The slam of John’s car door snapped me awake. I couldn’t tell how long I had been sleeping. I pressed my face to one of the holes again and called to him, begging him to let me out. After a moment I stopped, thinking I heard the approach of his footsteps. I scuttled on stiff elbows and knees for the door, hoping for his fingers to unlock the hasp. Instead I heard the front door slam shut like a gunshot behind him. I could almost follow his progress through the house by the creak of his boots on the floorboards. I scrabbled in the dirt for the rake handle and beat on the moldy wood overhead. Then I heard the muffled groan of mattress springs directly above me, where the bedroom was. My heart sank. I knew he had passed out. He might as well not even be there. But I pounded with the rake handle anyway, until I couldn’t feel my arms and shoulders. Finally I collapsed on my side and pulled my knees up under my dress tail against the cold. After a while, I began to drift off again. I wanted to be with Granny so much it was like searching for her inside myself and floating outward at the same time, over bare trees and brown water splitting the fields in two, fencerows like twigs strung together with thread. For a long time I circled Bloodroot Mountain, watching Granny pluck a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner as the Barnetts came up the hill bringing pumpkin pies for her.
I don’t remember anything else about being under the house. I think I was there for one day but it might have been more. When John opened the door in the morning I didn’t move. I only blinked at him. He knelt there sleepy-headed and rumpled, still half drunk. “Hell, Myra,” he said. “I didn’t mean to leave you out here so long.” When I still didn’t come he pulled me out by the ankles, dress rucking up and glass slicing my back. I barely felt it for the numbness. He hauled my body full length into the wintry sun and bent over me as I stared up blankly, like some creature born to live underground.
Back inside, I couldn’t get warm. John put his wooly socks on my feet and piled blankets on top of me. He sat on the edge of the bed waiting for me to speak. “What can I do to make you mind?” he asked at last. “I don’t understand it. I thought you wanted to be with me. Now you’re all the time trying to run home to your Granny. I ain’t letting you do me this way, Myra. I never took shit off of any woman and I don’t mean to start now.” He took a breath and blew it out. “Am I going to have to go up yonder and burn that place to the ground? If that’s what it takes to keep you from running off every time I turn around, by God I’ll do it.” I looked at his face in the light through the curtains, still sinister and beautiful. I didn’t know if I believed him. But I thought if he ever followed me there, he might hurt me and Granny both. I felt more trapped then in my bed with John than I had been under the house alone. At least there I had been away from him.
For days I shivered coughing under the blankets, burning up with fever. Once I woke from a nightmare and saw Hollis and John like goblins at the foot of my bed. John pulled the covers back from my feet and said, “Reckon I should take her to the hospital?”
Hollis spat tobacco juice into a can he was holding. “Nah, she’ll be all right.”
John peeled off one of the wooly socks. “Does that foot look frostbit to you?”
Hollis shook his head. “That girl’s tougher’n she looks.”
John seemed uncertain. “She might have pneumonia.”
Hollis scratched under his cap and resettled it on his head. Our eyes locked. “She ain’t got pneumonia,” he said. “She’s full of meanness, is her problem.”
John still didn’t look convinced. “I don’t know.”
Hollis spat into his can again. “A little bit of cold ain’t going to hurt her. Daddy claimed he used to slip laudanum to Mama whenever she went to messing around.”
“Yeah, well,” John said. “Mama’s dead, ain’t she?”
Hollis laughed and took hold of my foot. His touch burned through the numbness. “That laudanum’s hard to get these days, but I bet Rex Hamilton would give you some.”
John pulled the blanket back over me. “I ain’t giving her no laudanum.”
Hollis grinned. “You might have to before it’s over.”
They looked at me in silence for a long moment. Then Hollis said, “I better head out. Just let her lay here awhile. She’ll be up again trying to run off in no time flat.”
For months I kept a racking cough that hurt my chest. As I cooked and washed dishes I spat gouts of green phlegm into a dishrag. All winter I was weak and tired, face slick with sweat. I was never the same after my time under the house. I began to see things crawling toward me from the corners of my eyes. Once I thought there was a black dog at the foot of the bed but when I sat up it was a pile of dirty clothes. At night I slept beside John under heavy blankets, the fire dead in the stove. I put my feet between his warm calves, unable to hate him in the dark. I pretended he would protect me if a red-eyed thing crept into the room and that he was not the red-eyed thing himself. Sometimes when I heard his boots on the porch I thought of the winter before we got married, when I unwrapped his face from a scarf as if his mouth, his chin, his neck were all presents.
By the end of December, he was seldom home anymore. One morning passing the bathroom door, I heard the splash of him shaving and paused to look in. I stepped behind him and saw a love bite on his naked shoulder, speckles of blood sucked to the surface of his skin. I realized then that I didn’t care anymore. It was hard to remember how jealous I had once been of other women. Our eyes met in the mirror. His razor paused in mid stroke, tongue tucked into his cheek. After a while I turned and walked off. When he was gone to work, I wiped up the ring of soap scum and whiskers he left behind in the basin.
I stopped trying to run away, but he wasn’t satisfied. My complacence angered him somehow. He began to punish me for walking in front of the television or coughing too loud or spilling sugar on the counter. He threw empty beer bottles at the wall near my head, pressed his cigarettes into my flesh, bent my fingers back, and squeezed my wrists in the vise grip of his hands until I couldn’t feel them anymore. At first I fought back, leaving claw marks on his face and spit dripping from his nose. But as time went on, a stillness stole into me. His violence became something I bore, like when Granny brushed the knots from my hair before school in the mornings. I felt nothing anymore besides regret. But he kept trying to provoke some reaction that I was too sick and tired to give.
In the last months of our marriage, all John wanted to do was drink and eat. He had always loved my cooking, so I made big meals for him. I served him steaming plates heaped with meatloaf, okra, pork chops, soup beans, pickled beets, country fried steak, and cathead biscuits. I stuffed him with banana pudding and coffee cake and cobbler, all the things Granny had taught me to make. I kept him full and quiet as I had the baby rabbit. It was a means of self-preservation, but I didn’t like watching his once chiseled face softening and thickening, his belly beginning to lap over his belt buckle. I looked at pictures I’d taken of him in summer, posing by the car with an open shirt, standing under the trees with his arms crossed over his lean chest, and hardly recognized the man I saw.
John and I didn’t celebrate Christmas. He sat drinking in front of the television and I stood looking out the window at the snow-dusted ground, thinking about Granny. The next day while John was gone, Mr. Barnett drove her down the mountain to see me. It was a relief to feel her arms around me again, but I was too worried John might come home to enjoy her visit. I felt sick the whole time she and Mr. Barnett were sitting on the couch. After that she only came once more, near the end of February. I didn’t mean to cry when I opened the door and saw her standing on the porch, but there was no holding it in. As good as it was to see her, I was still shaking, afraid John might come home for dinner.