Blood Kin (2 page)

He used to wonder if maybe he was too smart for his own good. The arrogance embarrassed him now. He used to believe that if you were smart, you understood that life was meaningless. Tomorrow and tomorrow and more tomorrows still. All of it the same, all of our concerns petty. Without substance and full of dramatic, idiotic gestures. Perhaps that was true but at least now he wished it wasn’t.

Here, tucked up under the Morrison Ridge, many looked at him with vague suspicion; his color had become a central fact of his existence. His confidence was damaged, but more than that, the fact that he had behaved so badly when he’d had the advantage of an exotic appearance made him feel shame. He was darker than most. He was Indian or black. He was maybe part Portuguese or gypsy, or some throwback or creature from another world. He had skin the color of walnuts or papaws or light maple syrup. Sometimes he fantasized that when the sun went down you couldn’t see him, and he might slip his dusky body through a crack in your sleep and make himself a yellowed shadow in your dreams and whisper vague things to you that would disturb you and maybe your entire family forever. Quite a few people in the hills went mad; folks had to have some reason, somebody to blame. He was a Melungeon, or descended from them.

These days lots of people claimed the lineage — because off and on it was fashionable. When it wasn’t fashionable, any hillbilly with slightly darker skin was accused of it and looked down upon as shiftless or lazy. But he decided to take pride in it, even though he didn’t really understand what it meant, and even though some members of his own family had clearly been unworthy of the heritage. He had to take pride in something, with the things he had done, the disappointment he must have been to his friends because of all the broken promises, how he had used them.

His grandmother had never mentioned his drinking or his drug use, but being around her now, he realized she must have known.

At least he couldn’t get a variety of drugs here, not good ones. The heads in the county used that cancer drug Oxycontin, hillbilly heroin. There might be some meth, but so far he hadn’t seen any, and he’d never leaned in that direction anyway. The county was dry, and some of them still drank moonshine because it was cheaper than whiskey, accessible, and had a terrible kick — it tasted like some kind of fuel, kerosene maybe. You could buy some from this kid Mark Jepsen, if you really wanted to. Jepsen’s family had been in the moonshine business for generations.

Michael wasn’t seriously tempted. Apparently he had a window into not only other people’s needs, but also his own. His rehab counselor used to say he’d never really change unless he hit bottom, but Michael never would hit bottom. He knew how to hover just above bottom, and maybe that wasn’t a good thing. He wasn’t using anymore, but he was far from cured. Maybe he didn’t want to be cured. His addiction was his secret pill, something he could always take if things got really bad.

But how did you fill your day? That was the big question. You had to fill it somehow.

When he lived here as a teenager any one of his elderly female cousins would take him into their very similar parlors and tell him the story of the Melungeons, with little variation in the telling, except that Cousin Lillian’s version was always a mystery story, Cousin Ella’s a kind of heroic epic poem.

“No one knows where we come from,” Cousin Lillian always began her tale, whereas Ella was likely to start off with something like, “This is the legend of the Melungeons, your forefathers and mine, their trials and tribulations, their struggle against blind prejudice, and their eventual triumph as one of the finest and most respected old families in the Morrison valley.”

Needless to say, he had preferred Lillian’s version, even after hearing it a dozen times. She always forgot having told him, and she wouldn’t have heard him even if he had said so.

“The first Scotch-Irish explorers into the East Tennessee mountains discovered us,” Lillian continued. “On a high plateau, in an area where white men had never been seen and in fact further than any civilized person was thought to have ventured until that time, they found a village of almond-skinned people — similar in color to the Portuguese or Indians — who spoke a kind of Elizabethan English. They had simple tools, and crosses, and appeared to practice a variety of Catholicism. But they had no written records, and even the oldest of them had no idea how they first came to be there.”

At this point Lillian would pause as long as ten minutes to let that first part sink in. Despite himself, every time Michael was intrigued by the enormity of the mystery surrounding the origins of his people. Then Lillian went on about how the Melungeons, from the French
mélange
, “a mixture,” were considered blacks or worse to early white Southerners, and suffered some of the same restrictions concerning voting and land ownership. No one ever uncovered the answers to their mystery, although the theories were many. Cousin Lillian preferred the one that said they were Raleigh’s Lost Colony. Cousin Ella liked to think they were descended from Ponce de León’s men. Neither cared to discuss the theories that they were descended from runaway slaves and half-breed squaws.

Grandma Sadie almost never spoke about Melungeon history. Michael wondered if she thought it useless now. Maybe she didn’t think it had much to do with her. Once when he brought it up she said, “Oh, we be
darker
than that. And I aint talking about skin. We aint hardly even Gibson. We come from a
darker
branch.”

And that was as much as she would ever say on the subject. Grandma’s version flavored Lillian’s in a peculiar way — they didn’t seem inconsistent, but maybe just two facets of a complex whole. Michael imagined the day those explorers first found the Melungeons up on that plateau, and this one group hiding unnoticed off to the edges, shadows of the others, strangers among the strange.

“Mich... aaaell...” The whisper was soft like lizard husk dragged through leaves, the lizard jerking his legs slowly to rid himself of his old suit. The way her breath broke in the middle of his name... she was old, God, how she was old.

He turned on his hips and stared at the greasy oval on the screen door. Two spots of egg white appeared, and dry lips the color of earthworm. “Michael...”

When the lips disappeared into the dark of the stain,Michael stood up and limped toward the door. The leg was better, but some mornings it still stiffened up, and fought him.

They said nothing for most of supper, although he could hear her lips moving wetly, preparing to speak. He could hardly bear it. He thought he might scream, waiting. “You heard me... fall, Michael.” The whisper crackled like an old recording. She kept her head bowed, her nose hovering just a few inches above the sweet potatoes and tiny piece of pepper steak, so that he couldn’t see her lips move. It was a maddening habit; sometimes he thought she did it on purpose, to emphasize her power over him.

It was as if she spoke inside his head. “Michael...”

Only his family had ever called him that. He hadn’t been called that when he left here. Everywhere else it was “Mike,” or “MG.” “Michael” was a stranger’s name.

“Michael...”

He looked at her. Why didn’t she just say it?

“You want me dead...”

At last.

“I... do... understand.” She said nothing more for the rest of the meal.

He did his leg exercises after dinner. Back in Denver, before he was lured here by his grandmother to help take care of her and in return live rent-free, he’d stopped doing them, preferring pain pills that numbed him just enough without wiping his memory of the stupid thing he had done. His girlfriend at the time, Allison, pretty much did everything he wanted or needed. All he had to do in return was make her feel an essential part of his life. He’d had an enormous talent for that sort of thing. Sometimes now he thought about writing her and apologizing, but he wasn’t sure if she would understand why he was apologizing. He liked her — maybe someday there could be something there. But better for her if she never heard from him at all.

He couldn’t get cell reception out here, and his grandmother didn’t own a phone. Whoever heard of not having a phone? For a while he just used his cell phone to play games, until he got bored and put it away in a drawer somewhere. He wasn’t exactly sure where.

She at least had an old TV hooked up to a small antenna outside. It got one, sometimes two channels, both of them fuzzy. Sometimes he watched the news, but the news outside seemed to have less and less to do with the world here in the hollow. Now and then he’d watch a show or an old movie, but night scenes were impossible to see on that TV, so sometimes he’d just make up where they were. It was like living in the old times, in the days before any significant electronics. And the crazy thing was she seemed to like it that way. Crazier still was that he was starting to get used to it.

It seemed inevitable now that he be here. He’d been on his way back here ever since he left. Even as the red Chevrolet bit into his lower left leg he’d known he was going home. As he flew backwards into the sculpted shrubbery that lined the street he knew his grandmother must be waiting for him, sitting up with his pain in her own ancient legs. It had almost made him feel guilty, but not quite. He’d made another bad decision.

The parlor/sewing room was stacked high with folded materials in dusty red, green, and blue, baskets full of brocade and buttons, chairs piled high with patterns and books and catalogs twenty and more years old. He found his chair by the old Singer, and waited for his grandmother.

To come in. To get on with the story.

He’d been back almost two years. Every night at this time, sometimes a half-hour earlier, never more than fifteen minutes late, she camein here to tell a little more of the family tale, her tale. The first month she had made him come in here, in that cracked voice, that unaccountably compelling way she had, and when he began resisting in earnest she just sat next to him wherever he was, outside on the porch or in his own room, and began to tell the tale again. You couldn’t win against a crazy old lady.

He was thirty years old with no life, living with his grandmother. He couldn’t leave here, and he wasn’t even sure why. He felt like one of those women he used to date — wanting to leave, but somehow she was preventing it. And yet he kept coming back for more.

Once he’d limped out into the woods, almost as far as the resting fingers of the kudzu, and she’d followed him painfully out there, stumbling and sliding — he’d heard her protesting joints from yards away and it almost sickened him, did sicken him when he began feeling it himself. It took him an hour to carry her back to the house, and she’d been bedridden a week.

Every evening of that week he had gone to her bedroom to hear the story. She had talked and he had listened.

Now it was expected that he wait for her in this room. He almost, but told himself “not quite,” detested the old woman, maybe most of all for the waiting. She was pretty much in control of everything.

After all, a rotting iron-clad crate waited for him. Or what was inside, the name he did not know or care to know for fear he’d be calling it down on him, and him so ill-prepared. Not yet. He needed more of his grandmother’s tale.

He couldn’t help listening. For it was also his story.

He sometimes wondered if she would ever let him clean this room, this mausoleum of old cloth and dress patterns. Since he moved in she had had him excavate relics and mementoes and trash from corners and behind stairwells and the backs of built-in drawers and cabinets all over the house, sorting through things thathadn’t seen the light in decades. He imagined taking them from the dim artificial light of the old house into the more intense light of day, and watching them crumple or dissolve or rise into smoky wings circling the house before drifting into the trees. Anything was possible here.

His grandmother would examine each item for flaws, cast some — a very few — away, give others to Michael to look at or do with what he would, and put others back into the cabinets herself.

It was the items she gave him that troubled, because he never could figure out her criteria for the gift. They always looked much the same as the ones not chosen − old letters, newspaper clippings, and bits of toys, buttons, and Christmas ornaments. He would stare at them for hours trying to fathom their secrets, the secrets she meant for him to have.

Most of all, he resented the responsibility she gave him. It was now
his
decision whether to save any individual item or throw it away. Sometimes this took a long time — he’d look for opinions hidden within her expression but she was blank as stone — and, after all that, he’d change his mind. He’d foolishly scrabble through the trash searching for what he’d thrown away. It disgusted him... the power she had.

Thiswas one of the hand-made houses you saw all over this part of Virginia. Piece by piece over the past two years he’d learned that its first owner had beena farmer, a hermit really, by the name of Jacobs. Grandma’s uncle the preacher, Michael’s great great uncle, had bought it from Jacobs. Or obtained it by some other means; Grandmaseemed unwilling to commit herself on that point. One day Jacobs just left town on the back of a broken down mule he’d gotten from the uncle, not saying one word, just staring at the country he was leaving, not even bothering to take most of his belongings. The next day the preacher moved in, where he would live until Grandma’s father finally took over the house.

Michael hadn’t gone far enough into the tale yet to know what happened to the preacher. According to Grandma the present-day parlor was all there’d been to the original house. The woodwork in this room was darker and grainier than anywhere else, and the construction just different enough to show that anotherpair of hands had worked it. Walls and ceiling and broad, shiny floor came together pleasingly in this room, once you subtracted the clutter. The preacher apparently had made no attempt to duplicate such serenity in the rest of the house.

If Michael were to back out of this room, slowly, he would find himself in a narrow hallway that ran up the west side of the house. Back up too quickly and he’d already be in the kitchen, where walls tilted slightly away from each otherso that you might very well go dizzy if you stared too long.