Thinking about Wild Rose coming home in a trailer reminds me of the first time I saw Myra, dropping out of a tree behind the church house at the homecoming dinner. Her dress flew up like a parachute, tiny legs waving and black hair floating out behind her. Myra had been around my whole life, because the Lambs lived down the mountain and went to our church, but that was the first time I took notice of her. Myra didn’t cry when she landed, but Mr. Lamb rushed to her side, dropping his paper plate and splattering food everywhere. He spanked her in front of the whole congregation and I didn’t blame him. He was scared. It was only natural to be protective of something so precious. I knew the feeling myself, even as a small boy. You took extra care of your special things. That’s how I thought of Myra, as something extra special and wild. The wild part was scary to Mr. Lamb and me both, because it meant we were always in danger of losing her.
From the day she dropped out of that tree behind the church, I thought about Myra all the time. I followed her around school once first grade started, even though I was too backward to make friends with any of the other kids. Naturally, once Mark realized how I felt about Myra, he decided he wanted her, too. He set about stealing her attention every chance he got, making her laugh by pulling faces and burping in the library.
When Mark and I were old enough to go off by ourselves, we walked down the mountain to play with Myra as often as we could. She liked to wear dresses in warm weather, even though she was a tomboy, because she couldn’t stand for her legs to be confined. I guess it was easier for her to run away from us with a floppy dress on. Sometimes she disappeared into the woods at the end of the day without a word and we learned not to look for her. She always came back out to play again. The three of us spent nearly every weekend shooting tin cans with my BB gun and catching grasshoppers and wrestling in the mud if we got mad at each other. Myra jumped on my back and bit me once because I beat her at a game of marbles. She was a spoiled brat, but I didn’t mind. I was her fool from the minute she jumped out of that churchyard tree.
It was best when we ran off alone together. I followed her places where Mark wouldn’t go, into dripping caves littered with bones and hollow logs squirming with sow bugs. I wasn’t afraid when I was with her. We played all over the woods, not concerned about trespassing. My family and the Lambs and the Barnetts were the only ones living near the top of Bloodroot Mountain. The women shared their gardens and wherever the hunting was good a neighbor was welcome to shoot what he could. Fences were meant for keeping livestock in and strangers out, not for each other.
Bloodroot Mountain is small as far as mountains go. Daddy says it’s not even a thousand feet at the summit, but as a child it was the whole world to me. I knew that at the bottom of the mountain, a little over twelve miles down winding roads, through farming communities like Piney Grove and Slop Creek and Valley Home, there was Millertown, and about sixty miles beyond that was Chickweed Holler, where Myra’s granny came from. I had traveled that far with Daddy and seen the lay of the land, long stretches of corn and high grass, bridges over foaming waters, and white farmhouses scattered on hills. But the minute I got back home, with none of those places visible through the trees, I forgot about them. There was only Bloodroot Mountain and I didn’t mind because Myra was up here with me. The whole mountain belonged to us and we knew its terrain like our own bodies, every scar and cleft and fold.
But one fall morning, when I was ten, the three of us found something we hadn’t seen before. It was an abandoned cistern high on the slope behind the Barnetts’ house, half covered in dead vines. Myra pulled back the growth to reveal a stone opening edged with moss. Bright leaves floated on the surface of the murky water collected inside. I held my breath as Myra knelt to look closer. I’d heard tales of children drowning in wells and cisterns. Suddenly the trees I had lived under all my life seemed like giants peering over our shoulders, some so tall a grown man couldn’t have reached the lowest branches. I looked back toward Mr. Barnett’s house, a swatch of dingy white peeking up through the skinny trunks. It seemed so far below us, like there were no grown-ups around for miles.
“Oh,” Myra said. “Poor little thing.”
Mark crouched beside Myra and I took a step forward, not wanting her to think Mark was braver than me. I leaned over and saw a baby chimney swift floating among the leaves. I swallowed hard and inched a little closer.
“Must have fell out of a nest,” Mark said, glancing into the trees overhead.
“Chimney swifts don’t live in trees,” Myra said. “Look, there’s a nest in here.”
When she pointed I saw an empty cradle of straw in the shadows below the cistern’s opening. It made the bird’s death even sadder somehow, that its corpse had been left behind. I lowered myself beside Myra, the earth cold under my knees. I couldn’t look away from the dark clump of feathers, the tiny, sealed-shut eyes. We peered into the cistern for a long time, like mourners at a graveside. I didn’t notice until it was almost too late how far over Myra was leaning, her top half nearly lost in the dank gloom. Then we heard the crack of twigs and the thrash of fallen leaves. Before I had time to wonder who was coming, a big hand hauled Myra away from the cistern’s stone mouth by the back of her dress. Mark and I scrambled to our feet, eyes wide. It was Haskell Barnett standing there with a crease between his bushy eyebrows, leaning on the handle of his axe.
“Myra Jean Lamb,” he said. “Your granddaddy would skin you alive if he caught you up here messing around. And you boys ought to get a switching, too.”
The three of us stood in a line gaping up at him. I was half afraid he would take matters into his own hands and do the switching himself. He frowned down at us, maybe waiting for one of us to speak up, but my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. Then Myra burst out crying, which was a surprise to me. She wasn’t prone to tears.
“Here, now,” Mr. Barnett said, softening right away. “I didn’t mean to make you squall. But I told Byrdie and Macon I’d always watch over you. What would they think if I let you fall down a dadburn hole?” He put his big hand on top of Myra’s head and she dried her eyes hard on her sleeve. I knew she was embarrassed to have cried.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t tell Granddaddy, okay?”
“I won’t this time,” he said. “But don’t you younguns be messing around that old cistern anymore. Now come on to the house. Margaret’s made banana bread.”
I looked back to where the chimney swift floated, the loneliness of its corpse still tearing at me. I was sorry to leave it behind but I wanted to follow Mr. Barnett. If it was true that he swore to watch over Myra, we were in on something together now.
BYRDIE
One morning I woke up with the thresh. My mouth was broke out so thick with sores I couldn’t hardly swallow. Della said, “Ain’t but one thing’ll take care of this.”
Mammy was standing over my bed looking worried. “What?” she asked.
“A man that’s never laid eyes on his father.”
“Who’ll we take her to?” Myrtle asked, standing in the doorway with her hand on her hip. She looked blurry to me. My mouth hurt so bad I couldn’t see straight.
“Clifford Pinkston’s the closest,” Grandmaw said, leaning over to rub my hair.
“You can’t tell me Clifford Pinkston never seen his daddy,” Mammy said. “I went to school with him and I seen his daddy my own self a hundred times.”
“Howard Pinkston ain’t Clifford’s daddy,” Grandmaw said. She was done getting her headscarf on. “He was an orphan and the Pinkstons took him to raise.” She turned back to me and when she smiled I felt a little better. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll get you fixed up right quick. Clifford just lives down the holler a piece.”