A Choir of Ill Children (5 page)

Each new section, with chapter heading, begins with capitalization done in an ostentatious biblical-style calligraphy. There are extensive footnotes designating sets and subsets for further referencing.

As my orgasm draws closer she begins writing much faster, and we’re in the middle of a significant race that carries great consequence. Suddenly I’m filled with a sense of despondency. I know I need to beat her to the finish before she can complete her incantations and invoke some other form of dread.

I buck wildly into her mouth—what might be her mouth—but she’s no longer using her tongue for my purpose. Only her own. She’s talking to me or somebody else,
something
else drawing closer through the vast dark woods surrounding the parking lot. She repeats key phrases—names, clauses, entreaties, demands, and she keeps making more and more promises.

The statements in my flesh have ignited, and the truck grows brighter. Her face remains wreathed in shadow, hidden in a blackness that will always have sharp teeth. Trees bend in the wind, leaves writhing and whirling on burning fetid breath.

I pull her face closer to me, grinding my hips forward and hoping to make a mess of her penmanship, but she’s studied and trained too long for my ploy to work. She’s got great discipline for this.

That’s fine as I grunt and hold tightly to her cold, stiff hair. My cum streams down her throat, if she has a throat, if the mouth and hands are connected to anything at all. Claws tighten on my hips—it was a close race but I’ve won, and managed to escape another trap.

A heavy presence recedes into the brush. She continues sucking until my sweat has dried, my skin cooled, and my cock is hard again.

We proceed once more, perhaps to a different aftermath.

D
RABS HAS HIS CLOTHES ON AND WE
’
RE IN HIS
kitchen drinking coffee. He’s all right for the time being, a man of the earth and not of air, with only one tongue. He’s set aside God for the moment, or maybe it’s God who’s tossed him aside. Perhaps Christ has finally taken some pity on him. Drabs is on a sugar high, pouring heaping spoonfuls into the slightly tart, boiling coffee.

The morning sunlight gushes over his shoulder, making his beaded black skin shine with a certain purity. He wants to talk about Maggie and yet he doesn’t want to speak of her—we’ve been torn like this since we were nine years old. While I’ve grown accustomed to it, even comfortable in a way, he hasn’t and never will. Small talk is out of the question, and there are too many devastating and exhausting troubles for us to find any easy topic.

I know if I ask about the geek I’ll bring the wrath of the Lord down upon one of us. I make an opening but he’s got something else he wants to bring out.

“They found a child today, down in the bottoms.”

My heart is suddenly snarled in my rib cage. My chest throbs painfully. “How long has he been there?”

“I didn’t say it was a ‘he.’ Just so happens it was a girl. Maybe six years old or so. Seven, eight.”

“Did you see her?”

“No, I heard.”

“Who found her?”

“Dodi’s mother, that Velma Coots. Imagine it if you can—” I can and let him go on. His grin is harsh and humorless. “—here the conjure woman comes, crawling over creeks and down through the ditches, hunting for her roots and berries and insects for purposes untold. Covered in muck up to her thighs and holding a handful of swamp moss and snakeskin, and she finds a child laid out on the flat rock.”

My heart his hitting bone now and I can feel the vibrations in my back teeth. “They were at the flat rock?”

“Just as I said.”

Designs and forces are drawing closer together. I feel as if I should understand it by now, but I still can’t make anything out clearly.

Drabs and I had found the flat rock just like almost every kid did, although not all of us talked about it or ever went back again. It was a slab, perhaps a shrine or a sacrificial stone, built centuries ago, with channels running down its length to siphon off the purifying oils and blood. Some of the townsfolk thought it should be destroyed, broken into bits and the dust mixed with salt and scattered across the bottoms. Others, like my father, believed it should be moved yet preserved, studied at the university and considered as an archeological discovery worth some note.

Still others decided it should be used.

And it
had
been used over the years, usually by granny witches who consecrated scarecrows and goats there, hoping to appease an elemental force that lives on in our faiths and practices, down in the mists of antiquity.

Bodies are sometimes found there as well—elderly who die of natural causes, kids who go to bed at night in their beds and wake up laid out on the flat rock with no idea how they got there. On occasion just a bone or two. Usually they belong to an animal, but not always. The stone remains in the deep woods of Potts County, not too far from the river, and no matter the argument, it will always be there.

“What happened?” I ask.

I wait because when Drabs is like this, in his right mind and exceptionally focused, full of intent, he makes you wait. We have another cup of coffee, letting the day rise around us. Noon approaches. Shadows loom as we face each other. Someone walking in might think we are relaxed.

Soon, though, his knees start to jump, fingers tapping as he unravels strand by strand. The nervous tics appear in his face one after the other as the surging sugar works through him.

“So,” he says. “Where was I?”

“Dodi’s mother, hands full of swamp grass, snakeskin, berries, and so forth, at the flat rock and finding the six, seven, or possibly eight-year-old girl.”

“Yes.”

I watch him going farther away from me, inch by inch, button by button, as he undoes his shirt. I haven’t brought the Holy Spirit down on him this time. It’s the beauty of the morning, the taste of too much sweetness.

I need to hear the rest. I stand and yank the table aside, toppling it, then grab Drabs by his shirtfront. I hold it shut with my left hand. I clamp my right on his forehead as if trying to keep his thoughts inside his steaming brain. “You can roll around naked in the ravine all you want to later, Drabs.”

“No, no, I—”

“Now, tell me about the girl. This could be important.”

“Why so?”

“Come on,” I urge.

Even with the sugar-and-caffeine rush in effect, as the tongues are coming for him, his eyes center on me and I feel him coiling back into himself a little. He’s safe for a few seconds more while I keep his clothes on. He blinks as if seeing me for the first time. He says, “Velma Coots goes to inspect the body, unsure if it’s actually a child.”

“Unsure?”

“Possibly a well-made scarecrow, you know how they get. But this one here, it’s got a large lollipop, one of those all-day suckers.”

“I’ve got it.”

“A rainbow, it’s a rainbow of concentric colors, twirling in the light, spinning, spinning . . .”

“Stay with me.”

“. . . with that Velma Coots dropping her mystical wares, berries and critters and so forth, as she rushes forward, yelling.”

“Because it’s not a goddamn scarecrow.”

“Of course not, it’s a child. A girl, as I said. And this girl, roused by the screams, rises from the flat rock—”

“She’s alive?”

“—and holds her all-day sucker before her in a gesture of defense, like that, like that, with two days of grime on her, no food at all except this lollipop. Unable to recall her name, or maybe simply incapable of speaking it.”

“But she’s all right?”

He nods once, searching my eyes as I look into his. The hand I have on his forehead is beginning to heat up as if I’ve got it on a stove. “Yes,” Drabs says, “she’s fine, and staying in town with Lily while the sheriff tries to find out who the child is and where she belongs.”

I release his shirt and stand close by as the tongues come at him from everywhere. He spins and jerks away as if someone is flicking matches at him. The tongues lick out his identity until he’s nothing more than a vessel shrieking in the nonlanguage of martyrs. The Holy Spirit clambers inside him as he squirms on the kitchen floor. There are too many sharp corners in here so I open the back door and let him wriggle out into the yard, terrifying a hawk in flight above us. He spasms beneath sweet gum and mimosa, scaring cormorants standing in the brush.

I start back toward my truck. Before I leave he says one more thing that I can understand.

I stop and turn. His voice is clear and serene even while he thrashes. “The carnival is coming.”

O
NCE EVERY WEEK OR SO
I
SPEND A DAY AT THE MILL
.

You can feel the vehemence the workers have for the place, and you can understand how the mill itself feeds on that malice to keep going on, year after year.

Sometimes there is no place to put your anger and frustration, and sometimes, luckily, there is.

Paul, the foreman, knows exactly how to handle me. He says good morning and stays the hell away. My office—which had been my father’s and grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s before me—bears no sign of any of us. The walls are not scarred or blemished, the century-old desk appears new and perfect. There is nothing to be seen of ownership or tradition. The dust in here is the same dust from the last eighty years, and I breathe it in as they breathed it in, then breathe it out again.

This office is actually one of the few places where I feel content. I stand at the window overlooking the factory floor and watch the rows of employees using their hands the way my family taught them. The patterns are complex but repetitive, the thrum of machinery deadening but also soothing.

My great-grandfather instituted a no-talking policy on the floor that lasted for seventy-five years until I changed it. I had to fill out thirty-seven insurance forms in order to do so. It wasn’t that he believed production would suffer if the workers talked to one another, but he knew that the number of injuries would increase if they didn’t fully concentrate on their tasks. That machinery could tear a man’s arm off in three seconds. And great-granddad was right. Reports of injuries have gone up—fingers lost in gears, punctures and lacerated tendons and shattered knuckles. There was even a death here eighteen months ago, the first since the mill began operating.

Still, my forefathers never sat at those benches, performing the same murderously menial and tedious job every day, and I have. I spent all four of my high school years there among the men and women, learning and operating each machine in turn, without talking. With absolutely nothing but the staccato pounding and beating metal and fluorescent lighting to keep me from plunging into the endless depths of my own thoughts and insane boredom.

They hold me in esteem, or at least they pretend to. They wave and I wave back. There are twelve hundred of them down there and only me up above them. They grow self-conscious beneath my gaze: not just as laborers but as my neighbors. I make them blush.

The mill pays out a high insurance premium but now there are voices to be heard again above the clanking cogs. Chatter rises to the distant rafters. Chuckles and gossip and the retelling of bad jokes, an expression of human need and primordial instinct. It’s only humane.

Giggles and flirting, discussions of hair care products and wrinkle cream. They grunt about fishing and hunting, that terrible football game last night, the nonfat potato chip, the scraping of gums, bad milk, infantile paralysis—and more, always more—Sears & Roebuck, political platforms, that bizarre lesion on your back shaped like the governor’s profile, frying of catfish, the praising of Jesus, the praising of Walenda—and still more, because there must be more, and of course you can’t turn away—at the opening of old heartaches, and Gloria took the kids and is living with that car mechanic on the other side of town, wha’s his name, Verbal Raynes, that’s the one yeah the lousy prick—and he is, you know he is, and it’s killing her husband Harry—but you can’t be calling him the prick, Harry, ain’t his fault Gloria left you, it’s been six weeks already—that ain’t the fucking point—and it’s not the fucking point.

There are screams, it’s true.

They’ve come to be expected and, at least on some level, even hoped for as diversion. We wish for them.

M
Y MOTHER HAD MANY DREAMS THAT ARE NOW
mine.

In a recurring one, I am walking through a field carrying an infant, side by side with Maggie. She wears a sundress and bonnet. We are standing in wheat. There’s no wheat for three states in any direction, but that’s what my mother dreams about. The baby gives a toothless smile and holds out his chubby hands as if the whole world is a rare and precious thing for him to hold. My wife glances at me, radiant with the autumn sun, her hair curling 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.