Mama helped the old woman up, guided her to the rocking chair. Once in the rocker, the old woman rocked gently, glaring at us with her watery eyes, breathing heavily.
“You need to clean that blood off my floor,” she said between breaths. “I done your boy a favor, now do me one. You owe me.”
“You are something,” Mama said, and shook her head.
I looked at Terry, then at the old woman. “We’re going to put him in your bed, and that’s where he’s going to stay until he gets well enough we can haul him out. You’ll just have to sleep in that chair for a few days. I just hope him nesting in your bed won’t get him some kind of disease, or that some of your meanness is under the covers and crawls all over him.”
The old woman wrinkled her nose, closed her eyes, leaned back in the chair, and started rocking furiously.
We went out to the well and got some water to clean up with. There was blood all over the floor, and we was all covered in it, too. Mama heated up some water and washed our clothes while we all stood around with the old woman’s blankets wrapped around us. Mama even helped the old woman change her clothes and wiped her down a bit, all of this done in privacy in the bedroom. We wiped up the blood on the floor and rolled up the bloody rug where Terry had been operated on and put it aside at the far side of the room.
We found some whiskey and poured that on Terry’s nub to keep out infection. The old woman had some aspirin, so we gave him a couple of those. He was still mostly out of it, and I doubt he remembered chewing them or sipping water. When Mama had him dressed in his freshly washed and dried clothes, we carried him to the bedroom and put him in the bed with a prop of pillows and a thin blanket over him.
I got a rag and went back to the other room and picked up Terry’s cut-off arm and put it in the box with the saws, then closed it up. I put it on the mantel over the fireplace. I didn’t know what else to do with it.
I went in and looked at Terry, sat in a chair by the bed for a while, then Jinx took over for a stretch.
Out in the other room the old woman was still in her rocker. Mama put some pillows in the chair to make her more comfortable, got a blanket to drape over her knees. The old woman was cleaned up now, but she still had on that stupid bonnet, and there were drops of Terry’s blood on it where the wound had spewed when she first cut through the arm. She rocked and looked at the fire in the fireplace.
Mama was using the fire and one of the big black pots to cook up some dandelion greens she had gathered near the front door of the house. She found a bottle of vinegar, and some salt and black pepper, and done as much as she could with it.
While it cooked, night fell solid. I went over and made sure the door lock was thrown. There was little wooden doors that closed from inside over the windows. I closed them all and threw the latches on them.
“There’s screens over a couple of them windows,” the old woman said. “You could leave them shutters open. It’ll be cooler.”
I didn’t answer her. I would have preferred cool air, but I was thinking about Skunk. I had let thought of him slip away for a while, but now he was back on my mind.
I took Jinx a bowl of greens, came back, and got my own. I sat on the floor near Mama and the old woman, who smacked over those cooked weeds with her gummy mouth so loud a hog would have left the room in embarrassment. But we couldn’t leave; we had to bear it. So we sat and ate. It tasted good, though anything would have tasted good about then that wouldn’t break a tooth off.
When the old woman was finished, she gave me her bowl to put aside, leaned back, and rested her hands on her belly. “I ain’t always lived like this. We was cotton money. Had slaves. I remember it. I was, let me see…ten years old when the War Between the States come to its unfortunate end. We went to growing corn when the cotton was played out, and we did all right for a time. Then this and that happened, a few hot years with not enough rain, and we was in a hole we couldn’t never get out of again. Daddy eventually had enough of it and shot himself. Mama run off with someone, and my sister got married and moved up north. Married a damn Yankee, can you imagine? And him a former solider against the South. I had just as soon seen her take up with a horse thief.
“Anyway, cause of that, we didn’t never speak again, never exchanged a letter. My brother went off to the war and didn’t come back. He might have got killed, or he might have stayed over there. Ain’t nobody knows. Wasn’t never heard of again. I eventually had to sell the house and the land. I kept this piece on the back end of it, had a house built, been here for years. Them that owned the land that had been mine gave up and moved on, and the woods claimed it. So I guess it’s same as if it all still belonged to me. Married once, but Hiram liked to mess with other women. I shot the son of a bitch, told everyone he run off.”
“You killed him?”
“Deader than a doornail,” she said. “Ain’t nobody knows but me and ya’ll. I’ve kept it to myself, for reasons I figure are clear. Now, though, at my age, what’s it matter who knows what? He was buried out near where the woods start to grow up some thirty-five years ago. About five years ago I found a skull out in the yard, dug up and gnawed on by a coyote from the looks of it. I’m pretty sure it was Hiram. I broke it up with the ax. I was still strong enough then to do it. Lately, I’ve got down in my back some. Ain’t got the energy to get nothing done. Last thing I done was kill that mule and skin it up and eat it. I wouldn’t have done it, except I couldn’t feed it no more, and I was hungry myself. It was a good old mule, and me and him done a lot of plowing in our time. I figured if he could have figured out some way to kill me and eat me for corn, he would have. I reckon I just got to him first.”
I grinned in spite of myself.
“Killing that mule tuckered me out such, I ain’t never come back to myself. That’s why I was glad to see ya’ll.”
“We could have cleaned the place for a meal,” I said. “You didn’t need to threaten us with a pistol.”
“The gun was empty.”
“We didn’t know that.”
“I wanted to keep you around. I guess at the bottom of it, I knew it wouldn’t work out. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
In that moment, I surprised myself by feeling sorry for her.
“What are all of you afraid of?” she said. “What are you running from?”
“Who says we’re running or afraid?” Mama said.
“Your eyes,” said the old woman. “Way you look around. Check the door and the windows.”
“Why would it matter to you?” I said.
“It don’t, except if they come for you, they might come for me,” the old woman said. “I figure I got a right to know on account of that.”
“You lost your rights to much of anything when you held us prisoner,” I said.
“Maybe she ought to know,” Mama said. “Maybe she’s earned that by saving Terry.”
“She just wanted to see she could still cut someone’s arm off,” I said.
“Me and your mama together did a good job, didn’t we?” the old woman said. “Me and her saved that boy.”
“I still hate you,” Jinx called from the other room.
“All right, here’s the short version,” I said. “We made some people mad. We’re on our way to California, and they got a man named Skunk on our tail. That’s as much as you need to know.”
“Skunk?” the old woman said, and I swear, even there in the near dark, the room lit only by the fire in the fireplace, I was sure I could see her turn pale.
“You know of him?” I asked.
She nodded. “If that hellhound is on your trail, then you’re already dead and just walking around.”
“I don’t plan to just roll over and let him have me,” I said.
“It don’t matter,” said the old woman.
“It matters to me,” I said.
“What you need to do is go in the bedroom there, look in the chifforobe and get the pistol shells, and load up that pistol. Then you ought to get the shotgun out of the closet. It’s loaded and there’s a box of shells in there for it. I was going to try and get to it later and blow your head off, but I don’t think I can get out of this chair again, and I doubt you’ll help me over there so I can take hold of it.”
“You got that right,” Jinx called out.
I went and got the shells for the pistol, pulled the shotgun and shells for it from the closet. I gave the pistol to Jinx and she loaded it while I went back in the main room with the shotgun. It was a double-barrel. A twelve-
