Blood Kin

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Member how we used to work the fields together, two yoked mules, my arm aroun you, yer brown skin gettin browner, so’s after years I could hardly tell you from the earth hitself. Sweet, under the loam, after chores, yer skin would shine through all yer sweat, just like the sun. To have a purty woman to talk to, it’s alright. Yer body, she made me fly, but you never said nuthin, didn’t go nowhere. You was just dead in yer eyes!

  The other children now clung to Sadie and she was rocking them all. “And then the man told Jack that these giants were ten times bigger than a real man and had many many heads! What was he going to do?”

  Tryin to be a man, it’s a hard thing. Daddy never told me it’d be so hard. Bein a man, ya gotta take it all on, pretend them muscles dont hurt, that rheumatiz. And when yer woman’s got misery, and gets all sour with you, well you gotta pretend it didn’t even happen. It eats you up inside! So’s ya gotta bitch bout something else. Dammit, ya know ya gotta be some kind of a king, even when the throne’s just some shitty hole.

  Cant let yer woman beat ya. Aint gonna be no woman’s dog!

  “The man gave him good food and told him to go cut some wood with an ax.” Sadie couldn’t keep the tremble away from her words. The tremble came out and it took over everything she tried to say. “But Jack knew if he cut the wood, the giants would hear him and come, so what was he supposed to do? How was he ever supposed to keep those giants away?”

  Whatya gonna do, when yer hurtin? Daddy didn’t tell me that. Drink some turpentine, some sugar, dont help. Man’s gotta have somebody ta talk to. But ya just cant let her know yer down. Woman’s gotta obey, less it be a crime. Dont milk the cow, she dry up. Dont spread the manure, fields dry up. Dont can nothin, aint got nothin fer winter. That woman dont obey ya, ya aint got no home. But hell, what ya do? Damn if she dont take you all inside. She dont open her mouth, she dont let you out.

  Daddy’d say a woman gots magic, an I’d believe him. Her flesh’d cure all yer ills, she knows things a man dont. Look over an the woman be watchin me, quiet, an I knows she beginning ta find me out, takin me inside, knowin me, hidin me, ever night, stealin what I got, takin it, inside her an she never let it out again. She’s gonna take what I got an beat me with it. I’d beg her ta give it back, cryin, then gettin madder, cause she made me cry, wouldn’t say, wouldn’t give it back.

  Uncle Jesse’s voice kept changing. Sometimes he sounded like himself, and sometimes he sounded like the preacher, possessing him. He sounded like all the men in her life full of their weakness and delusion and unaware of the pain they caused everyone around them, instead blaming it on the women, persecuting the women, killing the women out of that terrible, devouring rage and emptiness she would never understand even if she lived into her eighties.

  So’s I hadda knock her down, rip open that purty pink robe, reach down where she kept it all, them things she wouldn’t say or do for me, and I saw myself, all red and angry, bleedin, an

  Lord I just had to rip it out!

  Sadie heard the rapid climb of Jesse’s voice on the other side of the door, until he was screaming, and Lilly was screaming too, first in terror, and then in pain, her throat finally making a sound unlike any human being should ever have to make. The kids were crying and screaming now, and Sadie pushed herself against the door in case he decided to come in after them. She didn’t want to look, she didn’t need to, having seen it all before in that vision at the store several days ago. She held onto the children and whispered to them, telling them it would be all right even though it never could be, and despite herself she turned her head and with one eye at the crack watched as Lilly’s screams reached their peak, and all that blood filled the room, and Jesse curled and uncurled his fingers, casting that bloody bit down like a dirty rag, and howled.

  Chapter Fifteen

  MICHAEL WALKED OUT of the hospital and crossed the parking lot slowly, feeling as if he might break into a run, but not trusting himself enough to do so. He’d trip and break a leg, or run into some small child. Right now he couldn’t bear the thought of kids getting hurt.

  Not having a regular job, he’d actually forgotten it was a weekend, a prime visiting day at the hospital. His leg still wasn’t quite right, maybe never would be.

  For such a small hospital, they had a lot of visitors. But southern families were close-knit, at least that’s what everybody said. Home was something special, and if your loved one couldn’t be at home you brought home to them until they’d recovered. Perfectly normal-looking families hung out in the downstairs lobby or on the lawn or in the park across the street. He didn’t see a thing wrong with any of them. Some of the kids were crying, but even in the best of times there were always kids crying, complaining about some small or imagined hurt. The problem was, you couldn’t always tell if their hurts were small or monstrous.

  He made it across the lot and across the road to the well-kept park where he threw up in a trash bin, had nothing to wipe his mouth on and took a chance on a napkin someone had thrown away. A little further in beneath the trees he lay down in the grass. He could still taste the blood in his mouth, and his nose still detected a faint trace. His brief touch of that cold and angry heart would be with him the rest of his life.

  He could not begin to calculate the strength such an act had required, or the insanity necessary to generate such strength.

  He gazed at the sky through the filtering green of the trees, breathing deeply and allowing the fresh air to steady him, to drive out the raw taste of the past with the light and air of this fresh new day. The car was still in the parking lot and the tank three-fourths full. He could get in it and drive, maybe sleep in the car until he found some work for a room, some food, and more gas that would get him even further down the road. Eventually he could get a better job, enough money to settle in with, meet some people and make some friends, and give regular life at least another try. No one needed to know about the family he’d once belonged to.

  He had no responsibility here. He hadn’t been alive when these events occurred.

  Why had his grandmother needed to show him this? If it was to let him know what an evil man the preacher had been, he’d already figured that out. But what did it matter now? All those people were dead.

  Or was it meant to provide him with a touchstone for his own anger, his own coldness? No use denying it was there. So far he’d been singularly unlucky in relationships — he’d never found that balance between caring and needing. It was hard not to resent the one who wouldn’t give back when a good and happy life seemed just within reach. And there was something about that particular resentment that seemed unfortunately male. But still, even when his mother died and he’d gone into that dark place, even there he hadn’t touched such coldness. Of what concern to him was the reality that this existed in other men?

  He sat up on the grass. The day had gone on without him, and now the sun was falling behind darkening clouds. An ancient black pickup truck idled in the almost-empty parking lot. The door and fenders were creased, bent and rebent, straightened so many times that the metal looked like crepe, with spider webs of rust tracing the paint. Flaking gray plywood had been used to extend the short walls of the truck bed, and then the edges cornered with scrap aluminum to make a box. A battered garbage can lid with big hinges attached was mounted on the back end of that box.

  At first he thought the truck cab was empty, and then noticed the top edge of a dome of skin, textured like an old leather basketball, and of a similar color. It bobbed, and then the driver’s side door sprang open, as if kicked.

  A short, squat figure in overalls climbed down to the pavement. The face looked both wrinkled and swollen, and all of it liver-spotted, or sunburnt. Before the truck door closed Michael saw that figure’s twin sitting on the passenger side, smoking, staring at him.

  The squat figure walked bowlegged across the lot and the road and into the park and up to a tree near where Michael was sitting. Michael decided it was male when it unzipped and let loose a strea
m of urine on the tree. The head turned and nodded. “Cant abide a hospital toilet.”

  After a couple of minutes the man zipped and turned around and walked over. He smelled of tobacco smoke and lotion. “How do.” The old man moved his pale pink, swollen tongue around inside his mouth a great deal. “Be much obliged if you’d join us over there. That truck? We’ll be leavin soon.”

  Michael tried to gauge the danger of going somewhere with this stranger and decided that at least for the moment he didn’t care. “Okay.” He climbed unsteadily to his feet, feeling as if he’d been knocked down and dragged for some distance.

  The little old man climbed up on the running board and yanked on the door handle. The door flew open and the man fell backwards and Michael caught him before he hit the ground. He made a sound like leaves crackling and Michael decided he was laughing.

  “Elijah! Dont be an old fool!” the other figure said.

  Michael was so shocked he almost dropped the little man. He leaned forward to get a closer look at the little bald woman smoking in the passenger seat, her matching overalls, her simultaneously swollen and wrinkled face. “You’re a Gibson all right.” Her left eyelid struggled to wink over an eyeball that was mostly cataract. “Too ugly to be nothing else.”

  Again Elijah made that dry, somewhat painful laughing noise. “Never thought to swap her,” he said.

  They sat in the pickup for a while, Michael in the middle towering over the Grans, quiet except for the engine, ready for a fast departure for whatever reason. He had a dozen or so questions to ask, but their manner didn’t encourage questions, so he held himself back. If anything, their presence encouraged speechless awe, and maybe a bit of fear.

  A narrow passage had been cut through the back of the truck cab to allow easy access to the plywood enclosure in the bed. A towel hung over the opening but it gapped enough on the side for him to steal a peek — a mattress, clothing piled everywhere, an avalanche of machinery parts, household knick knacks, papers, and food. It seemed a smaller version of their house at the top of the ridge, a place he’d never been.

  “Came to visit your grandma,” Addie said.

  “You went upstairs?”

  “No need.”

  “Cant abide a hospital,” Elijah said.

  “She knows we’re down here,” Addie said. “It’s enough.”

  “We tried to help your ma,” Elijah said

  “You knew my mother?”

  “Didn’t help. Probly made it worse.” Elijah sighed deeply. “We sure got our share of crazy.”

  “You help out your grandma?” Addie patted his arm with her tiny, narrow fingers.

  “I try. I’m not sure I know what I’m doing exactly. I don’t know much, about any of this.”

  She patted him again. “We never knew,” she said. “We were stupid.”

  Elijah cackled. “Never thought to swap her! Just tried to figure who she wanted to be, then I stayed out of her way!”

  “He aint askin bout us, old man!” She coughed, then she whispered, “I reckon he’s askin bout the preacher!”

  Elijah patted Michael on the knee, and after a few seconds they were both patting him and rubbing his arms as if he were a child who needed comforting. “Problem with us Gibsons,” Elijah said, “is some of us go crazy, an some of us live too long, and some of us…” his voice dropping low and cracking, “are just too damn hard to kill.”

  And then they had no more to say. They sat there quietly, the two very old people patting him on the leg, the knee, smiling, but not saying a word. After a few minutes Addie said, “Time to say goodbye.”

  Michael impulsively leaned over and kissed them on the tops of their heads and climbed out of the cab, closing the door behind him.

  Elijah turned and looked at him with his cloudy eyes. “Well, that’s something never happened before.” He smiled and drove away.

  When Michael got back upstairs his grandma was asleep. Mickey-Gene sat on the edge of the bed holding her hand. He turned and looked at Michael. It was hard to tell if he’d been crying — apparently his eyes always looked that way. “You know I never forgot about you,” Mickey-Gene said. “I was always wondering what you were doing with your life.”

  Michael had no idea what he meant. Maybe it was just this socially-awkward old man’s attempt at politeness. “Thanks for sitting with her,” he replied. “I… I just needed to take a break.”

  “Oh sure, sure. Anytime.” Carefully Mickey-Gene placed her hand on top of the covers. “She’s so tired. She asked me to tell you the next part. It’s okay, I was there.”

  “I… I dont know that it would work the same. Grandma and I, well, there’s a special connection when she tells it.”

  “I know, I know. But it’s okay, really. I’ll get us both back there — I promise.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  MICKEY-GENE WENT EARLY to the mill as he did every morning. Even with all the trees and the stream turning the wheel the building got so hot in the afternoon he usually had to quit by three. Hopefully enough folks had come by with their bushels of shelled corn by then to make it worth his while. He took a gallon of shelled corn for every bushel he ground into meal and gave back to the customer in those cotton sacks. It wasn’t much but still enough to trade for what he needed, and he didn’t need much. He lived with his Uncle Ralph who owned the mill but sometimes on cooler days he just stayed at the mill all day and slept there. His uncle said that was okay it kept him out of trouble but really it just kept folks from bothering him. Both Uncle Ralph and Aunt Mattie were good at keeping crazy folks from bothering them and they’d tried to teach the same thing to Mickey-Gene.

  He had figured out a long time ago that the best way to survive this family was to stay out of everybody’s way and not let on how much you knew about anything.

  Besides, he liked it here. It was the quietest, prettiest part of the county. It was a business, but he wasn’t busy all the time — he’d go days without anybody showing up. Then he could read, or daydream, or figure things out, or whatever he took a notion to. And survive. He had a box full of books he read over and over: Shakespeare’s Complete Plays, Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. He liked some of Shakespeare more than others, but all of it seemed strange, set in some other world a universe away from here. And the language — sometimes the words were living things, full of breath and blood and capable of biting you if you weren’t careful. Wharton’s book was all about a life unlike any he’d ever heard of — he couldn’t quite understand these people, but he kept reading the book anyway.

  In Cane there was this one sentence, “Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.” It was about the most beautiful thing he’d ever read.

  Years ago a rock slide had taken out the dirt road on the mill side of the creek. That was how folks used to get their corn to the mill. But after half the ridge came down they either had to abandon the mill or find another way, so his uncle built this swinging rope bridge across the creek, and lined the bottom of it with boards so that it was two planks wide, and the people had to carry their bushels of corn over on that narrow footbridge.

  Sometimes Mickey-Gene would look across from the mill and see some child the parents had sent on the chore, or some older person, and they’d look scared, and he could feel their scare right down into his bones and he just couldn’t bear it so he’d run across and tell them to rest up there on the bank while he milled their corn for them, and then he’d carry their bushel down to the mill.

  Today he’d be closing early for Lilly Gibson’s funeral. Of course her folks were organizing the funeral and none of the Gibson family was invited because of what Jesse done, but they were going to show up anyway because they all had loved Lilly. They would just stand back a little, down the hill, watching and paying their silent respects. Her little kids had already been taken to her sister’s house in Tennessee to live.
The Gibsons knew they’d never see those children again and that was a hard thing.

  He didn’t do well in groups of people. He especially didn’t do well at family gatherings. So today he spent some time relaxing and doing the things he enjoyed most in order to armor himself for the coming ordeal. He dipped into his box of books and read passages at random. Maybe that was a strange thing to do — he didn’t know because he didn’t talk to any other readers. But he liked the feeling he got from it — that sense of a solitary voice singing out from a strange and unknown place, and trying to trace it back and discover where it had come from.

  The Sound and the Fury was a difficult book. He didn’t know how others perceived it, but he suspected that most people thought so. It seemed to him that the book was all about communication, how difficult it was to make it happen, and by going into characters’ heads like that, so completely, well he’d never seen anybody do that before. It was a demonstration of empathy, and how strange empathy was, because you never could predict, could you, what went on in other people’s heads.

  This “feeling” the Gibsons were always talking about — Mickey-Gene had decided a long time ago that it was empathy they were talking about. In certain circumstances they could understand what other folks were feeling in a deep way — as if, just briefly, they were them. It worked best with other members of the family, but sometimes it worked with other people too. The preacher had it, Sadie had it in spades, and he himself had it, the Grans, hell, maybe all of them in varying degrees.

  But the understanding didn’t necessarily make you nice; it didn’t even make you kind. You just knew — that was all. You could use that power to make other people feel better, or worse. Once inside their heads, you could push them anyway you wanted to.

  Mickey-Gene couldn’t tolerate it. He had to shut it off a long time ago — that was why he was so alone in the world. He didn’t understand how most of the others used it, or tolerated it. The preacher used it to destroy people, like Jesse and Lilly, just because he could. He could control those snakes with it. The preacher could find it in the blood and push the blood however he wanted.