marble except her first name, which now reads as a command: BLOOM! He cannot think, at first, how the decapitated head of the piglet could’ve gotten out here unless someone carried it out. The swine enclosure is more than two football fields away. Then it comes to him that the mums must have root systems that reach all the way to the house. Perhaps this lump of pig has been carried all this distance underground. Is that possible? There is a lot of dried filth on the piglet’s face.
Jack grips a handful of stems and pulls. Whatever is below the soil is heavy, so heavy. Dirt falls away.
The top of his mother’s head comes out of the earth. Her eyes are shut. Her face is slick, and there’s a grub on her filthy brow.
He uses his hands to clear the dirt back from her nose, to unearth her mouth. Her eyes roll open. The onions in her head stare blindly out at him.
“Jack,” she whispers, and smiles.
15.
“You aren’t my mother,” he says when he gets his breath back.
“We’re all your mother,” she says, and his eyes dart to the other plants. “We grew you. Before you grew us.”
“My mother is in the dirt,” he says.
“Yes, but we don’t have to stay here.”
That’s not what he meant.
“I’m imagining you.”
“Give me your hand.”
He holds out his palm, close to her face. At the last instant, he thinks her mouth will suddenly distend, open into a grotesque horror-movie maw full of teeth, and she’ll bite his hand off at the wrist.
Instead she closes her eyes and rests her cheek against his palm. The texture is not quite right, not quite flesh. It’s more rubbery, like the outer skin of an eggplant. But she’s warm, and she gently kisses the ball of his thumb, as his mother did a thousand times in life. He shivers with relief and pleasure.
He didn’t know until right then how much he missed her.
16.
“Jack,” says the second mum when he tugs her head up out of the black, cake-dough soil.
“Jack,” says the third.
“Jack, Jack, Jack,” the mums singsong into the night as he clears the dirt away from their heads, six in all, buried up to their necks in the dirt. One of them has grown wrong. She has a dent in the right side of her face, and her right eye won’t open. The whole face has a misshapen gourdlike quality to it, and there are hundreds of tiny ants crawling in and out of a black gouge in her right temple. She grins toothlessly. When she tries to say his name, it comes out, “hhhHHh-hack! Haaa-ack!”
17.
He says, “Are you a plant? Or an animal?”
“They’re only different categories in people’s heads. There are really only two categories, Jack. Alive . . . and dead.” The first head he’d dug up does all the talking. The others stare at her with their slick white onion eyeballs. “I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave you.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Wasn’t it?” She smiles, eyelids sinking with a certain sly suggestion.
He looks back at the farmhouse and spits.
“They’re going to do something bad, Jack,” she says. “Your father is going to do something bad.”
“He already did something bad.”
“hhhhhhHHHHHAAAAaaants! Haa-ants! Haants in my p-p-pants!” says the mum with ants crawling in and out of the hole in her temple.
“No, love,” says Mum #2. “Not in your pants. They’re in your brains.”
“Grains?” says the deformed mother. “G-grains? Haaants in the grain!”
A few of the other mums sigh.
“He’s going to do something worse than what got done to me,” says Mum #1.
“I know. I know what he’s going to do and how he’s going to do it. He’s got all of it out in the barn: the fertilizer and the nitro. Connor is going to use it to blow people up.” Jack almost adds, And kill himself while he’s at it, and then Dad can marry— but he won’t even allow himself to finish the thought.
“You need to go. You need to warn people.”
“Why didn’t you warn people?”
Mum #1 smiles sadly, wistfully. “He had you. He said he’d kill you if I told. He’d shoot you, and then he’d shoot himself. I thought Meemaw could help us, but she didn’t get here until after I was gone.”
“She didn’t get here at all.”
“Yes she did,” she says, and the smile is sly again. “You’ve already met her.”
The other heads are nodding. A black, three-inch centipede falls out of the dirty root-tangle of Mum #2’s