Blood Kin (33 page)

The leaves on the tower suddenly started fluttering like thousands of green butterflies. The tower itself began to spin, and some of the gray ladies were momentarily caught and torn apart by the force of it. The green tornado twisted out a minaret at the top. Green buttresses flew out of the walls to join other parts of the building. Michael rushed his grandparents inside.

Inside the viridescent interior, walls of vine separated and some ceilings lowered while others expanded into leaf domes. Long strands of vine hung down from the ceiling and swept through the space touching the leafy floor. Michael considered how far they’d walked already and decided they still hadn’t even reached the original house. So far everything they’d seen was mounted on nothing but madness and imagination.

Here and there Michael was finding Bible pages caught in the vine and leaf tangle. He collected them, trying to keep them in order. Mickey-Gene started doing the same, now and then handing over what he’d picked.

“Is that the preacher’s Bible you two are picking up?” his grandmother asked. “Dont keep nothing from me now.”

“It’s the very one,” Mickey-Gene said. “That Bible isn’t something I’d likely forget. I recognize some of the pages, especially the painted ones. Excuse me if I dont ever want to study them again, but I recognize them alright.”

“Then he was able to find it. He had that damned Bible,” she said. “So why’d he tear it up? Leaving it lying around like trash?”

Michael picked up some more pages. These were from Revelations. One passage in particular had been underlined and decorated with crude renderings of kudzu leaves. He wasn’t sure what had been used to create the drawings. It wasn’t pencil. It might have been a dirty fingernail.

there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations

Filling the next page was an attempt at a painting of a tree. Long curving lines of vine had been drawn and painted with what might have been crushed kudzu leaves, crowning the tree and traveling back across previous pages. The brown of the bark might have been dried blood.

“I’m thinking he just doesn’t need to refer to it anymore,” Michael said. “He knows it all too well. And I think he’s living the parts he believes in most.”

“Sound and fury...” his grandfather muttered.

“I feel bad he found it so easily,” his grandmother said. “I didn’t remember where it was. He must have torn the place apart.”

They soon found themselves in an overgrown area littered with debris. A shattered window frame hung off an upturned spur of kudzu. Nearby lay a pile of fractured wood, some of the pieces only a few inches long. There was molding, bits of floorboard, baseboard, a small section of door panel, and random splinters of plaster lathe, wall rubble and horsehair still attached. Most he could not tell where they’d originally been from, but some still bore the specific paint colors of particular rooms.

He could hear Grandma sobbing softly behind him, his grandfather’s mumbled condolences. Michael had never owned much of anything, certainly nothing as substantial as a home, so he couldn’t imagine what she was going through. She gathered what she could of some shredded family photographs, stuffed them into her pockets. She picked up a handle from a broken china cup and asked Mickey-Gene to keep it for her. Over the next few yards she picked up silverware, a scrap of wallpaper, a child’s bright yellow spinning top, keeping a few things, dropping others, crying, spitting, cursing. Sometimes Michael’s grandfather would pat her. Other times he kept his hands away as if afraid.

After Allison’s grandparents died there had been an estate sale. She’d dragged Michael to it even after he’d attempted several excuses. For once she wouldn’t take no for an answer. It had been held in their empty house, soon to go on sale, their last remaining things that hadn’t gone to relatives spread out over four folding tables, things like silverware, un-matched dishes, some gaudy jewelry, an antique doorknob that had once opened an unknown door, books by old authors he’d never heard of, a jar full of buttons, a jar full of random parts to random things.

He’d wandered around the house for a bit, looking out of windows, imagining sights, viewpoints they might have had. He’d sat and watched Allison sell the last few items for dollars, quarters, and dimes. Then half a table’s worth of items shoved into a trash bag which he took out to the can by the alley. Then a few hours patting and kissing Allison, comforting her ineffectively, just as his grandfather was doing now. After a couple of months she didn’t mention her grandparents to him again. That’s what it came down to — all that was left was what they’d done for each other, for friends, for family, for strangers. What they had done. Their story. Was his story going to be bigger or smaller than that?

To add to the insult of the destruction of his grandmother’s possessions the kudzu had been used to duplicate the destroyed rooms, even down to vague representations of the pictures that had once hung on the walls. There were even crude approximations of the old furniture, emulations of the old views out the windows recreated in embossed green.

The farther they went in to the overgrown ruins, the larger were the broken pieces, until finally there were several rooms that appeared more or less intact — some of the old bedrooms toward the back of the house, and a couple more Michael didn’t think he’d ever been into. He assumed that the preacher must have found his Bible at this point, and that was why the destruction had stopped.

Something tall and sinewy was moving between rooms, passing in and out of walls of kudzu, observing from shadow, but only briefly, because this was something so incredibly tired of being fixed in one place.

“Michael...” His grandfather pointed at something behind him.

Michael supposed the figure might have been considered naked, which would have shocked the preacher’s conservative congregation. But the body was so different he didn’t know that standards of nudity would actually apply.

There was exposed bone — a great deal of it — especially in the lower legs and rib cage, and on the back part of the head where pale flesh and a little bit of hair blended into the dingy off-white exposed skull. The preacher turned slightly as if showing himself, as if posing. Where his saint had driven in the wooden stake an irregular patch of old and woody vine had sprouted into two vaguely cloud-like shapes. To Michael they resembled a crude framework for wings, if the wings had developed malformed and nonfunctional.

Of course there shouldn’t have been any flesh at all but there was a great deal of that as well, in the cheeks and neck and shoulders and upper thighs, and partially wrapping the arms and hands. In fact the preacher still had that ugly twisted place on his hand where he’d been bitten, and the flesh at its center was as dark as coal.

The preacher looked strangely muscular, and the muscles moved, or slid. Michael realized then that much of the preacher’s flesh and muscle was actually snakes, rattlers and copperheads which had worked their way through his body, and were as improbably vibrant and well-preserved as he was. So his slim muscular calves were made out of yellowed rattlesnake hide with dark V-shapes all up and down them like tattoos. His biceps and some of his abdominal muscles had these brown hourglass shapes on them and when they started moving around his body it became clear that these were, or once had been, copperheads. A black, fuzzy, gauze-like material appeared to be trapped in the transitional spaces and margins between snake and human, decayed remnants of the preacher’s black suit.

Michael closed his eyes, sick to his stomach. He opened them again and peered at his grandmother, who knew, who must have known, and still had allowed Michael to be here, had not tried to drive him away. She stared at him silently, but he could see the sorrow and feel the regret.

The figure in the doorway made a loud snorting noise as if trying to take in every last smell in the room and analyze it. Even though as far as Michael could tell the preacher no longer had a nose. “At lasssst...” The preacher spoke, lips ripping open as the mouth stretched wide. A second jaw within the mouth and behind the initial row of teeth was narrower and sported fangs. The snake came part way out of the preacher’s mouth and both mouths said together, “the lasssst one.” The preacher’s throat made a bubbling, choking sound and two more words, “maahh blood!”

“Grandma!” he cried, feeling like a little kid. “Tell me what I’m supposed to do!” He was crazy, of course. All those times he’d gotten high, or so emotional he imagined he could feel his own nerves ache had taken their toll, driven the real world from his head.

“If he gets outta here he’ll take the world with him!” she cried. “He wont stop at this town, this county! All those innocent people! All them murdered babes! All he is anymore is that bloodlust!”

“But I wanted...” Michael couldn’t finish, because he’d never actually known what he’d wanted.

“It’s a
curse
, Hone y! I’m sorry! There’s
nothing
I can do. All these years, it’s been coming toward this day!”

His grandfather pushed in front of her, getting between her and the impossible thing they’d all come after. What had any of them been thinking? Everybody had nightmares, and everybody knew you just had to endure them the best you could. You couldn’t just stop them from coming. When had the Gibsons become so stupid?

A rosy glow was creeping through the gaps in the curtain of kudzu hanging behind and overhead. The old house had no roof anymore, and only part of its outside walls, so the kudzu was the only barrier between them and the rest of the world. The leaves were curling, the vines twisting. What was the preacher doing now? The glow began to redden, and Michael wondered if maybe they had lost all time, they had been here all night, and now what was coming down was the dawn.

“People need filling, son.” Michael turned and looked at his grandfather, who had a knife in his hand. He’d been like that all his life, always hiding in plain sight. “And if they cant fill up with love and joy, they’ll fill up with something other.” His grandfather ran into that abomination with his knife raised. The snake came out then and bit him, and the arms came down and broke him.

“Mickey!” Grandma tried to pull Mickey-Gene’s body out of the preacher’s embrace.

“Didn’t
waaant
to do it, Sadie! Mickey-Gene is blood! But the snake in me! Aint gonna let me die!”

She continued to struggle with him, and the preacher kept saying “Nooo! Sa-deee, nooo!” in that new choking, stuffed throated way of his, until finally the snake pushed its way out of the preacher’s mouth again, coming down and clamping on her throat.

“Sadie!” the preacher screamed, in a voice now much like it had been in the past, and Michael’s grandparents lay together in a writhing layer of kudzu, as the preacher shook his head side to side and raged.

Michael raised his hands up in front of his face, wanting to grab onto something but having nothing to grab onto. He felt the first ice of despair, and waited for it to rip him apart. When it didn’t he let his arms fall to his sides, felt the bit of post he’d fixed to himself like a sword earlier. He pulled it out and swung it about foolishly, shouting “Ha!” and wondering if he might finally be losing his mind. He cut himself again on one edge.

While the preacher still raged Michael tried to find the tears and the deep well of sadness he knew to be there for the loss of his grandparents, the loss of everyone he had ever loved. But it was all just words in his head. He found his deep well, but it was full of family blood, and the knowledge of what he would someday be able to do, as he could hear the voices of the snakes whispering to him.

The initial flames burst through the kudzu above his head. Strands of it melted and dripped smoking to the vines and leaves below, and they too ignited. The preacher didn’t seem to notice. Now he stared at Michael with those shining, black coal eyes, both of his mouths grinning. “Blood.” He reached out his arm of snake and bone.

It was possible the fire would get to them both before either of them could run, that the last vestiges of family blood might be destroyed without Michael having to make another decision. But he could not take that chance, not with temptation slithering through his brain. He placed one sharp end of the post below his sternum and ran. There was an explosion in his head as the two of them came together, and he desperately embraced what had once been a man. The snakes came out and bit him, and the preacher filled the air with words, but Michael was not listening as the final curtain of flame came down.

Chapter Twenty-Five

S
OMEWHERE NEAR THE
middle of Kansas Addie cried out and slumped forward in the passenger seat. Elijah glanced over but didn’t stop. It had been a long day, and he had several hundred miles more to drive before they rested. He hummed a little tune he half-remembered had been a favorite of hers from back before the Civil War. He stroked the few remaining colorless hairs on her head. She had been quite beautiful, but quite old even back then.