Free Bloodroot by Amy Greene Page B

porch steps blocking my way.
    “She won’t ever have you,” he said, his eyes reminding me of that crazy boy who broke my mouth with a rock when I was seven. “Ugly old snaggletooth thing.”
    I climbed up the porch steps and he let me pass. I knew he was right. I couldn’t put into words why I’d never have Myra. It had nothing to do with how I looked. It was something else I couldn’t explain. I wanted to tell Mark that I love Myra’s wildness and hate it at the same time. I’m jealous because I can’t be it, and want it because I can’t have it. The only way to love Myra is from a distance, the same way Daddy loves Wild Rose.
    BYRDIE
    Pap lived to be a good age, but it still liked to killed me when he died. He never did get sick or feeble. He worked right up until the end, when that tractor he’d had ever since we moved to Piney Grove turned over on him. The doctor said there wasn’t nothing to do but wait for him to die. Thank goodness me and Macon got to the cabin before he passed on. The front room was packed full of people from the community he’d helped down through the years and it touched my heart to see how many had loved him. They parted to let me through and the first thing I seen was Mammy kneeling at his side. When she looked up at me her eyes was like holes and I had to turn my face. I stood at the end of the bed and took hold of Pap’s foot sticking out from under the quilt. I rubbed it through his old sock, feeling the hard corns and thick toenails he’d always pared with a knife. His face was so white it nearly blended in with the pillow. All of us waited, not speaking, for him to go. When he finally breathed his last, the breath went straight up. I seen it with my own eyes, a glow that rose and evaporated against the ceiling like steam. I held on tight to Pap’s sock foot, tears running down my face. Then I closed my eyes and prayed to the Lord that he wasn’t the only one of his kind.
    I didn’t get to be there when Mammy died. After Pap was gone I begged her to come and live with us on Bloodroot Mountain but she wouldn’t hear of it. Her and Pap had put a lot into that farm and she meant to keep it going. She took to wearing overalls and every time me and Macon visited she was out in the field or the garden sweatingunder the hot sun. She was like Pap and Grandmaw Ruth, worked right on up until the day she died. She passed away in 1939, just a few months after Clio was born. A woman from the church found her in the bed and the county coroner said she went peacefully in her sleep. That’s exactly how I want to go, fall asleep one night and wake up in Glory.
    With Mammy and Pap gone and the Great Depression on, it was sad times. The only thing that eased my grief was Clio. She was a good baby. It wasn’t until later that she started giving us fits. Most of the time Clio was sassy and full of mischief, but she could get down in the dumps sometimes. She’d let her hair go and not take a bath, and every once in a while she’d act plumb crazy. She got it after Macon’s people. He had a great-aunt that took a notion to fly and jumped off of one of these clifts around here. Sometimes Clio’d go to hollering and clawing at her face and slapping at her head. Some of the church people thought she was possessed with devils, but I knowed what it was. She just couldn’t stand to be pent up. She was worst in the winters when we got hemmed in by snow. She wanted to be out running the roads and if she couldn’t get to town it done something to her mind. One time, when she was seventeen, it came a bad ice storm, so slick even Macon wouldn’t venture out. He tried to go to work the second day, but he’d done fell down three times before he ever got to the truck, and there wasn’t no digging it out. We had a good fire going in the kitchen woodstove and he was setting there beside of it whittling. I set down at the table with him to drink me a cup of coffee. Not long after that I heard Clio’s