In a Heartbeat - Elizabeth Adler [30]
All the kids had their ma’s luxuriant black hair, straight as a plumb line and thick as hay in a summer meadow, and they all spoke with a Tennessee mountain accent, so dense it sounded like a foreign language.
They ran barefoot from spring to autumn, by which time their feet were Indian-hard, their skin berry-brown from the sun, hair streaked a dozen shades lighter. In September, they filed reluctantly to school again, wearing roughly cobbled shoes that rubbed the skin off their heels. Reluctantly, that is, except for Ed and his eldest brother, Mitchell, who, for entirely different reasons, couldn’t wait to get there.
“My two intellectuals,” Ma called them, smiling as they pored over geography books and history and math. Ed didn’t know what an intellectual was, and neither did Mitch, but each had his own urge to learn. Both wanted something more than this rough, deprived existence.
“Not that I knew then I was deprived,” Ed said to Zelda. “When you’re a kid, you don’t. It’s all there is. If you don’t know about any other way of life, how can you miss it? Yet somehow, somewhere, I believed there was a better life. And it wasn’t a tidy little three-bedroom house with indoor plumbing and a picket fence in Hainsville I longed for. It was a far bigger dream; a wider world.
“I was already in love with the idea of travel and adventure. I didn’t know how, but one day I knew I would spring like a bird from the cage of those forested green foothills and fly around the world on a jet plane. I would dine in Paris and saunter through the London parks, maybe even shake hands with royalty.” Ed smiled. “Nothing seems impossible when you’re just twelve years old.”
Ed’s brother Mitch was different. Narrower eyes half hidden behind prominent cheekbones gave his face an almost Cherokee cast. Of course, those eyes were his mother’s family blue, but the rest of him was closer to his father. Huskier, with muscular shoulders, a tapering back, strong neck, and jutting jaw. He was the odd man out in his sapling-growth family, a full-grown tree before he was even fifteen. Sure, he had that same mark of deprivation, the pinched look of almost-hunger, the wariness about the eyes, the quickness with the rifle. But it was different with Mitch.
Privately, his ma believed she had a changeling on her hands. Though she told herself she loved him equally with the others, she didn’t understand Mitch. There was a streak of cruelty in him. He enjoyed killing animals even if they were not for the pot. He liked to torment his brothers, using his superior weight and strength to wrestle them, screaming, to the ground. And he teased his sisters to the point of tears. He beat up other kids in school and in church, scrapping in the woods after the sermon and shaming his family. He’d even been caught by the deputy brewing moonshine in the forest, reeling about, drunk as a lord.
“Mitch didn’t care what anyone thought,” Ed said to Zelda. “He was a bully who swaggered his way through life. Whatever was bad, he seemed to find it. To our poor mother, it seemed he even sought it out. And no matter how hard Dad whupped him, it didn’t daunt him.
“At seventeen, Mitch towered over our daddy. He could have killed him easily, with just one blow of that powerful arm, one crazed shot from the rifle. And he was an expert marksman. Living with Mitch was like living on the edge of a volcano. You never knew when it might erupt.
“But Dad was so proud of the fact that he owned his five acres and that he owed nobody. The four hundred dollars needed to purchase that strip of land had taken him twenty long years to accumulate.”
“Mitch wants too much,” his daddy said to Ed one day when they were riding into Hainsville in the rusting old