Blood Kin (17 page)

But the worst thing, and he couldn’t have explained it if he tried, was that just because he saw those things and felt those things didn’t mean he cared sufficiently, not really. He’d witnessed too much, felt too much, and just wanted them all to leave him alone — he wanted to know nothing about their problems. Some days it was all he could do to control his anger at everyone he met.

After he got his grandmother into bed this night Michael tried to get some sleep himself, but his head was too full of her life, the preachings and the snakes and the raw red violent griminess of it. He felt sorry for her — her childhood had been far worse than his — but he didn’t want to know any more about it. He could walk away, but he understood that the stakes were high; he just didn’t yet know why. What was he supposed to learn from all her stories?

Not that they were simply her stories anymore. The worst thing about her memories, the most persistent thing was they were no longer just her own. It wasn’t like listening to stories. It was like remembering something that had actually happened to you a long time ago and far away, when you had been very different from what you were now.

He didn’t remember falling asleep. He had been trying to recapture Sadie’s last vision of her Aunt Lilly. Sadie hadn’t described it to him — she hadn’t even tried. Michael had seen it through a cloud of red, but he hadn’t understood what he was looking at. And now apparently it was gone completely from his head.

The lines of the room eventually began to waver, to lose the vertical, the horizontal, to break and bend and travel, to dangle from the window sash, to sway and drop from overhead. It was almost as if he was running a fever and things were dripping, drifting apart. Those moving lines began to hiss and snap.

He bolted awake then, his body vibrating. And the snakes he had just seen in his dream were still there: a complex tangle of rattlers sprawled over the folded quilt at the foot of his bed, a bloated copperhead hanging from one of the brass loops of the overhead light fixture, liquid lines of black-smoke water moccasins weaving themselves into the texture of the bedroom rug, snake curves gathering along the back and arms of the overstuffed chair. He held back a shout until it became a sigh, and the snakes gently faded into shadow and folds, metal and wood. Except for the thin S-shape uncoiling from his window, extending its reach and trolling for anchor.

A couple of times in his life, after a long week of poisoning himself with alcohol and whatever, he had had visions like these, the DTs. But he hadn’t had a drink in some time and these felt far more than visual. He could smell the snakes in the room and hear their quickening rattles.

Michael slipped his feet into decaying flip-flops, grabbed a flashlight, and ran out into the yard in his boxer shorts. In the misty dawn light long tendrils of kudzu dangled from the front porch roof. He walked carefully around to the side of the house. Ropy vines had layered the boards under the eaves, their runners tasting whatever moisture lay in the rain gutters. Other runners lay poised beneath the upstairs windows as if waiting for the signal to break and enter.

He hadn’t been around to the side of the house, or the back, in a week or so. He knew that kudzu could grow as much as a foot in a day, but still, this much spread was impossible, wasn’t it? He shone his light on what appeared to be the main trunk, following it back to where a mass of leaves and vines obscured that entire corner of the house, a ragged cloud of green, devouring. The leaves at the end and sides of the runners were about the size of his hands, two- and three-lobed. There was something inexact about them, dreamy and incomplete. He tried to avoid them but one of them brushed the back of his hand. It was furry — not animal furry, really, but insect furry perhaps.

Turning the corner into a sea of leaf and vine, he had to back up to get a more complete sense of it. The kudzu had flooded in from a sparse gathering of trees behind the house, the larger vines woody and as thick as his wrist, crossed the lawn and risen like a hand with dozens of green fingers to clutch the back wall, the two chimneys, and the roof. It looked ready to pry off the top of the house in pursuit of whatever hid inside.

He didn’t want to step over, or on, any of the web of vines. They lay unmoving, and the fact that he’d even have cause to notice a lack of movement was alarming. Some of the smaller leaves and narrow stalks drifted as if floating in water. He followed the stream of vines back between the trees and out to the narrow road where they funneled into and filled the corrugated drainage pipe that lay under it. The edges of the old metal pipe were bent and split. On the other side of the road the vines reappeared from the end of the pipe and made their way into the larger woods. Here and there he could make out the hulking shapes of green where trees had been mounted, covered, and starved of light. He stood still and listened to the silence, broken now and again by tree limbs shifting and cracking beneath the weight of vine.

The next morning Michael called Clarence Roberts. “I need you to come back — the vine’s worse, I’d say a lot worse. Bring more workers. I... my grandma will pay them whatever you think is fair. As many as you can get.”

There was a long pause on the other end during which it sounded as if Clarence was breathing with some difficulty. Finally he said, “I can do that, and I reckon I can round up some helpers somewhere, but just so you know, I wont be bringin my boy round this time.”

“Well, sure.” Michael wondered why the man was telling him this.

“Now I know yer good people and yer grandma, she’s always been kind to me and my kin. But not everybody in yer family was always thataway, and there’s all them stories, hell, Mr. Gibson, I’m sorry, but he’s my
only
son.”

Michael was embarrassed — Clarence sounded on the verge of tears. “Well of course, whatever you need to do. I’ll pay you well.”

“You pay me same as always. I dont need no extry, and whoever I find, you can pay them regular, but only if they do a good job, and I’ll be tellin you if they dont do a good job.”

When he got off the phone his grandmother was standing there, staring at him. “My window was full of green this morning,” she said. “It aint never been full of green before. I reckon that aint just a big house plant out there.”

“Grandma, are you making a joke?”

She blinked at him, then said, “Dont remember how.”

He made her breakfast — bacon and eggs, tea, a piece of toast, and a couple of sliced oranges. She didn’t normally eat fruit, and she wrinkled up her face when she put it into her mouth, but she ate it all anyway. He explained to her about Clarence Roberts coming out with some workers, and how he planned to help out, and not to worry because he’d make sure she’d have the house back the way it was before.

She stopped sipping her tea and looked at him. “You know kudzu dont grow like that, dont you? Not even at its worst. Aint nothing natural about it growin out there like that. A person might dream it happens that way, I reckon. So maybe that’s what’s going on. That kudzu is somebody’s evil dream. You think you can cut down something like that?”

“I dont know what else to try. I know it’s not natural. Clarence knows it too. He says the roots come together into these crowns, just under the surface. He says that’s what we have to dig up and cut out, all those crowns. He’s going to show me how it’s done.”

“So you feelin it?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I mean are you feelin
him?
”

He knew she wasn’t talking about God, or the Lord, or whomever. “Maybe,” he said. “I think so.”

She nodded, put her cup down and leaned back as if exhausted. “Thought so. I know I aint done much to get you ready for him. I’m truly sorry about that.”

“Grandma, you hardly told me anything about the family while I was growing up. And nothing about this
sense
, or whatever it is, we have of each other. All you did was stare at me, watch me. There were days when I was a kid, I bet you didn’t say more than three words to me. How do you think that made me feel?”

“Terrible, I know. Made me feel terrible, too. But I was afraid. I had to be sure.”

“
I
was afraid, Grandma! I thought something was wrong with
me!
I should have found myself a wife by now, had a family...”

“Oh, no, Michael, you wouldn’t want to do that, not till you was sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“Sure you wasn’t goin to be like the preacher. That’s what I waited for, watched you for, to see if you was goin to turn out like me, or like the preacher.”

He stared at her. “I’d
never!
I was angry sometimes, sure — I was an angry kid, but I never did anything
mean
. I’d never
hurt
anybody! What would you have done, anyway, if you thought I’d turned out like him?”

She sighed. “Killed you, I reckon. Killed you dead and then some.”

Later that morning Clarence Roberts showed up with three other beat-up pickup trucks full of men, strangers to Michael. A couple of them looked slightly drunk and dangerous, but Michael figured Clarence would handle them as necessary. They all brought plenty of tools — axes and picks and shovels and big two-man pruning saws and saws smaller but with wicked teeth and ladders to get up the side of the house and onto the roof.

“I’d been here sooner but I’ll tell you true couldn’t find a soul here local willin to come. These fellers...” The back of his hand swept around as if he wasn’t too impressed with what it was pointing to. “They’re from over the mountain, down near that Crossroads Hotel. Rough as grits, but I reckon I can get them to work alright.”

“What’s the word in town,” Michael asked, “about all this?”

“I guess some of them folks weren’t all that surprised to hear of your problem. They figure it’s cursed ground, I reckon, but most folks dont much like clearin kudzu anyways.”

The men started on the house, simply pulling the furthest, smallest runners down by hand, snipping them, and rolling them into sacks. Three fellows climbed up on the roof and began peeling the mass of green off the shingles. Sometimes a vine would snag and break off in a crack, or maybe it had already attempted to root. Clarence sent men up the ladders after these, determined to remove every scrap of vine. “If you dont get it all it’s likely to come back. It finds a place it likes and it wants to stay. Too bad people’s cash crops round here aint that stubborn.”

They rolled up the vine until it got too big and stiff to bend, and then switched to cutting it into sections and then hauling each section, as best they could, to the trucks. All afternoon the trucks took the cut-up vine away to some location where Clarence said they’d burn it. Since big burns like that were illegal in the county Clarence didn’t want to tell Michael where the location was, “less’n you want to watch.” Michael gave his regrets thinking there’d be a lot of drinking involved and he didn’t want to be with this bunch when there was both fire and liquor around.

Clarence kept yelling at the men not to do any rough chopping at the vines and the argument came to a head when they started digging into the ground to expose the crowns that formed the nexus for each network of roots.

Clarence had several of the large brown masses exposed and kept staring at them as if he wasn’t sure what to do. “It takes them a long, long time to get this big,” he said. “Years I reckon. But I was just here less’n a week ago, and there was nary a plant I could see.”

They were about the size of basketballs, but not so round. Shaped almost like a brain, if the brain had been injured on one side and swelled up lop-sided. Several wrist-thick shafts of root came out of each crown parallel to the ground. Like water pipes, vegetable pipes. One of the men prodded a crown with a large axe.

“Hold on now, dont be swingin that axe at them crowns!” Clarence walked between the man and the excavated kudzu. The man looked angry, but stepped back and bowed his head a little. Clarence turned to Michael. “You got to take them out whole and get rid of them somewheres else,” he said. “You chop them up an you dont manage to pick up all them pieces of the crown, you just get more kudzu. And when you take it somewheres to get rid of it, you best get rid of it all or you’re just movin your problem around.”

Clarence got two men on each saw to cut out all the crowns as they were uncovered with about two feet of root sticking out on each side. Then they carried them to the trucks and went back for more, and where any of the runners had rooted they dug those out too to join the pile.

When a fellow brought a gas can over to Clarence there was another argument. “You want that fire to take the house and god knows what after?” was all he heard. The worker looked both embarrassed and angry.

A little way down the hill from the house were the remains of the preacher’s church. Growing up there Michael’d always thought it was just the ruins of some old barn. Instead of tearing isolated buildings down they just let the vegetation take them. The results were rather beautiful, he thought, but contributed to an overall feel of decay and extinction. When he’d asked his grandmother about that building she’d said, “Jest an old buildin. You keep outta there, boy! There’s rusty nails what give you the lock-jaw in there iffen you step on them. Spiders and coons and likely some snakes. Likely a lot of them snakes the poisonous kind. They swole you up dead most likely before I could even get to you!”

But once he’d heard his grandma’s tale he knew exactly what the building had been because of its location. And the fact that she would make up a warning about snakes to keep a child out of there now seemed gutsy, given its history. Unless it were true. He’d seen no snakes around the property, not ever. Still, he couldn’t see himself ever going in there. Not then, not now.

On the outside of the building there were no signs of the writing she’d described — any paint had long worn off. It was all splintered gray board now, with a few dark crumbling posts poking up through the wreckage of the rusted tin roof. The doors were gone, probably scavenged long ago, but the frame had held up enough to keep a lopsided dark cavern open at the ruin’s center for any child foolish enough to venture there. Most of it was covered in vine — not kudzu, probably oriental bittersweet — and here and there small pines or a foul-smelling tree of heaven filled some of the interior space. Sometimes rain beating on what was left of the roof made a continuous hollow sound like singing, if the singers had forgotten the words and made up their own language.