Blood Kin (6 page)

Of course he’d felt uncomfortable taking care of her. He’d never been good at taking care of anything. Once when Allison had taken a month-long trip his only job had been to water the plants, which he didn’t do, not once. He’d been too busy watching TV, smoking weed, or hanging out at a bar with a few — well, he would never have called them friends — acquaintances. He discovered that two of the plants were dead a few days before she got back. He didn’t know what else to do but dump a great deal of water into the pots as evidence that they’d been watered. They’d only died because, well, plants die, not because of any lack of diligence on his part.

But another plant had thrived, despite his lack of care. She had it in the corner of the living room where it didn’t get much light. He had no idea what it was — some kind of thorny vine. And despite the lack of both water and light it had grown at least two feet in her absence, probably more.

The only reason he’d noticed it was because he’d tripped over it one morning coming out of the bathroom. Sprawled on the rug he was able to see the pot of it there in the corner between the furniture legs. He had no memory of having seen it before. The pot was small, and yet the vine was long, sprawling. Where were its roots? Certainly there was no room for them in that little pot. He kicked the plant back into the corner. One runner of it clung to his shoe. He broke that piece off in disgust. Not knowing what else to do he flushed the broken piece down the toilet.

By the next day the plant had extended itself back into the center of the living room. Another day, Michael imagined, and it would be tapping on the bedroom door. He couldn’t think about this anymore. He gathered up the whole thing, pot and all, and carried it out on the balcony and threw it into the alley below.

Once Allison was back he showed her the two dead plants and told her how sorry he was. He wasn’t good with plants. After all, he’d said, he’d watered them and yet they still died. Better yet, when she said “It’s okay, that happens sometimes,” he’d acted upset that he’d “let her down” and said he would find four “great” plants to replace them with. She’d been impressed by his concern, and he never had to get around to buying those plants. He never brought up the missing plant and she never mentioned it. Maybe she’d forgotten she had it.

He cleaned up his grandmother a couple more times that day, helped her get into a nice dress, made her some soup. After a while doing these intimate chores for her didn’t seem so bad. He was getting used to the embarrassing nudity and the smell, the mess. He thought about what it would be like if he ever got old. There was also something — “cleansing” wasn’t quite the right word but it would have to do — about taking care of someone in just this way. Lifting them on the toilet, wiping their butt if you had to. Taking care of someone else’s bathroom business. Someone famous had called it a “holy task.” Michael wouldn’t have gone that far, but he thought maybe there was some truth in it.

Last night’s story had worked inside him long after she’d gone to bed. He’d sat out on the porch, the night pitch-black except for the antique kerosene lamp beside him. There were few places you could get a night like this, without street or house lights to bring detail out of the dark.

As much as possible he tried to allow the immediate sensations of her young life to leave him, to dissipate and join whatever stream of lost and misplaced sense memories must flow through the hidden layers of the world. He’d felt the sun on her face, and smelled the smell of it, that dust and grass aroma of southwest Virginia, and he’d felt the seize in her heart when the young man had lost his hands, and the blood filling her eyes, and draining her pale and shaking. He felt bad for the slow sacrifice of her youth, he truly did, but he didn’t know how long he could stand to live inside her life this way.

He couldn’t see across the road, but he could hear things moving out there in the woods. Small animals. Had to be. And occasionally there was a subtle change in the quality of the darkness — a shadow would be suddenly lighter or darker, the massive outline of a tree would shift against the night sky. Michael had a sense that if he had a different kind of light, a new kind of light some physicist might invent someday, he’d be able to pull back these shadows and see the past of this valley laid out before him. He had a notionthat these peculiar night shadows, these dark silhouettes, were the valley’s way of dreaming. And surely there must be some way to see into those dreams.

At any other time, in any other place, he’d of thought that nonsense. But not here, not while listening to Grandma’s stories.

He kept wanting to ask Sadie what her choice had been, and what that choice meant, but he knew he’d have to wait for the story to catch up to that. She had her own timing for everything, and she didn’t change it for anybody. When she drew her lines, she drew them firm.

When he’d been small, and lived here with Grandma, he’d hated that strictness at first. He never would have said he’d grown to like it, but he’d gradually felt safer within its confines, knowing that however badly he might mess up, it wouldn’t be fatal, it would never ruin everything. Grandma would always protect him from that. With his mom and dad there was never that kind of firmness. His father, Sadie’s son, had stayed away from home most of the time. Only a few years ago Michael received the phone call from Thailand informing him of his father’s death. Sadie had said of her son, “People, any sort of people, were always too much for him. He got their feelings under his skin and he couldn’t take that. I kept telling him ‘you gotta set with it awhile and after a time you get used to it.’ But he couldn’t do that. I dont think he liked folks — they bothered him too much.”

Michael’s mother was another Gibson cousin, so it was a marriage like a lot of others in their family, not illegal, but it still made people talk. Gibsons were drawn to Gibsons. It had always been this way. Maybe they thought another Gibson was the only one who would understand them. Like so many in the family, his mother started in her thirties to lose touch. She’d spent the final two decades of her life in the State Hospital in Marion. Michael’s single visit had been so upsetting he’d come away thinking that
he
was the crazy one.

Grandma Sadie had raised him until high school, then she and every other adult who cared enough to have an opinion (which didn’t include his father), decided he needed to be in better schools if he was to make something of himself. So starting at age thirteen Michael had grown up with a succession of Gibson cousins spread all over the country, most of who thought he was wonderful and sensitive. He’d appreciated that, and would have liked to believe it, but most of the time he didn’t know what he was. He felt so many things, and resented feeling so many things.

When he went off to Chicago for college he was sure he’d find out who he really was. He’d have another culture to measure himself against. He wasn’t exactly embarrassed about being a Southerner, but he’d often found himself struggling to defend the South. Without thinking much about it he’d mention some fellow he’d known in Morrison and then he’d be genuinely surprised by the reaction. “Jesus, talk about
The Sound and the Fury
!” from a guy in the dorm, and, from the sweet-faced girl on the moonlight walk early in his freshman year, “Oh, Michael. It’s hard to believe you came from a place like that!” After that he played up the country background more — the women, some of them, at least, loved it.

Something shiny across the dirt road caught his eye. Michael looked up and saw that there were a few kudzu leaves hanging from the outside edges of the nearest boughs, the moonlight reflecting off their surfaces. They gave the outline of trees a slightly furry appearance.

Michael was just accommodating. Probably no other description was needed. He told people what they wanted to hear. If they wanted sensitive, he’d be sensitive. If they wanted aggressive, he could be aggressive. They didn’t even have to tell him what they wanted, usually; he felt it. But he understood that he couldn’t be touched, not really. He dropped out of college his junior year. He lived with, and off of, a succession of friends and girlfriends. He worked a string of odd jobs. He always got hired easily — sometimes it seemed all he had to do, really, was smile for them. But he never kept those jobs long. People found him easy to talk to, so they unburdened themselves, they let him know all about their problems. But the thing was, he really wasn’t that interested. They’d fill him up with their stories and after a while he couldn’t bear them. He’d move on, and they wouldn’t understand what had happened.

As the kerosene lamp dimmed, the night air yellowed like anold lithograph. The light pulled back, away from the woods, the road, and the front yard.

It was getting to be time for him to make plans for himself. With each week cooped up with Grandma he felt a year older. The intense claustrophobia — boxed in with her memories of the complicated lives and personalities of those long dead — had become increasingly aggressive, until he was beginning to feel anxious about his own life. He knew that if he stayed much longer he’d start drinking again; he’d find some source for pills, whatever he would need to get through the day. But she kept telling him that his self-preservation depended on his hearing her story out. Her tellings were coming to some sort of head.

There was something in a crate beneath the kudzu out in that field on the other side of the woods, a crate that someone had felt the need to bind in iron, if Grandma had not lied to him. And Michael didn’t think she ever lied.

She was up again at four. He could hear her stirring. He hadn’t even been aware he’d stayed up all night. He thought about slipping into bed before she knew he was up, but then the ache in his side intensifiedas she struggled to get to the screen door behind him.

He could feel her thin lips begin to move.

“We’d best get back at it. We lost last night.” He waited. “There’s little time left, Michael.”

The wind was suddenly in the distant kudzu, and the thousand green leaves of it pushed against the wall of dark trees until they swayed.

Chapter Four

S
ADIE DIDN’T WANT
the preacher walking her home, but she didn’t know how to stop him. She didn’t even know how to talk to him, didn’t want to. The preacher wanted something from her, seemed like most everybody wanted things from her lately: her daddy, her momma, George Mackey. But she was sure that whatever the preacher wanted would put all those other wants to shame. The preacher hadn’t said a word to her for some time, but he didn’t have to. Although they were walking together he was leading her, just like he did everybody in the hollow. Some people said it was because he carried our Lord with him that he was such a natural-born leader, but Sadie knew it was something else entirely. She couldn’t have said exactly what it was; she didn’t even want to think about it.

With her trembling left fist she clutched the back of her yellow dress so that it fell down in folds to hidethe blood from her period, praying her thanks that she was so skinny and that the dress had always been so loose. But she kept thinking about that blood on her and she couldn’t help thinking of it as Fred Shaney’s blood, too. She kept seeing Fred Shaney’s hands flopped down in the dirt like pale fish.

She kept trying to think of a way to explain it away. She wasn’t ready, and she didn’t even know what it was she wasn’t ready for.

But the preacher knew.

“They killed him last night,” the preacher said, his voice slow and watery.

“Who?” Again she thought of Fred Shaney. Who had the preacher done away with now?

“John Dillinger. Shot him down outside a theater in

Chicago. Heard it on the radio down at the store.”

“So? He’s a criminal, aint he?”

“Depends on how you look at the thing.”

Sadie wasn’t surprised by hisattitude, but it made her curious all the same. “Why... you’re a preacher. How can you say that?”

“John Dillinger was an outsider, an outcast in an evil society. He just did what they forced him to do.”

“He killed people.”

“Sometimes you have to. You’ll be learning that, Sadie.” She almost shook her head.
Not if it means cutting people up like that, like poor Fred Shaney.

They descended into a bottom where the creek came up almost to the roadside for a time. A soot-streaked shack on the opposite bank, eaten out over the years, leaned like it was about to fall into the water. Gazing at the wide spaces between the boards gave Sadie an achy feeling. A pleasing dampness filled the air; light shone between the trees like a wet silver ribbon.

Dying vegetation caked the creek banks. The creek was still, stopped by the green logs bridging the banks. Somebody had started a stone dam here years ago and left it a third built. Stones still jutted from the banks into the green water and the mass of rotting logs. Water wept down the rough stone. She felt like the air she was breathing was so old it was leaking.

“It be the third decade of the twentieth century, girl.” The voice was so low, so careful, Sadie wasn’t even sure it was the preacher’s voice, but she didn’t turn around to see if his lips were moving. It was like hearing her own thoughts. She just kept walking, looking straight ahead, and letting the words creep up into her head. “It is half done with nineteen-thirty-four. Our family has been on this earth a long time. Getting ripe. Developing their feeling for each other and everything their eyes can reach. Just like you, Sadie. All of us are getting to our maturity. The blood’s getting ripe, telling us what we gotta do.”