28
THE WOMEN of Rathlin Valley began crossing the creek to view her even as she lay in the tub. Sonya led Betsy and Caradoc Dolly’s widow, Permelia, who owned the third house in the rank of three on the far bank, into the bathroom and closed the door on the paled waiting boys with their stricken faces. Ree lay with her good eye open a peep in water skimmed thinly with suds. The women stood in a cluster looking down at the colored bruises on milk skin, the lumped eye, the broken mouth. Their lips were tight and they shook their heads. Permelia, ancient but mobile, witness to a hundred wounds, said, “There’s never no call to do a girl like that.”
Sonya said, “Merab’s got a short fuse.”
“Done booted her calico.”
“Her sisters helped her.”
Betsy, wife of Catfish Milton, gray young yet handsome, began to shudder with feeling. Betsy had never been chatty, but in the years since she’d lost her sweetest daughter to a tree limb that dropped on a calm blue day she could occasionally be heard in the night shouting threats from her yard at those shining stars that most troubled her. She knelt at the tub side, laid a flat palm on Ree’s belly and rubbed a gentle circle, then stood trembling and fled the room.
The noise of boys sniffling in the parlor carried through the bathroom door.
Uncle Teardrop snapped, Hush goddammit, and they did.
Permelia said, “My say is, this is wrong. It can’t ever be right to do a girl that way. Not between our own people.”
Sonya said, “You can see three kinds of footprints stomped on her legs, there. Must’ve took them a while to track her up bad like that.” She shook her head, then handed an orange plastic vial to Gail, and said, “Pain pills from Betsy’s hysterectomy. Give her two to start.”
“Just two?”
“She’ll want more, but just two to start with, then build from there to whatever number lets her rest.”
29
BY DUSK Ree had three kinds of pain pills sitting on the floor bedside next to her teeth. In her head she was furnishing a cave. Her teeth looked like some sort of baby tubers grown underground behind the shed and yanked out with stiff forked roots yet attached. Victoria came to sit at the foot of her bed and see her stomped so ugly with two teeth on the floor. Ree could feel the dunkle with her tongue. Victoria dwindled to a wan color and said things over her, or didn’t, but left behind two kinds of Uncle Teardrop’s pills and they swaddled her in warm pink clouds. Hauling the furniture up the slope would be the first hard part. Bunch of ropes’d be called for. Lay the beds in the middle room of the cave, maybe, in from the fire but not far. Boys here, Mom there. Take the table and chairs, both guns, Aunt Bernadette’s dresser—or will the cave wet ruin good wooden things, bubble the veneer, warp drawers so they never open easy again?
Could be the good stuff ought to be sold.
Also, get teeth in town.
The boys crept to her side at early dark to sit around her, mournful, with their heads bowed like they wished they knew how to pray the oldest prayers and pray her well. Harold held a cool cloth to her swollen eye. Sonny made fists and said, “What was the fight about?”
“Me bein’ me, I guess.”
“How many was it?”
“A few.”
“Tell us the names. For when we grow up.”
“I feel too good’n pink just now, boys. Let me drift.”
A big-ass rug could be unrolled across the cave floor to smother dust and make smooth footing. Take the potbelly. Lanterns, clothesline, knives. Finish stacking rocks in the mouth. Pack all the thunder mugs and slide them under the beds. Something to cook on… can openers… hand soap… oh, man.
She slept into the darkest hours. She flinched asleep and tried to duck away from fists flying in her dreams. Knuckles out of darkness, boots that never shined, horrid grunts of women who felt righteous beating whatever they did. Thump’s angled face and cold parts… the hats… Dad’s body hung upside down from a limb to drain blood from his split neck into a black bucket.
I ain’t never goin’ to be crazy!
A golden fish in the bucketwith a sparkling tail that swished bright words across the blood, bright words splashed past so fast they couldn’t be understood, leaving the mind to guess at the words and just what the fish means by them and all those sparkles in blood.
I ain’t never goin’ to be crazy!
Gail says, “Sweet Pea, you want more pills? You’re thrashin’.”
“Okay. Make it the blue ones.”
“There’s no water.”
“I gotta hit the john, anyhow.”
“Here’s two.”
Ree stood and walked across the cold floor, walked slowly and bent. Moons of ache glowed in spaces of her meat and when she moved the moons banged together and stunned. When she sat on the stool all her stiffened places stretched open and loosed fresh hurt. She took the pills and drank from the tap with cupped hands, then shuffled back through the dark.
The rifle barrel made a shadow and she saw it before she saw the man. The man was on the couch, sitting by the window, and the rifle was propped against the arm. She felt he was watching her but she tried to become still as the darkness and blend anyhow. She forgot to breathe, until Uncle Teardrop spoke, “Get back to bed.”
“What… ’s goin’ on?”
“I ain’t big on trust, is what.”
She sat on the far end of the couch. The potbelly door was ajar and by its dim glow she could see the heads of both boys, flat on the bed cushions, feet wiggled free of the blankets. She said, “I think I’ll be okay. Not tomorrow or nothin’, but sometime.”
“You took that beatin’ good as most men I’ve seen.”
“Huh.” Ree let her head fall back on the couch and closed her eye. She felt talkative from inside her pink cloud, chatty, maybe confessional. “What I really, really can’t stand… is… is how I feel so shamed… for Dad. Snitchin’ just goes against everything.”
Wind rattled the windows in their frames. The yard light across the way glinted on old ice stuck to the panes. Mom snored short honking snores that carried. The smell of a filling ashtray hung in the air.
“Well, he loved y’all. That’s where he went weak.”
“But…”
“Listen, girl—lots of us can be tough, plenty tough enough, and do it for a long stretch, too.” He pointed toward Mom’s room, flung his arm out briskly and straight. “You know, Connie in there, Connie stood up plenty tough, too. She did. She really did. Stood tough through shootin’s and prison bits for Jessup and all variety of shit before, I don’t know why, but she sprung a leak and all her gumption leaked out.”
“But snitchin’…”
“Jessup wasn’t always a snitch. For lots’n lots of years he wasn’t a snitch. He wasn’t, and he wasn’t, and he wasn’t, then one day he was.”
Ree looked to the potbelly and saw that Sonny sat up now, listening, his back to the wall, hearing words he’d be feeding on the rest of his life. She said, “That’s why everybody sort of shuns us a little bit now, ain’t it?”