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  “Your daughter ever come back, Alice?” she asked, none too softly.

  Alice Watkins dropped her head a second, then straightened herself, her elbows up and shoulders back. “Well, I’m afraid not. My guess is she’s trying to start a career somewheres away from these mountains, some better place where they’ll appreciate her talents. Then she’ll probably come back with some real money, and help me out a little. My Phyllis is a very kind and generous girl. A lot of folks dont know that.”

  “Hmmm,” Miss Perkins kept busy with her eyes, but they weren’t looking at that poor Watkins lady. “If she was so kind, you’d think she wouldn’t a run off without saying goodbye like that. That weren’t exactly a generous thing to do to her mother. Took your best green dress with her I hear — the one you bought right in this very shop!”

  “Oh, I’m sure she was just confused about it. I used to lend her that dress all the time for, for her dates. She probably just forgot and thought that dress was hers!”

  “Maybe. Maybe,” Miss Perkins said. “A lot of things get into girls these days. Lots of them get confused. It’s that Confused Disease, I reckon. I heard of two more girls pull something similar this year, just took off from their parents without word one. No one seen them since. Pretty awful, if you ask me.”

  The Watson lady wouldn’t talk no more after that, and after a while Miss Perkins put on her invisible sales cap again and tried to sell her something. She had her back turned a little, picking up individual pieces and pointing out the detail. Sadie could feel her contentment, the quiet music playing in her head.

  Again Sadie had this feeling that she was doing something she shouldn’t be doing. But she still ignored it. Miss Perkins wasn’t watching so close now. The woman thought pure poetry when she handled her own stuff, not noticing another thing in this world in the meantime.

  Sadie inched closer to the celluloid grooming set. She’d never had nothing so pretty as that; she didn’t even know what she could do with it.

  Her left hand was touching it, and then suddenly her right hand was just sweeping it all up into the loose folds in the front of her dress. She bunched the cloth together and ran for the door.

  “Thief!” Miss Perkins shouted. “I knew I’d catch you at it someday!” She had Sadie’s shoulder in her big old crow-claws, fingernails digging painful little holes into her skin. “No good thief!”

  Alice Watkins was bustling over to help, her big body swaying like it was going to fall on Sadie, her face determined.

  Sadie twisted away and hit the front door on the run, the screen slamming against somebody on their way in. She didn’t know if the screech was the door or a person, but she felt the sudden flash of the other person’s pain. It sickened her, and raised her fear sky high. She bit off a scream.

  She stopped abruptly when she was out on the front porch, so full of panic she could hardly think. She’d never been caught at it before, and now everybody was looking. All the men down at Levitt’s General were staring up her way, Mickey-Gene gaping, Petey Carter moving his mouth so fast he looked like a scrawny rat chomping away at empty air.

  George Mackey was grinning like he was about to eat something all up. That slapped her awake, and made her mad, too. She started running just as Miss Perkins again grabbed the shoulder of her dress, tearing it a little as Sadie pulled away. She almost dropped the grooming set. She grabbed what she could and stuffed it all into her one good pocket so that she could run better. That pretty little soap box dropped to the ground but she couldn’t stop to pick it up.

  Sadie held on to her tears, but it was hard — this was her only dress that didn’t have any rips in it. What was she going to tell Momma? And that pretty little soap box!

  She jumped over the legs of the elderly fellow — Willie Philips, she thought — sitting out in front of the hardware, turned the corner up the alley past the Barber Shop. Here she almost knocked Elsa Peters down, her school teacher last year. Sadie’s face went hot with shame, to have her teacher, who’d always liked her, know that she’d been thieving.

  She was climbing the dirt road above the livery when a black, wool-wrapped arm reached out and grabbed at her. She shrieked and turned, and found herself looking up into the face of the preacher.

  There were harsher things in this world than the preacher’s face, but Sadie had never met up with any of them. He had a face like a stone left out in the woods long enough for the damp and moss and the tree roots and the ice to crack it in the worst way, not enough to make it look so old but surely enough to make it look wounded, deformed, messed up. Like the damage had scarred over bad and those scars were bound to ache nights when the weather was changing. Not an ache you could put your finger on exactly, what made it worse. And down in his neck right below the ends of his mouth he had these big fatty pouches, like gunny sacks full of his extra meanness. They made her think of the snakes he handled, like the pouches they kept their poison in. Her granddaddy sometimes said that meanness was a corruption and a disease. She thought about how under the preacher’s terrible face the flesh and muscle must be all infected and maggoty inside like something run over and dead for days.

  One of the preacher’s scars — a crooked thing about four inches long that split his cheek from just below the left eye all the way to the jaw-line — looked like a living thing in the morning light, as if something awful had started growing in that crack in the rock face. But it was a tricky thing. Sadie had seen it fade back into his dusky skin when he must have not wanted folks to see it, like maybe when he was talking to some of the pretty young women around town, or somebody else he needed to charm.

  His real name was Jake, but nobody ever called him that, not even the family. The preacher didn’t like the name.

  Where you going, child? It was like a whisper, or words you might think you heard in the wind but weren’t really there. She hadn’t even seen him move his lips. But you never did when he was angry or up to some meanness or other. She’d heard that only when he was preaching and singing at the snake-handling meetings did those lips become living things, terrible, scary alive things that could latch on to you if you weren’t watching, chew you down right to the nub.

  “Just going home,” she cried, a little too loud, and he grabbed her arm so hard she thought he’d squeeze it in two.

  Over the years that followed she would think a lot about what happened next — if her uncle caused what happened, or if she did, or if it had all happened by coincidence. Or if she’d just imagined parts of it. But not the slowing down part; she knew the slowing down part was for real. It happened to her all the time. Things just stopped, or slowed down considerable, and suddenly she was seeing things she ordinarily didn’t see. Or want to.

  The preacher pushed her face around so that she had to look at the livery. Didn’t grab her exactly, at least not with his hands. But he wanted her to look that way, and suddenly she was just looking that way, without a word spoken or a finger lifted.

  She looked, and what she saw made her cold. FredShaney, Will Shaney’s eldest, was helping run some corn through that old steam-powered corn sheller. It was huffing and puffing and its rusted parts shaking side to side like it was about to explode.

  Fred Shaney had had more than one run-in with the preacher. There was Fred’s drinking and smoking, and his smart remarks about the whole snake-handling business.

  Thepreacher was watching Fred in such a way it brought winter down on Sadie’s shoulders. She could almost see the ice crystals in the air. Something was going to happen.

  Fred was feeding the corn into the machine faster and faster. His hands a blur.

  Her eyes were paining her. Spots burned in the air in front of her face. It startedin her lower belly, and she squeezed her eyes shut trying to ignore it, but the soft ache was making her sick. She looked down; a thin line of blood had run down her leg. Sadie’s hands were burning, burning.

  His hands a blur.

  Red spots. His hands a red blur.

  Bright
red over everything.

  She watched as the world slowed down around her, as Fred Shaney’s grin slowly widened and deepened as Fred Shaney’s arms were lifted slowly into the air, bright red crepe streamers tied to his wrists.

  “You have to decide soon, Sister,” the preacher whispered. “You’ve reached your maturity now.”

  She watched as Fred Shaney dropped into prayer, wondering if this could be her punishment for stealing.

  And the other men came to hug Fred Shaney, embrace him down to ground.

  Chapter Three

  FOUR TIMES ALREADY that morning Michael had had to carry Grandma into the toilet and set her on the stool. Each time she was weaker, until her feet dragged the floor, her high-top black boots bunching the rug as he struggled to get her in. It would have been easier to just let her mess herself and then clean up afterwards. But she would have none of that. Not that he blamed her. She still had her pride, and he guessed it was his job to help her maintain it. He’d been pretty ungrateful the past couple of weeks, pretty unkind. He certainly didn’t like doing things like this for her, but he wanted to do a better job of it.

  Of course he’d felt uncomfortable taking care of her. He’d never been good at taking care of anything. Once when Allison had taken a month-long trip his only job had been to water the plants, which he didn’t do, not once. He’d been too busy watching TV, smoking weed, or hanging out at a bar with a few — well, he would never have called them friends — acquaintances. He discovered that two of the plants were dead a few days before she got back. He didn’t know what else to do but dump a great deal of water into the pots as evidence that they’d been watered. They’d only died because, well, plants die, not because of any lack of diligence on his part.

  But another plant had thrived, despite his lack of care. She had it in the corner of the living room where it didn’t get much light. He had no idea what it was — some kind of thorny vine. And despite the lack of both water and light it had grown at least two feet in her absence, probably more.

  The only reason he’d noticed it was because he’d tripped over it one morning coming out of the bathroom. Sprawled on the rug he was able to see the pot of it there in the corner between the furniture legs. He had no memory of having seen it before. The pot was small, and yet the vine was long, sprawling. Where were its roots? Certainly there was no room for them in that little pot. He kicked the plant back into the corner. One runner of it clung to his shoe. He broke that piece off in disgust. Not knowing what else to do he flushed the broken piece down the toilet.

  By the next day the plant had extended itself back into the center of the living room. Another day, Michael imagined, and it would be tapping on the bedroom door. He couldn’t think about this anymore. He gathered up the whole thing, pot and all, and carried it out on the balcony and threw it into the alley below.

  Once Allison was back he showed her the two dead plants and told her how sorry he was. He wasn’t good with plants. After all, he’d said, he’d watered them and yet they still died. Better yet, when she said “It’s okay, that happens sometimes,” he’d acted upset that he’d “let her down” and said he would find four “great” plants to replace them with. She’d been impressed by his concern, and he never had to get around to buying those plants. He never brought up the missing plant and she never mentioned it. Maybe she’d forgotten she had it.

  He cleaned up his grandmother a couple more times that day, helped her get into a nice dress, made her some soup. After a while doing these intimate chores for her didn’t seem so bad. He was getting used to the embarrassing nudity and the smell, the mess. He thought about what it would be like if he ever got old. There was also something — “cleansing” wasn’t quite the right word but it would have to do — about taking care of someone in just this way. Lifting them on the toilet, wiping their butt if you had to. Taking care of someone else’s bathroom business. Someone famous had called it a “holy task.” Michael wouldn’t have gone that far, but he thought maybe there was some truth in it.

  Last night’s story had worked inside him long after she’d gone to bed. He’d sat out on the porch, the night pitch-black except for the antique kerosene lamp beside him. There were few places you could get a night like this, without street or house lights to bring detail out of the dark.

  As much as possible he tried to allow the immediate sensations of her young life to leave him, to dissipate and join whatever stream of lost and misplaced sense memories must flow through the hidden layers of the world. He’d felt the sun on her face, and smelled the smell of it, that dust and grass aroma of southwest Virginia, and he’d felt the seize in her heart when the young man had lost his hands, and the blood filling her eyes, and draining her pale and shaking. He felt bad for the slow sacrifice of her youth, he truly did, but he didn’t know how long he could stand to live inside her life this way.

  He couldn’t see across the road, but he could hear things moving out there in the woods. Small animals. Had to be. And occasionally there was a subtle change in the quality of the darkness — a shadow would be suddenly lighter or darker, the massive outline of a tree would shift against the night sky. Michael had a sense that if he had a different kind of light, a new kind of light some physicist might invent someday, he’d be able to pull back these shadows and see the past of this valley laid out before him. He had a notionthat these peculiar night shadows, these dark silhouettes, were the valley’s way of dreaming. And surely there must be some way to see into those dreams.

  At any other time, in any other place, he’d of thought that nonsense. But not here, not while listening to Grandma’s stories.

  He kept wanting to ask Sadie what her choice had been, and what that choice meant, but he knew he’d have to wait for the story to catch up to that. She had her own timing for everything, and she didn’t change it for anybody. When she drew her lines, she drew them firm.

  When he’d been small, and lived here with Grandma, he’d hated that strictness at first. He never would have said he’d grown to like it, but he’d gradually felt safer within its confines, knowing that however badly he might mess up, it wouldn’t be fatal, it would never ruin everything. Grandma would always protect him from that. With his mom and dad there was never that kind of firmness. His father, Sadie’s son, had stayed away from home most of the time. Only a few years ago Michael received the phone call from Thailand informing him of his father’s death. Sadie had said of her son, “People, any sort of people, were always too much for him. He got their feelings under his skin and he couldn’t take that. I kept telling him ‘you gotta set with it awhile and after a time you get used to it.’ But he couldn’t do that. I dont think he liked folks — they bothered him too much.”

  Michael’s mother was another Gibson cousin, so it was a marriage like a lot of others in their family, not illegal, but it still made people talk. Gibsons were drawn to Gibsons. It had always been this way. Maybe they thought another Gibson was the only one who would understand them. Like so many in the family, his mother started in her thirties to lose touch. She’d spent the final two decades of her life in the State Hospital in Marion. Michael’s single visit had been so upsetting he’d come away thinking that he was the crazy one.

  Grandma Sadie had raised him until high school, then she and every other adult who cared enough to have an opinion (which didn’t include his father), decided he needed to be in better schools if he was to make something of himself. So starting at age thirteen Michael had grown up with a succession of Gibson cousins spread all over the country, most of who thought he was wonderful and sensitive. He’d appreciated that, and would have liked to believe it, but most of the time he didn’t know what he was. He felt so many things, and resented feeling so many things.

  When he went off to Chicago for college he was sure he’d find out who he really was. He’d have another culture to measure himself against. He wasn’t exactly embarrassed about being a Southerner, but he’d often found himself struggling to defend the Sou
th. Without thinking much about it he’d mention some fellow he’d known in Morrison and then he’d be genuinely surprised by the reaction. “Jesus, talk about The Sound and the Fury!” from a guy in the dorm, and, from the sweet-faced girl on the moonlight walk early in his freshman year, “Oh, Michael. It’s hard to believe you came from a place like that!” After that he played up the country background more — the women, some of them, at least, loved it.

  Something shiny across the dirt road caught his eye. Michael looked up and saw that there were a few kudzu leaves hanging from the outside edges of the nearest boughs, the moonlight reflecting off their surfaces. They gave the outline of trees a slightly furry appearance.

  Michael was just accommodating. Probably no other description was needed. He told people what they wanted to hear. If they wanted sensitive, he’d be sensitive. If they wanted aggressive, he could be aggressive. They didn’t even have to tell him what they wanted, usually; he felt it. But he understood that he couldn’t be touched, not really. He dropped out of college his junior year. He lived with, and off of, a succession of friends and girlfriends. He worked a string of odd jobs. He always got hired easily — sometimes it seemed all he had to do, really, was smile for them. But he never kept those jobs long. People found him easy to talk to, so they unburdened themselves, they let him know all about their problems. But the thing was, he really wasn’t that interested. They’d fill him up with their stories and after a while he couldn’t bear them. He’d move on, and they wouldn’t understand what had happened.

  As the kerosene lamp dimmed, the night air yellowed like anold lithograph. The light pulled back, away from the woods, the road, and the front yard.

  It was getting to be time for him to make plans for himself. With each week cooped up with Grandma he felt a year older. The intense claustrophobia — boxed in with her memories of the complicated lives and personalities of those long dead — had become increasingly aggressive, until he was beginning to feel anxious about his own life. He knew that if he stayed much longer he’d start drinking again; he’d find some source for pills, whatever he would need to get through the day. But she kept telling him that his self-preservation depended on his hearing her story out. Her tellings were coming to some sort of head.