A Choir of Ill Children (26 page)

I drive to Velma Coots’s place and can hear her screaming voice over the thunder and thrashing rain as I draw up. Dodi is in there too, yelling, “No, Mama, no!”

“Do it, chile!”

“I won’t!”

“Do as I say!”

My roofing job has finally started to cave in. Rain boils into the shack through the ruptured beams and shingles. The brass cauldron in the fireplace spits black venom against the heated brick.

Velma Coots lies straddled over the chopping block. All her fingers are gone and the stumps of her hands have been cauterized and poorly tied off with strips of yellowed sheets. The burned flesh of those nubs still smells like sizzling steak. Dodi stands there with dark circles under her eyes. She holds a long-handled ax poised over her mother’s neck.

The swarming water washes over them. Velma Coots cries again, “Mine me! Do it, girl!”

“No!”

Dodi hurls the ax at my feet, rushes out to my truck, guns the engine, and wheels away, leaving me alone with this crazy granny witch on a night when the dead are climbing out of our heads.

“You go on and finish it,” Velma Coots tells me.

“Cut your head off?” I ask. “What purpose would that serve?”

“Only purpose there is! Somebody got to make the sacrifice. You ain’t gonna pay your debts.”

“Oh shut the hell up about that, lady. I’ve been evening the score on them pretty well the past few days.”

“Not enough,” she sneers.

I help her to her feet and move her off to a corner chair where the roof still gives some shelter. “I suppose it’s too late for that vinegar stuff.”

“A’yup.”

“Where are my brothers?”

“Doin’ their part.”

“Which is?” I try to imagine their stunted, gnarled bodies out on the highway hitchhiking, waving down strangers. Six thumbs hanging in the vicious wind pointing in every direction.

“Too late to worry about it.”

I snort and try another route. “Did you give Lucretia Murteen an abortion?”

“That woman wanted a child more’n anybody I ever known.”

“Who did it?”

“You ain’t ever gonna find out.”

“Jesus, I wish you hags would quit saying that.”

“Life’s got more questions than answers, boy.”

It hits me low and I burst out laughing. “You granny witches. You’re so laid-back about killers but you’ll put your own neck on the chopping block. The fuck’s wrong with you people?”

“It coulda been anybody. Maybe that Abbot Earl done it. He could be lying about what he heard and saw, you ever think of that? Maybe one’a them other monks. They got men floatin’ around that place from all over the country, with their minds that ain’t right. Drugs and liquor, torturin’ one another in the name’a God hisself. They beat themselves bloody for redemption, then spit in the Lord’s eye. It just don’t matter. You ain’t ever gonna know.”

“Yes I will.”

I head out. It’s a long walk back home in the slashing rain but the storm begins to lessen while I’m on my way.

Dodi drives past without slowing down and I think I see an odd movement in the back of the truck. A trifold darkness and blur of black motion waving. And beneath the sound of the storm of souls, fluttering in my basal ganglia, a laughter like the muted song of a choir of ill children.

When I get back to the house the rain has ended.

Drabs is hanging from a willow branch.

T
HREE DAYS AFTER
D
RABS
’
S FUNERAL
Reverend Clem Bibbler presides over my marriage to Maggie. He’s also the best man and has to stop several times in order to wipe away his tears and calm himself. His voice quavers but his smile is sincere. Abbot Earl offers up prayers and litanies at sixth hour during the wedding. Most of the town turns out for the church service and there are lavish gifts, cards, and favors, along with hundreds of homemade dishes. Even Sheriff Burke shows up in a good mood wearing lizard skin boots and a white ten-gallon hat. We hold the reception at the house and he gets drunk on some good red wine, hits on the fat woman that Sap Duffy and Tab Ferris were fighting over, and eventually winds up sleeping it off in the bathtub.

Fred and Sarah come in from New York. They’re both clean and sober, and Sarah shows off her engagement ring. Fred’s documentary on addiction has won some festival awards and he’s got a lucrative cable deal now. I decide to fund another project for him—an independent crime drama about a pair of hit men running from the mob who dress in drag and join an Atlantic City lounge act. Sarah’s written the script, which I read to Maggie one night in bed. I think it lacks a third act and make some notes in the margins with a red pen. Sarah and I discuss revisions and Fred uses the money to bring in two established actors. One is an Academy Award nominee, which will help to get distributors interested. Sarah takes the female lead and manages to hold her own pretty well, from what little footage I’ve seen. When we talk, she never asks about Jonah so I never mention him either.

Clay, Lottie Mae, and Darr come to visit often. They all enjoy my sponge cake too. The mood is genial with hints of distress bubbling up from beneath, but eventually a much more mellow atmosphere takes over. Clay is quite talented at carpentry and I pay him well to rebuild a few missing shutters and fix up some other areas of the house that have fallen into disrepair. Perhaps he just wants a peek at the crannies of the place, which is also fine with me. I still don’t know why they were killing all the birds.

Darr has taken up fencing, and I practice with him in the backyard. He wears a mask, plenty of protective gear, and a rubber tip at the end of his sword. He’s actually quite good. He’s got a much longer reach than I do, but he’s slower, so we’re evenly matched. I stock just enough liquor in the house to keep him pleasantly buzzed most of the time.

Clay and Maggie exchange long glances and share something beyond my understanding. It’s all right because we’re all protected here. The tempests and the dead come and go as they’re meant to do. They bring their pain and we bring ours and together we fight our way to the dawn.

I’ve put Velma Coots up in one of the free rooms. We’ve been spending time with some of the best doctors and mechanical engineers in the country fitting her with prosthetics. She wanted the hooks and cables, but I made her go for the gloveless endoskeletal hands with self-skinning foam. They’re much more realistic and even higher functioning.

She tells me that she hasn’t heard from Dodi and has no idea of her whereabouts, but she’s lying. It’s understandable. I know my brothers and Dodi are still together, close by, probably out in the bog shantytown. They remain her charges and she fulfills her duty. One day, I’m certain, they’ll return as promised. We’ll share whatever burdens must be shared for the sake of Kingdom Come.

T
HE
C
RONE HAS TAKEN OVER MY BROTHERS
’ bedroom. We’ve replastered and painted it a nice summer yellow. I’ve bought her a new wardrobe and she now wears sundresses, orthopedic hose, and sweaters with big pockets where she hides bits of food. She listens to plenty of Liberace CDs and she’s become fanatic about the DVD player. Already I’ve purchased an extensive library of movies for her to watch, and she spends hours in front of the home entertainment center listening to the commentary tracks and viewing the outtakes and deleted scenes. Deliverymen arrive at all hours of the day with packages containing boxed sets of classic fifties sit-coms and wide-screen versions of the John Wayne Limited Edition Collection.

The other granny witches visit quite often. Velma Coots has gotten good with her new hands and she can handle small objects with great dexterity. The conjure ladies used to spend afternoons brewing potions and making oxtail soup, but now they’ve taken to playing pinochle and mahjong. Velma Coots is so good with the prosthesis that she can sail the cards across the table like a Vegas blackjack dealer.

Lottie Mae occasionally joins them but most of the time she merely sits quietly and lets the conversation circle around her. Often she stares toward the bottoms as if she’s watching something off in the distance. She stares and frowns before turning again to the discussion, smiling blandly.

I try not to gaze at her with any great longing but it’s difficult. My heart juts into my ribs and a soft sorrow runs through me until the world begins to draw sideways and the wind brushes my collar back.

The burns fade and my eyebrows fill back in, but my hair doesn’t grow anymore. Every day I look as if I’ve come fresh from the barber. I still go on retreat to the Holy Order as much as I did before, but I scan Abbot Earl’s face wondering if he was the one who got Lucretia Murteen pregnant, and then balked at his responsibilities. I bake the morning bread, ride the donkey, and contemplate our efforts to discover the will of God. Sister Lucretia’s white eye patch watches me closely as I wander through the empty maternity ward thinking of her and newborn babies.

The carnival packs up and leaves town, traveling a few more miles upriver every week until it crosses the state line. It’ll be back next year and Maggie and I will visit again with a wretched man whose disappointments murdered my mother and drove him into the unstoppable wheels of his one grand monument to Kingdom Come.

I’ll beat the hungry dogs from him and chase the bog folk off. I’ll stare him in the eye and pay him the six bits it costs for a pint of moonshine, and when his blue runny lips quiver and begin to part I’ll leave him there in the slime once more.

There are still frayed ends that I return to again and again, questions that will not go away. I vow to find the killer of my grandmother no matter how long it takes me. I will know who pinned her to the roof of her school with a reap hook, and I’ll learn what the words on the side of the building meant.

Maggie gets pregnant and a new excitement fills all of us. Darr goes out and buys a tiny fencing outfit. Clay begins to carve and assemble a bassinet made completely from white oak.

The boys at the mill bring me gifts and good wishes, but there’s an added worry in their eyes. Paul the foreman tries to give voice to it but can’t quite pull it off. He wants to ask me if I’m afraid my wife will give birth to a monstrous three-headed being that will wallow in darkness and hide in the swamp and—

I smile evenly and dock him for the five minutes he’s late that day getting back from lunch. He walks around the floor in a wide-eyed panic the rest of the afternoon, screaming at the workers, keeping the line rolling as I look down from my office window.

I still wonder about who carried the torches and chased Betty Lynn through the tobacco fields, and if they’re still out there. Perhaps they believed that she was actually pregnant with my baby. If that’s the case, then they may return when Maggie begins to show.

We’ll be prepared. We have numbers. I track down all of Drabs’s children in the county. There are fourteen of them, more than I had thought. I take care of their mothers and set up accounts for their futures, and we invite them over to our home and watch them at play on the swing and along the slopes of the property. Reverend Bibbler’s laughter booms on the breeze as he plays with his grandchildren and he’s taken to wearing short-sleeved shirts and shorts. I’ve set up jungle gyms and seesaws and slides out in the yard. Clay builds the playground so it’ll hold up in a storm.

My mother is dead but she continues to dream.

I witness her as a girl with blond curls draped across the shoulders of her gingham dress as she tugs at the coat sleeve of her father. She removes all the rat traps. She forgives the shortcomings and hangs near the ceiling and drifts to the corners at dusk. Her hands are ivory and she brushes them softly against my cheek. She has an incandescence that will never die out.

Mama has shown me this: Maggie and I will walk side by side through a field, carrying an infant. Maggie’ll be wearing a sundress and bonnet and somehow we will find wheat and stand in it. The baby will give a toothless smile and hold out his chubby hands as if the whole world is a rare and precious thing for him to hold. My wife will glance at me, radiant with the autumn sun, her hair coiling out from beneath the bonnet and struck by the sunlight in such a way that her features are suddenly blazing, as natural and perfect as the season itself.

Secrets still chase me down the long dimly lit corridors of my life. Perhaps Drabs paid my debt for me or perhaps my brothers forfeited him. These walls are filled with history and heartache. The ham is still in the house. I go to the attic and stare at the trunk, which no longer has a key. There are dozens of other locked drawers, chests, chiffoniers, highboys, cabinets, and old luggage. I wonder what’s in them and what else my father has hidden up here. And his fathers before him? Any keys I find around the house I add to one large ring. One day I’ll try them all, but not just yet.

We are a family. This is blood. The home is huge and there’s room for plenty of healthy children. Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we’ve offered and those we have yet to make.