by Amy Jo Burns
Caleb listened.
“Folks like to yell here.” I lifted the bottles. “It’s a noise you fall into, one so deep you can’t hear it anymore.”
I cleaned the outsides of the old Cokes with the hem of my shirt.
“What are those?” Caleb asked.
“One is holy oil and one is strychnine,” I said. “The holy oil will bless you, and the strychnine will suffocate you from the inside out. It’s hard to tell the difference.”
He smiled. “All you need is a match.”
Caleb removed a matchbook from his back pocket and lit one. It glowed like gold. He took the first bottle and dropped it in, and together we watched the flame drown.
Then he lifted the second bottle out of my hand and unscrewed the lid. He dipped his finger inside and drew a cross in the hollow of my collarbones.
“This isn’t for play,” I said.
“I’m not playing.” He kissed the cross he’d made.
I’d never felt the miracle of a tongue on my skin. It glittered and flashed as he worked his way up my neck and found my mouth. I could barely breathe, he was so gentle. His lips still had a trace of oil, and I drank it. I wouldn’t leave a drop of it behind. All my life I’d been aching to be touched. I wanted the risk it promised—the kind Briar Bird would never understand.
When I went to the bathroom to wash the oil from my hands, the faucet shuddered. I knelt to fiddle with the pipe. Next to the wall, I found a note Ivy and my mother had left behind.
Sixteen years ago Ivy had etched these words beneath the sink:
Ruby and Ivy were here.
October, 1999
For a moment they were with me again. Ivy bringing fire, my mother bringing wind. Together forming a voice out of the silence that confined them.
I asked Caleb for his pencil and etched the markings onto a paper towel. Then I hid it in my pocket as we made the slow drive north toward the short life my mother had lived.
“Ivy’s,” I said. “We have to go to Ivy’s.”
Ruby or Briar—I couldn’t tell who I was hunting anymore.
HUNTER
It was three o’clock in the morning by the time Emma pulled the van off the road in front of Ivy’s old trailer. My mountain had never looked so dark. Since the last thunderstorm, on the day Ivy was buried, a crater had formed in the trailer’s roof. Rainwater spilled out. The sound of it shushed like a whisper. Their lot, ripe with stiltgrass and weed trees, looked smaller than it ever had when Ivy lived there. The largest swath of it had been scorched by a burn pile. Ivy’s old belongings—her quilts, dresses, and linens—lay before us in ashes.
The trailer’s front door busted open with one kick. Caleb reached for the kitchen light, and it flickered before going out. Emma sparked her Zippo. Light fanned across the trailer’s tiny entrance and into the galley kitchen. Her frown quivered in the glare.
“That smell,” she said.
“Ivy was ill,” I said. “This house ain’t been cleared out. Cover your mouths.”
I lifted the collar of my shirt toward my nose, but Emma shook her head.
“This sickness isn’t airborne,” she said.
She picked up one of the water jugs on the floor, uncapped it to sip the water, then spit it into the sink.
“This water is poisoned,” she said as she wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “Did she get this water from town?”
Emma opened the kitchen window, and a breeze swept through.
“Yes,” I answered. “From the spigot by the Saw-Whet. They haven’t had running water for months.”
“Didn’t you hear about that chemical spill at the coal treatment plant back in June?” Emma asked. “Most of the folks down in the foothills got sick.”
I remembered the day Ivy had burned. I’d been standing in the same spot, looking for a glimmer of afternoon sun and some food for Ivy’s boys when the story flashed on Ricky’s television. I was too shaken by Ivy’s fall to notice.
“Same thing happened to my mother a while back when our house got condemned,” Emma said. “Crude MCHM got into our water supply. We were all sick from it.”
“Sick how?” I asked.
“Rashes, vomiting, nausea. Delirium sometimes. My brothers had blurry vision and wheezing.”
Emma had described each of Ivy’s symptoms without fault. Ricky and the boys had gone sluggish these past few months, and Job’s cough had worsened since the spring. Even so, Ivy was the sickest among them. Her sons often drank milk instead of water, and Ricky drank whiskey more than anything else.
My mother, father, and I were convinced Ivy’s illness had been caused by her catching fire, that somehow my father’s mysterious God had been at the root of it. He wasn’t. A chemical poison was. I realized something else. Ivy hadn’t spoken in tongues at the Sunday service after the burning, either. She’d only been light-headed and mumbling. She must have thought my father was the only one who could help her because he’d cooled her burns after she fell into the flames. All the signs of a rational explanation had been present, and we hadn’t seen them.
“How did you treat it?” Caleb asked.
Emma shrugged. “We got the hell out and stopped drinking the water.”
I rested against the back of Ricky’s recliner in the same spot he’d used to keep his carboys of moonshine. Many times my mother and I had entered the trailer over the past summer and recoiled at the smell. Ivy had been living in it.
In her bedroom I threw open the drawer of her bedside table and sifted through the contents in the moonlit dark. Old letters from her Grandmother Harper, a dull knife. A calendar. Not one item of Ivy’s own that might speak for her.
My mother couldn’t speak for Ivy anymore, either. No one had believed her when she insisted that Ivy needed to see a doctor, not even my father. She died before her instincts were proved true. I felt it for a moment—the desolation my mother must have sustained when Ivy stopped believing her, too.
The drawer slid from my hands onto the floor. The papers scattered across the rug. Caleb held up the lighter in the center of the room, the beam a feeble beacon in the middle of the night.
Emma lifted a tub of salve from Ivy’s nightstand and screwed off the lid. Inside, it had been licked clean.
“Tallow and beeswax,” she said. “This is what my mother used for days before she heard about the bad water on the radio. Even five jars wouldn’t cool the itch. Ivy was in pain.” She replaced the lid. “Enough pain to drive her crazy. She just couldn’t see it.”
Emma was right. Even Dr. Ed couldn’t have diagnosed Ivy’s illness without knowing that her water supply had come from the town’s contaminated pipes.
I knelt to right the spilled drawer. A letter skirted the edge of the bed. By the gleam of the lighter, I could see two words written on the envelope’s face in Ivy’s handwriting: My Confession.
I opened the letter. In it she shared all the things my mother had never told me about the night an outsider rode into town in a white Silverado and the private path Ivy set him on because she knew that her friend would be walking it after dusk. Ivy had only wanted to make Ruby jealous, the letter said. She’d never meant to scare her. Then my mother got married and hid herself away in the highlands, and the two of them never left the mountain like they’d dreamed. For sixteen years Ivy had blamed herself for what a man had done.
Near the end of the confession, Ivy wrote that her only anchor in a sea of contrition was her choice to give her second child to Flynn Sherrod. It was a selfless act she hoped would atone for the rest of her regrets.
I read that sentence, and then I read it again. I’d always thought Ivy had four boys, but she’d had five. Her dead baby had lived. I saw it then, the likeness between Sonny and Ivy—pale hair and freckles, green eyes deeply set. She only felt shame, Ivy said, because Flynn had believed that the baby was Ruby’s.
; I placed the letter back inside its envelope, convinced Emma and Caleb to return to Aunt Bette’s before she woke and found her van had gone missing. The next leg of my journey I could travel alone, on foot.
As I hiked northward, I recalled Flynn’s waterfall of kindness toward me. A man’s folly, Ivy had used to say, lies in what he thinks he knows. When Flynn buried Ruby Day, he thought he’d buried his boy’s mother, that I was his sister.
He’d also asked me to stay off the mountain, but he’d never told me why.
* * *
It took over an hour to hike to Flynn’s hunting hideout. When I reached the top of Violet’s Run, the house stood empty and unlocked. While waiting for Flynn to return, I fell asleep next to the same bed where my mother’s body had lain.
I dreamed of her—the sensation of her fingers braiding strands of my hair, the echo of her laughter when Ivy poked fun, the way she wiped her hands on her apron when she was fixing to give my father a piece of her mind. I wanted so much for her to speak to me.
I woke just before dawn. The half-moon glowed from the window, and I rose to look through it. In the distance a meager light shone through a flock of sugar maples, and I left the quiet house in search of it.
As I climbed the slope, the violets cooled my feet. I passed my mother’s and Ivy’s graves, the mounds of dirt like two shut eyes. I’d never see Ivy blazing up our hill again, and I’d never hold my mother’s hand as we dipped under the creek water and disappeared. These women had raised me. They taught me how to survive our mountain but not how to live without them. I would have to learn that on my own.
By the time I reached Flynn’s still, I could feel the heat. Up high on the mountain, near the peak of Violet’s Run, I found the firelight I’d spied from Flynn’s bedroom window. In the dark of night, the smoke kissed the mist and the world smelled like candy.
I crept to the edge of a square hole and looked down. Inside it Flynn had dug a deep pit and fitted a copper still within. Next to my feet lay a rolled layer of sod that he must have used to cover the still during daylight.
I watched Flynn work. He’d tucked two barrels in the corner next to a stock of empty glass jars. Water flowed in from the far stream. Flynn dripped in sweat, shirtless. He touched the thin copper tube that connected the barrels, and he winced from the heat.
He looked up when the moonlight hit him and gave me a sad grin.
“Ain’t the prettiest setup I ever built,” he said. “But it’s the smartest.”
He wiped the sting from his eyes.
“Where’s Sonny?” I asked.
“Sleeping.” Flynn pointed to his truck in the shadows. “Why ain’t you at the home?”
“I need you to hear the truth,” I said.
Flynn waited.
“You were kind to me because you thought Sonny was my brother, but he ain’t.” I watched his eyes fall to the flames beneath the still. “He’s Ivy’s boy.”
Flynn rubbed his brow. His face was sun-beaten, his hair still as black as midnight in the mines. “That ain’t why I was kind to you,” he said.
I sat on the edge of the pit and let my feet hang.
“Won’t be long now.” Flynn nodded toward the twine stuck into the end of the still’s spout. “Gonna start to sing here real soon.” He readied a glass jug beneath the rod and waited.
The shine started to pour, and he took the first glass and threw it into a bucket.
“Why are you pouring it out?” I asked.
“That’s the foreshot.” Flynn wiped his hands on his pants. “It’ll kill you.”
My father had similar jars, his filled with strychnine, like the ones Caleb and I had seen at the gas station. Two men, two different brands of poison. One purged, the other swallowed, one noxious portion at a time.
Flynn filled a pint jelly jar with whiskey, capped it, and shook it until it fizzed. “Got a good bead,” he said, relaxing. “That’ll do.”
I watched him fill and cap the rest of the jars—fill and cap, fill and cap. I climbed down into the bunker and handed him the jugs. His hands worked magic. Not a drop fell to the ground. When the stream waned, he cut the fire, leaned against the wall, and closed his eyes.
The still sighed, the copper creaked. He watched that copper pot like he’d watched the boy he’d raised, with a father’s care.
I counted twenty jars while Flynn’s head lolled against his shoulder, and for the first time since my mother’s death I felt at peace. I took a glass and held it up to the firelight. The bottom third was painted white, just like the jars my mother collected in her kitchen.
“Flynn,” I said, eyeing him through the liquor he’d made. “How did you know my mother?”
He exhaled. “I would have been the best man at your parents’ wedding,” he said. “If I hadn’t fallen in love with the bride.”
Flynn lifted the jar from my hand and unscrewed the lid. He took a sip and then offered it to me.
“Here,” he said, and I took the glass and brought it to my lips. “This is how we share our secrets.”
* * *
Flynn told me that even now he had never loved another woman like Ruby Day. It was a tragic and terminal love, and still every morning when the sun rose, he chose it.
He looked at me as he spoke, maybe remembering how my mother’s hair used to turn a thick braid across her shoulder the way mine did before Emma cut it. I took another sip, and Flynn did, too. He told me of the night he and my mother spent in the creek, not a hundred yards away from where her father slept, their feet racing and their hearts racing even faster. Then he told me of the sickness that swept over him, that it was the best night of his life, even still.
I pictured my mother there in the summer dark, her skirt flowing against the current. Her eyes blazing like shooting stars.
“And she still married my father,” I said.
Flynn sucked his teeth. “I ain’t gonna defend your daddy. But there’s one thing he understood. He knew that faith—in God, in this West Virginia ground, in each other—only becomes real by putting something on the line.” He paused. “I just wish it hadn’t been his own life. Or Ruby’s.”
I took a fresh jar of liquor and shook it in my hands, watching it froth. The coming sun painted the sky orange, and the still had cooled. Flynn let the empty jar fall to the floor.
He told me that after Ivy died, my mother had planned to leave my father. I thought back to the money spread out across the kitchen table, the muted phone calls, the foreign prick in my mother’s tongue. That was why she sent Ivy’s boys away. She hadn’t only been preparing for Ivy’s funeral. She’d been readying our escape.
“She must have loved you,” I said.
Flynn ground his boot against a patch of leftover cornmeal on the floor. “I ain’t a praying man, but that’s my daily plea. Even though I know it don’t matter anymore.”
“My daddy was ruined by his own grief,” I said. “That’s why he ran.”
Flynn shook his head. “Ain’t grief that makes a man run,” he said. “It’s fear.”
“Fear?” I said.
“Briar might have handled snakes,” Flynn answered. “But he wasn’t a brave man.”
And then he told me the truth about my father.
* * *
After Flynn left my mother’s corpse with his boy and delivered me to Aunt Bette’s, he spun out of her gravel road and tore into the dark. His eyes blurred with rage. He knew where Briar would go to mope, a private place that would call him back to his own glory. He’d retreat to that fork in the river where old Arledge had nested his hollow F-86 Sabre plane. Briar had snatched his first snake there, with Flynn by his side—a memory more precious to him than a thousand strikes of lightning.
The river ran strong from the rain. He hoisted his daddy’s Marlin .35 above his head, a single bullet locked in a capsule strung around his neck. W
hen he reached the fork, he ran his free hand around the nose of the plane, across its boiled rivets. Then he heard a groan.
“Briar,” Flynn called out. “Show yourself.”
Briar let himself down, and the pair stood chest to chest while the water spit rivulets around them.
“What are you doing here, Flynn?” Briar asked. “We ain’t got Ruby to fight over no more.”
Flynn remembered what Ruby had called herself—the bartered calf. He’d fought her on it, but she was right.
“You got two choices, Briar. You can confess or you can hide,” Flynn said. “I ain’t gonna tell you which.”
“Ain’t much of a choice,” Briar said.
“Either way, you can’t see your daughter again.” The Marlin glistened in the river’s spray.
“You must think I’m a fool,” Briar said. “I know that gun ain’t loaded.”
Flynn tore the chain from his collar and ripped the 200-grain bullet out of its capsule. He loaded it into the chamber, then cocked the gun and pressed it to the artery pulsing in Briar’s neck.
“Do it,” Briar whispered. “Do it.”
Flynn drove the Marlin’s nose deeper until Briar buckled and sank to his knees. Flynn kicked him square in the chest and forced him under before yanking him up by the hair. Briar screamed, and Flynn screamed until he relented and collapsed against the bank.
“If I have to live without Ruby,” Flynn said, panting, “then so do you.”
Briar fell beside him and wiped a strain of blood from his temple.
“Confess or hide.” Flynn’s voice hitched. “Pick.”
“Confess? I didn’t kill Ruby, if that’s what you think.”
“You strangled a man sixteen years ago.”
“And you had no part in it, Flynn?” Briar asked. “Can you swear it?”
Flynn knew Briar was playing him, pressing on his tender seams. And yet he also saw that his old friend had no light left inside him, now that Ruby was gone. If Briar went to jail, he’d take Flynn down with him. Briar was too much of a coward to sit alone with his sin—and maybe that was the rightful cost for Flynn’s silence. But Flynn couldn’t bear to leave Sonny without a father. He would not let his boy pay the price for what Briar had done.
