A Choir of Ill Children (2 page)

Jonah rubs against Sarah like an animal, which is exactly how she thinks of him and the others and me. She chokes back puke. We are generally beneath notice, but not beneath disgust, and when she finally gets what she wants down on film she’ll wish us dead in the river.

I sit on the settee and try to look stupid without drooling. It’s easier than it should be. She has a DAT recorder thrust into the middle of the room and a minicassette recorder on the table placed precisely equidistant from us both. She asks the same questions repeatedly, hoping to keep me talking long enough so that even if I don’t give an adequate answer, I’ll say enough for her to splice the tape together into something worthwhile.

“Tell me, Thomas, what is it like living with a Siamese triplet?”

There is no such thing, of course—the term is a misnomer as she uses it, proving how ignorant she is of the situation. But I can’t completely fault her for that. There’s no way to comprehend it, even for us. “Oh, it’s fine.”

“Could you elucidate?”

I lean forward toward the recorder. “It’s fine!”

Her grin is soldered in place, and her upper row of crowns look like they might snap to pieces at any moment. Her nose hairs are being burned away by the coke. “No, Thomas,” she says through her teeth. “
Elucidate
doesn’t mean louder, it means could you go into a little more depth about that?”

“About what?”

“Living with your brothers.”

I lean forward. “We get along just fine!”

The minitape recorder makes a soft whirr as she swallows thickly. The pulse under her left ear throbs so wildly that it brushes her long gold earrings and gets them swinging. I must admit that Sarah is quite an attractive girl, and I realize why Jonah is falling in love with her despite her poor disposition. What I don’t understand is why Sebastian and Cole aren’t.

It’s a good thing Fred is using the Mist Filter because Sarah’s tongue unfurls and is very slimy. “Why do you sleep in the same bedroom?”

“It’s my room.”

“You have a gorgeous antediluvian mansion here that’s enormous enough to fit five families under one roof.”

I nod and tell her, “It’s nice.”

“Don’t you need privacy? Why do you sleep in the same bedroom as your brothers?”

“I always have. It’s our room. We watch over one another.” Which is nothing less than the truth.

The edges of her nostrils are threaded with broken blood vessels, a sharp pink that is both revolting and somehow arousing. Her hair is plum-colored, breasts slightly too large just the way Jonah likes them. Perfect caps that are not too white or too large, and the tip of her tongue constantly works across the glossy upper lip. Her insincerity bleeds off her in a torrent now. Jonah’s using his peripheral vision to stare at Sarah and somehow let his love be known. He’s beginning to jitter and giggle in place, which means all three of them are. The pleasure in his mind is a delight for them all.

Fred tries to hold his rancor and derision in but can’t make it. I see him coming apart inch by inch as the veins stand out in his muscular throat. He lets loose a bark of loathing and aims the camera at the window, searching for Dodi who’s swinging from an old tire out front. He zooms in on her, trying to get beaver shots. “Sarah, I’m sick of this place and these freaks. Let’s just get out of here and do the movie about your grandmother’s Alzheimer’s.”

“No.”

“It can’t be any less engaging than this. Come on, an old lady dressed in pigtails and diaper, calling for her mommy? That’s priceless material.”

“The story’s here.”

“The retards are here, and we’ve got nothing to show for our time so far except a huge credit card bill. That car rental is costing us, and I’ve got to get the DAT back to the university by next Wednesday or Professor James is gonna throw a fit. I signed for this hardware, I’m responsible for it.”

She tries to hold on, pressing her nails on top of the cassette recorder and shoving it closer to me. “Yours is one of the richest and oldest families in the town of Kingdom Come, but you seem to be ostracized by the community.”

“They bring us pies sometimes.”

“Pies?”

“Sour Cream Rhubarb, Mississippi Mud, Tar Heel Pie.” Some folks do bring us homemade meals on occasion, but usually it’s me doing the baking and giving food away to the men at the mill.

Though Jonah is irritated, Sebastian likes the way I’m screwing with her. He shouts out the names of more pies, using all their throats: Peach Skillet, Double Layer Pumpkin, Sweet Potato, Kiwi Lime.

Sarah’s eyes are almost spinning. The coke is really grooving in her system. She can’t focus well, and I’m breaking down what little concentration she has left. If only she’d listened to me that first day when I told her we weren’t interested in broadcasting our lives. She’d been in control then, so wonderfully sure of herself. Backing off the porch she had turned her attention to my brothers, who peered through the bay window and rapped on the glass with their many hands. Jonah, all three of them actually, begging Sarah to stay.

She’s spoken with them at length but still needs me for the buffer. The tale cannot work without my support. The audience needs someone to identity with. This is, after all, a human interest story.

M
AGGIE STANDS ON THE BACK LAWN STARING UP AT
our bedroom window.

The house is large and accommodating, with three floors, six bedrooms, and a century and a half of ghosts packed within its walls. Rich divans, exquisitely carved furniture, velvet draperies, and magnificent mantelpieces adorn almost every room.

Generations of our family have lived and weakened here. Our name is revered and cursed, as it probably should be. That’s all right. The grudge of money and the unyielding myth of the wealthy go hand in hand. An ancestor founded the town. Our great-grandfather built the mill. Our father leaped into its furious machinery one rainy summer night. And our mother vanished just days before his suicide.

Legend and language form their own religion here in Kingdom Come, Potts County.

When I was nine, a black boy from up the road, Drabs Bibbler, a preacher’s son who’d been touched by the bitter spirit of God, married me and Maggie down by the river’s edge.

He baptized us and gave witness and sang hymns too, showing us how to rejoice and dance in praise of the Lord. Before the day was out he fell to thrashing in a fit of tongues and shrieked out his despair. She and I watched on the shore as Drabs slid down the muddy bank on his back, wailing in an unknown language and heaving until he was out of sight.

No matter what anybody told us after that, Maggie and I knew we were man and wife from that day forward, though we never so much as shared a kiss.

She stares up at me now with all the passion, affection, and devotion the human heart can muster, and soon she begins to weave in the wind. Her white dress whirls like an unwrapped shroud until she eventually becomes just another part of the dark and endless night.

D
RABS
B
IBBLER IS WALKING DOWN THE ROAD NAKED
when I pull over and offer him a lift. He gets into the truck and doesn’t say anything for about five miles. Finally, he looks over and I can see that he’s welling up. The teardrops are spilling down his face across the burn scars on his neck and chest. He’s been in love with Maggie since long before the day he wed her to me, but he can’t tear asunder what he helped God to unite. It’s killing him and has been for twenty years. Maybe it’s killing all of us.

“The hell are you doing?” I say.

“You’re going to ask me that?”

It was a stupid question. When he’s in this state I can’t talk to him. No one can. I do my best to make sure he survives his own sorrow. If another white woman spots his flopping pecker swaying in the breeze the rednecks aren’t going to be happy with beating the hell out of him and swabbing his body with hot tar. They’re going to lynch and castrate him for sure.

I wonder if he’ll fall into tongues again, which almost always happens when I’m in his presence for more than twenty minutes.

“I’m going to give up the church,” he tells me. “My daddy’s church, really. I was never any good at it to begin with and I get worse with each passing week. The congregation hates me.”

“No they don’t, they just get scared. They don’t know any better.”

“My daddy don’t want me up on his pulpit.”

It’s true. Reverend Bibbler preaches about Paradise but his own son frightens the parishioners off. “What are you planning to do instead?”

“I’m not certain yet.”

“Maybe you should keep on preaching until you figure it out.”

“No, I want it to end,” Drabs says with a sneer. “I feel like a fraud and a damn fool up there.”

He can still make me chuckle at the most inopportune times. “At least you wear clothes at the altar.”

“That’s true, I do. But I’m still only lying.”

“You’ve got enough of God in your life already. Do something else that you might enjoy.”

“There isn’t anything.”

His commitment to Maggie is so intense that it envelops him like the crimson nimbus of a burning flare. It isn’t a pure love but it’ll do until one comes along. He’s had many women in Potts County and fathered a half dozen children I know about. He takes no responsibility for anyone or anything except my baptism and marriage. Nothing else makes any real impression on him.

“I’ve been having visions about you,” Drabs says.

“You’ve always had visions about me.”

“More now than ever,” he says, and the sorrow is so great in his voice that I want to leap out of the truck.

“Anything interesting?”

The angles of his shining handsome black face fall in on themselves as he frowns. “I keep seeing a Ferris wheel. It’s damn small. And a merry-go-round. The horses’ faces are all chipped.”

My life, going up and down, around and around, broken. “That’s not the Holy Spirit, that’s Freud.”

“And another thing . . . there’s a man who’s biting the head off a live snake, covered in chicken parts.”

“A geek,” I say. “Jesus Christ, Drabs, don’t tell me you see me winding up as a geek.”

“No, no, listen. It’s not you, but he’s willing to talk to you, for the price of a pint of moonshine.”

“Six bits. Do I give it to him?”

His fingers carelessly brush his chest scars as he nods, staring off through the windshield at the tree line. “Yes.”

I feel the slow-drifting chill begin to prickle my scalp. I know better than to ignore Drabs now. “What’s he saying?”

Drabs turns in his seat with his mouth open but the tongues are abruptly upon him. Maybe I’ve brought this on us simply by asking. Whatever he wants to tell me is important to him and he tries to fight. Sweat streams across his face and his fingers twitch like a handful of wasps. I grab the steering wheel tighter and whisper, “Leave him alone, damn you.”

Entreaties don’t matter much in the presence of the Lord. There is no petition, and I’ve always known it. Drabs hurls himself hard against the passenger door, the spirit bearing down on him, as he yells in a language I feel I could almost understand if only he’d slow down a little.

I pull up to his long dirt driveway and wheel around toward the back. I get out and ease him into a wet patch of yard so he won’t hurt himself. The chickasaw plum and sparkleberries sway against my shoulders. The words rush from him furiously until he’s foaming at the mouth, choking on them.

The muscles of his face are being yanked in directions they shouldn’t go. He tumbles and bounces viciously, flails sideways underneath a willow tree, and rolls through the brush until he’s eventually lost behind the glowing green cypress.

I smoke half a pack of cigarettes waiting to see if he’ll come back, but he never does.

I
N THE DEEPEST HOUR OF THE NIGHT, MY MOTHER
used to dream of Cole unfolded from Sebastian and Jonah, arising in the moonlight to stand complete and alone. They smile at each other and hug, and I wind up with pangs of spite making me grit my teeth.

It’s a dream that has somehow been passed on from her to me. Cole speaks in a singular forgiving voice, full of love, saying my name as though there is an extra meaning there that I don’t yet realize.

But I’m not falling for it. We have expectations and are prepared to do what we must to meet them. The dream is destined to become nightmare, of course. Mama turns and her mouth is red, the blood leaking out onto the floor. She needs help but she doesn’t want it, and I can’t get anywhere near her. She spins aside and is lost in the shadows. When Cole speaks my name from the doorway he is glancing down at the bed where I have replaced him among the others.

I can barely flap my dwarfed and bent arms, these diminutive bony legs wreathed around theirs. Our kneecaps clatter together. I can’t see anything but the glaring eyes of Sebastian and Jonah, who hate the way that I hate, and who do horrible things to me inside our shared ten-pound brain.