by Amy Jo Burns
Henry nodded, but his mind was elsewhere. “Do you remember the dead baby?” he asked. “The one Daddy always talks about?”
I shook my head. “I was too young. Why?”
Henry slipped the cigarettes into his back pocket. “If that baby lived, do you think I would have been born?”
“Shhh,” I said. “Now go.”
Once the boys left the trailer, I lifted a jug from behind Ricky’s chair while he dozed. I stole into the kitchen to dump it down the drain, but I filled the flask at my neck instead. Ivy might need it, I reasoned. For the pain. But I had lied to myself. I wanted it because my mother had these empty carboys in her kitchen, and that meant someone had drunk them, once upon a time.
* * *
By the time I reached the creek path, the sun had grown fat in the sky. When I met the riverbed, I buried the flask in its hiding spot and forgot about the feeling of being watched. The water called out to me. At the creek’s edge, I thought of Ivy, burning. My mother had told me to stay away, and I wanted to. All my life my chances for escape were so few.
I shed my dress and fell into the water. As I floated on my back, I prayed for Ivy. I never felt closer to God than when the shock of a cold stream hit me, and it never happened on a Sunday. Diving deep, I prayed that every shiver would take the heat from Ivy’s body. I prayed for my own way of getting burned. When I resurfaced and opened my eyes, I saw someone sitting on the rock above me at the edge of the overhang.
I could only see the diamond of his back, and he was holding the flask I’d buried. He looked a year or two older than me, and he hummed a tune I didn’t know. The rasp of his voice rippled in the well of my chest.
The boy stretched, and his muscles sang. His shoulders spread wide like a crucifix, the white of his shirt like a soul washed clean. He knocked back the bottle and sighed as the whiskey clawed his throat.
“Hey,” I called, and he turned to me.
His skin was black, his eyes like copper. I’d never seen a stranger look at me without pity before. I waited for him to laugh at me the way folks in Trap did, but he didn’t. I’d stripped myself of my mountain-girl costume, my homespun dress left on the bank and my thick braid undone. I was naked with creek water rushing over me, and I felt afraid.
I pointed to the bottle. “That—” My voice buckled. “That ain’t yours.”
“It isn’t yours either, is it?” His head cocked toward mine, and my breath stopped. I wanted to answer; I wanted to hide.
“Who are you?” I asked.
Music lifted from the cell phone that flashed next to his sneakers. Clean and white, it buzzed. I wanted to hold it to my ear, just to see what it felt like. We didn’t even have a landline at our cabin.
Ricky was the only person I knew with a cell phone, even though it rarely worked. The signals from Trap’s cell towers weakened up the mountain like dying men. This boy, in a white shirt and faded jeans, must have come from a city—maybe Morgantown or Pittsburgh. Places farther off to me than heaven itself.
“That thing.” I pointed to his phone. “Does it take pictures?”
He nodded.
“Don’t take one of me.”
“Okay.” He hesitated. “Are you scared of getting your picture taken?”
“No,” I lied. “I just ain’t a joke.”
He paused again. “I understand.”
I treaded water as he watched the clouds pass.
“Where did you come from?” I asked.
“Let’s trade,” he said. “A drink for a question.” He turned his back and stared into the forest. “I’ll wait for you to put on your dress.”
I swam to the bank, threw on my dress, and met him at the overhang. He handed me the bottle, and I brought it to my lips. It tasted warm and fiery.
“My name is Caleb,” he answered. “I’m staying at Aunt Bette’s in Trap.”
“The home,” I said.
Aunt Bette only attended my father’s church when one of her foster kids could drive her fifteen-passenger van up the mountain. They’d have to wait for the train to cross the tracks as long as snow hadn’t blocked them, then scale the corkscrew road up the hill for the better part of an hour, longer in the rain. Then they’d have to hike the remaining half mile, leaving the van by the downed trees. Everyone called her Aunt Bette, just like everyone called her house “the home.” She’d been taking in kids since her husband died in a coal-mining accident fifteen years back. My father forbade me to speak to Aunt Bette’s wards, even when I sat next to them in church. His word was law: No outsider would ever talk to his wife or his daughter.
“So that’s what you call it?” Caleb drank. “The home?”
“It is.” It shamed me to say it. Even I knew that no one felt at home there. “What are you doing up here?”
He passed the flask. “I wanted to disappear.”
“No one will find you here.”
His fingers skimmed mine as he took back the bottle. He swallowed the shine, and the sky spun above me. My body swayed.
“I’m Wren,” I said. “I live up the hill.”
“I liked that story you told those boys today.” Caleb set the flask next to the sketchbook and charcoal beside him.
“You were watching me.”
“I was.” He paused. “I wasn’t sure if it was safe to show myself.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why do you think?” he said.
My father preached that all were welcome inside his church, but his church was white. It was easy to think the snakes scared off anyone not born in these hills. It was even easier to think that was how God wanted it.
“You don’t have to be scared of me,” I said. “I won’t hurt you.”
“Your people might.”
“Why did you change your mind?” I asked.
“You won’t tell anyone you saw me,” he answered. “Any girl hiding whiskey has enough secrets of her own.”
Secrets. I’d never had one of my own before Ivy caught fire. Now I had Caleb and the whiskey, both. A catbird called out as it dove into the trees.
“What are you drawing?” I pointed to his book, and he handed it to me.
Each page of Caleb’s sketchbook featured a different portrait. On the first page, he’d drawn a mirror image of two boys.
“My brothers,” he said.
They sat back-to-back on top of a mountain, each casting out a fishing pole toward the stars. I touched the delicate branches of their arms. The paper stubbled against my fingers.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I said. “How did you make the gray background with such bright stars?”
“Like this.”
He pulled out a piece of soft charcoal from his pocket along with a white cloth. After turning to a fresh page, he drew three lines across it. Then he passed his cloth over the lines until they blended into each other, and he used a pointed white eraser to etch the stars in the midnight sky.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
The next picture he’d drawn was a replica of the hanging wooden footbridge that was suspended between the two razorback stone ridges, the same ones I saw every morning as I looked out across the ravine toward West Virginia’s highest peak. We lived in the foothills of the razorbacks, tucked between them and the only road that led to town. In the fog the ridges looked like two giant daggers. Caleb captured their shattered profiles in a charcoal maze of angles and curves. On the bottom of the page, he’d drawn a hand reaching out from the bridge into the dead drop.
“You went to the razorbacks?” I asked.
Anyone not born in our hills needed a guide to find their way to the base of those mountains. The razorbacks were as beautiful as they were fatal. Folks had died trying to cross the cavern.
Caleb shook his head. “A picture I found at Aunt Bette’s.”
I pointed to the final portrait in his book.
“What about this one?” I asked.
It was a rough sketch of a young woman holding a little boy in a pool of water. The corner of her shoulder cut like a cliff’s edge, her face sheathed by her long hair as it spilled into waves made from teardrops.
“It’s you,” he said.
I pictured the crest of his finger softening the charcoal edges of the young woman’s curves. My curves. My breath caught, and I clutched the edges of his book.
“You said you wouldn’t take a picture of me,” I said.
“I didn’t.”
“You can’t keep this.”
I tore the page from the book and rose to my feet.
“The flask,” I said. “I need it.”
Caleb surrendered it, and I ran up the hill without looking back. I thought of Ivy and my mother on the ground next to the fire, so close there wasn’t a breath between them. I remembered Ivy’s skin. The flames. My mother’s arms. My father’s wayward eye settling on the nook in Ivy’s collarbone as his hands traveled her wounds. Soon he’d realize how long I’d been gone.
* * *
I stalked the cattails when I returned home, right in the spot where I’d seen the fox from my bedroom earlier that morning. I’d been a different girl then, hidden and untouched. Now I’d collided with the world my father feared—the nip of cold whiskey, a stranger to share it with. All because Ivy had been so badly burned.
I crept to the window and looked through it. Ivy sat upright in my bed. She looked like the fire had never touched her, but here was the curse: She also looked like nothing else had, either. Her skin beamed. Ivy’s hair had been wiped clean from her head.
She slept, and her head sank to the side. Along the back of her skull ran a thin seam of red, like a rash. It started at the crown and slipped down her spine.
I backed away. Ivy was better, Ivy was new. I’d never seen my father work this kind of magic before. I’d only heard stories from mountain folks about the powers God had given him, but today I witnessed them for myself. The miracle saddled me with dread. My father had healed Ivy without so much as touching her. He’d brought himself into the holy temple of my mother’s friendship with Ivy, and I knew it couldn’t withstand the three of them. After hiding the flask in the reeds, I halted at the cabin’s corner when I heard my parents trading whispers on the back steps. They cast their glances into the shadows.
My mother still hadn’t changed her dress, and it hung in tatters at her knees. She dropped her chin into her hands, then grimaced. Her skin was swollen and stippled red from the flames, even though Ivy’s was pristine. The bandages she wore reached up to her elbows as she looked out over our land. The only sign of life beyond us was a thin cord of smoke from a mine slicing through the horizon. The fire still smoldered at their feet as the soap hardened in a mound on the grass.
Slowly, she leaned back and stretched out her legs. My father sat beside her, skating a pointer finger along his jaw.
“How’d you do it, Briar?” she asked. Her voice was weary. “I’ve seen you perform plenty of signs and wonders, but nothing like that.”
He leaned back next to her, and my mother was too tired to pull herself away. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them sit side by side. The step bowed beneath their weight.
“It was done to me once, a long time ago,” he said.
“After the storm?”
He gave a gentle nod.
“I thought you didn’t remember it.”
His eyes dug into hers, wanting to give love, wanting to take it away. “I don’t.”
And there my father went, spiraling into his own mysteries just as he’d done ever since the day lightning had come hunting for him.
SIGNS AND WONDERS
The mountain folks living along our lonesome road had always called my father by his real name, but anyone beyond Trap’s borders who’d heard the stories of the young man and his lovesick snakes knew him as White Eye. I knew because my father traveled to Jolo a few times a year for his snake handlers’ circle, which was full of men twice his age who knew how to keep his secrets. As soon as he left for the day, we’d sneak into town. Ivy and my mother would watch old movies at the dollar theater while I went to the library. I had two hours to myself—a gift in those days before Ivy caught fire—and I’d determined to spend them teaching myself to use a computer. My mother couldn’t teach me, and I wanted to learn. I opened up an internet browser, and the cursor blinked like the glassy pupil of a copperhead.
Every time I typed the same words with my index fingers:
P-R-E-A-C-H-E-R
W-H-I-T-E E-Y-E
S-N-A-K-E-S
I scanned the results slowly, unsure at first how to coax the mouse into clicking on each link. Local papers wrote of a lightning-struck man with a white eye, a mountaineer who served strychnine for breakfast and slept with his snakes. Folklore sites listed his whereabouts for the last fifteen years as anywhere from the Appalachian Trail to the Smoky Mountains, and none of the information was true. My father had never traveled farther than the four-hour trip to Jolo in his entire life. I found no pictures, no mention of a wife or child, even though rumors swirled around Trap that he kept us chained with the snakes. My father had no first name or last, only a title. White Eye. Even his own mother, legend insisted, had called him that before she died.
There’s a self-generating power born from a fitting name, the same way a clenched fist shoots blood through a vein. My father had been baptized as Briar W. Bird, but his mother started calling him White Eye the day he got hit by lightning.
The night of the storm, my father was asleep on the lofted floor above the kitchen in the cabin he shared with his mother. His father: a committed logger and an absent husband. They hadn’t seen him in over a year. A lightning bolt busted through the window, shattering the glass pane and scorching a cedar plank in the floor. A beam from the loft’s ceiling had fallen and knocked him unconscious. My father hadn’t yet seen his eighteenth birthday.
By the time he opened his eyes, a gang of flies had infiltrated the open window and all the glass had been swept. My grandmother, who died in her sleep less than a year later, never bothered to send for the doctor. In our hills folks drank poison in the name of God and handled snakes when the Holy Spirit led. For us sickness never rested in the body. It rested in the spirit. If illness came for one of the faithful, we prayed and waited for God to move. Evidence of God’s favor relied on how many times death was cheated when you called it by name.
The first miracle in my father’s life: He was fine. His body betrayed no sign of the electricity that had shot through him—until he opened his eyes. One eye held its blue color, and the other strayed toward silver-white. Ever since I’d known him, my father’s eyes straddled his two lifetimes, the moments before lightning struck and every moment that came after.
Though he’d told me this story countless times, the memory itself never belonged to my father. He couldn’t recall any of it. But his mother told anyone who would listen, and the tale grew a life of its own. Soon everyone from peak to crag owned the story of the day White Eye wrangled with the lightning bolt and won. Almost two decades later, long after my grandmother’s death, the shared memory had collected itself into an undisputed truth.
“That father of yours,” folks would say to me on Sundays, “is gonna save this mountain.”
I’d learned a long time ago to smile and wait.
“I still remember the day he got struck.” The stories always started this way. “It was like the lightning was hunting him. Your gran went running at the sound of prickling glass. Sliced her feet up good.”
My father’s version didn’t feature a lightning bolt, but I never tired of hearing it. While he slept through the storm, an angel came to him in a dream and touched a hot coal to his lips. He couldn’t see her face. He only felt
the burn. He also felt himself opening, like he was breathing for the first time. Then a frost set in that sent a shiver through his body. Sometime after that he opened his eyes. That was the first story he ever told me.
Before I was old enough to shake a tambourine at a Sunday service, my father entrusted these secrets to me for a simple reason. I was easily impressed, and my mother no longer was.
“It takes no bravery to work a miracle,” she’d say, digging potatoes from her garden’s brittle earth. “What takes bravery is when there’s no miracle at all.”
My father couldn’t fathom a life without miracles, not when he saw evidence of them every day in the mirror. He told me God wanted him to see the world in two separate realms. The dark eye, as he called it, saw the fallen earth as it was, and the blighted eye saw the spirit world.
I knew enough not to ask about the spirit world. It was a treasure I should have been able to follow his map toward, being his daughter. It was the same map my mother once followed, and she had turned back. My father sank so deep into himself when he spoke of holy things that there was no way for either of us to follow. The more I tried to understand him and his religion, the further he drifted away from me.
* * *
The day Briar Bird got struck turned out to be the first day of the rest of his life. He’d been wooing serpents for a long time before then, but that was the day he transformed from just another boy from the hills into a man. To be called a man at his age was to be granted an imaginary scepter and sword. It fostered mettle in his fresh heart, but not kindness. That was the day he became a snake handler.
Snake handler. My father’s temper would flare if he heard me call him that. He loathed the term. Taking up serpents, he always said. Taking up serpents was biblical. Snake handling was a sideshow. Most churches who practice the art of taking up serpents don’t allow anyone under the age of eighteen to partake. My father did it more than twenty years ago when he was twelve. This was another story he liked to tell.
