My fingers shook as I turned the mold-spotted pages. It was like hearing my mama’s voice in my head, the lilting way she recited her verses, the rhythm and music of all those poems bringing her back to me. Then, about halfway through the last volume, I dropped it in the dirt. I’d seen my mama’s words, those she whispered so often I thought they were from the Bible or maybe something she made up, printed there in smeary ink.
“These beauteous forms, through a long absence, have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man’s eye, but oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din of towns and cities, I have owed to them, in hours of weariness, sensations sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart….” I picked up the book and read the poem over and over. It had been written by William Wordsworth about a place called Tintern Abbey. I whispered it out loud and my mama’s presence came creeping over me. I looked down and saw a dark blot with crawling tendrils like long, black hair spreading over the dirt and pooling around my feet. I know now it must have been my imagination, but it seemed like she was more with me there under the Lawsons’ front porch than she had ever been on Bloodroot Mountain.
I crawled out from under the porch and went inside, holding tight to the books from the woods. Wanda had left my plate wrapped in a dish towel on the stove. I ate in the darkened kitchen and put my plate in the sink and took the books to my room along the back of the house. I switched on the naked bulb overhead and wrote my first poem sitting on the bed. I scribbled until pale light seeped under the window shade and my fingers were numb and the arm once stiffened by a copperhead bite sang with pain. It was clear now what I needed to do. This was a sign I couldn’t ignore. I had to see our house on the mountain one more time. Then, whether he was alive or dead, I had to find my father.
When I went to Odom’s Hardware a week later, I didn’t have to fake being sick to get out of school. The Lawsons left for work at dawn and I waited in my bed, thinking a hardware store wouldn’t be open so early. I brought my notebook from under the mattress and wrote again until my mind was empty and the sun was higher in the sky. Somehow getting the thoughts out calmed me. My hands were steady as I pulled on my shoes and ran a comb through my hair. I left the house and cut through the woods until I came out behind the high school. It wasn’t a long walk from there to Main Street. The buildings were abandoned looking, display windows crammed with junk, some cracked and repaired with tape. When I saw Odom’s Hardware, my own name painted on the dull red bricks of the building, my stomach clenched. It felt like someone or something else piloted my body down the sidewalk to the propped-open door. I stepped inside and the floor was made of wide, grimy planks that creaked under my feet. Once my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw long aisles of shelves holding dusty cardboard boxes spilling bolts and screws and hinges. By the dirty light of the smeared plate-glass window I saw him perched on a stool behind the counter, just inside the door. It seemed as if he’d been waiting for me all along. I walked closer to see my uncle better, a smallish man with cigarettes in the breast pocket of his shirt, sitting in a shaft of whirling dust. He was unremarkable, with slicked-back hair, a plain, ruddy face, and ears too large for his head.
“Help you?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said, taking another step closer. He rose from the stool and placed his hands on the counter, leaning forward. The way his eyes narrowed made my heart race.
“What are you looking for today?” he asked. I could see his mind working as he took me in, trying to decide where he knew me from.
“My father,” I said.
He stared at me hard for a long moment, face strangely still. He touched something metal hanging from his neck, gleaming dully in the gloom. I saw that it was a pair of dogtags. He rubbed his thumb over them as if for comfort. Then he laughed but his eyes didn’t change. “Your father, huh? Are you pulling my leg?”
“No.”
The man stopped laughing. That’s when we remembered each other at the same time. I could see the light coming on in his eyes. In my head, he was standing in the parking lot of the co-op all over again. I could hear the slap of his palm on Mr. Barnett’s hood. I stepped closer and put my hands on the counter so we were almost nose to nose.
“What’s your name, boy?” he asked softly, although I suspected he already knew. I could smell cigarettes on his breath, in his clothes.
“Odom,” I said. “Just like yours.”
The redness crept up from his neck to set his lined face on fire. “I know you,” he said, calmly enough. “I knowed your mama, too.”
I pressed my palms harder into the counter and stared at his throat, imagining how it would feel between my fingers. My voice was surprisingly even when I opened my mouth. “You said you knew what she did to your brother. Is he dead or alive?”
“You think I’d tell you a damn thing about my brother?” Hollis Odom asked through gritted teeth. A dot of spittle landed under my eye. It burned there but I didn’t move to wipe it away. “Hell, you probably ain’t even his. I didn’t know that whore had any babies. I would have called the human services on her after I seen you all at the co-op but I figured they’d come around with their hands stuck out, wanting us to take responsibility. We don’t owe you nothing, boy. You been signed over to the state a long time ago. You ain’t no Odom. And you ain’t got no business sniffing around here, so you might as well get along, before I put you out.”
“What was it you called her?” I asked, jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached. My hand shot out to seize his throat as if of its own volition. His eyes bulged and his face went plum. He pried at my fingers and I dug in deeper, the dogtags pressing into his flesh. I can’t say when I would have let go if he hadn’t scrambled around with one hand under the counter, knocking things onto the floor, and come up with a gun. He thrust its long barrel into my face. It didn’t even look real. I let go of his throat and watched, heart drumming in my ears, as he whooped and coughed and spat, leaning on the counter for support, still clutching the gun in his hand. When he was finally able to speak he croaked between hectic breaths, “You get out of here before I shoot you right between the eyes. I ever see your face in here again I’ll have you throwed under the jail. You hear me?”
I backed out of the store and into the sun. I stood looking at the building, breathing hard, thinking what to do next. It was only then that I realized I had somehow ripped the dogtags from around his neck. I was squeezing them tight in my hand, their notched edges biting into my palm. I opened my fingers and saw how old the tags looked, maybe from the Second World War. The name pressed into the metal was Franklin J. Odom. I knew they had belonged to Frankie Odom, my grandfather. I didn’t wonder what the middle initial stood for, either. It was John, like my father. It was Johnny, like me.