The Bushouse by Dalton Miller

The rain is a hell of a thing. It can bring us back to memories of the past, those memories which can only be reactivated via the affectation of a dreary day or a wet August morning. For me, it brought back only one memory, the only one that has ever truly haunted me. Some people say that their life is full of regrets but for me I only really have one.

Back in the nineties when I was attending grade school, we had a bushouse that would sit up on top of the mountain near the mouth of the holler. It was made from old, discarded lumber and painted that sort of farmhouse brown that was in such popular use back then. That was until Jeremiah got mad at my cousin Missy and attempted to write “bitch” on the doorframe. Although he didn’t actually spell the word bitch. So then we had to stand outside, waiting on the bus, with the word “bicth” painted above us children, like some sort of neon sign highlighting our lack of privilege and education.

On rainy days, depending on how cold it was outside, my mother would drive me to the top of the hill to drop me off at the bushouse. Usually this occurred after my best attempt at winning an oscar. I never liked school, for I had never had a good experience there. It was as if the civilization lying at the edge of the universe had dropped me off on my mother’s doorstep as an intergalactic eldritch infant and I was taken inside under the auspices of pity and human guilt. The other children picked up on that inherent weirdness, that innate sense of discovery for otherness which was pervasive in all children but seemingly non-existent in the adults that surrounded them.

Rarely was I accompanied by other children at the bushouse but when I was it was usually my cousin Kay or one of our neighbors who had stayed with their aunt the night before. In those instances there was some excitement present because it was a rare occasion where I actually had someone else to talk to, rather than the usual coldness of the winter and the biting maw of the wind to accompany me.

The bus usually arrived around 7:15, sometimes being later if the driver had a rough one the night before, which was usual for her given her penchant for long evenings of drinking post-workday. She was a horse-faced, gaudy woman with horribly kept teeth and eyes that held within them a neurotic impulse, the same way a stray dog’s might. At the time it had been a few weeks since I had been kicked off the bus and a few days since my mother no longer had to drive me to school. I suppose there was a victory in that for the two of them. The driver had gotten what she wanted—revenge for me spilling popcorn on the leather seat—and my mother finally had reprieve from the task of hauling me forty-five minutes to school and back.

When the bus took me home that evening, there was a smell in the cold December air of forgotten campfires, accompanied by a crisp feeling of an autumn that had long outstayed its welcome. It was common for the seasons in West Virginia to forget their identities and envy their neighbors. A spring would take on the countenance of a summer, a summer would dress up as fall, and fall would disguise itself as winter. Winter, however, was a madman. At one hour he was bright and cheerful as sister April, but then at night he would become deranged and depressed, blowing smoke from his pipe and covering the roads in its ashes. Not even the dogwoods, in all their immunity, were safe from the wrath of the erratic seasons and their demands.

My mother worked as a custodian for a veteran’s hospital for many years. Although not viewed as a particularly flashy line of work, she had the fortune of being quite respected for it. I admired her for how hard she worked, although I think at times I took it for granted. She was thin and tall and had long jet black hair that reached the waistline of her jeans. Her skin was olive, and the slant of her cheekbones spoke of something native in her bloodline, although its source was a mystery. My father had been a truck driver for over thirty years for my grandfather, who had built up his own company and essentially became the nucleus for all lumber yards in the mountain state. My father was of a dark complexion, muscular, and possessed a head of feathery black hair which worked together well with the mustache he donned for years at a time, only very occasionally shaving it off. I rarely saw him throughout my time in grade school, given that he was only home early in the morning and very late at night. It was as if at times he was an apparition, or an impending sense of danger. I knew he was real and that he was around, but I never saw him, only heard the occasional baritone of his voice amidst the state of wakefulness and deep sleep, or smelled the trace of his cologne wisping its way through the hallway near the front door.

Everyday my challenge was waking up and climbing the mountain to the bushouse. In ways, it was my Glastonbury Tor, my stone monolith, my Mecca. If a child could have self-discovered religion then I had found it in the certainty and routine of the bushouse and its ambient tyranny over my young life. To leave from, only to return to, the bushouse.

The school year started in late August and by the time January had hit, most of us children were ready to surrender and hide somewhere deep in those mountains. I had feigned sickness for several days in a row until my mother had finally had enough of it and demanded I return to school. I was angry, not at her, but at the thresher I had been forced into time and time again. No one has a say in their existence as that’s a choice made for them by someone else. One is ripped from nothing and given form, only to be pushed over and over again through the thresher. Although it’s easy for one to self-martyr, I knew early on that I had a lot in common with Sisyphus, pushing his boulder endlessly up the mountain and never making progress. That’s how it felt to drag my feet through the layers of ice and snow that slept upon the rock covering the hill. I knew that eventually I’d miss that place and perhaps might even miss the routine, but at that moment all I could feel was resentment.

I begged and pleaded with her to stay home, but she had grown exhausted with the performance and eventually came to the compromise of driving me the rest of the way. We sat in the old Chevrolet as she smoked menthols and flicked their ashes out of the sliver of the window open to the winter air. Before long I had become restless in my waiting and opened the door, leading out to the sprawl of frozen roads before us. I had decided then I would run away, as stupid as it was, and no longer be tethered to the responsibilities, no matter how little there were, of a child. To my surprise, she had followed behind me, gaining ground far more quickly than I had imagined she was capable of. Children often forget that their parents, especially when enraged, gain supernatural abilities. I can remember once she told me she had eyes in the back of her head and I believed her. Sometimes in the evenings when we’d sit to watch something on television I’d try to get a peek of them in the back of her head, beneath the rivers of hair growing there. Although I realize now the utility of the lie she had spun, I don’t think I ever got away with anything my whole life.

She followed after me, yelling my name, each time its syllables becoming more blurred and assimilating into a howl. Eventually I stopped in the middle of the road and noticed all of the snow and ice accumulated on the ground. It had become a slush, easily malleable in my hands and able to be formed into shapes. I took up a large handful of the ice and formed it into a crude, solid ball. It was dangerously heavy and sharply disproportionate, like a rock found while hiking along deer trails. I held the mass in my right hand, its water already soaking through my glove, and reared it back behind my ear.

“Sampson! If you hit me with that it’ll be the last thing you ever do!” she yelled.

Anytime my mother yelled it struck through me like lightning. It set off every nerve in my body and caused paralysis to overtake the action. Only this time, I didn’t care. I couldn’t think of anything remotely justifiable or rational. I had already made up my mind and committed, as if I had lost control of myself to some ill-begotten parasite found along the way. I think she understands that now, or at least, I hope she has reconciled the notion.

“Run.”

That was the only word I could think to say, the only one I wanted to say. There was a part of me at that moment that wished for her to really run, to really give this game I was playing a go. But she didn’t. She just stood there, shivering and looking at me with anger and disappointment. Then, after moments of silence and coldness, she seemed to have given up. In all of that running, chasing, yelling, and pleading there had been a victory but not the one I had hoped for. The imp inside myself had won and with that recognition my arm shoved forward and out from it flew the icy stone. It soared through the air and in an attempt to evade its wrath, she turned away, only for it to land square in the center of her back.

She let out a yelp that I had not heard a human make before. The sound of breath leaving the body in a way that produces an almost musical note. The kind of yelp a coyote might make when stumbling into a steel trap. It was so fast I could hardly keep track of it but she had crumpled to the cold, hard ground as a paper flower and I ran over to her, tears in my eyes and fear in my heart.

My mother was never the same after that. It took months of physical therapy to get her walking again. The doctors had said she’d already had a brittle spine and the impact from the ice had shifted everything. My father blamed me for all of it, and I didn’t blame him a bit for that. She had become a victim of my own impatience and selfishness. I had found myself feeling cold even in the summers after that. There was no warmth anymore and there was no fire for me to find. All I could feel inside was that icy sphere, burying itself deep within my gut and permeating my body with something dark and numb.

She lived most of the winter in her bed, dependent on my father and the occasional visit from my uncle. Through all of this, she never said a bad word to me, or looked at me with anything other than unconditional love. But I still felt that burning on the inside. It was unmistakable, like the way a hot skillet felt against a careless finger only intimately involved with my organs, becoming a serpent made of magma slithering its way through my guts. It reminded me of my mistake, my selfishness, and  of my mortality.

I started spending more time outside, mostly practicing with the bow and arrow I had gotten a few summers before. My uncle had fashioned an old target out of a canvas bag filled with hay, secured to a fence post and spray painted in a manner which resembled that of a traditional target. Although the arrows I had were for practicing and not as sharp as those for hunting, their ends were still dangerous enough. I would graze my fingers down them and remark at their ability to remain both smooth and sharp at once.

When it was just me out in the yard, in the cold and under the gray overcast that ceased to transform, I would aim the arrow up into the sky. I’d aim to pierce through the blanket of ash above and puncture the heavens, in hopes that something else would rain down. I’d pull the bowstring back as far as I could and then very slowly release back to a readied stance, never liberating the arrow.

There came a moment, however, where I wished to fully release the arrow into the sky and watch it storm back down upon the earth. There was a fire burning in my heart and I wished to ignite some invisible gunpowder and launch my suffering up high, somewhere only angels would feel its presence. I wanted to hear the trumpets welcome me into the gates and to see all of my departed loved ones again, even those I had never met. It was in that longing, that inarticulable nostalgia that I found the backbone of my decision.

My parents were gone that day. I can’t remember where they had gone now but I recall the feeling of independence that accompanied their disappearance. In a sense, it was the ultimate act of trust. Leaving your child on his own while you went elsewhere was a sign of his maturity, one would think, and I absorbed that into myself as a clandestine permission granted for the most dubious of acts. My heartbeat had become percussion for a funeral dirge, and I could feel the morbidity of its metronomic transmission.

I stood out before the target, its canvas skin and verdant intestines pillowing out after weeks of rain and inclement derision. The bow in my hands, I approached closer to the bullseye and readied an arrow for the notch. The fletching was simple to anchor upon the string and I still recall the affirmative clicking it would make when fully set upon the cord. I pulled the bow up to my right cheek, feeling the phantom of the bowstring upon my flesh as I pulled back and allowed the tension to persevere. The arrowhead pointed at the target, its pointed tip marking the destination of my soulless upheaval, until I tilted the bow towards the sky.

My head leaned back, my left right eye shut, and I peered through my left the topography above. Opaque, crackling with heat lightning, reddened only at the edges by the fur of the Sun’s blood. I stared into it for a moment, listening for any intervention from within, but there was none. I heard no murmur, no whimper, no protest from above. I breathed in and released my grip, watching the arrow soaring into the heavens, once more.

I stood there in place, mouth agape and gazing at the sky, as if in worship. Every fable I had ever heard, every verse in the Bible I had ever been forced to remember, came back into my mind. It was a chorus of life catching up to present, a familiar sense of Deja Vu returning again not as a stranger but as a close friend. The buzzing in my eyes grew louder, cicadas singing their returning song in ambience, fueling the fire lit within myself as an infant.

As the arrow began to fall back down to that land, I could no longer see it. Panic set its claws upon me and so I ran. Any direction was a valid one and so I ran this way and that, seeking to avoid the fate I’d prescribed myself. Only my footsteps were futile and as if something I already divined would happen, the arrow found its resting place in the center of my back. Darkness then. Spinning darkness.

I awoke in the hospital, the beeping of machinery and the throat clearing of my mother were the first sounds that welcomed me back into the world. I felt her grip around my hand, little bony copperheads writhing and searching for some sign of wakefulness in their grasp. When I had finally opened my eyes and took that first conscious breath, I saw her face contort and break into a wave of relief. Her arms wrapped around my neck and her tears fell softly upon my face. Her, my father, and my uncle were all in hysterics. I found out later that the arrow had just missed all of my vital organs. It had been only centimeters away from taking my life and plummeting me into the abyss. In this realization, I felt two things. I felt disappointed that the blackness had not swallowed me and here I was again in this thresher. Then there was relief in knowing that finally, after all those years, all those trips up the mountain, that my mother and I finally had a wound to share.

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Dalton Miller

Dalton Miller was born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia. At a young age he began writing, creating art, and learning music instruments. After years of experimenting with various mediums he has returned to writing poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. He currently lives in Georgia with his partner and their animals.

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• The Bushouse by Dalton Miller - July 18, 2024