Blood Kin (28 page)

“What are you talking about, Clarence? You’ve been doing great for my grandmother and me.”

Clarence shook his head. “That kudzu is back, and it pretty near covers
everything
. You cant even see the house no more. I never seen the like, and I cant deal with something like this. This black magic stuff. I got a family.”

“Clarence —” Michael was shaken. What was he supposed to do?

“Maybe you should get that dirt checked out!” Clarence shouted over his shoulder as he left.

Michael could hear his grandmother babbling as he came up to the second floor. He raced to the room. Mickey-Gene was struggling to keep her in bed. “It’s like in
Macbeth
,” Mickey-Gene said. “The woods of High Dunsinane hill, coming against him.”

“I knew he felt betrayed by all of us,” his grandmother began. “But I didn’t think he’d take it out on
them
.”

Chapter Eighteen

T
HE TOWN WAS
almost empty. It made no sense. They’d had the most gruesome murder anybody had ever heard of and the murderer in the local jail and the deputy scared to death of angry folks taking his prisoner and her daddy almost shot the most popular moonshiner in the county and there were two big families now that didn’t know how to talk to each other and of course there was the preacher going a little crazier each day. Who walked around with a snake under his shirt curled around his chest and belly.

She’d have thought people would be in the street gossiping, hanging around for the latest development. Unless they were too scared to be. Unless they were hiding in their little houses waiting for it all to play out.

“We got to talk to the Grans,” she told Mickey-Gene. “Are you coming with me?”

“Course I’m coming. With the preacher running around I cant let you go off by yourself. But do you think it’s safe up there at the Grans? If we had to holler for help nobody would hear us.”

“It cant be helped. I’ve got to
talk
to them! I took the preacher’s Bible and he
still
did that thing to Jesse and, and to Lilly.” She stopped, stared at the ground. “And maybe that was partly my fault, because he was so angry. There must be something more I can do. And I reckon maybe only the Grans will know what that is.”

“Do we need his Bible?”

“There’s no time. Besides, it’s too risky to carry it round till we know what we can do with it. If we run into him before then, how could we stop him from taking it away?”

Maybe it was because she was so tired, tired of everything, like if there was just one more terrible thing she’d lie down in the dirt and let happen whatever was going to happen. It seemed to take a lot longer to get up to the Grans this time than before. The mountain seemed steeper, the sun hotter, and her legs weaker. Every once in a while she’d stop to catch her breath and she’d turn around to see how high they were and it looked like she was the highest she’d ever been. She would have loved to live up there, so that she could see things going on but she’d be enough above it to look toward the sky and still feel it was in her reach.

She had a sudden terrible thought that maybe the preacher had already done something to them. The way he’d acted at the birthday picnic, she’d been sure he’d meant them harm, but they were family, and the preacher worshipped family, or at least family blood.

Should she have talked to somebody about it? Was this going to be her fault? But she wasn’t old enough for that kind of responsibility — they couldn’t put all that on her and expect her to take care of things.

Granny Grace would keep an eye on them — she was sure of that. It was just the kind of thing Granny Grace would do. She clutched Mickey-Gene’s hand and pulled, trying to hurry him. He was wheezing, but he was keeping up.

But once she reached the top of the ridge she was confused. The Grans had had a lot of junk lying around outside — parts of old cars, farm equipment, old steam-powered machinery, and a bunch of things big and small she had no idea what they were or what they did or how old they were. Now the ground was clear — hard-packed clay and limestone slabs and ugly little trees, a scattering of grass between. There were a few drag marks, and scattered ruts and holes and rectangular pits where heavy things had once stood, but no sign at all of the actual things that had once been here.

They walked around a small stand of cedars to get to the Grans’ house, that little one-room shack that had been so full the personal debris had been spilling out of doors and windows. The door was wide open so already she could see the difference. The porch was empty, without even those old rockers they’d had. And there was nothing visible just inside the door.

“Do they really live here?” Mickey-Gene asked beside her.

“You’ve never been here before?”

“No — you’re the only one I ever knew of to visit the Grans at their own place. Is it always so quiet and, I dont know, empty?”

“I only came the one time,” she told him. “But no, it wasn’t like this.

“Maybe they’re visiting?”

“I dont think they visit. Elijah? Addie?” she called. There was no answer.

She started walking faster and jumped up on the porch. Mickey-Gene stumbled on the steps and swore. Then she was standing in the doorway, staring. Mickey-Gene came up behind her. “It’s empty,” he said.

“Completely.” Although she wasn’t sure she fully meant that, because the Grans had left something behind. She went in, Mickey-Gene close behind her.

The wooden floor was scrubbed and polished, without even a piece of lint or sliver of paper to distract from the beautiful red oak grain. The walls were painted with a continuous mural that wrapped completely around all four sides, with even the two windows and the door worked into the design. The mural obviously wasn’t new — the colors were unevenly faded and there were scrape marks and some gouges where things had rubbed against or struck the plaster. But it was still in pretty good shape. Sadie figured that all the things stuffed into this house — she hadn’t even been able to see the walls before — had served to protect it.

She wondered which of the Grans had painted it, or if both had. It was possible they’d had someone else paint it for them. But it seemed too personal for that.

Her eyes were drawn to the ceiling. It was such a dazzling white she almost expected a window there — it was like clouds that had soaked up the sun — or some kind of white fire (Was there such a thing? Maybe in the Bible.) Something was written faintly in the center of it. She kept moving around trying to find an angle where she could see it better. The lettering was pink-colored, and thin in places, as if there hadn’t been enough paint on the brush so some of that improbable white shone through, like a ghost burning up through the skin that wrapped it, an idea which thrilled and amazed her.

Finally she was able to read it.

Psalm 139 - I will praise You for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

The mural around the walls started with an obscurity and a heaviness down by the floor — dark browns and blues and blacks showing rocks and fallen trunks, old bones and what crawled beneath the bones, and a fluid that ran through part water and part oil and a melting of body fat.

In the layer above was the living soil, active with creatures and their burrowings, and a certain fire, a promising warmth that Sadie could not find specifically in either the colors or the shapes. Plants began there, forming a complex layer of green, the branches above in harmony with the roots below, and both resembling the engravings Sadie had seen of the circulatory systems of humans, and how lungs and hearts and brains were like the fruits, or the flowers of those systems, or the lightning bolts that branched out of the multiple layers of sky reaching for their opposites.

The sky of the mural went from white to blue to shadow and then to that unusually brilliant white of the ceiling. It wasn’t the same in all places, which made it seem that much more real, that much deeper, so that she kept staring into it, expecting to find something in the distance.

The land, too, wasn’t the same in all places. There were close hills and distant folds of mountains, flatlands and hollows, and even one flat ridge rising above the trees and populated with little crude houses and tiny figures she couldn’t quite get the details from but which still seemed familiar.

Overlaying the landscape were large rough outlines of people spaced around the room, varying in size and slightly in shape but still recognizably human. These had no features but the colors that filled them ranged from that dazzling ceiling white to softer pinks and reds like floating mists of pastel lights, soups of chemicals and human beings turned spectacularly into gas. And despite their lack of detail Sadie was convinced they were still supposed to represent specific human beings and when she stepped up to one it was almost a perfect fit. It was like her shadow but more like her shadow’s opposite.

“It’s like a church,” Mickey-Gene said beside her, and although she agreed with him she thought it was certainly unlike any church she’d ever been in in her part of the country and obviously it was much more.

Another Bible passage was written into the sky of each wall:

Isaiah — They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.

And,

Corinthians — Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.

And,

Corinthians — we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

And right above the door that led in and out of the house,

John — Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

Sadie thought about that as she left the Grans' house for the last time. She had so many questions for the Grans, but now she really didn’t expect to see them again. How long had they sat in that house, painting and then gazing at that mural, before filling up their house and hiding it? Did they just forget it was there, or did knowing about its secret existence only make it more powerful? Of course she had no right to the answers to any of these questions, and maybe that’s why it had been hidden. What’s theirs was theirs — they didn’t owe anyone answers.

“Sadie, slow down! You’re going to hurt yourself!” That was poor Mickey-Gene shouting behind her, scared to death himself but still trying to keep up, still trying to protect her. But she was sure they couldn’t have much time. Maybe it was that urge she’d had just to stay up there on the mountain, maybe even move into the Grans’ old house, and not worry about what was going on with the rest of her family, or with anybody else down in the hollow. She could be above all that. She was just a child really, and she wanted a child’s life.

But she couldn’t let any more people die, and she could feel it in her body all the way to the ends of her nerves that more people were going to die if the preacher wasn’t stopped.

“We need to look at the preacher’s Bible!” she shouted back to him. “Maybe Granny Grace already has it figured out and she can tell us what we can do with it!” He was yelling things back but he was so out of breath she couldn’t understand him. She stumbled a few times, but still kept her feet. Her stomach dropped so rapidly in her descent she had to fight sickness. She was worried maybe she wouldn’t be able to find Granny’s place on her own. She might need extra time for that. Mickey-Gene would just have to keep up best he could.

She was about a hundred yards ahead of Mickey-Gene when things started flattening out a little, coming up to the edge of her grandpa’s old farm. Her need to go over and talk to him about everything that had happened since his death, to talk to him about anything, was overwhelming. Grief seized her face and turn it into a mask he would not have recognized.

The trail off the mountain disappeared into the curve of the dirt road running past his house. The barn was still as tall and as red as ever, the finest barn in three counties. Two wagons were pulled up along the side of the house facing the road, the first full of furniture and the second mostly empty, horses hitched to both. Her mother had told her the Simpson clan was returning to Wythe County that morning, saying that Morrison had gotten a little too “rough” for the likes of them. The farm would be put up for sale, and they’d given Momma the pick of whatever was left in the house before the sale went through. But they should have left by now. They were for sure going to have to ride over some difficult mountain road in the dark if they left this late in the day.

No one was in sight. As she passed the entrance to the farm she kept turning her head trying to get a better look. That was how she saw the big, sloppy lettering almost the color of the barn up on the side of Grandpa’s pretty white house. She turned around and trotted back, just as Mickey-Gene reached that point in the road.

“Sadie, the preacher’s Bible...”