And someone like Sadie, she could be kind with it. She wanted to be kind with it, but sometimes she was so beset, her life was so hard, she just didn’t have the will to be as kind as she might. But maybe he could help her with that. Now that she saw him as no one else saw him, now that she was the only one who saw who he was, he would do anything for her. He thought he’d loved her all his life, but his Aunt Mattie, she’d seen it in his eyes when he looked at Sadie, and she’d said, “No, Mickey-Gene, she’s your cousin. That aint for you, Mickey-Gene,” and that might be true, but he’d still felt it as cruelty when she’d said it, and he’d had to run away rather than hit her.
But he’d thought enough for the day. Thinking so often hurt his heart and he had to shut it off for a while. So he stood outside and he looked at the world, all the little bits of it, and the names of everything. It was important that every bit had a name he could place in his head. Everything, including people, had a color and a sound and a name he could say. Slippery elm and winged elm and scarlet oak. Wild turkey and grouse, pheasants and black ducks. The hollow was full of birds of all kinds, especially the small ones, and people would eat any kind of bird if they were hungry enough. Moles and blue tick hounds and short-tailed shrew. The chirp and saw of the late afternoon insects like a chorus of singers with something sharp shoved down their throats. The ticks of the katydids and the crickets who sounded like little tinny bells, the bright red dabs of cardinals like flying blood singing wait wait cheer cheer. The jays harshly repeating their own name over and over. The sad coo-oo-oo-hoo of the mourning doves, and on the other side of the forest the cheer-up cheer-up robins. Titmouse and chickadee dee and that friendly towhee inviting you to drink your tea, sweet, drink your tea.
Mickey-Gene wasn’t sure when he’d started it but he could feel himself spinning. Maple and dogwood and linden. Red cedar white cedar. Maybe if he got better he could be a painter some day or an artist of an art that hadn’t even been invented yet. Dibs and dabs and names and colors and explosions of sound, but knowing how they all flowed and fit together was the important thing. Meadow mouse and bull elk and mule. He spun around so hard he was getting dizzy but he just couldn’t quite stop himself.
Dry brown white oak leaves crunching beneath his feet. Red, golden, and scarlet sourwood leaves. Ripe paw paws, persimmons, and wild grapes. Sweet and sour and bitter on the tongue. Bees swarming the sky between the swaying trees.
And somewhere crying and terror and the grief that will not end or even explain itself. The sorrow for a child you cannot feed or begin to teach. The wonder, the wonder about a world impossible to parse or capture in a lifetime of looks. Milkweed blossoms, yellow butterfly weed, clumps of blue violets and phlox. Possum and groundhog and woodcock, dried pumpkin sassafras tea cornbread in a pan and biscuits cut out with the top of a glass and baked brown.
“Child! Could you stop spinnin round and come hep a poor old gal!”
Mickey-Gene stopped and looked out at the rope bridge. A skinny old woman with long ragged hair was swinging there, something big and black clutched to her belly she was losing a grip on. She looked strained and unhappy. She was that witch woman, Granny Grace, the one who had protected Sadie at the picnic, but she made him feel really nervous. He couldn’t begin to understand someone like her. He didn’t think he could talk to her.
But maybe he wouldn’t have to. He was rapidly losing balance. He was going down.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
He lay there with his eyes closed, listening to the world rustle around him, and then eventually rustling to him. “You aint dead or nothin are you? Then see if you cant sit up.”
He did as she said, but felt like the idiot he pretended to be. “You probably think I’m like Benjy,” he said.
“Who’s that?”
Of course, he had no idea if she’d read Faulkner’s novel, or even if she could read, or if it was too thin a reference for her to pick up on even if she had read it. He had no sense of such things, and always got it wrong. “Sorry. A character in a book…” Should he really drop his mask with her?
“I know, you read. You aint ignorant like most of the rest of us. That’s why I need you to do somethin for Sadie.”
“S-s-sure. What?”
“Hide the preacher’s Bible.” She lifted and dropped the heavy thing into his lap. “Least you could do, after I risked my life bringin it cross that thar bridge.”
He stared at it. It was old and beat up and smelled bad. The leather had a slightly greasy feel to it, like maybe it hadn’t been cured right, and was now beginning to liquefy, as skin would, if not preserved. “Why?”
“Because it’s too dangerous for Sadie to have it, and I just went by my place to hide it, but somebody’s been there lookin, and it smells to me like the preacher been through there. And no offense, child, but I dont reckon he’d suspicion you. So you got a good place to hide it?”
“Yes’m.” He was thinking of that bin full of shelled corn he had. He’d been taking his share from the last few weeks and just pouring it into that bin, not grinding it or trading it or anything, just watching it accumulate because he liked looking at it in different kinds of light, and putting his hands into it, and thinking about what kind of painting he’d make of it, if he painted. He didn’t need the money — his aunt and uncle gave him everything he needed. He could take some of that corn out, put the Bible in the bin, and pour some corn back over it. He put his fingers along the edge of the Bible’s cover and started to open it, but Granny Grace’s quick hands closed it.
“I know you like to read child, but not this. The riginal words might be okay, but not what he done to them, or what he added, or them pictures he drew all over. No sir, you dont want any of that nonsense in your head.” She got up then, and ran across the rope bridge like it was nothing.
Mickey-Gene decided he believed her. The same people who said Granny Grace was crazy thought him stupid. It was the same Bible the preacher had up at the mines. It would be hard not to look into a book when it was sitting right there in front of you, so he went inside and started burying it under all that beautiful, yellow, white, and golden corn. But after he got it all covered, and was patting himself on his own back about how clever he was, he reached into the bin and lifted the book out in a shower of corn, and sat right there on the floor and opened it.
The end papers and flyleaves had been used, like a lot of family Bibles he knew about, to record births and deaths in a kind of haphazard family tree of the Gibson family. Some of the earlier names were incomplete, or had a question mark beside them, or had been crossed out and corrected. The Grans were inside their own box that floated beside the others, with no relationship lines leading in or out of it, and it was also labeled with a red question mark.
Some of the names had the symbols of stars or planets or flowers drawn beside them, but he had no idea what any of that meant. Some of the more recent names, like Sadie, or Jesse’s children, were underlined, and some of those names were connected to other names with long, flowing arrows. Mickey-Gene blushed to see his name connected to Sadie’s.
The last page depicting the family tree was odd in that mostly it was just lines and arrows with spaces for names. But some marriages appeared to be planned, or speculated about, between family members, and there were even the proposed names for possible offspring. Mickey-Gene traced the lines for him and Sadie, saw that one simply said “
Even odder was the preacher’s own lineage, in which the preacher had listed himself as “Jake,”with a complex list of spouses and children heavily revised then scratched out. But as far as Mickey-Gene knew the preacher had never been married and had no children.
The rest of the Bible was awash in notations, underlines, highlights, boxes and circles around certain passages, arrows connecting others. In many of the margins were numeric and text notations in a tiny, almost unreadable script, some with spirals and crude depictions of animals and embarrassingly
lewd drawings of naked people doing a variety of things to each other, most of which Mickey-Gene didn’t even understand.
Some of the annotations were larger, bolder, as if the preacher had put just that much more emotion into writing them down. A number of these were about John Dillinger, who had been killed recently, and other criminals such as Pretty Boy Floyd. He had entered birth dates (and in the case of Dillinger a death date), specific crimes they’d committed, even comments on their relative good looks.
Other bold notes appeared to be about foreign countries, and camps, and factories where human beings were butchered like animals. Sometimes diagrams of these camps spread across the top margin. And in several places was the notation “Gibsons=Jews.” Mickey-Gene didn’t understand any of this, and the drawings were dreamlike and disturbing. The only thing clear was the size of the preacher’s anger, and the grimness of the visions that anger fueled. A man like the preacher was dangerous to have around, especially with any kind of following.
The preacher had used a variety of things to bookmark certain pages: strips of paper and cloth, yellowed receipts and dried leaves and pressed flowers and strings of various colors and thicknesses and in one place a huge insect Mickey-Gene didn’t recognize flattened and pressed between the pages.
Then there were the missing words. Throughout some sections of the preacher’s Bible individual words in the verses had been marked out with ink or blotted out with drops of blood or in a few spots actually burned out with something like a cigarette. These usually had something to do with sex, so that in Corinthians it was “But because of the temptation to ########, each man should have his own wife” and in Deuteronomy it was “None of the daughters of Israel shall be a cult #####” and in Jude it was “Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in ##### and pursued #####” and in Leviticus it was “You shall not #####.”
Other pages were so heavily altered with paint and lipstick and other kinds of ladies’ makeup and cutting and by other means that they resembled crude and terrible works of art concerning apocalyptic subject matter. These were mostly spread through the chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel, and Daniel. A great many of the words were obscured on these pages but the meaning was still pretty clear to Mickey-Gene.
In the Book of Daniel four great beasts came up from the sea… The first was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings… another beast, a second, like unto a bear. And it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it; and they said thus unto it, “Arise, devour much flesh.”
These creatures had been drawn in pencil across the pages of the Bible, and then painted in with lipstick or paint or blood or whatever the preacher must have had available. They obscured most of the words except for the ones the preacher wanted to emphasize. But what troubled Mickey-Gene most was their crude resemblance to other members of the Gibson family, and to people in the town, their flesh marred by terrible wounds and sores and things growing out of them which clearly did not belong.
On several pages he saw the scribbled outlines of masses of people lining up beneath a sign that said Arbeit Macht Frei. In some of the depictions black wolves were attacking and eating people.
And behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.
The eyes were actually like a woman’s, and the lipstick smeared mouth was huge and ugly and had terrible things swimming inside.
His throne was like the fiery flame, and His wheels as burning fire.
The rest of this page was consumed by flames painted in nail polish, between them glimpses of all the folks suffering and dying.
The visions of my head troubled me.
The preacher’s head, bare and bloody, his scalp being torn apart by winged creatures with barbed tails and many sharp teeth.
These great beasts, which are four, are four kings who shall arise out of the earth… and of the ten horns that were in his head… the horn that had eyes and a mouth that spoke very great things…
And everywhere Mickey-Gene looked in this part of the Bible people were burning, tortured, torn apart. What he couldn’t tell was whether the preacher identified with the victims, or the torturers, and sometimes he suspected both.
And shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down and break it in pieces.
Until finally the devil’s reptilian body rose up on a page, its head the preacher’s, whose face had turned ugly and insatiable, and the torn bodies of his victims hung from his many claws.
And his power shall be mighty… and he shall destroy wondrously, and shall prosper and perform, and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people.
Mickey-Gene closed the preacher’s Bible. His hands shook. His mouth gulped air. He struggled to regain control over his breathing. Finally he picked himself up and again buried the Bible in the bin full of shelled corn, digging and rearranging until every last evil swatch of it was completely obscured.
BY THE TIME he got to his aunt and uncle’s house they’d already left for the funeral, but his aunt had left out some clothes for him, cleaned and pressed, hand-me-downs from his uncle. He dressed quickly and left, almost stumbling in the rutted hard clay road as he hurried. He hated coming in late to anything, with everyone staring. Life was always better sitting back in a crowd, trying not to do anything that drew attention to yourself.
He hadn’t talked to Sadie since Lilly’s death, and he was a little afraid to be near her for the first time. And yet he wanted to be. It was like wanting to jump off one of these mountains, not knowing whether you’d land on the rocks, or into one of those more or less soft trees.
There were people on the porch of Sadie’s house, some he recognized and some he did not. A couple of the faces were not complete unknowns, Gibson cousins he’d seen only once or twice. When he came up on the porch no one even noticed him. Then he saw her sitting on the far side of the porch, looking up at the ridge that rose like a wall all around them, that separated them so completely from the rest of the world he was surprised even light or air managed to get in. He went over and sat down beside her, but didn’t say anything.
“Daddy wont be at the funeral,” she said. “He went out early this morning, took his shotgun. A couple of the cousins came up from town a little while ago and told us that Daddy brought in that moonshiner Lowell Jepsen to the jail this morning, said he’d sold Uncle Jesse some bad hooch, and that’s why he did what he did. Deputy Collins got him to put the gun down, and then he locked him up.”
“Do you think your pa might be right?”
There were tears in her eyes, and she shook her head. Mickey-Gene reached over and grabbed her hand. A sudden lurch in his chest made him close his eyes. He was seeing the redness under his lids and then could taste the blood, the heavy flavor of it in his nose, and then he saw what Jesse did to Lilly, in that area of a woman’s body he had never seen, and he bit into his tongue trying not to scream.
“Mickey? You okay?” Sadie looked at him, so close, her hands holding the sides of his face. He wasn’t sure he could breathe. In fact he was pretty sure he had stopped breathing because the world was still red, and would soon explode into flame. “Mickey-Gene!”
She was crying. “S-s-sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” He made himself breathe deeply, and when the air proved cool and delicious, he relaxed.
“Mickey-Gene?” It was Sadie’s mother. He couldn’t quite look at her directly. That bothered him — he knew he looked like a dog somebody had been beating when he did that, but he couldn’t help himself. She was one of those people who always looked at him with suspicion. But Aunt Mattie was standing right behind her, making sure everything would be okay.
“Yes’m,” he said.
“You go on to the cemetery with Sadie. That’s alright with your Aunt.”
“Keep each other company. That’s the best thing,” Aunt Mattie said.
Sadie’s momma looked at her. “Sadie,
you okay to walk with Mickey-Gene?”
“Well sure. Course.”
“I’ll be along directly. I got to go work out something with that sorry moonshiner, get him to drop them charges.”
Mickey-Gene could see the trouble in Sadie’s face. “Will they charge the moonshiner?”
Her mother shook her head. “They dont charge moonshiners round here, an how they goin to prove bad shine? Ask me it’s all bad shine. Besides, you cant tell me bad shine would make a man…” She stopped, looked away. “You kids go on. Least some of us should be on time for poor Lilly.”
Mickey-Gene and Sadie had been on their way for only a few minutes when this woman in a big floppy hat came running out of her house screaming. It wasn’t until she was almost to the barbed wire fence that separated her place from that little bank by the road that Mickey-Gene recognized her as Hattie Younger, who Mickey-Gene had never met but everybody said was crazy. Sadie started running and he started running too. The way that woman was screaming it was like the very devil was inside her working her loony mouth. Mickey-Gene was terrified. That hat on her was like a live thing, something with wings wanting to bite his head off.
Then Sadie just stopped right there in the road, her shoulders pulled up like a cat’s, her hands curled into fists. It was so sudden and unexpected Hattie Younger stopped screaming and came down to the fence. She bent down and looked at the two of them between the barbed wire.
Sadie turned and walked up the embankment. She reached between the two stretches of barbed wire, grabbed Hattie’s dress near the neck, and yanked the shocked woman’s head forward. The floppy hat caught on the top strand and flipped back off her head. Hattie’s head looked tiny between the twin strands, her eyes darting at the barbs above and below her. She moaned like a cornered cat.
Sadie pushed her head up close to Hattie’s until it looked like she was trying to smell the frightened woman’s face. She stayed that way a few seconds, and then she said, “I’m sorry your baby died the day I was born, but I didn’t do it.” Then she waited a few more seconds before saying, “Did you drop it? Is that what happened? Or were you just so crazy, even then, that you threw it down?” The woman started squirming, mewling, as if there was something burning her. Mickey-Gene found himself squirming, too, tortured by something he felt but didn’t understand. Sadie stood rigid, her smallish hands holding the woman still. He hardly recognized her. “Dont run after me again,” she said, and let her go. The woman tumbled back and just lay there in the tall grass.
Blood Kin Page 19