Bloodroot by Amy Greene

Author:Amy Greene
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Families, Family, Appalachian Region, Family Life, Fiction, Literary, Historical, General, Domestic fiction
ISBN: 9780307269867
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-01-05T00:45:51+00:00

MYRA ODOM

I can’t stand to hold them. I have to let them go. I don’t want to leave too many marks behind. There were fingerprints all over me when I came back here, and it’s taken a long time to wash them off. I hardly remember the names I gave them. That was another time. I think of them now by their real names. Silver like how her eyes glint in the dark. Cinder like how his eyes look in the white of his face. Woodsmoke, the way he smells passing by me in fall. Lacy, the way leaves pattern her shoulders as she moves under the trees. Their old names mean nothing now. Neither does mine. I am whatever I say I am. Rainy, when I come in dripping after a storm. Bird, when I climb to the ledge and sing down the mountain. Alive, now even more than when I was a child living here. I squat where I please and watch the water I lapped up from my hand run back out of me, spreading and mixing with the dirt of this place, swirling with pine needles as it heads down the mountain toward the creek where it came from. I am part of this place like never before. When I was small, there was always something hindering me.

Granddaddy was too protective, but I believe Granny’s instinct was to let me go. She would allow me to stand for a while in the rain, hair parting soaked down the middle, before making me come in. Once she found me stripped naked facedown in the dirt. She stood watching for a long moment before she pulled me up by the arm, wiping at my blackened tongue with her apron and brushing sow bugs from my chin. “Lord, youngun,” she said, “you’re going to be sick as a dog.” All I wanted was free. Granny seemed to understand. After Granddaddy was gone she let me roam. But every minute in her presence it seemed she was touching me, stroking my hair, pulling me onto her lap.

I still miss her every day. Time is different on the mountain. It stretches out longer. I used to always know what year it was, and how old I would be on my next birthday. But, like names, it seems less important now. There’s a calendar hanging in the kitchen, yellowed and stiff as if something was spilled on it. It has been there on the same rusty nail since before Granny died. It’s a calendar from 1975, the year I came home and my babies were born. If I mark time, it’s by their birthdays. Not the exact date, because I forget sometimes. But I can tell by the weather, how it smells outside and what’s growing out of the ground. One day I’ll wake up and there’s a charge in the air and I’ll know it’s the anniversary of their birth. I’ll get up and see what I have to make a cake for them.

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