Then I heard his car engine die out in the gravel lot and a deep calm settled in my guts. Sometimes he was too drunk to find his way home but this night he made it. I had willed him down the one-way streets, past the junkyard to this place, when so many times before I had wished his car wrapped around a telephone pole. As he fumbled with the lock until the door swung open, I got up from the couch and receded into the shadows, crouched in the corner to wait. His footsteps were heavy, a floorboard cracking under his boots. He fell across the couch I had just vacated, springs groaning. He didn’t stumble to the bathroom as he did sometimes when he came home drunk. I was glad because it meant he would lose consciousness faster. He lay there, knuckles trailing along the floor, loose fist finally harmless. I watched the stinking bulk of him rise and fall until he began to snore. I slunk across the floor and knelt before him, the stench of whiskey hanging over him like a cloud. I plucked at his fat pink fingers and he didn’t stir. I pulled his hand up into the weak light and placed it on the coffee table where I could see it better. I took a long look at Granddaddy’s ring and knew that I couldn’t pull it off. It hadn’t been removed since that night we stood in the preacher’s house and I slid it onto the flesh of a hand like carved marble. Now it was part of the ruin John had become.
I licked my lips. My heart began to beat for what felt like the first time in months, blood pumping hot and fast through my cold veins. I slipped into the kitchen and turned on the light and paced back and forth, trying to think. I couldn’t let him keep what was left of Granny and Granddaddy and the home where I ran like a horse through the trees. I wouldn’t give him the color of bloodroot and true love. It was blasphemy on his finger. It was hard to remember how much I once loved seeing it there, how I nibbled, kissed, sucked at that ring-finger tip ten times a day. Once upon a time, seeing his fingers laced through mine and the dark shine of that bloodred ring sent heat racing all over me.
I caught sight of myself reflected in the kitchen window, a white horror mask with black eye sockets and long snarls of matted hair. It was the wild woman I saw when John first opened the door of that place. There was an exhilarating moment when I knew it would end for me one way or another. That’s when I caught sight of the hatchet, leaning against the wood box beside the back door. I stood looking at it for a long time, thinking of the story Ford told about his missing finger. I tried to keep my breathing slow and calm as I crossed the kitchen and picked up the hatchet, its heft comforting in my hands.
I went silently back to the front room. All the time I had spent learning to be invisible was finally paying off. The limp slab of his arm had fallen from the coffee table and I gently replaced it. Granddaddy’s ring glittered in the pale streetlight. I raised the hatchet high and brought it down fast. The sound was loud in my ears, the force of the hatchet whacking through fingers and lodging in wood jarring my arms, causing me to bite down hard on my tongue. John bellowed and rose up, his eyes unfocused and searching. Without thinking, I yanked the hatchet free from the coffee table and brought the blunt end crashing up into his chin. There was a crunch of teeth as he fell backward.
I didn’t wait to see if he was out cold or dead. I grubbed around on the floor until I found the ring under the coffee table. Somehow it was still wedged on John’s finger. After a moment’s hesitation, I scooped up both ring and finger and stuffed them wet and warm in the pocket of my jeans. I ran to the bedroom and slung the bag I had already packed over my shoulder. I left out the back door and as I crossed the kitchen I could hear the terrible gurgling noises he made. I thought they might be his death throes and there was only relief. I fled across the barren yard, away from the tracks and the smothering house and the time I spent there. I’ll never forget that satisfying whack. It still lives in me, still vibrates through my arms. When I open my box it’s not just the ring that comforts me. It’s that scrap of finger, like a shaving I whittled off for myself, carved out of all those months. It was only fair, after the curls of me he left scattered. No matter what I’d done to bewitch him, it was only fair that I take a piece of his hide with me.
I walked out into the night with John’s finger and Granddaddy’s ring in my pocket. I didn’t have to change my clothes. Most of the blood was on John, not me. I walked and walked on those trash-littered roads, busted beer bottles, boarded-up buildings, dark houses. For a while a stray dog traveled alongside me, tail down and eyes watchful. He probably smelled John’s blood in my pocket. Above was the clearest night I’d ever seen, so many stars it made me dizzy to crane my neck and look up. Seeing them eased the ragged pain in my shoulder. Just when I thought I couldn’t go another step, God sent a car to me, a woman coming home from the night shift. She took one look at me and said, “Get in.” She asked if I needed help and I told her I only needed to go home.
She had bleached blond hair, permed tight, and some man’s name tattooed on her wrist. Her long fingernails tapped the cracked steering wheel as she talked on and on, false teeth slipping. She spoke of her no-good husband and her lazy sons and the arrogant foreman at the plant. I dozed with my head against the car window, her disembodied smoker’s voice loud in my exhausted head. She didn’t seem to mind or even notice that my eyes were closed, that I was drifting. She drove me all the way to the foot of Bloodroot Mountain without asking any questions. She said, “I can’t go up yonder. I’ve got to get back to the house before my old man wakes up.” I didn’t mind. I got out of her car and thanked her. It was a fitting way to come home. It was the third day of March, 1975. The sun was rising between the trees, fog low to the ground, the mountain high on both sides of me. I watched the woman’s taillights disappear back toward town.
I’d had time to rest in the woman’s car but my feet and back still wept. I was still sore between the legs and my shoulder felt dislocated where I’d yanked the hatchet free from the wood of the coffee table. It didn’t matter. The mountain looked beautiful, as if dressed up for my homecoming. I could have run when I saw the house. The house of Granny and Granddaddy and me, the house of us at supper in the kitchen, the house of being rocked on Granddaddy’s lap and reading books on the steps, the house, the home, of my soul and spirit. As I went up the hill there was no sound, of leaf or animal or even my feet in the dew-damp grass. It felt like I had been gone for a thousand years. Once I made it across the yard I could finally rest. My blood would run easy and warm from my head to my toes, not because of the mountain, but because of Granny and all that she was to me. I wondered if she would have a fire going. Yesterday’s warm weather seemed to have fled and it was a chilly morning. I thought of Granny bent over stoking the woodstove at night in the yellow-lit kitchen, potatoes sometimes baking in the embers, and how in the winter mornings before school, nestled under the blankets with my cold nose poking out, I’d hear her bringing in the kindling. All my life, she’d kept a good fire going for me. I imagined her pouring coffee, the wispy curl of her hair, the knotty crook of her finger. No matter the curse, no matter the charm, no matter the sins I’d committed, there she was, behind that door, as if she had been there since the world began.