Winter's Bone

by Daniel Woodrell

  She thrust her head into the cold and broadcast the hot mush of old swallowed food toward the snowbanks. But wind turned the hot mush pouring from her mouth back onto the side of the truck and splats of puke melded to the fender. She hung her head out the window until her cheeks could not be felt and water drawn from her eyes thickened in her lashes. She pulled inside, raised the glass, let her head sag and eyes close. She said, “I ain’t lookin’ to marry.”

  Teardrop abruptly skidded the truck to a stop in the middle of the fluffed white road. He stared into the rearview mirror while his thumbs tapped a short flourish of rhythm against the steering wheel. He drummed with his thumbs, looking in the mirror toward the beer sign lights behind him until he said, “I just don’t think I like the way he said somethin’.”

  Teardrop clanged the truck into reverse and it whined as he pushed on the gas. He aimed for his own wheel ruts going backwards but twisted all over the road. He was going a bit fast for the turn into the tavern lot, so he just stopped where he was and got out, leaving the door flung open. He grabbed an ax from the truck bed, then walked through a border of drifts to the line of vehicles parked in the lot. They were all obscured by snow, and he walked along the line past two trucks and one car until he came to a certain large sedan. He cleared a hole and looked inside but seemed unsure. He then leaned across the hood and pulled the snow away with big sweeps of his arms, pulled until the front end was swept clear enough. He stood back, studied the grille and hood ornament, then raised the ax and crunched a hole through the front windshield. Snow sagged and sank inside the hole with the ruined glass. He hit the windshield again to speed the sinking, then casually returned to the truck, pitched the ax thudding into the bed. He got behind the wheel and said, “Sassy. Sort of sassy-soundin’.”

  Ree saw the tavern door open, and one, two, then three men stepped outside into the snow and watched as Teardrop drove away. She thought they might blast a few deer slugs or something toward Teardrop’s truck, but these men made no gestures, yelled no words they wouldn’t want heard. She faced backwards, watching them until they fell from sight. She turned forward, opened the bottle, had a quick drink.

  “Can we go home? It’s fuckin’ cold out here, man.”

  “Those pills of mine Victoria gave you was what used to knock me off the mountaintop to sleep whenever I’ve been too far high too long like this.”

  “I didn’t bring none.”

  “Can’t catch no sleep by myself when I’ve clumb this high. Whiskey works, too, but slower.”

  “There’s a few left at home, man.”

  The snowfall had nearly tuckered out but the wind remained brisk. They met three moving vehicles in ten minutes, and Ree spotted the yellow lights of a snowplow shoving along the main route distant in the valley. Teardrop left known roads and turned down little woodsy lanes Ree’d never seen before, spun tires up mounds and slid around curves. They made the first tracks everywhere. He finally turned at a flat white space between leaning rock columns, pulled past the columns a few feet and parked. It was an abandoned family cemetery on the back side of somebody’s farm and headstones dressed with snow were lit by the high beams.

  Teardrop said, “There’s always been favorite places.”

  The headstones were the old sort that turned gray-green with time and often split in cold weather. They split at sharp angles, or fell apart in shards that were scattered by decades. More had fallen than stood. Ree stepped out of the truck to follow Teardrop’s footsteps wending among the graves. Passing years had not rubbed the names to blank space on all the headstones and the name Dolly was in big letters on so many that Ree’s skin spooked.

  “Where the hell have we got to?”

  Teardrop changed directions rapidly, stomping through the snow, first this way, then that, and she followed him, drunk in flopping boots. He stopped, held a hand to his ear, said, “This is where… I shouldn’t say where this is.”

  “What’re we doin’?”

  “Lookin’ for humps that ain’t settled.” He scanned the graveyard, his breath puffing hard from his mouth and flying toward the treetops. He crouched beside a headstone, held a flaring match to a cigarette, then blew smoke across the nearest name. He patted the stone, slid his fingers over the remaining letters, said, “It’s a lonely ol’ spot—that’s what makes it a favorite place.”

  “You sayin’…”

  “It’s been done, girl.”

  She stumbled backwards, watching as his fingers tenderly traced the letters above the grave. She turned and felt a powerful need to run, run to the truck or farther, but her loose boots slipped from her feet and flew. She had to calm down in wet knee socks and hunt them in the snow. She carried the boots to the truck, got inside, and laced them tight, fashioned snug bows. She sat straight and stiff, raised the whiskey, poured.

  When he sat in the truck, he said, “This ain’t the right night. Snow.”

  “Uh-huh. All over.”

  He pulled from the graveyard, started back the way they’d come. Their path was rankled by ice clods and cracked branches. The snow had stopped and half the sky was the color of a spring pool and as clear. Ree looked to the stars shining so brightly, so plain and brilliant, and wondered what they meant, and if they meant the same thing as rocks in springwater.

  “Can you push if we get stuck?”

  “Not enough to help.”

  “You could drive, though, if I pushed.”

  “I’ve never had a car, man.”

  “I don’t much feel like pushin’, anyhow.”

  They reached the main route in the valley, drove closely behind a snowplow. The snowplow displayed bright yellow lights and the plow bellowed a dragon’s roar scraping the road. A white fury was tossed up by the plow and made a hectic cloud of spindrift snow that broke low to ground and spewed. Teardrop turned the wipers on, then began to fall back from the snowplow. His eyes kept lolling shut, bursting open, lolling. When his eyes lolled, the truck hogged the center of the road. The snowplow was getting farther and farther ahead, and his eyes were about closed when flashing lights whirled over the truck from behind. Teardrop glanced in the rearview mirror but did not stop. A siren squawked briefly and he pulled over, rolled his window down, turned the wipers off.

  Ree craned about to look out the back window. The flashing lights were dizzying and the headlights behind shined fiercely into the truck. She shielded her eyes and squinted. It was Baskin in a green deputy’s coat and official smokey hat. He approached on Teardrop’s side but halted at a distance of several feet and said, “Turn the engine off.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Turn it off’n get out with your hands where I can see ’em.”

  Teardrop kept his head straight but angled his eyes to watch Baskin in the side mirror. His right hand eased toward the rifle. He said, “Nope. Tonight I ain’t doin’ a fuckin’ thing you say.”

  Ree watched Teardrop’s hand close around the rifle and she felt somehow instantly all sweaty on her insides, and her sweaty insides jumped into her throat. She saw Baskin drop a hand to his holster and step nearer the rear of the truck. Ree looked at the sawed-off shotgun on the seat between her uncle and herself and quaked.

  In the brightness of lights and swirling colors, Baskin was mostly a shadow wearing a wide-brimmed hat. He said, “Get out, Teardrop. Get out now!”

  Teardrop said, “Who’d you tell about Jessup, huh? You fuckin’ prick. Who?”

  For several seconds Baskin stood silently, his posture beginning to ebb, then inhaled hugely and drew his pistol from the holster.

  Ree slid her fingers toward the shotgun, thinking, This was how sudden things happened that haunted forever.

  “I’ve given you… that’s a lawful goddam order. I’ve given you a lawful goddam order.”

  Sounds like singed laughter burst from Teardrop, and he jerked the rifle onto his lap, curled his trigger finger. He seemed to have caught Baskin’s eye in the rearview mirror. He looked intently into th
e mirror, flicked a fingernail repeatedly against the folded wire stock on the rifle, flick, flick, flick, then said, “Is this goin’ to be our time?”

  Teardrop lifted his foot from the brake and calmly rolled onto the scraped road and began to drive away toward home. Ree watched Baskin, and he stood alone there in the road behind with his pistol hand dangled to his side, then he crouched to a knee on the thinned snow in the gusting wind, facedown, and his hat popped off his head, but he caught it before it blew away.

  Chapter 33

  THE BOYS had never known Mom when her parts were gathered and she’d stood complete with sparking dark eyes and a fast laugh. Mom only seldom walked farther than the kitchen and never danced during their days. Come morning, Ree saddled her hangover and rode that mood into the forlorn chores of a jittery day, and for over an hour she crouched at the big hall closet, pulling out dusty, tattered boxes of forgotten family flotsam, throwing everything away, until she came across a yellow envelope that held pictures. She spread the pictures on the floor and the boys bent over the snapshots, raising each for closer viewing, then dropping one old vision of Mom for the next. Mom in black-and-white, wearing a striped skirt that twirled aloft as she swung in the arms of Dad, sat on his lap beside a table overflowing with beer bottles and mashed smokes, did a tippy-toe spin on the kitchen floor with a full shot glass raised above her head. Mom in color, wearing a crown of twisted flowers at one of Uncle Jack’s weddings, standing on the porch preened to go out for the night looking gorgeous in a red dress, a blue dress, a green dress, a slick black coat shiny as Sunday shoes. Her lips were ever painted bright and smiling.

  Ree said, “She used to be so different from now.”

  Harold said, “Pretty. She was so pretty.”

  “She’s still pretty.”

  “Not like then.”

  “And these fellas with her are all Dad.”

  Sonny said, “They are? That’s him? Dad had hair like that?”

  “Yup. It mostly fell out when he was away. You wouldn’t remember.”

  “Nope. I don’t remember him with much hair.”

  Her sad slumping task for the day was to begin sorting the house, go through closets and crawl spaces, haul forgotten boxes and bags into the light and decide what old stuff was to be kept and what would be burned in the yard as trash. Bromonts had been in the house for most of a century and some of the old boxes in out-of-the-way nooks had collapsed into fairly tidy heaps of so much rot. Many of the papers became powder in her fingers as she unfolded them for reading. There was a purple velvet jewelry box mice had chewed ragged, and she opened it to find a collection of marbles and a thimble and a Valentine’s card received by Aunt Bernadette during third grade with words of love written large in crayon. She found heelless shoes still wrinkled from the feet of relatives who were dead before she could’ve known them. A large darkened knife with a bent blade. A delicate white bowl holding faded paper shotgun shells and a handful of keys to locks she couldn’t imagine. Straw sun hats with brims torn away from the crowns.

  “Carry this to the trash barrel’n start us a fire. Then come back—there’s more.”

  Under the stairs she found several battered tools, ax blades, saw blades, awls and hammer shafts, cobwebbed jars of ancient four-sided nails with square heads, metal washers, bent drill bits. Schoolbooks with Mom’s name printed in pencil inside the covers. A porcelain thunder mug cracked around the rim and base. A rusted lunch box lid that said Howdy Doody! and had the name Jack slapped on small with red fingernail polish.

  Mom sat in her rocker, and Ree asked, “How much of what you got still fits?”

  “These shoes do.”

  “I mean in your closet.”

  “Some in there never did.”

  Mom’s closet was a jumbo mess of her own clothes, plus relics from Mamaw and Bernadette. Mom and Mamaw had both been of a mind to save anything and everything that might possibly be worn by somebody in the family someday or maybe have some other unknown future use. Mamaw had run to sloppy fat for her last many years, Bernadette was made short and scant, Mom long and lean. Not much that fit one ever would fit another, but the closet became stuffed with maybe-someday clothes and stayed that way. Most of the white things had long since yellowed on their hangers. Dust built yokes of grime on the shoulders of dresses and blouses.

  Ree called the boys into Mom’s room and both rushed to her side. They had a big jumping fire going in the yard and enjoyed feeding it all this Bromont trash. A circle of melt grew outward from the rusty barrel. Birds sat in black ranks on cozy branches above the gush of heated air. Ash crumbs wafted past the window and sprinkled gray dots across the snow. She said, “Hold your arms out’n I’ll fill ’em with this junk.”

  She took a break and stood by the side window to watch the boys feed old family stuff to the fire. Across the creek, Sonya had come into her yard wearing a hooded overcoat and sat on the rock bench under her leafless walnut tree. It was very cold outside and the boys dodged about near the flames. Sonya waved and Harold saw her and waved back. Smoke boiled from the trash barrel, spilling a streaking mess into the valley. The boys held dresses above the barrel until they caught fire near the hem and the flames began to climb the cloth to the waist, the bodice, the neck, then dropped them at the last second before their fingertips blistered. Sonya waved and waved until Sonny finally saw her and waved back. Tiny bits of cloth rode the heat from the trash barrel up into the air, the edges briefly glowing as the last threads burned red, then became ash that matched the sky and disappeared downwind.

  Chapter 34

  THEY CAME with the dark and knocked with three fists. The door shook as the clamor of beating knuckles filled the house. Ree glanced from a window and saw three like women, chesty and jowly, wearing long cloth coats of differing colors and barnyard galoshes. She fetched her pretty shotgun before opening the door. She jabbed the twin barrels toward the belly of Mrs. Thump, Merab, but did not speak. The shotgun felt like an unspent lightning bolt in her hands and trembled. None of the sisters flinched or stepped back or changed expression.

  Merab said, “Come along, child—we’re goin’ to fix your problem for you.” Her hands were in her coat pockets. Her hair was swept away from her face in a towering white wave that barely budged in the breeze. “Put that thing down. Show some smarts, child.”

  “Right now I feel like I want to blow me a big sloppy hole clean through your stinkin’ guts.”

  “I know you do. You’re a Dolly. But you won’t. You’ll put that scattergun down and come along with me’n my sisters.”

  “You think I’m crazy? I’d have to be crazy!”

  “We’ll carry you to your daddy’s bones, child. We know the place.”

  The sisters were less stern versions of Merab. One had a shorter gray wave swept away from her face, standing stiff on top, and her cheeks powdered the pink of a faded rose. The other had a loosened wave of bottle-blond hair that shivered in the wind, and her fingers carried several knotty rings. They had faces like oaten loaves and flanked their sister with hunched shoulders, ready boots.

  It was the blonde who said, “We ain’t goin’ to come back’n offer this again.”

  “You kicked me.”

  “Not in the face.”

  “Somebody did.”

  “Things got wild there for a bit.”

  Merab clapped her hands together, saying, “Come on! Come on along, now—it’s cold. We need to put a stop to all this upset talk about us we’ve been havin’ to hear.”

  “I ain’t said a thing about you.”

  “We know. Everybody else has.”

  Ree moved the shotgun up and down. Her tongue licked over clotted vacancies between teeth. She heard the boys come to the door and stand behind her. “Get back in the house. Keep out of sight.” She poked the shotgun forward, said, “I’m bringin’ this.”

  “No, you won’t either bring that. You want his bones, you’ll set that down’n come along.”

  There was th
at scrape of unbidden music in her head, the beginning of a tilt, but she hushed the fiddle with a sharp thought and spread her boots for balance. She stood the shotgun in the corner behind the door, grabbed Mamaw’s coat from the hook and led the way down the porch steps. The sisters walked behind her like guards. The car was a four-door sedan with dulled paint and plenty of heft and iced snow on the roof. The quietest sister reached into her pocket for a burlap tote sack she shook open, then handed to Ree. “You can’t know where we’re takin’ you to. You’ll have to wear this over your head. It’s clean. Don’t try’n look out from under, neither.”

  “You fixin’ to shoot me?”

  “If you think a minute, you’ll know we could’ve did that already if we wanted.”

  Merab said, “Sit in back with Tilly.”

  Tilly was the blonde. Ree slid onto the seat and pulled the tote sack down. Tilly reached over to adjust the burlap, make sure no scrap of sight remained. The sack smelled of old oats and sunshine and scratched against her skin as the car hit bumps. The car had a big engine and leapt across some potholes and punished others with its pounding weight. The sack worked loose and she could breathe better, see a crack of light. She inhaled the scent of the sisters, a domineering reek of udder balm and brown gravy, straw and wet feathers. The car fishtailed in spots and skidded when turning.

  Merab said, “Dammit—don’t slam the brakes—tap ’em.”

  “I don’t want to tap ’em. I don’t tap.”

  “You ain’t s’posed to slam ’em on snow.”

  “When it’s your car, you can tap ’em. I drive my car just exactly this way.”

  “These roads’re slicker’n you seem to think.”

  “Look, when I wreck, you can tell me all about why. ’Til then, change the subject.”

  Ree tried to guess where they were. It all depended on that first turn from the hard road—was that by the school? Or was it closer than that? One way meant Bawbee, the other should mean Gullett Lake. Unless the turn was past the school. The turns began to come too quickly to divine, and Ree became altogether lost among the crossroad possibilities and confusing maybes.