Kind of Kin

by Rilla Askew

  “Turn it up.”

  “ . . . tracking dogs coming in from Stigler and Talihina,” the sheriff said. “Probably thirty or forty volunteers, we’re confident we’ll find him. But yes, ma’am, you could say it’s a challenge. That’s rough country down in there.”

  “What’s he talking about? Oh my God, did those men escape?”

  “Hush. Hush!”

  “ . . . no reason to expect foul play. The kid’s probably just run off to get attention. The boy’s aunt says this isn’t the first time.”

  A female reporter’s voice: “There are rumors the boy had been beaten. Can you confirm a beating?”

  “No, I don’t think that’s true, ma’am. I know the boy’s family, they’re good people.”

  “Good people, hah!” a voice catcalled from somewhere off camera. “Beaner smugglers, you mean!”

  A different reporter, a man’s voice this time: “Sheriff, what’s the correlation between the grandfather’s arrest and the boy’s disappearance?”

  “Well, now, I don’t know as I’d use the word disappear. He’s probably just hiding out someplace. He’ll get hungry and come in.”

  “Sheriff, why did you wait fourteen hours before issuing an Amber Alert?”

  The sheriff held up a hand. “All right, folks, nice talking to you. I got to get back to work.” He started down the steps, parting the half-dozen reporters like parting the waters; they scrambled aside, calling out questions: “Can you confirm that the boy was suspended from school?” “The boy’s uncle has been deported, isn’t that right?” “What about the family, do they have any idea who might want to harm him?” The camera followed the sheriff to his cruiser, and then the screen was filled with the exotic features of KFOR reporter Shoshone Ballenger signing off live from Wilburton, Oklahoma. Charlie hit the mute button. After a long, silent moment Monica said, “Shit, Charlie. What does this mean?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  A chill rushed over her. Her husband never, ever, said he didn’t know.

  Part Two

  Gone Astray

  Sunday | February 24, 2008 | 10:40 A.M.

  Sweet’s house | Cedar

  Sweet sat on the divan in her bathrobe reading her Baptist Messenger. From what she could tell reading the article, the all-Christian prison hadn’t been built yet—it was just a proposal somebody wanted to put before the state legislature—but the idea gave her hope. Maybe they would have a women’s wing, she thought. Then she could go to prison right along with her father and hang out with the Christians after she’d murdered her husband. She threw the Baptist Messenger on the floor. Leaning forward over the coffee table, Sweet cupped her forehead in one hand in a prayerful attitude. She wasn’t praying. She was trying to make herself get up and go get ready for church.

  She’d already skipped Sunday School—the thought of sitting around the long table with the six women in her Dorcas Adult Women’s class was just more than she could handle this morning—but she really had to go to eleven o’clock Worship. What would it say about her and her family if she didn’t go? Every able-bodied man in town was out searching day and night for Dustin, and the women of the church had been feeding them, and the preacher had been running interference like a lineman for seventy-two hours straight. He’d promised not to let news cameras in the sanctuary, but what if there were reporters waiting outside the church? The ugliness she would have to run through to get up the front steps! She looked at the clock. Twenty till eleven. Brother Oren would be in the Pastor’s Study getting ready for his sermon; she shouldn’t bother him. Anyway, what was the point of calling to find out if there were reporters waiting? Whether there were or there weren’t, she still had to go.

  Sweet reached across the coffee table and drew the Bible over, but she didn’t open it. The house was so quiet. When she’d kicked her husband out last Thursday, she hadn’t necessarily meant to kick her son out as well, but Carl Albert needed to be away from all this. He’d had a complete meltdown when they discovered his mountain bike missing, flinging himself down in the carport, flailing his legs and wailing—with that bunch of reporters filming it from right out there in the yard! She didn’t have a big enough family, that was the problem. If she only had some kind of a decent living sister, or an aunt and uncle, or even just a few in-laws, somebody her son could go stay with and be away from this mess. She’d had no choice but to let Carl Albert go stay at the motel in Poteau with Terry. So far, at least, no reporters had tracked them down there.

  Terry. God. She didn’t want to even think about him. She knew what the Bible said, Thou shalt not kill, and what Jesus said, that to look on somebody to lust after them was to commit adultery in your heart. Probably this meant that if you looked at your husband and truly wanted to kill him, you’d committed murder in your heart. She had done just exactly that, from the very minute she realized he was the one who’d turned Daddy in. “You son of a lowdown skunk,” she’d spat. “I ought to wring your neck!” She had turned and stomped back inside the barn, and Terry had followed, hollering like it was somehow her fault: “How the hell did I know it was going to turn out to be such a big deal! I figured he’d pay a piddly fine, learn a lesson, we’d get rid of a few wetbacks! I had to do something, they’re spreading like these damn fire ants swarming up from Texas!” When she found Dustin’s empty Spider-Man backpack, unzipped and filthy and stuffed down behind an old feed bin, that’s when Sweet had become truly terrified. She’d immediately punched in the sheriff’s number, with Terry shouting behind her, “Don’t do that, don’t do that, what the hell’d you do that for?”

  Well, it was a horrible fight, both of them ranting and stamping and throwing things around the barn, with Carl Albert trailing after them wailing and blubbering. They were still yelling and cussing when Holloway’s cruiser pulled up. After that, it was all out of her hands.

  But it had always been out of her hands, Sweet thought. She had tried all week to hold things together, and every day things had fallen further apart. What things? she wondered. Hell, everything! Her life! Or her life as she’d known it for the seventeen and a half years she’d been married. And here she sat, uncombed and cussing to herself on a Sunday morning. Unable to pray no matter how badly she wanted to. Skipping Sunday School on purpose. Late for church. Murdering her husband in her heart. Sweet glanced again at the wall clock. Then she got up and went to the bedroom to put on some clothes.

  She had promised herself she wouldn’t scuttle, and she didn’t. She did, however, walk very fast. The Call to Worship had already started; she could hear the singing as she strode past the KTUL-TV Channel 8 News van and directly in through First Baptist’s front doors. Grabbing a bulletin from the basket in the foyer, Sweet kept her same swift pace into the sanctuary. Everybody was standing, singing, and she felt heads turning as she made a beeline for her regular pew three-quarters of the way down on the left, where, thank goodness, she could see empty space on the end where she and Terry and Carl Albert usually sat next to Mr. Bledsoe’s wheelchair in the aisle. She’d never seen the church so packed, folding chairs lining the wall on both sides of the sanctuary. If you didn’t know better, a person could think a mighty bunch of folks in Latimer County had just suddenly got religion.

  Sweet reached for the hymnal in the pew-back holder in front of her, tried to somehow spread out and fill the pew so that the absence of her husband and son wouldn’t seem so obvious, though the empty aisle space at the end seemed to gape like a wound. She flipped through the hymnal, kept her eyes on the page even though she knew the words to “His Name Is
Wonderful” backward and forward, and she sang as loud as she could. She wouldn’t allow herself to look around. She didn’t want to know what people’s faces were saying. Numbly she went through the motions, standing for prayer, sitting when it was time to sit again, listening to the song leader Lon Jones make the announcements—potluck dinner in Fellowship Hall after the service, all were welcome, the relief search party would head out from the Senior Citizens Center parking lot at two o’clock, the list of new prayer requests, Dusty’s name, Mr. Bledsoe’s, “the whole of the Brown and Kirkendall families”—but it all seemed so unreal, like a script somebody wrote.

  During the greet-one-another-in-Christian-fellowship portion, Sweet remained in her pew and let others come shake her hand, firm grip, limp grip, sweaty grip, we’re praying for y’all, don’t worry, they’ll find him. The ushers started from the rear of the sanctuary passing the plates, and Sweet plucked one of the little Special Offering envelopes out of the pew back and took her checkbook out of her purse. Last Sunday had been her and Terry’s tithe Sunday—they tithed once a month, on the first Sunday after he got paid, making sure to write the check to God before their balance got too low—but she’d missed both services last week and her Sunday School class this morning, where she normally turned it in. She was going to have to put it in the offering plate if she aimed to get it in today. Sweet licked the envelope, slashed through the words Special Offering, signed her name in bold letters. She was not going to quit tithing. That was one thing she could still do.

  The song leader dismissed the kids for Children’s Church, and that almost got to her, the sight of all those little ones running toward the door to the classrooms where they would color cut-out Bible pictures and learn about Jesus and the Fishes and drink Kool-Aid and eat cheap store-bought cookies and spoil their dinners as her own son had done for years when he was still young enough for Children’s Church. Don’t! she told herself. Don’t go there. She pawed through her purse looking for some chewing gum. If she let herself get weepy now, no telling when she would quit.

  So she made it through that part okay, but then here came the Special Music, young Amber Ann Fields standing beside the pulpit with the cordless mike in her hand, nodding to the kid on the CD player in the back, and over the speakers came the rippling sound of harps and violins like an orchestra, and Sweet’s heart contracted—oh, wouldn’t you know, wouldn’t you just know. “I Believe.” They couldn’t have picked a worse song. Amber Ann’s clear, high, country voice rang through the sound system. How many times had Sweet told people that was the song she wanted sung at her funeral? Because it said everything, all she’d ever known of faith—and, yes, there was Jesus, of course there was Jesus, but there was this, too, believing the Lord sends a flower for every drop of rain, a light in every darkness. She didn’t have that kind of faith anymore, or if she did, it was crammed so low and deep she couldn’t touch it; she couldn’t even remember what it felt like. I believe for every one who goes astray, someone will come, to show the way. Probably the people nearby thought she was weeping because of her nephew being lost, but it wasn’t for Dustin, it was for her. She couldn’t really be lost, of course—she’d been saved since she was a kid—but somehow it was only her head that knew that. Her heart didn’t know. Her heart felt like she was sinking into a black wilderness and she might be there forever. Her soul felt cold and empty, like there just might not be any point in anything. Her throat felt like it could burst wide open. “I be-lieve, ” Amber sang. “I—I be-lieve.”

  When the music finished, the amens were many and loud, and so was the clapping, which never failed to aggravate Sweet. You weren’t supposed to clap for somebody singing in church, she’d been taught better than that. It was like applauding a sermon, like you were giving credit to the human person instead of the Lord. In her opinion there were entirely too many new Christians who hadn’t been taught proper Baptist etiquette. She blew her nose, opened her Bible to where Brother Oren told everybody to turn. Matthew 18:12–14. “When you find it, say amen,” the preacher said. Several scattered amens stuttered through the sanctuary. “Let’s all stand for the reading of God’s Word.” Some of the strangers in the folding chairs glanced around, confused, but then they stood up along with the congregation.

  “ ‘How think ye?’ ” Brother Oren read. “ ‘If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray. Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.’ Let’s go to the Lord in prayer: Heavenly Father, we come to You here this morning with burdened hearts. You know our sorrows, Lord. You know the sorrows of this family. We’d just ask, Father, that You’d be with us here in this service this morning, guide us in the seeking of Your Word. Be with the ones who are out searching now, the ones who’ll go out later this evening. Guide and direct them, Lord, that Your will might be done. We know that not a little sparrow falls but that Your eye is upon it. We know it’s not Your will that one of these little ones should be lost. Continue to guide and direct our lives, Lord, and we’ll be careful to give Thee the praise. These things we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Sweet murmured, along with many others. Brother Oren was, to be honest, a better pray-er than he was a preacher. That was one of Terry’s biggest gripes. “He talks like a blamed Presbyterian, he don’t preach!” By which Tee meant there was insufficient hellfire and damnation in Brother Oren’s sermons. Sweet had to admit that this was true. His voice was just too quiet. And monotonous. And he always had to pause to go back to the pulpit and read his notes. He was a young old man, or an old young man, with lank sandy hair and a faint little potbelly showing under his tie. The pulpit committee had found him in some tiny country church way down around Idabel; she couldn’t think how they’d even run across him down there. He’d been here five years, and in that time the church hadn’t exactly grown, but it hadn’t shrunk much, either. Brother Oren might not be a great preacher, Sweet thought, but he’s a good pastor, a good shepherd. She couldn’t imagine how she would have managed without him this past week. Out of respect she kept her eyes on his face, trying to act like she was listening, though her mind, as usual, began to drift.

  Goeth into the mountains. Well, yes, they were doing that. She’d heard that Holloway was getting up a search party to go down into the Winding Stair. They’d already searched every inch of the farm, searched miles out in the valley in every direction, and the boy was not here. “Vanished into thin air,” the sheriff kept saying in his many news conferences. After that bad rain Friday night, he’d called in a diving team to search the strip pits north of town. That made no sense to Sweet. Why would Dustin pedal five miles north when the backpack was found at the farm three miles south? Holloway just wanted to make it look like something was happening. But, then, why would Dustin go south into the mountains, either? Why would he go anywhere . . . And if so be that he find. If so be. Meaning sometimes it could be that He doesn’t find the lost sheep. No. Not possible. Not in this case. She wouldn’t let herself think it. Sweet must be among the ninety and nine, because she had surely been left behind, because the Shepherd was definitely someplace else—except the ninety and nine went not astray, that’s what the verse said, and she had gone astray. Somehow. Some way. Astray. A stray. Like Dus
tin. The little stray orphan. Again the knot swelled in her throat, and she was working it, swallowing hard, trying not to resume bawling, when she heard a faint sound to her left, a tiny, hollow, mechanical click. Brother Oren’s droning voice stopped. “Who did that!” he said, very loud. Everybody looked around. Sweet was still trying to come to herself when Brother Oren did something she’d never seen him do before. Right in the middle of the sermon, he switched texts. “Would y’all turn with me in your Bibles to the Book of John! Chapter two, verses fifteen and sixteen!”

  John two sixteen? Sweet thought vaguely. Shouldn’t it be John three sixteen? For God so loved the world . . .

  “John two!” Brother Oren repeated. “Verses fifteen and sixteen. When you find it, say amen.” He didn’t wait for any amens, though, but came out from behind the pulpit and held his Bible before him spread open in one hand; he started reading in a loud, clear voice: “ ‘And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables; and said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.’ ”

  Brother Oren paused, looking from one side of the sanctuary to the other. “I believe there’s all kinds of merchandise in the world today. Do y’all believe that?” There were a couple of murmured amens. “Back in Jesus’ time it might’ve been sheep and oxen in the temple, might have been doves. These days, though, that merchandise might be something a little different, something you can’t put your hands on necessarily but something that’s no less real, no less hurtful to the Lord’s purpose. Public gossip, for instance. Buying and selling folks’ troubles. Merchandising somebody’s heartache and pain. Now, we’ve got members of this church family here this morning that’s going through some terrible times, we all know that. The worst kind of times a person can go through nearly, a lost child. Plus other troubles, too, of course—we’re not going to speak of that now. But let’s listen here to what the Word says: Make not. My Father’s house. An house of merchandise.” Again Brother Oren turned his head from side to side. “I have asked y’all to keep your merchandising outside the Lord’s house. I’m not about to go fixing up a scourge of small cords. All are welcome here. All are welcome. But when I asked folks not to bring cameras into this worship service this morning, I meant that also includes cell phones.”