Shiner Read online

  STRANGER

  Before she’d burned, Ivy had always said that my father should have made solitude his bride instead of my mother. He loved to be alone. No one in Trap would ever hear me if I screamed, thanks to him. When my parents married sixteen years earlier, he grieved the whole mountain by choosing a secluded marshland as the home he’d offer his new wife—Ruby, who’d always been the dawn of everyone’s morning.

  “It wasn’t right,” Ivy had told me. “Closing Ruby off that way.”

  So Ivy convinced her husband, Ricky, to settle nearby. Back then he’d still been eager to please her. He’d wanted to live in town, closer to the seam of Randolph County coal mines and the motel where he and Ivy had met, but that was forty minutes down the mountain from my mother, and Ivy wouldn’t yield.

  “Ain’t nobody up in those woods,” Ricky had reasoned with his new wife.

  “Ruby ain’t nobody,” Ivy said, and Ricky didn’t dare cross her.

  Their rusted trailer, two miles down the road, looked like it had fallen from the sky. Sun-scorched toys littered the lawn, and a ring of garbage moated the house. They outgrew the trailer in three years with their first pair of boys, but Ivy would not be moved. Her devotion to my mother was matched only by my father’s.

  He’d never been unkind to Ivy. He only loved my mother so recklessly that he wanted to claim all of her for himself. Other summers Ivy used to slip my mother’s wedding band onto her finger when Ruby took the ring off to scour the soap pot in our backyard. My mother didn’t want to lose it in the cattails, so she gave it to the one person she kept near. It never failed to roil my father’s nerves. I watched his white eye twitch as Ivy slipped on the ring. She stood by until the pot gleamed—my mother close enough to be Ivy’s shadow, her dark eyes and hair the opposite of Ivy’s fair skin and pale topknot. Ivy hadn’t made a show of the ring to rouse my father’s jealousy. She’d done it because she and my mother survived their silent lives by taking care of each other, and Ivy cared for my mother better than she cared for herself.

  These two women had taught me to fear what you’d find in a man once he became a father. I went to bed with a man, Ivy said to the empty hillside, and woke up with a boy. Ivy—mother of five, including her husband—didn’t bear it as well as my mother did. Her green eyes shuddered like wind skimming water.

  “I wish I could have been good at something besides making babies,” she’d said more than once as my mother hemmed and rehemmed Ivy’s skirts when they started to unravel.

  My mother wasn’t the kind of woman to make something out of nothing. Instead she made the most of what she had. This was what Ivy liked best about her. My mother, who could fix anything, never thought of Ivy as someone who needed fixing.

  Folks said Ivy and Ricky’s four sons held all the promise of the Confederate Army at Appomattox. I hardly saw her oldest boy, Bobby, who was fifteen like me. He wasted warm afternoons pinning squirrel tails to chestnut oaks in the woods. Bobby wanted to enjoy what freedom he could before he’d have to start fixing broke-down Chevrolets for cash like his father.

  Now the narrow road before the boys and me curled around a cluster of white pines. We’d run away, but we couldn’t escape. The images of Ivy on fire had seared the hearts of her three youngest sons. Only my mother’s hands and arms had burned, and I’d never strike a match again without remembering the way she’d used her own body to dampen the flames.

  The day had grown hot. The woods rustled with the sound of Job’s wheezing. I turned and saw him bent at the knees. He had asthma, and the hike had worn him out.

  “Come on.” I turned off the path into the hillside that dipped down to the creek. “I want to show you something.”

  I heard the drawl of the water before I saw it. The sound hummed, native as a heartbeat. My mother and I liked to take this path in the early-summer mornings, and together we’d hold our breath, slip underwater, and disappear.

  “Stretch your arms out like Jesus on the cross,” she’d told me when she first taught me to float. She’d taught me everything—how to swim, how to read, how to hide.

  I led the boys through the brush to the swimming hole where the creek pooled beneath a stone overhang. It was silent but for the skittering water. Thirty miles away miners were hanging their headlamps for their lunch break as the waitress at Teddy’s Tavern in town polished window-side tables for the young men who came through to hike in the caves. They were lively and tan and muscled, never without a friend. I watched them on my monthly visits to town so I could replay the memory in my mind at night once the mountain went dark.

  The creek shushed around me as the sun cast the rock with a pewter sheen.

  “Ain’t this where we do the baptisms?” Henry asked.

  “It is.”

  Every August my father called his flock to the creek and asked who wanted to be baptized into a new life as a Christian. Confess your sins, he’d say. Then go forth and be healed. It had been years since anyone came forward. The old men had done it in their youth, and the children here grew scarce. It wasn’t the kind of thing you did twice. Still, the faithful gathered, and my father prayed.

  I knelt by a knobbed rock and dug through the dirt with my fingers. When I scratched metal, I lifted a tin of butterscotch candies and the silver flask I’d buried beneath it. I’d found the flask empty underneath a torn hemlock root after church let out one day last April. I filled it now with creek water and hung it with a cord around my neck.

  “Shirts off,” I said to the boys. “And turn your backs.”

  The three obeyed, and I hitched up my skirt and tied it in a knot at my waist. Pony climbed onto my back, and we entered the water. I rattled the candy in the air.

  “Come and get it,” I said.

  Job and Henry crept as deep as they dared.

  “Let me tell you a story,” I said, taking Job into my arms. Water trickled over the rocks in the distance. “Violet’s Run is the gorge near the top of the mountain. That grassy stretch of meadow even farther north than my cabin. You know it?”

  Henry nodded as a crow crossed the sky.

  “It’s named for a young woman who lived a hundred years ago.” I took the flask and dumped water over Job’s head. “She was a daredevil like your mama.” I paused.

  Job closed his eyes, and I poured another round of water. His dark hair went silky, and his body relaxed against mine.

  “Violet wanted to jump off the gorge into the falls below. Everyone swore it was no feat for a woman. Many men had attempted that same jump, and none of them survived. But Violet knew that the secret was being light on her feet.”

  Job opened an eye. “Did she die?”

  “Lie back,” I said, coaxing his body into a straight line. “Men love a woman in trouble. The moment Violet jumped, a string of five lovesick young men jumped after her, each convinced he’d be the one to save her life.”

  Henry wiped away a tear.

  “Folks despaired, thinking they’d lost six young people to the falls. They climbed down the ravine to fish out the corpses, and you know what they found?” I took Job’s arms and straightened them out at his sides, leaving my hand beneath his shoulder blades.

  “They found Violet carrying them out one by one, cradling each of them like a baby boy.”

  “She must have been strong,” Pony said.

  “Like our mama,” Job whispered.

  “Like your mama.” I nodded. “And look, Job. You’re about as close to floating as I ever saw.”

  As soon as I said it, a rustle in the white pines pricked my ear. My mother had taught me how to listen for a threat. The grass grew tall around our house, and we kept vigil for snakes. Ten years earlier my father had lost his prized rattler in our fields after he thrust it into the air and it squirmed out of his grasp. A snake could live fifteen to twenty years, and my mother and I readied for the day that rattlesnake would return.<
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  I scanned the trees and found nothing. Still, the feeling hooked me. We were being watched. I’d never felt watched this deep into the woods before. Ivy was the only visitor we ever got. I undid the knot at my waist, and my skirt bloomed in the water.

  “Let’s go, boys,” I said, giving the forest a futile glance. “Time to get you home.”

  * * *

  Ivy’s boys didn’t want to return to their trailer for the same reason I didn’t want to take them. Home was not home without Ivy there to make it so.

  “If I have any more boys,” she liked to say from her trailer’s cockeyed screen door when my mother and I visited, “I’ll open a reform school.”

  I knew that my mother wouldn’t ask Ivy where she’d gone yesterday. She didn’t like calling attention to the differences between them. Ivy’s whole life came with proof of her existence. She had birth certificates for her babies and a deed for her house and a driver’s license—the kinds of things my mother abandoned when she married my father. With a car and a docile husband, Ivy could leave the mountain when she wanted. My mother couldn’t.

  I arrived at her trailer with each of the boys nursing a butterscotch. Ricky’s Impala sat idle in the gravel, coated in dust. The lawn was a graveyard of boyhood. A rusted trike lay on its side next to a beach ball impaled with an arrow, and a nest of squirt guns leaked water onto the dirt. Ivy called it poverty, but I called it riches. My cabin remained bare enough so I could spot the four gray corners of any room I stood in. Cracks traveled every wall. Mason jars and Bibles were our only decorations. I owned no bracelets, no diary, no pictures, no letters, no mirror on my bedroom wall. All I had were books, and most of those I hid beneath my bed so my father wouldn’t see.

  Ricky ought to have been alone in the trailer, since he liked to feel lonely when he drank, but when we cut across the road’s sharp curve, a silver Tacoma was pulling out of their gravel drive.

  The man at the wheel tucked a lock of black hair behind his ear. His face was long and solemn, with a sharp jaw. He pressed the brakes and gave us a good gawk, the kind my father’s congregation of sheep gave a serpent as they wondered if they had the courage to touch it. His dark eyes settled on me, and I swore somehow he knew about Ivy. He looked at me a little too long, like he understood I’d never be out walking the mountain road without my mother unless something terrible had happened.

  In the bed of the truck, a kid with no shirt and a blond cowlick crouched to embrace the carboys of whiskey at his feet. The loose clasp of his overalls smacked against the jars as he bent, and the gray mutt beside him yelped into the still air.

  I’d seen the boy before, in Trap’s pocket-size library during our grocery trips. While my mother paid the bill, I’d slip into the library to check out as many books as I could carry with the card I kept secret from my father. It was the only item I had with my own name on it. The boy—no more than thirteen—often sat at a desktop computer with his hand quivering over the mouse. His fingers flew across the keys. I watched him, hoping to learn. Younger than me, he’d mastered a machine I could barely use for a simple internet search. He’d never looked at me until now. His chin hung down as he watched us.

  “Close your mouth,” I said once we reached the gravel.

  The kid snapped his mouth shut, and the man in the front seat let out a gutted laugh before pressing the gas. The truck lurched, and the jugs in the back clattered as he spun out.

  “Who was that, Henry?” I asked.

  Henry shrugged.

  When I stepped inside the house, the stench of hot licorice whipped me in the face, and I opened the kitchen window.

  “What’s that smell?” I asked.

  “Pipes are rusted through, and Daddy ain’t fixed them yet.” Henry fanned his face with his hand.

  “You’re not drinking out of the faucet, are you?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Been getting our water from a spigot in town.” He pointed to a slew of jugs covering the linoleum.

  “It would help if you let some air in.” I looked past him and squinted into the gloom.

  On the coffee table, Ricky had parsed out two stacks of quarters and dimes for his next pack of Marlboros. The coins’ shadows towered over the empty bottles of pills scattered across the glass top.

  “What’s your daddy got against the sun?” I asked.

  “It ain’t the sun,” Job answered. “He don’t want to see the work he ain’t finished in the backyard.”

  I watched Ricky from the tile by the doorway. A busted lawn mower sat in the center of the carpet with Ricky’s jeans hanging from the handle. He lounged, sweating through his underwear, in the next room in front of the dim TV.

  He and I rarely spoke when I came by, but we both had a crush on his cable television. On any other day, I’d have been hungry for the signs of life it promised. The news program flashed a series of lead stories in the outside world: the spiking unemployment rate after another mine shutdown, a dead body found in a far-off creek, a chemical spill at the coal treatment plant nearby. Their TV had taught me that you could buy anything in the world with a flat piece of plastic called a credit card, and that there were people charging money for the kind of healing my father claimed to do for free.

  A toothpaste commercial broke the spell of dispatches from beyond our mountain, and I looked back at Ricky.

  “Ricky,” I called. “There’s been an accident.”

  Silence.

  “Ricky,” I said again, and he tilted his head.

  He didn’t answer, so I tried a third time.

  “Who was that man?” I asked.

  His face released a wave of sweat. “A compatriot,” he said. Ricky flicked his eyes at the bottles. He meant that man was a moonshiner—or a shiner, as my father would say.

  At the base of his recliner sat a cluster of glass growlers like the ones in the back of the shiner’s Tacoma. They’d each been painted milkman white across the middle. The television’s glare cast a diamond shimmer onto the liquor. I wanted a jar for myself.

  I’d seen these bottles before. My mother had lined the tops of her kitchen cabinets with them. But hers stood empty because my father thought whiskey was a sin.

  “You want the remote?”

  Ricky pitied me, and on any other day I would have let him. He knew I loved the swirls of chocolate frosting on the cooking channel and the tick of the spinning circle on Wheel of Fortune, the swell of an orchestra when a hero in one of Ricky’s westerns kissed a girl. We didn’t have a TV because my father feared it would infect us with the world’s wisdom. The television gives you thoughts instead of you having your own, he’d told me.

  I went to the trailer’s closest window and slid back the curtain.

  “Ivy’s hurt,” I said to Ricky. In the backyard a broke-down school bus faced off against a refrigerator. The cap of an old Ford sat upturned in the dirt, and Ricky’s tools moldered inside it. “She got burned at our fire pit.”

  The boys huddled together, hoping their father would spring to life.

  Ricky sat up, as if he’d finally heard me. “She all right?”

  “I ain’t sure.” We stared at each other. This was the first time I’d had to deliver bad news, another act Ivy swore a woman did best. People here were primed for it. A mine collapse, an overdose, another merciless snowfall blocking our way off the mountain for a month.

  “Ivy seemed all right when I left,” I lied. Ricky didn’t seem sober enough for the truth. “My mama is taking care of her.”

  He sat there, stiff and bent at the waist. He’d once been handsome, Ivy liked to recall. Now he was bloated and crow-eyed. He lit a cigarette.

  “First the baby,” he said as smoke unfurled from his nose. “And now this. Living on this mountain ain’t nothing but cursed us.”

  Ricky had left his family behind near Elkins when he’d followed Ivy into the mo
usetrap she and my mother were born into. He’d wanted to leave ever since.

  He shut off the television. “Did you know we had a dead baby? Right after Bobby?” His voice cracked. “I never even got to see him.”

  Pony crawled into his lap, and Ricky clutched him around his middle.

  I sat in the wicker chair across from him. “I’m real sorry, Ricky,” I said. “Let me fix you something to eat.”

  “Ain’t nothing to fix,” he said.

  His eyes flitted to the bare window before he turned the television on again, and I searched through a kitchen drawer until I found a jar of peanut butter under a swarm of Bobby’s absence-ridden report cards and a reading list for next fall’s courses at the county high school. I slipped the piece of paper beneath the belt of my skirt. During the school year, Bobby never paid me or his homework any mind. Whenever I had the chance to visit Ivy, I took his books and did the work so I could learn it myself. My father had a strict curriculum of Bible learning I followed, but my mother submitted a wider study plan based on Bobby’s lessons to the county so I could get real credit. My father didn’t know.

  As I handed each boy a plastic spoon for the peanut butter, I heard the strike of a match. The end of Ricky’s second Marlboro glowed, and Job coughed.

  “You can’t smoke in the house,” I said. “Job is sick.”

  He closed his eyes for the next pull. If Ivy had been there, she’d have ordered me to fight.

  Ricky won’t fend for our boys, she’d have said. So you have to.

  I crept behind Ricky and lifted the cigarettes from the edge of the armchair. Then I took Henry aside by the door and handed him the pack.

  “Hide these outside,” I said. “Near the engine of the school bus. Tell him if he wants to smoke, he has to lift the hood.”