Every Bone a Prayer

by Ashley Blooms

  “Oh,” the garden said. Its presence withdrew from Misty’s shoulders and the air seemed suddenly colder. “That’s a good idea.”

  “I think so. The trees know everything.” Misty’s chest swelled with a feeling of full earth after a deep, hard rain, and she knew the trees were listening and that they loved compliments.

  “Do y’all know this place?” Misty asked. She shared images of the garden before the statue grew so the trees would know which piece of earth she was talking about. They didn’t think of boundaries in the same way people did, and Misty had to be specific when she asked them questions or else she would get answers she never intended. “Can you tell me about it?”

  A pause. A swell.

  A tide growing closer, closer and then a burst of images as the trees exhaled their memories. Some of the trees started too far back, and Misty didn’t recognize the bottom at all. There were fires and great elk and treacherous storms whose lightning flashed across the backs of Misty’s eyes and filled her with the scent of ash. She waited as the trees’ memories marched on until she saw the dogwoods that Dolly had talked about in church, the bottom before Misty’s time, before the trailers. The memories slowed, as though the trees treasured this time, held it close. They showed her the dogwood trees in every season—withered by the snow and bright with blooming life and full of bone-white blooms that glowed in the moonlight and, when the blossoms fell, covered the bottom with a ghostly down. Misty felt a petal on her tongue, light and cool, tough and solid as leather, but delicate, too. The bloom dissolved before she could taste it and left her with a mouthful of cold rainwater.

  The trees missed the dogwoods. They had known them, loved them.

  Then a woman was there. Thin and brown-haired—the same woman the trailer had shown Misty, the same woman in the garden’s memories. She wore a dress with little spiral designs stitched along the hem, and she hurried across a swinging bridge, the rope swaying under her hands. She walked through the dogwood grove and touched the trees gently, her hand caressing their trunks, following the ridged line of their bark. She spoke to them, though Misty couldn’t make out the words.

  Time sped up. The images mashed together too quickly, too many. Misty’s chest contracted. A voice in her head pleading and then gone. Her arms stiffened. Her toes curled inside her shoes. She looked down at her hands and saw branches instead.

  “Wait,” Misty said, but the images rifled on.

  Earl was there. Younger. He looked almost like Misty’s father.

  Then the trees were gone, ripped up by their trunks, their roots a tangled mess, the ground scored with deep runnels where the trees had been.

  And then trailers, then people, then birds. The bottom took the shape Misty recognized until she appeared in the trees’ memories, small and squinting up at the sun, holding her mother’s hand on the day they moved into the trailer.

  The memories ended and the woods grew quiet. The birds yielded their songs to silence. The bugs paused in their tracks. Everything listening, listening.

  “Thank you,” Misty said to the trees. She shared a memory from the summer before when Misty had crawled into Penny’s bed and Penny had let her stay. It was a close feeling, a not-alone feeling. She turned her attention back to the garden. “Do you know who that woman was? The one with the trees?”

  Misty walked back toward the trailer as she waited for the garden’s answer. Her legs felt a little wobbly from the weight of the trees’ memories and she walked slow, careful. The trees sent her passive images—deep greens and browns, the feeling of themselves stretched mile for mile, an expansiveness that made Misty’s ribs feel like they were floating away from her, held only by the faintest memory of what it meant to be an I instead of a we.

  “Are you there?” Misty asked the garden. Worry wormed into her stomach.

  “I’m here,” the garden whispered.

  “Did you know that woman?”

  Misty replayed an image between them but the garden cut it off, fragmented it so the image of the woman’s face dissolved into a film of pale colors.

  “She’s part of the bad thing,” the garden said. “She’s part of the losing, the unnaming, the gone and hiding. She’s not part of me.”

  “Oh. Do you remember her name?”

  “Caroline.”

  The name had a weight that Misty could feel. The name like a hand on her shoulder holding her in place. Caroline was the woman her sister and William had talked about in the barn. The woman everyone thought Earl had killed.

  “What happened to her?” Misty asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “But it might help us figure out—”

  “No!”

  The word smashed against Misty’s sternum so hard that she actually took a step back. The birds above her lifted from their branches like they sensed the shock wave.

  “I’m sorry,” the garden said. “I don’t want to hurt my little friend. But I can’t think about Caroline. I only want to think about the trees. Little white blooms falling like snow. I remember those. They were good.”

  Misty rubbed her fingers across her ribs.

  “I’m sorry,” the garden said again, and the remorse spread through Misty like vines creeping. Her own heart ached with the grief the garden felt. “That was the wrong thing to do. I’ll go now. It’s okay.”

  Then it was gone.

  Misty felt the garden’s leaving like a shade drawn over a window, a shuttering, a closing. The silence in her head seemed greater than before now that she knew what it was like not to be alone all the time. She tried reaching out to the garden, but without a name there was no way to find it. There was only silence.

  Misty leaned against a tree trunk. The roof of her trailer peeked through the trees, slim and dark. Their mother would be there, in the kitchen, and the television would be on, the volume turned down low, and there was a spot on the couch waiting for Misty.

  Then leaves crunching.

  Then twigs snapping.

  Misty turned as William struggled through the undergrowth behind her. He came crashing over a tangle of brush and briar and stumbled in front of her. There was something held tight inside his hand.

  “I been looking for you,” he said.

  “Are you okay?”

  William shook his head. There were dark circles under his eyes and dirt on his chin and underneath his fingernails. His clothes looked rumpled, almost sleepy, like they hadn’t quite woken up that morning.

  He said, “I need help.”

  “What happened?”

  “Mom is—” William shook his head. “She said Harold asked her to move in.” William’s lip curled and a stream of words tumbled from his mouth. “He said there’s lots of room for us in his house on Beech Fork, and Mom said she was thinking about. She said it would be good for us but I don’t want to leave. I want it to be just us again. Just me and her.” William lifted his right hand and showed Misty a brown glass bottle. “I got this from Earl’s garbage. It was just sitting there, and I thought if we could just do it again like we did before, then maybe something new will grow. She didn’t like the last statue but she might like another one. I don’t know what else to do.” He handed Misty the bottle.

  “What do I do?” she asked.

  “Spin it.” He pulled her wrist toward the ground until the bottle was lying on the leaves. “Like we did in the barn.”

  A screen door slammed in the distance and Shannon’s voice floated through the air, calling William’s name.

  “I have to go,” William said. “Harold’s taking us to dinner. Please, Misty. It might be different this time. Please.”

  It was just her and William in the woods, and she didn’t know what else to do so she wrapped her fingers around the bottle’s neck and spun. The leaves underneath were too wet to let the bottle move much, so it stuttered and t
humped against Misty’s foot, ricocheting to the side, but William didn’t pay it any mind. He leaned forward and kissed Misty on the lips, once, twice in a row. His mouth was hot against hers and his cheeks were damp. Their noses bumped together twice, and Misty flinched as William stooped to grab the bottle from the ground.

  “This will work,” he said. “I know it.”

  He turned and ran through the trees toward the sound of his mother’s voice, leaving Misty in the woods alone.

  Thirteen

  That evening, Misty pressed her cheek against the window of her mother’s car. She smushed her face as tight as possible, only leaning back when her nose began to hurt. No one noticed her contortions. Her mother was looking at the road, her sister toying with the small black purse in her lap. Penny seemed to be the same Penny that she had always been. Skinny Penny with her long limbs and earlobes that stuck out just a little too much. A gap between her front teeth and freckles from her nose to her chest. Dark-haired Penny with their father’s blue eyes and their mother’s wide feet. Nothing sprouted from her lips, nothing froze her into place, no part of her replaced, not yet, with glass. But Misty couldn’t forget the way her sister had pressed her lips to the green glass man or the cloud of frost she had exhaled afterward.

  And Misty seemed the same, too. Her reflection blurred in the car window. She only appeared in the shadows while the rest of her face was eaten up by the light, by other, stronger reflections. She’d kissed William again, or he had kissed her. She wasn’t sure which it was or if it mattered, but just thinking about it made her stomach tight, so she slid away from the window and watched the road curve ahead.

  The road to Aunt Jem’s was two narrow blacktopped lanes whose edges were crumbling into the ditch lines. Their mother knew all the potholes, all the dips and divots, and she led their little car along the road like she was dancing with the pavement. There were dozens of hollers that branched away on either side of them. Some Misty knew, and many she didn’t. Some were only a mile long, ending with a house or a creek or with the mountains. Some went for miles and miles, winding deep and deeper, crisscrossing with other hollers and with abandoned mining roads. It was hard to tell just by looking at the hills, but they were filled with people, with life.

  Their mother’s eyes moved from side to side as she drove. Careful, always. Watchful, always. She’d put on makeup before they left. The corners of her eyes were smudged with brown shadow, her eyelashes thick with mascara. There was a small tube of lipstick in her purse that she rarely used. Misty had seen her bring it out before, twisting the base until the deep-red stick appeared, but she usually just closed the lid again and dropped it back into her purse without ever putting it on.

  “Will you be back to get us tonight?” Misty asked.

  Their mother looked up at Misty through the rearview mirror. “No, Little Bit. I’ll come get you in the morning. Like always.”

  Misty leaned her head against the back of the seat. They’d gone to Aunt Jem’s a lot lately. At least once a week. They would spend the night, and their mother would be there in the morning. Sometimes she brought them sausage biscuits from the gas station where William’s mother worked, and she didn’t even scold them when they dropped crumbs onto the seat. Those were the good mornings.

  Misty had asked if she could stay with their mother before, but their mother never said yes. These nights, she said, were for her and the girls’ father. Private nights.

  The car wobbled as they turned into Jem’s driveway, which was really nothing more than a steep hill. The hill had been covered in gravel once, but the rains had washed most of the stone into the creek, leaving behind deep ruts and furrows.

  “Hold on,” their mother said.

  The girls each grabbed hold of their door handles as the car lurched forward.

  Misty couldn’t help but smile when she saw Jem’s double-wide. Jem had told Misty a story about her trailer and how it was cousin to another trailer that had turned feral years before. The trailer had kicked its owner out the back door and taken to the mountains. Its wallpaper peeled and its sinks filled with tadpoles and its walls skittered with mice. But the trailer had never felt more beautiful, more itself. No one had seen it for years, except on foggy nights when little girls could sometimes hear the creak of its underpinning as it ran through the trees. Jem said she knew that her trailer would do the same to her one day, but she had made her peace with it and only hoped it would toss her onto something soft when it kicked her out.

  The grass in Jem’s yard was knee-high because she refused to cut it. So instead of being blunt and green, her yard was filled with wildflowers and grasshoppers. She had a stick she carried when she went outside to warn away the snakes. There were colored Christmas lights strewn across the trees in the driveway that Jem kept lit every evening no matter the season, and wind chimes hung from the branches of almost every tree. When Misty opened the car door, the clamor of the bells brought goose bumps to her skin. Jem stood on the front porch, smiling. She held one side of her long golden skirt in her floured hand, revealing her bare feet and wide calves.

  “Hello, sweet babies,” Jem yelled. “Come give me some sugar.”

  Misty hurried up the steps and wrapped her arms around Jem and breathed in the smell of fry grease and the Fabuloso cleaner that Jem bought in bulk at the Dollar General. Penny followed and she didn’t even wait for Misty’s hug to end before she started her own so they all stood there, a tangle of limbs and sweat. Their mother followed with a garbage bag full of clothes clutched in her hands. She tossed it at Jem and smiled.

  “That’s for the clothing drive,” she said. “It’s all washed and dried. I’ll help you sort everything next week.”

  Jem hugged their mother, too, and whispered something in her ear that made their mother laugh. It was a true laugh. Nothing forced or hidden about it, and it was one of Misty’s favorite sounds in all the world.

  “You got any of that ice cream with the cookies in it?” Misty asked.

  Jem grinned. “I got us some this morning.”

  “It’s a wonder I let them stay with you at all,” their mother said. “Come in here with me. I need your ear a minute.”

  The girls followed Jem to the door, but their mother asked them to stay outside while she and Jem talked. “I won’t be long,” she said. “Y’all can pick me some of them pretty wildflowers of Jem’s, okay?”

  Penny didn’t argue, but she rolled her eyes as she stepped off the porch, and she tugged the hem of Misty’s shirt to keep her from lingering by the door.

  “It ain’t like you can hear what they’re saying anyway,” Penny said.

  “What do you think they’re talking about?”

  Penny shrugged. Two of Jem’s dogs ambled around the corner of the house, and the girls followed them back into the driveway. Plenty of hunting dogs got lost in the woods or were set loose to starve when their owners couldn’t train them. Most of them seemed to find their way to Jem’s hill, and she never turned them away. Gubby and Jake were two strays who had stayed for years, their hips stiff with arthritis, their muzzles slowly turning gray. They led Misty and Penny to the edge of the driveway where they lifted their heads and howled low, deep notes that joined with the ringing of the wind chimes.

  Misty ran her fingers along Gubby’s thick nose, and his name swelled in her knuckles. Dogs were easy to talk to, so willing to share every inch of themselves, so happy to be known.

  “What do you hear?” she asked aloud and the rumble of an engine answered, then another. The sound was far off, but it grew louder, reverberating off the mountains until the headlights of her cousins’ four-wheelers swept over the trees. Jem and Dolly’s holler was one that went for miles, twisting and turning through oil and timber roads, intersecting other hollers, and Jerry and Jamie knew every inch. Misty led the dogs beneath a mulberry tree as Jerry and Jamie flew up the hill. Jamie popped a wheelie at the top, sp
ewing a cloud of dust into the air, and Jerry followed him, slower, frowning.

  “I have asthma, you fool,” Jerry yelled as he cut his engine.

  “Nothing the good Lord can’t heal,” Jamie said as he hopped off his four-wheeler. He paused long enough to give Misty a high five before he ran up the steps and into the house.

  “Where’s he going?” Penny asked.

  Jerry shook his head. “Him and Sam have some kind of deal. He said he needed to get something. We’re about to meet them up on the ridge—Sam and Charlene. Y’all wanna come?”

  “Yes,” Penny said before Misty could say anything about asking their mother for permission. She ran to Jamie’s four-wheeler and climbed onto the back, leaving Misty to ride with Jerry. He eased off his seat so Misty could wiggle onto the worn cushion he’d tied to the racks. The plastic sides of the four-wheeler were warm against Misty’s calves as she settled into place.

  “You can hold on to the rack there, or you can hold on to me,” Jerry said, turning until he could see Misty behind him. “It don’t matter which as long as you don’t fall off, all right?”

  Misty wrapped one arm around Jerry’s waist as Jamie came running outside. He had a plastic bag in his hand and a stick of beef jerky in his mouth as he hopped onto his four-wheeler and revved the engine.

  “All right, children,” Jamie said. “Let’s ride.”

  Fourteen

  The rumble of the four-wheeler’s engine eclipsed every other sound as they flew along the road. They passed Dolly’s house and the garden she and Jem worked and then Misty’s grandparents’ house, which had stood empty since her grandmother passed a few years before. The house technically belonged to Misty’s mother, but they didn’t live there. Misty wasn’t entirely sure why, but she knew it had something to do with her father’s family. Misty hadn’t spent much time with her father’s parents or with her uncle Danny, and she knew it might be unfair, but she wished they could move back here with Jem and Dolly and her cousins, away from the statue and the garden’s voice in her head. It would be simpler here. Better.