I felt guilty for betraying Granny. If she’d known what I had done, she would have been disappointed in me. But there was no going back. I didn’t know if I believed in Lou Ann’s charm, but I knew now what those women had felt. I wasn’t worried about Ellen Hamilton or anybody else. I was only concerned with myself and what I had to have. I went to bed early that night, half sick from the chicken heart, but I couldn’t rest. I tossed and turned, thinking how he’d looked over his shoulder at me as he walked the blond girl back to work. It was like being possessed. When I finally closed my eyes and drifted down toward sleep, I dreamed his face hovered inches from mine in the dark, his long, sculpted body floating over my bed like an angel or a wraith. I opened my eyes with a start, prepared to be kissed like he had kissed Ellen Hamilton on the sidewalk. I promised myself that if he ever did kiss me that way, I’d kiss him back twice as hard.
Now the ghost of John is different. It has no face or body, just the shine of eyes. Last night, I saw them in a tree and thought he was there. Then something moved along the branch and hissed down at me, a red-eyed possum. But sometimes I wake up smelling sulfur and dead rats and sweet aftershave. My bedroom reeks of him and I know he’s been there watching me sleep. Once I walked in and saw him sitting in the rocking chair. I dropped my book but didn’t scream. He was there for a long second and I thought he would say something. Then I blinked and he was gone, the rocking chair empty. These days John could come to me in any form. Long shadows falling across the yard could be the shape of tree trunks or of his legs, claw-tipped branches could be his arms, dripping water could be his tapping fingers, cold drafts could be his breath. But back then, when I was seventeen, I wanted every noise to be John Odom coming after me in the dark.
It wasn’t the next day that he came. It was a long four weeks in which I could think of nothing but him. I was guilty about the chicken heart and desperate for it to work at the same time. I had no appetite and Granny kept shooting me troubled looks across the table. I couldn’t concentrate on chores. I broke eggs carrying them in from the barn, cut my finger peeling potatoes, singed one of my good dresses with the iron. Then school started back and my life fell into a familiar routine. I still dreamed of John Odom, but I began to feel foolish for believing that swallowing a heart might bring me love.
On Monday of the second week of school, John materialized out of the early gloom as I walked to the bottom of the dirt road on my way to catch the bus, eyes and teeth shining. It seemed he had boiled up from the dust of the road.
“Don’t be scared,” he said. “I just came to drive you to school.”
“How did you find me?” I asked when my tongue came unstuck.
“I been asking around.” He fell in step beside me.
“What makes you think I’d take up with just anybody?” I asked, keeping my eyes straight ahead. I should have been scared but I was only excited.
“I ain’t just anybody. You’ve been in my daddy’s store before.”
“Who’s your daddy?” I asked, pretending ignorance.
“Frankie Odom.”
“I thought you had a girlfriend.”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
I stole glances at him from the corner of my eye as we went down the hill, heart slamming against my breastbone. He looked at least five years older than me, maybe more. He was a man, not a boy. He was no less beautiful than I remembered. He looked almost foreign, hair and eyes black as soot. I wondered then if his mother had been someone exotic, but not after I saw pictures of her later. She was scrawny with bleached hair and slit eyes under pointy glasses. I remembered his jug-eared father from the store, and his pot-bellied brothers, plainer versions of him. His beauty was inexplicable.
He wasn’t like the boys at school. He kept his hair short while they grew theirs long. He wore creased trousers, they wore bell-bottoms. His old-fashioned ways made him even more foreign and like home at the same time. Living with Granny on the mountain, the old ways were what I knew best. As we walked I took secret sips of him, unable to find a flaw. His one physical imperfection, I discovered later, was invisible. He was deaf in his left ear since childhood, when his youngest brother, Hollis, had shot a cap pistol beside it. I learned this is what saved him from the war. Later I would come to wish that he had gone to Vietnam, that he had been killed over there, and I had never met him.
I didn’t let John take me to school. I was too shy to get into his car. I caught the bus instead. But I looked back at him, sitting behind his steering wheel beside the road. All day long I tried to remember the details of his face. After school I had plans to go to the library and study for a test with one of my friends. Her father had offered to pick us up and drive me home when the library closed. I was supposed to meet her in the parking lot but when I walked out the double doors of the high school, shading my eyes against the sun, John was standing at the bottom of the steps. I almost dropped my books.
“I’m here to take you home,” he said, squinting up at me.
“I told Granny I was going to the library.”
He smiled in a crooked way. “I’ll take you to the library.”
“No,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere else.”
I climbed into the passenger seat of his car and told him to head for Bloodroot Mountain. It was a risk to have him take me home, but I wanted to be somewhere safe with him. As he drove, I cracked the window to let in the September wind. We didn’t talk but he kept glancing over at me. When we finally turned onto the dirt road leading up the mountain, I asked him to pull onto the shoulder so that his car would be hidden in the trees. I led him by the hand along the creek, to a place I had shared with no one else. Not long after Granddaddy died, I had followed the creek up the mountain trying to find its source. I found an abandoned springhouse instead, a little block hut with its foundation covered in weeds and ferns, the arched roof patched with vivid green moss, springwater flowing out the shadowed opening over ledges of rock. Farther up the mountain, I found some rotten poplar logs and the remains of an old stone chimney. When I asked Granny about it, she said Doug Cotter’s great-grandfather had once lived there in a cabin.
John didn’t ask where I was taking him as we cut a path through the bushes and saplings. We were both out of breath by the time we reached the springhouse. I watched as John hunkered down to drink from his cupped palm. When he looked up at me, chin dripping, all of my shyness disappeared. I got down on my knees in the mud beside the spring, not caring how I would explain my dirty skirt to Granny. We studied each other, a beam of sun lighting his face. After a while I asked, “Why did you come to me?”
He was quiet, looking up into the tree branches. “It was your eyes,” he said at last. “I never seen a blue like that.” He turned to me and studied them for a long time. He reached out to touch my hair but his hand paused in the air. He was looking at me in a way I had never been seen. I was a girl to everyone else. John Odom saw me as a woman. But I could tell that he was nervous. Like me, he was scared of the spell we were under. “I shouldn’t have come up here,” he said. “I better go on, before I get you in trouble.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want you to go.” I only hesitated an instant before leaning over to kiss him, as hard and wild as I had promised myself to if I ever had the chance. When his arms came around me I was lost, not thinking of Granny or how to behave. The whole thing happened fast but it felt like slow motion, John pushing me down on the leaf-littered mud, the weight of him pressing the breath out of me. If someone had come upon us it might have looked like a fight, our mouths and teeth clashing so that my lips were sore later, my fingers tangled up in his hair as he kissed where the buttons of my blouse had come undone. It was a helpless feeling, like in dreams of diving off the rock over the bluff, those few sweet moments of flight worth the death that was waiting for me. When I groped for his hand and pushed it under the hem of my skirt, I could feel his heart beating in his fingers, or maybe it was mine. I gasped as his palm slid up the length of my leg. But then, without warning, his fingers clamped down on my thigh. Before I could protest, he was wrenching himself out of my arms. “I should have left you alone,” he breathed, getting to his feet. When he rushed off, leaves clinging to his pants, I was too stunned to go after him. I lay on my back trying to catch my breath, the smell of him all over me.