Shiner

by Amy Jo Burns

  Ivy didn’t want the gloves for her hands, either.

  “I stole these,” she said. “From men’s pockets outside the Saw-Whet.”

  Up the hill the preacher’s voice shuddered through the mountain quiet.

  “Why?” Ruby asked.

  Ivy didn’t answer. She had no reason, no need for one. She lined up the pile of mismatched gloves and tied them together, thumb to pinkie finger, like a wreath. Then she knotted it loosely around her neck, took out her daddy’s lighter, and set the wreath on fire. A ring of orange shot around her throat.

  Ivy fell back into the snow, and the flame went to smoke before swirling into the sky. Fire to ice, black to white, one girl to another. Ruby lay beside her, and together they watched their breath escape.

  That day Ruby witnessed Ivy’s burnt offering for a sin she had yet to commit. By the time Ivy burned at Ruby’s fire pit twenty-six years later, they’d barely remember the girls they’d once been—Ruby, the intrepid wanderer, and Ivy, who had crowned herself in fire.

  * * *

  After that morning in the churchyard, Ruby and Ivy’s friendship became a handprint they shared, twin life lines that began and ended as one. Old churchgoers like Hasil and Ivy’s father, Noble, used to have a name for this sort of union: a covenant, the kind that King David had with Jonathan in the Book of Samuel. They spoke of it as if men had invented the mystery of friendship, as if it hadn’t been the libation that sustained mountain women ever since water split rock to form the razorbacks above the hills.

  There was no solemn vow between Ivy and Ruby, no promise, no pressing of bloodied palms together in the firelight. They didn’t need the boastful promises of men. The things they did for each other, they did in secret.

  It started with Ivy, on the eve of her seventeenth birthday.

  Twenty miles north of the Saw-Whet, Ivy’s A-framed cabin sat on a skein of dirt that fed off the mountain’s lone road. Her mother had been raised in that house, and her Grandmother Harper, too. They had no indoor plumbing, and it was Ivy’s job to shovel the shit. She spent most summer nights smoking her father’s Pall Malls behind the woodshed, and on the evening before her birthday, Ruby joined her.

  Ruby had never left home after dark before. Hasil was the sort of father who punished his six daughters for things they hadn’t done—things that mostly had to do with the faults of men. He never hit his children. That was for unsaved hillbillies, he often said. Instead he told his girls lies about what would be true of them if they got caught with a boy after sundown, if they risked donning a dress cut above the knee. Ain’t nothing worse, he liked to warn, than a harlot leading a man to sin. One lash of his tongue stung twice as much as the lash of any whip, he reasoned, and the scar it left behind couldn’t be seen. Ruby tried to anticipate his corrections, doing her best to swerve away from them as if they were oncoming cars. Ivy, though—Ivy wanted to play chicken with her daddy and his puritan rules. Punish me? she baited him in her mind. I’d like to see you try.

  But that night, in the swell of summer, Ruby helped her daddy get good and drunk before sneaking out to see her friend for her birthday. She’d witnessed her mother do the same, once a month for the past year, as a means of keeping herself from getting pregnant for the seventh time—a trick that hadn’t worked. Inside the cabin Ruby’s mother lay in bed in the dark, a cold cloth to her forehead and a spoiled bucket of vomit at her feet. Her nausea worsened with every new baby her body grew. Ruby slipped out the door, her shoes in one hand and her father’s latest jar of whiskey in the other. She left Hasil’s moonshine next to his favorite rocker on their porch, and then she waited in the weeds. Two hours after sundown, when he slogged up the hill after a day at the junkyard, he perked up at the sight of the jar and had himself a drink. Then another. After he slumped deep into the rocking chair and shut his eyes, Ruby flew to the mule path behind her house.

  Ruby could make it to Ivy’s cabin in twenty-five minutes, if she ran. Beneath her arm she carried a poplin dress she’d sewn for Ivy with a small raspberry rosette stitched at the hip. The women of Ruby’s faith were called to wear long dresses, lest they tempt a man with their bodies. They wore gray and black, brown and tan. This was why Ruby had begun to sew as soon as she could hold a needle and thread: to be able to wear the colors of her mountain. Lilac and turquoise and peach and magenta—Ruby loved them all.

  She’d gotten the fabric for Ivy’s dress in her home economics class, and she’d reworked an old McCall’s pattern into a style she’d seen Ivy eyeing in Seventeen magazine. The rest of her classmates had moved on to sewing pairs of oven mitts, while Ruby traded the pattern’s waistline pleats for darts, hand-stitched seashell scallops along the skirt’s hem. It had taken an entire semester of school to perfect.

  Ruby knew that her friend would have no occasion to wear such a delicate dress. Still, she wanted Ivy to have something beautiful stowed in her closet. Ivy kept it for the rest of her life, never wore it again after her seventeenth birthday had ended. The dress would be among the first of Ivy’s possessions that Ruby would burn on the night she died.

  Ivy was waiting at the woodshed when Ruby arrived, the smoke from her cigarette like a mist settling over the firewood. The friends crouched in the stiltgrass, said nothing, so they wouldn’t wake someone inside the house. When Ruby presented her gift, Ivy hugged her tight.

  Then Ivy stripped in the moonlight. The dress slipped over her shoulders, and Ruby zipped up the back. Ivy twirled, laughed at herself. The skirt flashed in the shadows.

  “I have something for you, too,” Ivy whispered.

  She handed Ruby a switchblade with a pearlescent handle, and Ruby fastened it to the belt loop on her skirt. The gift made her smile, made her blush. She’d never owned such a graceful weapon. Ivy had chosen the knife at last summer’s flea market because it was sleek enough to hide, unique enough to be worthy of her friend.

  Up the hill the dry growl of an engine turning over cut through the stillness. Together Ivy and Ruby watched Flynn Sherrod and his father steal away from their own cabin across the road to make whiskey after dark. As the headlights of Sherrod’s Chevy threw golden daggers into the night, Ivy ached to slip into their truck and hide herself among their carboys of moonshine.

  Getting drunk didn’t bait her, but ruling the hills like a mountain man did. Ivy longed for the kind of escape a man like Sherrod would never need. She wanted to get wherever he headed with his son, to reach beyond the crater of rotted wood her father pissed in behind their cabin, which meant getting anywhere at all.

  Ivy loathed her life on the mountain, even though it was the life she and Ruby shared. Guilt nagged at her for wanting something more than her friend could give. Ivy hated the lime her father spread in their outhouse to stanch the smell, the scabbed chicken in their coop that ate its own eggs, the pair of brothers she had who fought more than they slept. She wanted sidewalks, curbs, and strangers—each a wonder she’d have forsaken a treasure for, if she’d had one to give away.

  * * *

  Ruby stayed with Ivy until Noble returned home from a night at Teddy’s. His truck eased into their gravel patch before he spilled out of it and headed for the house. The kitchen light flicked on, then off. The house settled, and Ivy exhaled. Ruby kissed her on the cheek, wished her happy birthday, and disappeared into the shadows.

  Ivy crept through the cabin’s back door and found Noble leaning against the cool of the woodstove in the dark, his feet spread-eagled on either side of it. He hoisted a cast-iron pan in the air and then he let it drop. It clattered against the floor. He’d done this before, waiting for her just inside the house without so much as a candle lit. Noble liked to startle his daughter as a teaching method, one meant to scare her straight—even when she’d done nothing wrong.

  That night Ivy’s daddy put his hands loosely around her neck. His thumbs grazed her chin as he kissed her mouth, lost his balance. He was whiskey-drun
k and sloppy, and his tongue swam down her throat like a trout.

  “Mountain men are all the same,” he said, swiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “Sooner you learn that, the better.”

  Then he staggered and fell on his daughter. Ivy kicked and clawed at him until he passed out by the woodstove. Barely a breath left in her, she slithered her body out from under his. Noble, big as a bear, could not be moved. Ivy lit a match, tossed it in the stove, and waited for it to scorch. She imagined shoving her father’s forehead against the belly of the piping iron until he woke up with a fist-size blister on his face. Ivy would make sure tonight was the last time Noble dared come near her.

  Then she heard Ruby’s voice calling her name.

  “Ivy,” Ruby said.

  Ivy jolted at the brush of Ruby’s hand on her shoulder. She must have returned after the cast-iron pan sent a clang into the woods, slipped through the porch’s screen door without making a sound.

  “What did you see?” Ivy asked.

  “Enough.”

  Ivy looked away, caught the beads of sweat on her father’s brow. She had no need to feel ashamed in her best friend’s presence, but she did. Noble had punished his daughter for her beauty, her curiosity, her spirit. The things she loved most about herself, he meant to destroy. He had a good chance of succeeding if she didn’t destroy him first.

  “I think you got two choices.” Ruby’s voice was softer than the whisper of the creek in the distance. “We got two choices, really.”

  Ivy fingered the black arrowhead she kept on a chain around her neck. Its point scraped against the flesh of her thumb.

  “We either kill him or we leave,” Ruby said. “There ain’t no in-between.”

  Ivy didn’t hesitate. “We leave.”

  She couldn’t bring herself to use the word “escape.” They’d never said the word aloud to each other, the promise of it too holy to be real. But Ivy aimed to be known for the things she did rather than the things done to her.

  “All right,” Ruby said. “It’ll take some time to plan, but we’ll leave.”

  Ivy nodded, and Ruby swept out into the night. Then Ivy couldn’t help herself: She pressed her foot into Noble’s skull just enough for his cheek to rest against the hot stove, held it there until he quivered and fell back asleep.

  Ivy spent the night watching her father from the kitchen corner. His freshly laundered long johns swayed like ghosts from their hangers by the open windows. She could suffocate him in five minutes with nothing but the tail of her skirt. She wanted to, if only to feel her own strength pulsing through her palms. But the thrill of it would be empty if he never knew what she’d done. That she’d won and he’d lost. Ivy wanted him to live until age turned him frail, knowing she’d left him behind.

  When Noble stirred the next morning, Ivy’s Grandmother Harper appeared and nudged his jaw with her foot.

  “Women give this mountain its splendor,” Harper said to Ivy. “And they get nothing in return.”

  Noble’s mouth hung open. Above him a paltry collection of tiny spoons dangled in a wooden cabinet, a delicate, silvery hook for every state Ivy’s mother had visited. They numbered three. Noble slammed the pocked flooring with his fist as he came to, and the spoons shook. Harper poured a pitcher of water on his head, then reached for his bottle of rotgut on the table. Took a swig.

  “A temper is good,” she said to Ivy as Noble’s spit pooled on the floor. “But a plan is better.”

  Ivy’s mother rushed in then, cradled her husband’s head in her lap, and went about soothing his burn with a cloth and some salve. This was the true original sin, Ivy swore. A man always had a woman to clean up his mess. Ivy wished she could keep her temper. At least a temper would flare and die. What had replaced it was disquiet, everlasting. Ivy promised herself that day she’d never clean up a man’s mess. Instead she’d make a mess of her own.

  Harper gestured toward the porch. “Come sit with me.”

  Ivy joined her grandmother in the pair of rockers that overlooked the swirls of gravel in their front yard. The two of them often sat together, just so, while Harper regaled Ivy with stories of their mountain. Now that Ivy had turned seventeen, her grandmother told her it was time she learned about the kind of cunning she’d need to survive.

  No legal record of it existed, Harper began, but coal miners’ wives had been forced to use sex as a shield since the 1930s, when mining companies had yet to purge the hills of ore, and coal barons thought they owned the right to all the land’s riches—including the women. An Esau Agreement, Harper called it.

  “The law around here denies it ever happened,” she said from her rocking chair, twining a thread of waist-length, heathery hair around her finger. “Someone ought to know the price we paid.”

  Back then, if a miner fell ill or broke a limb and couldn’t report to work, his wife was permitted to earn scrips to the company store in his stead. The agreement had the appearance of kindness, but the catch was deadly. A mining wife earned scrips for food and clothing by sleeping with her husband’s boss—or bosses, in Harper’s case. A woman who wore trousers and preferred three daily meals of tobacco rather than food, Harper had stepped into the agreement, wide-eyed and daring.

  “None of those limp-dicked cowards could look me in the eye,” she said. “Not one.”

  Often the agreement took place in the company store’s dressing room while a woman tried on an item of clothing. Some of them were prepared, and some weren’t. When Ivy asked why local police hadn’t put a stop to it, Harper laughed.

  “The law around here don’t do shit for women,” she said. “You know that.”

  The term “Esau Agreement” came from the Old Testament, Ivy’s grandmother explained. Esau, Isaac’s beloved firstborn, had returned from hunting so famished that he sold his birthright to his younger brother, Jacob, in exchange for a bowl of stew. Harper had sneered her lip at the name.

  “Esau was so desperate it made him stupid,” she said. “Just another man, prisoner to his own appetites.”

  Sooner or later, Ivy’s grandmother warned, a woman would do what she must for the ones she loved, and she ought to find no shame in it.

  After that night Ivy and Ruby plotted their escape each time they were alone. Once they saved enough cash, they’d dump their fathers’ bottles of whiskey and disappear without a note. They’d catch a bus to Morgantown, where Ivy would learn to tend bar and Ruby would find a job keeping books. No one would gawk at them as strange statues of an even stranger faith, the way they did in Trap. The friends would work, they’d keep their own money. They’d forget about shitting outside in winter and bartering for penicillin in the cracked lot of the Saw-Whet. They’d buy themselves denim and rhinestones and drugstore perfume, all the wondrous things forbidden to them by the religion of their fathers. Ruby and Ivy vowed it would be the gift they’d give each other for high school graduation, and Ivy had even begun to pack her sweaters.

  Then Briar Bird fought a lightning bolt and won.

  * * *

  The saddest truth about Ruby: She believed that miracles happened only to men.

  Their whole mountain purred with the story of Briar’s boldness. No one mentioned the mudslides that had leveled most of the houses on the eastern edge of the hills, or that Ivy’s own father had disappeared since the night lightning struck. He’d been gone for almost three days, and no one at the mine had seen or heard from him. Noble had skipped town before, as men were sometimes prone to do. All that was nothing compared to Briar’s miracle.

  Ivy had never seen her friend so flushed or fainthearted.

  She’d never thought much of Briar, the dreamy-eyed logger’s son who’d rather charm a snake than a girl. His mama had been hotfooting around the mountain to spread a brewing redneck legend, the new gospel of a boy called White Eye.

  Ivy pitied Briar for such a stupid tale. He’d forev
er be known as the boy who got hit by lightning, like the girls down in Trap were known for what farmers’ sons did to them in horse stalls when school let out in June.

  Ivy and Ruby had been told the same bedtime story by their mothers since they were young: Bold girls become loose girls, and loose girls get broken. Ivy could see no other future if they remained. Even church girls as innocent as Ruby ended up nursing four babies and a husband. If the measure of a man lay in the deeds he’d done, then women paid from their own empty pockets. Ruby had paid a fortune to her scamp of a father. What other way could Hasil Day starve his daughter that he hadn’t already done? He drank all he earned, and he earned next to nothing. Ruby and her younger sisters had to hunt wild ginseng and sell it at the 4-H fair so they could keep potatoes and carrots in the cellar. Ruby also subjected herself to crimson welts from Old Lady Frye’s chestnut cane because she earned an extra ten dollars a month by clearing dead chickens out of her coop. If she missed a feather or two, Frye’s cane struck. Hasil had taken Ruby’s health, her heart, and her pride, and all he’d do when she turned eighteen was surrender them to her husband—unless she and Ivy left, and left soon.

  * * *

  But now Ivy felt Ruby slipping away from her, even as they whispered to each other under the gas station’s weeper on Sunday mornings. When Ruby got poison ivy after a night at the creek with Flynn—a fool’s error that proved she’d lost her sense—Ivy went to Ruby’s cabin to remind her friend of the promise she’d made to leave the mountain behind.

  As she stepped through the front door, she bit back the laugh in her throat. It looked like Snow White had bustled through with her broom and left a shiny quart of apples perched on the table. Gone was the trash of Hasil’s daily toils. No spindles of pilfered copper sat stacked in the fireplace. The spew of old tires in the backyard had been rolled into the woods. The hundreds of keys without locks that once littered the floor had been collected in a tin can. Today Hasil had cleaned up after himself, and it wasn’t for Ivy’s sake.