by Amy Jo Burns
“You know I can’t.” Flynn’s voice trembled at the words.
“Then I guess you better leave,” Briar said, rising to his feet. “And I guess it’s best that we not meet again.”
Flynn nodded and watched his friend walk away from him into the dark. That was the last time Flynn saw him.
“My father killed a man,” I said now, the jar between Flynn and me half empty.
This was the reason my father had never let me attend school or talk to strangers. He was afraid of getting caught. The revelation didn’t shock me like it should have. The burden felt too familiar, the same rot that had spread its stench across my mountain ever since the night of the storm.
REVENANT
Every Sunday in my father’s old church, just before the serpents bared their slit tongues and the tambourines started to shiver, the old women used to gather in the gravel lot and tell stories. They talked of husbands dead and children gone, they talked of being young and in love, and no one listened. They were too old to matter anymore, folks figured, so the women told their stories to one another. I’d always thought Ivy and my mother would one day be among them.
Theirs was a tale worth telling. If I told my mother’s stories, it wouldn’t make her return to me. They weren’t magic like my father’s, but they were real. They still had the power to draw a wayward heart home in this lifetime, if not in the next.
Heaven ain’t so far off, my mother used to whisper when we would look over our violet meadows as the colors burst against the sky. I could not imagine a life or an afterlife without her.
Three weeks after she died, I visited my mother’s grave. September had come, and just as my mother had dreamed for me, I started attending school. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for. I was behind in every subject except for English. Typing felt impossible, and my classmates looked at me like I was strange. But the school had a library full of books for me to read, and Emma and Caleb guided me through the hallways until I could manage it by myself. The best part: I had my own work to do. I didn’t have to steal it from a boy.
After Flynn told me what my father had done, he offered me a place to stay. I paid my debt to him as well as I could—even though he’d never asked it of me—by helping post a roof over the porch for my bedroom and scrubbing still parts. But it was the debt I owed my mother that had kept me away from her grave. She had given me life, and I still felt I had taken hers.
As she had done the day my mother was buried, Emma kept me company when I visited my mother’s burial ground. Emma brought her guitar, and the two of us walked the mourners’ trail on Violet’s Run as she played “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” Her voice rang deep and raspy, and my mother’s tambourine chimed against my hip.
A bouquet of white ladies’ tresses had been laid on my mother’s plot as well as Ivy’s. Flynn had tied a burlap ribbon around each of them and brushed away the dead leaves. I envied him. He knew how to sit with his own sorrow, how to court it into talking back.
It’s an art, the way women punish themselves. I kept myself from my mother’s grave after she died because I feared I was just as much at fault for her death as my father. Ivy had spent years blaming herself for the sins an outsider committed. And my mother never let herself trust her own heart. At the end of her life, she wondered if there might have been another way. She didn’t want me to wait as long as she did to find it.
Wren, she’d written, I have to tell you—
Seated at her grave, I didn’t say good-bye. I ran my fists through the dirt and told her that the pain of missing her cut me fresh every morning. I promised I’d remain to bear witness to her stories and to tell my own, which I’d start to do in autumn while standing in the back of Flynn’s pickup truck. I promised her if any outsiders asked me about the snake handler and his wife, I would tell them the truth.
The sky went goldenrod, and I thought of my mother in a thousand afternoons, a woman whose face always seemed to find the sun. I touched my lips to the ground, and I said, Amen, and amen, until we meet again. And then I left her in peace.
By the time I reached Flynn’s cabin, dusk had edged in. On the hill Flynn messed around in his graveyard bunker. He’d gone to pack up his still supplies for the season while Sonny set up Flynn’s first computer in the cabin so we could complete our schoolwork without having to leave home. Sonny had just started sixth grade, and I’d need his help to survive my sophomore technology seminar. Summer had ended, and Flynn wouldn’t run shine again until the spring crop of corn grew past my waist. I rose to my feet and hiked to the bunker, held out my hands as he lifted the still’s cap out into the open. He set it in the shade of a sugar maple and smiled at me.
“This ain’t so easy on my own,” he said.
“I can help,” I said, taking up the copper worm. “I’m stronger than I look.”
Flynn nodded, then sat down against the maple and gave me a five-card-draw stare.
“What was the first miracle Jesus performed?” he asked.
His question didn’t throw me. My father had quizzed me just the same in the marshes for most of my youth.
“Turning water into wine,” I answered.
“That’s it,” Flynn said. “See that stream there?” He pointed beyond the hill to the peak of Violet’s Run. “That fresh water turned to whiskey by my hand. Don’t need no snakes, no poison. It’s a miracle all on its own, every time.”
“There’s a few more steps in that miracle for you than there was for Jesus, I think.”
“A few.” He laughed.
“Flynn,” I said, running my finger along the soldered edge of the still’s cap. “Why did you never leave the mountain?”
“Some good people got to stay.” He grinned. “Besides, there’s always shine to run.”
I sat beside him beneath the shade. “I want you to teach me,” I said.
He thought on it, softly rocking back and forth to the music of the wind.
“Moonshining is a way of life,” Flynn said. “And not because it makes you an outlaw. It asks you to stare down your fears and remember all you’ve lost. Once the nights get lonely—and they will—you’ll wonder if you’ve lost your way. But take heart and don’t turn back. Shiners don’t wait out the dark. They rise in it.”
Flynn sat up and turned toward me. “I have one condition. You’ll take a wage for your work, and you’ll save it for school. Some good people may need to stay on this mountain, but that don’t mean you have to.”
I extended my hand, and we shook on it. Flynn unearthed a fresh jar of whiskey from his bucket of tools. He spun off the lid and took a drink.
“To a partnership,” he said, and handed it to me.
“To a partnership.”
I brought the whiskey to my lips. It tasted like my mother’s laughter, the sound of her calling my name, the warmth of her skin in the creek on a hot summer day.
“If only my daddy could see me now.” I wiped my mouth. “If we knew where he was.”
Flynn clicked his tongue, and his face went blank. “I never said I didn’t know where he was.”
My head whipped toward him. “You do?”
He nodded. “He’s squatting in his mama’s house up in Logger’s Nook on the other side of the mountain. Been hiding there ever since the last night I saw him, I’d wager.”
My father had taken me to his mama’s cabin just once when I was a girl to show me the lightning’s scorch marks on the floor. I’d been easily impressed then. After I helped Flynn load the Tacoma with the rest of the still parts, I headed to bed early. The next morning I rose before the sun and slipped out of the house. I headed for the highlands with a creek map of Sherrod’s in my hand. It would take till midday to make the hike to Logger’s Nook, and I’d need to return to Flynn’s cabin by dark so he wouldn’t worry.
* * *
My father saw me coming. He stood on the porch, waiting. At f
irst I figured Flynn must have called to warn him, but it wasn’t hard to see that my father had nothing here, not even a phone line. He saw no one. The cabin cleaved to a bare skeleton of a structure, one of the walls almost blown out from a fallen tree limb. A fruitless rhododendron bush larger than the house itself camouflaged its presence.
An old sadness washed over me. For the past month, my father and I had dedicated ourselves as distant accomplices in my mother’s death. It was the closest we’d ever been. He looked tired as I neared the house. Thin, but not gaunt. Pale, but not squalid.
“Well,” he said as I forged the rhododendron’s branches. “Well.”
One thief doesn’t greet another.
“You’re a hard man to find,” I said. “But that’s how you like it.”
“I get by on my own,” he answered. “With God’s help.”
When I didn’t respond, he broke the silence. “How did you find me?” he asked.
“Flynn.”
My father’s smile sagged, and his white eye settled on mine before shooting to the sky. He held fast to his hurt like it was a locket at his throat. As I climbed the porch steps, I heard the habitual hiss from my childhood sneak out of the pine boxes stacked by the door.
“You still have your serpents.”
“I never needed an audience.” He rocked back on his heels and puffed out what was left of his chest.
The space lingered between us long enough for me to remember what it had felt like to want to be his heir. I didn’t ask if he blamed me for my mother’s death, and I didn’t ask if he regretted what he’d done to Ivy. There was only one question I needed him to answer.
“Why did you try to drown me?” I asked.
He sighed.
“I always wondered if you were my child or another man’s,” he said. He must have meant the outsider from Ivy’s letter, the one who drove a white Silverado. “That day my doubt got the better of me.”
It was the closest he’d ever come to an apology.
“But I look like you,” I said. “Don’t you see it?”
He looked into my eyes but somehow couldn’t see his daughter.
“Are they still there?” I asked. “The lightning’s marks on the floorboards?”
He nodded.
“Show me.”
I followed him inside the house, where the interior wilted, dank and ridden with must. A mattress lay on the floor next to a shallow pot. My father had been living in a cave of shadows, and when I pulled back the window’s curtain and light flooded in, the house couldn’t even muster the illusion of his blessed origins. There was no ghost, there was no spirit. White Eye, the mountain magician, had been left empty, just as he’d been born.
“Watch your step,” he said as he led me around the tree limb toward the loft’s ladder.
We went up into the flimsy attic, stocked with the old pillowcases and homemade snake poles of my father’s youthful exploits.
“There,” he said, pointing.
I followed his finger and saw two black tracks striking out from the window. His mother had never replaced the glass, and a sour wind shot through the hole. The beam that had knocked him unconscious still lay crosswise on the floor.
“Still don’t remember the lightning,” he said. “But I’ve spent my life chasing the feeling it gave me.”
I stepped toward the open window and peered through it. Fragments of clouded glass clung to the splits in the porch roof below me. They looked like they’d been lodged there since the night of the storm. I glanced back at my father, then again at the glass, as a question insisted itself on me. If lightning had burst into the cabin through the window, as my father’s legend swore it did, would most of the broken glass remain on the roof? A better question was whether a bolt of lightning would ever come through a windowpane at all.
I knelt to touch the scorched flooring and started to imagine a new origin story about that night, one perhaps more akin to the truth. The darkened marks could have been forged with charcoal, a sharp knife, and a lighter. Maybe my father did it. Or they might have been the scratchings of a mother desperate to tell her fatherless son a hopeful tale, rather than the truth of what had happened to his eye after he’d been knocked unconscious. Many trusted accounts of old mountain healings had been witnessed by women from my grandmother’s generation. She might have wished for her child to have a legend of his own.
I thought back to the last time I saw Ivy, the real Ivy, before she fell on the fire pit. She and her three boys had crested our hill, and Ivy glistened with sweat beneath the sun—or at least I thought she had. Emma had shown me the empty jar of salve that Ivy had coated herself with to treat the rash from the poisoned water. But it wasn’t sweat that made her skin glow. It was the beeswax and tallow.
The salve must have kept most of her skin from burning until my mother dampened the flames. My father hadn’t healed Ivy. His own myth convinced him and the rest of us that he had. Briar Bird believed in nothing as much he believed in himself. He had staked his life on what he called a miracle, and so had his faithful. It cost my mother her life, just as it had cost Ivy hers.
My father stood over me in the loft, watching those floor markings like the anchor they were for his soul. I could have disputed his power to heal—but I didn’t. I couldn’t prove the lies of his past, and neither could he.
“Tell me about the serpents,” I said.
His good eye glinted. “What do you want to know?”
I thought of what I’d left behind to come here. Emma tickling the strings of her guitar, Caleb worrying the pages of his sketchbook. Flynn and Sonny bedding down for the coming winter.
“I want to know what snakes ate before the fall of man,” I said.
He thought, and his stare measured me. Then he laughed.
“Damned if I know,” he said. “What does it matter?”
“It matters because you’re just a man,” I said.
He led me back to the porch, and as he spoke, he held his favorite yellow timber rattler in his hands. Its elliptical eyes glossed like marbles. I waited to see venom drip from its fangs, for it to pull its head back and sink itself into my father’s loving arm. But it didn’t. This serpent, this odd thing, became a movable sculpture in his hands, one he’d fashioned into a passage toward the mind of God.
“God is glorious in the thunder,” my father said as he watched a cloud scud overhead.
“I spy,” I said, and he smiled.
We used to play this game in the ginger fields when I was a girl. I spy, we’d say, and take turns reimagining the world that held us. He’d never spy ordinary things like trees, wildflowers, old barns. I spy a trumpet, he’d say, or a priestess in a red, royal robe. As a child I could have played that game for days. Just once I wanted to see the world the way he did.
Grasping that snake, my father talked to me the way he used to. He told me of speaking without words, of the unknowable things of the Spirit, of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection. As I listened, I was reminded of my favorite proverb: Words kill, words give life; they’re either poison or fruit—you choose. My father had made his choice, and it was time for me to do the same.
On that September afternoon, my father talked on, and a new premonition swept over me. This was my father’s life, and it also would be his death. One day I would come here and find his body, swollen and hard, double dash marks left by angry fangs. And it would be his time, and he would go willingly, embracing the mystery even as it turned on him.
* * *
On my way back down the mountain, I stopped at the fork in the trail that led to the creek where I’d once waited to be baptized, the same place my mother and Ivy used to swim when they were young. I hiked toward the bank and saw that Caleb had beaten me there. He was flat on his back at the overhang where we’d first met, his breath curling upward into the cool air. A catbird whistled a lo
w, sweet holler, and Caleb whistled in response.
“Seems like we had the same idea,” I said as the catbird returned his call.
He glanced over his shoulder, sat up, and wiped the dirt from his knees.
“Sit with me,” he said.
I sat next to him, and together we gazed out over the trembling water. The sky was graying, and the trees shook. I looked at Caleb, his stare already chasing mine. His eyes were hungry and cautious, bold and constant. Coal grumbled a thousand yards away, and miners freed it, shard by shard, and ferried it to a hundred far-off places we would never go.
Ruby Day understood what every minute of her life would become from the moment Briar Bird walked into it. Her death had stripped me of all I had and left the birth of something new in its place—something that thrummed at my mother’s core and pulsed strong inside me. A mountain woman’s heart.
“Didn’t you ever want to escape?” I asked. “And leave this world for a better one?”
Caleb shook his head. “Only one world.”
I loved him then, because together we would dare to live this mountain life—the slick autumns and the fields of violets and the rivers of whiskey and the relentless moonscapes left behind after the coal companies had their way—we would dare to live this life even as it slipped away from us.
Caleb held me close, and together we turned our backs on the water. A fox crouched nearby and pierced the cold with her wild-eyed heat. I studied her until she turned and fled, the sheen of her coat catching the light of stars hung in a country sky. At the end of the night, Caleb and I would walk hand in hand back to Flynn’s hunting cabin, back to Aunt Bette’s, back to Emma and Sonny, back to what we would someday think of as home. Some might say we were destined to repeat the mistakes of our mothers and fathers, but I didn’t believe it. We’d have our own mistakes to make. We’d fight with each other, and we’d fight for each other, too. We’d tell the truth about our mountain’s ghost stories. We’d give our children their own stories to tell. We would take part in this West Virginia earth and let it take part in us.
