Original Sins (3 page)

The men sitting on the back platform with their feet propped on the rail would smile and wave back: “Maybe someday. Just be patient.”

The Five would race back through the familiar fields and woods to the pond, in whose red clay banks they knew every muskrat hole. Almost every bluegill who leapt from the water, and twisted and flashed silver in the sun they had caught at one time—and had thrown back after introducing themselves. They would pile into the boat and row around the pond rescuing drowning insects. They called this mission the Bug Patrol.

The Five agreed that Kathryn was as close to being special as any adult could be. As each was shooed out of his or her house by the arrival of a new baby or a new job, Kathryn was there to bandage cuts, wipe noses, and tie shoes. Once when Emily and Sally's mother was in the hospital getting them a new brother, Kathryn took The Five to the lawn below her third-floor window. Mrs. Prince appeared at the window in a filmy white robe with her black hair flowing, looking like a fairy princess. While The Five gazed in amazed silence, she threw down chocolate-covered cherries wrapped in gold and silver foil. For days they hoarded the candies, looking at them and remembering this vision. But it was Kathryn who took the children home that day and fixed lunch and read a story with a different one cuddled in her lap every few pages.

Then one day Kathryn was no longer there. Their parents said she had gone to New York City to learn to be a nurse; she had said to tell them good-bye and that she would see them sometime one of these days. Emily reported to the others having been awakened the previous night by voices in the driveway below her window.

“But I'm scared, Mr. Prince,” Kathryn had said.

“Don't be scared, Kathryn,” Emily's father had replied. “Everything's going to be all right.”

“What do you reckon she was scared of?” Emily demanded. The Five searched their brains and couldn't come up with an answer. They themselves were scared of nothing—not Commies, not Yankees, not Indians, not nothing. They had a pact that if they were ever captured and tortured by the enemy, they would never reveal each other's names, not even to the death. They had drills to prove their courage. On summer nights under the streetlight in front of Jed and Raymond's house, large fluttery shadows swooped through the circle of light on the pavement. Raymond said they were the shadows of vampire bats. The Five took turns standing directly under the streetlight as at least twelve vampire bats passed overhead.

Another drill involved the old boarded-up Hardin house down the street. It was crumbling red-brick with vines all over it. The story went that old Mr. Hardin beat his wife. One night as he was beating her nearly to death, their son Carl came in and shot him dead. Mrs. Hardin died of her injuries; Carl was still in the pen. The house was supposed to be haunted by both Mr. and Mrs. Hardin, who continued to carry on even in death. Jed and Raymond insisted they regularly heard screams coming from the broken upstairs windows late at night.

“Why did she let him?” Emily would demand. “Any man who tried that on me would be sorry!” The others nodded in agreement.

The Hardin drill required each to crawl through the wrought-iron fence after sunset, sneak across the overgrown lawn, and dash seven times across the gravel driveway. In bare feet. Then they would reassemble in Emily and Sally's yard to catch lightning bugs and put them on their fingers and pretend they were diamond rings.

Once Raymond led them down by the river in search of a trestle for a defunct railway spur. He had studied in school how the Yankees set fire to it to cut off supplies to Lee in Virginia. An eight-year-old girl from a nearby house dumped a bucket of water on the fire. The Yankees, retreating in their torn blue, their faces black with gunpowder and sagging with exhaustion, saw this and set another fire, which the little girl dowsed. The Yankees squatted down and lied patiently to her in their harsh accents, thinking of their own little daughters, about how the trestle had to be destroyed so that no more Yankees could come south and bother her people. She smiled shyly. As they left, she dumped water on the new fire. They rode back shooting rifles in the air. She ran and hid. And once the Yankees were certain the blaze was going and were riding away, she emerged to drown it.

The Five knew they would have done the same. And if the Yankees wanted to fight about it, they'd have a
real
fight on their hands. In Emily and Sally's dining room was a mahogany table from their mother's family farm. The table top was scarred from when Yankees butchered the farm's steers on it. Their great-grandmother had watched in silence, as her table was hacked up and as blood dripped onto her carpets and splattered the walls. Well, Emily and Sally were certain they would not have just stood there. And all the children cheered at the part of the story when the Yankee officer slashed open the feather bed in search of silver, inhaled a feather, and suffocated to death.

One Christmas The Five received further confirmation that they were special. With Raymond's battered .22 rifle, they trudged through the fields behind Emily and Sally's house. The mustard-colored stubble, stiff with frost, snapped under their boots. Up the high hill they had tried to fly off when they were dumb little kids. In the distance were blue mountains, fronted by row upon row of frosty mustard-colored fields. And immediately below was the woods, the bare limbs of oak and poplar and walnut etching intricate dark designs like wrought-ironwork on the overcast sky.

Enveloped in their own steamy breath, they inspected the oak trees for dark clumps of mistletoe. Each took one bullet. The idea was to shoot through the branch and bring an entire basketball-sized clump floating like a parachute to the forest floor. If you shot through the clump instead, tiny sprigs would shower down. Often even Mr. Tatro failed to bring down more than sprigs. But that year, and for the next three, one of The Five shot down an entire clump. They would race through the tangled dead timothy into the forest and search until they found the clump on its shattered branch. The one who had shot it would inspect it as the others watched in silence. The mistletoe lived on dusty green through the winter when everything else in the forest appeared dead. Like them, the mistletoe was special, chosen to keep watch. Yet the waxy white berries were poisonous. You didn't mess with mistletoe, and you didn't mess with The Five either.

They would carry their totem home—where someone's mother would hang it in a doorway by a silly red ribbon and kiss other adults under it—while The Five watched with disdain.

The Five felt these signs should be acknowledged, so one blustery March morning they pooled their allowances and bought a yellow paper kite and four dozen balls of string. On the kite they wrote, “Messages received. Call Newland 761, collect, day or night.” Then they climbed the hill and sent up the kite, which tugged and tossed in the gusts. They let out more and more string until the kite was less than a speck in the distance, with fluffy clouds scudding and colliding all around it. Then they cut the string, certain the kite would be found in New York City. They hung around by the phone, but it never rang for them.

Doubt didn't really set in until the fall Raymond entered junior high school. In the first place, Emily didn't go to Washington, D.C., for the National Spelling Bee. In fact, she hadn't even made it out the door of Jefferson Davis Elementary School. She misspelled “abscess” and had to sit down in the second round in tears. If she couldn't even get herself to Washington, D.C., the others whispered, how could she get to New York City for “The $64,000 Question”? Was it possible that, even with her oversized brain, she might not make it to the top plateau?

The Five were lolling in the Castle Tree one Saturday afternoon. “Boy, I just wish some Commies would try to take over this town,” Jed said, his brown eyes gleaming. “It'd be the last place they'd invade, I'm telling you.” The Five settled back on their branches and pictured themselves disposing of dozens of attackers—Commies, Yankees, Indians, bandits, pirates, atheists. Judo throws, bayonet thrusts, left hooks to the jaw….

“Yeah,” Donny agreed, rolling languidly off the Tire and falling through the air, looking to even the initiated as though he would certainly crash through branches thirty feet to his death. Just in time he grabbed the knotted rope that hung from the Throne and, with a thrust of his skinny black legs, swung up and landed on the Couch. It was his favorite commando stunt. The others watched from the corners of their eyes, pretending to be unimpressed. Jed was too puny for that stunt, Raymond was too clumsy. Sally had recently become concerned with keeping her knees together at all times, and Emily was scared of breaking her neck.

Emily, who was carving “abscess” into the footrest of the Couch, said, “I'm sure we're adopted.”

“How do you know?” her younger sister asked.

“Well, I mean, it's obvious, isn't it?
They
couldn't be our real parents, could they? We don't even look like them. They're dark.” She gestured to Sally's light brown braids and her own auburn boy cut. “Probably our real parents live in New York City in a penthouse.”

“Shit,” said Raymond, learning to swear now that he was a seventh-grader. “Your parents screwed like everybody else's, and that's where you came from.”

The others looked at him. “Whadaya mean?” Jed asked.

Raymond described the animated cartoon called “The Mystery of New Life” that he had just seen in Physical Education class.

“Naw, you're lying,” Jed insisted. “The man puts a seed in the woman and it grows into a baby. That's what Dad said that time.”

“Yeah, but where does it come from? How does he put it there?”

“It's true. I seen it myself,” Donny muttered. “My neighbor done that to his girl. I sneaked up and watched them in his car.”

There was a silence.

“Six inches?” Sally gasped, pressing her knees together. “And how big around?”

“Oh, I don't know.” Raymond yawned. “Two maybe? Like a cardboard toilet paper roll sort of.”

“Barf!” Sally and Emily said, pretending to vomit over the side.

“Don't knock it if you ain't tried it,” Raymond suggested.

“And I suppose you have?” Emily sneered.

“Wouldn't you like to know?”

“Well, I'll tell you one thing, Raymond Tatro: When we get married, I'm not doing that with you.”

“Me neither,” Sally agreed, fingering the end of one braid.

“According to this movie, we have to if we want children.”

“Not me. I'm adopting,” Emily insisted. “It's disgusting.”

“Then our children can't be
real
double-first cousins,” Sally wailed.

“They wouldn't be anyway, since you and I aren't real sisters,” Emily pointed out. “Now I'm sure we're adopted. Mom and Dad would never do that.”

“Let's not talk about it anymore,” Jed requested, looking green.

As the leaves on the Castle Tree that year faded to pale yellow and fell to the ground, The Five met in its branches less often. When they did, they sometimes avoided each other's eyes. Silences seemed awkward. Sally would chatter mindlessly to fill them.

The Five ambled into the newsstand one afternoon the following spring to watch the high school boys play pinball. As the machines bonged and lit up in carnival colors and shuddered to blows from cursing players' hands, Raymond sneaked off. The others saw him by the magazine rack, and with a smirk he gestured to Donny and Jed. Soon all three were pointing and giggling. Emily and Sally wandered over. Raymond flipped the magazine shut in their faces. But not before Emily and Sally caught a glimpse of some naked ladies.

They walked out of the newsstand and across the green in front of the red-brick courthouse. On the wall of the courthouse were bronze plaques bearing the names of all the men from Cherokee County who had died in the two world wars. And outside the doorway was a statue of a Confederate soldier holding a bayoneted rifle, which had been sold to the county right after Reconstruction by a salesman from a Vermont granite company. Traditionally, The Five saluted as they passed. This day Donny kept his hands in his shorts pockets.

“You forgot to salute,” Jed told him.

“Don't feel like it.”

“How come?”

“Just don't.”

The five had worked all morning collecting soft drink bottles in the mill village and hauling them to the store in a wagon. They gave a penny of the refund per bottle to the person who donated it and kept a penny for themselves, trying to amass entrance fees to the Majestic Theatre matinee
Thing from Another Planet.
At one house, a peeling wooden box on cinder blocks, a woman in a torn housedress came to the door with a squalling baby on her hip. She asked Raymond, “Is these here the Prince gals?” He nodded. She yelled at them, “No, I ain't got no bottles for you! You go tell that daddy of yours to give his gals some of the money he stole from Mrs. Harmon's husband! You tell him that!”

The Five ran down her sidewalk, dragging their red wagon.

“What's she talking about?” Emily demanded. “Our father would never steal.”

“Ah, old lady Harmon, she just crazy,” Jed assured her.

As they hauled the wagon to the store, Jed picked up a Coke bottle and said, amazed, “Look, this here bottle's from over at Egypt.” He pointed to the “Cairo” embossed on the bottom.

Raymond snatched it, looked at it, and tossed it into the wagon. “Cairo, Illinois, dummy.”

“It is not,” Jed insisted. “How do you know? You think you're so smart just because you're in the seventh grade.”

“I sure know more than a dumb fifth-grader. Egypt! Boy, are you dumb!”

Leaving behind the Confederate soldier, Donny began balancing along the curb, Yo-Yoing. The others balanced and Yo-Yoed along behind him.

“I ain't never been to no downtown theater,” Donny remarked over his shoulder.