Amy Greene - Bloodroot

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I didn’t look up at her face. I already knew it, pale with slit eyes and a fuzzy ring of dun-colored hair. She sat in the desk next to mine staring at me all day. I looked at her shoes instead, mud-crusted brogans with the laces untied. They were probably hand-me-downs from her brother, a bone-thin boy who was always throwing up. There was a rumor that he needed surgery on his stomach but their parents couldn’t afford it. Tina’s father drew a disability check and her mother had run off with another man. I didn’t answer her. I waited for her to go away, but she sat down in the grass close to me. I scooted over. When she breathed through her mouth I could smell her rotten teeth.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” she asked.

My heart leapt to hear Myra called my girlfriend. I thought at first she was making fun of me, but I glanced at her eyes and they were serious. Maybe Tina Cutshaw wasn’t so bad. I poked a twig through the fence. “She’s got the chicken pox,” I said.

Tina was silent for a minute but I could still feel her watching me. It made my skin crawl. “You oughtn’t to mess with that girl,” she said finally. She plucked a thistle and twirled its stalk between her thumb and forefinger. Part of me wanted to ask what she was talking about, but I didn’t. I glanced at her dirty face. She grinned and tickled herself under the chin with the thistle’s prickly head. “Don’t you know about her people? My mamaw said they’re witches. You better watch out. She’ll put a hex on you.”

I turned away from Tina Cutshaw and stared through the chain link at the silent graves, wishing for her to disappear. I could feel my ears reddening.

“It’s true,” she said. “Mamaw told me. If you keep hanging around with that girl, you’ll be cursed the rest of your life. All kinds of bad things will happen to you.”

I should have got up and walked off but somehow I couldn’t move. Then I felt a touch under my chin, a sly tickling. I jerked away and she dropped the thistle in my lap. I pressed my face into the chain link so hard that my cheeks and forehead hurt. “What’s wrong, Doug?” Tina Cutshaw asked. “I can be your girlfriend if you want.”

After school I walked down the mountain to see Mr. Barnett, chest tightening as I passed the house where I knew Myra was sick in bed. I found Mr. Barnett hammering on his roof, where a storm had blown off some shingles. I waited on the porch until he came down, trying not to think about Tina Cutshaw and the prickle of her thistle’s head.

“What do you say, Douglas?” Mr. Barnett said, coming around the house with his hammer. He stopped grinning when he saw my face. “Lord have mercy, boy. You look like you done lost your best friend.” I stared down at my shoes, not ready yet to talk.

He left the hammer on the steps and I followed him across the yard, hands stuffed deep in my coat pockets against the cold. Halfway up the slope, when I still hadn’t spoken, Mr. Barnett asked what was on my mind. “Something happened at school,” I said. I told him about Tina Cutshaw all in a rush, barely stopping to pause for breath. When I was finished, light-headed and dizzy, I waited for him to say it was nonsense. He moved silently under the winter trees, eyes tracking a red bird, until I began to think he wouldn’t respond at all. Then he startled me by saying, “I figured you’d hear it sooner or later. That talk’s been going around ever since Byrdie came here from Chick-weed Holler.” I stopped and stared but he walked on without me. I hurried to catch up.

“Back when Byrdie and her mama first came to Piney Grove to worship, there was an old busybody in the congregation by the name of Ethel Cox. She had something ill to say about everybody. My mama was in charge of organizing the bake sale that year and she held a meeting at our house. Well, there wasn’t much talk about a bake sale that night. It was stuffy so Mama had opened the windows. I stood outside smoking and heard the whole thing. Big old Ethel got up and said, ‘Before we get started, there’s something important that ort to be addressed.’ She was always trying to sound proper. I peeped in and seen her standing in front of one of the chairs Mama had arranged in a circle, big as a Sherman tank in that flowered dress she wore all the time. She said, ‘I’m talking about that Pinkston woman and her girl that’s been coming to Sunday morning services. I thought I knew that woman the minute I seen her. I got to talking with my second cousin that lives in Chickweed Holler where the Pinkstons come from, and I figured it out.’ Then she took a big pause. The other ladies was getting restless. It was hot and they was fanning theirselves with paper fans Mama got from the funeral home. I could tell they wished Ethel would get on with it. Ethel said, ‘That woman’s mother is Ruth Bell, one of the Chickweed Holler witches.’ I knowed she expected everybody to gasp and carry on, but they just looked at her like she was crazy. She said, ‘Ain’t you all ever heard of the Chickweed Holler witches?’ Her fat cheeks was turning red. Mama asked her what in the world she was talking about. She never could stand Ethel Cox. Ethel said, ‘The women of that family has been practicing witchcraft up in them hills since time out of mind. I been hearing stories about them all of my life.’ Mama said, ‘Now, Ethel, you know there ain’t no such thing as witchcraft.’ Ethel looked mad enough to spit. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and said, ‘Well, them Bell women thinks there is. They’re up yonder making love potions and casting spells, and who knows what all. We can’t have people like that joining our church.’ Then Mama got Ethel’s goat real good. She said, ‘If what you say is the truth, it sounds like they need to be in church just about as bad as you do.’ I believe Ethel would’ve choked Mama dead on the spot if she could have got away with it. She stood there for another minute red in the face, mouth working like a fish on dry land, trying to think of something else to say, before she finally set back down. If it hadn’t been for Mama, Ethel Cox might have got her way and run Byrdie off.”

He fell silent and we walked on for a while, our shadows long on the frozen ground. I listened to the wind stirring through the trees. It sounded like an incantation. “Mr. Barnett,” I said at last. He glanced at me and kept on walking. “Do you believe it?”

He seemed to think it over, maybe deciding if he should go on. “I never did buy that talk about witches,” he said. “But sometimes I thought about it. Like one time I walked up the hill to take Byrdie and Macon a cake Margaret made and seen Myra sleeping under a tree. She was just a little bitty thing then, must have got tuckered out playing and laid down right yonder in the shade to take a nap. I walked up to make sure she was all right before I went in the house. That’s when I seen the butterflies. They was lit all over her arms and legs and in her hair. There was even two or three on her face, all sizes and colors with their wings opening and closing. I shut my eyes, thinking I might be seeing things. But when I opened them up, all of the butterflies was still there and Myra still sleeping away. She looked like a child out of a fairy story. For some reason, I was scared to death. Directly Myra opened her eyes and blinked at me. I kept still and held my breath to see what she would do. It took her a second to notice anything was unusual. Then she raised up her arms and said, ‘Look, Mr. Barnett. Look at the birds.’ I never told anybody this story except for you, Douglas. Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it.”

There was nothing else to say after that. We walked out of the woods and parted without a goodbye. Dark was already falling across the mountain as I headed home. I was late for supper but I stopped in the road for a while anyway to look up at Myra’s house. The front windows glowed and there was smoke rising out of the chimney. I tried to send her a message in case mind reading was one of her powers. I love you, I shouted without words across the rushing creek and the rocky ground and through the walls that kept me out. Then I moved on, feeling empty and lonesome and like someone cursed.