A Choir of Ill Children

by Tom Piccirilli

  “Does it mean anything to you?” I ask.

  She takes a breath that sounds as if it might never stop rattling around in her chest. Her brittle voice rustles, crackles and ticks. “Hell no . . . you’d have to be out of your head for this fool talk to make sense.” She gums more of the words and swallows them down. “What’s this here? This basal ganglee?”

  I sit up and the raw skin pulling makes me champ at my tongue. It takes a few seconds for the pain to subside enough for my vision to clear. Sheets are covered in ointment and soot but not much blood. I lean back against the headboard and light a cigarette. “Nerves deep in the brain.”

  “Well, they’d be the right boys to talk about such things I suppose. Where are they?”

  I struggle not to hiss. “I don’t know.”

  “How’d they get there?”

  “No idea.”

  “You miss ’em?”

  It’s an average question, a common one, and perhaps it’s the normality of it that takes me back. I hadn’t thought of it in terms like this. Missing them implies love, or at least affection, and we are somehow beyond that, being blood. She knows this but is testing me. We’ve still got a long way to go before we get to the heart of the matter, if we ever do.

  “Where’s that Coots girl?”

  “Upstairs. She’s upset that my brothers are gone.”

  “Here, let me bum a butt.”

  I offer her a cigarette and give her a light. She inhales deeply and the eras that have worn down her shrunken frame seem to flash by. She is dainty, she is young, she’s refined and smokes like a noblewoman. She’s dancing with my great-grandfather and laughing at his feeble attempts at romance. I can imagine her doing a two-step shuffle around the room with bits and tatters coming off her as she sways until there’s nothing left of her except a small pile of rags.

  Those charms and bells sewn into her filthy clothing ring in time with my melted fillings, chiming through the house and my head.

  She sits on the end of their bed, somewhat uneasy. The nest of sheets and blankets on the floor in the corner seems as if it should have huge eggs laid within it. “Looks like you had yourself a hurtful night,” she says, gesturing to my wounds. “The storm do that to you?”

  I have to think about it before I answer. “Mostly it was a killer named Herbie, who felt compelled to come back here to the bayou. Considering he survived a bull gator attack many years back, he probably felt invincible in the bottoms. He was finished off by lightning.”

  “Really?” the Crone asks, blowing smoke in a thin billow. “Hmph, you got more good luck floating about you than anybody I ever knowed. More ghosts and puzzles too.”

  That’s twice she’s told me that and it’s starting to get to me a little. I look from her to the words and back again. “Why?” I ask, genuinely curious. “Why do you think that is?”

  “Some questions ain’t worth askin’.”

  “And some are.”

  Her face is stark but not hollow. There’s an energy in those wrinkles that means something I’ll never understand. She carries a thousand epitaphs that won’t ever fully convey her life’s signature.

  “You even got yourself a nice haircut out of it,” she says.

  I run my hand through my shortened curls again, and it’s true; I sort of like it.

  “Guess that’s one secret that don’t have you no more. This bad fella from the past.”

  “No, not any longer. But another has been eating at me. Who killed my grandmother on the roof of the school?”

  She waves the question off. “Nobody knows that and nobody ever will, I’m thinkin’. You won’t find all the answers no matter how hard you try.”

  “Probably not,” I agree. “So what are you here for?”

  “I done told you once, I got to reserve my consternation for the right time and the proper folks.”

  “This the time?”

  “No.”

  She finishes the cigarette, wets her fingertips with her tongue, and puts out the burning ember. She carefully conceals the filter somewhere in her tatters, possibly to use in a spell somewhere down the line. Settling herself on the mattress she lets out a relieved sigh and begins to drop off. The silence of the house is compelling and relaxing. It can be an overwhelming influence of serenity and solace. I wonder if I should put her to bed in one of the other rooms.

  Wavering a bit as the dust settles around her, she takes in the quiet. “At least your brother isn’t crying his blues anymore.”

  “Not here anyway.”

  “Not anywhere. He’s got himself a new way to grieve.”

  “What is it?”

  She shrugs and her rags slip across her shoulders. “You got any more of that pound cake?”

  “No,” I say, “but I could make another if you like. It won’t take long.”

  “Nah, don’t go to no bother. I just had a hankering for it.”

  We’re about done for the night and I can feel her gathering her resolve to leave. Sometimes it can be difficult, with the night and the darkness and quiet pressing down and the smell of sweet gum settling in. “Last time you were here you were talking about the past.”

  “Yep.”

  “About how it can die and be reborn.”

  “I got’s to get going.”

  She gets up and shuffles out of the room, but pauses at the doorway. I give it a three count as she stands there, waiting, and then ask, “Did you dance with my great-grandfather?”

  “That man owned two left feet and thirteen arms. Had me a hell of a time fighting him off. Few men take no for an answer, and he sure wasn’t one of ’em. Had to use tooth and claw to pertect my virginity.” She glances back, reading the shadows lying across me, and says, “Drink some oxtail soup, it’s good for you.”

  “Fuck no.”

  A childlike titter breaks free from the cobwebs far inside her body as she leaves and shuts the door. I hear her hobbling steps all the way down the stairs and out across the front yard into the greater darkness. The willows brush against the shingles as if pleading with me to call her back.

  I do miss my brothers, and they are singing a new brand of blues. I can feel the song occasionally prodding the back of my head and every so often my side erupts with agony. Retribution is waiting for us all. I’ve checked the house for them and now Dodi is in another bedroom surviving her guilt because she feels she’d somehow failed in her duties to them. I listened to her weeping earlier, surprised that she’d taken their leaving so deeply to heart.

  I take the key off the nightstand and hold it clasped in my fist. It must fit somewhere even if nothing else does.

  Maybe they followed Johnny Jonstone back into the swamp.

  There’s only one way to find out.

  Tomorrow I’ll head into the bayou.

  THE HAM IS STILL IN THE HOUSE.

  I’ve got the key and I try it in every lock I can think of even when I know it’s not going to fit. Every bedroom, closet, storage area, and bathroom door. I spend an hour in my parents’ bedroom going through belongings I’ve never touched before. My mother’s jewelry chests, cabinets, dresser drawers, desk compartments, anything at all with a lock no matter how undistinguished. I enter rooms I haven’t stepped foot in since I was a child. I’m surprised at how clean everything is. Dodi has really kept the place up.

  She sleeps curled around pillows. She’s wept herself into exhaustion. I stand over her, wanting to make love and not wanting to make love, yet hoping she’ll awaken. The Crone has gotten me into the mood to talk, but except for an occasional grimace Dodi appears to sleep deeply and peacefully enough. I lie beside her for a while enjoying the company.

  She’ll be leaving soon, I know, now that my brothers are gone. I take her hand and press my lips to her palm, brushing her knuckles across my cheek. I hope to Christ she doesn’t start hacking off her fingers too.

  I leave her and close the door quietly behind me, heading up to the attic.

  There’s a century of packed
, hidden and lost effects up here. Dozens of knotted lives and deaths drifting through time. There’s nowhere to start looking because each inch and article is only another chapter of somebody’s continuing existence. Their memoirs and confessions and endless guilt. There are fifty broken arms packed beneath the rafters. Twenty abortions, sixteen rapes, a couple kidnappings, four murders, a thousand clandestine affairs and shrouds of indemnity. Innumerable veiled threats and countless failures.

  Niches, cubbyholes, and crawl spaces abound, stuffed with boxes, furniture, trunks, furnishings, toys, possessions, and personal effects beyond my understanding. I pick up a thin polished piece of wood with two metal clasps and a pointed end set against a spring. I could stare at it for the rest of my life and never learn its intent. But it’s not junk, nothing here is. All of it has a meaning and reason even if it’s never known again.

  This is family.

  There are locks upon locks.

  Dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. We must’ve been a secretive people once, carefully preserving, protecting and placing our items away in the time before the secrets owned us. So much to be hidden and safeguarded and secured. The shadows were made for just such things, and these things were made for the shadows. I shouldn’t be here because I haven’t brought anything to leave behind. This is a sacred place of ancestry and kindred history, and I can feel the importance of what has been harbored in the house.

  The storm of ghosts hasn’t done much to shake loose any of the dead. They’re still snug and cozy and quiet. I want to start calling out names—“Grandfather? Uncle Jonathan? Aunt Fidencia? Rollie! Nicole! Jort?”—but there are too many for me to remember.

  The key fits many of the locks but won’t turn once inside them. For a moment I wonder if the mechanisms have been rusted shut or jammed with lost years. But if that were true my brothers wouldn’t have left the key for me. I can see their shambling trifold form moving carefully among the contents of the attic, crooked and gnarled and toiling, just to spray a drop of oil into a lock so that one day I might find whatever needs to be found.

  They have been put in charge of this as I was put in charge of them. Why did they give it up now? Is it a sign of trust? Or will I be unlocking the box of my own undoing?

  For hours I walk among the remnants, chronicles, and accounts of my family, hunting. I think about how the mind might actually be dissatisfied with the sexual urge, and how irrational numbers are necessarily nonterminating and nonperiodic.

  We are archaic. We are tuned to the deceased, and still my brothers’ blues thrum through my basal ganglia with rhythm and skill.

  Just before dawn, as the light streams in through the single attic window, I find the lock that the key fits.

  Penetration.

  It’s an old black trunk covered with stamps and stickers from foreign cities that looks as if it’s been around the world twice before returning to Kingdom Come. The key slides in and turns easily, perfectly, the hard snap of metal on metal extremely loud in the silence of this crypt.

  I ease the hasp down and open the trunk.

  My mother lies within, wrapped in clear plastic, shrunken and contorted as any of my brothers. She smiles in her rictus and remains exactly as my father has left her: dead but still dreaming.

  And beneath her corpse, the wrapped body of a six-year-old kid. It’s Johnny Jonstone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CLAY THE CONJURE BOY AND HIS BUDDY DARR have their bikes parked outside of Doover’s Five & Dime at around closing time when I pull up. There are dead cormorants, grebes, ring-neck ducks, and heron scattered all around the area, some with their heads or wings missing. Whatever the brew is that they’re cooking up takes a hell of a lot of bird parts. Mallards wallow across the Spanish moss and morass behind the store and snapping turtles hang off the skiff lines and traps draped in the mire.

  Darr is the only one in sight. He’s been raking up piles of feathers and bones with a threshing scoop, but now stops to withdraw his knife from a cormorant at his feet. He stomps on over, grinning like we’re old buddies, cleaning his switchblade with a bandanna. There are stained croker sacks up on the porch that flutter, flop, and roll a bit. This is getting a little out of hand.

  His head is freshly shaven around the three strips of hair. Those jailhouse tattoos on his arms look larger and more intricate now, and I realize they’re a work in progress. He, or perhaps Clay, has been adding to them with a needle and ink. The edges are a bright black and scabbing over, but I still can’t make out what any of them are supposed to be.

  He finishes wiping down the blade and replaces it in his right boot. The butterfly Band-Aid on his forehead has finally fallen off. “Back again?” he asks.

  “I’m renting a skiff.”

  “Yeah, well now, that’s good. Hey, you got yourself a nice haircut there.”

  “Thanks.”

  Clay steps out onto the porch and takes a seat on an old bench. He watches me carefully, expressionless but alert as always.

  Darr says, “You know what I simply cannot stand?”

  “Fencing,” I answer.

  “No, not fencing really, not in and of itself, as it goes,” he tells me. “You see, seems like you’ve already forgotten.”

  “No, I haven’t. You hate watching fencers who have no notion of the hardcore reality behind the art form. You’ve got to have convictions to live with the blade. Belief. But those players, they might as well be shooting hoops or sliding into third base. They never embrace the tenets and ideology behind that discipline.”

  “That’s exactly correct, word for word!”

  “It’s a little trick I have.”

  That makes him laugh. He throws his head back and lets the guffaws loose and claps me on the back. “A damn good one, tossing people’s words back at ’em.”

  Clay looks down at all the dead birds and a wrinkle crosses his features that might be embarrassment on anybody else. He still doesn’t want any part of the ways of the granny witches but he’s as caught up in the wheel as the rest of us. I step over to him and cock a thumb at Darr. “He’s talking about fencing again.”

  “He can’t help himself sometimes.”

  “You the one doing the tattoo work on him?”

  “He does most of it with sewing needles. Lottie Mae touches it up some if need be.”

  I offer him a cigarette and he passes. Clay’s got a look in his eyes like he’s going to have to kill me one of these days although he’s not quite sure why. Once again I get the feeling that he’s been through something very much like this before. I want to ask him about it.

  “You’ve come again,” he says, “to bother my sister.”

  “No, I’m here to rent a skiff.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to find something in the bayou.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Maybe I’ll explain it to you sometime.”

  We’re still waiting for circumstances to play out in a specific fashion, the pattern growing larger until we can’t see the threads of it anymore. The wingless grebes have something to do with the eyeless newts and the kicked dogs, my grandmother on the roof, my father in the mill, the flat rock, Eve’s all-day sucker.

  I turn and head into the store but Lottie Mae is standing on the other side of the screen door just staring. I try to ignore her but it’s impossible. It’s obvious she’s been busy lately.

  She nudges the screen open with her hip and approaches with no trepidation at all. There’s a scent of alcohol about her but it’s not booze, it’s rubbing alcohol. She’s had her navel pierced and there’s a very sharp tattoo on her belly. If Darr did this one too he’s got a hell of a lot of talent. The design is something almost cabalistic but not exactly. Maybe it’s a sign of protection or one of contrition.

  At least she hasn’t been downing any more vodka gimlets. She’s dressed seductively and the air of confidence surrounding her makes her sultry in the extreme. She’s had new training for her mission. The feathered points of h
er short dark hair are curled and wet with sweat, wisps clinging to her forehead. There’s drama in her stance, the hint of misconduct and danger. Jesus, there’s several swamp whores who can’t cast sexuality with such a perfect aim. A gentle laugh flits from her throat and I know I’m the prey, and I like it.

  “Lottie Mae?”

  “Hello, Thomas, how are you?” She tilts toward me and gets a better look. “Oh my, what happened to you? Your eyebrows. And your neck, it’s all burnt.”

  By now she and the whole town knows about Herbie the child killer, the storm of souls, and my missing brothers. “I’m okay. I just came to rent a skiff from Doover.”

  “He ain’t here today. I’m working the store.”

  “So long as I get a boat.”

  There’s another, much uglier smell on her breath: it’s oxtail soup. She’s back to making incantations, perhaps now with her brother’s help. Her resolve has returned along with a new sense of purpose.

  She’s completely split from the granny witches now. She’s taken Clay’s advice to stay away from the crazy old women and she finds herself much more capable without them. “You gonna stobpole into the bayou all on your lonesome? You ever done that before?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’ll be lost inside of ten minutes and nobody’ll ever see you again. There’s a thousand square miles of slough out there. How you gonna challenge that? A gator can take off the back end of a skiff with one bite or a swipe of the tail. Why you headin’ into the swamp anyway?”

  “Exercise. My doctor says I need to get out more.”

  “All Doc Jenkins knows is how to hand out aspirin and scratch his ole ugly ears. Skiff rental is five dollars for the afternoon. Some of them monastery folks come around on occasion, they want to go see the wonders of God out in the bayou, commune with nature. Usually Doover takes the charters out himself, if need be, but I can go with you instead.”

  She means it to be a temptation and it is. I can’t understand why we’re still at this. It’s got nothing to do with the chants and hexes of the granny witches dancing around on my lawn in the rain. I’m not sure it’s anything personal either. There’s probably no reason anymore, we’ve simply become tangled up together and can’t figure out a way to get free.