Blood Kin (29 page)

“Wait a second. We need to check on things here.” She ran past him and went through the gate. When she came up beside the wagons the horses jerked their heads nervously. She checked the wagon beds — one was full of Grandpa’s best furniture and the other had a few piles of quilts and linens, some clothing, with some chairs and benches for passengers filling the rest of the space. “Hello!” she cried. There was no answer.

Mickey-Gene came up beside her. “What’s that noise?”

She focused on sound: the horses flicking their tails around their hips, their occasional snorts, and the rapid pulse in her ear, the rise and fall of the flies’ buzz. “I dont think...”

“The preacher’s been here,” Mickey-Gene said. He’d gone ahead of her to the side of the house where she’d seen that loose lettering.

The flies were a little louder in their complaints (or was it a celebration?) as Sadie walked up to him. Something red had been rubbed onto the clean white house to make the lettering. It reminded her of when some kind of meat would half fall out of Homer Goin’s rendering truck and make a smear as it was dragged down the road. The flies were the same, too, spinning around and settling down to feed, then taking off again. Buzzing the whole time.

The smears had been pushed around to make letters, like a kind of rusty red paint with here and there lumps of fat or threads of skin to make the letters more physical, and unforgettable.

It said,

Luke 21:16 — And ye shall be BETRAYED both by parents and brethren and kinfolks and friends and some of you shall they cause to be put to death.

Except some of the letters were broken and not all there and in a few sections a faint trail of blood was all that completed a letter, but Sadie could still read the message just fine. She looked down on the ground and saw the trail of blood leading around to the back of the house, punctuated here and there by a bloody boot print.

The flies were loud here, but not as numerous or as loud as they were somewhere else.

Mickey-Gene ran ahead and she tried to stop him. He was saying something but the flies were too loud in her head for her to hear him. She followed him and watched as he fell to his knees, his hands on his face, mouth open, repeating over and over something terrible and full of anguish and soul scouring but she couldn’t hear a word of it because the flies were too loud in her head.

But she could follow his hand as he threw it forward in a gesture of surrender, the finger pointing, shaking.

At the end of the house beside her grandpa’s back door they had left their dirty laundry, piles and piles of it fouled and smeared and layered with flies. It seemed like such a terrible and disrespectful thing to do, to leave such a thing for her mother to clean up. For a moment she just wanted to go to the back door and beat it down, scream at them to come out and take care of their awful mess. And she started toward the door to do that very thing, angrily waving the flies away as they seemed to be attacking her in waves.

Then she saw more lettering on the back of the house beside the door and it distracted her. She felt like she needed to read it just so she’d have some sense of the extent of their crime.

As it is told in Exodus — Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

She gazed down at the bloody pile to the left of the door and discovered that the dirty laundry had faces. Hands and arms and legs as well, but it was the faces of all those Simpsons from Wythe County that bothered her the most.

And then she found the smaller pile to the right of the door, and spread over the top of that pile as if to protect what lay beneath her was Granny Grace, her clothing even more stained and ragged than usual, her arms fallen out from their sleeves, her legs angled too sharply from where they left the bottom of her torso. One foot was bare and torn; the other had a blood-stiffened sock hanging from the toes. Her eyes were as wide open as Sadie remembered them, and the wicked smile was there, but extended somehow, and the width of her face seemed wrong, and her neck lopsided.

More words had been scratched into the dirt below Granny Grace, deep, dry, uneven scratches as if the author of all these verses had run out of his red paint.

Suffer the little children to come unto me — for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

That’s when she saw the small arms and hands, tiny legs of those rude Simpson children and grandchildren, peeking out from under Granny’s dress.

Chapter Nineteen

M
ICHAEL CAME OUT
of his grandmother’s story weeping and curled on the floor of her hospital room. He stretched his hands out and felt the tile, pushed himself up so that he could get a better look at his hands on the surface of the tile, feeling the smooth slickness. No grit, no dirt, no grass, no blood. He struggled to stand, finally managing by grabbing the hospital bed and pulling himself up. The room spun momentarily as his eyes tried to find his grandmother in the brilliant white sheets, thinking of that celestial ceiling at the Grans’ house, and not being able to find her at all.

He looked around. There was no sign of his grandmother, but Mickey-Gene was sitting on the floor in the corner mumbling “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” softly to himself with his eyes closed. Michael was still seeing him as he had been in that vision of a long ago yesterday, brilliant and confused and scared.

Michael walked over and touched his shoulder, shaking him gently. “Grandpa. She isn’t in the room. You need to help me.” Mickey-Gene’s lids shot open. He looked terrified, grabbing Michael’s arm. “Grandpa, it’s Michael. You’re just coming out of her story. Everything’s okay, but we need to go find Grandma. She’s not in the room.”

They ran to the nurse’s station. The woman in charge said she had seen nothing. She got on the phone while Michael and his grandfather headed for the elevator. As it opened on the ground floor Michael saw his grandmother going out the front door still in her hospital gown, dragging her overnight bag by one strap across the floor behind her. They reached her as she stepped into the parking lot.

“Grandma, come back inside.” Michael tried to grab the strap from her hand but she wiggled it away from him.

“We have to leave
now
.” Her voice was firm, and clearer than he’d heard it in some time.

Mickey-Gene tried to get ahead of her, made sure she saw his face. “Where you going, Sadie? You’re still in your hospital gown!”

“Going to that crate out in the field.
You
should know,” she said. “You helped put it there.” She kept pushing forward about as fast as Michael imagined her short legs could manage. They both were struggling to keep up with her. Mickey-Gene was carrying her bag now which allowed her to move even faster.

Michael’s grandfather’s face was pale, his eyes looking somewhere else. “You’re
feeling
something?”

“I’m feeling that we’ve got no time for talking. We’ll take your pick-up. Michael can drive while you help me get dressed.”

“Grandma, Clarence says that whole area is under kudzu now. I dont think...”

“I
know
it’s all under kudzu, and I know that nasty vine is growing ever-which-way out there. That’s why we got to get out there, because I also know why it’s happening!” She grabbed the side of Mickey-Gene’s arm and started slipping out of her gown.

“Grandma!”

“If you dont want a public show then you better get me into that cab! Mickey-Gene, you still got that kerosene in the back of the truck?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“And matches? An axe?”

“There’s a bunch in the glove box. And yep, there’s an axe in the truck bed, a little rusty I’m ashamed to say.”

“It’ll do. Get me to that crate, Michael!”

“
What
is it?” He felt a little childishly resentful about her bossing him around this way. “Do you need to get something out of that crate?”

“No, child. I’m trying to keep something in.”

Chapter Twenty

P
SALM
50:19 — T
HOU
givest thy mouth to evil, and thy tongue frameth deceit.

It was written in dried blood on the floor of the millhouse with a scatter of yellow, white, and gold corn. The handwriting was thin, almost delicate. Sadie figured the preacher had cut open his own finger and used it to make the letters.

“He got his Bible back,” Mickey-Gene said faintly. “I’m sorry — I must’ve done it all wrong.”

“No. No. He has a sense for the thing, like a hound on the scent of what he’s hunting. I think he would’ve found it no matter what.”

“So what do we do now?” Sadie didn’t blame him, but she really wished he’d stop being so scared, and confused, or whatever he was. She felt terrible and mean-spirited for thinking it, but there it was.

They’d gone down to the next farm and told the old man there what they’d found. His son rode out to get the deputy and then over to tell Momma. Sadie and Mickey-Gene had waited by the wagons until everybody got there. It took very little to convince Momma not to go around back. The deputy had just asked who they thought could’ve done such a thing and Momma hadn’t even looked at him. She’d just stared at the ground and said, “The preacher. The preacher done it.”

Nobody said a word for a little until the deputy just spat on the ground. “I think you’re
all
crazy,” he said. “All you Gibsons and half the other families in town, all you Melungeons with your weird churches and your feuds and all. You cant tell me one man did this without no help, without nobody else knowing about it, and a
preacher
to boot. Little girl, did you
see
the preacher anywheres around here?”

“Nosir.” Sadie stared at him, mad, but what did she expect him to do?

“Then why does your momma think he done it?”

“It’s hard to explain,” she said quietly. Then she looked at him more directly. “It
cant be
explained really. You have to see for yourself, and ask yourself questions, like about how some things were even possible. Seen many folks in town today, deputy? Have you wondered any about why folks might be hiding out?”

“The law needs evidence, young lady. That’s how it works. The sheriff’ll be here in a couple of days. Maybe he can sort it out.”

“Maybe,” she said. “If it aint all done by then.”

There had been nothing silly about his questions. Sadie just didn’t know. It seemed unlikely the preacher trusted anybody enough to help with something so awful, but she couldn’t see how he could have done something like this by himself, unless he had changed some. But she wasn’t ready to believe that yet, because believing that made stopping all this seem impossible.

She told Momma she was going to take Mickey-Gene home. He hadn’t spoken up while the deputy was there and no one would expect him to. Momma barely even raised her head to say goodbye.

“So what do we do now?” Mickey-Gene asked again.

“I dont know. I dont see any use of running, do you? Where would we even go? The deputy aint going to do anything, at least not till it’s too late for us.”

Mickey-Gene kept staring at the Bible verse painted in blood onto the millhouse floor. “Well, I dont think he wants us dead. He had plans for us, right?” He still didn’t look at her.

“That’s right,” she said. “We’re blood. So we get to play our parts. The preacher knows exactly what he wants us to do and say — he’s got it all worked out. We just have to hope it all goes the right way. Maybe we can do and say things that are going to surprise him. You never know what’s going to happen. But as long as you keep playing, getting up and going out and living, something might just go your way. And if we ran, or tried to run, what would happen to all these folks we left behind?”

“‘One man in his time plays many parts’,” Mickey-Gene said. Sadie stared at him, thinking how exhausting it would be to spend much time with this person. “What’s that?”

“Shakespeare. His play
As You Like It
. It’s from that. During your life you play many parts — a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, a hero, a villain. You enter people’s lives and then you exit them. You say your lines — you inspire some people, and maybe some people hate you. And then, well, you leave the stage.”