Blood Kin (20 page)

The children Sadie’s age were supposed to read while Mrs. Welch worked with the third graders in math. There was a shelf of donated novels at the front of the room, mostly ones that belonged to folks who had died and then the family gave them to the school. The older kids were supposed to choose one and read it and maybe answer some questions Mrs. Welch would ask about it. Some of the children gave a report to the class, but Mrs. Welch didn’t make you if you were too shy. Mrs. Welch was nice enough, but that was the only time she seemed especially nice.

This last time Sadie had chosen
Papa’s Little Daughters
by Mrs. Mary D. Brine. It had shown up on the bookshelf just two weeks ago, she didn’t know from who or where. Like most of the books it was old — the front page said 1882. It was all about the nice Moore family who lived in a fine house in the city. She didn’t think they were supposed to be rich but they were surely rich by Morrison standards, what with their library and sitting room and a chambermaid named Betty and nice dresses and a daddy who worked in an office downtown and put on a fancy coat every morning and read the newspaper. They even owned a canary in a cage with his own little dish for food. But for all that they seemed like just the nicest people and she was sure they’d be nice to her if she ever met them one time even if she was poor and shabby.

It was sad because their mother died right at the first of the book — the poor woman’s pale skin and her blue veins showing — and the little girls Madge and Marjorie (the one with the lovely curls, and the one with “golden, flaxen” hair like Sadie had never seen and could barely imagine) were left alone with their dear sweet papa who laughed a lot and said things like “Goodness gracious!” and put them on his knee and hugged and kissed them all the time.

And then Papa’s sister came from out west, the dark-eyed Aunt Grace, who was so nice and the daughters “were as fond of Auntie as though they had never known a dearer love.”

The strange thing was Sadie could get so wrapped up in the lives of these two little girls and their worries even though their worries were pretty small when she thought about them, especially compared to folks living in the hollow — worries like what they were going to wear and what papa’s big secret was and why one of them was being cross one day and all that.

Sometimes when she read that book she would look around at the other students — their shabby clothes and their broke-down shoes, their burnt skin, their spreading bruises, the way they coughed too much or sneezed too much, how skinny some of them looked, how pale — and she’d gaze out the window at the gray board shacks and the fallen down fences and the broken things in folks’ yards and just how dirty everything was. Most everything she saw was messed up, forgot, or just uncared for. She wondered how it was that authors could write about a different way of life, a different story of what a person could be, but no one she knew could do that in the real world outside of them books.

Today it was hard to read because she was still thinking about the Grans’ birthday and how disappointed she was that she hadn’t been able to talk to her grandpa about it and because Mrs. Welch had to paddle some little boy in the first grade for misspelling “meadow.”

She took her book outside at recess and watched the other children playing Round Town and Anty Over and Fox and Dog. She wasn’t popular mostly because of her daddy and the rest of her family and what people thought about them. But she was pretty shy herself anyway and had never been too good at making friends. Momma always said she was too
sensitive
. Maybe she was. She always seemed to know when people didn’t like her, or were annoyed with her, or were suspicious of her. They didn’t have to say anything to her; they didn’t even have to look at her. She just knew, and knowing was a hard thing sometimes.

She sat on a rock and ate her biscuit and jelly and her corncob. She read another page and then she heard some of the children yelling and there was Mrs. Welch dragging Andy Carter down to the toilets by his ear. Jane Gollaghon came up to her all out of breath. “He done dropped his reader into the toilet hole
on purpose
. Teacher says he’s got to fish it out and take it down the creek for a bath!” Then she ran off to watch. Jane was the biggest gossip in school and only spoke to Sadie when she had news and needed somebody to tell it to, but Sadie was still glad to be included.

Something turning in the edge of the woods caught her eye. She stared at it and just like she thought it was one of those gray ladies again, looking at her. The way they kept bothering her made her mad and she tried to look back with hardness in her eyes, but that only made her see more of them, two more behind the first and another one to the right a few feet, that one particularly bad because her neck was bent to the side and she had blood trailing out of her mouth and onto her pale see-through dress. Only it wasn’t like see-through naked. It was see-through like Sadie could see through to the trees standing behind that woman.

There was a sound coming out of those woods. It was long and lonesome, kind of like the sound poor Addie had made at the picnic. But with something extra, crying maybe but worse than crying.

She wondered if one of those gray ladies was the woman Mickey-Gene had seen that day up by the mines. But that was an awful thing to think about and she didn’t want to think about it right now. She opened up her book and tried to read some more.

The words had changed so Sadie couldn’t read them. They were wiggling around the page like worms, or snakes. Somebody had written on the page, doodles and drawings, pictures of such terrible things. There were some Bible verses and a house with a woman in it and bones and snakes and such. She wanted to look away but she couldn’t help studying it. There was a room with a Bible in it and there was a church nearby. That was when she knew the preacher kept his special Bible in his house in its own special room.

S
ADIE WENT BY
her granddaddy’s house again right after school. The front door was still locked and there was still no answer, but when she walked around the side she was relieved to see the big barn door wide open. “Grandpa!” she called. “Grandpa!” maybe a little too loud and a little too excited. She started walking fast and by the time she reached the barn door she was running.

She couldn’t see much at first, and when she heard a woman singing softly it confused and scared her. “Grandpa?”

“Over here child,” the woman said.

Sadie walked around the edge of the first stall. Granny Grace was sitting there in the hay with her granddaddy. For a second she was embarrassed, not sure what she was seeing, not able to put any of it together. She didn’t think she’d ever even seen her granddaddy lying down before. Her eyes went to his feet. He had his work boots on. They were fallen over, one to each side, like his feet couldn’t handle the weight of them. His overalls were stretched tight over his skinny legs. The tail of his checked shirt had come loose, and one corner was now poking outside. He’d hate that. He’d always liked things neat and tidy.

Granddaddy’s head was in Granny Grace’s lap. She was stroking it lightly. His eyes were closed and his lips hung loose. He might have been sleeping but Sadie knew he wasn’t.

“Used to buy my eggs,” Granny Grace said smiling. “And he’d trade me for things. He’d ask me to make a powder for his feet, or something for his sore muscles. He didn’t need it I dont reckon, but I made it like he needed it. He’d give me vegetables and meat, all kind of things. Once he asked me to make him a poultice for heartbreak, said he might need it someday. I told him not to use too much, might make the womens run after him. A good man, your grandpa.”

“What happened?”

“Stroke, child. They used to say that’s what the fairies did, touch your heart with they magic and make it stop.”

“Cant you do something?” Then she was crying so hard she couldn’t talk.

“I aint no fairy, honey. Aint no witch, neither, not really. I knows a few things. But aint no comin back from where your grandpa gone.”

Chapter Eleven

M
ICHAEL WOKE UP
on the couch twisted and sore, his head coming apart. He’d fallen asleep there listening to his grandmother’s story. He staggered into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. The right side of his face was deeply creased by the cushion. His eyes were red, inflamed, and there was a yellowish cast to the whites. He felt as if he’d been crying for days.

Of course he hadn’t known his great great grandfather except through her memories, but when she told her stories they weren’t like
her
memories. They became his rage and despair and sweet love, each a charge of pure emotion that ran through his veins like a drug, in fact so like a drug that he felt muted without it, disconnected from his primary sources of feeling. Almost immediately, when her stories stopped he felt in withdrawal. Having once been so reluctant to have her begin, now he didn’t really want her to stop, didn’t want to eat, sleep, dream on his own as long as she was talking. Even though her talking seemed to steal everything out of him, as if he didn’t have his own life anymore.

As overwhelming an experience as it was listening to her stories of her long ago days, he couldn’t recall many of the actual words she’d used to tell it. He’d begun to realize that she was using fewer and fewer words to tell these stories, didn’t have the strength or the energy for any more. And yet his visualization of that lost year in Morrison had grown sharper with each of her tellings.

And there were other stray, trace images he didn’t think had ever been conveyed by her, but which he had seen on his own. Whether they were real, whether they had actually happened, or if they were merely the random generations of his own over-reaching imagination he had no idea.

Lodged in his head like a stake was a vision of the preacher surrounded by several young women and numerous writhing, aggressively moving snakes. The women ran, but they were unable to escape being bitten, by the man, or by the snakes. The women fell to the ground around the preacher as the snakes returned to him, climbed his legs and encircled his body. Several bit him but he appeared unaffected. He seethed, near out of his head.

Michael looked at his watch. It was ten AM. He never slept this late; he was surprised his grandma had let him. “Grandma!” he called, running into his bedroom to change shirts. “Sorry! I overslept! Wait right there!”

He knocked on her door and went in — she wasn’t there. He couldn’t tell if she’d even been in there to sleep; she seldom fully made her bed anymore. It was something he should do for her, but she’d always seemed reluctant. “Grandma!” He went back through the house and paused at the door of the sitting room where the two of them had been chatting the night before, where he’d fallen asleep, but still — he now realized — hearing her. Had he even missed a word? Was she inside his dreams now?

She was still sitting in her rocker, but slumped over. He ran to her and gently grabbed her shoulders, pushing her upright slowly. “Grandma, wake up. You fell asleep in the rocker. Grandma? Grandma are you okay?”

She moaned softly, but didn’t open her eyes. “Come on, Grandma, wake up!” He moved her shoulders, afraid to shake her much more. Her lids opened slightly. Her eyes looked pale, silvered. “I’m too tired,” she whispered, so softly and with so little lip movement he wasn’t really sure it was her speaking. “Cant do my chores.”

Michael bundled her carefully into a blanket and carried her out to the car. His leg throbbed terribly, almost more than he could bear. He assumed someone at their small regional hospital could get her inside because he could already tell he wouldn’t be of much more physical assistance the rest of that day.

As Michael was closing the car door a long skinny gray house cat crept out of the woods a few yards away. Michael stopped, trembling. Part of the left side of its head had been shaved, as if for some medical procedure. There was a long scar that ran from just below the left eye almost all the way to its mouth. It was the ugliest cat he’d ever seen — there was no way he’d ever forget it. But it was the same cat he’d seen in Denver a few days before deciding to come out here. He felt sure of it, except he couldn’t be sure of it of course because it was impossible.

He hadn’t been out driving in several weeks and it was painful to step on the brake. Still, he found himself tapping it almost immediately as he was leaving the yard. Down the hill in the overgrown ruins of the old church something had changed. Michael leaned over the steering wheel and stared: a section of the rusted tin roof appeared to be floating unsupported in the sky. He climbed out of the car and stepped in front of it, leaning back against the hood, wanting to go down for a closer look but not daring to leave his grandmother alone.

He wasn’t sure when was the last time he’d looked downhill from the house. The last several days he’d been inside, taking care of his grandma or simply consuming her story for hours at a time. Probably the last time he’d given the abandoned church building a good stare had been when the crew was removing the kudzu from around the house, and that had been no longer than a week ago.