The drawings covered the whole wall over the bed. They were taped one beside another in rows, edge to edge, hundreds of them, yellowed and curled and faded by the damp: a house with a smoking chimney, a horse with five legs, a rainbow over a creek, a stick woman holding a stick girl by the hand. Under every one was a date in the careful print of a child, and I knew every date. They were mine. Every drawing I had made for my grandmother from the age of four to the age of fifteen, which she had told me she hung on the refrigerator. She had been hanging them here.
The trailer was dim and smelled of damp wool and woodsmoke. There was a narrow bed with a patchwork quilt, a camp stove, a shelf of canned goods, and a picture on the windowsill in a cracked frame. It was my first grade school photograph, and I had a gap where my front teeth should be. On the bed lay a figure curled on her side under the quilt, small as a child, trembling. I said, “Mama?” in a voice I had not used in fifty four years. She turned her head, and her eyes opened, and she said, “Rhetta Jean. You came up the hill.”
She was burning with fever. I touched her forehead, and it scalded my hand. I did not think. I took out my phone, which had one bar of signal on that ridge, and I called 911, and then I took off my funeral coat and laid it over her. The ambulance could not make the last half mile of the logging road, so two paramedics carried her down the mountain on a stretcher while I walked behind with the empty blue cooler. The sky was gray. I remember the smell of the laurel and the sound of her breathing.
A grandmother who tells one lie for thirty one years may be telling the only story that could keep two people alive.
In the waiting room of the hospital in Hazard, Uncle Clell found me. He had driven all the way from the church and stood in the doorway of the room with his hat in both hands, gray in the face. He sat down beside me on a plastic chair and did not speak for a long time. Then he said, “I drove her to that river in 1972. She asked me to. I did not know what she meant to do.” He took a breath that sounded as if it came from the bottom of his boots. “I think it is time you heard it all.”
Darlene had been twenty six that winter, he said, and ruined. Pills, and then worse. She had lost two jobs, and a man in Hazard had been selling her what she could not stop wanting, and that night she walked out onto the bridge on Highway 15 in a thin dress. Clell went in after her. He pulled her out of the North Fork half frozen and carried her to Mamaw. And Mamaw, standing in her kitchen at three in the morning with a wet daughter and a sleeping four year old, had made her decision. “She said, nobody takes Rhetta,” Clell whispered. “Not the state. Not that man. We tell them the river took her.”
The sheriff was a friend of the family and wrote it up as an accident. Mamaw hid her daughter in the trailer on the old logging road, because the strip mine owner was a deacon at her church and would never look there. Darlene tried to quit five times. Five times she failed. Each time she came back to the hills, and each time Mamaw brought her food and a clean blanket and a drawing from me. “She did not want you to see her like that,” Clell said. “Your grandmother kept thinking next year she would be well enough to come home. And then it was thirty one years.”
I was angry. I will not pretend that I was not. I stood in the hospital hallway with my fists clenched, and I wanted to scream that they had taken my mother from me, that I had been told she was in a river when she was in a trailer a mile up the hill. But when I went back into her room, she was awake, propped on a pillow, clean for the first time in who knows how long, and she looked at me with my own eyes and said, “I begged her to keep you away from me. Do not blame her. Blame me.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. “Mama,” I said. “I am fifty eight years old. I get to decide what I am able to see.” She started to cry. I put my arms around her, and she weighed nothing, and she smelled of woodsmoke and old medicine, and I held on. Behind us, in the doorway, Clell had gone down on one knee on the cold tile, with his hat on the floor. He said, “Darlene, I am sorry.” She said, “Clell, you saved my life,” and that was all either of them said.
The women at the recovery house in Lexington took her in the next week, a brick building with a kitchen and a garden and a bed by a window. The church in Hazard paid for her teeth. For eight months, I drove up every Saturday with a hot chicken from the Piggly Wiggly in the red cooler, and we ate it at the picnic table in the yard. In the cooler of Mamaw, I found a spiral notebook, and I read it in the car. Thirty one years of notes in her neat hand. Darlene ate half. Darlene waved. Darlene asked about the girl.
At Thanksgiving, my mother sat at the head of my table for the first time in her life, in a clean blue sweater, with her hair washed and cut. She was a year clean in November. She said grace in a shaking voice. Afterward we drove up Lick Branch Road in the old Ranger, the two of us, and we sat on the stump at the end of the logging road with the empty cooler between us. The sun was going down behind the laurel. She took my hand. She said, “Rhetta Jean, what are the drawings going to look like now?” I said, “Different.”