“But she weren’t home.”
“No.”
“Where was she?”
“She were there, with me, only I didn’t know it ’till she stepped out from the trees and called my name.”
“Your sister had such pretty dresses, didn’t she Luke?”
“Yes Momma.”
“Made most of them myself. What dress was she wearin’ that day, Luke? I forget.”
“A pink one.”
“Of course, you got a good head for mem’ries, boy. And what was she wearin’ when she stepped out and called your name?”
Luke answered, quietly. “Nothin’.”
“I can’t hear you.”
“Nothin’ Momma. She weren’t wearin’ nothin’.”
“That must’ve surprised you.”
“It did.”
“Say again?”
“It did, Momma. I didn’t know why she did that. Thought she might’ve been skinny-dippin’ in the creek like she done sometimes, maybe cleanin’ the possum guts off, and Aaron had stoled her clothes, or somethin’ because she were all wet.”
“Go on…” Momma urged.
“I asked her what were she doin’ without no clothes on, and she said it was too damn hot and her dress were ruined and she’d taken a dip to wash off. I told her if anyone came along’n seen her, there’d be trouble. She said no one was gonna bother us, and then she came over to where I was layin’ and started openin’ up my belt. I told her to stop, was she crazy or somethin’ and she wouldn’t. She just kept tearin’ at my clothes till she had my…” He swallowed again, the words lodged in his throat.
“Your what?”
“My pizzle, Momma. She had it in her mouth, and I couldn’t make her stop.”
“You couldn’t stop because you didn’t want to. Your Jezebel sister had her lips on your dirty thing and you liked it, didn’t you?”
Luke nodded. Truth was, and he’d never denied it because lying was something of which he seemed completely incapable, he had enjoyed it, and enjoyed it a great deal, despite knowing that he and his sister, who was older, but only by a year, were doing something that went against nature, and worse, against God himself. But he had been unable to stop the queer, frightening, but unstoppable current of sensation that her lips evoked as she sucked on him. It had felt as if she were drawing out all the bad things, all the fears, worries, and the pain he’d carried within him since he’d first come to understand the world into which he’d been deposited. And when his seed erupted, he felt as if dynamite had detonated in his balls and would blow him to little bloody pieces. He lay there panting as the incredible, terrifying sensation ebbed away and his member slackened. Then he stared, open-mouthed, as his sister stood and spat, then walked away toward the creek. He’d followed a moment later, intending to ask her what had just happened, and why. He was hurt, a little angry, but more confused, and it seemed to steal a little bit of the color from the world, darkening it with a mystery he needed solved. He found Susanna washing herself in the cool clear water, her back turned to him, her hair wet, but before he had the chance to put to her the burning question, she spoke first:
“I love you, Luke,” she said softly, sadly. “And I’m leavin’. I know you won’t come with me, that you can’t, but I gotta go, gotta get out. I’m not supposed to be here. There’s a big world out there for people like me. Yours is here, with Momma and Papa. I wanted to kiss you on the mouth back there, but I reckon that should be kept for my husband. What we did…Lorraine Chadwick at school told me she saw her mother do it to her boyfriend and he seemed to enjoy it all right. Said it was a secret kiss, and now we got a secret all our own.” She shrugged, cupped water in both hands and washed out her mouth as if she’d just eaten a bug. “I guess I were curious, and…maybe I didn’t know stuff like snot was gonna come out…but I ain’t sorry none…. It’s your birthday’n all, and I know I love you Luke. Maybe even enough to kiss you on the lips, but like I said, I reckon I gotta keep somethin’ for my husband.”
“The seed of incest is the devil’s milk,” his mother said. “And it poisons everythin’ it touches.” Her playful tone was now gone completely, replaced by bitterness and shame. “Your Papa stood a few feet away watchin’ the whole wicked thing. You were lucky he didn’t kill the both of you that day, right there and then. Maybe he should’ve.”
Luke had nothing to say. If Susanna hadn’t sinned with him that day, he would still have skin on his privates, and maybe his sister would still be here. Of course, for a long time, he’d borne his punishment well, consoled by the knowledge that she had made it out, was on her way to a new and better life somewhere, where no one would ever find her. He fantasized about growing up and finding her, or maybe not even waiting that long. Maybe someday he would end up possessed of the same wanderlust, the same certainty that life was better Out There, and he’d travel the same path, his beloved sister waiting for him at the end of it. He knew he wouldn’t care if she were married when that time came. He didn’t want her for a wife. He loved her as a sister, and as the best friend he’d ever known. And he had always envied how much different she was from the rest of the family. She was independent, headstrong, and defiant, all traits Luke admired greatly, but never dared try to learn.
“Tell me what became of her, Luke.”
For two years he had thought Susanna gone. It had cheered him and brightened his darkest hours, of which there had been many. He wondered what she looked like, whether she was rich or poor, still in the South or elsewhere. He dreamed of her voice, and waited for her to write him with details of her adventures.
It was another summer before he found her old blue suitcase half-buried in the barren field behind the acre of corn. It was the same one he’d seen tucked beneath her arm as her shoeless feet carried her up the dirt path and away from the house, bound for town, and the strange unfamiliar lands beyond. Inside that suitcase were her meager possessions: two dresses, a pair of socks with holes in the heels, two pairs of underwear, a cold roast beef sandwich wrapped in waxpaper, a small hunk of cheese, a notebook and a small stubby pencil, and a small pink purse with a brass clip in which she carried ten whole dollars to start her on her way.
All of these things were still inside the suitcase when he’d yanked it free of the dark red earth that day years later. Also inside were Susanna’s small yellow comb, a rusted switchblade, a doll with a cracked face, and Susanna’s badly decomposed head.
“Tell me about the note.”
Someone had shoved a rolled up piece of notepaper into his sister’s right eye socket. With trembling hands, and hardly able to see through the sparkling film of tears, a sob caught in his aching throat, Luke had withdrawn the scroll and turned his back on his sister’s remains to read it.
“Two pieces from Leviticus,” he told his mother now, his tone grave.
“You ’member them words?”
There was no way he’d ever forget them. They were branded in his brain, a signpost on the border of a part of his mind he seldom ventured into. “’None of you shall approach any who is near of kin to him to uncover their nakedness: I am the LORD.’” He took a breath, slowly released it. “’The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home or born abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover.’”
“Amen,” said his mother, serenely and he could tell from her voice she was smiling. “It was his message to you, son.”
She had said that more than once before, and still he wasn’t sure whether she meant that his father, or God, had written it for his benefit. At the time, and the years had only bolstered the conviction, he’d considered it a warning. A lesson, meant to scare away whatever latent strains of rebellion might have been subconsciously forming inside him in the wake of his sister’s desertion. He remembered the anguish, the suffering, somehow infinitely worse than the day Papa-in-Gray had strapped him to a chair in Momma’s room and used his razor on Luke’s privates. The pain had be
en excruciating, but it was pain of a different kind. In the fallow field the day he’d stumbled on his sister’s final destination, he had sat with Susanna’s rotted head cradled in his arms as the wind chased shreds of the sundered scroll away across the field, and he had felt as if her death had shoved him into a new world, a terrible place where no one could be trusted and the ground could swallow you and your dreams. And if the ground didn’t get you, the coyotes would, or Papa would see to you with his blade and carve the sin from your soul, the skin from your skull.
“Why did I ask you ’bout this today?” Momma asked.
Luke shrugged, his mood darkened by the memory of his sister.
“’Cause you poisoned your sister,” she answered for him. “And for that she had to be dealt with. Don’t you understand that if we’d let her go, she’d’ve been corrupted even further by Men of the World, and they’d’ve sent her back to us once they’d filled her with their wicked venom, and through her they’d’ve corrupted us, destroyed us, Luke.” Her hand left his knee, and found his fingers, enveloping his warm skin in a cold damp cocoon of flesh. “We’re the last of the old clans, boy. We stay together. We hunt and we kill Men of the World. We devour their flesh so they cannot devour us. We hold them off and resist their attempts to convert us to sinful ways. We protect each other in the name of God Almighty, and punish those who trespass, destroy those who would destroy us. We are the beloved, Luke, and once the light has been shown to those who are not of the faith, they must embrace it or be destroyed. All your life you have understood this.
“Today, you were lazy, and foolish. You let one of them get away. You sucked out her venom and showed her the light, but now she’s Out There again, with the light in her eyes and our fate in her hands. They’ll send her back again someday, Luke, and by then it’ll be too late. She will not come alone, and their numbers’ll be too great for us to survive. They’ll kill us and scatter our bones so our spirits cannot rest. Our work’ll be over, and it’ll all have been for nothin’. You and me, and all our kin’ll be left in the dark, far away from God’s grace.”
Luke was afraid. He believed her, knew she did not lie. And if the girl—Claire—came back with others, with Men of the World, he knew it would mean the end of everything. And it would be his fault.
“What do I do, Momma?”
“Talk to Papa. He knows the townfolk. He’ll know who owned that truck. Then you find ’em, and you’ll find the girl. Once you do, take her heart and bring it back to me. Burn the rest. We’ll share her meat, and save ourselves from Purgatory. But you ain’t got much time to waste now. You best move.”
Luke stood. But Momma’s grip tightened around his hand. She tugged him close. The stench was overwhelming, and he shut his mouth, hoping she couldn’t hear him gagging. “You find her, or we’ll take what’s left of your pizzle and eat it with grits for breakfast, you understand?”
He nodded, and held his breath until she released him. Then he turned and headed for the door. As his hand gripped the moist, grimy knob, her voice once more stopped him.
“Keep the skin,” she demanded.
“What, Momma?”
“My boy. My Matthew. Tell your brothers to eat whatever needs eatin’, to take what they need, but they need to keep the skin for me. Winter’s comin’ and I need all the heat I can get.”
Though Luke couldn’t imagine his mother ever being cold beneath the heaps of her own slippery rotting flesh, “Yes Momma,” he said, and opened the door to the rain and smoke and the aroma of cooking meat.
-8-
There would be no prayer. Not yet. Momma-In-Bed had made it clear that there was not enough time to indulge in giving thanks, not when Hell itself might already be gathering on the horizon. He’d been with her for what had felt like hours, a long slow walk through the sluggish waters of unpleasant times. And because of that inner sense of more time lost than they could afford to lose, the sense of urgency increased. Every minute that passed him by was more distance between him and their quarry, and closing the distance between him and whatever Momma-in-Bed would do if the girl was not retrieved.
Luke ducked his head as he stepped off the porch into the gloaming. The fire cast reddish yellow light, the flames sizzling in the rain and casting shadows on his brother’s faces as they looked at him, but he didn’t spare them a glance before moving off toward the wood shed. Still, he found it harder to ignore the smacking of lips, the clicking of teeth, the greedy swallows, the tearing of meat from bones, and the murmurs of appreciation as they sat around the smoldering corpse of their brother. It was even harder to resist the smell the breeze carried to him before whipping it away into the trees behind him, where animals with dark eyes would pause and look up, curious but not nearly enough to follow the scent to its source. Even the carnivorous creatures that existed in the premature twilight beyond the trees—among them, the coyotes Momma-in-Bed feared so much—knew the small series of cabins in the woods were best avoided, for they had seen few of their fellow scavengers return from there, and so their curiosity abated quickly and they wandered on.
Luke was hungry, his stomach hollow and aching, and he was as eager as the rest of them to feed on the meat, to savor both the taste and the feeling of their dead brother’s strength settling in his own body, Matt’s unspoken thoughts, dreams, and ambitions, however simple, weaving themselves into his own brain. But the flesh would keep, he told himself, as he sighed and felt his worn boots sinking into the moist earth. He knew the importance of the task that lay ahead. If they failed this time, if the girl had already found her way to a haven they could not reach, then there would be more than the authorities to worry about. Momma-In-Bed had threatened him, but it had been merely a formality, and not a true promise. What she would do to him, maybe to all of them, if the girl was not returned, would be much worse than simply skinning his pizzle with a rusty knife. She loved him, as he loved her, but that would not be enough to save his life if he didn’t make things right, no more than it had saved poor Susanna when she’d defied them.
Teeth clenched to force back the emotions that always tried to insinuate their way into the forefront of his mind whenever he remembered his lost sister, Luke climbed the small rise where the bare earth narrowed to a single trail that wound unsteadily through a short stretch of wild untended grass. The woodshed was narrow, and old, the wood bleached by the sun so it was a mottled white, with patches of gray. In the rapidly fading light, it looked leprous, with yellow light around the edges. The door bent outward at the bottom like a well-turned page, and as he approached, that splintered corner scraped dirt and the door swung wide with a sound like rocks tumbling down a hollow pipe.
Luke stopped in his tracks.
Though not a large man, Papa-In-Gray cut an imposing figure. In daylight, his skin was the same shade as the door that was now swinging away from him. In town, he was respected, but it was respect borne of fear. At home, among his kin, things were not much different. Now, in the gloom, beneath his angular, inverted triangle of a face, the chin topped with a peppering of silver stubble, Papa wore a dirty brown apron, which Luke himself had made for him from the skin of one of the men they had caught the summer before. Strands of blue nylon rope had been looped through holes at the top corners of the apron, the holes ringed by steel washers to stop the rope from sawing through, keeping the rough rectangle in place, and also, as was the case now, to conceal the wearer’s nakedness.
Grim-faced, Papa raised his right hand. In it, he held the head of one of the youths—the one the girl had called ‘Stu’, which the family had found amusing since they figured this was most likely going to be the way he ended up. His blonde hair, though matted with filth now, still managed to retain a healthy look death had denied the rest of his body. The tanned handsome face of which Luke had found himself mildly envious, was no longer so handsome, slackened now by the pain that had ushered it into death. The eyes were closed, pale brows arched, the thick-lipped mouth open slightly, as if starting a sente
nce that would forever remain unspoken. Papa-in-Gray very rarely did a sloppy job with the carcasses and this one was no different. The machete had made a good straight cut through the boy’s neck, and no bone or flesh protruded from the wound.
“A good’un,” Papa said now, in his gravelly voice. “Who took the girl?”
Luke couldn’t meet his gaze as he spoke, so instead he stared at the ground. “Big red truck came and picked ’er off the road. Two niggers—one old, one young it looked like. They made off with her. Headin’ east.”
Behind his father, Luke glimpsed the rest of the boy’s naked body, splayed out on the worktable in the shed underneath a single bare light bulb. His hands and feet were gone, and his chest had been opened and excavated, the organs collected in a rusty bucket on the floor. As Luke tried to get a better look, Papa surprised him by tossing the severed head in his direction. Caught off guard, it hit Luke in the chest and he was knocked back a step. With a grunt, he staggered, feet splayed, and quickly righted himself, grabbing with his crooked fingers a handful of the boy’s hair just seconds before it hit the ground, a development he knew would not have impressed his father.
As if anything ever would.
Exhaling heavily, Luke straightened and clutched the head to his chest. Papa-in-Gray nodded, but it was not a gesture of satisfaction, rather confirmation that his disdain for Luke was justified, and no one would ever convince him otherwise.
“Take it,” the old man said, wiping bloodstained hands on the apron. The flesh seemed to soak it in. “We’re bringin’ it with us. Tell the others to get themselves a piece of those kids each’n load ’em up.”
Though Luke wasn’t sure why they were bringing along pieces of the dead kids, he knew better than to question Papa’s instructions.
“All right,” he said, and waited.
“Tell Aaron bring the truck ’round, and make sure all you boys got yer knives.” He looked over Luke’s shoulder. “Get movin’.”
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