A Choir of Ill Children (10 page)

“Have you seen my son recently, Thomas?”

“No.”

“Drabs hasn’t been home for several days. I fear for him.”

“Don’t. He might be cursed but so long as he keeps his clothes on in public he’ll be all right.”

Reverend Bibbler pulls a face. “Please don’t border on blasphemy. I’m greatly worried.”

“So am I. I’m sorry to be facetious. I’ll see if I can track him down.”

“I’d be grateful. Do you have any idea where he might be?”

“No, but if he’s still in town, I’ll find him.”

“Thank you. I appreciate your efforts.”

“Of course.”

An all-prevailing silence washes over and engulfs us. It always happens. We’re at different ends of the earth, he and I, though at times he thinks of me as something of a wayward son, and I feel for him the way I did for my father. I should leave but he has more to tell me, and he’s working his way up to saying it. I sit in the pew and give it time.

“Did he tell you that he no longer wishes to preach the Word?”

“Yes.”

He expects a lengthier response but I see no point. We’ve had conversations exactly like this one many times since Drabs married Maggie to me down by the river and he lost himself within the grace of God.

The reverend wants to draw me into a tête-à-tête, but the possibility annoys him all the same. “And what are your thoughts on that?”

“It’s his life.”

“But admit the truth. You’d prefer if he gave up the pulpit.”

“I’d prefer if the pulpit gave him up.”

“What you call a curse is special consideration under the Lord.”

“I only want him to be happy.”

Reverend Bibbler, for all his faith and sermonizing, still believes the damage done to Drabs may only be psychological or neurological. He once asked me for the money to send Drabs down to Atlanta for an MRI scan, which I gave to him. Drabs fell into a fit of tongues inside the small resonance chamber and the doctors, after two days of observation, had him committed to the psychiatric wing. It took a month and four lawyers to get him released.

“I pray for him each morning and night, that he’ll find release from his burden. I pray—”

“Maybe you shouldn’t.”

He gets my meaning immediately but decides to play it out some. “Excuse me, Thomas?”

He speaks my name with a singular flourish. It’s the name of the Doubter and he tries to say it the way he thinks Christ would have. All he thinks I need are a few Sundays listening to his preaching in order to get my mind right.

“Maybe you shouldn’t pray for him. Drabs needs something else in his life right now. He always has, but especially for the time being. Perhaps you should help him attend to those matters first.”

There’s more of the Puritan in him than he thinks. He would’ve been at home in Salem seated beside Cotton Mather, laying stones on Giles Corey’s chest and hanging possessed dogs.

“What matters are they?” he asks.

“You’re already aware of them.”

“He dreams of you often.”

“I know, he’s told me.”

The reverend is a Christian warrior who wears the highly polished armor of the Lord. Still, he’s no fool or instigator, and he knows that he must share his control of Kingdom Come’s spiritual well-being with other forces. His mama told him stories about the bayou and the deep woods, the same way all our mothers did. The nature of his belief is more emancipated than most, as it has to be in Potts County.

He’s also a shrewd reader of souls. “Don’t hate my son, Thomas.”

“He’s my only friend.”

“Yes, he is. And he loves you deeply. Remember—”

The pause lengthens as I hang waiting. “What?”

“He’s no more a burden to you than you are to him.”

M
OONLIGHT POURS THROUGH THE WILLOWS AND
swamp cyrilla as I continue to cruise the backroads of town. I keep expecting Drabs to come stumbling out of a drainage ditch, clothed or unclothed, maybe leaping from behind a patch of dogwood scrub. I can only hope I won’t find his castrated corpse dangling from a birch limb, swinging slightly in the rising wind.

I drive slowly, circling the highway, surveying all the shanties and ramshackle cabins dappling the hills and hollows. Pinewood boards that don’t fit in door frames are held in place with knotty crossbars. Screens hang from broken hinges. Televisions and radios mumble politics and weather and canned laughter from sit-com hijinks. Banjos and drawls float from splintered slats. I head farther into the marshland, past Doover’s Five & Dime.

I should go to the flat rock. Drabs—or someone—might be waiting there for me, but I’m moving in some vague pattern, following a different course. I tug the steering wheel left and right without reason in mind, riding down routes that are little more than ruts through the woods.

The moon beckons, so what the hell.

I think about Lottie Mae, the teenage granny witch who, presumably, was after my vinegar. We’ve got something in store for each other, but whether it’s going to be worthwhile or just dangerous I’ve no idea. Maybe she’s lying out there on the flat rock right now, nude in the silver blazing of the night, eviscerated or waiting for me to climb onto her. Maybe she’s holding a reap hook.

A smear of black motion off the side of the road lunges free. I stomp on the brakes and hang on to the wheel as the truck swerves wildly to the left.

Bursting through the brambles, Betty Lynn rushes in front of the truck and I nearly clip her. The truck goes into a skid and grinds up gravel and mud as I swerve into the weeds. She lies in the dirt, stunned. I get out and check her over in the glare of the headlights to make sure that I haven’t hit her. There’s no blood but she’s covered in sweat, disheveled, and confused.

She blinks at me without recognition. Her face and arms are torn up with scratches. She’s been running and crawling through the fields, and tobacco leaves are mashed into the knees and seat of her jeans.

“They . . .” she gasps. “They comin’ . . . behind me.”

“Who?”

“They started followin’ . . . I heard ’em . . . ran.”

“Who is it, Betty Lynn?”

She still can’t pull it together, and she’s trembling so hard that she shakes right out of my grip. “Dunno . . . think they got guns. Heard sounds . . . coulda been a rifle bolt sliding . . . mebbe not . . .”

She can’t say any more as she takes in heaving gulps of air. I get her into the truck and turn off the headlights.

I wait, expecting to hear drunken laughter, hoots and hollers. To see a couple of flashlight beams waving back and forth, guys whistling and calling
Here, kitty, kitty.
That sort of crap. A few good ol’ boys out having fun chasing after a pretty girl, things getting just a touch out of hand. It happens.

But there’s only silence. I light a cigarette, acutely aware of the irony as I lean against the truck on the outskirts of a tobacco field. I look back and Betty Lynn is bewildered and exhausted, staring at me, still sweating. Her hair and clothes are drenched. They must’ve chased her all the way from Leadbetter’s parking lot, almost three miles away.

“Let’s go,” she says.

“It’ll be all right.”

“But—”

“Hold on.”

“Thomas . . .”

There is a sound of crackling, and soon I see two distinct orange glows approaching in the brush. They come nearer and nearer, then stop and hover in the distance.

I can’t help myself, I burst out laughing.

These fuckers are actually carrying torches.

It’s got my curiosity up, that’s for certain. My chuckling catches in my throat and sticks there. If they’ve got guns they haven’t used them yet. No smell of gunpowder beneath the burning tallow. No straight-taper twenty-two-inch barrels pointing out from between the dogwood leaves. Embers float and rise in the breeze. I take a step toward the brush and the glow recedes. Skittish pricks. I shake my head and toss the cigarette butt.

I talk into the darkness.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” I say. “Somebody want to come out and play?”

The flames dip closer together, converge, then separate again.

“Don’t be shy now.” My voice is full of anger even though I’m not. “You want her, you just need to get past me. You want me, well, there’s no obstruction at all then. Let’s confer and have a nice colloquy. I’m open to any and all discussion.”

They hesitate for another moment, wavering, then begin to back off. I watch the fires recede into blackness.

I get back into the truck and start down the road. Betty Lynn says, “Oh God, no, please don’t take me to yer house.”

“I won’t. I’ll drive you back home to your place.”

“Mama’s gonna kill me, she’s ’lergic to tobacco.”

“When you spend all night in Leadbetter’s you stink of smoke anyway.”

“She don’t mind cigarettes, but she worked in the fields most’a her life and she hates the reek of it.”

We drive on. She takes my hand and holds on to it tightly, then draws it into her lap. The one time we’ve made love started out with a similar display before we crept into the backseat. After a minute or so she begins to weep softly, but that passes by pretty fast. I keep clean rags from torn up T-shirts in the glove box. She knows it because it’s also where I keep the condoms. She grabs a couple of the scraps and wipes her face, arms and neck down.

“Thomas, the baby . . .”

“Yes?”

“It wasn’t yers. It was Jasper Kroll’s, from down at the mill, but I—”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“I’m sorry I lied.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I drop her off and swing around past the railroad tracks. I park on them looking forward into the hills and back into the swamp, as the moon boils down over Kingdom Come.

I wonder if those torch-bearers have captured and lynched Drabs.

Worse, I can’t help wondering if he was one of them.

I
N MY MOTHER
’
S DREAMS SHE STANDS IN FRONT OF
the school staring up at her own murdered mother hanging across the peak of the roof. My mother—the girl—is eleven years old. Blond curls drape across the shoulders of her gingham dress. She’s a tomboy and her elbows are scraped. Dust devils whirl past her knees and the dull roar of wind plays in the top branches of the cottonwood trees.

The girl gapes but is not frightened. She feels only a wrenching, unformed sadness that collects in her chest. She knows her mother is dead, butchered, laid out on view although there’s no one else to see this. The reap hook catches a glint of light that winks back at her. She steps closer to the school, which has a thin but drying stream of blood oozing down across the west wall.

The air smells foul and fishy. Potts County has been suffering under a drought for the entire summer and the river has dropped almost two feet. Fish, beaver, and possum lie putrefied on sandbars, and the bottoms reek with dankness. The wind is blowing in the fetor, which coats the area like a funnel of smoke.

Someone has been here recently, not just to kill her mother in such a bizarre, vicious fashion, but also to write with her blood across the white clapboard. For some reason both sights are distinct and separate in her mind. These are independent, detached, possibly unconnected displays of outrage.

The dead mother up there on the roof, the writing here on the wall.

The words are in a precise and deliberate block lettering, but appear strangely stylish. The girl presses closer and realizes they’ve been written with a piece of chalk, which lies red-tipped in the dust. It has been run through the blood so that the letters are white at the center and crimson at the edge, where the blood has thinned around the dense chalk marks and then run off. They are, in fact, rather pretty.

DO NOT CONSIDER THIS ANOTHER DEFEAT. FORGIVE THE SHORTCOMINGS. GRAVITY. LOVE IS ONLY LUST DRESSED UP FOR CHURCH. PENETRATION. GRAVY. MEANING. SIGNIFICANCE. THE HAM IS ON THE TABLE.

These words are only a little higher than her own eye level, perhaps proving that the killer—or at least the writer—is only slightly taller than she is herself. She doesn’t understand or care for these declarations and washes them off, standing on a stool used by her classmates when being graded on oral reports. She is responsible for washing the blackboard at the end of class every day and she does a good job. However, when the wall dries the words seep through again. Her father and the sheriff are angry with her for disturbing evidence.

The reap hook can’t be traced. It could belong to anyone in Potts County, including the sheriff, including her father. The summer heat and drought make matters much worse. A white woman’s murder can’t go by without some retribution being served up. Over the next month four colored folks are lynched and six houses burned down into the dust.

The killer and the writer are never found. No one is ever found in Kingdom Come even though some are lost day after day.

In my mother’s dreams the ham is on the table.

I
SPEND A FEW DAYS WITH THE
H
OLY
O
RDER OF
Flying Walendas, riding the donkey, baking bread at dawn. Abbot Earl is eager to speak with me, but it’s not yet sixth hour and we’re committed to our vow of silence.