On the Savage Side

by Tiffany McDaniel

“A witch is not a pointy hat or a broom or warts. A witch is merely a woman who is punished for being wiser than a man. That’s why they burned her. They tried to burn away her power because a woman who says more than she’s supposed to say, and does more than she’s supposed to do, is a woman they’ll try to silence and destroy. But there are some things that not even fire can destroy. One of those things is the strength of a woman. Don’t you want to be a woman like that? A woman with power?”

“Listen to me now, girls.” Mamaw spoke as seriously as ever. “Power is not only physical. It’s not some muscleman lifting all the weights. It’s much more than that. It’s being smart. It means you endure.” “What does endure mean, Mamaw?” I can’t remember if I was the one who asked this or if it was Daffy. “It means you suffer something, toward a greater end,” Mamaw Milkweed said. “Because in this world you must be smart and you must endure. Most importantly, you must be ready to be treated like a woman. If you are not ready for that, you’ll break wide open.” “How is a woman treated?” I asked. “Not like a person,” she said. Perhaps seeing the fear in our faces, she said, “But you two are powerful. You two are witches. Like me.” That was one reason we thought the land Mamaw Milkweed lived on looked as though gasoline had been poured upon it and lit.

We headed to the center of town, to the large houses where we imagined nice things. Pretty lamps, swept floors, yellow sunlight like a bright pattern on the walls. We believed that in the big, beautiful homes, everybody got what they wanted. That the mothers and fathers were spaced far enough away to be heroes and the children were never lost.

“Yours was a spider?” Sage Nell asked. “Mine was a big ugly cockroach.” I looked up into her eyes. “Most of the girls out here,” she said, “have their own spiders and wolfs and rabid dogs. If only we could begin again. Start over with our virginity and make a rule on how it’s devoured.”

“Years from now,” she said, “an archaeologist like you, Arc, will dig my tooth up and I’ll matter because I’ll be from the past. They’ll wonder who I was and they’ll give me a better story than my truth.”

“I keep hoping I’ll look through these keyholes,” she said, “and see a future that goes for all the miles it takes to get outta this stinking town. But all I see is a woman on a mattress in a room. Do you think that’s our future? I don’t wanna call that my life, Arc. But I’m scared I’ve made certain it will be now.”

“A needle is a needle.” She looked at it. “And you know what? When it’s inside you, it does turn the savage side beautiful. Nothing feels bad here, Arc. All the sadness goes away. The warmth washes over you. It’s the most magnificent thing. It makes me feel like glass. The way it breaks me into pieces. But I love being broken by it. Because the next time I use it, it makes me whole again and it holds me so tight. It loves me. It’s a friend for a thousand years. It’s a father who’s still alive. A mother who hugs me. It’s Mamaw Milkweed coming back with the flower bulbs. Your stories weren’t turning anything into the beautiful side, Arc. This stuff does.”

We humans have always been in pain. History tells us that in the artifacts civilizations have left behind. Pain is there in the broken vases, the fractured poetry, the overwhelming music we have played for centuries. We belong to grief until the engine goes out. Then we belong to the dirt, our bodies identical to other fallen things.

“The Taj Mahal,” Aunt Clover said. “It’s a tomb built for a woman.” She picked up the dented can with the faded creamed corn label and held it to her mouth. “White marble, red sandstone,” she spoke into it. “Addie? Can you hear me? The tomb reflects a woman in water. Spittle, spittle, spider, where you gonna hide her?” Aunt Clover spit inside the can. “In the water.”

“How’d you know when you were ready?” I asked, the rain sliding down over the glass of the window Daffy was looking out of. “Ready to quit the shit?” “I was driving,” Violet said, “wearing my crown. I ran over something. I stopped the car and got out. The air was hot. The sky was gray. The snapping turtle I’d hit was still moving. I was on a road by the river. She’d come up to lay her eggs. Her shell was crushed. The eggs were falling out all over the place. Turtles, even when they get their shells destroyed so badly you think they gotta be dead, they usually ain’t. They can live for a long time after, just suffering. They’re queens of the earth, turtles.”

I knew if we had waited for the perfect moment, we would either be dead, our obituaries written by the street, or we’d be old women with dirt on our feet, living in the back bedroom with our mother and the other ghosts.

Detox was a different monster than the flu we had when we were kids. Sure, there was nausea, diarrhea, chills, and fevers, but it all had gasoline poured on top and lit. Left to the flames, I gave the fire my hands. It took them and asked for more. I gave my feet, my legs, my arms. It took them and asked for more. I gave my eyes, my breasts, my ribs, one by one. The pain took them all and asked for more. That was when I realized that a woman holds most things in the back of her throat. And that these things come out in vomit and screams and cries.

Addiction is a thief. It steals the minutes from the day. The color of the sky. It steals the hero from the story, the leaves on the trees, the answer to the question, Who am I? The thief doesn’t go completely away because you’ve stopped holding the needle to your arm. Sobriety is just a better hiding spot for the minutes of the day, the color of the sky, the answer to the question, Who am I?

“What they don’t tell ya in the history books is that war is fought with sober intention but not always with sober minds.”

Speed, cocaine, heroin. Our wars have been fought not with the sobriety that tradition so admires, but with the use and the aid of enough narcotics to super our heroes.

I thought if you smiled in a photograph, you smiled forever, and anything else that came after that smile didn’t matter because the moment that was captured on film was the moment that mattered for eternity. I guess it was just another myth for the heart to believe.

“My mother has been an addict for most of my life,” I said. “I used to believe she would wake up one day and not be one. I tried to help her the only way I knew how as a kid. I’d take little objects. A spoon, a clothespin, a bottle cap. I’d put them on the edge of the table and push them off, pretending they were the bad things in her life, and if only they were to fall away from her, everything would be okay and she would stop unraveling. When that didn’t happen, I started to think it was because she didn’t love me enough. I started to hate her. But the more I hated my mother, the more I hated myself. Those things are connected, you know. And even when I’m in a room full of people, I am always astonished at how lonely I can be, because the one person I need isn’t there. A daughter is a woman lost at sea. A mother is the one who saves her. But if she’s not there, the daughter will always be lost.”

Who we were as women will be lost to a whole conversation about addiction itself.

Mamaw Milkweed once said, “A shotgun don’t fire softly.” It took me a while to figure out what she was saying. Then I realized what she meant. Life hurts. When you’re in front of the gun, it hurts a hell of a lot more. For some of us, to stand in front of the gun is less of a choice and more of the place we were delivered to here on the savage side.