Free Winter Rose by Rachel A. Marks

PART ONE
     
     
     
     
     
     
    The pungent stench of sweat and whiskey fills the air. The smells of Pa, of what might be coming. Pa and his anger. Pa and his fists. Pa and his dangerous grip.
    He killed the rest of our chickens last night in a rage when Mamma wouldn’t stop her coughing. Tore them to pieces. All blood and floating feathers. I was glad it wasn’t me, but now we have nothing except grain to eat all winter. And what’s left of that fills the sack that’s thrown over Pa’s broad shoulders—the sack that says he won’t be back for several months. By then, Me and Becca and Mamma could be dead.
    He walks past me, out the door, not even acknowledging my existence with a look or a goodbye. I might as well be a ghost or a puff of smoke in his way.
    I follow him for a few steps, my feet silent in the newly fallen snow. His back disappears into a flurry of white as he heads down the hill. I should yell for him not to go, not to abandon us, but it sickens me that I need him for anything. I want him gone. I always have.
    Still, it’ll hurt Mamma and Becca.
    And what I want never matters much, anyhow. Not even when his knuckles left purple blossoms on my skin. Not even when he tore into my clothes and called me names I can’t bare to think of now. Not even when...
    Mamma’s cries mingle with the wind, calling me back to the sorrow of today. She moans and weeps of her lost love, until the cries turn into a string of coughs, sharp and full of death’s keening. Before, when I was tiny, she would have burned lavender and called on God to give Pa true direction, she would have crushed rabbit bone and ash from his left-behind shirt and sprinkled it on the threshold to draw him back home.
    Now, she can only curl on her pallet like a wounded bird and hope.
    “Rose,” my sister calls from the shadows. “Come inside.” There’s fear in her voice. I can’t allow myself to feel it. I can’t allow Pa that much victory.
    I turn back to our shack. It’s nestled on a rise, against a backdrop of forest, fir trees as thick as wool and aspen that grow gold like butter in the fall. Beside it is a small barn that could hold animals if we had some left alive. Remnants of a picket fence poke out of the snow here and there around the yard, forgotten ruins from ancient days. And once there was a path of dark, coal-colored stones leading from the abandoned garden to the front door that Mamma could walk on when the rains came in spring.
    Before the herbs and vegetables withered and curled up into rotten piles. Before Mamma got sick and Pa drank the whiskey to hide—so he could do his dark deeds and not feel them twisting his soul and mine. 
    Before this endless winter.
    The shack itself is small, made up of only one room. The walls are warped and the door hangs crooked, patched up with old newspapers and branches from the forest floor. Wind whistles through neglected cracks in the panels like the voice of a weeping child. It’s as if we haunt this place even before our death. A sick woman and two thin, pale girls, no good for anything much.
    I push open the door and walk across the wood floor to my pallet without a word.
    Becca looks at me with tears in her eyes. “Will we be all right?”
    I stare back at her. Is she really older then me? She seems younger in so many ways. In all her sixteen years she still hasn’t learned to harden her heart to life.
    Well, she’ll have to soon enough.
     
    *
     
    A man comes to our shack five days later. I go out to chop fire wood and see him emerge from the falling snow, at the bottom of the rise. His broad shoulders and coal-peppered coat tell me he’s from the mines and his firm jaw and smooth skin say he’s a little younger than Pa.
    He comes into the yard without an invitation, walking right up to the corner of the house where I stand. We stare at each other for a second and I make myself stay still and not shift my feet. His eyes are dark and hard, like the bowels of the mountain