Bloodroot by Amy Greene Page B

stood there swaying in the slick-bottomed shoes she’d worn to school, not made at all for climbing.
    “My daddy’s been, too,” Mark said. “He claims there’s a field up yonder.”
    Myra’s eyes lit up. “There’s a field? Maybe that’s where Wild Rose goes when she gets loose.” I could picture Rose grazing, long neck bent, in my great-grandfather’s mountaintop paradise. I knew Myra would never rest until she saw it.
    “Let’s go up there,” she said.
    Mark tried to get up and they both laughed when he tripped over the rusty tines of a rake and nearly fell back down again. “I will if you will,” he said.
    I couldn’t keep quiet anymore. “Don’t you remember what happened to Daddy?” I asked Mark, trying to sound calmer than I felt. “It’s too steep of a climb.”
    Then Myra said something that cut me to the bone. “Why do you have to be such a baby all the time?” I could feel the blood draining out of my face.
    Mark slapped me hard on the back and I almost tipped over. My head was swimming. “Buck up, private,” he said. “Have some gumption about you.”
    Myra narrowed her eyes at me, as if they were having trouble focusing. “If he’s too yellow,” she said, “we’ll just do it without him.”
    I stood there for a minute unable to speak, hating both of them, until Mark said, “If we’re going we better head out, so we can make it back before supper.” I could have told him there was no way we’d be back before supper. We were guaranteeing ourselves a whipping, but I kept quiet. I moved to let them pass and then followed them out of the chicken coop into the sun. We looked over our shoulders as we ducked under the fence, Mark holding the barbed strands apart for Myra, and disappeared into the thick pine trees that marked the beginning of our woods. Mark and Myra stumbled ahead, half leaning on each other, and I wanted to knock their heads together. I thought of turning back and telling Daddy what they were up to, but in the end I stayed my course.
    The climb was easy at first. There was a footpath worn up through the trees, but I didn’t feel any better about the fix I was in. It didn’t help how the moonshine sloshed back and forth in my stomach. Several times I had to stop with my hands on my knees until a dizzy spell passed. At first Mark and Myra pretended they were still having fun. I tensed up each time she slid on loose rocks but Mark would get behind her and push, tickling her ribs under her blouse. It wasn’t long, though, before their giddiness wore off.
    The terrain wasn’t very rugged but it labored straight up through trees so tall we couldn’t see their tops even when we craned our necks.After we had walked for what seemed like hours, sweating and pale and thirsty, the footpath began to disappear under a scrawl of twisted roots and ferns. I was so sick-feeling, it took every ounce of my will not to give up and sit down. At some point Mark must have realized it was still a long way to the top. I could see our predicament dawning on his face. Now he would be the baby if he suggested turning back. I was heartened a little to see my brother getting his comeuppance, and relieved that the climb wasn’t as dangerous as we had been told.
    But just when I began to think Daddy had exaggerated, we came to a place where it seemed the mountain’s rock core had erupted through the pebbled dirt surface of the slope and heaved it almost in two, each side studded with scrubby bushes and tall, thin trees jutting at angles across the divide. It was still daylight and not much cooler in spite of the elevation but there was fog up ahead, curling close to the ground and clinging to the tree trunks. We all stopped and Mark and I exchanged nervous glances. I knew he wanted me to be the yellow baby she had called me, to let on like he was only turning back to appease his cowardly little brother, but he wasn’t going to get away with it. Then Myra started climbing again, maybe