A Choir of Ill Children (17 page)

She doesn’t consider this another defeat. She forgives the shortcomings.

Father clutches at his heart as if sharpened steel has just gone through it. She moves along to sit on the porch and considers the man with three heads, who is waiting for her somewhere farther down the path.

T
HE PHONE IS RINGING AGAIN AND
I
LEAP OUT OF BED
to nab it. Reverend Clem Bibbler wants to see me. By the time I get to the church it’s 2:00
A
.
M
. and Drabs’s father is sitting in the back pew, praying in whispers.

I join him, listening to the rafters creak, the branches of white oak scraping against the shingles. You can imagine how it might have been forty years ago: the children opening their textbooks and taking out their pencils as my grandmother scratched equations and underlined conjunctions on the blackboard. Even with the reverend’s prayers in my ear, staring at the cross and altar in front, with a missal at my side, I can get no true sense of this place as a church.

The room is no longer clean. There are wrappers, bottles, and remnants of half-eaten dinners strewn about. He’s been staying here night and day in the hopes that his faith, his missing son, or his absent congregation might return. Those two ropes leading up to the steeple snap and twist. The bell still rocks to and fro, and that constant thrum fills my chest and tries to get out through the top of my head.

The heat hammers at us but Reverend Bibbler still doesn’t sweat. When he finishes praying he sits back and looks startled to see me here. He nods and the muscles in his black face shift unevenly beneath the skin. He looks as if he’s trapped in the memory of something that’s never happened. His stoic, impervious front has been penetrated. He licks his lips but his mouth is so dry that the tip of his tongue catches. “Oh, Thomas, please forgive me. I didn’t realize you’d gotten here so quickly.”

He doesn’t find it odd that I would come out in the middle of the night at his request, and I don’t find it strange that he’d ask.

“He was here,” Reverend Bibbler says.

“Drabs came back?”

“Yes.” He wrestles with whatever is crawling around in his brain, squeezing his eyes shut and repeating a litany as fast as he can. It’s not helping and his breathing becomes brutally ragged. He might be having a heart attack. I crouch forward and put my hands on his shoulders and he snaps back as if he didn’t know I was there. “Thomas, he was wounded.”

A chill forms in the pit of my belly and keeps edging out, cooling me off inch by inch until I’m trembling. “How so?”

That all-prevailing silence washes over and engulfs us again. It always happens. I look down and see that I’ve picked up the worn missal. I page through it and I’m surprised that so many of the hymns are unknown to me. Belief and conviction are always changing and rushing along like the river. I should leave but he has more to say, and he’s working his way up to saying it. I sit in the pew growing colder and give it some more time.

Something breaks loose inside him and a fierce and barbaric hiss works free. “They lynched him! Scalded him with tar again, but much worse this time. Rope burns around his throat, raw and infected—” He struggles for air, but can’t breathe through his gritted teeth. “They . . . they . . . oh what they did to my boy. My son, my little boy . . .” He doesn’t have to finish.

My teeth are about to break and I fling the missal as far from me as I can. “Oh my God.”

“I don’t understand how he survived.”

But he does understand, and so do I. Drabs has always been watched over and used for another purpose.

“I failed him.”

“We both have,” I say.

“His voice has been destroyed, and the words that came out didn’t sound human. But they were.”

“Are you sure?”

He knows what I mean. “He didn’t speak in tongues. He said the Holy Spirit had finally left him. He’d done all that he had to do. He was smiling, Thomas. Happier than I’d ever seen him. Laughing and making those horrible sounds. Scarred and bloody with his manhood mutilated, but he was joyful. Oh Lord in heaven forgive me, but it was wonderful to see him smile.”

I had promised to find him and I had failed. I was more like my father than I ever wanted to admit. Failure inspired me just as much as anything else, and now it urged me to let out an enraged bellow that had nothing to do with rednecks or rope and everything to do with my own oversights and weakness. Reverend Bibbler puts a hand out to touch me and I shrink away.

There’s a tap at the window.

I look over and see a smear of moonlight reflecting off the nutmeg skin, igniting the whites of eyes, blazing teeth.

Drabs peers in smiling, and Christ, it
is
a beautiful sight.

As he drops away into darkness I spin out of the pew and run after him.

Reverend Bibbler slides in his seat, sticks his foot out, and trips me. I go tumbling into the aisle and fall flat on my face. My chin cracks hard and suddenly blood is flooding down my throat. I spit a mouthful onto the wood floor.

I grab the reverend by the collar of his heavy frock coat and scream, “Why’d you do that?”

“Leave him be. He’s happy now.”

I rush outside and see a dark shape cavorting across the lawn, heading for the tree line. I scream his name and Drabs slows but doesn’t stop. I spring after him, watching the silver light lapping at his glistening wounds. He’s letting me catch up. He’s still naked and the kudzu must be tearing his feet apart, but he’s beyond feeling pain now. His soul’s been released. I stumble over a patch of crabgrass at the instant he breaks into the woods. I’ll never find him in there and he knows it, so he stops for a moment, eyeing me.

“Drabs?”

He begins laughing feebly, and that destroyed cheerful voice is filled with a choir of ill children.

S
ISTER
L
UCRETIA
M
URTEEN
’
S BODY IS FOUND IN A
ditch off the highway. Her uterus has been perforated and she’s bled to death elsewhere, her corpse moved and hidden beneath the palmetto leaves. It looks like a botched abortion.

She carried invisible babies across an empty nursery but she’d never gotten the chance to bear her own. Abbot Earl is inconsolable at the funeral, as are several other monks and sisters who belong to the order. Many of the seekers and travelers also show up to pay their respects.

More people from town turn out than I expect. As a whole, the folks of Kingdom Come haven’t embraced the new faith or those who follow it. But Lucretia Murteen is one of their own, or had been, and for the sake of the woman they’d once known they pay their respects.

Hundreds show up in the blazing sun. Some with lemonade, lawn chairs, and sandwiches, and others have even brought along their pets. There are many children running among the tombstones, saying prayers, holding flowers. They read epitaphs and show off their kittens, giggling with delight. Sister Lucretia would’ve enjoyed that, I think.

We must wait for sixth hour before commencing. Abbot Earl has a long eulogy prepared, but he can’t calm down long enough to give it. He grabs anybody near him and holds on for life—his powerful muscles strain as he hugs everyone tight enough to cut off the blood flow. His sobbing is as loud as a fire engine.

Abbot Earl is pulled away and leaned against a cottonwood tree, which he immediately begins to throttle. Another monk is forced to speak instead. He does a fair job under the circumstances even though he speeds through the service, dry-mouthed and occasionally quivering.

She is buried wearing the eye patch, not very far from my grandmother’s grave. The pilgrims wander the grounds, searching out spirits, God, death, redemption, or resurrection. It’s a respectable cause. Several are performing their own strange rites, clanging tiny bells and waving incense, dancing in circles. Most of them continue to wear the cowls and robes of the penitent.

A couple conceal bottles of gin and tequila in their shapeless garments, taking furtive sips when they think no one is watching. A few others are just tripping on acid and talking about the groovy colors in the sky, pulling at their melting faces. Deputies chase after the naked ones who are running around in the woods. Some of the folks turn their lawn chairs around and watch the antics.

Those travelers must’ve seen a thing or two in the middle of the night at the monastery. Even while stumbling over roots and rocks they mime the same motions that Sister Lucretia Murteen once did. It’s bad form but I need a cigarette and light up. The acidheads act as if they’re walking down a long hallway handing newborns to mothers in the maternity ward. They sit talking with phantoms for a time, discussing the beautiful infants, those bright and open futures.

Daylight runs into their mouths as they turn blindly to face me, arms wide.

Burke is taking notes and doing little else. The sheriff’s seen movies where they say the murderer might show up at a victim’s funeral. He hasn’t thought ahead enough to bring a camera so he can take photos. He’s writing down names, license plate numbers, checking shoe sizes. Binky shall be avenged.

Abbot Earl cries himself dry. He hits the wall and once he gets there he simply can’t weep anymore although he wants to. He wipes his face with his robes and the sewn-in catclaw briars crease his cheeks with scratches.

There are three people in town known to perform abortions—two farmers’ wives and Velma Coots. Planned Parenthood is simply too far away, too expensive, and nobody in Potts County can trust a stranger in such matters. We stick closer to home.

I’ve brought girls to all three of them before and none would have screwed up the job as badly as I’ve heard Lucretia Murteen’s abortion had been botched. Either somebody else has decided to try their hand at it or Sister Lucretia did it to herself. Still, someone had to dump and cover her body.

Abbot Earl is so drained by now that he can barely stand up under his own power. Two monks take hold of his arms and steady him as best they can. He sways and finally regains some of his composure. They try to lead him to shade but he won’t go. He spots me far in the back alone, on the embankment, and makes his way over, hiking his vestments up so he can climb.

“I need to speak with you,” he says. His voice is wet and heavy, sloppy and full of misery, but there’s something tough down the center of it. If my father had ever had that hardness he wouldn’t have killed himself.

“I’m listening.”

“Yes, this is difficult for me . . .”

I’m forced to back away a step. I hadn’t been close enough before to smell the gin on his breath. Sister Lucretia’s death has drop-kicked him back into the old pattern of drinking through his pain just like when he worked for my father trying to clear the swamp. The shallow cuts on his face well up and drip. We stand beneath the darkening sky looking at one another. He starts tapping his incisors together again, that nervous tic coming on strong.

I tell him that I suspect Sister Lucretia had been having an affair with one of the spiritual seekers staying at the monastery, a different man named Sebastian. He shakes his head until it nearly wags off his shoulders and says that there is no man named Sebastian staying at the Holy Order of Flying Walendas, and never has been.

“Are you positive?” I ask.

“Yes.”

He still thinks that I’m somehow involved, of course. It’s justifiable. A niggling worm of suspicion can eventually chew through your sleep. He heard her mention my brother’s name while she was praying and he feels Sebastian has—in some unfathomable way—something to do with her death. Perhaps he does.

“Talk to me, Earl,” I urge. “What happened to her?”

“There’s not much more I can tell you or anyone else. Whatever happened to her occurred during the night. I said good night to her myself and watched her go to her chambers. The next morning she didn’t come to meet us for breakfast and morning prayers.”

“Do you still believe she wanted to leave the order?”

He lets out a sigh that fogs my face with gin. “She had grown more and more distant.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“I know that.”

Unconsciously, he inches his hand out as if to grasp my wrist. He’s in dire need of human contact but he’s afraid to get too close to me. He wants my help but he’s hoping to avoid asking for it directly. “The last time we spoke you mentioned she might have been going because she felt threatened.”

“Yes, I said that.”

“Do you still think that’s the case?”

“I believed someone might have been imploring her to leave us. Possibly her lover, whoever he might be.”

“It makes sense.”

“Yes, perhaps he wanted to marry her and raise a family. Or . . . maybe he was simply afraid of being found out and—”

“And forced her to get an abortion.”

He can’t help himself any longer and finally grips hold of my arm. I have to suck my breath between my teeth. He hangs his head and when he glances back up the veins in his neck are standing out, thick and red. “My God, I can still hardly believe it. For her to be left like that.”