Blood Kin Page 6

  Sadie looked down at her yellow dress, still gathered in folds behind her. She wondered why her mother hadn’t noticed, or why she wasn’t saying anything. “I’d best be changing,” she said, and started for her room.

  “They’re the Grans, but they’re still just Gibsons, Sadie. I never knowed you to change your dress afore dark.”

  Sadie stopped, wondering if her mother knew about her period. Maybe older women sensed that kind of thing. “I gotta go to church meeting after. I promised the preacher.”

  Her mother’s laughter was like a donkey braying. “You’re gonna handle snakes!” The cigarette dropped out of her mouth and rolled on the floor. Aunt Lilly stamped the sparks out, looking a little mad. Momma must have forgotten that Aunt Lilly and Uncle Jesse were part of the preacher’s congregation.

  “You oughtn’t to go, child,” Lilly said. “That church is no place for a young girl like you. Best keep away.”

  “I’m just gonna watch. I promised I’d go.”

  “You’re gonna watch, huh?” There was a last, brief explosion of laughter from her momma, but this time it didn’t sound like laughter at all.

  “Sadie, girl — let’s talk about this,” Aunt Lilly said.

  “I probably wont even stay the whole time.” Sadie tried to slide kind of sideways into her room without showing her backside.

  SADIE WIPED HERSELF clean with the dress — she’d find some place out in the woods to dump it tomorrow. She didn’t have so many dresses she could afford to dump one like this, but she just, just couldn’t wear it no more. Momma would find out though, when some time passed and Sadie hadn’t been wearing it. Sadie didn’t know what she’d say, but it didn’t matter. Momma would be so mad no matter what she told her.

  She really didn’t have a “good” dress — her momma made most of hers out of those fancy print feed bags — but she had a blue one that was pretty clean. It had some bad tears, but they were along the seams, so maybe she could just pin them up and nobody at the church service would notice, especially if they were consumed by the spirit like they all got at the preacher’s sermons.

  The walls of her back porch room were old gray planks, just like the regular outside walls, except those walls were two boards thick everywhere. In her room there were places where the planks that made her walls didn’t come together just right, leaving narrow little spaces. Where her walls faced the outside her momma had pasted newspapers to help block the cold. She’d read the stories on those papers maybe a thousand times. But spaces between the boards on the inside wall were left open to let the heat through from the wood stove in the front room. She could put an eye up to the cracks and see what went on in that room. And the walls were so thin she could hear almost everything going on in the whole house.

  She hid herself behind her dresser, just in case one of them drunk men had his eye up to one of them cracks, changed into a fresh pair of flour sack panties her mother made, then arranged the blue dress as best she could. She then put her face up to a wide crack to see what those nasty men were up to.

  She knew her granddaddy was right — not everybody in the state was like the folks she had to put up with every day — and not every man was out to get every young thing he could, but how could she really know for sure when those were about the only men she knew anything about?

  Her daddy was sitting on the floor with a bunch of men playing dominoes. This was a regular weekly thing, although Sadie was pretty sure they almost never finished a game. They either broke up with a fight or got too drunk to handle the tiles proper. This was the kind of ignorant stuff that gave the hollow people a bad name, but she didn’t know nobody else behaving like her sorry daddy and his friends.

  “I’ll just take me one from the boneyard.” She saw her daddy dip into the stock of unused dominoes. She knew everyone else there: Uncle Jesse Gibson; Luke Grogan, whose wife committed suicide last winter and everybody was saying he hadn’t been home in a month; Speed Sexton, whose wife May was said to have visions; and Buck Willis, a dreamy sort of fella who nobody knew a whole lot about. He never said that much about himself and what he did say didn’t make much sense.

  “Your turn, Buck,” her daddy said. All the men waited, watching Buck’s face like it was the most interesting thing they ever seen.

  “Shit or get off the pot,” somebody finally said.

  “I was just thinking…”

  Her daddy groaned.

  “No… I was just thinkin how I farm only the flat patches of my place. I figure it must be because I was Gyptian oncet, you see. I member it clear as a bell. I member livin a long, long time ago. And I member hot weather, so hot the eggs was fryin inside the chickens. And I member sand.”

  “Make your damn play, Buck,” her daddy said.

  “Maybe us Melungeons was Gyptian in the oh-riginal,” Buck continued.

  Her daddy slapped the boneyard, scattering the dominoes all over the room. “Hell, let’s do some bettin!” he shouted.

  “I’m too drunk to bet wit you,” Luke said. “Hell, you’ll do most anything for a bet, Bobby. Aint sportin to bet wit you.”

  “How bout you, Jesse?”

  Uncle Jesse had been drinking a long time. Most days he started right after breakfast. He pinched a wrinkled picture carefully between two square-tipped fingers.

  “Ah, Jesse.” Speed, also quite drunk, sounded as if he was ready to cry. “Why you want to look at that thing for?”

  The other men didn’t say anything. Sadie had seen the picture before. A funeral picture of Jesse and Lilly’s first child, a daughter who died when she was two; it was faded to a pee-yellow brown. The little girl wore a dainty silk gown and was leaning against a pillow held up by a man’s rough-looking, stained hands. Uncle Jesse’s hands, Sadie figured. Her eyes were closed. First time Sadie saw it she’d asked if the little girl in the picture was sleeping. Lots of folks kept funeral pictures — if the child died young and hadn’t had a picture taken it was considered a last chance to get a record to remember them by. But she’d never known anyone else to carry one with them.

  “One of these days I’m gonna find who killed my baby,” Jesse said. “Lord’ll help me, and Lord help me when I do.”

  No one said nothing. Everybody who knew Jesse was tired of arguing the point. His daughter died of the small pox.

  “Come on, boys,” her daddy said. “I need some bettin done here. Help keep me outta them mines.”

  “Help keep us all outta them mines,” Luke said.

  They were all scared of the mines. Most everybody had at least one relation broke his back from a rock fall. Sadie had seen her daddy do this before. Talking about the mines got some men into a betting mood. She thought it kind of funny that he should use that. Her daddy was scared half to death of them mines. He’d worked one week in that mine at Tempco and he wouldn’t talk about it, but some nights he woke up screaming.

  “Okay, Bobby,” Luke said. “So what you want to bet over?”

  Her daddy grinned, his lips stretched tight. Two year ago, when Sadie was first seeing her breasts, her daddy had come to her in her bed and kissed those breasts goodnight. “Ever see a man et a live mouse afore?”

  “Seen a geek in Kingsport oncet,” Buck said. “Damn fool bit the head clean off a squeaker!”

  Her daddy grinned again, staring straight at the wall of Sadie’s bedroom. “Well, that’s what I’m aimin to do.”

  Her daddy brooded most of the time. At least he had ever since Sadie started growing.

  “Give you a quarter, Geek Man!” Luke shouted.

  “Hey, me too!”

  “Well now.” Her daddy gazed down at his long, dark-brown fingers as if admiring them. “Buck, you find us a mouse. Should be one in the woodpile out back.” Buck leaped to his feet, stumbled, cackling, and then stomped out of the room.

  Sometimes her daddy stared at her a long time. When her momma talked about her seeing boys soon her daddy just laughed. “Too ugly,” he’d say.

  One day she
saw him looking through her boxes, holding her dresses up. She’d wondered if he was sniffing around for blood. Momma didn’t give her daddy everything he needed, but Sadie was never clear on what it was she was supposed to do about that. She was just a girl, and Daddy wanted more than that.

  Buck didn’t come back for a long while. She’d always heard Buck was good at catching little critters, but catching a live mouse inside a woodpile with it almost dark outside — Sadie couldn’t imagine nothing much harder than that. She waited nervously, her forehead getting sore from rubbing it against the wall when she shifted, trying to see as much in the front room as she could. She was going to miss it — she had to leave for the Grans soon. But just as she was about to give up Buck came back with a mouse, dangling it by its tail. It had some blood on the side of its head, which looked a little lopsided. It struggled weakly. “Tweren’t easy,” Buck said, “had to mash it up against the house a little with my boot.”

  “That’s no way to treat a critter,” her daddy said in a scolding tone of voice. “And I bet that mashin you done dont help the taste none. Go on, give it here.”

  Her daddy held the mouse tight in his right fist, only its little furry head exposed, its eyes tiny coals, its whiskers trembling.

  He held his fist up and shook it at Sadie’s bedroom wall, a serious expression on his face, like he was going to toast somebody like in that movie she saw over in Wise County.

  Sadie knew that in his way her daddy loved her and that in some way her momma was wrong for trying to keep love out of their house. Love ought to be in a house, somehow.

  He stared right at the crack Sadie was peeking through. He stared right into Sadie’s eyes. He knows I’m here watching, she thought, and started to go away, thinking for just a second her going might save the mouse’s life. But she was held by her daddy’s eyes, by the way he held his fist, the seriousness of the whole thing.

  Suddenly her daddy’s fist went up to his mouth and she almost thought he was going to gently kiss the little head, when blood splashed over his nose and down his hand. He took the fist away and the blood covered his chin. The other men were laughing, sputtering, cheering. And still he stared at her. Sadie’s lower belly tightened.

  The tension made her sick, but the wetness didn’t come between her legs again. She held her daddy’s eyes grimly, even watched while he chewed. He knows, he knows, she thought.

  She had to spit out the blood taste, the bad mouse taste, for several minutes before she could leave the house. She continued to cough and spit on her way to meet the Grans.

  SADIE GOT TO the place in the road where she was to turn and climb the rock-studded path to the Grans. It was more like a goat trail; the preacher went the back way on his visits, taking that old logging road — not more than two deep ruts in these times — to the top of the mountain, then there was this private little stretch that wound up to the house that somebody had built long ago. The preacher paid some boys every summer to clear that dirt stretch, just to the back of the house. They didn’t touch the kudzu up around the cliff — everybody said there was no sense in cutting it, it would just come creeping back again, might even eat up more of the hillside on account of being disturbed like that. Some of the boys claimed to have seen the Grans while they were working back there, said they wandered the house without no clothes on and that they had long hair and swollen up heads and scabs all over their skin. Sadie didn’t believe any of that.

  Just around the bend was Granddaddy’s house, then the town. For a few minutes Sadie stopped and thought about dropping in on her granddaddy. As long as nobody brought up her daddy the talk would go okay; her granddaddy was special fond of her. Right about now he’d be sitting in his front parlor, maybe reading Treasure Island, or Twenty Thousand Leagues, or Huck Finn, or Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Granddaddy dearly loved his Whitman. The parlor had two overstuffed chairs; Sadie always sat in the green one while Granddaddy read to her from one of those books. They didn’t have no books at home, not even a Bible. Sometimes Granddaddy would cook her a meal and it was always a lot better than her momma’s cooking. “An old buck needs to know enough to fend for his self,” he’d say, and wink.

  But the thought of being in her granddaddy’s house tonight — that regular home like she imagined homes were supposed to be, just like she’d always read about in the books and magazines he gave her — didn’t seem right tonight, not after seeing what happened to Fred Shaney and talking to the preacher and seeing that blood all over her daddy’s chin and then having to visit the Grans. And having her period. Maybe that most of all. Next time she visited Granddaddy she wasn’t going to be the same, and he’d probably know that right off.

  She still had mouse taste in her mouth. Salt and hair and old sour water and that little crunch like chestnut pieces caught between her teeth.

  Granddaddy used to talk about the Gibsons. From the outside, but not like he was better than them or anything. “They aint all crazy, you know,” he used to say. “Your other granddaddy Orson Gibson was one of the finest men this county has ever seen, a man generous with his time and with his hands, a reading man, and there’s nothing wrong with you,either, Sadie. Remember that now.” Sadie hadsat still and listened hard. She never heard nobody else talk about these things. She only wished Granddaddy Orson had still been alive when she was born. “Your daddy and the preacher and some of those others that think themselves ‘pure bloods,’ — they aren’t that way cause they’re Gibsons. Nosir. I suspect it’s something peculiar to that small group within the family, that one gnarly branch. But whatever it is, I couldn’t say. It’s like they’re getting a little crazier every year. There’s something inside them that they’re all getting worked up about, like it’s all building to something. What, I dont know. But you’re okay, Sadie. Your momma isn’t a Gibson. She’s got my family’s blood in her, my blood.” But Sadie had never been much reassured. Anyway, she’d better hurry on up the mountain. She didn’t know first-hand, but she figured it didn’t pay to keep the Grans waiting.

  The climb up to the Grans’ house didn’t take her as long as she’d expected, but it was still well into sunset. The sky had gotten some of that orange color into it. The path led up to the side of the small shack, a smaller place even than her house. It looked to be all one room, part of it up on piled stones.

  The two withered forms on the front porch were sitting. They both looked bald, but then Sadie realized the woman’s hair was just so thin, so white, you couldn’t see it unless you were close up. They were just two very old people.

  “Grans,” she said softly. There was no answer, so she moved around to face the porch. She had never seen anyone so old before. Their necks looked as if someone had let some of the air out of them. The woman stared straight ahead with pale, seemingly lidless eyes. The man looked to be sleeping.

  “Grans,” she said again, a little louder this time. She didn’t know what else to call them. She was unclear as to their exact relation to her, just that they were old Gibsons. None of the family recounting by uncles or aunts ever called them anything else. Sometimes she would ask, and would get a blank stare in return. Then the uncles and aunts would debate the thing — either they were distant cousins or brother and sister-in-law to Walt — which was surely impossible — or from some other branch entirely. Some in the family claimed they weren’t real Gibsons at all, but that was a minority opinion. Uncle Jesse once said he’d heard they were Walt Gibson’s mommy and daddy, who he brought into the holler after marrying that Indian woman and building the first house. But Uncle Jesse had been real drunk at the time, so most everybody laughed. Except the preacher. They say he just turned and walked away.

  Nobody knew how old they were. If you believed Uncle Jesse’s story they would have had to have been impossibly old. If you believed Uncle Jesse’s latest elaboration on his theory, also shared by Speed Sexton’s visionary wife — that the Grans were among the first Melungeons found on Newman’s Ridge by the explorers back before 1700, a
nd that they were old even then — then they’d entered the land of myth and fairy tale. It was all craziness. No wonder folks told spook stories about them to their kids. It was hard to think about the hollow without thinking about them. Sometimes Sadie dreamed about them, perched up there on the mountainside all by themselves, like angels.

  “Grans…” she said again.

  “Elijah, darlin,” the old man said in a voice full of gravel and pain. “Call me that. And this here old lady…” He moved his eyes ever so slightly in the direction of the woman. “Addie.”

  The old woman barely nodded her head and licked her lips with a pale, lizard-like tongue. She appeared to be blind, her eyes white, clouded over. “Sadie…” she whispered harshly.

  “Bobby’s girl, out of Orson and Cleo Patty.”

  Sadie nodded, and then felt like a fool. “Yes,” she said, quaking.

  “Come up here on the porch,” Elijah said, then sighed so deeply it was like all the air had suddenly leaked out of him.

  Two fat hounds lay under the porch steps. They were almost as wrinkled as the Grans, and at first Sadie went a little sick with the notion that they were dead, but then one twitched an ear and a lid floated lazily up a wet eyeball.

  “Nice to have company,” Elijah said.

  “Mail never comes,” Addie said.

  “No, that’s a fact,” Elijah said. “Mail never does come, does it, Addie?”

  “No…”

  The door in front of Sadie was wide open. She could see a small bed, a dresser, and the rest of the house full to the ceiling with boxes of metal, jars full of buttons, straightened nails and other small things, burlap sacks filled and bulging with cloth scraps, bottles, old calendars and newspapers and greeting cards, old clothing and oddly shaped handmade wooden items. It looked like they saved everything. Some of the items on the bottom layer appeared collapsed and rotting, the decay spreading upwards like a disease.

  A wooden cross, maybe three feet high, hung over the bed. The wood was stained and warped. It looked even older than the Grans.