A smell stretched from Uncle Teardrop, a sharp cooked stench like something electric had been plugged in too long and was burning out. He lit a smoke, leaned toward Ree, and in coming forward exposed his melted side to a faint spot of light. He said, “The Dollys around here can’t be seen to coddle a snitch’s family—that’s always been our way. We’re old blood, us people, and our ways was set firm long before hotshot baby Jesus ever even burped milk’n shit yellow. Understand? But that shunnin’ can change, some. Over time. Folks have noticed the sand you got, girl.”
Ree watched as he smoked, watched and waited drowsily until he leaned backwards, unrolled a Baggie of crank, dipped a finger to the powder and snorted, gasped, snorted more. He sucked up hard with his nose. She yawned and said, “You always have scared me, Uncle Teardrop.”
He said, “That’s ’cause you’re smart.”
The blue pills bloomed inside Ree and suddenly made her droop in the darkness. She sagged drooling on the couch until Teardrop poked her awake with a finger. She stood, shuffled to bed, lay down with her hip touching Gail’s. She plumped her fattest pillow and soon slept black sleep, no pictures were flashed in her head, no words were hollered, just black and sleep and the radiant heat raised by two lying close beneath the quilts.
30
ALL MORNING it seemed fiddlers hidden from sight played slow, deep songs and everybody in the house heard them and absorbed the mood of their music. The boys were broody, alert but broody and wordless as they ate the scrambled eggs and baloney Gail whirled together in the black skillet. Mom kept to her room and Sonny carried a plate to her. Ned gurgled in his carrier across the tabletop. The hidden fiddlers’ music thickened the air with a lulling fog of low notes but now and then screeched rogue higher notes that raised eyes to the ceiling. Ree used her fork to chop her food to small bits, then gently chewed the bits on her unbroken side. Coffee made her broken side lunge with pain.
Sonny asked, “Will you see good again out of that swole eye?”
“They say.”
“Is it still all the way blind now?”
She spoke mushmouth sentences through bloused lips. “I can tell the sun is up. Catch a shadow movin’.”
Harold said, “There’s two Miltons from over towards Hawkfall in my grade—want I should fight the both of ’em?”
“No, Harold.”
“I’m friends with one, but I’ll still fight him anyhow if you say.”
“No. None of that. Don’t do that. Not now.”
Sonny said, “When, then?”
“If there comes a when, I’ll tell you.”
The boys split to catch their bus. Morning sun shined everything wooden to gold and made a garish molten puddle across the tabletop. Ree felt a dash of wooziness staring into the puddle and pushed back from the table, rose, and sat in Mom’s comfy rocker. She swallowed the last white hysterectomy pills and hummed along with the fiddlers. The music belonged to a ballad that the words to had been lost but was still easy to hum. Gail stood in Ree’s spot at the sink and washed dishes slump-shouldered while staring out the window at the steepness of limestone and mud. Ree watched Gail’s strong back and scrubbing hands, then snapped to a vision of herself idled by morning pills, beside the potbelly, humming along with unseen fiddlers, and instantly began to shake in Mom’s rocker, shake and feel weak in her every part. Weakened parts of her were crumbling away inside like mud banks along a flood stream, collapsing inward and splashing big flopping feelings she couldn’t stand. She gripped fiercely on the rocker arms and pushed and pushed until she gained her feet, moved to a chair at the table, laid her head flat in the molten puddle.
I ain’t never goin’ to be crazy!
Gail draped the dishrag over the faucet, turned around and said, “Done.”
“You’re awful good to pitch in.”
Gail stood over Ned, adjusted his blankie, pulled his skull cap snug. “I’ve got someplace I want to take you, Sweet Pea. Someplace they say’ll make you feel better in your bruises’n all.”
“I don’t know. I feel so stiff.”
“Here. Take this.” Gail reached into a near corner for a broom, an old grimy broom, the straw bristles trimmed short and made dull by long use. “You can lean on this ol’ broom like a crutch, kind of. We’ll be drivin’, but there’s some walkin’.”
The broom helped. Ree put the straw end under her armpit and leaned. She tapped the broomstick to the floor and walked with a peg-leg sound to Mom’s doorway. She rested against the jamb and squinted into the shadows.
“Mom, you might as well come out of your room. This is how I look now. I know it troubles you to see, but you might as well come out of your room’n get some sun. Your rocker’s all warmed up for you. I’ll only be lookin’ this way for a while, then I’ll be just almost like I was again.”
Gail said, “You about ready?”
There was no response from the shadowed bed, no words or movement, and Ree turned away and thrust the broomstick down hard and creaked toward the front door. She took Mamaw’s coat off the wall hook, slipped into the sleeves.
“Reckon I should bring my shotgun?”
“I would. If it happens you do need it, there ain’t gonna be no time to send home for it.”
“I about wouldn’t mind needin’ it today. I got me some targets picked out.”
“Well, I hope to hell it don’t come to that while Ned’s along, that’s all I can say.”
“Aw, don’t worry, they’re probly done with me.”
Ree carried the shotgun, Gail carried the baby. Ree limped on her broom down the porch steps to the old truck and noted a flurry of women watching from across the creek. Sonya, Betsy, and Permelia standing with two Tankersly wives from Haslam Springs and two women Ree didn’t exactly recognize. Gail started the truck and eased down the rut road. She waved when level with the women across the creek.
Ree said, “What’s up with them over there?”
“You, I bet. That’s Jerrilyn Tankersly and, I think, Pam’s her name.”
“I know them two some—who’s the other two?”
“One’s a Boshell. I’m purty sure that’s a Boshell. And one’s a Pinckney girl who married a Milton. The tall gal’s the Boshell. Both of ’em’re from around Hawkfall.”
“Think they’re askin’ shit about me?”
“Looks more like Sonya’s tellin’ ’em shit, from here. Their lips ain’t movin’ much.”
Ree laughed, then winced when her hurt lips spread, and said, “Heck, none of the ones I’d like to shoot is standin’ in the open over there. I could pot ’em from here if they was.”
Gail twisted her neck to see the gathered women.
“Looks to me like Sonya’s took up for you, Sweet Pea.”
“Huh. She’s got a soft spot for Sonny. Can’t help herself.”
At the hard road Gail continued south, straight across the blacktop to regain the dirt rut. Barbed wire nailed to tilting timber posts made a slack fenceline along the western side of the rut. A roadkill armadillo had been tossed at the fence and snagged on a barb, tail up and eaten down to an eyeless husk that wiggled in the breeze. Gail said, “Does he know? Sonny?”
“Not from us. If he knows, it’s from somebody else blabbin’, ’cause we never.” The eastern side of the rut belonged to the government and a wall of trees grew near the road. Branches overhead rent the sunlight into jigsaw pieces that fell to ground as a jumble of bright shards and deckled crescents. Beer cans and whiskey bottles and bread bags uglied the gully between the rut and the woods. Ree said, “The army’ll still take you even without the full amount of teeth, won’t they?”