After my talk with Granny, I didn’t hide my relationship with John, but I spent less time on the mountain for the sake of Doug Cotter. I knew he loved me, and I cared for him enough not to flaunt my happiness. John and I mostly went to Millertown. I thought of my mother, running off with my father when she was my age. John showed me places and I imagined her there, the glass-sprinkled lot of a drive-in, the restaurant where I ate pizza for the first time. I wondered if my parents ate it together as John and I did, by the window of a dim place with checked tablecloths and silk daisies in vases.
When spring came, John taught me to drive his car. We spent hours tooling down the back roads of Valley Home and Slop Creek and Piney Grove with the windows down and the radio playing, pulling over for long golden meadows and covered bridges and ponds green with scum. The more time we spent together, the more certain I grew that he would propose. That’s why I pushed aside my nerves and took him up Bloodroot Mountain to meet Granny. I was relieved to see that she was charmed by John, but by then nothing could have kept me from being with him, not even my love for Granny.
One Sunday afternoon we were supposed to meet at the spring-house after church. We hadn’t walked together in a long time and I missed being on the mountain with him. Granny and I always rode to Piney Grove squeezed between the Barnetts in the cab of their truck and I was quiet all the way down the mountain, dreaming of lying with John once again on the bank beside the spring. After the service I waited in the churchyard as Granny and the Barnetts chatted with the preacher, sitting on my mother’s grave with my knees drawn up under my dress tail. I tried to talk to her in my mind. I closed my eyes and conjured her, not bones in a casket six feet under, but the girl I had seen in pictures with somber eyes and long hair parted straight down the middle. I felt closer to her than ever before. I sensed her spirit moving up through the grass and passing over me like a sigh. She of all people would understand how loving John Odom made me feel. She had run off to town with a man herself, left Granny and the mountain behind for him. Now she would lie in her grave beside him forever. I pictured a double headstone with my name carved in granite next to John’s. The image filled me with warmth from head to toe.
When I looked toward the church again, Granny and the Barnetts were finally heading for the truck. I jumped up and ran fast enough to beat them. I leapt over the side of the truck bed into the straw and dirt, dress billowing up. I rode home hugging myself against the keen spring wind, knowing I was late and John was waiting for me. As soon as Mr. Barnett let us out at the house, I vaulted over the side of the truck and took off. I heard Granny saying to the Barnetts, “Lord, I don’t know what’s got into that girl.”
I ran all the way to the springhouse with a stitch in my side, but I couldn’t slow down. It seemed I could already taste his lips, cold from the water he would drink from his palm. I only stopped running when the block hut came into view on a rise above me. When someone stood up out of the bushes on the opposite side of the spring where he had been squatting, I expected it to be John. But I saw the fair hair and the long, skinny legs and the smile I had carried all the way up the mountain wilted. It was Mark Cotter, holding a cane fishing pole in one hand and a string of fish in the other. For a moment we were both too startled to speak. The woods were quiet and still besides the wasps hovering in and out of the springhouse opening. Then he grinned in his lazy way. “Look who it is,” he said. “I ain’t seen you in a long time.” He came down the slope and splashed across the creek to where I stood. I scanned the trees, heart thudding in my ears, hoping his brother hadn’t come with him. “You found my good fishing hole,” he said, standing so close I could smell the salt of his sweat. “Don’t tell nobody and I’ll give you a bluegill.” He held up the string of dripping fish, rainbows shining on their scales.
“That’s all right,” I said, forcing a smile. “I won’t tell.” It was true, Mark and I hadn’t seen each other in a long time. He had become a man since I saw him last. It was more than the scruffy beard he had grown. There was something wiser about his eyes.
“I hope you know you’ve done broke my little brother’s heart,” he said after an awkward silence. “He’s been moping around the house like a sick puppy dog.”
I shifted from foot to foot, wondering how to get rid of him before John came along. “I’ve been meaning to walk up the hill and see Wild Rose.”
Mark shook his head. “Shoot, you’d be just as likely to see her out here running the woods. They never made a fence that could hold that horse.”
There was another silence. I glanced nervously at the pole leaning across his shoulder. “Looks like you’re on your way to the house. Tell Doug hello for me, okay?”
Mark grinned again, but not with his eyes. “What are you doing up here anyway?”
“Nothing. Just taking a walk.”
“Why don’t you set down here and watch me catch a fish?”
“I better not,” I said, looking down at my dress. “I’ve got my church clothes on.”
He held his hand in front of my face, black with soil from baiting hooks. “Since when was you scared of a little dirt?” He lowered his cane pole to the ground. “Here,” he said. “You can blame it on me.” He reached out and took hold of my arm, fingerprinting the sleeve of my dress. I tried to twist away but he wouldn’t let go. I was surprised to see a flash of anger in his eyes. I had never thought he might have wanted me as much as his brother did. That’s when I heard John’s footsteps coming up the slope behind us.
“What’s going on here?” he said. I turned around and the look on his face made my stomach lurch. His eyes seemed almost inhuman, mean and glittering black like a crow’s. I had the urge to take off running for home as fast as my legs would go.
“Who the hell are you?” Mark said.
John stepped between Mark and me. “You better move that hand.”
“It’s okay,” I said, but neither one of them seemed to hear.
Mark let go of my arm. “Watch it, buddy. This is my daddy’s land.”
“I don’t care whose land it is,” John said. “You don’t touch her.”
Mark’s face flushed a deep, ugly red. “She’s on my daddy’s property, too. I reckon I can do whatever I want to with her.”
Before I knew what was happening, John had Mark Cotter by the throat. The string of bluegill slid onto the mud at our feet alongside the fishing pole. “You better get on away from here,” John said through clenched teeth.
After what seemed a lifetime, he turned Mark loose. Mark stood still for a moment gasping for breath, rubbing at his throat where John’s fingerprints were fading. Tears of humiliation stood in his eyes. He looked at me in an accusatory way, as if I were the one to blame. Then he backed off and blundered into the trees, swatting vines and branches out of his path. I looked at the fish he had caught, left behind on the ground to rot in the sun, and felt a wave of pity for him so overwhelming I had to sit down on the bank. John watched Mark until he was gone and then lowered himself beside me.