Each day it grew harder to bear the dark-paneled walls, the rats scurrying back into their holes when I turned on the lights, the whiskey bottles and charred cigarette butts littering the gulley alongside the tracks. Even when I cooked with the back door thrown open there was no relief from the thick smells of fatback and beans and lard because of the chemical tincture of factory smoke and the squall of train wheel on rust-colored track. Someone might ask how I lived through those last weeks married to John. The answer is simple. I wasn’t there with him. My body couldn’t hold my soul. It left that smothering place and found its way back to Bloodroot Mountain, like when John trapped me under the house. I whispered those magic lines and they took me right back home. “In darkness and amid the many shapes of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir unprofitable, and the fever of the world, have hung upon the beatings of my heart — how oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee … how often has my spirit turned to thee.” I could say the words and be gone somewhere John couldn’t follow. It didn’t matter what my hands were doing, washing dishes, peeling potatoes, scouring floors. My spirit’s hands were catching minnows darting silver in the shallow part of the creek. John couldn’t touch me where I was.
One morning after I heard the front door slam and John’s car start up, I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and looked up at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. I was stunned by my reflection. It wasn’t just John who had changed. My hair was limp, my face haggard and thin. My eyes had lost their shine. I was still staring at my haunted reflection when I heard a bird twittering outside the bathroom window. It was a strange sound. There were no trees in the yard, so I thought I must have imagined it. I peeled back the curtain to open the window, but it was nailed shut. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care anymore if the bird was real or not. I saw the sun and knew spring had come. That’s when the clouds parted in my head. I began thinking clearer than I had in months. I knew I had to escape, at least for a while. I wasn’t willing to brave going home anymore, after John had threatened to burn it down. But the man at the pool hall had told me where I might find some of my people. I could go to the house and be back before John got home from work. There were a few dollars left in my old coffee can under the kitchen sink. I bathed and dressed and walked to the neighbor’s house to call a cab again.
The same snaggletooth driver as before let me out at the pool hall. I thought it wouldn’t make the right impression to arrive at my relatives’ house in a taxicab. There was no waiting to see my father’s mother. She was sitting on the blue concrete porch when I walked up. She was old and dark-skinned like an Indian woman, with what appeared to be a large goiter on her neck. The house was white with shutters painted blue to match the porch. It was dull and dirty and smudged, the yard crowded with dark trees and bushes. This was where I had lived with my parents. A cat stretched and rose to greet me on the steps. The old woman squinted down at me where I stood by the mailbox. I thought she would call out to ask who I was or what I wanted, but she only blinked. I went to the bottom step and she still didn’t speak. I wondered if she was blind.
“Hello,” I said. The cat rubbed against my ankles.
“Hidee,” she said. Her voice was deep and flat.
“Are you Kenny Mayes’s mother?”
There was a long silence. She looked at me. She wasn’t blind. “Who’s asking?”
“His daughter. I’m Kenny’s daughter, Myra.”
She fell silent again. I was sick to my stomach. I pushed back my sweaty hair and tried to smile. “Do you remember me?”
She adjusted herself in the green metal chair. I was careful not to stare at her goiter. It looked like a bullfrog’s throat sack. “I reckon,” she said.
“I wanted to see where he and my mother lived. And I wanted to see you.”
For a long moment she didn’t answer, until I thought I would go mad. Then finally she said, “I didn’t figure you wanted nothing to do with us.”
“Well,” I said, flustered. “I always wondered about my parents….”
“Kenny nor Clio neither one was fit to raise a youngun,” she said.
I stared up at her, not sure if I had heard right. I waited for her to go on, but she turned her face to the screen door and bellowed, “Imogene!” I jumped. Her voice was startlingly loud. The door creaked open and a slim woman came out. She had styled hair and tailored clothes. She seemed out of place there. She froze when she saw me.
“Imogene,” my grandmother said, “this girl claims to be Kenny’s youngun.”
Imogene looked at me and touched her face. Then she smiled. “Of course she is, Mother. Of course this is Kenny’s girl. Look at her eyes.”
We sat in a small, dark kitchen that smelled faintly of mellow garbage. I could hear an old man calling and moaning from another room. “That’s Uncle,” Imogene said to me as she poured coffee. There was a Chihuahua under the table. It trembled and growled at me. “Why don’t you see about him, Mother?”
“He’s all right,” my grandmother said flatly. “He’s always carrying on like that.” The dog stood up and barked at me, showing its teeth. “Hush, Peanut,” the old woman said, and kicked at his flank with her bare foot. I could see dirt caked under her toenails. The dog skittered away and curled up again out of reach.
I sipped the bitter coffee and studied them in the murky light. They didn’t seem related. Imogene’s face was soft and pretty. I liked the veined backs of her hands. “Mother, isn’t she beautiful?” Imogene asked. The old woman didn’t answer. “What have you been doing with yourself, Myra? You were just a baby when I last saw you.”
“I got married and moved down here with my husband, John Odom.”
“Is he any kin to Frankie Odom,” the old woman asked, “has a hardware store?”
“Yes, that’s John’s father,” I said. I was growing impatient. I wasn’t there to talk about myself. “I have some questions, I guess. About Kenny and Clio.”
“We’ll tell you anything we can,” Imogene said, smiling over her coffee. “Won’t we, Mother?” The old woman just went on blinking at me.
I thought hard but all my questions had suddenly evaporated. My mind was blank. They stared at me across the table. I felt my cheeks burning as I groped for something to say. Imogene looked concerned. Then her face brightened.
“Would you like to see some pictures?”
“Yes,” I said, exhaling at last.
“Mother, where are those albums?”
“Under the bed,” the old woman said. She grunted and rose to take a pack of sugar wafers from a bread box on the counter. She stood at the sink eating them as Imogene went for the albums. She looked at me, soggy crumbs falling down her goiter. I was sickened that she had given birth to my father and known my mother as a daughter-in-law. Imogene brought the albums to the table and removed one from the top of the stack. She wiped dust off its cover and turned the pages slowly, a parade of unfamiliar faces in grainy black and white. Then she stopped. “Here. This is Kenny and me,” she said. Two children stood on a porch with solemn expressions. It was hard to tell how far apart in age they were, but I guessed he was at least six years younger than her. I wanted to feel something. This was my father. But as the pages turned and I watched the progress of his growth from a boy into a young man, I realized I was waiting to see my mother’s face. We flipped through the second album and still no sign. It was like she, and I, had been erased from the history of these people. Granny had pictures of my mother but they were all taken on the mountain. I needed pictures of her there in that house, living a life I didn’t know or understand. Imogene must have seen my disappointment.