It was a long trailer with a muddy yard and cinder blocks up to the door. Dogs followed at our heels and one came inside with us, a small white mutt with matted fur. The living room was flooded with sun, dust motes dancing, and books piled everywhere. Ford turned to me and smiled awkwardly. We stood regarding each other in the middle of the cluttered room. “Home sweet home,” he said. I looked him over, so different than what I was used to. John was fastidious, at least in the beginning of our marriage. This man was sloppy, sweaty, and dirty. But he had a good face. “Wordsworth,” he said suddenly, and turned to search through the books. I watched his back moving, the chain of his spine under the open shirt. “Yes, here it is.” He brought a slim volume with yellowed leaves. “I found this in Pennsylvania.” He looked at the table of contents, scanning with one finger, and turned the brittle pages. I closed my eyes and listened as he read. “Five years have past, five summers, with the length of five long winters, and again I hear these waters, rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur. Once again do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, that on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion, and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky….”
The words sounded more beautiful to me than ever before. I focused on his voice, taking me away from everything, taking me back to my mountain. By the time he finished I had sunk down on the carpet. The dog came wagging to sniff my face. Then Ford knelt and I pictured his damaged hand when he put his arm around me. “She dropped me,” I said, beginning to cry, and he didn’t ask questions. He only said, “It’s okay.”
I kissed him first. For so long with John, I hadn’t been loved. I might never have been loved by my mother. If I retaliated against them, it was unconscious. I cared for nothing in that moment. There was no thought of revenge. Ford resisted at first, tried to pull back, but I thrust my whole self against his chest and he gave in. We stayed there on the floor. It felt like there was no time to move to his bed. When it was over we propped our backs against the couch and sat dazed and half naked, sweating in the heat of the stifling trailer. “What if I told you,” he said, “that I knew you were coming?”
“Oh?” I said, heart beating hard but slow. “How is that?”
“I have visions sometimes.”
We looked at each other. I smiled. “Visions.”
He smiled back. “Yes. Do you believe me?”
“No. There are no prophets in this day and age. Except maybe false ones.”
I began to gather my clothes around me, reaching for my shoes.
“Do you have to go? Stay with me for a while.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’ve done wrong being here.”
“Stay with me forever, then,” he said.
“I’m married.”
“But he doesn’t love you.”
“How do you know?”
“I told you. I have visions.”
“Well. It’s still a sin, being here with you.”
“He’ll hurt you if you go back.”
“Probably. But I still have to go.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s got my granddaddy’s ring.”
Ford reached for me. “Myra. Your life is more important than a ring.”
“I’d never leave John without taking that ring with me.”
“You could sneak in while he’s sleeping and slip it right off.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I had the wild urge to laugh, even though nothing was funny. “John’s put on a few pounds. It might be stuck.”
Ford grinned. “You could grease up his finger,” he said, holding up his left hand. “Or you could do what my ex-wife did. I bet your husband’s a drinker, like I used to be. Nothing will pack on the pounds like beer. My ring was stuck, too. One night she got tired of me blowing our grocery money on booze. I came in drunk as a skunk and passed out cold. She got so mad she chopped off my finger, took my wedding ring and everything else of value we had and ran off with it. Haven’t heard from her since.”
I tossed my shoe at him. “You’re nuts.”
“I’ve heard that before,” he said. “Are you sure you have to go?”
I nodded. He kissed me and smoothed back my hair. For a long moment he studied my face. “Because in my vision,” he said, “we had babies together.”
Ford drove me to the pool hall and let me out. I slammed the door before I could hear his goodbye. I used a pay phone to call the hardware store. I knew John wouldn’t be there anymore, but I didn’t know what else to do. I stood in the parking lot under a streetlight for what seemed like hours, thinking he might come looking for me there. I only prayed he hadn’t been up the mountain. Sometime after dark he wheeled into the lot slinging gravel and leaned over the seat to open the passenger door. I was too numb to be afraid. He didn’t say anything on the drive, didn’t ask where I had been.
When we arrived at home I sat in the car and waited for him to pull me out by the hair, my knees scraping in the dirt. Grunting and puffing, he dragged me across the yard, my scalp screaming. He yanked up my dress and wrestled my legs open. There was no use begging him to stop. I fought hard but I was tired and he was strong. He forced himself on me as I looked up at the stars. I tried to send my soul floating out of my body again, back up to Bloodroot Mountain. Tears ran from the corners of my eyes toward my ears. Whatever wrong I’d done in swallowing that heart, surely this settled the score.
When it was all over, I lay still on the ground, careful not to look at his face. The night was cool. The neighbor’s dogs were barking. I closed my eyes and remembered them lunging at the ends of chains. Then it seemed I caught the scent of mountain woods. For a moment, I felt my mother’s ghost with me. I took in long, slow breaths of her.
My whole body was limp as John dragged me by the arms back to the door in the house’s foundation. I didn’t resist this time as he shoved me inside and locked it behind me. I lay on my back quivering in the blackness, spiders crawling over my arms and shoulders. I felt a warm wetness between my legs, maybe some of it blood. After a while my muscles loosened and I rested on the cool, grave-smelling dirt. Sometime during the night, listening to the thunder of a train that shook the house on top of me, the shine of its light flooding through the cinder block’s holes, I became sure there was life growing inside me. I wasn’t alone in my body anymore. I didn’t question how I could know such a thing. The only question was whether the child was fathered by John or Ford. But it didn’t really matter how it came into the world. All that mattered was the one certainty, that it was mine. I rested my hands on my womb. This baby had never bewitched John with a chicken heart. This baby had nothing to make amends for. I had to set it free.
John didn’t come back and open the door, but I could see better once the sun came up. After I heard his car leaving for work, I kicked with a kind of strength I didn’t have before. I hammered at the boards for hours with my feet, already warped from the last night I spent under the house. Finally there was a loud crack as the door broke loose from its hinges and fell forward onto the ground. I slid out into the sun, squinting against the light. I went inside and took a long, hot bath, carefully washing the throbbing place between my legs. I put on an old blouse and a pair of jeans and prepared to wait. It was Friday and I knew John would come stumbling home drunk in the dark. He would fall across the couch on his face as he did every weekend when his paycheck was spent. I went to the front room and sat thinking of the hours I’d spent there away from home, where I had draped myself in mountain laurel, plaited crowns with this flower, wound myself in that vine, stepped out of green tangles smelling of honeysuckle so that Granny scooped me up and drank my hair like sweet tea in the summertime. It was hard to remember exactly how long I’d been trapped in that house with John, ten months or ten years. I saw the bits of me that had fallen off, the chiseled-off curls of flesh and bone like raw wood he had whittled from me. At some point I stretched my sore body out on the couch and slept, hands folded across the baby I now had to live for. When I woke up later, it was night. I sat up, eyes wide, afraid John had stolen into the house. I tensed and listened to the dark. There was nothing but the hum of the refrigerator.