“When Della was young and silly,” Granny said, “she had dealings with Lou Ann herself. She got struck on an old boy that came around selling Bibles, not that he ever cracked one open. Nothing do her, she had to have him. But he wouldn’t look twice at her. Well, Della went to see Lou Ann, with Grandmaw Ruth and Myrtle both begging her not to. She came back looking peaked. They all still lived at home and she asked her mammy if they could have chicken for supper. Said she’d be the one to cook it. Their mammy said she reckoned so. Della went out in the yard and caught her one right then, wrung its neck and plucked it and took it in the kitchen. She pulled out the innards and Grandmaw and Myrtle thought she was fixing to make chicken livers. But that ain’t what she was up to. She found that chicken’s heart, popped it in her mouth, and swallowed it whole. Grandmaw and Myrtle seen her do it. She hacked and carried on, but she kept it down. Lo and behold, the next day that Bible salesman came calling. Him and Della ran off and got married. It didn’t last long, though. Grandmaw said he beat Della like a mule. I reckon he got shot six months later, messing around with some other man’s wife. Della wouldn’t talk about it much, but she told me all the time, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’”
Granny was always telling stories like that, about Grandmaw Ruth and the great-aunts and Mammy and Pap. I know she was trying to teach me something, but that wasn’t her only reason. After so many years, she still missed her family. As much as she loved Bloodroot Mountain, she talked sometimes about going back to Chickweed Holler and seeing the old homestead again. It belonged now to distant cousins who wrote her letters. Once she went so far as to ask Granddaddy if he would drive her over there, but when the day came to travel she changed her mind. “I reckon I better stick close to home,” she said. “I’m too old to be running off. I used to dream about crossing the ocean on a ship and seeing the world, but it never happened. Your granddaddy scratched that itch.”
But it seemed nothing could scratch mine. The soles of my feet itched so hard in the night, they almost burned. Whenever Granny saw me squirming, she looked troubled. One night I asked her to scratch my feet. She said, “No use in me scratching them. You took that after me. Ain’t but one cure, and I dread the day that itch gets satisfied.”
“What day, Granny?”
“The day you run off from here.”
“I won’t ever!”
“I don’t know if you can help it,” she said, reaching under the quilt to take one of my feet in her warm hand.
She was right about me. I’ve done a lot of things I never thought I’d do. When I was a little girl, I always figured I would marry a mountain man, who knew the sting of briar scratches, the teeth-rattling shiver of cold creek water, the black smell of garden soil that made you want to roll in it. But John was the first thing I ever saw that was prettier than my home. The first time I laid eyes on him, we had gone to Odom’s Hardware after seeds. Granny usually ordered them from a catalogue, but that Saturday we were working in the yard when Mr. Barnett stopped to drop off a red velvet cake from Margaret. He was headed to Millertown for nails and snail bait. He asked if we wanted to come along and I was surprised when Granny said, “Why, I believe I will. Let me run in the house and get my pocket-book.” I could tell by the way she turned her face into the summer wind as we rode down the mountain that she just wanted to go for a ride. I was always up for a trip to town myself. The high school was usually the closest I got, unless I hitched a ride with Doug or Mark or went along with one of my girlfriends. Granddaddy had left behind a truck when he died, but it was rusting in the barn because Granny never learned how to use it. Sometimes it was like being stranded on an island. But I felt free as we drove past the red brick school building, making waves with my arm out the window.
There were only a few people milling the streets downtown. I drifted behind Granny and Mr. Barnett as they browsed the dim aisles of the hardware store. I was ready to go after we’d picked out the seeds, but Granny and Mr. Barnett stopped to make small talk with the man behind the counter, about weather and farming and inflated prices. I asked Granny if I could walk to the dime store and Mr. Barnett handed me his bag of nails. “Will you put these in the truck on your way down the sidewalk, honey?”
I stepped into the sun holding the wrinkled brown sack, sharp with nail points, and stopped in my tracks. A boy and girl stood outside the door in a patch of shade, kissing each other in a hungry way I’d never seen before. A tingle darted through me. I couldn’t see much of the boy’s face but I could see his hair, black as pitch, and her pale fingers digging into the dent between his shoulder blades. Then the girl cracked her eyes and noticed me. She broke away from him with a start. He turned around and I dropped the sack, nails spraying everywhere on the cracked cement. I knelt to pick them up, cheeks on fire. I’d seen his face, both sinister and beautiful. Before I could register what was happening, he was coming to kneel beside me. “Let me help you with that, miss,” he said. His voice was like a silk ribbon unrolling. Our fingers touched and when I glanced up, I thought I saw a flicker of interest in his eyes. Then the girl was saying, “I’d better get on back to work, John. My dad will skin me alive.” He rose and went to her as Granny and Mr. Barnett were coming out of the store. “I’ll walk you,” he said. When he looked back over his shoulder at me, my legs felt made of something unreliable.
I watched them go, taking in the shape of his body, tall with narrow hips and wide shoulders. “Who was that?” I asked, following Granny to the truck.
“That’s John,” Mr. Barnett said. “One of Frankie’s boys. You don’t want nothing to do with him. I reckon he’s tomcatting around with that Ellen Hamilton now. Her daddy’s got a drugstore down here on the corner. But you ort to hear the stories John’s brothers tells on him. They claim he’s got a girlfriend for every day of the week. I reckon it’s pitiful how he does them girls. They was one tried to kill herself over him.”
I was so quiet on the way home that Granny asked if I was sick. It didn’t matter what Mr. Barnett had said about John. I couldn’t stop seeing his eyes, the hair that fell across his forehead when he knelt by me, the beauty of his face, like something carved from marble. I never knew there were real people in the world that looked like him.
Mr. Barnett let us out of his truck at the house. Walking across the yard, Granny said, “Let’s have chicken and dumplings for supper.” I stood under the apple tree while she killed and plucked the chicken, trying to cool my face in the shade. After a while I followed her up the steps and into the kitchen. When I saw the chicken’s carcass laid out on the counter, it seemed like a sign. The instant Granny went to the pantry I tore into the bird’s chest and pulled out its heart. I crammed it into my mouth and it was awful, small and slick, sliding down my throat. I coughed and gagged, the heart struggling to come back up. But, like my great-great-great-aunt Della, I was determined to choke it down. When Granny rushed over to pound on my back, I said, “It’s okay. I just got strangled on spit.”