by Taylor Brown
“That boy they killed, that mill boss’s son? You know your mama was sweet on him. A secret. They were sweet on each other.”
Rory squinted at him. He could see worms of gold buried in the creases of the man’s face. They pulsed. His hand seemed higher on his thigh than before, closer to his hip.
“Ain’t many believe that,” said Rory. “Most think she wasn’t but a whore.”
“Why else you think she sat so long in that boy’s blood, not leaving his side?”
“She went dumb.”
“She loved him.”
Rory’s eyes seared.
The Sheriff nodded, speaking as if to himself.
“That boy’s daddy, he was the one funding us that were fighting the government dam. He owned half the valley. Nearly every shothouse and nip-joint rented from him. And his boy kept telling him there was some bird down along the river, some parrot thought to be extinct. Some parakeet. Said it might keep the government from coming in. Said he was writing to the Museum of Natural History, in Washington. All he needed was proof. Then those nightriders come through the valley, cutting us down. One night they caught the Gaston boy in the valley. Made sure he never did find any bird.”
“It’s some story you made up, just to keep me from killing you.”
“I wished it was.”
“Then how come you never did nothing?”
“Evidence, son. We didn’t have it.”
“Didn’t?”
The Sheriff took off his hat with one hand, set it upturned in his lap.
“The warden down at Dix Hill, I told him to send word if your mama ever said or did something that might be a clue to what happened.” He reached into the black well of the hat, bringing out a folded square of paper. “We never did find what she used to take that man’s eye, you know. The one we found in her pocket. It was the investigator said a cat’s paw, but we never found it.” He tapped the paper against the hat brim. “This come today, express from Raleigh.” He leaned forward, holding it out, his other hand nearly in shadow.
Rory looked at the man, at the note. It quivered in the space between them, light as a wing. Rory lowered the shotgun slightly, snatching the paper from the outstretched hand.
The Sheriff leaned back.
“Warden said your mama started drawing them after you come to see her last Sunday, slipping them to the nurses and orderlies.” He pointed. “This is what she drew.”
Rory began unfolding the paper.
“My brother, the pastor, he’ll tell you he lost his eye in a timber accident,” said the Sheriff. He scoffed. “A lie. One of those nightriders took it. And what you think he done it with?”
Rory looked at the shape dark-slashed across the folds.
A long handle, a round head forked like a tongue.
A tined spoon.
“Must of been the first thing your mama could get her hands on,” said the Sheriff. “When she come at them.”
“No,” said Rory.
The Sheriff nodded.
“With the valley flooded, there wasn’t no whiskey but his.”
The word broke like a stone from Rory’s throat.
“Eustace.”
“How you think he raised that mountain like he did?”
Rory hopped backward a step, lost his balance. He fell flat on his rump, the weapons clattering around him. He looked down at his monstrous hand, his missing leg, then out at the flooded valley of the lake. The moon was breaking free of the clouds, jags of light racing across the surface like slicks of burning oil, and for a moment he could see into the very depths of this place. An underworld of drowned cabins and bright-glowing bones, a vision seen as if from mountain height.
Now darkness.
CHAPTER 28
He was on a horse, descending through moonlight. He could feel the air cooling, the road falling into the valley, the horse a machine of muscle between his heels. He should have hit the edge of the lake by now, but the road kept on, crooking ever deeper into the pines. In the distance, the rumble of water over stone.
The river, not yet dammed.
He stood before a small cabin, unpainted. Oaks crowded the place, black and gnarled on every side, and he knew Bonni was inside. She had snuck out from the white castle of the bawdyhouse to meet him. She was still young, milk-smooth in her nakedness, and she was waiting for him. He was going to hear her voice.
He stepped onto the porch, into darkness deeper than the surrounding night. He heard the planks creak, felt them shift under his feet. Someone was there. He turned to look.
Too late.
He was punched in the gut, hard. He dropped to his knees, no breath to scream, and they wrenched his arms behind his back, lifting him loose-kneed from the planks. They were wearing sack hoods, the eyeholes cut ragged, the sack corners flat and pointed like animal ears. The burlap was sucked up against their mouths as they breathed, darkened in vents and leers. They carried ax-handles and clubs. A silver medal, three-tined, shone on the bib of one.
You think some bird can stop what’s coming? Some parrot?
They drove him through the door. A girl came flying toward them, her black hair wild as a mane. She scraped and pawed at their chests. One of the nightriders drove her back against a sawhorse table, his right hand forking her throat.
Best say your good-byes, said the big man. He thumped his ax-handle against Rory’s chest. You mightn’t not talk so good after we done.
Rory was looking only at the girl. Something silver winked in her hand. Now a flash of light wheeled from the end of her arm and the man above her screamed. He staggered backward, dropping his club, palming the bloody socket where his left eye used to be.
Rory wrenched loose his arm and spun on the balls of his feet, delivering a left hook into the leering mask of the big man standing beside him. Like hitting stone, his knuckles shattering against the point of the man’s jaw. Now a club fell heavy across his back, thumping the breath from his lungs, and he was on his knees. Now another and another, the hickory handles falling bone-white in the room, shattering his ribs, and he was crawling across the planks, trying to reach her.
He had to hear her voice.
One word.
Any.
He crawled into her arms. She opened her mouth, as if to speak, and a green bird lifted from the hollow of her throat. He followed the creature out the nearest window, through the black clutches of the trees. Together they rose out of the valley, light as a song, pulled toward the moon.
CHAPTER 29
Granny May sat in her rocker, watching dusk come through the valleys. The sun was dying red in the west, and the world before her was the color of blood and smoke. The purple ridges rippled into the distance like eroded ramparts, the valleys between them dark as fractures in the earth. The blue twist of the woodstove stung in the cold air, in her nostrils, and she breathed deeply and liked the sting.
It was going to be a cold winter. She could tell. She could feel it in her bones. But the woodpile was stacked high with split oak and maple. The smokehouse was full and her boy was home. He was back there in his room, sleeping. Healing beneath the curling wings of his mother’s paintings. The town doctors had kept him a week, feeding vials of antivenin into his blood. They said he would regain full use of his hand. Likely he would. They said the snake carried enough venom to kill five men and wasn’t he lucky.
Granny knew it was more than luck. When Eli arrived at her porch, telling her Rory had been bitten, she was not surprised, given the signs of late. Her snakebite herbs were sitting in a small burlap purse on the shelfboard, readied for just such circumstance. That first night, while the duty nurse patrolled the halls, Granny chewed ribwort leaves—mountain plantain—applying a spit poultice of the macerated substance to the boy’s wounds, packing it hard with her thumb. This weed brought toxins to the surface, drawing venom from the blood. She followed with poultices of purple coneflower, such as the Cherokee used for rattlesnake bites, and osha and yellowroot. Cold, bitter herbs t
hat fought sepsis and poison. She applied these night after night, when the doctors were home in bed.
At intervals, she forced the boy, half-conscious, to hold lumps of ground echinacea root under his tongue, letting the medicine absorb. She did not want to risk him choking. In the days that followed, she would give him milk thistle and nettle to support his liver, and potions decocted of turmeric and sarsaparilla and oak, alternating with spoons of activated charcoal to absorb any remnant venom from his gut.
She sat by his hospital bed for a week, never sleeping, subsisting on a bag of roasted chestnuts and hard candy she brought down from the mountain, her temples rumbling as she chewed. She refused the town-food that Eli tried to bring her. She left the room only when nature forced her. She watched every doctor and nurse with one eye squinted, as if sighting them down. As soon as they were gone, she opened her herb purse, applying her own medicines to the task.
The first morning, returning from the ladies’ room, she found a dark-haired girl sitting at the bedside, holding her boy’s hand while he slept. A white hatbox, black-bowed, sat on the side table, waiting to be opened. The girl stood.
“You must be Granny May,” she said. “I’m Christine Adderholt.”
Granny growled.
“God ain’t meant to live in no box,” she said, “and neither is a rattlesnake.”
But the girl came every day after her shift, sure as clockwork. Her brow set, her back straight. She didn’t care that Granny would hardly speak to her, that the two of them would sit silent on either side of his bed, chewing lips or snacks. She kept coming, undaunted, steady as a stream that cuts stone.
At the end of the third day, Granny’s jaws groaned open.
“Some hat,” she said, jutting her chin toward the flat-crowned beauty the girl was wearing, colored the pale pink of a kitten’s paw. “Mail-ordered?”
“I made it,” said the girl. “I got my own business making them.”
Granny straightened.
“Say you do?”
“Yes, ma’am. Got newspaper ads going up in Charlotte, Raleigh. I’ll be out the mill soon, keeps going the way it is. I hate the kitchen, but I can make a pillbox hat pretty enough to eat.”
Granny nodded. “I see that.” Now she leaned back, reaching into her sweater for her pipe. “Tell you what, girl. You come for a visit on the mountain once the boy is home. I never been anything special in the kitchen, neither, but I can bake a mean stackcake.” She scratched a match, winked over the flame. “And not just in the Presbyterian fashion.”
* * *
Granny was alone the day the government man showed up. He was square-faced with a handlebar mustache. He wasn’t from around here, didn’t say much. He stood there at the foot of the bed, working his lips back and forth across his teeth. He held Rory’s black bowler hat in his hands—the one her own dead husband had worn. There was a deep dent in the crown.
“You raise him?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“He’s a tough little knot.”
“Born hard.”
The man nodded, setting the hat at the foot of the bed.
“He wakes up, you tell him he gets one pass,” he said. “For what he could’ve done on that dam and didn’t. For surprising me. And that’s all he gets.”
Granny nodded, her tongue coiled against the side of her mouth. The man turned on his heel and walked out, his boots clopping down the hallway, growing faint. She took up the old bowler hat, rubbing her thumb along the edge of the brim, so tatty it felt serrated. She had never been good at letting go of things, be they goods or ghosts. She eyed the white hatbox on the table, still unopened, and dumped the old bowler in the wastebasket.
* * *
When Rory could speak, she was ready. She was sitting alongside his bed, thumbing a green wad into the bowl of her pipe. He blinked at her, watching the smoke uncoil from the side of her mouth.
“I don’t think you can smoke in here.”
“You see me doing it.”
The boy looked down at his white-mounded form, at the tubes feeding him who knew what. He raised his bitten hand, ugly but there. She bent toward him.
“You do know pit vipers don’t make much for pets.”
“So I learned.”
“Well, you best be thanking that snake.”
“How’s that?”
“Sheriff said he might of shot you, you hadn’t been snakebit. You hadn’t passed out.”
Rory lifted his head, as if checking the bedrails for handcuffs. None.
“He the one that brought me in here?”
“That’s right. Him and that brother of his.”
“He tell you why I come at him?”
“Said he’d leave that part to you.”
Rory nodded, swallowed.
“I’m tired,” he said. “Maybe I ought to tell you later.”
Granny licked her thumb and stove it into the bowl of the pipe. The ash hissed.
“Nuh-uh, boy. You gonna tell me now.”
* * *
Granny leaned back in her rocker, the valleys welling beneath her. Her pipe lay cold on the side table, unused. There was the faint sound of Rory snoring in his room. The dusk deepened, the world bluing toward dark. She was watching her breath smoke from her throat when a pair of white headlights flared at the bottom of the drive. She watched them come bouncing up the grade, jaunty almost, the first dust of snow swirling through their beams. It was the big six-wheeled truck.
Eustace.
He parked beneath the lone chestnut, there where Maybelline used to sit, and stepped down from the cab. He had on a furry cap with earflaps, a leather vest over a flannel shirt. Bits of snow flecked the mountains of his shoulders, caught in his beard. He approached the porch, labored up the steps. He scratched his chin with a thumb.
“Come to see the boy,” he said. “Brought him a jar of my very best.” He patted his pocket, a square bulge. “This here is barley scotch, good for toddies.”
“That’s very sweet of you. He’ll like that. He’s back in his room.”
He started for the door.
“Eustace.”
The big man stopped.
“You forgetting the toll?” She cocked the flat of her cheek toward him, smiling. “Give us a kiss.”
Eustace took off his hat and rolled it between his hands. He tried to smile. He came down the porch. Bent over her. Kissed her.
Her hand had slipped beneath the blanket in her lap.
He never saw the blade.
It was a bone-handled straight razor, the same she’d carried in her working days. She’d stropped it bright-edged the day her boy came home.
She laid him open at the throat, deep and fast, like she would a hog. The blade winked through his flesh as through a hunk of dough, that easy, and his blood came in a bright flourish into the blued-out world. He clutched the wound with both hands, as if he might hold it together, but the blood pumped helter-skelter through his knuckles, over his fingers and down his shirt. He stepped backward once, twice. He fell off the porch, hitting the earth with a bony crack, like an ax-felled tree.
Granny stood, the razor held open-angled in her hand. Dripping. She stepped down from the porch, carefully, and stood over him, his thrashing bulk. His eyes were wide, white-bulbed, like he was seeing everything for the first time, and maybe he was. His screams were caught gurgling in the new mess of his throat. The blood bubbled through his fingers. It was like he wanted to scream, to say something, but it was the wound that kept talking instead.
She couldn’t believe he’d deceived her so long.
She should have known.
She knelt beside him. He started to reach for her but didn’t want to take a hand from his throat. He clung to it like something that could save him. She touched a palm to his forehead, holding the razor over his face.
“Who were the others done it with you?” she asked. “Whose eye is in the jar?”
He tried to tell her. Tried and tried. Reall
y seemed to want to. But his words flecked and spat shapelessly from his cut throat.
“Oh honey,” she said. “I’d kill you twice if I could.”
She took the jar of whiskey from his pocket. Unscrewed the lid and poured it out, then sniffed. Beneath the round sting of barley there was something else. Something chemical.
Strychnine.
Just as she thought.
She screwed the lid back on the jar, leaned over him.
“Christ’s father let him die on that cross,” she said. “I understand why he done it.” She leaned closer, whispering in his ear: “But Christ never had no granny like me.”
CHAPTER 30
They buried him high on Howl Mountain at first light, up among the towers of red spruce and fir where the wind never slept, where it was always cold. They dragged him there on the mule-sled, no sound save the murmuring of ancient trees, the stomp of hooves, the slash of iron skids. They followed old paths that twisted through understories of witch hobble and purple laurel, snow-dusted, their breath and the breath of the mule throbbing in the gray. The paths grew ever narrower as they ascended, dark and sinewy veins tread by hoof and claw, the furred bloodlines of the mountain. Beneath them the valleys lay flooded in white seas of mist, the ridgelines ghostly and unreal, the world lightly powdered.
Near the summit a thick carpet of moss covered the ground, a wooly green cap that covered the bones of the fallen, the graves of beasts and men. They found a wind-thrown spruce, uprooted, the earth cratered beneath the snarled mass of roots.
Here was the place.
They dug together, unspeaking, and their breath clouded the shafts of light lancing slantwise through the trees. Rory had to lay aside his crutch and lean against the edge of the hole to keep his balance. Granny stood in the very center of it, in her tall man-boots, and her arms were streaked black as she worked. They rolled his body into the ground wordlessly, without ceremony, shoveling the black dirt over his shrouded form. The mountain would do the rest for one of its own. Reclaim him, the roots of the high forest driving his bones ever deeper through the black earth, toward the stony heart of the mountain.
