Grandmaw had the best gift of all. She claimed she could send her spirit up out of her body. She said, “You could lock me up in the jail-house or bury me alive down under the ground. It don’t matter where this old shell is at. My soul will fly off wherever I want it to be.” She told me about a time she fell down in a sinkhole when she was little and couldn’t climb back out. She had wandered far from the house and knowed her mammy and pappy couldn’t hear her. She looked up at the sun between the roots hanging down like dirty hair and wished so hard to fly up out of there that her spirit took off, rose, and soared on back to her little house in the holler. That’s when she figured out what her gift was. She had no memory of being stuck in a hole that day. What she remembered was watching her mammy roll out biscuit dough and romping with her puppy dog and picking daisies to braid a crown. Grandmaw wasn’t even hollering when a man out hunting came along and his dog sniffed her out. That’s the gift I wish I had. I’d go back to Chickweed Holler right now and see if everything still looks the same.
DOUG
It doesn’t take as much to poison a horse as people think. You just have to know what to feed one. A few oleander leaves, a little sorghum grass, a bit of yellow star thistle and a horse can choke faster than the vet can get there. Tie your horse to a black locust or a chokecherry tree and it could be dead within minutes. Bloodroot is dangerous to horses, too. We have a carpet of it growing down the side of our mountain when springtime comes, thriving under the shady tree canopy high above our house. We have to walk quite a piece each year to find it. Daddy says such a lush stand is rare these days. My brother Mark, Daddy, and I used to go up there with hand spades and a sack, noses red in the leftover cold of winter. Bloodroot can be harvested in fall but the leaves have died back, so it’s harder to know where the plants are. That’s why we always made the trip in early spring, when the flowers are spread across the slope like the train of a wedding gown. We had to be careful not to damage the roots. When Mark and I were small, Daddy would yell at us if we were too rough, “That’s money y’uns is throwing away!” He taught us to shake the roots free of clinging black soil and brush off the bugs and pluck away any weeds that might have got tangled in. Then we had to move fast because bloodroot is easy to mold. We’d head back down the mountain with our sacks to spray the roots with the water hose attached to the wellhouse spigot, washing away the dirt. Once the roots were clean we put them in the smokehouse to dry for about a week. Daddy or one of us would check them for mold once in a while, and when they broke without bending they were dry enough to store. Sometimes we got up to ten dollars a pound. I’ve heard bloodroot’s good for curing croup, and it’s even been used for treating certain kinds of cancer. Some of it we kept for ourselves, to use on poison ivy and warts. I’ve known bloodroot to last in a cool, dark place for up to two years. It will also kill a horse. Daddy told me so last spring, the last time we went up the mountain to dig.
It was March and still cold enough to see our breath. Daddy lumbered along beside me and Mark walked on ahead because, even though we’re both grown, he always had to be the fastest. We heard the crack of Wild Rose’s hooves before we saw her.
“Dang horse,” Mark said. He hoisted himself up by a sapling onto a shelf of rock. “She’s loose again.”
Daddy shook his head but I saw a grin ripple under his beard. His beloved Rose could do no wrong. Not far up the mountain we saw the bloodroot, a lacy white patch littered with dead leaves. Wild Rose stepped out of the trees near the scattering of flowers and stood looking down at us, tail switching. Her beauty took my breath away.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen her stray this far from home,” Mark said. “She must be looking for something to eat up here that she’s not getting in the pasture. Do you think she needs a dose of vitamins, Daddy?”
Wild Rose blinked at us indifferently for another second or two, then lowered her head to crop at the mossy grass beside the patch of bloodroot. All of a sudden Daddy sprang forward and threw up his arms. “Hyar, Rose!” he shouted. “Git!” Wild Rose turned and thundered off between the trees, tail high.
“Shoot, Daddy,” Mark said. “You scared me half to death.”
“Wouldn’t take much of that bloodroot to kill a horse,” Daddy said. He straightened his stocking hat and picked up the sack he had dropped. He moved on with Mark but I stood looking after Rose for a long time.
“This here’s a three-man operation, Douglas,” Daddy finally called. I went and joined them on my knees among the flowers.
BYRDIE
There was others in the family that had the touch, but some didn’t use it for good purposes. Grandmaw always said it can draw ugly things to you if you’re not right with the Lord. Whenever she talked like that, I figured she was thinking about her cousin Lou Ann. Most people thought Lou Ann wasn’t all there, but that was no excuse for her to be so hateful. She was a granny woman, too, but the neighbors didn’t go to her unless they was ashamed to go to Grandmaw and Della and Myrtle. Sometimes a girl would go up to Lou Ann’s to get rid of an unwanted child she was carrying. Lou Ann knowed what kind of root to use. She wasn’t above putting a curse on somebody, either. When my great-grandpaw died, he left the best plot of land to Grandmaw and her sisters. It liked to drove Lou Ann off the deep end. She told Grandmaw that she was putting a curse on them that wouldn’t be lifted until there was a baby born in our line with haint blue eyes. Haint blue is a special color that wards off evil spirits and curses. Grandmaw said, “That old devil knows ain’t nobody been born with blue eyes in our family for generations.” It was true, all of us had brown and green eyes. Lou Ann went down to Grandmaw’s house and pronounced her curse, then she climbed back up the hill and shut the door on her little shack perched on a ledge and never spoke to Grandmaw or the great-aunts ever again. I seen her sometimes setting on her porch and even though I couldn’t make out her face from such a distance, it seemed like her mean eyes was piercing right through me. After she laid that curse Grandmaw said awful things started happening to her and her sisters. Grandmaw, Myrtle, and Della all lost their husbands right close together, and two of Della’s grandbabies was stillborn. Myrtle’s house burnt down across the holler, and that’s how come she moved in with Grandmaw. Even though I lost all five of my children, I don’t believe in curses. But I was still glad all the same, the first time I seen Myra and she opened up them big haint blue eyes to look at me.
After Lou Ann died, Grandmaw and the great-aunts painted the doors and windowsills of the house haint blue to keep her mean old spirit out. Anytime that blue started to fade in the weather, they’d get out the paint can and freshen it up. Mammy said they kept it up until the last one of them, Myrtle, died at the age of ninety-two, after I had done married Macon a long time ago and moved off to Bloodroot Mountain.
DOUG
Daddy believes he knows that horse better than anybody, just because he loves her better. But nobody knows Wild Rose better than me, and sometimes I think I hate her. I’ve studied her for years now. Many times I’ve tried to enter her body, wishing to know how to enter Myra Lamb’s. I’ve stood at the fence and watched Wild Rose grazing on the mountain, a dark outline against the pale sky right before the sun is gone, and sent my soul across the rolling green searching for entry, maybe through the tear ducts of the blue glass eyes, maybe through the snuffling channels of the downy nose, or through the grass she rips from the earth and grinds between her big square teeth. Most of the time Wild Rose stands a few yards off with her head lowered, staring back at me. Her tail keeps moving, flicking off flies, but it’s me she’s concentrating on. She’s known for a while that I’m up to something, way before that stunt I tried to pull with the bloodroot last night, when I heard for sure that Myra got married. I guess I’ve wanted to poison Wild Rose for a long time, ever since the day I saw her standing beside the bloodroot patch.