A Choir of Ill Children

by Tom Piccirilli

  “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.”

  ONCE 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 on
ly 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.

  MY 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.

  Sometimes I wake up crying, with my brothers leaning over my bed, staring and weeping with me.

  LILY THE REPRESSED SCHOOLTEACHER HAS REAL initiative, and she finds me at the mill. No one has ever found me here, or needed to find me here, so I’m a little shocked to see her coming up the stairs with the girl in tow.

  “Thomas, we need your help,” Lily says, sitting in the chair at the front of my desk. It may be the very first time anybody has ever sat there.

  We are in the convergence corridor now. I can feel it quite strongly, this gathering of energy. The girl from the flat rock, the warnings from Drabs, the talk of Gloria leaving Harry for Verbal, my mother’s unfolding dreams, the ghost of my father, and the coming of the carnival.

  Whoever said the kid was seven years old saw her at a distance. She’s at least thirteen or fourteen and looks rather ridiculous holding an all-day sucker. I can see how the mistake has been made though. She’s wearing a younger girl’s school outfit: bobby socks, tiny plastic black shoes that belong on a doll, and her hair is in pigtails for Christ’s sake. She’s confused and wide-eyed, gawking all around the room and down below at the rest of the mill. When her gaze settles on me it’s like she’s stabbing me in the belly. Sometimes you know when someone wants something from you. I’m waiting for her to lick the lollipop but she doesn’t. Her knuckles are white around the stick as she angles the sucker like a sword. She cocks her head cutely and I wonder what the hell is going on.

  “What can I do?” I ask.

  Lily has decided to live the stereotype. She wears glasses with thick black frames, her hair always kept up in a tightly knotted bun. She has a penchant for oversize clothing, large blouses and sweaters, lengthy skirts, a lack of form. She does this to hide the true nature of her beautiful body from herself and from the licentious men of Kingdom Come.

  Lily used to fuck me down into the floorboards beneath the bed with her massive tits mashed into my mouth until I turned a light shade of blue, her cunt alive and starving. She is dichotomy itself, and neither role is any more or less real, although I definitely like the one who fucks a lot better.

  Her staunch persona is in effect. One of Lily’s hands flutters about as if she were brandishing a ruler or a piece of chalk at a map, pointing out the Gobi Desert, the Pyramid of Cheops, the corner where the woman in the red dress led Dillinger to his death.

  She says, “Do you know of our situation here?”

  “Not really,” I tell her.

  “The circumstances surrounding this little girl. I call her Eve simply because we must call her something.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Sheriff Burke hasn’t been able to find her parents yet or where she comes from or how it is she’s gotten here. If she’s been kidnapped and brought across state lines this could be the responsibility of the FBI, but we really don’t know where to turn in order to help Eve.”

  I look at the girl and she appears completely oblivious to us now. “Has she spoken at all?”

  “No, not a word.”

  “Is it something physical or has she been traumatized?”

  “Dr. Jenkins isn’t sure. There’s no immediate signs of abuse. She appears perfectly healthy in every other regard. There’s always a chance she’ll snap out of it, whatever ‘it’ might actually be. I’m horrified to think what that poor girl might have been through.”

  It makes me uncomfortable talking about the girl as if she weren’t there, as she glances at me. Everything about her makes me uneasy—those clothes, the swell of her pubescent breast, that damn all-day sucker with its concentric colors winding me into its syrupy abyss. Eve wanders onto the platform outside the door and waves down at the workers the way I do, and they wave back.

  Lily’s stern manner is beginning to turn me on the way it used to. “What can I do?”

  “I’d like to hire a private investigator.”

  “All right.”

  “It might prove costly. A PI could be on this case for weeks or even months, and wind up with little or nothing to show for his efforts.”

  “That’s fine. Is she staying with you?”

  “Yes, there’s enough room in my house and truthfully, I enjoy the company. We’re making do, and she seems to have already grown quite at ease.” Her gaze is downcast, with a nice flush already creeping up her neck. I imagine those big red knockers bobbing all around while I take her from behind. She knows what I’m thinking and her hands flit to her glasses, to keep them on, to yank them off. She says, “Do you want to make the arrangements or shall I?”

  “I will. I’ll get an agency to start working on this immediately.”

  “Thank you, Thomas.”

  “Of course, Lily.”

  I call Paul the foreman up to the office and tell him that perhaps Eve would like a tour of the mill. He knows better than to frown. He takes Eve by the hand, quickly becoming entranced by the circling colors of that all-day sucker. Paul gets a bit woozy and I have to grip his shoulder to snap him out of it. He leads her downstairs among the awful machinery and curious people who call her the flat rock girl in whispers.

  We defeat the dead air of ages as Lily and I move, in spasms, up onto the desk naked and glistening. We tear gouts from the wooden floor and walls, with nails and teeth, leaving marks for the rest of history to see.

  SARAH IS NOT ACCUSTOMED TO BEING WOOED AND she likes the attention. In the deep night, when Fred has finally fallen into his fitful sleep and cocaine nightmares, she comes to our bedroom. She is apprehensive, which only makes sense. Jonah is charming in his own way, and the timbre of his voice coming from all three throats of my brothers is enthralling. She enjoys his poetry and selfless attentions, even if she doesn’t know which body is actually his.

  “And in the aggression of our loss we find, another draped flattery at your feet, as roses and accolades and murmurs all day are cast once again, into the saltless seas of our impertinent memories.”

  Sarah does not join them in bed. There’s r
oom for her now that Dodi has taken to sleeping with me or alone in one of the empty bedrooms on the third floor. Sarah sits on the floor, her head eased back against the edge of the mattress, sighing after each of Jonah’s stanzas. Despite their physical disfigurement, the voice from those three throats is quite splendid.

  I usually enjoy listening, but tonight I’m not in the mood.

  I wander the house, feeling the breeze as I step across each open window in every hall. Downstairs the mantel appears strange, and it takes me a moment to realize that the framed photo of my parents is missing.

  There’s a noise at the end of the corridor. I follow the sound. To my surprise, I see that Fred is lying awake. Usually he stays up for three paranoia-wracked days in a row, then crashes hard, but he must be snorting so much now that it’s bounced him back to life. I’m shirtless and he stares at what might be my sister in my side. The feminine features at my ribs having shifted slightly into a grimace.

  He talks to the face. “She’s leaving me.”

  “Yes, I think so,” I tell him.

  “We’ve been together for almost two years, and now she’s dropping me, like that, all the way out here in the fucking boonies.”

  “Maybe it’s best this way.”

  “Fuck no it’s not best like this! How can you even say that? Listen, we had plans, we were going places. She was going to write screenplays and I’d get the financing and produce and direct them. That’s the way it was. But this? . . . the hell is this? She’s cutting loose and leaving me for that goddamn obscene creature!”

  “Only one-third of it. My brother Jonah.”

  “I don’t care what you call it! Haven’t you seen the way it moves and what it does? Jesus, it isn’t human!”

  He hops up out of bed, nothing but tendon, muscle, bone, and a few dug-in ticks because he’s always too high to burn them off. No fat, no extra pieces or persons. He’s bursting with a manic tension, each vein raised. He rushes to the bureau and begins ferreting about, tossing aside clothes and empty vials, sections of scripts. He spills talcum powder and baby laxative, and a white mushroom cloud explodes into the air, leaving traces on the ceiling.