Blood Kin (32 page)

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” his grandfather muttered.

“Hush, Mickey-Gene,” Grandma said, patting his grandfather’s leg. “It’s not a good time.”

“You know it seems like the preacher wasn’t that much of a threat to you that night,” Michael said. “After he killed all those people. Slaughtered them. He knew you were coming. Obviously he was just waiting for you. From what you’ve said, it looks like he gave himself up pretty easily. Did he even put up a fight? Did you even raise your gun?”

“He might have,” she said. “His falling back like that, all helpless like in his chair, that might have been a trick. He might have been trying to catch us off guard. But then that’s when they all came into the house.”

“K
ILL ME NOW
!” the preacher said again. “Put me in that box and carry me out to the field! That’s what you want to do, aint it? Go ahead and do it!”

Sadie raised the rifle. “Just you shut up! Shut up now! We got to think about this!”

There was a pounding on the front door. Then the thunder came in, a roar and a knocking around that swept through the house, bringing the angry voices with it. Mickey-Gene, standing in front of the door to this room, looked at Sadie. The snakes were in a frenzy. She ran over to pull Mickey-Gene out of the way.

The first one through the door was Sadie’s mother, her hair sticking out, face a wild mask. She carried a double-barreled shotgun, firing one barrel immediately into a cluster of snakes that had gathered on the floor nearby. The preacher moaned.

“Tell me one reason I shouldn’t let you have it with the other barrel, take your head clean off!” she shouted.

The preacher just grinned. In a county where folks couldn’t always afford good dental care the preacher still had all his teeth.

Daddy came around Momma carrying a pitchfork. He drove it through the preacher’s hand into his open Bible. Sadie noticed that the hand was the one with the dark poison spot. The preacher didn’t make a sound.

George Mackey pushed through the people jamming the door, towering over everybody. He carried a short, thick piece of wood. He nodded once at Sadie, then swung the stick and hit the preacher full in the face with it. The preacher’s head jerked, blood and a few teeth spilling to the floor. Mackey stooped and picked up the teeth before leaving.

Several folks crowded in then, so many there was considerable pushing and shoving, with Mickey-Gene stepping in between Sadie and the more aggressive members of the crowd. She wanted to tell them to wait, there was something wrong about how the preacher was being and they needed to just stop awhile and figure it out. But there were too many of them, and they wouldn’t have listened to a girl her age anyway. Several had been drinking besides her daddy. As places were sorted out Will Shaney ended up at the front with several other members of the preacher’s congregation, including two tall men Sadie recognized as part of the preacher’s troop of saints, their faces calm, their eyes moving back and forth over the crowd. Mr. Shaney carried a heavy-looking hammer in one hand, a cluster of long nails in the other. Sadie’s mouth went suddenly dry. “Mickey-Gene,” she whispered. “This is getting out of hand.”

“We trusted you,” Mr. Shaney said, “we all did. You were our preacher. You read that there Bible to us. And after what you done, well, I dont know how, but you killed my boy didn’t you, or you were part of it?”

Someone in the back yelled, “Go on! Shoot him!”

“Shooting’s too good for him,” one of the two saints said. He laid his hand on Mr. Shaney’s shoulder. “I know how you feel, sir, but
Christ
was crucified. It would be a sacrilege to use them nails on the preacher, givin that polecat the same treatment as our lord Jesus!”

The other saint walked over and kicked the box under the preacher’s feet. The snakes inside jerked and hissed, making the box buck. “Be a shame to separate the preacher from his pets!” he said.

There were shouts of agreement and several people grabbed the preacher. He didn’t struggle. The two saints pulled some poles out of the corner with hooks on the ends and stood by the crate.

“Well, aren’t you gonna say somethin?” someone shouted. “You’re a preacher, so preach!”

There was a moment of silence. The preacher looked at them all and smiled, but only with his lips. His eyes remained cold and dark. “Well, you folks should at least know your Ecclesiastes
,”
he said. “Remember there’s an appointed
time
for everything! There is a
time
for every event under heaven! And I know when
my time
has come! And some day so will you!” Then he looked directly at Sadie and Mickey-Gene. “At least I see you two are together.”

They pried off the lid of the crate then, the saints holding down at least a dozen snakes as the people threw him in with them. Sadie saw that the snakes were biting him already, and although his body jumped a little with each bite he didn’t make a sound. “He’s tryin to get out!” one of the saints cried, but Sadie didn’t think it was true. That saint took out a fresh-looking wooden stake, and grabbing Shaney’s hammer from him, drove that stake right between the preacher’s shoulders. Even the eager ones in the crowd shouted and drew back from that terrible act.

Then the saints crashed the lid over the preacher’s flailing body, and they helped Will Shaney nail it down, spacing the nails only a few inches apart all around the rim. They argued over who got to carry the crate out to the field, and eventually they decided they would all take turns, and a bunch of people lifted it and carried it through the door, Mickey-Gene trailing behind.

The ones that stayed back looted the few belongings left in the house. Sadie saw several older women walk out carrying crosses, including the one she’d hit the preacher with. They went through the house like banshees, yelling and screaming and taking everything.

Daddy was the first to come back, sweaty and out of breath and stinking of hooch. He put his pitchfork down and leaned against the wall, grinning sloppily at her. “You shoulda been there, darlin. We made him a little bitty grave house just like he was a decent person, put the crate in there and threw a little bit a dirt on it. But he
was
my brother, so he oughter had
some
kind of grave. You know there was still thumpin on the inside of that crate, the preacher or them snakes or both, hard to say.”

“Where’s Momma?”

“She’s still all wound up, bout Lilly and her Simpson kin and all. She’s just runnin around out there in circles, pretty much. You know what she said when we threw on the dirt? She says ‘Now he’s partly above ground and partly below. Just like a snake! He’s just some kind of animal,’ she says, ‘that dont deserve neither heaven nor hell!’ I just about bust a gut!”

“So you’ve done what needed to be done?”

“I reckon I did.”

“Then you got to go, Daddy! You got to go away from here and never come back! I cant be worried about you messing around with me no more!”

“Now listen here, girl! Who do you think’s the man, the
father
, goddamit!”

She raised the rifle and pointed it at him. She tried to ignore the shaking barrel. “Too late. Too late for that! Now git before I pull this trigger!”

He stared at her for a little while, his drunkenness draining away. Eventually he went out the door. She would never see him again. Her mother would never mention it. It would be as if he had never been. Over the next year she became the mother Sadie had always wanted and they eventually moved into the preacher’s house. It would have some terrible memories of course, but you never turned down an inheritance in 1934 in Morrison, Virginia.

Chapter Twenty-Four

M
ICHAEL MOVED THE
pickup gradually down a tunnel of green. He couldn’t see the road bed. It was matted with crushed vine and layered leaves. The leaves appeared wet, as if the mass of kudzu had created its own weather. He could feel the tires slipping, the manual transmission trying, and failing to find purchase. Afraid he was going to slide them off the road, he barely pressed the gas pedal.

“So he let himself get caught,” he said to his grandmother. “He could have gotten away. He could have killed you both. But he didn’t.”

“No, he sure didn’t.”

“And you knew something was up, I got that. I was there, in that way we have of being there. For whatever reason, he wanted to be buried that way, alive.”

“No, Michael. Not buried, exactly. His saints, it was supposedly their idea to put him in the box with his snakes.
That’s
what he wanted.”

The truck was moving so slowly it was almost at a stop anyway, so he made it complete. His grandfather was nodding slightly, rocking, his eyes half-closed. “He also wanted the two of you together. And you knew that.”

“I knew that,” she repeated, “but I was just a girl. Mickey and I came together years later, after Momma died. I made myself believe the preacher was dead — why wouldn’t he be? I didn’t think it mattered anymore. He wasn’t in our lives anymore, he just wasn’t. But then we had our son, your father, and later you were born, and Mickey and I, we could see it.”

“See it?”

“Our part in it. Your granddad here was always quoting that play, about how everybody has many parts to play...”

“
As You Like It
,” he said.

“Yep, that’s it. And how you say your lines. Everybody has their lines, everybody has their parts.”

Michael started moving the truck again. The green tunnel trembled. “Just like I have my part,” he said.

“Yes, baby.”

“The preacher was waking up again. Somehow I must have known. It was time to play my part. I got myself injured, trying not to come back here, trying not to play my role.”

“Yes, baby.”

“But I got back here anyway. I guess it was in the blood. I had to come back.”

“All these people. All these innocent lives.”

“I dont know any of them,” he said. “I dont know them. I shouldn’t have had to come.”

“If you hadn’t come he would have killed everybody here anyway, and still gone looking for you, and he would have killed people along the way you might have cared about.”

“All our yesterdays,” his grandfather muttered. “The way to dusty death.”

“Hush, Mickey. Hush,” Grandma said.

“But what does he expect of me?” Michael gripped the wheel angrily, trying to keep the pickup from sliding off the road. “What can he possibly expect?”

“That you’ll be like him,” she answered. “But you aren’t like him.” And then she stopped. “Are you?”

They came out of the green tunnel before Michael could answer. He pulled over and got out of the truck. He had some difficulty orienting himself within all the layers of what he was seeing, but as best he could determine the house and lawn were now entirely contained within walls of flowing and mutating kudzu. Even the sky had been obscured behind a lacy baffle of vine and leaf that moved to let in light, then floated closed and tinted everything in variations of green. The rest of the space was filled with the intricately imagined grounds and structure of what Michael thought might be a wealthy Victorian-era estate. But the style of it kept changing, so sometimes he thought he was seeing Roman features in the design, and sometimes Egyptian.

Of course it was possible that it was all his own imagination creating the effects, because the entire thing was made from kudzu — he couldn’t even see the original underlying house and trees anymore — so what he was actually looking at were sometimes geometric and sometimes amorphous cloud shapes abstracted from masses of pulpy green leaf, blossom, and vine.

Smaller mounds of kudzu rose and collapsed within this more or less level part leading up to the house. Sometimes these shapes resembled the statues of lions you sometimes saw as protective figures on either side of entrances to large houses, but other times they were more bear-like or even bird-like, giant hawks or swans. He led the way forward to the first “lion” and tried to look it more directly in the face: the eyes were hollow green shadows, and inside the roaring green mouths there were still more layers of deepening green, a leaf or two stirring like a tongue.

He insisted that his grandmother and grandfather stay behind him as he moved past these figures. He could tell how much trouble they were having maintaining their balance on the constantly shifting vegetation. The grand doors of the green mansion yawned just ahead, and as they approached he heard the figures move behind him. He glanced back and watched them as they first appeared to run, then dissolved into the floor of green.

“Did you ever know the preacher to have this kind of power?”

“No! I think this must have come to him while he was in that crate,” Grandma said. Michael flashed back to that image of the saint driving that fresh-cut wooden stake into the preacher’s back.

Above the entrance and stretching across the entire front of the house, an elaborate balcony was decorated with twisted vine and leaf filigree. He saw just a brief moment of white there, followed by folds of rushing gray. He knew immediately these were the gray women he’d seen in his grandmother’s memories, but in person they were even more chilling, their faces translucent enough to show jaw muscles and necks stressed to the extreme, the tongues inside ragged with decay. They paced the balcony with confused, awkward movements. At the front left corner of the kudzu house was a circular room — maybe a music room — that extended up into a kind of tower, except the top appeared unfinished, the runners and topmost leaves waving about aimlessly. There were more gray women in the tower, dancing with each other. Michael thought about kings, and the brides of kings, and wondered if maybe these dead women were all the preacher’s brides frozen in their youth.