Blood Kin (26 page)

The end papers and flyleaves had been used, like a lot of family Bibles he knew about, to record births and deaths in a kind of haphazard family tree of the Gibson family. Some of the earlier names were incomplete, or had a question mark beside them, or had been crossed out and corrected. The Grans were inside their own box that floated beside the others, with no relationship lines leading in or out of it, and it was also labeled with a red question mark.

Some of the names had the symbols of stars or planets or flowers drawn beside them, but he had no idea what any of that meant. Some of the more recent names, like Sadie, or Jesse’s children, were underlined, and some of those names were connected to other names with long, flowing arrows. Mickey-Gene blushed to see his name connected to Sadie’s.

The last page depicting the family tree was odd in that mostly it was just lines and arrows with spaces for names. But some marriages appeared to be planned, or speculated about, between family members, and there were even the proposed names for possible offspring. Mickey-Gene traced the lines for him and Sadie, saw that one simply said “,” and from there the initials “MG.”

Even odder was the preacher’s own lineage, in which the preacher had listed himself as “Jake,”with a complex list of spouses and children heavily revised then scratched out. But as far as Mickey-Gene knew the preacher had never been married and had no children.

The rest of the Bible was awash in notations, underlines, highlights, boxes and circles around certain passages, arrows connecting others. In many of the margins were numeric and text notations in a tiny, almost unreadable script, some with spirals and crude depictions of animals and embarrassingly lewd drawings of naked people doing a variety of things to each other, most of which Mickey-Gene didn’t even understand.

Some of the annotations were larger, bolder, as if the preacher had put just that much more emotion into writing them down. A number of these were about John Dillinger, who had been killed recently, and other criminals such as Pretty Boy Floyd. He had entered birth dates (and in the case of Dillinger a death date), specific crimes they’d committed, even comments on their relative good looks.

Other bold notes appeared to be about foreign countries, and camps, and factories where human beings were butchered like animals. Sometimes diagrams of these camps spread across the top margin. And in several places was the notation “Gibsons=Jews.” Mickey-Gene didn’t understand any of this, and the drawings were dreamlike and disturbing. The only thing clear was the size of the preacher’s anger, and the grimness of the visions that anger fueled. A man like the preacher was dangerous to have around, especially with any kind of following.

The preacher had used a variety of things to bookmark certain pages: strips of paper and cloth, yellowed receipts and dried leaves and pressed flowers and strings of various colors and thicknesses and in one place a huge insect Mickey-Gene didn’t recognize flattened and pressed between the pages.

Then there were the missing words. Throughout some sections of the preacher’s Bible individual words in the verses had been marked out with ink or blotted out with drops of blood or in a few spots actually burned out with something like a cigarette. These usually had something to do with sex, so that in Corinthians it was “But because of the temptation to
########
, each man should have his own wife” and in Deuteronomy it was “None of the daughters of Israel shall be a cult
#####
” and in Jude it was “Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in
#####
and pursued
#####
” and in Leviticus it was “You shall not
#####
.”

Other pages were so heavily altered with paint and lipstick and other kinds of ladies’ makeup and cutting and by other means that they resembled crude and terrible works of art concerning apocalyptic subject matter. These were mostly spread through the chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel, and Daniel. A great many of the words were obscured on these pages but the meaning was still pretty clear to Mickey-Gene.

In the Book of Daniel
four great beasts came up from the sea... The first was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings... another beast, a second, like unto a bear. And it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it; and they said thus unto it,
“
Arise, devour much flesh.
”

These creatures had been drawn in pencil across the pages of the Bible, and then painted in with lipstick or paint or blood or whatever the preacher must have had available. They obscured most of the words except for the ones the preacher wanted to emphasize. But what troubled Mickey-Gene most was their crude resemblance to other members of the Gibson family, and to people in the town, their flesh marred by terrible wounds and sores and things growing out of them which clearly did not belong.

On several pages he saw the scribbled outlines of masses of people lining up beneath a sign that said
Arbeit Macht Frei
. In some of the depictions black wolves were attacking and eating people.

And behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.

The eyes were actually like a woman’s, and the lipstick smeared mouth was huge and ugly and had terrible things swimming inside.

His throne was like the fiery flame, and His wheels as burning fire.

The rest of this page was consumed by flames painted in nail polish, between them glimpses of all the folks suffering and dying.

The visions of my head troubled me.

The preacher’s head, bare and bloody, his scalp being torn apart by winged creatures with barbed tails and many sharp teeth.

These great beasts, which are four, are four kings who shall arise out of the earth... and of the ten horns that were in his head... the horn that had eyes and a mouth that spoke very great things...

And everywhere Mickey-Gene looked in this part of the Bible people were burning, tortured, torn apart. What he couldn’t tell was whether the preacher identified with the victims, or the torturers, and sometimes he suspected both.

And shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down and break it in pieces.

Until finally the devil’s reptilian body rose up on a page, its head the preacher’s, whose face had turned ugly and insatiable, and the torn bodies of his victims hung from his many claws.

And his power shall be mighty... and he shall destroy wondrously, and shall prosper and perform, and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people.

Mickey-Gene closed the preacher’s Bible. His hands shook. His mouth gulped air. He struggled to regain control over his breathing. Finally he picked himself up and again buried the Bible in the bin full of shelled corn, digging and rearranging until every last evil swatch of it was completely obscured.

B
Y THE TIME
he got to his aunt and uncle’s house they’d already left for the funeral, but his aunt had left out some clothes for him, cleaned and pressed, hand-me-downs from his uncle. He dressed quickly and left, almost stumbling in the rutted hard clay road as he hurried. He hated coming in late to anything, with everyone staring. Life was always better sitting back in a crowd, trying not to do anything that drew attention to yourself.

He hadn’t talked to Sadie since Lilly’s death, and he was a little afraid to be near her for the first time. And yet he wanted to be. It was like wanting to jump off one of these mountains, not knowing whether you’d land on the rocks, or into one of those more or less soft trees.

There were people on the porch of Sadie’s house, some he recognized and some he did not. A couple of the faces were not complete unknowns, Gibson cousins he’d seen only once or twice. When he came up on the porch no one even noticed him. Then he saw her sitting on the far side of the porch, looking up at the ridge that rose like a wall all around them, that separated them so completely from the rest of the world he was surprised even light or air managed to get in. He went over and sat down beside her, but didn’t say anything.

“Daddy wont be at the funeral,” she said. “He went out early this morning, took his shotgun. A couple of the cousins came up from town a little while ago and told us that Daddy brought in that moonshiner Lowell Jepsen to the jail this morning, said he’d sold Uncle Jesse some bad hooch, and that’s why he did what he did. Deputy Collins got him to put the gun down, and then he locked him up.”

“Do you think your pa might be right?”

There were tears in her eyes, and she shook her head. Mickey-Gene reached over and grabbed her hand. A sudden lurch in his chest made him close his eyes. He was seeing the redness under his lids and then could taste the blood, the heavy flavor of it in his nose, and then he saw what Jesse did to Lilly, in that area of a woman’s body he had never seen, and he bit into his tongue trying not to scream.

“Mickey? You okay?” Sadie looked at him, so close, her hands holding the sides of his face. He wasn’t sure he could breathe. In fact he was pretty sure he had stopped breathing because the world was still red, and would soon explode into flame. “Mickey-Gene!”

She was crying. “S-s-sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” He made himself breathe deeply, and when the air proved cool and delicious, he relaxed.

“Mickey-Gene?” It was Sadie’s mother. He couldn’t quite look at her directly. That bothered him — he knew he looked like a dog somebody had been beating when he did that, but he couldn’t help himself. She was one of those people who always looked at him with suspicion. But Aunt Mattie was standing right behind her, making sure everything would be okay.

“Yes’m,” he said.

“You go on to the cemetery with Sadie. That’s alright with your Aunt.”

“Keep each other company. That’s the best thing,” Aunt Mattie said.

Sadie’s momma looked at her. “Sadie, you okay to walk with Mickey-Gene?”

“Well sure. Course.”

“I’ll be along directly. I got to go work out something with that sorry moonshiner, get him to drop them charges.”

Mickey-Gene could see the trouble in Sadie’s face. “Will they charge the moonshiner?”

Her mother shook her head. “They dont charge moonshiners round here, an how they goin to prove bad shine? Ask me it’s
all
bad shine. Besides, you cant tell me bad shine would make a man...” She stopped, looked away. “You kids go on. Least some of us should be on time for poor Lilly.”

Mickey-Gene and Sadie had been on their way for only a few minutes when this woman in a big floppy hat came running out of her house screaming. It wasn’t until she was almost to the barbed wire fence that separated her place from that little bank by the road that Mickey-Gene recognized her as Hattie Younger, who Mickey-Gene had never met but everybody said was crazy. Sadie started running and he started running too. The way that woman was screaming it was like the very devil was inside her working her loony mouth. Mickey-Gene was terrified. That hat on her was like a live thing, something with wings wanting to bite his head off.

Then Sadie just stopped right there in the road, her shoulders pulled up like a cat’s, her hands curled into fists. It was so sudden and unexpected Hattie Younger stopped screaming and came down to the fence. She bent down and looked at the two of them between the barbed wire.

Sadie turned and walked up the embankment. She reached between the two stretches of barbed wire, grabbed Hattie’s dress near the neck, and yanked the shocked woman’s head forward. The floppy hat caught on the top strand and flipped back off her head. Hattie’s head looked tiny between the twin strands, her eyes darting at the barbs above and below her. She moaned like a cornered cat.

Sadie pushed her head up close to Hattie’s until it looked like she was trying to smell the frightened woman’s face. She stayed that way a few seconds, and then she said, “I’m sorry your baby died the day I was born, but I didn’t do it.” Then she waited a few more seconds before saying, “Did you drop it? Is that what happened? Or were you just so crazy, even then, that you threw it down?” The woman started squirming, mewling, as if there was something burning her. Mickey-Gene found himself squirming, too, tortured by something he felt but didn’t understand. Sadie stood rigid, her smallish hands holding the woman still. He hardly recognized her. “Dont run after me again,” she said, and let her go. The woman tumbled back and just lay there in the tall grass.

They went on their way. Behind them, Mickey-Gene heard a screen door slamming, a boy yelling “Mama!” and “Sadie, what did you do?”

Sadie didn’t say anything for a long time. Mickey-Gene kept trying to get a good look at her face and she kept turning her head away. Finally he came around and stood in front of her. Her eyes and face were wet with tears. “I’m a terrible person!” she cried.

“You just wanted to get her to stop bothering you.”

“She was in Hell! And I left her there!” Sadie pushed past him. She scared him, and she moved him with her regret. He was hopelessly in love with her.

T
HINGS FELT SO
badly at the funeral Mickey-Gene was afraid he was going to throw up and make some kind of scene, and having people notice him like that right now felt like the worst thing that could happen. As it was he started crying from the tension, and couldn’t stop, even when everybody started looking at him — embarrassed or hateful. Even when Sadie took his hand.

Lilly’s family stood up on the hill around the grave, their backs to all the Gibsons who had dressed up only to stand no closer than forty feet or so down the hill. Lilly’s family brought in a preacher from that Methodist church down in the flatlands a few miles away. He spoke quietly just to that bunch gathered around him, his voice carrying no farther. Not like the preacher at all, which was a great thing, except the Gibson bunch would have liked a few words of comfort as well, not that Mickey-Gene believed there was any real comfort anywhere in this world.

He could see the preacher, just barely, up on the edge of the woods there above the graves. It would be easy to mistake him for something else, a tree maybe or some rocks, but Mickey-Gene had always been pretty good at picking out individual pieces in any kind of picture. The preacher was standing perfectly still, watching, ready like some giant dark bird of prey to strike when the time was right. Mickey-Gene wondered if Sadie had noticed the preacher, and she did keep looking up there, but he figured she thought she might have seen him, but wasn’t quite sure. After a while it seemed she got tired of looking, and just stared at her hands, or at the backs of Lilly’s other kin.