pinky hanging on by a string. I can’t say exactly what went through my head. I lurched around looking for Myra and bawling out in the yard. A train came up about that time and I couldn’t even hear myself hollering anymore.

What I kept seeing in my mind was her offering me that red ring like Eve giving Adam the apple, how her eyes was beautiful and shining, how wild her hair was around her face. The day she gave it to me, she led me up the steepest path I ever saw, a narrow dirt trail, and I nearly tripped I don’t know how many times over tree roots and rocks. One spot, we had to walk across a rotten tree trunk over a mud-hole and I nearly fell in. I was wore out before she was ready to rest. We came to a clearing where there was two big slabs of rock hanging over the bluff. It was a long way down. I was weak in the knees standing out on that ledge, but it was a pretty sight. It was summer and the trees was bright green. A breeze fluttered leaves around and lifted Myra’s hair off of her shoulders. She sat down with her long legs curled under her dress and I sat facing her. She was like a little girl. She said, “Close your eyes and hold out your hand.” I said, “It better not be poison ivy.” She said, “Just do it.” I put out my hand and she placed something in my palm. What she put there was a heavy lump, still warm from where she held it all the way up the mountain. It felt kind of like a lug nut. I opened my eyes and there it was, stones glimmering in the sunshine. I didn’t know if they was rubies or what, but I could tell that ring had cost a lot of money. I looked at her and she was excited, breathing fast and face rosy. “Put it on,” she said. “I know we’re not married yet, but I want you to have it.”

“I ain’t had time to get you one,” I said.

She said she didn’t care, so I went ahead and slipped it on my finger. It was loose but it fit better than I expected it to. She picked up my hand and held it against her cheek.

Standing in the yard that night, covered in blood with a train going by, it was hard to think about what to do next. I did have the sense to go back in the house and wrap my cut-off fingers in a dishrag and take them with me to the emergency room, in case they could be re-attached. The doctor told me later it was too late for that, but I didn’t know it at the time. I can’t say how I made it to the hospital. I don’t even remember driving over there. I kind of remember stumbling through the automatic doors at the emergency room and throwing up on the floor. I believe some boys came to help me up. Next thing I knew, I was laid out on a table and someway I had hung on to my fingers wrapped up in that dishrag. There was a young doctor standing over me, had blood on his scrubs, probably mine. I held the fingers out to him. I couldn’t talk. My mouth was busted all to pieces. The doctor took the rag and opened it up and stared into it. All of a sudden it came to me that one finger was missing and I understood then why she did it.

The doctor looked in my eyes and said, “What happened to you?”

That’s when I knew even if I could’ve answered him, I wouldn’t have. I’d never tell anybody. I was laid up sucking soup through a straw for a long time. I didn’t let the hospital call none of my people because I couldn’t stand for them to know what Myra did to me. At first I plotted how to kill her and get away with it. I knew right where she’d go, back home to her granny’s place. But in my heart, I didn’t want her dead or hurt like I was. She crawled under my skin the first time I saw her and she’s been there ever since.

Myra probably thinks I was the devil, but I loved her. I used to watch her sleeping and something about her hair against the white of the sheet pained my heart. Looking at her made me think about my mama, the only other woman I ever lived with. Once I stepped on a broke bottle and me and Mama sat on the front steps together while she dug it out. For a long time that was my best memory, her prying something out of me. I remember wishing she’d keep that glass, with my blood on it. I wanted her to have it but she pitched it in the weeds. That’s how it was for me. Pitched in the weeds. But after a while I got to where I didn’t feel a thing when I thought about that bloody glass, bitter or sweet. I got used to not being touched. She wasn’t no kind of mother. One time Hollis and me was wrestling and laughing on the kitchen floor while she was trying to talk on the telephone. She took off her shoe and threw it and hit Hollis right between the eyes. He had a knot there for a long time. She wasn’t much of a wife to my daddy, either. Once before city water came through and we still had a well, I remember a man coming in the yard and asking for a drink of water. He went behind the wellhouse to the spigot where Mama was rinsing specks of grass off of her feet after Eugene had mowed. I was outside throwing a baseball up and catching it. After a while I didn’t hear Mama or the man talking. I went around the wellhouse and saw them knelt down with the water still running, making a mud puddle under the spigot, and that man with his hand inside of Mama’s blouse. I never told Daddy, but he suspected her of running around anyway. One night after she came in drunk he broke down the bathroom door and dragged her out. I was watching on the stair landing. He beat her and kicked her and pulled her out the door by the hair of the head, out through the mud and into the street. He got down and straddled her and beat her some more, slapping her over and over in the face. Then he got up and come on back in the house, not even breathing hard. But after I got older, she quit going out all the time with her perfume on and her mouth smeared up. She got to where she stayed in the bed all day long. Daddy used to snigger and hint around that he was slipping something in her drinks to keep her at home. I still don’t know if he was just kidding or if he was being serious. There’s a lot of things about them times that I still ain’t figured out. Like whether or not my mama died of heart trouble or if I poisoned her.