A Choir of Ill Children (15 page)

“You know what I simply cannot stand?” he asks me.

“I’ll play along since this has the structure of a rhetorical question. What is it that you cannot stand?”

“Fencing.”

I clear my throat. “Fencing?”

“Watching fencers who have no notion of the hardcore reality behind the art form. They think it’s a sport, the damn fools. Or worse, some kind of performance they’re putting on for their mamas, like ballet or synchronized swimming. It was never meant to be a sport. You’ve got to have convictions to live with the blade. Belief. True belief, that’s it, that’s what I’m talking about. But those
players,
they might as well be shooting hoops or sliding into third base. They never embrace the . . . the
tenets,
the
ideology
behind that discipline.”

“I can’t say that I have an opinion one way or the other.”

“Trust what I’m tellin’ you. No matter how much training they go in for they always got that swashbuckling bullshit fantasy going on in their heads. No way around that for most of ’em. They feel
gallant
sashaying around with their Musketeer sword, lunging after each other on the mats, shouting in French like it means somethin’ special when they can’t even pronounce the words. With those silly helmets on over their faces, you shouldn’t be caught dead in one’a them, and the machines buzzing when they tap each other on the chests.”

“Even the women?”

“Especially the women! Oh hell, don’t get me goin’ on that!”

He spits into the mud as the last couple of patrons leave the store and get back into their skiffs, stobpoling into the bayou. Lottie Mae turns the sign in the window to
CLOSED
and notices the scene out front. Vines drape against the glass and frame her face for a moment. She raises her chin and sets her lips into a thin white bloodless line before she withdraws.

Darr sways a little, maybe a sign of inner ear damage. “Wouldn’t you think they’d get tired of that foolhardy act? All that idiotic fake valor they’re supposed to be clutching hold of when they go prancing around like any old so-and-so? How you supposed to prove you’re made of real blood and bone when you go stabbing at each other covered with all that metal getup gear on, huh? Don’t you think you’d get a lot further along if they didn’t have cork tips on the swords?”

“They’d probably try a lot harder not to get struck.”

He bursts into a robust laughter, which sounds genuine and a bit crazed. “That’s it! You got it! My point, that’s exactly my point right there!” His muscles ripple and the washed-out jailhouse tattoos look worse than melanoma.

I blink at him a couple of times and lean against the side of the truck. Not only does Darr expect the world to handle itself but he’s also got high hopes for the logic of his assertions to eventually come to validity all on their own. Maybe he’s talking in metaphor. I wonder if this is some vague attempt at intimidation.

“I do believe you and me understand each other well.”

“I’ll get back to you on that,” I tell him and walk over to Clay.

Maybe he’s a conjure boy and he’s already working spells and making invocations for purpose unknown, even to himself. His shoulders are drooped with weariness and his eyes are half-hooded. It appears that he has been through this—or something very much like this—many times before. I feel the same way.

“Why do you keep showing up around my sister?” he asks.

“The first couple of times she showed up around me, but I admit I came seeking her out tonight.”

“Why?”

“I’m not so sure.”

A small line appears between his eyebrows and it takes me a second to realize that this is his version of a frown. Then the line disappears. “Don’t you have anything better to say than that?”

I think about it. “No, not really.”

“You should probably stay away from her. I think that would be best.” No implied caveat, no brandishing of weapon or muscle. His voice is slightly cold, traced with melancholy. I can tell that he once almost made it out of Potts County, only to be drawn back in.

“Did you come back to town for your sister?” I ask. “To protect her? To take her out of here?”

“No.”

“Why then?”

“Maybe I’ll explain it to you sometime.”

It’s good to hear him telling the truth, flatly, without riddles. We’ll get to the meat of the matter perhaps, if things turn out in a proper fashion, whatever the hell that is. We must wait for certain circumstances to play out, a chain of events that began with Lottie Mae’s vomit, or maybe my grandmother on the school roof, or long before that even. Each incident following the other in a pattern that can’t be determined yet. At least not by me.

I ask, “Does your friend really dislike fencing that much or was the whole thing some kind of roundabout threat?”

“No, he hates it.”

“So why’d he tell me?”

“He likes you.”

“Oh.”

Darr takes out his switchblade, opens it, and hurls it into the weeds at a passing cormorant. The bird shrieks in pain, rolls and flops and tries to crawl away as Darr goes after it.

There’s very little blood. He stomps through the muck smiling, catches the duck and stabs it through the brain. He carries the corpse over and hands it to Clay, who handles the murdered bird with a certain reverence. Lottie Mae comes out with a croker sack, refusing to meet my eyes. I watch with mild fascination. Clay puts the dead cormorant in the sack, ties it shut, and places it behind the seat of his bike. He and Lottie Mae get on his motorcycle, Darr gets on the other Harley, and they all ride away without another word.

I stand around for a while longer, thinking about Drabs and looking into the glowing green of the bog. The grebes and mallards float past, dipping for fish. A cold wind starts blowing and it feels good against my throat. Bull gators roar out in the morass and a few cormorant feathers drift by.

The loons weep, just as my mother wept, echoing through the lowland. I light a cigarette. Rising swamp gas ignites and flames spring and dance across the stagnant water, flailing and sinuous, writhing and red like dying men unwilling to let go of a hated life.

T
HE
C
RONE AND TWO OF THE OTHER GRANNY
witches somehow get into the house one late afternoon and start running around performing rituals all over the place. They rush from room to room spattering foul-smelling oils across the doorways, chanting and carrying out cleansing ceremonies.

Strangely enough they pass by the bedroom where Dodi lies with my brothers trying to draw Jonah back from the abyss of his depression. They don’t aim their prayers there and don’t waste their potions.

Velma Coots hasn’t sanctioned this attack. It’s not her way. She, out of all of them, knows better. This faction of conjure women has broken off from the rest of the whole, rising out of the swamp after much planning on their part. When I come near they shriek words I don’t understand and make warding gestures in front of my face. They believe there is a dark truth hidden here that must be excised immediately, and they’ve finally decided to take matters into their own hands. I can appreciate that kind of bravado. They wear their shawls, lace wrapped three times around their hair, bracelets of thistle and flower petals, carrying charms and bells that they ring every so often between all the yelling.

The Crone tires quickly and reaches out for the velvet draperies, sits on the divan, breathing heavily. She’s too ancient to have a name any longer. When she coughs you can hear the ages rattling inside her shrunken frame. No human names can cling to her anymore—they slip from her dusty shriveled flesh like a young girl’s whimsies. She holds star charts that show an alignment—a misalignment—of the planets and moons. Bloody streaks have dried across the parchment as if she’s tried to compel the celestial bodies back on course through the force of her own soaking blood. I suppose it’s as good a try as any.

I decide to make tea and offer them finger foods and pound cake. The Crone’s voice is so brittle that it sounds as if it has been broken and repaired with a hammer and nails many times before. “You’re culpable,” she says.

“So you old ladies keep telling me. The more I hear it the less I believe it though, to tell you the truth.”

“Dues a’plenty but it ain’t your fault, not entirely.”

“Yeah?”

“Sometimes it’s just the way things are. Wrong, but natural.”

“Well, thanks for that much. Pound cake?”

“Okay.”

Her rags are paper-thin, held together only by filth, but she’s swathed in them as if wrapped in gossamer. There’s something very beautiful about all her stacked-up years, vicious and startling as well. She deserves reverence and respect and I do my best to keep from throwing them out on the lawn.

“What’s this shit you’re tossing all over the place?”

“Oxtail soup, boiled for three days.”

“Christ!”

“We thought it might help.”

She says it sadly because she realizes it won’t. We’re beyond such measures and probably always have been. Her hands tremble as she takes the proffered teacup and a slice of cake.

“I appreciate the effort. A little lemon?”

“Yah, please.”

I add a slice of lemon to her tea and watch her eat with trembling hands. She gums the food until it’s a thin gruel that swirls around her mouth for a time before she swallows.

My great-grandfather must’ve danced with her long ago. Thinking of it makes me a little rueful, about how it had been and how it should be. He danced with all the girls and plucked jasmine bouquets for each one of them when he did his courting, down Main Street and over the meadows, through the orchards and while walking to church. He had a good line, I guess. I look at her twisted brown fingers and imagine them pale and young again, drawn into his hands as they do-si-doed in the spring across the town square. That corrupted withered voice once tittered shyly as she whispered to him. The generations continue to close in.

“I’m old,” the Crone says as if this should be news. “I don’t have much consternation left in me. What I do got I reserve for the proper time, the right people and things.”

“Me?”

She cackles and pieces of her clothing flake off. Her hair has come loose from her skull and nearly transparent strands waft to the floor. She’s thin and tattered as a streamer caught in the wind. There’s a madness circling in her eyes but it’s a kind of insanity you can embrace. A madness of history and survival, much different than that of Drabs or Maggie or my brothers or even me. Her voice fades in and out, weakening then gaining strength. She smells like bad meat.

“Most folks got secrets, but that ain’t so with you.”

“No?”

“Nah. It just ain’t so. With you, well, it’s the other way around. Them secrets, they come out of the wood, and they got you instead.”

“Feels like it at times.”

The other grannies drift outside and keep screaming and dancing and doing their thing. They pass in front of the windows fingering symbols onto the glass. I wonder if they tried contacting Lottie Mae and if she told them about the other night when she got drunk and wound up puking instead of making love to me, probing my underside for vulnerable spots.

“This pound cake is very good,” she says.

“Yes,” I tell her. “Dodi and I made it together.”

“Didn’t think that girl could cook a lick.”

“She can’t really. I did the baking and she mostly just handed me ingredients.”

“Heard you liked to make bread.” She frowns and glances up, for the first time aware of the soft noise filling the house from upstairs. It’s like a hum on the edge of your ears that trills on and on. “What is that? Somebody weepin’?”

“Yes,” I say.

She sips at her tea and even chews and swallows down the lemon slice. She turns again and gazes at the darkness at the top of the steps. “Who’s crying? That a ghost, you say?”

“My brother Jonah.”

“He a ghost?”

“I don’t think so.”

She lets a belch rumble up and pats her stomach. “The boy’s got some powerful blues.”

“The love of his life just left him.”

“When?”

“A week ago.”

She rolls her eyes and her bottom lip droops. “If you gone sob like that for a solid week you’ll never stop.”

“I’m afraid you might be right.”

She takes my hand and kisses it with her dry lips, gathers her belongings, and folds the remainder of the cake inside her rags.

“The past can come back in a lot of different ways, chile. It don’t get old and wind up buried like people do. It can die and be reborn. Sins take on shape and peck at your face.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“You’ll find out . . .”

“. . . soon enough. Yeah, I know. Tell me about the carnival.”

The Crone frowns, displaying the gruel still stuck between her brown teeth, and says, “What carnival is that?”

M
Y FATHER SITS ON THE EDGE OF MY BED, STARING
straight ahead.

His evil is no longer molded with the face of his own life. He’s free of that and with the dead-end destiny confining him to Potts County. He paid the price but he got out, at least in his own head. The arrogance is gone, his pride shattered. The living heart of his hatred has cooled to a weaker but more steady burn, and he doesn’t seem to be familiar with anything around him. He could’ve left, I suppose, but he’s chosen to stay behind. His vision and imagination have failed him long ago, but a desire to hold back the swamp has remained. He smells of stale sweat, moonshine, dog shit, spoiled chicken parts, and the bayou. Inadequacy and collapse. His ruin is complete, and from that he takes his freedom.