Free Signs in the Blood by Vicki Lane Page A

good hand to milk”—when she broke off abruptly and looked at Elizabeth, as if she'd read the latter's mind.
    “Reckon I don't sound like a natural mother, just a-goin' on like that and my boy dead and not even in the ground yet. But, Lizzie Beth, I tell you how it is. Cletus has gone to be with Jesus and I know he's safe now. . . . These last few years, I been studyin' what would happen to him when I was gone. I'll be eighty-two in October and him just forty-one.” Miss Birdie's eyes were misty now. “He was the onliest one of our babies what lived. We had five afore him and they was all born dead or died afore they could walk. I thought I wouldn't have no more, then he come along and me thinkin' I was havin' the change. Me and Luther was so happy, and even when we knowed he was simple, why hit didn't hardly matter; he was a good help on the farm and as sweet as the day is long. He couldn't never learn to read, but . . .”
    She wiped her eyes and blurted out, “When Luther died ten years ago, some lady from the county come out and talked to me about Cletus, said maybe he would do better in one of them special homes. I run her off right quick, but I knowed that if something was to happen to me, they'd take and put him in one of those places and, Lizzie Beth, he couldn't of stood it. So I guess maybe the Lord knowed that, too, and that's why He called my boy afore me.”
    Elizabeth started to speak but Birdie went on, her voice stern now, “But that don't mean I don't want to find whoever it was knocked my boy on the head and throwed him in the river like a bag of garbage.”
     
    Lonesome Holler was aptly named. A narrow dirt and gravel road ran between two freshly plowed and harrowed tobacco fields and up a densely wooded mountainside. Next to the road a swift-moving stream hurtled down over huge mossy boulders. Ancient dark green rhododendrons loomed above the road, bathing it in deep shadows.
    “I thought we'd best start here 'cause it's the clostest place he mighta gone,” Miss Birdie explained, holding on with both hands as the jeep crawled over the rutted road. “This here's where Walter and Ollie Johnson live; do you know them? It was Walter brought them beans over to Dessie's that last day.”
    “I know who they are. . . . Sam and I were over here years ago, looking for some of our cows that had gotten out. I think I remember . . . there was a beautiful little pool at one place in the woods, under a big oak tree in a clearing. . . .” With a sharp pang she remembered the day: hot and sweaty from the long hike up and then partway down Pinnacle, they had come upon this perfect bathing spot hidden away in the woods. They had quickly stripped and immersed themselves in its four-foot depth, delighted at this rare find so high up a mountain. They had emerged and dressed just as quickly, huddling their clothes onto still-wet bodies, when they heard voices and realized that there must be a house nearby. “Do they live in a pretty little log house—two rooms with a dogtrot down the middle—almost to the top of Pinnacle?”
    “Used to they did,” Birdie said. “That is, till their childern got the notion Mommy and Daddy was too old to live up there so far from the hard road and without no phone nor 'lectricity.”
    They had reached a clearing where a small barn and a newish white single-wide mobile home sat on a bulldozed cut in the side of the slope. A shed-roofed porch attached to the front of the trailer was lined with plastic lawn chairs. As Elizabeth pulled the jeep to a stop beside a rusted Ford truck, the door of the trailer opened and Walter and Ollie Johnson came out and sat down, ready to receive company. Ollie, a large, comfortable-looking woman with fluffy white hair, urged them, “Get you uns a chair,” and flapped her apron to shoo a yellow cat off the porch.
    Once they were all seated, Miss Birdie began. “You uns know Lizzie Beth. She lives right down the other side of the mountain from