Winter's Bone

by Daniel Woodrell

and the lumpy stuffing and worn fabric yet held the scent of Grandad’s pipe tobacco and ten thousand dusty days.

Mom’s evening pills did not tamp her as far down inside herself as the morning pills did. She did not stumble so wretchedly after concepts that squirted away from her time and again, but had occasional evening thoughts come complete and sit on her tongue to be said, and as the sun faded from a day she might release a few sentences of helpful chat or even lend a hand in the kitchen. She said, “There’s whiskey hid in a ol’ boot on my closet floor. Any honey anywhere?”

Ree tried to hold Teardrop’s gaze but blinked uncontrollably. It was like staring at something fanged and coiled from too close without a stick in hand.

The women came to mind bigger, closer, with their lonely eyes and homely yellow teeth, mouths clamped against smiles, working in the hot fields from can to can’t, hands tattered rough as dry cobs, lips cracked all winter, a white dress for marrying, a black dress for burying, and Ree nodded yup.

Ice hung from the roof eaves, catching dribbles of melt to become longer and stouter pickets of jagged freeze stretched across the window above the sink. The sun was weak in the west, a faint smudge behind middling clouds, and low. Soup stock from deer bones simmered on the stove and steamed a comforting scent.

Love and hate hold hands always so it made natural sense that they’d get confused by upset married folk in the wee hours once in a while and a nosebleed or bruised breast might result. But it just seemed proof that a great foulness was afoot in the world when a no-strings roll in the hay with a stranger led to chipped teeth or cigarette burns on the wrist.

Words were the hungered-for need, and the necessary words would be spoken low, sometimes sounding so truly true she could believe them with all her heart until the naked gasp happened and the man started looking for his boots on the floor. That moment always drained her of belief in the words and the man, or any words and any man.

Houses above looked caught on the scraggly hillsides like crumbs in a beard and apt to fall as suddenly. They’d been there two or three lifetimes, though, and cascades of snow, mushes of rain, and huffing spring wind had tried to knock them loose and send them tumbling but never did.

Rime of frost thickened where breath fell onto her chest. Sleet crackled down, laid a cold sheen across everything. The afternoon sky dimmed and lights from the house carried into the yard as gleamings stretched by skidding across the ice. Tree limbs fattened with gathered silver and drooped. Dogs went home to crawl under porches.

Ree left the tracks and crossed a level field to reach the slope of caves. Weeds and grasses were made stiff by a bark of ice, shimmering and fragile, and shattered underfoot. The shimmering grasses tinkled to nothing as she kicked her feet. The caves were easy to see from below but difficult to reach. Ree snatched onto saplings to pull herself through the beating weather and up the steepness toward the slant gaping cave she knew best, the cave with a wall of stones standing in the mouth.

The fire seemed to have been waiting to be born for it scooted quickly from flickers to a roaring flame. The flames pulsed and brightened the cave mouth. The light met Ree and glowed on her skin and cast her shadow up. She stamped her feet and stared out from the cave onto a forest vista sunk beneath ice. Some trees sagged near to snapping, some snapped.

They drove past deep woodlands and ranges of snow. The sun was behind the hills, the last western light made a sky of four blues, and the gaunt trees on the high ridges were stark in relief. Crows sat on limbs and looked like black buttons on twilight.

The snow on the drive to the house was unmarked by boot or hoof or claw.

April Dunahew had a rail fence across the face of her yard

Along the dangle of knotted branches gray squirrels crouched utterly still as the day roused. They were alarmed by every sound but not long alarmed by any. The dawn air held the cold of night but there was no breeze and squirrels soon lost their fear of the new day and moved out along the branches. Easy meat for the table with naught but silence and a small bullet required.

Beneath the pines the ground was kept clear by falling needles, a soft carpet of browned needles spread under the low branches, a natural rumpus space for short scampering youngsters. The pines could easily be imagined into a castle or a sailing ship or serve merely as an ideal picnic spot. The trees broke any wind that came and lent a good scent to any season. Mom held on to a branch and paused. “This is where I used to play.”

The morning sun polished the hard road to a blinding sheen and both girls squinted on the way to the house. Mud holes were growing brown spots in the blanket of snow. The holes held water and birds pecked in the mud. A couple of saplings had roots spring loose in the wet and had fallen partway onto the road, and the thin ends of branches crunched under the truck tires.

Thump Milton loomed over Ree, a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched. His spade beard was aged gray but his movements were young. He crouched, grabbed her chin, and turned her head from side to side, inspecting the damage. He was bigger than she’d thought, hands strong as stormwater rushing. His eyes went inside you to the depths without asking and helped themselves to anything they wanted.

Ree lay back on the barn floor, feeling the pitiful squish of her own voiding, and stared up. The pigeons in the rafters were awful quiet. Auction signs from long ago had been nailed to the underside of the hayloft floor and Ree stared at them but couldn’t make the signs hold still long enough to read any of the items for sale. She felt rude swishing in her belly and rolled over to spew but didn’t. Blood trickled from the side of her mouth to her earlobe and she wondered if Dad was lying on his side, too, or dead in a different position.

We’re old blood, us people, and our ways was set firm long before hotshot baby Jesus ever even burped milk’n shit yellow.

The heated room of close withered air made Ree swoon. It was like all the air had been breathed many times before until shriveled and stinky from the mouths of chain-smoking drunks. She started to sit on a plastic chair but felt overcome by the place, the odors, the lights, that music, and she spun about instead and pushed outside again. The wind made her skin smart and she sat in the truck, leaned to the window, closed her eyes.