stones. Here and there small pieces of shattered stained glass glinted surprise colors from the cow-path mud.
The drive up to Thump Milton’s house was wide enough for two cars to pass and coated with pea gravel. The gravel gave way underfoot so that each step sounded like a shovel digging. Trees lined the drive and many birds sang from the limbs but their songs were not the same. Near the dun house there were two cars and two trucks parked. A redbone hound resting in a truck bed stood as she approached and barked.
The house door opened and Mrs. Thump looked out. She closed the door briefly, then came outside carrying a steaming cup. Mams hung to the belly of her stout frame and heaved as she advanced. Two other women stepped onto the porch behind Mrs. Thump and both had postures and chins that suggested they were her close relatives. Mrs. Thump’s white hair was done up in big pink rollers held in place by a mostly yellow scarf.
Ree reached for the steaming cup, smiling, and said, “I’m not really—” And the world flushed upside down in her eyes while her ears rang and she staggered, then the world flushed again and again and she stumbled across the gravel. One of Mrs. Thump’s rollers had jerked loose and dangled springy around her head as she pulled her big hand back to whack Ree another in the face, and Ree swung a fist at those blunt teeth in a red mouth but missed. The other women closed in with boots to the shins while more heavy whacks landed and Ree felt her joints unglue, become loose, and she was draining somehow, draining to the dirt, while black wings flying angles crossed her mind, and there were the mutters of beasts uncaged from women and she was sunk to a moaning place, kicked into silence.
25
WORDS WERE reaching her but none that she understood. The pain was dense and dazzling and traveled her body in pounding waves. It had been only black in her spirit until small slices of dull light began creeping toward the center of awareness from the rim, but her first brightened thoughts were jumbled and ungraspable. There were shovels, she heard shovels, several shovels digging around her, then she was hefted aloft and flying along in agony until crashed to a new ground that smelled of straw and feed sacks. She screamed landing. Her ears hummed ugly noise and her nose felt thickened. She tasted blood, spit marbles to the straw. Her tongue moved along the slick in her mouth to a leaking vacancy where two teeth had been.
“She’s crazy to’ve come here—wouldn’t you say that means she’s crazy?”
Only one eye would open.
“Her momma’s crazy, so there’s a good shot of her bein’ crazy, too.”
The women stood over her, spires of menace wearing lipstick and scarves. They saw her eye open and she sat up, aching in her ribs, her legs, her everywhere. Her teeth lay dirty in the straw, broken from her mouth, cap and root, and she stretched their way, fumbled both onto a palm, made a fist around them. She mumbled, “I ain’t crazy. I ain’t crazy.” She spluttered blood and dropped her teeth into a pocket of Mamaw’s coat. Her words were wounded in her mouth, crippled in shape but flung hard as a dying wail.
Mrs. Thump stepped closer, into plain view, with her hair rolled back into place beneath a snug scarf. She seemed grim and unruffled.
“You was warned. You was warned nice’n you wouldn’t listen—why didn’t you listen?”
“I
She moved her head slowly, wobbling as she aimed her good eye, and saw that there were others in the barn. Shapes milling by the open double door, wearing man hats, smoking, watching in silence. One of the man hats stepped near. Megan squatted, patted Ree’s face, and said, “Whatever are we to do about you, baby girl? Huh?”
“Kill me, I guess.”
“That idea has been said already. Got’ny other ones?”
“Help me. Ain’t nobody said that idea yet, have they?”
The sightless eye was fattened shut and stretched tight. She felt the swelling and tried to pry the eyelid open, but could not even sense daylight through that eye. Blood had to be spit and came out in heavy wads trailed by stringy drools that lapped onto her chin and cheeks. With her tongue she could feel shreds of her own meat broken from inside her lips. Her skirt was thrown up and her legs were decked with bruises that colored uglier as she watched.
Megan said, “I tried to help you some the other day, and this is what come of that.”
Near the door the small crowd began to part, make way, and though nobody spoke his name, Ree knew Thump Milton had come into the barn. Ree could tell a hatted shape was stepping toward her, a shape wearing an olden sort of farmer’s winter cap with stretch earflaps and a stovepipe crown. Megan glanced at the advancing hat, then stood and quickly moved aside.
Thump Milton loomed over Ree, a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched. His spade beard was aged gray but his movements were young. He crouched, grabbed her chin, and turned her head from side to side, inspecting the damage. He was bigger than she’d thought, hands strong as stormwater rushing. His eyes went inside you to the depths without asking and helped themselves to anything they wanted.
He said, “You got somethin’ you need to say, child, you best say it now.”
His voice held raised hammers and long shadows.
Ree could feel the sting of piss drying on her legs and a thicker expulsion mushed in her panties. There were pigeons watching from the rafters. Smells of sweat-soaked leather, spilled feed, and scared calves. Ree turned aside and vomited blood and lunch toward a slop bucket but spewed wide. When she looked up at Thump Milton, the women and the other hats from the doorway had come to stand close behind him. She recognized Little Arthur, Spider Milton, Cotton Milton, Buster Leroy, and one of the Boshell men, Sleepy John.
She spoke low with her head down, the words lamed by spatters of red wet and slow limping from her mouth. She said, “I got two little brothers who can’t feed theirselves… yet. My mom is sick, and she is always… goin’ to be sick. Pretty soon the laws’re takin’ our house away n’throwin’ us out… to live in the fields… like dogs. Like fuckin’ dogs. The only hope I got to keep our house is… is, I gotta
Her words were met with silence, an electric moment of utter silence, then Thump Milton stood and left the barn. Mrs. Thump and two of the men went with him. The others began to gather again near the doorway, whispering. Cigarettes were lit and funny things were said. The crowd chuckled at funny things she couldn’t hear and there was a great ugly roaring in her ears. Megan moved on the fringe of the crowd, and twice it seemed like she might’ve nodded Ree’s way.
Ree lay back on the barn floor, feeling the pitiful squish of her own voiding, and stared up. The pigeons in the rafters were awful quiet. Auction signs from long ago had been nailed to the underside of the hayloft floor and Ree stared at them but couldn’t make the signs hold still long enough to read any of the items for sale. She felt rude swishing in her belly and rolled over to spew but didn’t. Blood trickled from the side of her mouth to her earlobe and she wondered if Dad was lying on his side, too, or dead in a different position.
That redbone outside barked again, and a man in the doorway said, “Who’s this comin’ up here in such a big toot?”
Little Arthur said, “Is that truck green?”
“Looks green to me.”
“Aw, shit—that’s Teardrop’s truck. Teardrop her fuckin’ uncle—who the hell called him?”
The man said, “I don’t know, but I gotta go quick get somethin’ from my car. I ain’t standin’ here naked when that motherfucker walks in and sees her beat silly over there.”
Ree sat up and one of the women took two steps toward her and hissed, “Now look what you did!”
The truck door slammed and she heard digging steps cross the pea gravel.
Little Arthur said, “Hey, Teardrop, what—”
“Where is she?”
“Don’t get all excited.”
