A Choir of Ill Children (4 page)

Even the conjure women and granny witches who live in the bottoms don’t know what to do about it. They weave their charms and wipe various concoctions all over the hounds, meant to drive away the mischief. Now the dogs aren’t only angry but they smell awful too. Their fur is slicked back and gummed up, streaked with foul grease and colorful powders. Some of the children are allergic to the potions. Terrible hives as fat as tubers rise on moppet faces.

The townsfolk have grown paranoid, searching out size twelve boots. If you wear an eleven and a half or a twelve and a half, you still get frightful glances and scowls. Percy’s Ammo and Tackle Shop has had a run on shotgun shells. The granny witches empty the swamp of frogs, newts, bats, and night crawlers.

Red clouds and vicious stenches rise from their smokestacks, fumes swirling above Kingdom Come. Velma Coots lops off a pinkie in sacrifice. The price doesn’t matter to her. Only the service and finality of exchange.

I’m beginning to suspect that lady’s sanity.

Eyeless newts and legless toads are tossed out shack windows and thrown back into the bayou. Heaps of them lie struggling and dying in the morass, crawling and clinging together. The dogs are too angry to play with anymore, and the children have taken to carrying crippled frogs, blind newts, and wingless bats around—naming them, trading them, affixing tiny collars and leashes, sunglasses and carts.

The elixirs continue to boil but the dogs aren’t protected.

None of us are.

M
Y FATHER KNEW EVIL.
I
T CAME FOR HIM IN THE
shape of his own past.

From birth he was as rooted to Potts County, the mill, and his family name as I am rooted to my brothers and they are rooted to one another. Evil, as considered in these cases, is a lack of choice.

He had a destiny confined to the town, but he was never afforded much vision or imagination. He was a realist with too much fervor and not enough reverie. He always remained pragmatic in a place that had too much use for superstition. That’s enough to ruin any man.

But he did his best, or what he considered to be his best, most of the time. He used his wealth in an attempt to better the lives of the citizens of Kingdom Come even when they didn’t want what he had to contribute. He built schools and homes and even a hospital. He attempted to drain the swamp in order to let a highway pass by that would allow these people alternatives.

My father had been a practical man but hardly a sensible one. The schools sat empty until the storm and wind damage wore them away inch by inch. You couldn’t blame the people of Potts County just because the board of education hadn’t offered any kind of a useful curriculum. Chemistry in a tube wasn’t pertinent. The wheel of the universe didn’t turn when the cream went bad. Logarithms, geometry, and algebra did not apply to the height of the river during flood season.

And who exactly could afford the time for that sort of schooling? Crops needed planting, fence posts fixed, grandpa’s colostomy bag cleaned out, and rituals to be performed. The new houses became hovels filled with pigs, goats, and buckets of slop. There are men who do not yet trust lightbulbs.

The vacant hospital that bore my father’s name couldn’t run without the sick and eventually closed its doors. Kingdom Come had found its medicine in the granny witches and bog bottoms for a hundred years, and the doctors wouldn’t take eggs or turpentine in trade.

Draining the swamp was impossible and everybody knew it. Even my dad knew it, I think. It was an act of arrogance and pride on his part, and he deserved whatever happened because of his conceit. Despite an army of screaming machinery and a parade of two hundred men, he never cleared a whole foot of the bayou. Each failure brought him closer to the living heart of his own hatred.

My father loved my brothers better than me, which I can understand and even respect. He cared for them in the same way a hostage learns to show regard for his captor, as the tortured comes to welcome the rope, and a suicide grows eager for the skinning knife of his own flaying. This is a rare and ultimate grace.

He had no other choice, which means that his love, too, added to the killing of him.

Evil followed my father through every minute of his life, including the final instant when he threw himself into the mill. Palpable, omnipresent, and altogether indifferent. It’s an anguish I’ve come to understand over the years. I fill his clothes and shoes. We are nearly the same size and take up almost an equal amount of displacement in the world. We are virtually the same height and weight, with the identical name. His void lives on, awaiting me in this house, beyond the weeds, at the center of the shower, and breathing heavily in back of my truck.

I am as grounded to my brothers as if I were one of them. Which I am.

So I continue checking the paper for a missing six-year-old kid or some word on my mother, and still there’s no mention of either.

A
BBOT
E
ARL IS A HELL OF A SQUARE DANCER EVEN IN
his robes. He hikes them up and shows off his salt-stump knees to everyone at the barn dance. There are trails and spatters of blood across his skin because he’s a penitent who’s sewn catclaw briars and thorns into his vestments. He calls out with an occasional “Yee Ha!” which he doesn’t consider to be talking. He can only speak at sixth hour, according to his vows.

I keep waiting for Drabs to show up but he doesn’t. I look out the windows at the dogs cowering in the dirty straw. Maggie stands on the other side of the barnyard, wary, gliding easily away from me whenever I move toward her.

We circle like angry, heated beasts.

T
HEY HOLD A TOWN MEETING TO FIND OUT WHAT TO
do about the dogs being kicked, but folks are so scared to leave Spot and Cody and Byron and Sienna and Criswell and all the others behind for the evening that only a few people show up. Cat lovers mostly, I suspect.

Sheriff Burke is having a hard go of it, pawing his chin. “At this time, we have no suspects.”

“No suspects, you say!” shouts Velma Coots, who has given a pinkie hoping to get to the bottom of this, and she expects no less sacrifice from the police. “I believe that every man wearing size twelve shoes is a suspect, for sure! That’s how it seems to me. And don’t you turn a blind eye to any woman with big feet either.”

There is hesitant agreement and some nods of approval from all around the room.

Burke is a little man who suffers from short guy syndrome. He’s piqued and always keeps his hat and boots on to gain the extra few inches. His insecurities show through every time he tries to drop his squeaky voice by an octave. Sometimes he’s too excited and forgets to talk from his diaphragm, and this reedy piping escapes him. He waves his arms around like a drowning child, the fury filling his face. “That’s true, Velma, and we’ve been through the local footwear shops already in order to obtain shoe-size records. While we’ve questioned several men and women, at this time we have no single chief suspect.”

Velma Coots glares at Burke’s pinkies with so much animosity that he’s nearly brushed over by her vitriol. He makes tiny fists.

“So what are people to do?” asks Drabs’s father, Reverend Clem Bibbler. No matter how badly it breaks a hundred degrees I’ve never seen him sweat. He’s taking this situation extremely seriously, but as quietly and calmly as possible. Members of his congregation have stopped attending services because they’re afraid to leave their dogs and hive-riddled children home alone. And also because they’re frightened that Drabs might start taking his clothes off at the altar.

“Everyone’s being asked to take certain precautions,” Burke tells the reverend. “Don’t leave your loved ones out at night. Bring them inside. Keep as good a watch over them as you do your own children. Don’t let them alone over long periods. Make sure your gates are locked. Undo the chains. Keep your guns loaded and close to you at all times. Keep a round in the chamber. If you must leave your home for an extended amount of time, hire a sitter. I’ve also been authorized to employ three new part-time deputies who are currently assisting me on this case.”

Prayers aren’t helping. Perhaps Reverend Bibbler has put too much pressure on God lately, diverting His divine attention and diluting the Lord’s power.

For twenty years he’s been begging the Almighty to bring his boy Drabs back to his senses, and now all of a sudden he expects miracles over a few booted poodles. Even he cannot fathom the full extent of his folly, and he’s obviously ashamed just in the asking. The more I think about it the more I realize how incongruous Reverend Bibbler has become in Potts County. I’d pity the man if I wasn’t so sure that, like my father, he’s brought this on himself.

“We want justice!” someone cries.

“Blood!”

“We don’t want our kids playing with legless frogs anymore!”

“Or crippled bats!”

“We’re going to catch this clever kicker,” the sheriff tells them. He finds me in the audience and scowls in my direction. When it all comes down to it, he harbors a grudge against my family for having settled the county. All troubles track back to us.

Burke is as small as a white lie and looks as if he might be carried off under the arm of a hefty woman at any second. He feels it too, and smiles cruelly.

T
HE
H
OLY
O
RDER OF
F
LYING
W
ALENDAS.

They like the metaphor of walking the high wire through life, putting your faith in God and in your own responsible preparation. I still think there must be some kind of legal infringement here, but every year it seems that there are more monks and fewer Walendas.

Abbot Earl drove one of the bulldozers my father hired to drain the swamp. He was good at his job, as were all the workers, but they still couldn’t accomplish the task set before them. When my father died, he took something from those loyal men who had vainly fought alongside him. Abbot Earl lost his way for a time and continued to stay in town, living at the bottom of a tequila bottle and bedding a one-eyed woman named Lucretia Murteen.

He found his faith again when he awoke covered in vomit and blood lying on the icy floor of the vacant hospital. The front windows had been shattered long ago but he’d still somehow sliced open his forearm climbing inside. Perhaps he’d been attempting to kill himself. There were three deep vertical gashes from his wrist to halfway up his arm. If he’d meant to do it then he’d been earnest about dying at the time.

God was there with him, he said, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. The hospital was completely empty except for one pack of bandages, which was just enough for him to tie off his flowing wounds. That kind of coincidence would have made me think twice too. I sold the place to him for a dollar, and he immediately converted it into a monastery.

Spiritual seekers from all over the world have made their pilgrimages to Kingdom Come and settled into the order. The races, religions, and shades of their features are as varied as any in the world. Some are prophets, or might be. Others are acolytes hoping to pierce dimensions and stand between the pillars of heaven. Some are alcoholics and drug addicts looking for a last chance at redemption.

In meditation anything is allowed. They sweat before fires and pentagrams, and they speak in dead dialects. They struggle with complex intonations of the Kabbalah. The journey is arduous.

A few have bathed in blood, and the ghosts of their victims prance inside the shadows of the empty wards. Lucretia Murteen has become a nun—a bride of the Flying Walendas—and she can see the needy apparitions from her empty socket. Sister Lucretia says she hears babies crying in the nursery.

I am technically a monk, by proxy. My name is still on the building and Abbot Earl feels that I am a benefactor, at least, if not a true believer.

I attend the occasional meal with them, and observe their rules while I’m among the order. I wear a cowl and robes with thistles and barbs woven into them. I chant. I only speak between sixth and seventh hour. I remain chaste. I do not take the holy name of Walenda in vain.

Anything is possible here, as it is on the wire in the savage wind.

J
ONAH RECITES THE NAMES OF SYMPHONIES, POEMS
and sit-coms, from the core of his third of that brain. It’s almost all he can do on his own, but that doesn’t matter. His words are passionate and true. The execution, the intent, the subtleties of tone and finesse of his tongue add new depths of expression. For Sarah, who sleeps with Fred down the hall. “
The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock, The Odd Couple, please, Barney Miller, In a Disguised Graveyard,
Toccata, Mandoline Concerto
. . . Because I could not stop for Death, please oh please, Three’s Company, I Love Lucy,
‘Waltz of the Flowers,’
Liebestraum, Gilligan’s Island, Will and Grace,
‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’
. . . McHale’s Navy, Burns and Allen,
‘The Moon and the Yew Tree,’
Seinfeld,
Adagio, ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba,’
please come to me, I await you, I am always waiting, you see . . .”

He is sobbing madly, the tears corrupting his throat, while Sebastian cackles in whispers and Cole remains oddly silent.

A
WIDE BUT DULL MOON DOESN
’
T HAVE WHAT IT
takes to illuminate the inside of my truck. Whoever she is, she’s doing all right in my lap without me. She smells of death, but that doesn’t matter a hell of a lot at the moment. Her hair is a fiery red that might only be orange in the daylight, but for now it is a mass of bobbing flame that spills across my belly to my knees.

She’s producing noises that could be ecstasy, or perhaps this is only an agonizing murder. It’s hard to tell. There weren’t any women in the bar tonight, so how did she find me? The woods. I think she moved on me from the woods. She drags her nails down my legs and back up again, making other little motions as if she’s scratching sparse but powerful sentences into my skin. I try to make them out. It’s a cursive script with well-defined curves, crossed t’s and dotted i’s and hanging g’s. Lots of passive verbs. There are a meager number of semicolons but a fair amount of emphasis is drawn to certain words via italics.