I looked for Mr. Barnett to come along behind her, but there was no sign of him. It would have made me feel better, the way he always smiled down at me with his kind eyes. I used to sit on the porch for hours waiting for him to come walking with a bag full of clothes or oranges or candy. Mrs. Barnett was always sending him up the hill with something she thought we needed. The Barnetts were good people and Laura and I had love for them, but we never trusted them completely. Sitting next to Mrs. Barnett on their living room couch as she read us picture books, I always made sure no part of us was touching. Even Laura remained guarded. I think both of us were afraid of betraying our mama by learning too much about the world she had tried to hide us from. Now that world had come knocking on our door, and we didn’t know what to do about it.
We tried to play. Laura found a funny-looking toad and we sat on the ground beside the stoop poking at him with a stick, making him jump in the grass between us, but our hearts weren’t in it. Our eyes kept returning to those papers on the step. When our mama opened the front door at last, our backs stiffened but our faces turned to her. She stood in the doorway looking down at the pamphlets with eyes that didn’t belong on some rawboned mountain woman with sleeptangled hair. Then she bent and lifted the rock, crumpled the tracts in her hand and tossed them into the weeds.
She went down the steps, probably meaning to disappear into the woods, but I couldn’t let her this time. As she stepped onto the grass and turned her back, I reached out to her. I would have said “stay” if my voice had worked. She turned back and looked down at me without expression. Then she stooped to pry my fingers loose with no more feeling than if her dress had been caught on a nail. Laura and I watched as our mama walked off into the trees. Later, when she finally came to gather us close, it was too late.
LAURA
Three days after them church ladies looked in our window, two other cars came up the hill, one with a light on top. The man who got out looked a little bit like Mr. Barnett so I thought he might be nice. Johnny grabbed my arm and said, “Let’s hide.” He tried to drag me off but I was hungry. I stayed in case that man had oranges like Mr. Barnett brung at Christmastime. There was a heavyset woman with papers, too. I watched them walk toward the house. Johnny stood beside me. The man went up to the front door and knocked. Then he noticed us and came over. I seen too late his hands was empty.
“Is your mother home?” he asked, bending down to talk to us.
Right when he asked, I seen her stepping out of the woods with a string of fish. Her legs was wet and specked with grass. There was a leaf stuck to her ankle. When she seen the car she froze in her tracks. The man followed my eyes and turned around. He asked, “Are you Myra Odom?” That’s the first time I knowed our last name. When Mama didn’t answer, he went on talking. “We’re with the Department of Children’s Services, ma’am. I need to speak with you for a minute.”
Mama let the fish slither to the ground. Their bellies flashed in the sun. Then she was running toward us. “Don’t let them touch you,” she said to me and Johnny, her voice jogging up and down. Before them people knowed what was happening, she had took me and Johnny by the shoulders and herded us in the house. The man and woman tried to follow us but Mama was too quick. She slammed the door shut in their faces.
Mama knelt on the floor and gathered me and Johnny up. I could feel her shaking. We watched the door as the man pounded on it. “Open up, Mrs. Odom. I got an order here from the court.” We knelt for a long time in the front room with the furniture left from some life Mama had without us. We hardly ever set on that couch or them chairs but they was ours. Someway it felt like that knocking was taking our things away from us.
It was the longest I could remember Mama holding me and Johnny in a long time. Her body heaved up and down. Her smell, like fish and creek water, filled the room. When the knocking quit she got still between us. Her arm clamped tighter around me but Johnny slipped out of her grip. She snatched after him but he didn’t come back. She stayed on her knees with me. He stood at the window, white and thin with hair like a pile of blackbird wings. I asked, “Are they gone, Johnny?” He said, “No,” and that was all. We waited some more. Johnny finally came back to wait with us. He crouched beside Mama, but not close enough to touch. I don’t know how much time went by. But the knocking came again, then another voice. “This is the police, Mrs. Odom. You’d better come on out.” For a while it was quiet again. This time I didn’t ask if they was gone.
Mama stood up and started walking back and forth. Her bare feet creaked on the floorboards. She cracked her knuckles and tore at her fingernails with her teeth. After a while she got to muttering under her breath. I couldn’t make out the words but she didn’t sound like a person anymore. Johnny and me hugged each other. Her voice got bigger and bigger. Slobber strung down her chin. She walked back and forth faster and faster until she was just about running. Then she was yanking at her hair. Clumps of it trailed from her fingers. I wanted to close my eyes but someway I couldn’t. I called on the fairies but they didn’t come. Johnny got mad and screamed, “Stop it! Stop it!” He covered his eyes like I wanted to. But my eyes kept following Mama back and forth.
Then the loudest pounding came. A different voice hollered, “This is the Polk County Sheriff’s Department. Open the door!” Mama rushed at me and Johnny and swooped us up, one under each arm. She ran with us to the back room. She put us down rough and my sides felt sore. She throwed open the window. The smell of outside and birdsong came in. “Go on,” she whispered at Johnny. Her eyes was red and her mouth was wet. I thought Johnny wouldn’t go. He was shaking his head but he must have got scared not to mind Mama. He climbed up on the dresser. He looked back at me once and disappeared out the window. I was bawling out loud then. The pounding hurt my ears.
Mama turned and knelt down by her bed. She reached into the mattress and pulled out the box. A puff of dirty stuffing came out behind it. She shoved the box in my hand but my fingers didn’t want to close around it. Mama made them. She pressed them so hard around the wood it hurt. That’s when I heard the front door breaking open. She lifted me under the arms and pushed me towards the window. “Run,” she said.
Johnny wasn’t gone. He was crouched under the window. I knelt down with him. We listened to Mama’s screams and things breaking as she fought. We couldn’t leave her, even if she had left us so many times. After the fighting was over, it didn’t take them long to find me and Johnny huddled there. By then, Mama was gone from us forever.
JOHNNY
All that happened after we were found under our mama’s bedroom window is like a blur in my memory. A social worker took us to a house in Valley Home, about ten miles from Bloodroot Mountain. She left us with a couple named Ed and Betty Fox and their two children. The man owned a carpet-cleaning business and drove a white van with a fox painted on the door. The woman was obese and Laura and I couldn’t stop staring at her. She asked us to call her Mother Betty as she led us to the kitchen, where it smelled like cookies baking. We stopped in the doorway gaping at the shiny appliances, the row of cabinets, the plants hanging in the window. The bright rooster wallpaper hurt my eyes.