Blood Kin Page 7

  “It’s all ass shit,” Addie said suddenly.

  Elijah coughed drily a few times, until Sadie recognized what he was doing as laughter. “Never thought to swap her,” he said. It sounded like an old joke, repeated endlessly.

  Sadie sat down between the two, like them staring straight ahead across the valley. “You wanted me for something, Grans?”

  “Elijah,” he said.

  “Elijah.”

  “And Addie, honey.”

  “And Addie.”

  They sat that way for some time. When Sadie was younger, she might have thought the Grans had forgotten her. But she had learned that adults were like that sometimes. Talking took a while. You had to learn to use all the silences.

  Across the valley she could see a ramshackle barn, a broken-down stone wall attached. She couldn’t remember who it belonged to.

  “Yessir, I like them mountains,” Elijah said. “Gives you somethin to rest your eyes against.”

  Down below that barn was a small sleeping cabin, looking greasy in the dim light. Dogs ran back and forth the length of the porch, jumping into the trash pile at the end and tearing it apart. A sour smell wasworking at her nose, beginning to sting her eyes. She turned her head away.

  “We sold the coal rights to that land on them long deeds. Fifty cents an acre. Signed our X’s big and black as you please. Dumbest thing we ever did.”

  “The dumbest,”Addie said.

  “I put a lot into that holler. Now I cant, I cant…”

  “Spit it out,” Addie said.

  “Get a thing out. We owned… we owned all you see.”

  Sadie looked out, trying to see as far as she thought the Grans might be seeing, and as far back. She didn’t know, but somehow she was sure they could see a lot further. They’d owned it all.

  “Worked in the mines… and I was already an old man. Hell… six or seven a day got kilt. Their kinfolk couldn’t afford to bury them.”

  She remembered she used to walk up that old logging trail above the Grans by herself. It was something special in the fall: you could look down into the hollow and there would be gray, pale blue, and orange trees.

  “Walt, he used to shoot his meat… out there in the woods. Afore all these others come. Raised his corn down in the bottom, just enough for his bread. Used a deer skin with holes for a sifter. Fires kept the bear and deer away.”

  Maybe she could stay with the Grans up into the night. That way she couldn’t make it to the church meeting and the preacher wouldn’t dare blame her because she had been with the Grans.

  “Been here a long time, Honey. Way back afore, buried our kin above ground. Little houses… over the graves. Ever afternoon we bowed toward the bell. Dont rightly remember why.”

  Sadie wasn’t sure if Elijah was talking about the Gibsons in general, or him and Addie personally.

  “Oh, been here years. Cant recollect how long. Nobody knows where we come from, and I swear I dont remember. Seen lots of starvin times. This aint so bad. Folks used to eat the sparrows they was so hungry.”

  They were trying to give her information here, memories, history. Sadie wondered what it was they meant to prepare her for, and why.

  “Chillen,” Addie croaked.

  “That’s right!” Elijah’s voice went higher. Sadie thought he sounded kind of happy. “Dont have a child you dont have nothin.”

  “Once the midwives done cotched them, they yours forever!” Addie almost shouted it.

  Elijah made his dry, coughing sound. “Never thought to swap her,” he said. His voice went lower. “You got our blood.”

  Addie cackled. “Gettin creatures born is important work!”

  “I promised the preacher I’d go to church tonight,” Sadie said softly. “See there, almost pitch dark already.”

  “Gettin old,” Addie said. The whites of her blind eyes glowed in the dark. “Not much time. Dont need it. Dont want it.”

  “Need new blood. Me an Addie,we got so old, full of forgettin, we got sick of it all.”

  Addie began a paper-thin, brittle wailing.

  “We got sick of the preacher, too,” he said. “Even if he is one of our’n. Crap gets out of hand.”

  Addie rocked back and forth, her mouth open, wordless.

  “You get tired of livin, keepin the feelin what it should be, stoppin it from goin bad. You get tired of ownin that. You just wanna lay it all down and rest.”

  Sadie had started down the steps, trying hard not to listen.

  “Other people’s got the feelin, too, Honey. Their turn now. Me an Addie, we done our part.”

  When Sadie got to the path she started to run, but the old man’s words came too fast for her. “Body shouldn’t have to live forever!” he shouted in a breaking voice. “Time for some of this new blood!”

  Either Addie began to scream, a throat-rending screech followed by a rattle, or it was the tearing of Sadie’s own thoughts as she stumbled down the steep path.

  Chapter Five

  GRANDMA HAD DECIDED it was time to take a break from the stories, whether because she was tired, or because she’d seen the deep lines of exhaustion in Michael’s face and was takingpity on him. He made himself stop shaking. His hands felt weak, and as if they would surely float away if he didn’t watch them.

  He didn’t understand what was happening to him. When she talked about her first period he’d felt a dampness, a rawness between his legs, and a stiffness in his lower gut. When her father, Michael’s great grandfather, bit into the mouse, he’d tasted what she tasted and what her father had tasted: the sharp salt of blood and the dryness of hair fiber and the crunch and grit of bone stuff. There was danger in those stories, and it was beginning to touch him as well.

  When Sadie talked about the men she knew as a child Michael felt disjointed. Each storied male brought a face, and the need to enter into another’s feelings, to infiltrate his voice. Again and again he saw his own face in her memories, as if all the stories were about him. He asked if she had some photographs he could look at. She promised to come up with some by the afternoon.

  Michael went out on the porch for some cool mountain air. It was the closest thing he had now to a tranquilizer. If he’d been back in his old neighborhood he would have gone to see Bill the Pill Guy by now, an old hippy who would sell you a pill to correct any pain or trouble or anxiety described to him. He couldn’t tell you the names of any of these pills, just their benefits. Michael hadn’t believed that the fellow knew what he was doing but he’d still gone to him because his pills always seemed to work. Of course he’d been foolish, risking his health that way, but listening to his grandmother’s stories, preparing for god-knows-what, felt even riskier. He’d studied History in college — for a long time it seemed the most real, the most important discipline there was. Now he felt he had far too much of it. The past had overstepped its bounds; there was no more room for the present.

  He needed someone like Allison in his life. But although he needed Allison, it would be unfair to call her now, to put her through more, to put her through any of the bad things that might come from being around him again. The last week they had been together he had been so tense, and consequently, cruel. He’d picked arguments over insignificant things — the cereal she’d bought, the clothes she wore, a damp towel left in the wrong place. Every afternoon he would make himself go outside so he wouldn’t have the opportunity to say more mean things to her.

  He remembered that one of those afternoons he’d been sitting in the alley watching as a skinny gray cat made its way down the narrow lane lined with cans, bins, and boxes. Most of the cat’s fur had been shaved from the left side of its head so that its face looked almost human from that angle. An ugly scar ran from under its left eye down the side of its face almost to the mouth. Michael had assumed it was recovering from some sort of surgery. At one point it had put its paws together, looked up at the sky, and made a screeching noise.

  Michael stood up suddenly and had to grab the post by the s
teps. I called it Reverend, he thought. I called that cat Reverend.

  That afternoon Grandma gave him the photograph albums to study. These were full of pictures of the Gibsons and other inhabitants of the town for generations back. Pictures of Sadie herself, her hair yellow and eyes bright. He was amazed at how closely the images matched his imaginings. But there were differences. Her father, Bobby Gibson, was much better looking than he’d imagined, dark-skinned with high chiseled cheeks, and the one image of the preacher — taken in secret, Sadie said, made him look small relative to the people gathered around him.

  “Think about what you see,” Grandma said behind him. “Then feel what you see.” It was uncomfortably like being in school again.

  He flipped through page after page of pictures, the same people in different settings, in different poses, at varied occasions. Layer after layer of photographs, peeling back, and each new layer told him something new. He felt his shoulders stoop, his hands palsy. He grew old, then drew back to when things were newer, the sun on his face, warming his hair.

  His grandmother looked so old; her skin was like cracked porcelain, glued and reglued but with all the fractures still showing. Something had drained her, cost her, and robbed her. He didn’t have the words for it and it made him feel like a fool. There was nothing he could do for that little girl from the thirties; there seemed to be even less he could do for her now. Again, he questioned exactly what it was she was asking him to do here. Did she understand he wasn’t good at much of anything, and never had been?

  “Clarence Roberts and his son are here,” his grandmother said to him from the parlor doorway. “I think you best take a minute to say hello to them.”

  Of the few dozen or so population left in the town of Morrison, Clarence was the only one he’d actually talked to. Miss Perkins and the others, everybody his grandmother had told him about, they were long gone.

  Clarence and Benny were waiting politely at the bottom of the porch steps. Clarence made a living doing routine maintenance for various real estate companies that still owned parts of Morrison, and for private citizens like Grandma Sadie. He dressed the part, and acted it. In the city, Michael had never met anyone so deferential. Benny hid behind his daddy’s leg; Clarence held on to the boy’s collar. Here in the mountains the children were trained to stay close when strangers were around.

  “Hello, Clarence, Benny,” Michael said awkwardly. “You’re here to clean out the weeds in that ditch line across the road.”

  “Just takin what the Good Lord sends us,” Clarence said easily. Michael didn’t know what to say. Benny looked up at him with wide, frightened eyes.

  “This will be done today, wont it, Clarence?” Grandma had stepped up behind him.

  “Cant promise you nothin, but I spect so.”

  Benny had squirmed away from his father and was looking at a butterfly on a bush. Clarence reached over and pulled him back. “I’ll give you away to that man if’n you dont behave, Benny.” The boy looked stricken. Clarence looked back at Michael. “Best be gettin on with it, I guess.”

  “Sure, thank you, Clarence.”

  “That man’s never been outside this valley,” she told him later. “His son probably wont leave, either. Granddaddy once told me Appalachia was a reservation and probably always would be. One of the truest things the man ever said.”

  Clarence and his son crossed the gravel road and approached the weed-choked ditch. Above their heads, a new shoot of kudzu drifted down from the upper branches of the thick wall of trees. Michael stared as it wiggled slightly in the breeze, making a lazy S.

  “YOUR DADDY ALWAYS held you back. I’m afraid I cant explain that.” Grandma rocked furiously, as if gearing herself up to continue the story. “I heard him one time tell you ‘You cant do nothing,’ but that was always something he’d believed about himself. You looked like him and talked like him — he felt you in his bones. He couldn’t handle all that, I dont reckon.”

  “It’s okay, Grandma. I think I’m beginning to pull some of the pieces together.”

  “Just remember that the way you feel their voices is just like real good guesses — you’ll never get them xactly right so dont start gettin too cocky.”

  “I’m trying, Grandma.”

  “Gettin stronger every day.”

  “That I am.”

  “When you feel somebody you have to give yourself away to them, and that’s a real hard thing to do, Michael.”

  “A real hard thing, Grandma.”

  “Dreamin makes it better.”

  “Yes, ma’am, dreaming makes it better.”

  “You’re a survivor, Michael. Just like me.”

  “Just like you.”

  “So now you’re ready to handle some snakes?”

  He hesitated a second or two. Then he lied. “That I am, Grandma. Set them loose.”

  Michael looked out the window. Clarence Roberts was beating a stick against the weeds, calling out Benny’s name. It was the second time today the boy had gotten lost out there. Michael knew there probably wasn’t any danger, but he didn’t want to watch.

  Numerous long streamers of kudzu now hung from the branches of the trees on the other side of the ditch. It seemed highly unlikely that any plant could grow that much in an afternoon. Michael’s best guess was that bunches of it had gotten caught up inside the boughs, and then a little wind must have unsnagged it all to make it drop down out of the trees like that.

  The kudzu was green and deep, and he was remembering voices in the valley he had heard only once, from a twelve-year-old farm girl, and some voices he had never heard before at all.

  Chapter Six

  SADIE DECIDED THERE was one thing she needed to do before church that night, and that was to go apologize to her granddaddy. It didn’t matter if he saw the change in her, she reckoned. After tonight she was likely to be changed even more. It was a peculiar thing. She was just going to church, which was supposed to be something good folk did, but she felt like one of them condemned prisoners fixing to walk to their final judgment. And what if she got bit and died? The preacher was always saying that some did get bit, but the ones that had the right kind of faith survived. Sadie doubted she had that kind of faith. She didn’t trust nobody. And if she was going to die, she wanted things right with her granddad first.

  She knocked on his screen door but he didn’t answer. Of course when he wasn’t sitting there reading one of his books he was out working somewhere, so she went around the side of the house to the barn. Granddaddy’s barn was something special — he built it pretty much all by hisself and he took pride in it. It was the straightest barn she knew of in the whole county. Most of them leaned this way and that like a lame fellow or a drunkard. But Granddaddy’s barn had all kinds of bracing inside, and to show it off even more he painted it bright red like they did in the nicer parts of the county, and he repainted it every other year so that it was as red as red can be. Whenever Sadie saw that red barn behind his bright white house she thought of a candy cane.

  He was just inside the barn, sitting on a bale of hay, bent over with his head bowed like he was praying, both arms stiff on his knees. He had his hat off, so that the bottom part of his face looked red as a tomato, and his forehead that had been covered by the hat was white as flour. She almost never saw him with his hat off, not even inside the house.

  “Granddaddy? You okay?”

  His head went up a little but not all the way. “That you, Sadie?”

  She came closer. “You see me now okay?”

  His eyes squinted a little, and the lines in his face got deeper like he was in pain. “I reckon.”

  But Sadie suspected he was covering up. “You want me to go get somebody?”

  Granddaddy made a little tired laugh. “Who would you go get?” And that made her feel bad — her granddad didn’t have many friends in these parts.

  “I dont know. Momma maybe.”

  “Now dont go bothering her any. I’ll be alright. Just tried to do a l
ittle too much today I reckon.” He moved his head forward like he was trying to see better. “That your good dress you wearing? You fixing to get married or something?” He made that tired little laugh again.

  “Oh, Grandpa, I aint even dating! No, I… well I just thought I’d go up to the church tonight.”

  “What, that Signs church? Those snake handlers? Your folks know about that?”

  “Oh, they know. It’ll be alright.”

  “Awww, well. You just be careful. I’m not going to say nothing about them — people believe what they believe and I know some fine people who’ve taken to picking up snakes. Long as folks are sincere, who cares what they believe? It’s not what I believe but I dont believe a lot of things. Just be careful who you put your trust in, and the preacher, well, can you say you really trust that man?”

  “Well —” Of course she didn’t. “He is family,” she said.

  Granddaddy raised his hand. “I know, I know. Never you mind, sweetheart.”

  “Granddaddy, I’m sorry about how I was, earlier.”

  “Never mind that. Older folks shouldn’t be parading their quarrels around children. It isn’t right that I said something like that.”

  “That’s okay.” She looked down, scraped her shoes against the ground. She realized then she should have probably put on her better shoes for church — they didn’t have as many scratches and tears in them. “There’s just lots of things about — I dont know — my family, this town — I dont understand.”

  “Lots of things I dont understand, neither,” he said, “and at my age it’s pretty near too late to try. There’s just one thing I want you to think on some. You spend your whole life down here between two mountains and you think the whole world’s like this. But Honey, the rest of the South isn’t even like this. And lots of folks cant seem to figure that out — they judge us by our lowest. That’s the thing what bothers me.”

  “Maybe, but how does that matter to me? I have to deal with what I see with my own two eyes, and what I can feel, and what I can smell, and what I can taste. And right here and now, things taste pretty bad.”