Winter's Bone

past houses built on yon slopes yard dogs barked faintly from under porches but none came into the cold to make a run at her and flash teeth. Smoke poured from every chimney and was promptly flattened east by the wind. There was deer sign trod below trestles that stood over the creek and thin ice clung around rocks in the shallows. Where the creek forked she left the tracks and walked uphill through deeper snow beside an old pioneer fencerow made of piled stones.

Uncle Teardrop’s place sat beyond one daunting ridge and up a narrow draw. The house had been built small but extra bedrooms and box windows and other ideas had been added on by different residents who’d had hammers and leftover wood. There always seemed to be walls covered by black tarpaper standing alone for months and months waiting for more walls and a roof to come along and complete a room. Stovepipes angled from the house on every which side.

Three dogs that were a mess of hunting breeds lived under the big screened deck. Ree had known them since they were pups and called out as she reached the yard and they came to sniff her nethers and wag welcome. They barked, jumped, and slapped tongues at her until Victoria opened the main door.

She said, “Somebody dead?”

“Not that I heard.”

“You walked over in this nasty crud just for a visit, dear? You must be purty awful lonely.”

“I’m lookin’ for Dad. I got to run him down, and quick.”

That certain women who did not seem desperate or crazy could be so deeply attracted to Uncle Teardrop confused and frightened Ree. He was a nightmare to look at but he’d torn through a fistful of appealing wives. Victoria had once been number three and was now number five. She was a tall blunt-boned woman made lush in her sections with long auburn hair she usually wore rolled up into a heavy wobbly bun. She had a closet that held no jeans or slacks but was stuffed with dresses old and new and most of Ree’s things had first been worn by her. In winter Victoria was given to reading gardening books and seed catalogues and at spring planting she disdained the commonplace Big Boy or Early Girl tomatoes in favor of exotic international strains she got by mail and doted on and always tasted like a mouthful of far pretty lands.

“Well, then, come on in, kiddo. Shake off the chill. Jessup ain’t here, but coffee’s hot.” Victoria held the door for Ree. Victoria smelled wonderful up close, like she always did, some scent she had that when smelled went into the blood like dope and left you near woozy. She looked good and smelled good and Ree favored her over any other Dolly woman but Mom. “Teardrop mightn’t be up yet, so let’s keep it down ’til he is.”

They sat at the eating table. A skylight had been cut into the ceiling and leaked rainwater from the low corners sometimes but helped a lot to brighten the room. Ree could see through the house to the front door and over to the rear door and noted that a long gun stood ready beside both. A silver pistol and clip rested in a nut bowl on the lazy Susan centered upon the table. Beside the pistol there was a big bag of pot and a pretty big bag of crank.

Victoria said, “Ree, I forget—you take it black, or with cream?”

“With cream when there is any.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

They hunched over the table and sipped. A cuckoo clock chirped nine times. Record albums lined along the floor went nearly the complete length of a wall. There was a fancy-looking sound system on a bookshelf, plus a four-foot rack of CDs. The furniture was mostly wooden, country-type stuff. One piece was a big round cushioned chair on a sapling frame that you sat in the exact middle of like you were squatted inside a bloomed flower. Swirly- patterned lavender cloth from Arabia was tacked to a wall as decoration.

“The law came by. That Baskin one. He said if Dad don’t show for his court day next week we got to move out of the house. Dad signed it over to go his bond. They’ll take the place from us. And the timber acres, too. Victoria, I really, really got to run Dad to ground and get him to show.”

Uncle Teardrop stood stretching in the bedroom doorway and said, “You ought not do that.” He wore a white T-shirt and plum sweatpants stuffed into untied boots. He was a nudge over six feet tall but had fidgeted his weight way down and become all muscle wires and bone knobs with a sunken belly. “Don’t go runnin’ after Jessup.” Teardrop sat at the table. “Coffee.” He rapped his fingers to the tabletop and made a hoofbeat rhythm. “What’s this shit all about, anyhow?”

“I got to find Dad’n make sure he shows in court.”

“That’s a man’s personal choice, little girl. That’s not somethin’ you oughta be buttin’ your smarty nose into. Show or don’t show, that choice is up to the one that’s goin’ to jail to make. Not you.”

Uncle Teardrop was Jessup’s elder and had been a crank chef longer but he’d had a lab go wrong and it had eaten the left ear off his head and burned a savage melted scar down his neck to the middle of his back. There wasn’t enough ear nub remaining to hang sunglasses on. The hair around the ear was gone, too, and the scar on his neck showed above his collar. Three blue teardrops done in jailhouse ink fell in a row from the corner of the eye on his scarred side. Folks said the teardrops meant he’d three times done grisly prison deeds that needed doing but didn’t need to be gabbed about. They said the teardrops told you everything you had to know about the man and the lost ear just repeated it. He generally tried to sit with his melted side to the wall.

Ree said, “Come on, you know where he’s at, don’t you?”

“And where a man’s at ain’t necessarily for you to know, neither.”

“But, do you—”

“Ain’t seen him.”

Teardrop stared at Ree with a flat expression of finality and Victoria jumped in between them, asking, “How’s your mom?”

Ree tried to hold Teardrop’s gaze but blinked uncontrollably. It was like staring at something fanged and coiled from too close without a stick in hand.

“Not better.”

“And the boys?”

Ree broke and looked down, scared and slumping.

“A little pindlin’ but not pukey sick,” she said. She looked to her lap and her clenched hands and drove her fingernails into her palms, gouging fiercely, raising pink crescents on her milk skin, then turned toward Uncle Teardrop and leaned desperately his way. “Could he be runnin’ with Little Arthur and them again? You think? That bunch from Hawkfall? Should I look for him around there?”

Teardrop raised his hand and drew it back to smack her and let fly but diverted the smacking hand inches from Ree’s face to the nut bowl. His fingers dove rattling into the nuts, beneath the silver pistol, and lifted it from the lazy Susan. He bounced the weapon on his flat palm as though judging the weight with his hand for a scale, sighed, then ran a finger gently along the barrel to brush away grains of salt.

“Don’t you, nor nobody else, neither, ever go down around Hawkfall askin’ them people shit about stuff they ain’t offerin’ to talk about. That’s a real good way to end up et by hogs, or wishin’ you was. You ain’t no silly-assed town girl. You know better’n that foolishness.”

“But we’re all related, ain’t we?”

“Our relations get watered kinda thin between this valley here and Hawkfall. It’s better’n bein’ a foreigner or town people, but it ain’t nowhere near the same as bein’ from Hawkfall.”

Victoria said, “You know all those people down there, Teardrop. You could ask.”

“Shut up.”

“I just mean, none of them’s goin’ to be in a great big hurry to tangle with you, neither. If Jessup’s over there, Ree needs to see him. Bad.”

“I said shut up once already, with my mouth.”

Ree felt bogged and forlorn, doomed to a spreading swamp of hateful obligations. There would be no ready fix or answer or help. She felt like crying but wouldn’t. She could be beat with a garden rake and never cry and had proved that twice before Mamaw saw an unsmiling angel pointing from the treetops at dusk and quit the bottle. She would never cry where her tears might be seen and counted against her. “Jesus-fuckin’-Christ, Dad’s your only little brother!”

“You think I forgot that?” He grabbed the clip and slammed it into the pistol, then ejected it and tossed pistol and clip back into the nut bowl. He made a fist with his right hand and rubbed it with his left. “Jessup’n me run together for nigh on forty years—but I don’t know where he’s at, and I ain’t goin’ to go around askin’ after him, neither.”