I guess some part of me must have died anyhow because it was easier when my boy Willis got killed. It’s awful to say but it’s the truth. I had Willis in 1924, three years after Patricia, Jack, and Sue was gone. I didn’t want to have no more babies for a long time because I was scared of losing them, but Macon begged me to. I never seen that man beg to nobody before, but he got down on his knees as I was trying to hang the worsh and clung to my legs. “This house is too lonesome, Byrdie,” he said. “I can’t stand it.” People might have thought Macon didn’t have no feelings, but his heart was softer than just about anybody else’s you could find, including mine. He loved younguns and animals better than anything, and couldn’t be happy unless there was a child or dog underfoot. I gave in because I couldn’t stand to see Macon that way, and we had Willis.
Willis wasn’t no good, from the time he was little. He’d bite my nipple hard as he could soon as his teeth came in, and would fight me with his fists anytime he didn’t get his way. Willis broke my heart every day he was alive. I don’t know what went wrong with that boy. I reckon it had to been something me and Macon done. Someway or another, we wasn’t cut out to raise younguns. That might be how come the Lord took them from us. All I can figure out is we spoiled them too much. I believe we ruint Willis and Clio both by smothering them, and I reckon we did the same thing to Myra when she came along. I treated Willis like a little king, made him sugar cookies every day until nearly every tooth in his head rotted out, and he still hated me and Macon both.
Whatever made Willis that way, he was meaner than a striped snake. He got stabbed in a bar fight when he wasn’t but twenty years old and bled to death. The ones that done it throwed him off of a bluff and he laid there a week until somebody found him. I never did feel like Willis loved me. Maybe that’s how come it was easier to take. Besides that, me and Macon still had Clio. She came to us late in life and you’d think we would have learnt our lesson, but we couldn’t help petting Clio rotten, too, until she growed up and turned against us. I believe she blamed us for being born on a mountain. Why, we didn’t ask for her no more than she asked for us. That was the Lord’s doing.
DOUG
For a while after my fall on the mountain Myra wouldn’t look at my face, even when we were laughing. I wanted to tell her she was forgiven but that would have been like accusing her. I knew she didn’t want to talk about what happened so I kept it to myself, until the day we sat in the barn loft eating peaches. Her eye caught mine and darted away and I couldn’t stand the awkwardness anymore. “We can climb to the top again if you want,” I said. “I bet we could make it this time.” She turned to me, sucking shreds of peach from a wrinkled pit. She took the pit from her mouth and closed her hand tight around it. I held my breath, waiting for her to speak. After a while she opened her palm, looked down at the peach pit, and said, “Let’s bury this and see if anything grows.” I didn’t bring the subject up again. It would only have made things worse between us.
It’s true that Myra and Wild Rose are two of a kind. That’s why they took to each other so quickly. If I believed that talk I heard about witches, I’d figure Wild Rose was Myra’s familiar. But there’s one difference I can think of between them. Wild Rose never let me within arm’s reach of her, but I got away with touching Myra once. It was because of the poems. All through elementary school Myra and I had the same teachers, and in high school we always had at least one class together. Junior year it was English. Myra loved the poems we studied, especially Wordsworth. “It’s like he’s talking about here,” she said. “He wrote this one a few miles above a place in England called Tintern Abbey, but I can tell he feels the same way as I do about Bloodroot Mountain. Does that make any sense to you?” I said yes, but it didn’t matter to me. I just liked hearing her talk.
Whenever she knew that Mark was away from home, she would come walking up the mountain to find me, carrying one of her books, wearing a floppy old dress with the sun in her eyes. Just to make sure, she always asked, “Where’s Mark?” I’d smile with my lips closed over my broken tooth, knowing she needed to share the poems she loved with somebody quiet. I’d say, “Mark’s gone hunting,” or fishing, or down to the pool hall with some of his friends. Then she’d ask if I wanted to take a walk. She didn’t really have to ask. She knew I’d follow her anywhere, branches slapping my face in her wake.
Most of the time we went to a big rock high on the mountain behind her house and I’d sit there with her for hours, listening to her read. But that day we decided to walk down to the creek branch instead, where it runs downhill beside the road. She was quiet and I thought maybe she had spied an animal or bug she wanted to touch. She could track for hours, shushing Mark and me, telling us to go away, even though we never did. But there was no lizard, no squirrel or frog this time. She was only thinking.
When we came to the creek branch we crawled under the pink rhododendron together, where its low branches made a cave of shadows sprinkled with coins of light. She read for a while, but I could tell there was something on her mind. Finally, she put down her book and sat on a rock with her feet in the water. I stared at them through the silt-swirling ripples. They were long and slim, smooth on top and leathery on the bottom. “I got a chickadee to eat out of my hand,” she said, dipping her cupped palm in the water.
“How’d you do that?”
“You know that stump behind the house where Granny scatters seed? They come in droves this time of year, all different kinds of birds. I’ve been sitting there every day with my hand out. They’re used to me now.”
“Reckon they think you’re part of the stump?”
“I am,” she said.
She lowered herself off the rock and into the branch, her dress darkening and spreading in the water. She lay back on the rocks with light shifting on her face, fingers of creek water closing across her middle.
“Can I tell you something?” She closed her eyes and propped up on her elbows. The water trickled over her thighs and played with her dress tail. I couldn’t stop looking at her pale body, stretched out long and hard in the creek branch.
“Yeah.”
“I’m afraid you’ll think I’m crazy.”
“I won’t.”
“I thought… it was like …that chickadee was my mother.”
Myra had never mentioned her dead mama to me before. “Like reincarnation?” I asked. “Better not let the church folks hear you talking that way.”
Myra smiled. “Not exactly.”
“Like a ghost or something?”
“More like a spirit. Like she’s still here.”
“The Bible says there’s two places people go when they die.”
I looked at her stomach, the black dress gathering in neat wrinkles where her navel was hidden. I imagined a dark slit filling with water.
“I wonder about her. You know she moved off to town with my father when she was seventeen. I can’t figure out how she could leave this place. She must not have been like me.”
I lowered myself into the water beside Myra. The cold took my breath. “Does it make you sad?”