“Well,” I said, but Oleta was done off on another subject before I could answer.
There was quite a bit needed doing. I swept and mopped and put a pot of beans on the stove. As I was tidying up, somehow or other I got to feeling funny. I got to studying on what Oleta asked, did Macon do me that way. I reckon the answer would have been yes if she had give me time. He’d head out for work every morning without saying a word, but he didn’t need to. We knowed each other so good after all them years of marriage, there wasn’t no use in saying much. I’d fix his dinner and put it in his bucket and we’d drink us a cup of coffee beside of the stove, then he’d get up and leave. I didn’t see nothing wrong with it, but the way Oleta said it sounded bad. I tried to remember if I said goodbye to Macon when me and Myra left the house that morning. The whole time I was worshing Oleta’s breakfast dishes and sweeping off the back stoop I was retracing my steps, trying to decide if I told Macon bye. In my head I was waking up before first light, Macon already setting on his side of the bed getting his boots on. I was walking across the dewy grass toward the barn to gather eggs. I was frying the eggs in my old iron skillet and calling for Myra to get up before she slept the day away. I was eating breakfast in the kitchen by myself because Macon and Myra was done before I ever set down. I was bringing in some tomatoes before they rotted on the vine. I was telling Myra if she wanted to walk up to the Cotters’ with me she better come on. I was passing Macon on my way down the hill with Myra as he was headed for the barn. “Did you see them dadburn Japanese beetles on my rosebush?” I asked him. “I was fixing to spray,” he said. That was it. I never did say bye. I reckon he knowed where I was going, because he probably heard me holler at Myra, but I started feeling bad just the same.
The longer I was at the Cotters’, the more anxious I got to get back to the house. I allowed to Oleta I better get on home and fix Macon a bite of supper. I had to stand in the yard and holler for Myra a long time, until she finally came out of the woods looking like she’d rolled in the mud with them Cotter boys, sticks and leaves stuck in her hair. I thought how I’d have to check her head for ticks before she went to bed that night.
Since I’d turned seventy-one, I didn’t get around as good as I used to. I was wore out by the time we got home, but Myra never ran out of wind. She took off for the house soon as we made it up the hill and beat me to the door by a mile. She went on in while I was still dragging across the yard. I seen where Macon had done a little bit of weeding around the steps and there was a mess of wood shavings in the grass, too, so I knowed he must have been whittling. He was getting on in years hisself, nearly eighty by then, and couldn’t take the sun for long at a time. He’d take a break and set down if he got too hot working in the yard, but Macon never could stand for his hands to be idle.
I didn’t think nothing of it and went on in the house. First thing I seen was Myra, standing in the middle of the floor with her back to me, hair ribbon hanging crooked where she’d been playing. It took me a minute to see she was looking at Macon. He was slumped over in his chair, the same way he took a nap of the evenings, but it still didn’t hit me that something was wrong. I reckon I was so hot and weary my head was addled.
“What in the world are you doing?” I asked Myra.
She turned around and I never will forget the look in her eyes. She said, “Is Granddaddy sleeping?”
That’s when I knowed. I walked over to his chair and seen how still he was. “No,” I said to Myra. “He ain’t asleep.” I ran my finger across that island birthmark one more time. Then I sent Myra down to the Barnetts’ for Hacky to get word to the coroner. I hated for her to have to do it alone, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave Macon’s side.
I was setting at Macon’s feet waiting for the people to come when I noticed this little wood box, about the size of my hand. It was on a piece of newspaper on the end table beside of his chair, looked like the varnish was still tacky on it. He must have been working on it for a while out in the barn when I thought he was making another bird-house. Once I seen it I smelled the varnish, but I hadn’t even noticed it until then. The lid was laying separate and it was the prettiest piece of carving I ever seen. It was carved with a bloodroot flower, all by itself. I could tell he’d took time with every petal and every vein in the leaves. I figure he made it for Myra’s birthday to hold her trinkets, and meant to hide it someplace once the varnish dried. Then he’d leave it on her pillow without saying nothing and stand off somewhere waiting for her to find it.
I knowed what it meant that he would give Myra that bloodroot flower. I knowed everything he was trying to say to her. I took Macon’s hand and wet it with my tears, wishing I never left him alone that day. After all me and Macon went through together, for him to die by hisself broke my heart. It took a little bit of work to pull that bloodred ring off of his poor old finger, stained black with the oil of all them engines he’d fiddled with down through the years. His knuckles had swole with arthritis as he got older. But then it was in my palm, like I dropped it in his that day in the cornfield. I put the ring in that fine box he whittled like it was a casket, the last thing he ever done. I took the box and Macon’s whittling knife to the back bedroom, where me and him had started sleeping after Clio got killed by that train so we could feel closer to her. I made a cut in the mattress and hid the box before anybody came to see about Macon’s body. I didn’t want Myra to have it before she knowed how to appreciate it. She was too young to understand the preciousness of that bloodroot flower, no matter how pretty it was, and I didn’t know how to tell her. I slept on top of that ring for four years, until the day I gave it to Myra for that snake John Odom. Now I’d do just about anything to have it back.
DOUG
Myra and I didn’t talk again after that day I found her crouched on the rock. She stopped riding the bus and I knew it was about that tall boy Mark claimed he had seen her with. One night near graduation, Mama and Daddy were talking over supper about how Frankie Odom’s son was struck on Myra. They said he’d been taking her to and from school and coming up the mountain to get her every Saturday night. I recognized the name Odom from a long time ago. We used to stop in at Odom’s Hardware when I was small, but Daddy had stopped trading there after Odom raised his prices. I looked across the table at Mark, his cheeks fat with mashed potatoes. He had lost interest in Myra. All he thought about was joining the service and fighting in Vietnam. I wondered how he could eat when my stomach felt like a cauldron of acid. I guess in my heart of hearts I knew he didn’t love her, but I never thought how quickly he’d move on.
After supper we stood having a smoke out behind the barn, hiding even though we were grown, because we didn’t want to hear Mama’s mouth.
“What do you think about Myra and that Odom boy?” I asked, trying to be casual.
Mark pitched his butt into the dark grass. “Shoot, I gave up on that’n a long time ago. If a man’s not crazy, he’ll finally get the picture.” Mark grinned and slapped me on the back. I pitched my butt with shaking fingers and followed him inside.
The next day, for the last time, I went to see Mr. Barnett. He was in the garden pulling weeds. When he saw me he took off his cap and wiped the sweat from his brow. He didn’t ask what I was up to. We stood for a while in silence, looking toward the woods at the edge of the yard where we had walked together so many times. “You were wrong,” I told him at last. “She won’t ever come around.” Then my knees came unhinged and I sank down in the black dirt. Mr. Barnett knelt with me and hugged me tight. “You’re the one she ought to be with, Douglas,” he said. “You and me both know it’s the truth. But Myra’s got a choice. Everybody’s got a choice. She just made the wrong one.”