Blood Kin

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “Where’s Momma?”

  “She’s still all wound up, bout Lilly and her Simpson kin and all. She’s just runnin around out there in circles, pretty much. You know what she said when we threw on the dirt? She says ‘Now he’s partly above ground and partly below. Just like a snake! He’s just some kind of animal,’ she says, ‘that dont deserve neither heaven nor hell!’ I just about bust a gut!”

  “So you’ve done what needed to be done?”

  “I reckon I did.”

  “Then you got to go, Daddy! You got to go away from here and never come back! I cant be worried about you messing around with me no more!”

  “Now listen here, girl! Who do you think’s the man, the father, goddamit!”

  She raised the rifle and pointed it at him. She tried to ignore the shaking barrel. “Too late. Too late for that! Now git before I pull this trigger!”

  He stared at her for a little while, his drunkenness draining away. Eventually he went out the door. She would never see him again. Her mother would never mention it. It would be as if he had never been. Over the next year she became the mother Sadie had always wanted and they eventually moved into the preacher’s house. It would have some terrible memories of course, but you never turned down an inheritance in 1934 in Morrison, Virginia.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  MICHAEL MOVED THE pickup gradually down a tunnel of green. He couldn’t see the road bed. It was matted with crushed vine and layered leaves. The leaves appeared wet, as if the mass of kudzu had created its own weather. He could feel the tires slipping, the manual transmission trying, and failing to find purchase. Afraid he was going to slide them off the road, he barely pressed the gas pedal.

  “So he let himself get caught,” he said to his grandmother. “He could have gotten away. He could have killed you both. But he didn’t.”

  “No, he sure didn’t.”

  “And you knew something was up, I got that. I was there, in that way we have of being there. For whatever reason, he wanted to be buried that way, alive.”

  “No, Michael. Not buried, exactly. His saints, it was supposedly their idea to put him in the box with his snakes. That’s what he wanted.”

  The truck was moving so slowly it was almost at a stop anyway, so he made it complete. His grandfather was nodding slightly, rocking, his eyes half-closed. “He also wanted the two of you together. And you knew that.”

  “I knew that,” she repeated, “but I was just a girl. Mickey and I came together years later, after Momma died. I made myself believe the preacher was dead — why wouldn’t he be? I didn’t think it mattered anymore. He wasn’t in our lives anymore, he just wasn’t. But then we had our son, your father, and later you were born, and Mickey and I, we could see it.”

  “See it?”

  “Our part in it. Your granddad here was always quoting that play, about how everybody has many parts to play…”

  “As You Like It,” he said.

  “Yep, that’s it. And how you say your lines. Everybody has their lines, everybody has their parts.”

  Michael started moving the truck again. The green tunnel trembled. “Just like I have my part,” he said.

  “Yes, baby.”

  “The preacher was waking up again. Somehow I must have known. It was time to play my part. I got myself injured, trying not to come back here, trying not to play my role.”

  “Yes, baby.”

  “But I got back here anyway. I guess it was in the blood. I had to come back.”

  “All these people. All these innocent lives.”

  “I dont know any of them,” he said. “I dont know them. I shouldn’t have had to come.”

  “If you hadn’t come he would have killed everybody here anyway, and still gone looking for you, and he would have killed people along the way you might have cared about.”

  “All our yesterdays,” his grandfather muttered. “The way to dusty death.”

  “Hush, Mickey. Hush,” Grandma said.

  “But what does he expect of me?” Michael gripped the wheel angrily, trying to keep the pickup from sliding off the road. “What can he possibly expect?”

  “That you’ll be like him,” she answered. “But you aren’t like him.” And then she stopped. “Are you?”

  They came out of the green tunnel before Michael could answer. He pulled over and got out of the truck. He had some difficulty orienting himself within all the layers of what he was seeing, but as best he could determine the house and lawn were now entirely contained within walls of flowing and mutating kudzu. Even the sky had been obscured behind a lacy baffle of vine and leaf that moved to let in light, then floated closed and tinted everything in variations of green. The rest of the space was filled with the intricately imagined grounds and structure of what Michael thought might be a wealthy Victorian-era estate. But the style of it kept changing, so sometimes he thought he was seeing Roman features in the design, and sometimes Egyptian.

  Of course it was possible that it was all his own imagination creating the effects, because the entire thing was made from kudzu — he couldn’t even see the original underlying house and trees anymore — so what he was actually looking at were sometimes geometric and sometimes amorphous cloud shapes abstracted from masses of pulpy green leaf, blossom, and vine.

  Smaller mounds of kudzu rose and collapsed within this more or less level part leading up to the house. Sometimes these shapes resembled the statues of lions you sometimes saw as protective figures on either side of entrances to large houses, but other times they were more bear-like or even bird-like, giant hawks or swans. He led the way forward to the first “lion” and tried to look it more directly in the face: the eyes were hollow green shadows, and inside the roaring green mouths there were still more layers of deepening green, a leaf or two stirring like a tongue.

  He insisted that his grandmother and grandfather stay behind him as he moved past these figures. He could tell how much trouble they were having maintaining their balance on the constantly shifting vegetation. The grand doors of the green mansion yawned just ahead, and as they approached he heard the figures move behind him. He glanced back and watched them as they first appeared to run, then dissolved into the floor of green.

  “Did you ever know the preacher to have this kind of power?”

  “No! I think this must have come to him while he was in that crate,” Grandma said. Michael flashed back to that image of the saint driving that fresh-cut wooden stake into the preacher’s back.

  Above the entrance and stretching across the entire front of the house, an elaborate balcony was decorated with twisted vine and leaf filigree. He saw just a brief moment of white there, followed by folds of rushing gray. He knew immediately these were the gray women he’d seen in his grandmother’s memories, but in person they were even more chilling, their faces translucent enough to show jaw muscles and necks stressed to the extreme, the tongues inside ragged with decay. They paced the balcony with confused, awkward movements. At the front left corner of the kudzu house was a circular room — maybe a music room — that extended up into a kind of tower, except the top appeared unfinished, the runners and topmost leaves waving about aimlessly. There were more gray women in the tower, dancing with each other. Michael thought about kings, and the brides of kings, and wondered if maybe these dead women were all the preacher’s brides frozen in their youth.

  The leaves on the tower suddenly started fluttering like thousands of green butterflies. The tower itself began to spin, and some of the gray ladies were momentarily caught and torn apart by the force of it. The green tornado twisted out a minaret at the top. Green buttresses flew out of the walls to join other parts of the building. Michael rushed his grandparents inside.

  Inside the viridescent interior, walls of vine separated and some ceilings lowered while others expanded into leaf domes. Long strands of vine hung down from the ceiling and swept through the space touching the leafy floor. Michael considered how far they’d walked already and decided the
y still hadn’t even reached the original house. So far everything they’d seen was mounted on nothing but madness and imagination.

  Here and there Michael was finding Bible pages caught in the vine and leaf tangle. He collected them, trying to keep them in order. Mickey-Gene started doing the same, now and then handing over what he’d picked.

  “Is that the preacher’s Bible you two are picking up?” his grandmother asked. “Dont keep nothing from me now.”

  “It’s the very one,” Mickey-Gene said. “That Bible isn’t something I’d likely forget. I recognize some of the pages, especially the painted ones. Excuse me if I dont ever want to study them again, but I recognize them alright.”

  “Then he was able to find it. He had that damned Bible,” she said. “So why’d he tear it up? Leaving it lying around like trash?”

  Michael picked up some more pages. These were from Revelations. One passage in particular had been underlined and decorated with crude renderings of kudzu leaves. He wasn’t sure what had been used to create the drawings. It wasn’t pencil. It might have been a dirty fingernail.

  there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations

  Filling the next page was an attempt at a painting of a tree. Long curving lines of vine had been drawn and painted with what might have been crushed kudzu leaves, crowning the tree and traveling back across previous pages. The brown of the bark might have been dried blood.

  “I’m thinking he just doesn’t need to refer to it anymore,” Michael said. “He knows it all too well. And I think he’s living the parts he believes in most.”

  “Sound and fury…” his grandfather muttered.

  “I feel bad he found it so easily,” his grandmother said. “I didn’t remember where it was. He must have torn the place apart.”

  They soon found themselves in an overgrown area littered with debris. A shattered window frame hung off an upturned spur of kudzu. Nearby lay a pile of fractured wood, some of the pieces only a few inches long. There was molding, bits of floorboard, baseboard, a small section of door panel, and random splinters of plaster lathe, wall rubble and horsehair still attached. Most he could not tell where they’d originally been from, but some still bore the specific paint colors of particular rooms.

  He could hear Grandma sobbing softly behind him, his grandfather’s mumbled condolences. Michael had never owned much of anything, certainly nothing as substantial as a home, so he couldn’t imagine what she was going through. She gathered what she could of some shredded family photographs, stuffed them into her pockets. She picked up a handle from a broken china cup and asked Mickey-Gene to keep it for her. Over the next few yards she picked up silverware, a scrap of wallpaper, a child’s bright yellow spinning top, keeping a few things, dropping others, crying, spitting, cursing. Sometimes Michael’s grandfather would pat her. Other times he kept his hands away as if afraid.

  After Allison’s grandparents died there had been an estate sale. She’d dragged Michael to it even after he’d attempted several excuses. For once she wouldn’t take no for an answer. It had been held in their empty house, soon to go on sale, their last remaining things that hadn’t gone to relatives spread out over four folding tables, things like silverware, un-matched dishes, some gaudy jewelry, an antique doorknob that had once opened an unknown door, books by old authors he’d never heard of, a jar full of buttons, a jar full of random parts to random things.

  He’d wandered around the house for a bit, looking out of windows, imagining sights, viewpoints they might have had. He’d sat and watched Allison sell the last few items for dollars, quarters, and dimes. Then half a table’s worth of items shoved into a trash bag which he took out to the can by the alley. Then a few hours patting and kissing Allison, comforting her ineffectively, just as his grandfather was doing now. After a couple of months she didn’t mention her grandparents to him again. That’s what it came down to — all that was left was what they’d done for each other, for friends, for family, for strangers. What they had done. Their story. Was his story going to be bigger or smaller than that?

  To add to the insult of the destruction of his grandmother’s possessions the kudzu had been used to duplicate the destroyed rooms, even down to vague representations of the pictures that had once hung on the walls. There were even crude approximations of the old furniture, emulations of the old views out the windows recreated in embossed green.

  The farther they went in to the overgrown ruins, the larger were the broken pieces, until finally there were several rooms that appeared more or less intact — some of the old bedrooms toward the back of the house, and a couple more Michael didn’t think he’d ever been into. He assumed that the preacher must have found his Bible at this point, and that was why the destruction had stopped.

  Something tall and sinewy was moving between rooms, passing in and out of walls of kudzu, observing from shadow, but only briefly, because this was something so incredibly tired of being fixed in one place.

  “Michael…” His grandfather pointed at something behind him.

  Michael supposed the figure might have been considered naked, which would have shocked the preacher’s conservative congregation. But the body was so different he didn’t know that standards of nudity would actually apply.

  There was exposed bone — a great deal of it — especially in the lower legs and rib cage, and on the back part of the head where pale flesh and a little bit of hair blended into the dingy off-white exposed skull. The preacher turned slightly as if showing himself, as if posing. Where his saint had driven in the wooden stake an irregular patch of old and woody vine had sprouted into two vaguely cloud-like shapes. To Michael they resembled a crude framework for wings, if the wings had developed malformed and nonfunctional.

  Of course there shouldn’t have been any flesh at all but there was a great deal of that as well, in the cheeks and neck and shoulders and upper thighs, and partially wrapping the arms and hands. In fact the preacher still had that ugly twisted place on his hand where he’d been bitten, and the flesh at its center was as dark as coal.

  The preacher looked strangely muscular, and the muscles moved, or slid. Michael realized then that much of the preacher’s flesh and muscle was actually snakes, rattlers and copperheads which had worked their way through his body, and were as improbably vibrant and well-preserved as he was. So his slim muscular calves were made out of yellowed rattlesnake hide with dark V-shapes all up and down them like tattoos. His biceps and some of his abdominal muscles had these brown hourglass shapes on them and when they started moving around his body it became clear that these were, or once had been, copperheads. A black, fuzzy, gauze-like material appeared to be trapped in the transitional spaces and margins between snake and human, decayed remnants of the preacher’s black suit.

  Michael closed his eyes, sick to his stomach. He opened them again and peered at his grandmother, who knew, who must have known, and still had allowed Michael to be here, had not tried to drive him away. She stared at him silently, but he could see the sorrow and feel the regret.

  The figure in the doorway made a loud snorting noise as if trying to take in every last smell in the room and analyze it. Even though as far as Michael could tell the preacher no longer had a nose. “At lasssst…” The preacher spoke, lips ripping open as the mouth stretched wide. A second jaw within the mouth and behind the initial row of teeth was narrower and sported fangs. The snake came part way out of the preacher’s mouth and both mouths said together, “the lasssst one.” The preacher’s throat made a bubbling, choking sound and two more words, “maahh blood!”

  “Grandma!” he cried, feeling like a little kid. “Tell me what I’m supposed to do!” He was crazy, of course. All those times he’d gotten high, or so emotional he imagined he could feel his own nerves ache had taken their toll, driven the real world from his head.

  “If he gets outta here he’ll take the world with hi
m!” she cried. “He wont stop at this town, this county! All those innocent people! All them murdered babes! All he is anymore is that bloodlust!”

  “But I wanted…” Michael couldn’t finish, because he’d never actually known what he’d wanted.

  “It’s a curse, Hone y! I’m sorry! There’s nothing I can do. All these years, it’s been coming toward this day!”

  His grandfather pushed in front of her, getting between her and the impossible thing they’d all come after. What had any of them been thinking? Everybody had nightmares, and everybody knew you just had to endure them the best you could. You couldn’t just stop them from coming. When had the Gibsons become so stupid?

  A rosy glow was creeping through the gaps in the curtain of kudzu hanging behind and overhead. The old house had no roof anymore, and only part of its outside walls, so the kudzu was the only barrier between them and the rest of the world. The leaves were curling, the vines twisting. What was the preacher doing now? The glow began to redden, and Michael wondered if maybe they had lost all time, they had been here all night, and now what was coming down was the dawn.

  “People need filling, son.” Michael turned and looked at his grandfather, who had a knife in his hand. He’d been like that all his life, always hiding in plain sight. “And if they cant fill up with love and joy, they’ll fill up with something other.” His grandfather ran into that abomination with his knife raised. The snake came out then and bit him, and the arms came down and broke him.

  “Mickey!” Grandma tried to pull Mickey-Gene’s body out of the preacher’s embrace.

  “Didn’t waaant to do it, Sadie! Mickey-Gene is blood! But the snake in me! Aint gonna let me die!”