Then one night Granny didn’t get up to help me when the babies cried. My heart ached with lonesomeness, but she had seemed so tired all day. I told the babies, “We’ll let Granny sleep.” But when I opened my eyes at dawn and she wasn’t making coffee, I knew. The babies were still resting. I crept by their crib into the front room. The house was cold. She hadn’t stoked up the fire. I stood for a moment in the door of my childhood bedroom looking at her, knowing this time it was for real. Winter light fell through the window across her face. Her mouth was open. Her arm dangled off the bed. I crossed the room and crawled under the quilts to be with her, to rest one last time on her shoulder.
This winter it will have been six years since Granny passed away. Sometimes when I think about her, I have to escape the house where she died and take a walk. That’s how I knew the present I wanted to give the twins. They spent most of their sixth birthday rolling down the hill all the way to the road while their chocolate cake rose, running back up with beggar’s lice on their clothes. I heard them laughing and wondered how I had ever wanted anything or anyone else, how a man could have been so important to me. I watched them pushing together a pile of leaves in the yard and dreamed of hiding with them in their fall-colored mountain. Later I stood on the back steps looking into the woods while they ate cake, the smell of woodsmoke drifting down from the Cotter farm. Everything was quiet indoors and out. The boy was solemn-eyed at the table, eating with his hands. The girl sat on her knees licking icing off her fingers. I went and lifted her out of the chair. She looked at me as I wiped the smears from her face with my dress tail, fine wisps of black hair in her eyes. The boy got down on his own, cleaning his mouth on the too-long sleeve of his flannel shirt. He could read me as they did each other and knew we were going somewhere. I knelt and the girl climbed on my back, arms tight under my chin. I knew she could make it because the twins have been all over the mountain, but I liked the weight of her body. When I galloped across the yard she giggled in my ear.
It would take a long time but we had plenty of daylight. The boy traveled his own way alongside us. I watched his black hair passing under the trees and tried to send everything I felt for him between the tall trunks as I had once sent my soul flying out of my body. I tried to tell him that I knew him, whether or not he knew me. I want to believe his spirit was with me, even as his body ranged out of sight. I saw that he’s worn his own paths on the mountain. Maybe he’s already been to the top. I know my twins think their own thoughts and have their own lives. Sometimes I wonder what it’s like inside of them.
The path’s not as treacherous as our elders claimed. For the last half mile the boy came out of the trees and climbed with us. When we passed the springhouse I wouldn’t let him stop for a drink. The waters there are poison now. The girl scrambled onto my back again at the place where Doug Cotter fell. The boy went ahead of us through the fog, surefooted as a mountain goat. After the outcropping, the slope leveled off and we reached the summit. The stories were true. There’s a meadow at the top. I thought John might be waiting there, his shadow face revealed at last, but there was only grass and trees. Doug once told me they called it Cotter Field. I thought it would be grown over, and it’s probably not as open as it once was, but it’s still mostly cleared off. Maybe Mark tends this spot where his ancestors drove their cattle to, or Mr. Barnett, who I think of now as the keeper of Bloodroot Mountain. But it could be Wild Rose who keeps the grasses trampled. I could tell she had been there. I could feel it. I knelt and closed my eyes. She’s part of the mountain now, a spirit in these woods. I know she’s finally free.
The girl slid off my back and went hopping over thatches of grass like dry hair with briars tangled in. The boy bent to chase a cricket over and under the bracken. There was a border of stunted trees, limbs broken and bare, and the hump of a slate-colored rock in the middle of the field like a tortoise unearthing itself. I saw the edge of the mountaintop and moved toward it, remembering a distant relative who had jumped off a cliff here ages ago. My steps quickened until I was almost running for the sky ahead of me, imagining how she might have flown, hair and dress billowing up. Then I tripped over a hole and caught myself on my hands, palms skidding over ridges of rock hidden in the weeds. I stayed on my hands and knees until I felt small fingers parting the black wings of my hair. I looked up and saw the girl between me and the edge. The boy joined her and there was a knowing in their eyes that made them seem old. If I had gone over I would have taken all of it with me, the things I’ve never spoken of, how the rabbit’s back legs kicked and went still, how it smells of grave dirt under old houses, how it feels to bring a hatchet blade down on human flesh. I swiped the hair from my eyes and sat back on my haunches, examining my palms. There were flecks of dirt and shale in the scrapes. I held them up to show the twins. They stepped closer, drawn to my blood.
I struggled to my feet and went to the border of bushes at the brink of the plunging rock face. I could almost see the cows grazing and the Cotter man looking over the fields in neat squares, farmhouses and red barns like toys from a train set, roads and fences dividing the green. The world didn’t seem as dangerous from up there. I felt a tug at my hem and saw the boy holding my dress tail, maybe afraid I would jump. For a long time he’s been restless. I told him we’d ride to the co-op with Mr. Barnett, but now I’m having second thoughts. So far I’ve managed not to lose my mind after what happened to me, but I couldn’t stand my twins being found by the Odoms. I have to protect them for as long as I can. If they were older, I know what I would tell them. You might leave but one day your blood will whisper to you. You’ll hear witches making magic in a holler, healing wind blowing down a swollen throat, the song of the woman who came here in a mule-drawn cart and made it home. One of these days, wherever you are, you’ll turn around and look toward the mountain, old and wild and bigger than you. You’ll look this way and know it’s still alive, whether I am or not anymore. I was only thinking the words but the girl came to me as if she had heard them out loud. She reached up and I swung her onto my hip. “Look, Mama,” she said, pointing at the world below. “Can I go down yonder?” I thought of Granny taking my itchy foot in her hand and ached with loneliness. “Yes, honey,” I said. But you’ll come back. Just like me, you’ll always come home.
EPILOGUE. JOHN ODOM
Sometimes I get to missing the hills. I never thought I would when I first cut out and headed up north, but here in Rockford there’s buildings instead of trees everywhere you look and cars honking even in the dead of night. Living in a motel like I do, I can always hear somebody talking through the walls. It’s like I’m alone but I can’t ever get off by myself. If I think about the mountain where Myra came from, it don’t seem all that bad to me anymore. I understand now why she was so homesick being in Millertown. It’s took me a long time, but I’ve got to where I don’t hold a grudge against her. Since I’ve quit drinking and got a few decades older, I can look back and see how mean and crazy I was myself. I figure I ain’t nobody to judge the way Myra acted or where she ended up.