Blood Kin (25 page)

Elijah turned and looked at him with his cloudy eyes. “Well, that’s something never happened before.” He smiled and drove away.

When Michael got back upstairs his grandma was asleep. Mickey-Gene sat on the edge of the bed holding her hand. He turned and looked at Michael. It was hard to tell if he’d been crying — apparently his eyes always looked that way. “You know I never forgot about you,” Mickey-Gene said. “I was always wondering what you were doing with your life.”

Michael had no idea what he meant. Maybe it was just this socially-awkward old man’s attempt at politeness. “Thanks for sitting with her,” he replied. “I... I just needed to take a break.”

“Oh sure, sure. Anytime.” Carefully Mickey-Gene placed her hand on top of the covers. “She’s so tired. She asked me to tell you the next part. It’s okay, I was there.”

“I... I dont know that it would work the same. Grandma and I, well, there’s a special connection when she tells it.”

“I know, I know. But it’s okay, really. I’ll get us both back there — I promise.”

Chapter Sixteen

M
ICKEY-
G
ENE WENT EARLY
to the mill as he did every morning. Even with all the trees and the stream turning the wheel the building got so hot in the afternoon he usually had to quit by three. Hopefully enough folks had come by with their bushels of shelled corn by then to make it worth his while. He took a gallon of shelled corn for every bushel he ground into meal and gave back to the customer in those cotton sacks. It wasn’t much but still enough to trade for what he needed, and he didn’t need much. He lived with his Uncle Ralph who owned the mill but sometimes on cooler days he just stayed at the mill all day and slept there. His uncle said that was okay it kept him out of trouble but really it just kept folks from bothering him. Both Uncle Ralph and Aunt Mattie were good at keeping crazy folks from bothering them and they’d tried to teach the same thing to Mickey-Gene.

He had figured out a long time ago that the best way to survive this family was to stay out of everybody’s way and not let on how much you knew about anything.

Besides, he liked it here. It was the quietest, prettiest part of the county. It was a business, but he wasn’t busy all the time — he’d go days without anybody showing up. Then he could read, or daydream, or figure things out, or whatever he took a notion to. And survive. He had a box full of books he read over and over: Shakespeare’s
Complete Plays
,
Babbitt
by Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos’
Three Soldiers
, Jean Toomer’s
Cane
, Faulkner’s
The Sound and The Fury
, and
The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton. He liked some of Shakespeare more than others, but all of it seemed strange, set in some other world a universe away from here. And the
language
— sometimes the words were living things, full of breath and blood and capable of biting you if you weren’t careful. Wharton’s book was all about a life unlike any he’d ever heard of — he couldn’t quite understand these people, but he kept reading the book anyway.

In
Cane
there was this one sentence, “Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.” It was about the most beautiful thing he’d ever read.

Years ago a rock slide had taken out the dirt road on the mill side of the creek. That was how folks used to get their corn to the mill. But after half the ridge came down they either had to abandon the mill or find another way, so his uncle built this swinging rope bridge across the creek, and lined the bottom of it with boards so that it was two planks wide, and the people had to carry their bushels of corn over on that narrow footbridge.

Sometimes Mickey-Gene would look across from the mill and see some child the parents had sent on the chore, or some older person, and they’d look scared, and he could feel their scare right down into his bones and he just couldn’t bear it so he’d run across and tell them to rest up there on the bank while he milled their corn for them, and then he’d carry their bushel down to the mill.

Today he’d be closing early for Lilly Gibson’s funeral. Of course her folks were organizing the funeral and none of the Gibson family was invited because of what Jesse done, but they were going to show up anyway because they all had loved Lilly. They would just stand back a little, down the hill, watching and paying their silent respects. Her little kids had already been taken to her sister’s house in Tennessee to live. The Gibsons knew they’d never see those children again and that was a hard thing.

He didn’t do well in groups of people. He especially didn’t do well at family gatherings. So today he spent some time relaxing and doing the things he enjoyed most in order to armor himself for the coming ordeal. He dipped into his box of books and read passages at random. Maybe that was a strange thing to do — he didn’t know because he didn’t talk to any other readers. But he liked the feeling he got from it — that sense of a solitary voice singing out from a strange and unknown place, and trying to trace it back and discover where it had come from.

The Sound and the Fury
was a difficult book. He didn’t know how others perceived it, but he suspected that most people thought so. It seemed to him that the book was all about communication, how difficult it was to make it happen, and by going into characters’ heads like that, so completely, well he’d never seen anybody do that before. It was a demonstration of empathy, and how strange empathy was, because you never could predict, could you, what went on in other people’s heads.

This “feeling” the Gibsons were always talking about — Mickey-Gene had decided a long time ago that it was
empathy
they were talking about. In certain circumstances they could understand what other folks were feeling in a deep way — as if, just briefly, they
were
them. It worked best with other members of the family, but sometimes it worked with other people too. The preacher had it, Sadie had it in spades, and he himself had it, the Grans, hell, maybe all of them in varying degrees.

But the understanding didn’t necessarily make you
nice
; it didn’t even make you kind. You just
knew
— that was all. You could use that power to make other people feel better, or worse. Once inside their heads, you could push them anyway you wanted to.

Mickey-Gene couldn’t tolerate it. He had to shut it off a long time ago — that was why he was so alone in the world. He didn’t understand how most of the others used it, or tolerated it. The preacher used it to destroy people, like Jesse and Lilly, just because he could. He could control those snakes with it. The preacher could find it in the blood and push the blood however he wanted.

And someone like Sadie, she could be kind with it. She wanted to be kind with it, but sometimes she was so beset, her life was so hard, she just didn’t have the will to be as kind as she might. But maybe he could help her with that. Now that she saw him as no one else saw him, now that she was the only one who saw who he was, he would do anything for her. He thought he’d loved her all his life, but his Aunt Mattie, she’d seen it in his eyes when he looked at Sadie, and she’d said, “No, Mickey-Gene, she’s your cousin. That aint for you, Mickey-Gene,” and that might be true, but he’d still felt it as cruelty when she’d said it, and he’d had to run away rather than hit her.

But he’d thought enough for the day. Thinking so often hurt his heart and he had to shut it off for a while. So he stood outside and he looked at the world, all the little bits of it, and the names of everything. It was important that every bit had a name he could place in his head. Everything, including people, had a color and a sound and a name he could say. Slippery elm and winged elm and scarlet oak. Wild turkey and grouse, pheasants and black ducks. The hollow was full of birds of all kinds, especially the small ones, and people would eat any kind of bird if they were hungry enough. Moles and blue tick hounds and short-tailed shrew. The chirp and saw of the late afternoon insects like a chorus of singers with something sharp shoved down their throats. The ticks of the katydids and the crickets who sounded like little tinny bells, the bright red dabs of cardinals like flying blood singing
wait wait cheer cheer
. The jays harshly repeating their own name over and over. The sad
coo-oo-oo-hoo
of the mourning doves, and on the other side of the forest the
cheer-up cheer-up
robins. Titmouse and chickadee
dee
and that friendly towhee inviting you to
drink your tea, sweet, drink your tea.

Mickey-Gene wasn’t sure when he’d started it but he could feel himself spinning. Maple and dogwood and linden. Red cedar white cedar. Maybe if he got better he could be a painter some day or an artist of an art that hadn’t even been invented yet. Dibs and dabs and names and colors and explosions of sound, but knowing how they all flowed and fit together was the important thing. Meadow mouse and bull elk and mule. He spun around so hard he was getting dizzy but he just couldn’t quite stop himself.

Dry brown white oak leaves crunching beneath his feet. Red, golden, and scarlet sourwood leaves. Ripe paw paws, persimmons, and wild grapes. Sweet and sour and bitter on the tongue. Bees swarming the sky between the swaying trees.

And somewhere crying and terror and the grief that will not end or even explain itself. The sorrow for a child you cannot feed or begin to teach. The wonder, the wonder about a world impossible to parse or capture in a lifetime of looks. Milkweed blossoms, yellow butterfly weed, clumps of blue violets and phlox. Possum and groundhog and woodcock, dried pumpkin sassafras tea cornbread in a pan and biscuits cut out with the top of a glass and baked brown.

“Child! Could you stop spinnin round and come hep a poor old gal!”

Mickey-Gene stopped and looked out at the rope bridge. A skinny old woman with long ragged hair was swinging there, something big and black clutched to her belly she was losing a grip on. She looked strained and unhappy. She was that witch woman, Granny Grace, the one who had protected Sadie at the picnic, but she made him feel really nervous. He couldn’t begin to understand someone like her. He didn’t think he could talk to her.

But maybe he wouldn’t have to. He was rapidly losing balance. He was going down.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

He lay there with his eyes closed, listening to the world rustle around him, and then eventually rustling to him. “You aint dead or nothin are you? Then see if you cant sit up.”

He did as she said, but felt like the idiot he pretended to be. “You probably think I’m like Benjy,” he said.

“Who’s that?”

Of course, he had no idea if she’d read Faulkner’s novel, or even if she could read, or if it was too thin a reference for her to pick up on even if she had read it. He had no sense of such things, and always got it wrong. “Sorry. A character in a book...” Should he really drop his mask with her?

“I know, you read. You aint ignorant like most of the rest of us. That’s why I need you to do somethin for Sadie.”

“S-s-sure. What?”

“Hide the preacher’s Bible.” She lifted and dropped the heavy thing into his lap. “Least you could do, after I risked my life bringin it cross that thar bridge.”

He stared at it. It was old and beat up and smelled bad. The leather had a slightly greasy feel to it, like maybe it hadn’t been cured right, and was now beginning to liquefy, as skin would, if not preserved. “Why?”

“Because it’s too dangerous for Sadie to have it, and I just went by my place to hide it, but somebody’s been there lookin, and it smells to me like the preacher been through there. And no offense, child, but I dont reckon he’d suspicion you. So you got a good place to hide it?”

“Yes’m.” He was thinking of that bin full of shelled corn he had. He’d been taking his share from the last few weeks and just pouring it into that bin, not grinding it or trading it or anything, just watching it accumulate because he liked looking at it in different kinds of light, and putting his hands into it, and thinking about what kind of painting he’d make of it, if he painted. He didn’t need the money — his aunt and uncle gave him everything he needed. He could take some of that corn out, put the Bible in the bin, and pour some corn back over it. He put his fingers along the edge of the Bible’s cover and started to open it, but Granny Grace’s quick hands closed it.

“I know you like to read child, but not this. The riginal words might be okay, but not what he done to them, or what he added, or them pictures he drew all over. No sir, you dont want any of that nonsense in your head.” She got up then, and ran across the rope bridge like it was nothing.

Mickey-Gene decided he believed her. The same people who said Granny Grace was crazy thought him stupid. It was the same Bible the preacher had up at the mines. It would be hard not to look into a book when it was sitting right there in front of you, so he went inside and started burying it under all that beautiful, yellow, white, and golden corn. But after he got it all covered, and was patting himself on his own back about how clever he was, he reached into the bin and lifted the book out in a shower of corn, and sat right there on the floor and opened it.