Shiner

by Amy Jo Burns

  Ivy had been healed. No one could refute it. My father had performed a miracle, and yet something was wrong.

  NIGHT SWIM

  Our cabin sat quiet after Ivy’s testimony. The sun disappeared into the horizon, each she-balsam a black stroke against its warmth. My mother hid in her bedroom, and my father did not follow her. I cooked canned beans and Swiss chard from the garden for dinner, and my father and I ate like escaped convicts on the back porch—in the dark and in a hurry.

  We sat side by side, just as I’d found him and my mother on the steps after Ivy had burned two days before. It was safer this way. I could keep watch with my father without having to look him in the eye. If that white eye got hold of mine, he’d know about Caleb and the whiskey.

  “What do you think,” he finally said, “about Ivy’s miracle?”

  My father never asked a question he sought an answer to. He didn’t care what I thought. He cared only about my mother.

  “Nobody can make sense of what happened to Ivy,” I said.

  His head sagged to the side. “I see. And your mama?” His blond hair looked silver in the night. “What does she think?”

  Before us the snake shed crowned the ravine. The shadows doubled it in size.

  “She’s thinking Ivy ain’t herself,” I said. “Like she escaped but left her body behind.”

  I watched him from the corner of my eye as he arched his back. “You think Ivy needed to escape?”

  Everything inside me warned against answering him.

  “It’s just . . .” I tried to find the words. “That she’s new now, in body and mind.”

  “There is no sickness in the flesh. Only sickness in the spirit.”

  “I know, Daddy.” I’d heard him say those words so often I recited them in my sleep. “But Ivy’s different now. You saw how she was at church.”

  “And it’s my doing?” he said. “And not hers?”

  “It seems so.”

  “And your mother doesn’t like it.”

  “I think she liked the old Ivy just fine.”

  Ivy had never been afraid to tell my father she thought he didn’t amount to much without his copperheads and rattlers. Just because a snake don’t bite you don’t make you a god, she’d said, making him mad enough for his skin to purple. And now that my father’s miracle had transformed Ivy’s body, it seemed he’d changed her mind, too.

  He scowled as he leaned toward the earth, plucked a blade of grass, and stuck it in his mouth. “I should have let her burn, then.”

  “Watch, Briar. That mean spirit will be the death of you.”

  My mother’s voice flooded toward us. I turned and saw her face aglow through the screen door. She looked worn, her thick hair grazing her waist, her palms flush against the sides of her patched skirt. I waited for my father to spout an apology, but my mother did instead.

  “I’m sorry I doubted you after Ivy caught fire,” she said as she stared him down with her dark eyes. “But Wren is right. Ivy ain’t herself. She’s never liked showy religion. You shouldn’t have called her up front today. You know that’s not her way.”

  My father’s lips formed a heartless smile, just like they always did when he figured he’d backed her into a corner. “God’s ways are not our own,” he said.

  My mother exhaled and pulled her brown hair into a bun. “I offered you my apology, Briar. You can take it or let it lie.”

  She slipped into the shadows and headed for their bedroom. My father rose to his feet, placed our dishes in the sink, and tailed her. I heard the hush of their bedroom door as my father closed it behind him. His voice whispered to her, and my mother’s voice echoed his. I came to my feet and stretched my arms out into the stillness. Those murmurs would fool anyone into believing they were still in love.

  It had taken my mother all day to apologize for doubting my father’s gifts. Maybe she’d been yearning all this time for her own miracle, and it had gone to Ivy instead.

  This kind of longing my father would never understand. He could drop God’s blessings like pennies in a fountain and never miss them. Ivy had experienced something real and holy and not of this world, and he wanted to fan it to a flame. After years of bucking against his wife’s best friend, he had finally found something he liked about Ivy—a glimmer of himself.

  * * *

  The trek to the creek was dreamy and hazed. I couldn’t stop myself from running to the water. I felt scared of what was happening to Ivy—of what was happening to me. Her accident had cracked open my deserted world. It made me reckless. Alive.

  The creek called me onward. Even at night the water never stilled. It always ran cold, the way old moonshiners liked it. My mother taught me this about our mountain’s fierce waters: If I wanted to conquer them, I had to give myself over to them first.

  Caleb sat cross-legged at the bank in a hooded sweatshirt. He’d taken Aunt Bette’s van in the night and parked it on a patch of dirt about thirty yards away at the top of the creek’s path. The engine ticked as I passed it. At the water he’d left his sketchbook and pencil by his shoes. It was cool out. I’d come barefoot, flask around my neck. I gripped it tight so Caleb wouldn’t see my hands shake. Then I walked past him and sank my feet into the water.

  “You ready?” I asked, hooking my eyes over my shoulder.

  He stood and pulled his hoodie over his head. I caught sight of his shoulders again, bare and muscled and tight. I’d never wanted to touch someone like I wanted to touch Caleb then. My dress slipped off my body. Underneath I wore a faded navy swimsuit that had once belonged to my mother. Most of what I owned had first been hers.

  I looked at Caleb. Touch me, my body begged. Please.

  I waded into the water up to my neck and took a sip of whiskey. Caleb still waited at the water’s edge.

  “You scared?” I asked.

  “I don’t get scared unless I need to.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “Is it always so cold at night?” he asked. He dipped his fingers into the water and drew them to his lips. I waited for his mouth to curve, for his fingers to go back for more. The creek water was sweetest in June.

  I smiled. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I don’t want to.” He took a step into the creek, and his eyes gleamed, two soft summer moons. “Coming here was like falling off a map.”

  Above us, atop the forest’s tallest spire, someone had planted three white crosses—one for Christ and the other two for the thieves crucified with him. The crosses’ silhouettes draped the creek like robes falling from the sky.

  “It’s easy to get lost on this mountain,” I said as I lifted my eyes to his.

  I offered the moonshine I’d stolen from Ricky. He stepped back, took it, and drank. I would come to know this about Caleb—he was as brave as he was cautious, never careless. I forged deeper as the water rushed past me, and Caleb followed with his arms overhead.

  “First,” I said, turning toward him. “Breathing underwater is just breathing out. Ready?”

  I didn’t wait for an answer. I took his hand and pulled him down, and he let himself be taken under. I held him there, feeling the weight of his palm on mine. I opened my eyes into the black. My dark hair swayed in the flux. Caleb’s hand tightened around mine as he pulled me to the surface. Our bodies sighed into each other. I’d never admit it, but I was freezing.

  “So is that it?” he asked. Drops of water glistened on his lips.

  “You’ve got to learn to float.” I stepped behind him and put one hand between his shoulder blades. “Lean back.”

  “You can’t hold me.”

  “I’m not holding you. The water is.” My voice softened. “Just lean.”

  He pressed backward, and his body folded in half. He flailed for my arm, and I took hold of him. Around us the water licked the rocks.

  “Floating feels lik
e sinking at first,” I said. “Stretch your arms out and keep your body straight.”

  Again my hands found his back, and again he folded. His teeth chattered.

  “Try again,” I said. “And lock your knees.”

  His body straightened against my palm, and I cradled my other hand around the soft bend in his knees. I’d never guided a man’s body with my own. It felt powerful and fleeting and terrifying. It was volcanic, how close our hearts were. I thought of my father and his magic palms, the fingers that soothed serpents and cooled flames. This must have been what he felt when the power left his body, a sensation so intimate he couldn’t help but crave it.

  * * *

  Caleb walked me home in the dark. We both shivered in the empty night as he told me about the Ferris wheel he used to ride every summer in Richmond, where he’d once lived. It was the first picture he’d ever drawn, a panorama of the city buildings reflected on the water before him when the ride’s alternator stalled and he got stranded with his brothers at the very top.

  “Your brothers,” I said. “The two boys in your sketch pad?”

  He nodded. “Twins.”

  “Where are they now?”

  He sighed. “Not far. A few towns over from Trap. My mother’s job transferred nearby, and that’s when the trouble started.”

  “Trouble?” I asked.

  “This place is all kinds of trouble,” he said.

  I couldn’t understand what Caleb meant. The only trouble I’d heard of was the kind that waited for me if I left this mountain—if I ever left my father and his serpents behind.

  We reached the bottom of my hill and pushed through the wall of balsams. Across from the gang of pines, an empty mailbox stood crooked in the ground. My father had camouflaged it with fir branches. Our cabin didn’t even have an address. The only mail we got was about my schooling, and it was delivered to Ivy’s mailbox. Above us Royal Empress trees trimmed the sky. Caleb pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt.

  “My father has a shed out back,” I said. “That’s where he keeps his snakes.”

  “He sure knows how to hide himself away from the rest of the world,” Caleb answered. “There isn’t another house for miles.”

  “He hates the thought of getting laughed at.” I thought of myself on my knees outside the library as the boys around me snickered. “And so do I.”

  The point of Caleb’s elbow touched mine. “I’m not laughing.”

  The softness of evening settled around us as the crickets cried out and the sound of the creek died away.

  “Folks ask you about the snakes, right?” Caleb leaned against the trunk of a tree. “They ask me why I’m separated from my family. Do you want to know?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The twins,” he began. “They’re only twelve.”

  I nodded. The tree branches spliced the moonlight into spindles.

  “I took them out on my neighbor’s four-wheeler last March,” Caleb continued. “It was risky, and that’s why I did it. I was so sick of sitting around this place where there’s nothing on the radio but static. I thought the risk would keep me alive in such a dead town.

  “I learned to drive in the city, and I knew that country roads were rougher. I’d heard stories of people losing control in the woods, and I wanted to feel it. I thought I was strong enough to steer as we spun out.” He waited. “But I wasn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “I hit a boulder I didn’t see. The four-wheeler bucked, and my brother Derrick flew off the back and hurt his spine.” He clutched the nape of his neck. “Been in bed ever since, and we don’t know if he’ll walk again. And Surley—the other twin—said he didn’t blame me, but he can’t talk to me anymore. Not even my mother can.”

  “That must be lonely,” I said.

  He nodded. “The separation is temporary, until my mother can adjust to caring for Derrick. But what they all need is to forget that I was the one driving. I could stand to forget it, too.”

  His shoulders curved in, and his face disappeared behind the fabric of the hood on his sweatshirt. I placed my hand on his back. His muscles tensed, then he sank a hand into his pocket.

  “Families take me on for a few weeks, and then I get sent to a new spot,” he said. “The farther we get from a city, the less people want someone like me around, and you know what?” His eyes flashed like oncoming headlights. “It’s like getting punished again, every single time.”

  He sighed, and his breath grazed my neck.

  “When I saw you with those boys in the creek,” he said, “it reminded me of my brothers.”

  I took Caleb’s hand, and his heat became mine. Our palms together: urgent, soft, dangerous.

  “Hey.” I could barely get the words out. “Do you want to see the snakes?”

  Caleb grinned, and together we forded the swamp and hiked the steep hill. Our shadows merged in the moonlight. The entire house stood dark as we passed it.

  We walked through the cattails until we reached the shed. I lifted the leather latch on the door. We stepped inside, and the door clanked shut behind us.

  “There’s no light in here,” I said, Caleb’s chest against my back. “I never realized till now.”

  The only flash of brightness came from a tiny window on the far wall, and the space was so small that Caleb couldn’t stand straight. When I’d found my father dozing in his shed just a few days ago, he’d seemed asleep in paradise. But in the midnight air, I saw that he’d built himself a coffin. It was death-quiet inside. Not a hiss snuck out of the five boxes.

  Caleb and I sat shoulder to shoulder across from them.

  “So,” he said. “You believe in all this?”

  It was an outsider’s question. I didn’t have an answer.

  “The snakes are real enough,” I said.

  “Seems like testing God to me.”

  “‘And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name they shall cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them—’”

  “‘—and they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.’” Caleb finished the verse from Mark’s sixteenth chapter. “I’ve read it.”

  His voice, a knell in the silence. It made my skin flush. My words might have honored my father and his religion, but my actions defied him. I’d never been a better daughter, sitting in my daddy’s shed and reciting his favorite Scripture, but I’d broken his fiercest rule. I’d let an outsider in—not only into my father’s sanctum but into mine.

  A spool of light drifted in from the small window and cast a spare gleam on our outstretched legs. I looked over at Caleb.

  “You think I’m odd,” I said.

  “No.” He spoke with care. “But your father is.”

  “What if I took up a serpent?” I asked. “Would I be odd to you then?”

  Our bodies were close and still not close enough. He leaned toward the cases where the snakes lay waiting.

  “Do it,” he said.

  My hands slipped against each other. “It ain’t meant to be a performance.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  “Only that you can do it or you can talk about doing it. It’s up to you.”

  I started to regret bringing Caleb here. He’d never fallen for the sick beauty of a serpent—lifting it beneath the jaw with one hand, tucking its tail behind his thumb with the other. Letting it move him, letting himself go palm to palm with his own death and defeat it. As my father’s daughter, I’d been waiting for the day I’d hold a canebrake aloft, my fingers finding the pulse of its three-chambered heart, its vertebrae swaying the way waves came to shore. But I’d never found the courage.

  “My father might be odd,” I said, “but he’s no fool.”
/>   “I never said he was a fool,” Caleb countered. “I—”

  I clapped my hand across his mouth when I heard a twitch outside the door.

  “Hide,” I said.

  “No,” he answered.

  “Please,” I begged. The sound came closer, footsteps breaking through the parched earth from the fire.

  “Don’t make me hide,” Caleb said. “Don’t do that.”

  I saw then I had no right to invite him here. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. I sprang to my feet and grabbed the latch when I heard my father’s voice.

  “Who’s there?” he asked. He knew enough not to open the door to a room full of snakes.

  “It’s me, Daddy,” I said.

  “Wren.” He hardly ever said my name. “What are you doing?”

  I bit my lip as I looked at Caleb. The flask dangled from my neck. “I’m praying,” I said, and my voice lost its strength.

  He was silent for a moment. “The snakes,” he called. “They locked up good?”

  “They are.”

  I could picture him pursing his lips, wondering whether or not this was a day to trust his daughter.

  “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I waited until I heard the screen door on the porch slap behind him, and then I turned to Caleb. I’d never felt dirtier.

  “I should go,” he whispered.

  “I’m sorry.” I couldn’t look at his face.

  Caleb stood and closed the door quietly behind him. I sat alone in the snake shed for the first time in my life. On my knees I crawled toward the yellow timber rattlesnake my father kept in the middle. I placed my hands flat against the glass, and I could feel it fogging from sweat. This felt safe, the snakes and me both confined. It was frail and lonely and everything about myself I wanted to change.

  * * *

  I would come to remember the following weeks by three measures: how much I thought of Caleb, how quickly Ivy got sick, and how much Ivy’s sudden illness provoked my father.