Blood Kin (27 page)

The patience of his family surprised him. They all just stood there quietly, looking up the hill, not saying a word. Some of them closed their eyes, their lips twitching like they were saying their own personal prayers to themselves. It wasn’t like them. He hoped the funeral didn’t last any longer than their patience.

The preacher was staring in Sadie’s direction. Mickey-Gene didn’t think she knew, which was a good thing. Mickey-Gene felt like he would just melt away if someone looked at him that way.

Sadie’s mother finally got there with two of the cousins. She came up behind Sadie and started whispering. “Lowell Jepsen says he’ll take eighteen dollars to forget about what your daddy did. That’s the same as two gallons of his hooch he figures he woulda sold if Bobby hadn’t interfered with him. We’ll take care of it... after.”

Then she stepped back and stared up the hill at the ongoing funeral. But after only a couple of minutes she was crying, and a couple of minutes more and she was sobbing about as loud as a person could sob. Sadie kept touching on her and holding her hands but it only seemed to make it worse. Lilly’s family kept turning around and looking, some of them with angry faces, and eventually all the Gibsons had to leave.

S
ADIE’S MOTHER POUNDED
on the jail door a good five minutes before Deputy Collins finally came to the little window. He looked really nervous and he insisted on everybody speaking their name out loud before he would let anybody inside. “I aint gettin a minute asleep till the county sheriff comes and picks up your Jesse.” Sadie’s mother scowled at him. “No offense.”

“I aint here for Jesse.” She poked her finger into his chest until he backed away. “I dont want to hear that name spoke in my presence, if’n you dont mind. I’m here for my husband. I put that eighteen dollar together for that sorry moonshiner to drop the charges.”

Deputy Collins looked embarrassed. “I aint supposed to know about that. And he aint here. Maybe you could go find him.”

“You’re gonna take that eighteen dollar and hold it for that moonshiner to come back round for it. And you’re gonna let my husband out. Unless you want me to talk to the sheriff about the local moonshining and what you aint doin about it.”

“Oh he knows. Everbody knows, Mizz Gibson.”

She slapped the money down on his desk and started up the stairs. “Best bring them keys,” she said over her shoulder. The rest of the family waited for the deputy to pass and followed him up the stairs to the cells.

Sadie’s daddy was in the first cell. It was old and a little rusty, made out of flat pieces of metal that crossed over each other in a lattice with square spaces about six inches on a side. It must have taken someone forever to build, and it was probably empty most of the time — you had to do a lot to get locked up in this town. He’d heard that Deputy Collins only locked folks up if he really had to. Mickey-Gene thought it looked more like an iron crate or a bird cage than a jail cell. Bobby Gibson grinned up at them from the stained mattress. “He lockin up the moonshiner?”

“No, he aint,” her mother said. “But you’re getting out.”

“I tell you that moonshiner
paisened
my brother. He wouldn’t done such a thing otherwise! That shine put the idear into him!”

“Daddy?”

He looked at Sadie as if noticing for the first time that she was there. “Jail’s no place for a girl,” he said, frowning.

“Daddy, it wasn’t that moonshiner put the idea into Uncle Jesse’s head.”

“Girl, this is grown up business here. You shouldn’t even be talkin bout such things.”

“But it was the preacher. You need to leave that man alone. I was there at the church. The preacher scared Uncle Jesse with his snake, and then he whispered something into his ear, and he kissed him on the lips, like he does with some of his saints. And after that Uncle Jesse and Aunt Lilly and I went to their house and that’s when he did what he did.”

Then she stepped back, as if her pa could have reached through the bars and hit her. Mickey-Gene held his breath, thinking about how awful all this was, and waiting for her pa to explode.

But he didn’t. He just stared at her, and his eyes went off somewhere, and he licked his lips, and he straightened himself up on that cot. “Daughter,” he finally said. “You best just go home. Jail’s a bad, bad place. And not for you.”

Sadie glanced at Mickey-Gene, turned and went down the hall, and Mickey-Gene followed her. But they didn’t go back downstairs. Sadie led him around the corner, to this cell they had in the back, away from the others.

It stank of sweat and alcohol and human waste. There was a big lard can with a newspaper over it in one corner, and Mickey-Gene was pretty sure that was supposed to do for a toilet, but he didn’t think it had been used in a while. A ragged, sorrowful figure was shackled to an iron ring in the center of the floor, and he didn’t think the prisoner had ever been let loose from that. Tin plates of half-eaten food were scattered on the floor around the prisoner, and a biscuit and a carrot on the floor between the cell door and the figure. Mickey-Gene assumed the deputy had just slid the plate across the floor rather than get too close, and occasionally something would tumble off. The cell door wasn’t even locked — that iron ring and those shackles would have held an elephant securely. The deputy was a nervous, cautious man, and Mickey-Gene didn’t blame him for a certain caution after what Jesse had done.

Before he could stop her Sadie was inside the cell approaching her Uncle Jesse. At least she was walking slowly, talking softly. Maybe if he suddenly went crazy she could get out in time.

“Uncle Jesse? It’s Sadie. Oh, Jesse, I’m
so
sorry.”

The figure stirred, uncurled, shook. Mickey-Gene saw the shiny spots on Jesse’s clothes where he had fouled himself. The stench was worse now, terrible, and yet Sadie showed nothing in her face. Jesse turned around, squatting because the chain was so short. Like a duck or a frog. His eyes came around from under his matted, greasy hair, slick gray stones at the bottom of pits dug out of the mud by hand. His mouth looked broken. Somebody had hit him a few times between then and now.

“Jesse?” Sadie crouched a little, on her uncle’s level. “Do you remember?” She paused. “What did the preacher say to you, back there at the church?”

He stared at her. “Sadie? Sadie, how’s my Lilly?”

Mickey-Gene could hear the little gasp she made. In the yellow light of the one narrow window her face looked damp and shiny. “Do you remember, Uncle Jesse? The preacher had that big snake wrapped around him, and he whispered something to you. Just between the two of you — no one else could hear?”

Jesse shook his head, shook it again, like a dog that had something crawling around in his ear and he couldn’t get it out. “Said she were a demon.” His voice croaked like the creature he resembled. “Women, they all got secrets. He said that, and I know it too. They know what you need to hear, but they dont always say it. They know things you never will, but they dont want to share none of it. I seen it myself, I just didn’t know it was because they had a demon in there. That preacher, he knows all about demons, always did.” He shook his head again. “Used to be my brother. Now he’s... more.” He shook it again, this time with fury, as if he might snap his own neck. “Lilly okay? Why aint she visited?”

Sadie was sobbing. Mickey-Gene eased himself into the cell, more terrified with every step. He could smell the blood again and there was this roaring in his ears, his own panic and a woman’s screams, drowning in red.

“Sadie?” Jesse’s head went up, his eyes wide and staring. Mickey-Gene began pulling Sadie slowly out of the cell. He could feel the world breaking apart around him, dibs and dabs of color and sound, and all of it flowing and making new patterns in the world that spread and divided through time. “Sadie!” Jesse screamed, pulling against his chain, and the both of them ran, flowing past the deputy and the running Gibsons, down the stairs and out into the town.

Chapter Seventeen

M
ICHAEL FLUTTERED HIS
eyes as the town faded from his view of the hospital room. Increasingly it had become difficult to tell if he fell asleep during these tellings, or if he simply entered an intensive and altered, listening state. He looked at the chair across from him where Mickey-Gene slept. It jolted him. Had Mickey-Gene fallen asleep just as Michael was entering normal awareness? He couldn’t make sense of it any other way, because if Mickey-Gene had fallen asleep much earlier then who had told the story?

The man sitting across from him was nothing like the man Michael had imagined when his grandmother started relating the story. When he’d been little she’d always told him not to “judge a book by its cover.” She should have told him the story of Mickey-Gene instead. Michael wanted nothing more than to hear more of Mickey-Gene’s life told in his own words. Or just to hear his take on what had happened to these people, and what this monster the preacher had been like.

After southwest Virginia in the thirties Michael was amazed at how clean and sanitized everything looked. Just this room alone looked so scrubbed, crisp, and perfect it might have been a dream. So when his grandmother started speaking to him again he didn’t even think to answer at first.

“Michael, did you... hear me?” Her voice was dry and weak.

“Grandma? Can I get you some water?”

She started to speak, and then just nodded. As he turned to get it Mickey-Gene was already there, smiling, handing a full glass to him. She took a few sips, cleared her throat and said, “So you’ve finally met your grandpa. You know you were named after him?”

It was an awkward moment. Michael smiled, shook his head. “You’ll have to give me a minute. You’re not,” he looked at Mickey-Gene, “this isn’t what I was expecting.”

“We haven’t lived together in a long time,” Mickey-Gene said. “But we were good together. After it was all over, or after we thought it was all over, we needed, well, no two people could have understood each other better.”

“It was me, I reckon,” his grandmother said. “Michael, you know I’m not always easy to live with.” She laughed softly, and winced. “Mickey-Gene’s a good man, and he knows, well he knows things I cant even dream of, and after everything that happened, it was
healing
, for us to be together. But I knew from the beginning the preacher
wanted
us together, it was something he’d
planned
. And that couldn’t be a good thing. Fact is, that had to be a
terrible
thing. We just didn’t know how yet. And it weighed on me so. I was the one who told Mickey-Gene to leave, after we had a child, and raised him. I thought maybe then we could pretend it never happened, that everything would be okay. But I was foolish, as foolish as I was when I was that barefoot girl running around messing in things she hadn’t a fly’s chance of understanding. I was just a fool, a complete
fool
. Your daddy suffered for it, and your poor mother — we couldn’t help either one of them. And now it comes down to you. What kind of legacy is this for a child?”

“Grandma, I’m not a kid. I didn’t
have
to be here.”

“Didn’t you?” She wasn’t crying, but she began to shake. “I think we
all
had to be here!”

Michael decided to take a break while Mickey-Gene talked to his grandmother. But before he left he said, “Granddad? Did you ever start painting? Did you work on your art?”

Mickey-Gene looked blank for a moment, then smiled sadly. “Not really. Just in my head. I filled my head with those paintings, but they never quite got outside.”

He wanted nothing better than to talk to his grandfather some more, but of course his grandmother had to be taken care of first. He walked down to the lunchroom, struggling to put it all together. Why couldn’t they have told him at some point? No doubt he would have been angry about it, but at least he wouldn’t have had so many questions.

Down in the lunchroom he watched a nearby elderly couple sitting and holding hands.
They are so old
, he thought,
maybe the oldest couple I’ve ever seen
. So old they looked like twins. One turned to him and nodded. Behind Elijah, Addie tilted her head forward and smiled at him.

“Did you decide to come back?” Michael asked. “I saw your truck leave.”

“He’s almost awake, I think,” Elijah said.

“Awake?”

“Best get him while he still lies,” Addie shook her head.

“I don’t...”

“Stop him before he stands up,” Elijah added. “He can be a real devil if he’s standing.”

“I’m sorry, but why...”

“And for sure before he strides. He’s got a helluva stride,” Addie said almost gleefully.

“Excuse me, who are you talking about?”

Addie stared at him, the side of her mouth drooping, as if she’d just had a stroke. “Oh, sweetheart. You haven’t been payin attention. That thing in the box, of course.”

The vision of the two faded even as he was looking at them. There was no one sitting there.

Clarence Roberts came into the lunchroom and waved to catch Michael’s attention. Clarence walked up to him, frowned, looking down at his feet. “Fraid I cant work for you no more, Mr. Gibson. I thought I knew what I was doin, but I’ve been plumb useless to you.”