Blood Kin (10 page)

“Clarence Roberts and his son are here,” his grandmother said to him from the parlor doorway. “I think you best take a minute to say hello to them.”

Of the few dozen or so population left in the town of Morrison, Clarence was the only one he’d actually talked to. Miss Perkins and the others, everybody his grandmother had told him about, they were long gone.

Clarence and Benny were waiting politely at the bottom of the porch steps. Clarence made a living doing routine maintenance for various real estate companies that still owned parts of Morrison, and for private citizens like Grandma Sadie. He dressed the part, and acted it. In the city, Michael had never met anyone so deferential. Benny hid behind his daddy’s leg; Clarence held on to the boy’s collar. Here in the mountains the children were trained to stay close when strangers were around.

“Hello, Clarence, Benny,” Michael said awkwardly. “You’re here to clean out the weeds in that ditch line across the road.”

“Just takin what the Good Lord sends us,” Clarence said easily. Michael didn’t know what to say. Benny looked up at him with wide, frightened eyes.

“This will be done today, wont it, Clarence?” Grandma had stepped up behind him.

“Cant promise you nothin, but I spect so.”

Benny had squirmed away from his father and was looking at a butterfly on a bush. Clarence reached over and pulled him back. “I’ll give you away to that man if’n you dont behave, Benny.” The boy looked stricken. Clarence looked back at Michael. “Best be gettin on with it, I guess.”

“Sure, thank you, Clarence.”

“That man’s never been outside this valley,” she told him later. “His son probably wont leave, either. Granddaddy once told me Appalachia was a reservation and probably always would be. One of the truest things the man ever said.”

Clarence and his son crossed the gravel road and approached the weed-choked ditch. Above their heads, a new shoot of kudzu drifted down from the upper branches of the thick wall of trees. Michael stared as it wiggled slightly in the breeze, making a lazy S.

“Y
OUR DADDY ALWAYS
held you back. I’m afraid I cant explain that.” Grandma rocked furiously, as if gearing herself up to continue the story. “I heard him one time tell you ‘You cant do nothing,’ but that was always something he’d believed about himself. You looked like him and talked like him — he felt you in his bones. He couldn’t handle all that, I dont reckon.”

“It’s okay, Grandma. I think I’m beginning to pull some of the pieces together.”

“Just remember that the way you feel their voices is just like real good guesses — you’ll never get them xactly right so dont start gettin too cocky.”

“I’m trying, Grandma.”

“Gettin stronger every day.”

“That I am.”

“When you feel somebody you have to
give
yourself away to them, and that’s a real hard thing to do, Michael.”

“A real hard thing, Grandma.”

“Dreamin makes it better.”

“Yes, ma’am, dreaming makes it better.”

“You’re a survivor, Michael. Just like me.”

“Just like you.”

“So now you’re ready to handle some snakes?”

He hesitated a second or two. Then he lied. “That I am, Grandma. Set them loose.”

Michael looked out the window. Clarence Roberts was beating a stick against the weeds, calling out Benny’s name. It was the second time today the boy had gotten lost out there. Michael knew there probably wasn’t any danger, but he didn’t want to watch.

Numerous long streamers of kudzu now hung from the branches of the trees on the other side of the ditch. It seemed highly unlikely that any plant could grow that much in an afternoon. Michael’s best guess was that bunches of it had gotten caught up inside the boughs, and then a little wind must have unsnagged it all to make it drop down out of the trees like that.

The kudzu was green and deep, and he was remembering voices in the valley he had heard only once, from a twelve-year-old farm girl, and some voices he had never heard before at all.

Chapter Six

S
ADIE DECIDED THERE
was one thing she needed to do before church that night, and that was to go apologize to her granddaddy. It didn’t matter if he saw the change in her, she reckoned. After tonight she was likely to be changed even more. It was a peculiar thing. She was just going to church, which was supposed to be something good folk did, but she felt like one of them condemned prisoners fixing to walk to their final judgment. And what if she got bit and died? The preacher was always saying that some did get bit, but the ones that had the right kind of faith survived. Sadie doubted she had that kind of faith. She didn’t trust nobody. And if she was going to die, she wanted things right with her granddad first.

She knocked on his screen door but he didn’t answer. Of course when he wasn’t sitting there reading one of his books he was out working somewhere, so she went around the side of the house to the barn. Granddaddy’s barn was something special — he built it pretty much all by hisself and he took pride in it. It was the
straightest
barn she knew of in the whole county. Most of them leaned this way and that like a lame fellow or a drunkard. But Granddaddy’s barn had all kinds of bracing inside, and to show it off even more he painted it bright red like they did in the nicer parts of the county, and he repainted it every other year so that it was as red as red can be. Whenever Sadie saw that red barn behind his bright white house she thought of a candy cane.

He was just inside the barn, sitting on a bale of hay, bent over with his head bowed like he was praying, both arms stiff on his knees. He had his hat off, so that the bottom part of his face looked red as a tomato, and his forehead that had been covered by the hat was white as flour. She almost never saw him with his hat off, not even inside the house.

“Granddaddy? You okay?”

His head went up a little but not all the way. “That you, Sadie?”

She came closer. “You see me now okay?”

His eyes squinted a little, and the lines in his face got deeper like he was in pain. “I reckon.”

But Sadie suspected he was covering up. “You want me to go get somebody?”

Granddaddy made a little tired laugh. “Who would you go get?” And that made her feel bad — her granddad didn’t have many friends in these parts.

“I dont know. Momma maybe.”

“Now dont go bothering her any. I’ll be alright. Just tried to do a little too much today I reckon.” He moved his head forward like he was trying to see better. “That your good dress you wearing? You fixing to get
married
or something?” He made that tired little laugh again.

“Oh, Grandpa, I aint even dating! No, I... well I just thought I’d go up to the church tonight.”

“What, that Signs church? Those snake handlers? Your folks know about that?”

“Oh, they know. It’ll be alright.”

“Awww, well. You just be careful. I’m not going to say nothing about them — people believe what they believe and I know some fine people who’ve taken to picking up snakes. Long as folks are sincere, who cares what they believe? It’s not what I believe but I dont believe a lot of things. Just be careful who you put your trust in, and the preacher, well, can you say you really trust that man?”

“Well —” Of course she didn’t. “He
is
family,” she said.

Granddaddy raised his hand. “I know, I know. Never you mind, sweetheart.”

“Granddaddy, I’m sorry about how I was, earlier.”

“Never mind that. Older folks shouldn’t be parading their quarrels around children. It isn’t right that I said something like that.”

“That’s okay.” She looked down, scraped her shoes against the ground. She realized then she should have probably put on her better shoes for church — they didn’t have as many scratches and tears in them. “There’s just lots of things about — I dont know — my family, this town — I dont understand.”

“Lots of things I dont understand, neither,” he said, “and at my age it’s pretty near too late to try. There’s just one thing I want you to think on some. You spend your whole life down here between two mountains and you think the whole world’s like this. But Honey, the rest of the South isn’t even like this. And lots of folks cant seem to figure that out — they judge us by our lowest. That’s the thing what bothers me.”

“Maybe, but how does that matter to me? I have to deal with what I see with my own two eyes, and what I can feel, and what I can smell, and what I can taste. And right here and now, things taste pretty bad.”

She felt a pain in her left side then, numbness in her arm, and she saw the way his face wrinkled up. “Granddaddy —”

“Sadie, no more stealing from Miss Perkins’ shop, okay? You don’t need to do that — you’re better than that.”

She felt her face go hot. She thought she would just about die. “Grandpa, I’m sorry. I don’t know why —”

“It’s alright. There’s lots of reasons we do the things we do, but that has to stop. I found out and I paid her. She’s not going to tell your folks, but you’ve got to promise me, no more.”

“I promise.” She felt that pain again. “Grandpa —”

“Best be getting on to that church, sweetheart. I’ve got lots to do here.”

“Okay, you take care,” she said tenderly. She swung around and started walking away then, the pain burning brighter for a second, then gradually softening the farther away she got. “Love you!” she shouted back over her shoulder.

“Love you, too!” he cried out, so fiercely the pain came into her side again, spreading into her ribs, and then into nothing. She would always wonder if she’d hurried away thinking the preacher would be mad if she was late, or because she’d wanted to outrun her granddaddy’s pain.

Sadie’s hands went sweaty as soon as she saw those words, “The First Church of Signs of His Return” printed in thick black paint on three gray barn boards nailed to a maple downhill from the church building. She figured the tree didn’t much like being nailed into because it had bubbled up dark brown sap that dripped across the middle of all three boards. Course somebody like the preacher probably thought that a good thing — it looked like dried blood.

The preacher’s house was past the church, further up the hill, where the land started flattening out into woods and cornfields and the like. It looked dark and dreamy now with the sun down and a lantern hanging on the front porch. Folks said the preacher mostly walked around the house in the dark, only using the lantern if he had somebody with him. Sadie wondered how he read his Bible with it dark like that, and that made her picture him with his eyes glowing like some critter back in the woods. She shook that off though because it scared her.

The church didn’t look too much like a church except it’d been whitewashed until it was as white as white can be. It didn’t have any kind of proper steeple or a little room on top for a bell like the Baptist Fellowship over in Clinch had. Sadie hardly ever went to church but when she did she went there to the Clinch church with her momma. She’d liked it — they had real pews to sit on and the people were all pretty quiet and dressed up nice for the service and smiled a lot and talked real polite. None of the mountain churches were anything like that and this one was supposed to be the worst.

What this church did have was a big ugly drippy cross painted on the side of the building with that same rough black paint that had been used on the sign. There were torches stuck in the ground for the people to see their way in and they made that paint shiny like it was still wet. The church also had a passage from the Bible painted on it in crooked lines and letters all different sizes like a crazy man did it (which he
was
). She could just imagine the preacher climbing up and down ladders with a messy brush and paint can in his hands, and skittering around hanging from a rope making all those letters.

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpeants; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. MARK 16 17-18

Those two Bible verses filled up most of that side of the building, even a little bit of window glass where he’d made one of the l’s too tall. She noticed right off that “serpents” was misspelled. She didn’t know if that made it a big mistake because it was in
big
letters, or if maybe that was the church way of spelling serpents. She had to give the preacher a little credit. There wasn’t nobody going to walk into that church without having some idea what went on there.

People were trailing in from the cow paths that ran up the slopes and through the woods, mostly farm people she didn’t know — there were lots of folks in the back hollows that almost never came into town and just had their store orders sent up on a wagon. Off on the left side of the church somebody had tied a few horses to the fence. There were only two or three cars she knew of in the area, and she had no acquaintance with their owners, and it was looking like none of them went in for snake handling.