Blood Kin

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  He didn’t want to step over, or on, any of the web of vines. They lay unmoving, and the fact that he’d even have cause to notice a lack of movement was alarming. Some of the smaller leaves and narrow stalks drifted as if floating in water. He followed the stream of vines back between the trees and out to the narrow road where they funneled into and filled the corrugated drainage pipe that lay under it. The edges of the old metal pipe were bent and split. On the other side of the road the vines reappeared from the end of the pipe and made their way into the larger woods. Here and there he could make out the hulking shapes of green where trees had been mounted, covered, and starved of light. He stood still and listened to the silence, broken now and again by tree limbs shifting and cracking beneath the weight of vine.

  The next morning Michael called Clarence Roberts. “I need you to come back — the vine’s worse, I’d say a lot worse. Bring more workers. I… my grandma will pay them whatever you think is fair. As many as you can get.”

  There was a long pause on the other end during which it sounded as if Clarence was breathing with some difficulty. Finally he said, “I can do that, and I reckon I can round up some helpers somewhere, but just so you know, I wont be bringin my boy round this time.”

  “Well, sure.” Michael wondered why the man was telling him this.

  “Now I know yer good people and yer grandma, she’s always been kind to me and my kin. But not everybody in yer family was always thataway, and there’s all them stories, hell, Mr. Gibson, I’m sorry, but he’s my only son.”

  Michael was embarrassed — Clarence sounded on the verge of tears. “Well of course, whatever you need to do. I’ll pay you well.”

  “You pay me same as always. I dont need no extry, and whoever I find, you can pay them regular, but only if they do a good job, and I’ll be tellin you if they dont do a good job.”

  When he got off the phone his grandmother was standing there, staring at him. “My window was full of green this morning,” she said. “It aint never been full of green before. I reckon that aint just a big house plant out there.”

  “Grandma, are you making a joke?”

  She blinked at him, then said, “Dont remember how.”

  He made her breakfast — bacon and eggs, tea, a piece of toast, and a couple of sliced oranges. She didn’t normally eat fruit, and she wrinkled up her face when she put it into her mouth, but she ate it all anyway. He explained to her about Clarence Roberts coming out with some workers, and how he planned to help out, and not to worry because he’d make sure she’d have the house back the way it was before.

  She stopped sipping her tea and looked at him. “You know kudzu dont grow like that, dont you? Not even at its worst. Aint nothing natural about it growin out there like that. A person might dream it happens that way, I reckon. So maybe that’s what’s going on. That kudzu is somebody’s evil dream. You think you can cut down something like that?”

  “I dont know what else to try. I know it’s not natural. Clarence knows it too. He says the roots come together into these crowns, just under the surface. He says that’s what we have to dig up and cut out, all those crowns. He’s going to show me how it’s done.”

  “So you feelin it?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “I mean are you feelin him?”

  He knew she wasn’t talking about God, or the Lord, or whomever. “Maybe,” he said. “I think so.”

  She nodded, put her cup down and leaned back as if exhausted. “Thought so. I know I aint done much to get you ready for him. I’m truly sorry about that.”

  “Grandma, you hardly told me anything about the family while I was growing up. And nothing about this sense, or whatever it is, we have of each other. All you did was stare at me, watch me. There were days when I was a kid, I bet you didn’t say more than three words to me. How do you think that made me feel?”

  “Terrible, I know. Made me feel terrible, too. But I was afraid. I had to be sure.”

  “I was afraid, Grandma! I thought something was wrong with me! I should have found myself a wife by now, had a family…”

  “Oh, no, Michael, you wouldn’t want to do that, not till you was sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “Sure you wasn’t goin to be like the preacher. That’s what I waited for, watched you for, to see if you was goin to turn out like me, or like the preacher.”

  He stared at her. “I’d never! I was angry sometimes, sure — I was an angry kid, but I never did anything mean. I’d never hurt anybody! What would you have done, anyway, if you thought I’d turned out like him?”

  She sighed. “Killed you, I reckon. Killed you dead and then some.”

  Later that morning Clarence Roberts showed up with three other beat-up pickup trucks full of men, strangers to Michael. A couple of them looked slightly drunk and dangerous, but Michael figured Clarence would handle them as necessary. They all brought plenty of tools — axes and picks and shovels and big two-man pruning saws and saws smaller but with wicked teeth and ladders to get up the side of the house and onto the roof.

  “I’d been here sooner but I’ll tell you true couldn’t find a soul here local willin to come. These fellers…” The back of his hand swept around as if he wasn’t too impressed with what it was pointing to. “They’re from over the mountain, down near that Crossroads Hotel. Rough as grits, but I reckon I can get them to work alright.”

  “What’s the word in town,” Michael asked, “about all this?”

  “I guess some of them folks weren’t all that surprised to hear of your problem. They figure it’s cursed ground, I reckon, but most folks dont much like clearin kudzu anyways.”

  The men started on the house, simply pulling the furthest, smallest runners down by hand, snipping them, and rolling them into sacks. Three fellows climbed up on the roof and began peeling the mass of green off the shingles. Sometimes a vine would snag and break off in a crack, or maybe it had already attempted to root. Clarence sent men up the ladders after these, determined to remove every scrap of vine. “If you dont get it all it’s likely to come back. It finds a place it likes and it wants to stay. Too bad people’s cash crops round here aint that stubborn.”

  They rolled up the vine until it got too big and stiff to bend, and then switched to cutting it into sections and then hauling each section, as best they could, to the trucks. All afternoon the trucks took the cut-up vine away to some location where Clarence said they’d burn it. Since big burns like that were illegal in the county Clarence didn’t want to tell Michael where the location was, “less’n you want to watch.” Michael gave his regrets thinking there’d be a lot of drinking involved and he didn’t want to be with this bunch when there was both fire and liquor around.

  Clarence kept yelling at the men not to do any rough chopping at the vines and the argument came to a head when they started digging into the ground to expose the crowns that formed the nexus for each network of roots.

  Clarence had several of the large brown masses exposed and kept staring at them as if he wasn’t sure what to do. “It takes them a long, long time to get this big,” he said. “Years I reckon. But I was just here less’n a week ago, and there was nary a plant I could see.”

  They were about the size of basketballs, but not so round. Shaped almost like a brain, if the brain had been injured on one side and swelled up lopsided. Several wrist-thick shafts of root came out of each crown parallel to the ground. Like water pipes, vegetable pipes. One of the men prodded a crown with a large axe.

  “Hold on now, dont be swingin that axe at them crowns!” Clarence walked between the man and the excavated kudzu. The man looked angry, but stepped back and bowed his head a little. Clarence turned to Michael. “You got to take them out whole and get rid of them somewheres else,” he said. “You chop them up an you dont manage to pick up all them pieces of the crown, you just get more kudzu. And when you take it somewheres to get rid of it, you best get rid of it all or you’re just movin your problem around.
”

  Clarence got two men on each saw to cut out all the crowns as they were uncovered with about two feet of root sticking out on each side. Then they carried them to the trucks and went back for more, and where any of the runners had rooted they dug those out too to join the pile.

  When a fellow brought a gas can over to Clarence there was another argument. “You want that fire to take the house and god knows what after?” was all he heard. The worker looked both embarrassed and angry.

  A little way down the hill from the house were the remains of the preacher’s church. Growing up there Michael’d always thought it was just the ruins of some old barn. Instead of tearing isolated buildings down they just let the vegetation take them. The results were rather beautiful, he thought, but contributed to an overall feel of decay and extinction. When he’d asked his grandmother about that building she’d said, “Jest an old buildin. You keep outta there, boy! There’s rusty nails what give you the lock-jaw in there iffen you step on them. Spiders and coons and likely some snakes. Likely a lot of them snakes the poisonous kind. They swole you up dead most likely before I could even get to you!”

  But once he’d heard his grandma’s tale he knew exactly what the building had been because of its location. And the fact that she would make up a warning about snakes to keep a child out of there now seemed gutsy, given its history. Unless it were true. He’d seen no snakes around the property, not ever. Still, he couldn’t see himself ever going in there. Not then, not now.

  On the outside of the building there were no signs of the writing she’d described — any paint had long worn off. It was all splintered gray board now, with a few dark crumbling posts poking up through the wreckage of the rusted tin roof. The doors were gone, probably scavenged long ago, but the frame had held up enough to keep a lopsided dark cavern open at the ruin’s center for any child foolish enough to venture there. Most of it was covered in vine — not kudzu, probably oriental bittersweet — and here and there small pines or a foul-smelling tree of heaven filled some of the interior space. Sometimes rain beating on what was left of the roof made a continuous hollow sound like singing, if the singers had forgotten the words and made up their own language.

  From where the stream of kudzu had poured out between the trees behind the house Michael had a clear view of the church ruins, and as the men worked their way back through the trees removing the thick web of kudzu he still had an unobstructed view of that structure almost as far as the road. There the stream of vine turned and narrowed to enter the corrugated drainage pipe.

  Michael gazed at where the kudzu had abruptly changed direction. There was no accounting for it. The woods were sparse enough here they provided no barrier at all to the encroaching vine. The kudzu should have just travelled straight on and filled the space. There’d been no reason for it to turn. There’d been no reason for it to restrict itself to the drainpipe either. It would have gone through the drainpipe certainly but it should have flowed over the road without anyone there to trim it back. Unless what it wanted was to hide itself until just the right time.

  He watched as the men dug and exposed more of the crown and root system. Two of the crowns nearest the drainage pipe were a good three times larger than the rest, broad and flattened like rough, scarred palms, roots coming out like fingers that reached on and on toward the house until the point where the workmen severed them, hoping to keep them from going any further. One of the palms was darkened, twisted and mutilated on one side.

  Michael watched as they removed the fingers, the palms, the roots that trailed into the pipe. The vine was so thick inside that the metal had ruptured, and as they pulled out each vine individually Clarence had to insert stakes to keep the pipe from collapsing completely and leaving a deep gulley in the road. As it was Michael would have to hire a crew someday to come out and fix the damage, if he ever could find a crew that was willing after this. His grandma had a lot of money saved up, but she might need it for other things.

  They worked late into the night by flashlights, truck headlights, and lanterns. Grandma was up, having slept most of the day, and insisted on providing coffee. The men accepted but kept their distance from her. At one point a section of the kudzu curled up after it was severed and snapped at the men, slapping one worker so hard across the face he bled.

  Michael lost some time then, watching Clarence bandage the man’s face. He saw the huge snakes striking, the boy and the girl pursued by the preacher in his black coat flapping through the woods. When Michael came out of it he left Clarence and the men to finish on their own, found his grandma sitting by the window staring into the inky dark, and asked her to tell him some more.

  Chapter Nine

  “BIRTHDAY GRANS… THE fog, oh that fog!” Sadie stared at her grandson, the words difficult to find and to choose when she did find them, so that although they came out infrequently, they came out strongly. “Gray ladies… those poor… those poor… gray ladies! They just… just faded away!” Just as her grandson faded away now, and her body grew smaller, and better formed, and without the physical pain that had plagued her for years. Not that that young girl didn’t have troubles. She did, and Sadie knew she always would.

  The day of the Grans’ birthday began with a stubborn morning fog, catching on the ragged limestone spines of the hill slopes, and still clinging hours later like torn slips among the low scrub trees as the picnic spread was being served. Sadie guessed that meant there were cold patches where maybe the sun didn’t always reach. She’d found those places some early mornings herself, and they always made her feel bad, like some things never got better. Sometimes folks had to make do with sorry explanations because those were the only ones they had.

  They’d set up the celebration at the campground, and she reckoned everybody she ever knew was out there on that knobby field that fell back behind the buildings on main street. The field was surrounded by trees, most of them too far away to give much shade, but there were a couple near where the big shelter used to be, and they planted the Grans there to keep their heads out of the sun. Folks treated the old people sometimes like they were fragile little baby birds you could scarce breathe on but if they were that delicate then how had they lived so long?

  There was a clump of three or four crippled up maples about a hundred feet past, there where the old Mullins farm began, the wide trunks and the twisted limbs all tangled up in wild strawberry vine, and under and through it all the weeds that hadn’t been mowed in ages. That overgrowth was a long way from Sadie, so she couldn’t see much detail, but it looked like there was still some fog trapped in there by the vines. People stayed away from that area, she reckoned because of the mess, and whatever critters it hid, but her eyes kept going back there, as if they expected to see something.

  Back in the old days they’d used this field for camp meeting, evenings of travelling preachers fighting to renew the faith of some but mostly hoping to bring new sinners into the loving arms of Jesus. There’d been the one big shelter with the roof and a raised floor in case it rained, and the smaller ones, for the church camp kids and little get-togethers.

  She’d heard her mama say that all stopped ten years back when the preacher insisted on being a part of every service, and since he was the local minister those visiting men of God must have felt obliged to humor him. But give the devil an inch and you’ll wish you hadn’t because before long the preacher ran that whole camp meeting tradition into the ground. He wasn’t handling snakes back then but you couldn’t get him to stop once he got started talking, and sometimes he preached mean and sometimes he preached angry so the traveling preachers stayed away after a while and anybody not in the preacher’s own little group stopped coming. After a couple of years pieces of the shelters started disappearing, boards and tin roof and even posts, about the same time the preacher’s new church started going up. Nobody accused him but pretty much everybody knew what was going on. Nobody did nothing about it though, nobody did nothing about nothing in the hollow, and pretty s
oon most of those shelters were gone, and now all that field got used for was the occasional church picnic and maybe a game of pickup ball.

  The only signs those buildings had even been there were a few posts too buried to move and some scattered piles of stones they’d used to shore up the old floors. Today folks were sitting on those stones and hanging baskets of flowers from the posts. What was left of a few steps now led up to nothing. People sat on those, too, even though they were wobbly. Sometimes the little children would take those steps up to the nothing and then jump off into giggles.

  While everybody else was congratulating the Grans and finding their sitting place Sadie held back, standing under the trees behind Levitt’s where she could see pretty much the whole picture, how it was all laid out and who sat where. She wasn’t ready to commit herself. Sit by the wrong bunch and she’d get stuck in a bad place all day. She looked around for her granddaddy Simpson but it looked like he hadn’t got there yet. Folks had started eating and the younger ones were choosing up for games.

  “Hey, Sadie.”

  She looked around at him, staring at her, making her jittery inside with those wet eyes of his with the long girly lashes. “Oh, hey Mickey-Gene.” She turned back to the picnic. She could hear him moving up behind her. She tried to ignore him, but he felt really big beside her. Even though he wasn’t very big, he felt big.

  “It’s like a painting, aint it? A painting that moves.”

  Something hard loosened up inside her head. That’s exactly what she’d been thinking, only he’d said it better. “What you mean, Mickey-Gene?” She didn’t look at him.