Blood Kin (18 page)

From where the stream of kudzu had poured out between the trees behind the house Michael had a clear view of the church ruins, and as the men worked their way back through the trees removing the thick web of kudzu he still had an unobstructed view of that structure almost as far as the road. There the stream of vine turned and narrowed to enter the corrugated drainage pipe.

Michael gazed at where the kudzu had abruptly changed direction. There was no accounting for it. The woods were sparse enough here they provided no barrier at all to the encroaching vine. The kudzu should have just travelled straight on and filled the space. There’d been no reason for it to turn. There’d been no reason for it to restrict itself to the drainpipe either. It would have gone through the drainpipe certainly but it should have flowed over the road without anyone there to trim it back. Unless what it wanted was to hide itself until just the right time.

He watched as the men dug and exposed more of the crown and root system. Two of the crowns nearest the drainage pipe were a good three times larger than the rest, broad and flattened like rough, scarred palms, roots coming out like fingers that reached on and on toward the house until the point where the workmen severed them, hoping to keep them from going any further. One of the palms was darkened, twisted and mutilated on one side.

Michael watched as they removed the fingers, the palms, the roots that trailed into the pipe. The vine was so thick inside that the metal had ruptured, and as they pulled out each vine individually Clarence had to insert stakes to keep the pipe from collapsing completely and leaving a deep gulley in the road. As it was Michael would have to hire a crew someday to come out and fix the damage, if he ever could find a crew that was willing after this. His grandma had a lot of money saved up, but she might need it for other things.

They worked late into the night by flashlights, truck headlights, and lanterns. Grandma was up, having slept most of the day, and insisted on providing coffee. The men accepted but kept their distance from her. At one point a section of the kudzu curled up after it was severed and snapped at the men, slapping one worker so hard across the face he bled.

Michael lost some time then, watching Clarence bandage the man’s face. He saw the huge snakes striking, the boy and the girl pursued by the preacher in his black coat flapping through the woods. When Michael came out of it he left Clarence and the men to finish on their own, found his grandma sitting by the window staring into the inky dark, and asked her to tell him some more.

Chapter Nine

“B
IRTHDAY
G
RANS... THE
fog, oh that fog!” Sadie stared at her grandson, the words difficult to find and to choose when she did find them, so that although they came out infrequently, they came out strongly. “Gray ladies... those poor... those poor... gray ladies! They just... just faded away!” Just as her grandson faded away now, and her body grew smaller, and better formed, and without the physical pain that had plagued her for years. Not that that young girl didn’t have troubles. She did, and Sadie knew she always would.

The day of the Grans’ birthday began with a stubborn morning fog, catching on the ragged limestone spines of the hill slopes, and still clinging hours later like torn slips among the low scrub trees as the picnic spread was being served. Sadie guessed that meant there were cold patches where maybe the sun didn’t always reach. She’d found those places some early mornings herself, and they always made her feel bad, like some things never got better. Sometimes folks had to make do with sorry explanations because those were the only ones they had.

They’d set up the celebration at the campground, and she reckoned everybody she ever knew was out there on that knobby field that fell back behind the buildings on main street. The field was surrounded by trees, most of them too far away to give much shade, but there were a couple near where the big shelter used to be, and they planted the Grans there to keep their heads out of the sun. Folks treated the old people sometimes like they were fragile little baby birds you could scarce breathe on but if they were
that
delicate then how had they lived so long?

There was a clump of three or four crippled up maples about a hundred feet past, there where the old Mullins farm began, the wide trunks and the twisted limbs all tangled up in wild strawberry vine, and under and through it all the weeds that hadn’t been mowed in ages. That overgrowth was a long way from Sadie, so she couldn’t see much detail, but it looked like there was still some fog trapped in there by the vines. People stayed away from that area, she reckoned because of the mess, and whatever critters it hid, but her eyes kept going back there, as if they expected to see something.

Back in the old days they’d used this field for camp meeting, evenings of travelling preachers fighting to renew the faith of some but mostly hoping to bring new sinners into the loving arms of Jesus. There’d been the one big shelter with the roof and a raised floor in case it rained, and the smaller ones, for the church camp kids and little get-togethers.

She’d heard her mama say that all stopped ten years back when the preacher insisted on being a part of every service, and since he was the local minister those visiting men of God must have felt obliged to humor him. But give the devil an inch and you’ll wish you hadn’t because before long the preacher ran that whole camp meeting tradition into the ground. He wasn’t handling snakes back then but you couldn’t get him to stop once he got started talking, and sometimes he preached mean and sometimes he preached angry so the traveling preachers stayed away after a while and anybody not in the preacher’s own little group stopped coming. After a couple of years pieces of the shelters started disappearing, boards and tin roof and even posts, about the same time the preacher’s new church started going up. Nobody accused him but pretty much everybody knew what was going on. Nobody did nothing about it though, nobody did nothing about nothing in the hollow, and pretty soon most of those shelters were gone, and now all that field got used for was the occasional church picnic and maybe a game of pickup ball.

The only signs those buildings had even been there were a few posts too buried to move and some scattered piles of stones they’d used to shore up the old floors. Today folks were sitting on those stones and hanging baskets of flowers from the posts. What was left of a few steps now led up to nothing. People sat on those, too, even though they were wobbly. Sometimes the little children would take those steps up to the nothing and then jump off into giggles.

While everybody else was congratulating the Grans and finding their sitting place Sadie held back, standing under the trees behind Levitt’s where she could see pretty much the whole picture, how it was all laid out and who sat where. She wasn’t ready to commit herself. Sit by the wrong bunch and she’d get stuck in a bad place all day. She looked around for her granddaddy Simpson but it looked like he hadn’t got there yet. Folks had started eating and the younger ones were choosing up for games.

“Hey, Sadie.”

She looked around at him, staring at her, making her jittery inside with those wet eyes of his with the long girly lashes. “Oh, hey Mickey-Gene.” She turned back to the picnic. She could hear him moving up behind her. She tried to ignore him, but he felt really big beside her. Even though he wasn’t very big, he felt big.

“It’s like a painting, aint it? A painting that moves.”

Something hard loosened up inside her head. That’s exactly what she’d been thinking, only he’d said it better. “What you mean, Mickey-Gene?” She didn’t look at him.

“Well if you squint your eyes a little, and look at it all just so, they’re like dibs and dabs of color, paint maybe, or pieces of cloth. Real pretty. But it’s better cause they move around, like butterflies, or bees gatherin their honey. They get pulled this way and that, like there’s a river of them, and you can see them flowin along, and changin course, and some of the little pieces in the stream, they jump out, and then they jump into a different stream, and if you look at it all long enough, well, I think you can tell what they’re going to do next. At least I can.”

Sadie didn’t say anything for a time, because she was too busy seeing what Mickey-Gene was seeing. Then she said, “Mickey-Gene, you aint dumb like everybody says?”

She could hear him shuffling his feet. “Dont tell nobody. But I reckon not.”

She heard a sound then, a complaining, unhappy kind of sound but with no words in it. It rose up out of the field and floated over everything. People lifted their heads and stretched their necks trying to find where it came from. Sadie knew right away. It was coming from where the Grans were sitting. Addie was the one. How she knew which one was Addie from this distance when they both looked the same Sadie wasn’t sure. She just knew it was the kind of sound only Addie would make.

Addie was staring across the field and pointing, her face red and her mouth drooped open, and there where she was pointing was the preacher coming down that slope behind the livery, and he had two of his big saints with him carrying this long wooden box. Sadie could hardly believe it, but there was no mistaking it was the snake box.

The crowd separated to let them through, some of the folks clearly upset. A few even grabbed up their things and left. “You reckon he’s got his snakes in that box?” Mickey-Gene asked.

“That’s the box I guess, and he must figure folks are gonna
think
they’s snakes in there. But I cant believe he’d take them out in front of the Grans.” But Sadie wasn’t looking at the preacher and his box anymore. She’d been looking at the crowd, and there on the edge of it, just after the preacher passed, she saw a black-haired woman she didn’t recognize, all dressed in gray. She was staring at Sadie like she wanted Sadie to know something. The woman’s gaze was so intense that it made Sadie look away, and when she looked away she found another strange woman dressed all in cream-colored clothes, staring at her. This woman had light yellow hair and a pale face and eyes that looked... Sadie couldn’t even find the eyes they were so pale, and no eyebrows either, but the way that woman’s head was pointed her way, leaning forward, Sadie knew the woman wanted her to pay attention.

And that’s when Sadie could see them all so clearly, back under the distant trees that bordered the campground, and there between some of the buildings, and there, even there inside that overgrown clump of trees, where nobody could get into, and where the silver wraps of fog still lingered, a woman’s pale head was clearly visible, staring at Sadie.

“Did you hear me? Did you hear me, Sadie?” Mickey-Gene was tugging on Sadie’s arm. Gently, almost tenderly she thought, like he was trying to wake her up. “I said I know where the preacher gets his snakes.”

She turned around. “I figured he just trapped them here local. You mean he dont?”

“Last summer I spent some time with Aunt Mattie’s people around the coal camps above St. Charles. They kept tellin me to stay away from them hills up there, said they was full of holes cause of the mines, didn’t want to have to explain to Aunt Mattie why I fell into one I reckon — she’s pretty quiet but she can be a terror where children are concerned. Anyways, I talked one of the older fellers into takin me exploring, figured I’d find me some treasure. Silver maybe.”

“They got silver around here?” Sadie frowned, glanced back at the celebration. The preacher was standing on that box of his getting ready to preach. The thought of all those snakes wriggling around under his feet while he preached made her own feet tingle.

“Not that I know of.” He looked embarrassed. “I just liked the idea of it. It gave me pleasure. Anyways, we came up over a ridge and was coming around some trees when we saw his big old black hat and his coat, even though it was hot as He — Hades that day. He was looking into this dark hole there in the side of the hill and he was reading from this big old floppy Bible what seen better days, had it clutched up in his bad hand, you know, the one what’s dark and kinda tore up.”

“Yep, I know that ugly thing.” The preacher was raising his voice, but the people were restless, maybe because of that snake box, and maybe because they didn’t want to hear any preaching. So the preacher raised his voice some more until Sadie could hear the hoarseness in it. But she wasn’t hearing too many of the words, because she was looking for those pale women in the trees and in the crowd, and she spied at least three or four more than before.

“And Abraham was
old
, and well stricken in age, and the Lord had blessed Abraham in all things. And as the Lord says in Genesis, I’m saying to you now, we gots among us here Addie and Elijah, surely two of the oldest of the old in this world, forebears and ancestors, progenitors and part of the Gibson original flesh! We’ve come here today to honor them, and eat as much food as possible!” There was some scattered laughter, mostly among the preacher’s saints, but Sadie figured most people were reluctant to laugh in the preacher’s presence, not being sure how he might take it. Sometimes what sounded like a joke from the preacher was just him making a point of being cruel.