Blood Kin (24 page)

Man’s gotta run things his own, that’s what my daddy always said. Lord knows it’s in the Bible, just using fancier words. Dirt’s his work, farmin it, hell — it’s his life an family too. Cant show no weakness in your muscle or the death’ll creep in. Weaken ya, like a hook worm suckin on your bone growin and eatin. But what can a real man do bout it?

Nothin, I’d say, but what do he do with it? Start gettin old, wind take the fire outta yer dirt, not much growin no more, not your corn, not your tobaccy, or your pecker. Ya wring your hands, your snake, ya cry in the dirt afore that plowin gets done, goddamn it’s a hard life!

Abigail started crying and Sadie picked her up and began stroking her hair. “So Jack, he walked for a long time and he got real tired and hungry. Then he came to a big stone house with golden gates. He walked up to the gates and a man came out and asked him kind of unfriendly like, what do you want? He told the man that he wanted a job. And the man said, well, I do have this one job. It’s killing giants!”

My daddy used to say yer woman’s gotta be quiet, she takes it all in, holds it fer ya. Member when I met you? I picked up that stone, bout thirty pound threw it in the pond just to show you how strong I was, reglar hoss. Only a few days later we was married. Takes a strong man to win a woman like you.

Member how we used to work the fields together, two yoked mules, my arm aroun you, yer brown skin gettin browner, so’s after years I could hardly tell you from the earth hitself. Sweet, under the loam, after chores, yer skin would shine through all yer sweat, just like the sun. To have a purty woman to talk to, it’s alright. Yer body, she made me fly, but you never said nuthin, didn’t go nowhere. You was just dead in yer eyes!

The other children now clung to Sadie and she was rocking them all. “And then the man told Jack that these giants were ten times bigger than a real man and had many many heads! What was he going to do?”

Tryin to be a man, it’s a hard thing. Daddy never told me it’d be so hard. Bein a man, ya gotta take it all on, pretend them muscles dont hurt, that rheumatiz. And when yer woman’s got misery, and gets all sour with you, well you gotta pretend it didn’t even happen. It eats you up inside! So’s ya gotta bitch bout something else. Dammit, ya know ya gotta be some kind of a king, even when the throne’s just some shitty hole.

Cant let yer woman beat ya. Aint gonna be no woman’s dog!

“The man gave him good food and told him to go cut some wood with an ax.” Sadie couldn’t keep the tremble away from her words. The tremble came out and it took over everything she tried to say. “But Jack knew if he cut the wood, the giants would hear him and come, so what was he supposed to do? How was he ever supposed to keep those giants away?”

Whatya gonna do, when yer hurtin? Daddy didn’t tell me that. Drink some turpentine, some sugar, dont help. Man’s gotta have somebody ta talk to. But ya just cant let her know yer down. Woman’s gotta obey, less it be a crime. Dont milk the cow, she dry up. Dont spread the manure, fields dry up. Dont can nothin, aint got nothin fer winter. That woman dont obey ya, ya aint got no home. But hell, what ya do? Damn if she dont take you all inside. She dont open her mouth, she dont let you out.

Daddy’d say a woman gots magic, an I’d believe him. Her flesh’d cure all yer ills, she knows things a man dont. Look over an the woman be watchin me, quiet, an I knows she beginning ta find me out, takin me inside, knowin me, hidin me, ever night, stealin what I got, takin it, inside her an she never let it out again. She’s gonna take what I got an beat me with it. I’d beg her ta give it back, cryin, then gettin madder, cause she made me cry, wouldn’t say, wouldn’t give it back.

Uncle Jesse’s voice kept changing. Sometimes he sounded like himself, and sometimes he sounded like the preacher, possessing him. He sounded like all the men in her life full of their weakness and delusion and unaware of the pain they caused everyone around them, instead blaming it on the women, persecuting the women, killing the women out of that terrible, devouring rage and emptiness she would never understand even if she lived into her eighties.

So’s I hadda knock her down, rip open that purty pink robe, reach down where she kept it all, them things she wouldn’t say or do for me, and I saw myself, all red and angry, bleedin, an

Lord I just had to rip it out!

Sadie heard the rapid climb of Jesse’s voice on the other side of the door, until he was screaming, and Lilly was screaming too, first in terror, and then in pain, her throat finally making a sound unlike any human being should ever have to make. The kids were crying and screaming now, and Sadie pushed herself against the door in case he decided to come in after them. She didn’t want to look, she didn’t need to, having seen it all before in that vision at the store several days ago. She held onto the children and whispered to them, telling them it would be all right even though it never could be, and despite herself she turned her head and with one eye at the crack watched as Lilly’s screams reached their peak, and all that blood filled the room, and Jesse curled and uncurled his fingers, casting that bloody bit down like a dirty rag, and howled.

Chapter Fifteen

M
ICHAEL WALKED OUT
of the hospital and crossed the parking lot slowly, feeling as if he might break into a run, but not trusting himself enough to do so. He’d trip and break a leg, or run into some small child. Right now he couldn’t bear the thought of kids getting hurt.

Not having a regular job, he’d actually forgotten it was a weekend, a prime visiting day at the hospital. His leg still wasn’t quite right, maybe never would be.

For such a small hospital, they had a lot of visitors. But southern families were close-knit, at least that’s what everybody said. Home was something special, and if your loved one couldn’t be at home you brought home to them until they’d recovered. Perfectly normal-looking families hung out in the downstairs lobby or on the lawn or in the park across the street. He didn’t see a thing wrong with any of them. Some of the kids were crying, but even in the best of times there were always kids crying, complaining about some small or imagined hurt. The problem was, you couldn’t always tell if their hurts were small or monstrous.

He made it across the lot and across the road to the well-kept park where he threw up in a trash bin, had nothing to wipe his mouth on and took a chance on a napkin someone had thrown away. A little further in beneath the trees he lay down in the grass. He could still taste the blood in his mouth, and his nose still detected a faint trace. His brief touch of that cold and angry heart would be with him the rest of his life.

He could not begin to calculate the strength such an act had required, or the insanity necessary to generate such strength.

He gazed at the sky through the filtering green of the trees, breathing deeply and allowing the fresh air to steady him, to drive out the raw taste of the past with the light and air of this fresh new day. The car was still in the parking lot and the tank three-fourths full. He could get in it and drive, maybe sleep in the car until he found some work for a room, some food, and more gas that would get him even further down the road. Eventually he could get a better job, enough money to settle in with, meet some people and make some friends, and give regular life at least another try. No one needed to know about the family he’d once belonged to.

He had no responsibility here. He hadn’t been alive when these events occurred.

Why had his grandmother needed to show him this? If it was to let him know what an evil man the preacher had been, he’d already figured that out. But what did it matter now? All those people were dead.

Or was it meant to provide him with a touchstone for his own anger, his own coldness? No use denying it was there. So far he’d been singularly unlucky in relationships — he’d never found that balance between caring and needing. It was hard not to resent the one who wouldn’t give back when a good and happy life seemed just within reach. And there was something about that particular resentment that seemed unfortunately male. But still, even when his mother died and he’d gone into that dark place, even there he hadn’t touched such coldness. Of what concern to him was the reality that this existed in other men?

He sat up on the grass. The day had gone on without him, and now the sun was falling behind darkening clouds. An ancient black pickup truck idled in the almost-empty parking lot. The door and fenders were creased, bent and rebent, straightened so many times that the metal looked like crepe, with spider webs of rust tracing the paint. Flaking gray plywood had been used to extend the short walls of the truck bed, and then the edges cornered with scrap aluminum to make a box. A battered garbage can lid with big hinges attached was mounted on the back end of that box.

At first he thought the truck cab was empty, and then noticed the top edge of a dome of skin, textured like an old leather basketball, and of a similar color. It bobbed, and then the driver’s side door sprang open, as if kicked.

A short, squat figure in overalls climbed down to the pavement. The face looked both wrinkled and swollen, and all of it liver-spotted, or sunburnt. Before the truck door closed Michael saw that figure’s twin sitting on the passenger side, smoking, staring at him.

The squat figure walked bowlegged across the lot and the road and into the park and up to a tree near where Michael was sitting. Michael decided it was male when it unzipped and let loose a stream of urine on the tree. The head turned and nodded. “Cant abide a hospital toilet.”

After a couple of minutes the man zipped and turned around and walked over. He smelled of tobacco smoke and lotion. “How do.” The old man moved his pale pink, swollen tongue around inside his mouth a great deal. “Be much obliged if you’d join us over there. That truck? We’ll be leavin soon.”

Michael tried to gauge the danger of going somewhere with this stranger and decided that at least for the moment he didn’t care. “Okay.” He climbed unsteadily to his feet, feeling as if he’d been knocked down and dragged for some distance.

The little old man climbed up on the running board and yanked on the door handle. The door flew open and the man fell backwards and Michael caught him before he hit the ground. He made a sound like leaves crackling and Michael decided he was laughing.

“Elijah! Dont be an old fool!” the other figure said.

Michael was so shocked he almost dropped the little man. He leaned forward to get a closer look at the little bald woman smoking in the passenger seat, her matching overalls, her simultaneously swollen and wrinkled face. “You’re a Gibson all right.” Her left eyelid struggled to wink over an eyeball that was mostly cataract. “Too ugly to be nothing else.”

Again Elijah made that dry, somewhat painful laughing noise. “Never thought to swap her,” he said.

They sat in the pickup for a while, Michael in the middle towering over the Grans, quiet except for the engine, ready for a fast departure for whatever reason. He had a dozen or so questions to ask, but their manner didn’t encourage questions, so he held himself back. If anything, their presence encouraged speechless awe, and maybe a bit of fear.

A narrow passage had been cut through the back of the truck cab to allow easy access to the plywood enclosure in the bed. A towel hung over the opening but it gapped enough on the side for him to steal a peek — a mattress, clothing piled everywhere, an avalanche of machinery parts, household knick knacks, papers, and food. It seemed a smaller version of their house at the top of the ridge, a place he’d never been.

“Came to visit your grandma,” Addie said.

“You went upstairs?”

“No need.”

“Cant abide a hospital,” Elijah said.

“She knows we’re down here,” Addie said. “It’s enough.”

“We tried to help your ma,” Elijah said

“You knew my mother?”

“Didn’t help. Probly made it worse.” Elijah sighed deeply. “We sure got our share of crazy.”

“You help out your grandma?” Addie patted his arm with her tiny, narrow fingers.

“I try. I’m not sure I know what I’m doing exactly. I don’t know much, about any of this.”

She patted him again. “We never knew,” she said. “We were stupid.”

Elijah cackled. “Never thought to swap her! Just tried to figure who she wanted to be, then I stayed out of her way!”

“He aint askin bout us, old man!” She coughed, then she whispered, “I reckon he’s askin bout the preacher!”

Elijah patted Michael on the knee, and after a few seconds they were both patting him and rubbing his arms as if he were a child who needed comforting. “Problem with us Gibsons,” Elijah said, “is some of us go crazy, an some of us live too long, and some of us...” his voice dropping low and cracking, “are just too damn hard to kill.”

And then they had no more to say. They sat there quietly, the two very old people patting him on the leg, the knee, smiling, but not saying a word. After a few minutes Addie said, “Time to say goodbye.”

Michael impulsively leaned over and kissed them on the tops of their heads and climbed out of the cab, closing the door behind him.