Every Bone a Prayer

by Ashley Blooms

  “That was Caroline,” Misty said. “Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I ask you something about her?”

  The garden didn’t answer.

  “It’s just… I thought that maybe you’d seen what happened to her. Back when Earl hurt her. And maybe that’s why you forgot your name.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Is that why you don’t like to talk about her?”

  “I don’t like to talk about her because it’s her fault,” the garden said, its voice rising in Misty’s head until she had to squint just to bear the noise. “She was a foolish woman. She got herself hurt and me hurt, and it’s her fault that things are this way. Nobody ever liked her. Did you know that? Nobody at all.”

  “But what did she do?”

  More images surged through the garden. The branches of a dogwood tree heavy with bloom, a man’s voice in the distance, a feeling in her arms like she was being ripped apart, pain bursting through her chest until Misty almost screamed.

  The garden’s leaving was like a door slamming shut in Misty’s chest. Her head throbbed with every beat of her heart, and it hurt to breathe too deeply. From the next room, her mother called her name and told her it was time to go.

  * * *

  Dolly’s house was a fifteen-minute drive from Misty’s trailer. It wasn’t a long trip, but there was something about the mountains that made it seem much longer. There was so much more than just distance between them. There were thousands of trees and brambles and vines, endless pounds of kudzu, countless dips and hollows and bumps. There were a dozen hollers between Misty’s and her aunts, and each of them had families and creeks and pets and people of their own. And every one between them added to the weight and the distance so that going to Dolly’s house felt like a great journey.

  It didn’t help that their mother never drove above thirty miles per hour.

  “We need out of the house. It’ll be good for us.” Their mother smiled through the rearview mirror at Misty and Penny as she talked, but her hands couldn’t be still. It was always her hands that gave her away, like all her nerves and worries retreated there when the world became too much. They buzzed in their mother’s palms until the fingers had to move. So she cleaned or straightened or weeded or shoveled or mended. She found places where the house was falling apart or not even falling, but just leaning a little too far to one side, and she fixed it. Every time, she fixed it.

  Dolly and Jem were already in the garden when they arrived. They wore loose T-shirts and ankle-length denim skirts, just like Misty’s mother, with their hair pulled into high ponytails that swung as they turned to wave.

  Their garden was much bigger than Earl’s. It covered a whole hill that had been tilled many years before by Misty’s great-grandfather. The garden wasn’t flat, exactly, but it was flatter than any other ground nearby. The soil had been worked for decades and was darker and richer for it. There were a dozen rows of corn and three long rows of potatoes, half-runner beans and tomatoes and one lonely eggplant at the end, which had been Jem’s idea.

  “Eggplant,” Dolly said, toeing the green leaves with her tennis shoe. “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  “Everybody’s heard of it except you, you old Philistine.” Jem adjusted the leaf that Dolly had touched as though she might transfer some of her ill will into the plant and tomorrow they would wake up to find it shriveled and dark.

  Dolly frowned. “I don’t know how it growed this fast. You only planted it a week ago, and now look at it.”

  “Some of us just have that special touch.” Jem winked at Misty.

  “Well, I still think it looks obscene,” Dolly said. “Reminds me of Ned Hacker’s nose. You remember him?”

  “The woodworking teacher?” Misty’s mother asked.

  “That’s the one,” Dolly said. “I hated that man. He was always squinting at me in the lunch line.”

  “He knew you was stealing milk,” Jem said. “And say what you want about the man’s nose, but he always smelled right. Like Old Spice. That’s how a man’s supposed to smell. Like a cold morning. Something to smack you in the face and wake you up.”

  “What do you know about the right kind of man,” Dolly said, laughing. “You couldn’t even hold on to the one that you had.”

  Jem’s expression tightened. “You know, that’d bother me more if he’d been worth holding on to.”

  Misty’s mother cupped Jem’s elbow and Jem turned so no one could see the look on her face and Dolly rolled her eyes and the moment was over as quickly as it had begun. Still, Misty could feel that something had happened, the air sparking and humming around her aunts, but she couldn’t be sure exactly what it meant. She could only watch the space widen between Dolly and Jem as Jem walked down the row of beans, tearing off stray leaves that had yellowed and dried and some that were still fresh and green.

  Dolly squeezed Misty’s shoulder so tight that Misty almost cried, her body still sore from the long night it had lain empty on her bed, but she closed her eyes and bore the touch because Dolly’s hand was also warm and worn in all the best ways. Dolly leaned down and pressed a kiss to the top of Misty’s head.

  “I’ve sure missed you girls. You can go and dig some new potatoes if you want. Whatever you get, we’ll cook up tonight. We’ll ask Jem to fry us some of that chicken, too. Lord knows it’s one of the only things the old girl does right.”

  “I’ll show you how right my aim is in a minute.” Jem pointed the sharp end of her hoe in Dolly’s direction.

  Misty walked toward the lower half of the garden, which was closer to the creek and to the shade of a long line of maple trees. The dirt was stiff and dry. It crumbled under Misty’s feet, the earth shifting so she couldn’t walk straight or easily. Her stomach ached as she tensed to steady herself. She stumbled past a mound of earth seething with little red ants and plopped onto a patch of shade at the edge of the garden.

  She had missed her family. She didn’t know how much until she saw them again, standing all three together—Jem and Dolly and her mother. The shape of them was so near the same as they bent their backs toward the earth or squatted in front of the beans. Their hands were deft and quick. They carried five-gallon buckets everywhere they went, squatting on the white rims or leaning their stomachs against them for balance as they worked. The beans fell with a hollow thump into the bottom and then with no sound at all as the buckets grew fuller and fuller. When they were finished with one task, they would carry the buckets to the bed of Jem’s truck, turn back, and start again.

  They talked as they worked, almost without ceasing, but there was quiet, too, long stretches of nothing but the slide of the dirt beneath their feet and the rustle of leaves. Misty felt a deep contentedness sweep over her just looking at the garden, but it was hard to be happy when her body hurt so much, and when the world was still so loud. The birds were calling overhead and there was a cicada somewhere, whirring and whining, its voice a high-pitched keen that worked against Misty’s head like a saw.

  Penny dropped the head of a hoe beside Misty. The metal piece had been pried from its handle so only the flat spade was left with a little piece of metal where Misty could wrap her hand. Penny had another of her own, taken from the back of Jem’s truck. The women gave these to the children when they wanted to help because even now their limbs were too short to hold a hoe properly. It was easier this way, to give them less to control.

  “They’re talking about the statues,” Penny said.

  “What are they saying?”

  “Not much. Just a bunch of ‘good Lord’ and ‘I’ll be.’ Mom’s telling them that she thinks something’s wrong with them. That you and me ain’t been acting right lately. Especially you.”

  “Did she really say that?”

  Penny shrugged. She dug carefully into the small trench where the potatoes were hidden u
nderground. She had always been the best at this, the most patient. She coaxed a small potato out of the dirt and into her palm. She rolled it back and forth, blowing the dust from its mottled skin.

  “Do you hear that bug?” Misty looked around.

  “Which one?” Penny asked. “And you know what else there is? There’s all the crawdads in the yard. And Mom said that the statues are starting to change. There’s cracks in all of them now. I asked her if it was because of Dad hitting them with the bat, but she said she saw the cracks before that.”

  “I saw them, too,” Misty said. “In the green glass man.”

  “You know what I think?”

  “Not much,” Misty said.

  Penny stuck out her tongue. “I’m trying to be serious.”

  “Fine. What do you think?” She covered one ear with her hand to block out the drilling whine of the cicada. It seemed to help for a moment, but then the sound amplified and changed directions, coming from overhead.

  “I think the statues is poison,” Penny said. “I think they must have done something to the air. They’re probably doing something to the water, too, since they grow right there in the ground. I think that’s why you been acting so sick lately. Because they got to you, too.”

  “If they’re poison, then why ain’t you sick?” Misty asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m stronger than you. I never get colds as much as you, and I never had one ear infection when we was little. All you did was cry. Mom says it herself.”

  “So it’s just me that’s dying then?”

  “I never said you was dying.” Penny dropped three more potatoes into the bucket and turned to Misty. “Do you think you’re dying?”

  Misty sighed. “No.”

  Penny went back to working, the quiet chh-chh-chh of her hoe parting the earth, and the pop of the beans from their vine as their mother and aunts walked down a long row of half-runners. Misty kept looking for the cicada overhead, squinting against the sunlight filtering through the leaves, but she saw nothing but green and gold. She closed her eyes and tried to reach out for it. Some of them spent years underground, sleeping, and their names were filled with dream language, strange and twisting, like a whole other world that the cicadas knew, a whole separate life they lived before they lived. She’d spoken to them before in clips and whispers, little conversations about the taste of the earth and the way it felt to disappear, but she didn’t know any of them very well, and they didn’t trust her now. They shied away from her calling because she wasn’t sharing her name. The cicadas didn’t want to speak to her without it.

  So Misty tried what the garden had taught her. She took part of her name and she took the name she knew for bugs in general—not just cicadas but anything like them—and she joined them together in her mind. It felt different this time, but she kept trying. She asked them to stop their noisemaking, to stop, just for a little while, so her head might ease its aching, so she might be able to close her eyes and rest beneath the trees. She just wanted some quiet.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then Penny screamed.

  Misty startled, falling back onto her elbows. Penny jumped to her feet. She stared down at the ground with her face contorted.

  “What is it?” Jem yelled.

  “A bug!” Penny said. “I think it’s dead.”

  Something landed on Misty’s shoulder, and she turned her head slowly. A great black-shelled beetle was tangled in her hair. Its body was stiff and unmoving, but Misty couldn’t help but smack it away.

  There was another soft smack, and another as bugs poured from the trees.

  Beetles of all shapes and colors, cockroaches with their wings rustling in flight, dog ticks, centipedes, ladybugs and assassins, spiders by the dozens—yellow spiders and black, spiders with long, thin legs and with squat heavy bodies, their bellies thick with eggs. All of them fell from the trees around the garden and from the cornstalks and the vines. They landed on Penny’s shoulders and at Misty’s feet, and Penny screamed for their mother as Misty turned and vomited. Her stomach was like a fist punching through her, and what came out was hot and yellow and thin. What came out of her felt exactly like she did.

  “Oh Lord, Misty. Beth, it’s Misty,” Dolly said.

  All three of the women came high-stepping in her direction, but it was Jem that reached her first. Jem scooped Misty’s hair away from her neck and held it. One damp strand stuck to her chest, and she smelled what the inside of her smelled like. Her stomach rolled again, but Misty could only cough this time.

  “Was it the heat, you think?” Jem asked. “Or the bugs. Good Lord, what has happened to these bugs?”

  Misty started to cry. Her mother lifted her onto her shoulder, and Misty wrapped her legs around her mother’s waist without thinking, some old instinct from the days she had reached for her mother most often, the days when her mother had always been there. She carried Misty across the garden with one hand held tight to Misty’s head.

  “It’s okay,” her mother whispered. “Everything’s okay.”

  Penny followed, close enough that Misty could see the faint speckles of dirt on her sister’s cheeks like freckles. She jumped and whipped her hand through the air occasionally as she felt the ghost of a bug land on her, but she held on to Misty’s hand, too, even as their mother dumped Misty into the back seat of their car. Outside, the sound of the whining had stopped, every sound had stopped until the car engine rumbled to life and carried Misty away.

  Thirty

  Dolly lived in a shotgun house that had been built by Misty’s great-grandfather. Rooms had been added onto the house over the years, and the porch had been boarded up to make a nursery when Charlene was born. For the longest time, weeds still sprouted between the floorboards. Dolly would stomp them down, shove them into the cracks, until finally they sealed all the holes and insulated the floor. A bathroom was added onto the living room and a sewing room onto Dolly’s bedroom, though it had become more of storage closet, packed with boxes and old toys, musty church clothes slung across Sam’s discarded twin bed.

  The floor was dark-brown linoleum and, in the winter, covered with rugs to keep their toes warm, although the rugs had been shed for summer and all the old scuff marks and scars were visible on the floor. The furniture was a mix of hand-me-downs from Dolly’s mother and her husband’s family. There were three couches in the living room, none of which matched, a large television in the corner, and shelves for Dolly’s porcelain figurines.

  Misty’s mother carried her inside and put her in a cool shower while her aunts cooked. Her mother sat on the toilet while Penny lingered in the doorway, fetching towels, clean socks, a glass of apple juice—whatever Misty asked for.

  Before long, Misty was dried and dressed in her favorite purple pajamas, sitting on a pile of blankets in the living room. Her cousin Charlene stared at her from the other end of the couch.

  “What happened to you?” Charlene asked.

  “I got sick,” Misty said.

  “What kind of sick?”

  “Puking sick.”

  “Is it catching?”

  “I don’t reckon.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Misty shrugged.

  Dolly’s older child, Sam, walked in from the kitchen and leaned his hip against the couch. His long hair was tucked into a baseball cap. “Just be glad whatever you got ain’t catching, Char. The rest of us sure are thankful.”

  Charlene stuck her tongue out and chose a seat on a different couch. Sam took her spot, sitting with his legs folded beneath him.

  “What’s a matter with you, Little Bit?” Sam asked.

  “Not feeling good.”

  “Mom’s got some ice cream sandwiches hid in the back of the freezer. You want me to steal you one before I go?”

  “That might help,” Misty said. “Or you could take me with
you.”

  “You don’t want to be where I’m going, especially with a bellyache. Some friends of mine are going night riding up on Four Seam. Jerry and Jamie are coming with me. Danny Turner said he’d let me drive his four-wheeler.”

  “Just be careful.”

  “I will.”

  Jamie and Jerry came through the door a minute later. They all stopped to check on Misty, teasing her, ruffling her hair before they left with a plate of food each.

  Penny hovered around Misty most of the evening. She even packed Misty’s plate to overflowing with fried chicken, boiled new potatoes so tender they fell apart on her plate, half-runner beans slick with oil, and a chunk of corn bread dripping with butter. Everyone watched Misty take small, deliberate bites. Even when they were tending to their own plates, they still looked to her from the corner of their eyes, offering to get her refills or a fresh paper towel or asking if she needed another pillow.

  It was just like the way everyone had gathered near her when she cried at Jem’s house. Again Misty found herself hurt, and again everyone was kinder than they had ever been. She didn’t understand why it had to be this way. Maybe she could tell her father about William and the barn, about the hardest, strangest hurt she’d ever known, and it might be the thing that would bring him back, would bind them, forever, as a family. A hurt so great that he couldn’t ever leave her again.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it.

  She wasn’t even sure her family could help her anymore. And even if they could, she was tired of being the one who was hurt and in need of help.

  When the plates were cleared, her mother and aunts went to the front porch to tend to the day’s harvest. They moved Misty’s blankets and pillows onto the porch swing so she could sit with them while they worked. Penny and Charlene played with Charlene’s pet turtle, a squat little thing with a crack in its shell and a heart painted over it with pink nail polish. They tried to force lettuce into its retreating mouth until they lost interest and played in the yard instead, chasing lightning bugs back and forth through the tall grass.