Blood Kin

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “Do we need his Bible?”

  “There’s no time. Besides, it’s too risky to carry it round till we know what we can do with it. If we run into him before then, how could we stop him from taking it away?”

  Maybe it was because she was so tired, tired of everything, like if there was just one more terrible thing she’d lie down in the dirt and let happen whatever was going to happen. It seemed to take a lot longer to get up to the Grans this time than before. The mountain seemed steeper, the sun hotter, and her legs weaker. Every once in a while she’d stop to catch her breath and she’d turn around to see how high they were and it looked like she was the highest she’d ever been. She would have loved to live up there, so that she could see things going on but she’d be enough above it to look toward the sky and still feel it was in her reach.

  She had a sudden terrible thought that maybe the preacher had already done something to them. The way he’d acted at the birthday picnic, she’d been sure he’d meant them harm, but they were family, and the preacher worshipped family, or at least family blood.

  Should she have talked to somebody about it? Was this going to be her fault? But she wasn’t old enough for that kind of responsibility — they couldn’t put all that on her and expect her to take care of things.

  Granny Grace would keep an eye on them — she was sure of that. It was just the kind of thing Granny Grace would do. She clutched Mickey-Gene’s hand and pulled, trying to hurry him. He was wheezing, but he was keeping up.

  But once she reached the top of the ridge she was confused. The Grans had had a lot of junk lying around outside — parts of old cars, farm equipment, old steam-powered machinery, and a bunch of things big and small she had no idea what they were or what they did or how old they were. Now the ground was clear — hard-packed clay and limestone slabs and ugly little trees, a scattering of grass between. There were a few drag marks, and scattered ruts and holes and rectangular pits where heavy things had once stood, but no sign at all of the actual things that had once been here.

  They walked around a small stand of cedars to get to the Grans’ house, that little one-room shack that had been so full the personal debris had been spilling out of doors and windows. The door was wide open so already she could see the difference. The porch was empty, without even those old rockers they’d had. And there was nothing visible just inside the door.

  “Do they really live here?” Mickey-Gene asked beside her.

  “You’ve never been here before?”

  “No — you’re the only one I ever knew of to visit the Grans at their own place. Is it always so quiet and, I dont know, empty?”

  “I only came the one time,” she told him. “But no, it wasn’t like this.

  “Maybe they’re visiting?”

  “I dont think they visit. Elijah? Addie?” she called. There was no answer.

  She started walking faster and jumped up on the porch. Mickey-Gene stumbled on the steps and swore. Then she was standing in the doorway, staring. Mickey-Gene came up behind her. “It’s empty,” he said.

  “Completely.” Although she wasn’t sure she fully meant that, because the Grans had left something behind. She went in, Mickey-Gene close behind her.

  The wooden floor was scrubbed and polished, without even a piece of lint or sliver of paper to distract from the beautiful red oak grain. The walls were painted with a continuous mural that wrapped completely around all four sides, with even the two windows and the door worked into the design. The mural obviously wasn’t new — the colors were unevenly faded and there were scrape marks and some gouges where things had rubbed against or struck the plaster. But it was still in pretty good shape. Sadie figured that all the things stuffed into this house — she hadn’t even been able to see the walls before — had served to protect it.

  She wondered which of the Grans had painted it, or if both had. It was possible they’d had someone else paint it for them. But it seemed too personal for that.

  Her eyes were drawn to the ceiling. It was such a dazzling white she almost expected a window there — it was like clouds that had soaked up the sun — or some kind of white fire (Was there such a thing? Maybe in the Bible.) Something was written faintly in the center of it. She kept moving around trying to find an angle where she could see it better. The lettering was pink-colored, and thin in places, as if there hadn’t been enough paint on the brush so some of that improbable white shone through, like a ghost burning up through the skin that wrapped it, an idea which thrilled and amazed her.

  Finally she was able to read it.

  Psalm 139 - I will praise You for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

  The mural around the walls started with an obscurity and a heaviness down by the floor — dark browns and blues and blacks showing rocks and fallen trunks, old bones and what crawled beneath the bones, and a fluid that ran through part water and part oil and a melting of body fat.

  In the layer above was the living soil, active with creatures and their burrowings, and a certain fire, a promising warmth that Sadie could not find specifically in either the colors or the shapes. Plants began there, forming a complex layer of green, the branches above in harmony with the roots below, and both resembling the engravings Sadie had seen of the circulatory systems of humans, and how lungs and hearts and brains were like the fruits, or the flowers of those systems, or the lightning bolts that branched out of the multiple layers of sky reaching for their opposites.

  The sky of the mural went from white to blue to shadow and then to that unusually brilliant white of the ceiling. It wasn’t the same in all places, which made it seem that much more real, that much deeper, so that she kept staring into it, expecting to find something in the distance.

  The land, too, wasn’t the same in all places. There were close hills and distant folds of mountains, flatlands and hollows, and even one flat ridge rising above the trees and populated with little crude houses and tiny figures she couldn’t quite get the details from but which still seemed familiar.

  Overlaying the landscape were large rough outlines of people spaced around the room, varying in size and slightly in shape but still recognizably human. These had no features but the colors that filled them ranged from that dazzling ceiling white to softer pinks and reds like floating mists of pastel lights, soups of chemicals and human beings turned spectacularly into gas. And despite their lack of detail Sadie was convinced they were still supposed to represent specific human beings and when she stepped up to one it was almost a perfect fit. It was like her shadow but more like her shadow’s opposite.

  “It’s like a church,” Mickey-Gene said beside her, and although she agreed with him she thought it was certainly unlike any church she’d ever been in in her part of the country and obviously it was much more.

  Another Bible passage was written into the sky of each wall:

  Isaiah — They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.

  And,

  Corinthians — Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.

  And,

  Corinthians — we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

  And right above the door that led in and out of the house,

  John — Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

  Sadie thought about that as she left the Grans’ house for the last time. She had so many questions for the Grans, but now she really didn’t expect to see them again. How long had they sat in that house, painting and then gazing at that mural, before filling up their house and hiding it? Did they just forget it was there, or did knowing about its secret existence only make it more powerful? Of course she had no right to the answers to any of these questions, and maybe that’s why it had been hidden. What’s theirs was theirs — they didn’t owe anyone answers.

  “Sadie
, slow down! You’re going to hurt yourself!” That was poor Mickey-Gene shouting behind her, scared to death himself but still trying to keep up, still trying to protect her. But she was sure they couldn’t have much time. Maybe it was that urge she’d had just to stay up there on the mountain, maybe even move into the Grans’ old house, and not worry about what was going on with the rest of her family, or with anybody else down in the hollow. She could be above all that. She was just a child really, and she wanted a child’s life.

  But she couldn’t let any more people die, and she could feel it in her body all the way to the ends of her nerves that more people were going to die if the preacher wasn’t stopped.

  “We need to look at the preacher’s Bible!” she shouted back to him. “Maybe Granny Grace already has it figured out and she can tell us what we can do with it!” He was yelling things back but he was so out of breath she couldn’t understand him. She stumbled a few times, but still kept her feet. Her stomach dropped so rapidly in her descent she had to fight sickness. She was worried maybe she wouldn’t be able to find Granny’s place on her own. She might need extra time for that. Mickey-Gene would just have to keep up best he could.

  She was about a hundred yards ahead of Mickey-Gene when things started flattening out a little, coming up to the edge of her grandpa’s old farm. Her need to go over and talk to him about everything that had happened since his death, to talk to him about anything, was overwhelming. Grief seized her face and turn it into a mask he would not have recognized.

  The trail off the mountain disappeared into the curve of the dirt road running past his house. The barn was still as tall and as red as ever, the finest barn in three counties. Two wagons were pulled up along the side of the house facing the road, the first full of furniture and the second mostly empty, horses hitched to both. Her mother had told her the Simpson clan was returning to Wythe County that morning, saying that Morrison had gotten a little too “rough” for the likes of them. The farm would be put up for sale, and they’d given Momma the pick of whatever was left in the house before the sale went through. But they should have left by now. They were for sure going to have to ride over some difficult mountain road in the dark if they left this late in the day.

  No one was in sight. As she passed the entrance to the farm she kept turning her head trying to get a better look. That was how she saw the big, sloppy lettering almost the color of the barn up on the side of Grandpa’s pretty white house. She turned around and trotted back, just as Mickey-Gene reached that point in the road.

  “Sadie, the preacher’s Bible…”

  “Wait a second. We need to check on things here.” She ran past him and went through the gate. When she came up beside the wagons the horses jerked their heads nervously. She checked the wagon beds — one was full of Grandpa’s best furniture and the other had a few piles of quilts and linens, some clothing, with some chairs and benches for passengers filling the rest of the space. “Hello!” she cried. There was no answer.

  Mickey-Gene came up beside her. “What’s that noise?”

  She focused on sound: the horses flicking their tails around their hips, their occasional snorts, and the rapid pulse in her ear, the rise and fall of the flies’ buzz. “I dont think…”

  “The preacher’s been here,” Mickey-Gene said. He’d gone ahead of her to the side of the house where she’d seen that loose lettering.

  The flies were a little louder in their complaints (or was it a celebration?) as Sadie walked up to him. Something red had been rubbed onto the clean white house to make the lettering. It reminded her of when some kind of meat would half fall out of Homer Goin’s rendering truck and make a smear as it was dragged down the road. The flies were the same, too, spinning around and settling down to feed, then taking off again. Buzzing the whole time.

  The smears had been pushed around to make letters, like a kind of rusty red paint with here and there lumps of fat or threads of skin to make the letters more physical, and unforgettable.

  It said,

  Luke 21:16 — And ye shall be BETRAYED both by parents and brethren and kinfolks and friends and some of you shall they cause to be put to death.

  Except some of the letters were broken and not all there and in a few sections a faint trail of blood was all that completed a letter, but Sadie could still read the message just fine. She looked down on the ground and saw the trail of blood leading around to the back of the house, punctuated here and there by a bloody boot print.

  The flies were loud here, but not as numerous or as loud as they were somewhere else.

  Mickey-Gene ran ahead and she tried to stop him. He was saying something but the flies were too loud in her head for her to hear him. She followed him and watched as he fell to his knees, his hands on his face, mouth open, repeating over and over something terrible and full of anguish and soul scouring but she couldn’t hear a word of it because the flies were too loud in her head.

  But she could follow his hand as he threw it forward in a gesture of surrender, the finger pointing, shaking.

  At the end of the house beside her grandpa’s back door they had left their dirty laundry, piles and piles of it fouled and smeared and layered with flies. It seemed like such a terrible and disrespectful thing to do, to leave such a thing for her mother to clean up. For a moment she just wanted to go to the back door and beat it down, scream at them to come out and take care of their awful mess. And she started toward the door to do that very thing, angrily waving the flies away as they seemed to be attacking her in waves.

  Then she saw more lettering on the back of the house beside the door and it distracted her. She felt like she needed to read it just so she’d have some sense of the extent of their crime.

  As it is told in Exodus — Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

  She gazed down at the bloody pile to the left of the door and discovered that the dirty laundry had faces. Hands and arms and legs as well, but it was the faces of all those Simpsons from Wythe County that bothered her the most.

  And then she found the smaller pile to the right of the door, and spread over the top of that pile as if to protect what lay beneath her was Granny Grace, her clothing even more stained and ragged than usual, her arms fallen out from their sleeves, her legs angled too sharply from where they left the bottom of her torso. One foot was bare and torn; the other had a blood-stiffened sock hanging from the toes. Her eyes were as wide open as Sadie remembered them, and the wicked smile was there, but extended somehow, and the width of her face seemed wrong, and her neck lopsided.

  More words had been scratched into the dirt below Granny Grace, deep, dry, uneven scratches as if the author of all these verses had run out of his red paint.

  Suffer the little children to come unto me — for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

  That’s when she saw the small arms and hands, tiny legs of those rude Simpson children and grandchildren, peeking out from under Granny’s dress.

  Chapter Nineteen

  MICHAEL CAME OUT of his grandmother’s story weeping and curled on the floor of her hospital room. He stretched his hands out and felt the tile, pushed himself up so that he could get a better look at his hands on the surface of the tile, feeling the smooth slickness. No grit, no dirt, no grass, no blood. He struggled to stand, finally managing by grabbing the hospital bed and pulling himself up. The room spun momentarily as his eyes tried to find his grandmother in the brilliant white sheets, thinking of that celestial ceiling at the Grans’ house, and not being able to find her at all.

  He looked around. There was no sign of his grandmother, but Mickey-Gene was sitting on the floor in the corner mumbling “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” softly to himself with his eyes closed. Michael was still seeing him as he had been in that vision of a long ago yesterday, brilliant and confused and scared.

  Michael walked over and touched his shoulder, shaking him gently. “Grandpa. She isn’t in the room. You need to help me.” Mickey-Gene’s lids shot open. He looked terr
ified, grabbing Michael’s arm. “Grandpa, it’s Michael. You’re just coming out of her story. Everything’s okay, but we need to go find Grandma. She’s not in the room.”

  They ran to the nurse’s station. The woman in charge said she had seen nothing. She got on the phone while Michael and his grandfather headed for the elevator. As it opened on the ground floor Michael saw his grandmother going out the front door still in her hospital gown, dragging her overnight bag by one strap across the floor behind her. They reached her as she stepped into the parking lot.

  “Grandma, come back inside.” Michael tried to grab the strap from her hand but she wiggled it away from him.

  “We have to leave now.” Her voice was firm, and clearer than he’d heard it in some time.

  Mickey-Gene tried to get ahead of her, made sure she saw his face. “Where you going, Sadie? You’re still in your hospital gown!”

  “Going to that crate out in the field. You should know,” she said. “You helped put it there.” She kept pushing forward about as fast as Michael imagined her short legs could manage. They both were struggling to keep up with her. Mickey-Gene was carrying her bag now which allowed her to move even faster.

  Michael’s grandfather’s face was pale, his eyes looking somewhere else. “You’re feeling something?”

  “I’m feeling that we’ve got no time for talking. We’ll take your pick-up. Michael can drive while you help me get dressed.”

  “Grandma, Clarence says that whole area is under kudzu now. I dont think…”

  “I know it’s all under kudzu, and I know that nasty vine is growing ever-which-way out there. That’s why we got to get out there, because I also know why it’s happening!” She grabbed the side of Mickey-Gene’s arm and started slipping out of her gown.

  “Grandma!”

  “If you dont want a public show then you better get me into that cab! Mickey-Gene, you still got that kerosene in the back of the truck?”