Ree slid her hand from the shotgun barrel across the seat to Uncle Teardrop’s arm, and squeezed, squeezed again. He turned his head away and started the engine. Dead limbs scraped the truck and broke to the ground. He drove out of the orchard and across the bumpy field to the road. He said, “You’re a mess, let’s get your ass home.”
The world rippled in her view until she shut her eye and let her head loll to the window. Teardrop drove the dirt roads, the nigh cut to the house, and as the truck rattled down the rut he began to honk the horn. Ree opened her eye. He stopped just below the undulating porch with the shimmying rails and went around to open Ree’s door. Gail jumped down the porch steps and ran with her echo to the truck and the boys echoed to a four-part stop in the doorway behind her. They appeared stunned to sickness by the sight of Ree’s face. Gail instantly began to cry. She and Teardrop lifted Ree from the bench seat. Ree spit the stained coil from her mouth, rested her head on Gail, and whispered, “Help me wash. Burn my clothes. Please. Help me wash.”
Chapter 27
ALL HER aches were joined as a chorus to sing pain throughout her flesh and thoughts. Gail stood her straight and naked and cleaned her body as she would a babe’s, using the soiled skirt to swab the spread muck from her ass and thighs and behind the knees. Gail touched her fingers to the revealed welts and bruises and shook between cries. When Ree moved she came loose and sagged as the chorus inside hit fresh sharp notes. Her agony was the song and the song held so many voices and Gail lowered her into the bathtub where sunk to her chin in tepid water she marked a slight hushing of all the chorus but the singers in her head.
Chapter 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.”
Chapter 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?”
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.
Chapter 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 belong
ed 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?”
“I don’t know. I imagine they would. Why wouldn’t they?”
Ned stretched and mewed, opened his eyes and puckered his lips, then was instantly asleep again. He smelled sweet and the trees stood tall and the truck jostled across furrows in the rut. Heavy clouds rimmed the northwestern distance, a warning border of bustling gray creeping into the plain sky.