Blood Kin (22 page)

“Oh child, I dont know everthin. We just gots to take this one step at a time. Next up we gots to get the preacher’s Bible away from him.”

“You know about that?”

Granny Grace laughed. “I said I didn’t know everthin. But I do know
somethin
.”

S
ADIE AND
G
RANNY
Grace stood back in the trees a long time watching the preacher’s house. The only reason they knew he was still home was because of the yellow lamp flicker they could see through a window near the back, moving a few times as the preacher carried the kerosene lamp from room to room. Sadie was cold and scared and wanted to go home. She was sure her pale dress must glow in the dark — all the preacher had to do was peek out the window and he’d know for sure it was her. Granny Grace on the other hand was so dark and dirty and woodsy that Sadie could barely make her out and she was standing right next to her.

“Let’s leave,” Sadie hissed. “He’s got church tonight and he’ll be taking his Bible. We aint got no chance at it.”

“Patience, missy. He’ll be goin for supper soon. He wont take that special Bible to eat. He wont carry it round like that.”

“How you know he wont be eating at home?”

Granny Grace sighed like Sadie was a two year old that didn’t know nothing. “Cause he most never eat at home, not his supper anyways. Not that one.”

“Where does he eat then?”

“Everbody knows he goes over to the Mullins sisters for supper most nights.”

“
I
didn’t know,” Sadie said.

“That’s cause you a youngin. And that’s adult business.”

“They’re not even in his church! Why would he have anything to do with them? And why would
they
mess with
him?
”

“Cause he knowed better than messin round with women in his own church, that’s why. And some women, they look at his ugly and they think it handsome.”

“I dont understand.”

“Granny Grace dont understand it neither, but that’s how it be sometimes.”

The lamp flicker bobbed suddenly among the shadows at the back of the house, then moved quickly past the windows to the front before appearing on the other side of the wire screen in the front door. It floated there a few seconds, and Sadie imagined its burning eye watching her, then it bobbed again and led the dark silhouette of the preacher out onto the front porch. His broad hat was tilted down. It moved side to side and then he stepped off the porch and around to the woods on that side of the house. The floating light rushed down the path and disappeared.

Granny Grace bounded across the yard, Sadie struggling to keep up. “Think he locked it?” she whispered to Granny on the porch.

“Your daddy locks yours?” Granny pulled a lamp out from under her shawl.

“Not that I know of,” Sadie admitted.

Granny dragged her inside the front parlor of the preacher’s house and struck a match. “Well I reckon the preacher feels safer than anybody.” She lit the lamp.

On the back wall of the parlor was a framed picture of Jesus on one side of the door and a little photo of the preacher hanging on the other. His face was as white as a skull under his big black hat and his body an inky streak. Granny stared at the pictures, and then looked around the room. It was completely empty. “Preacher likes it spare,” she said. “Come on. Lotsa lookin to do,” and they rushed into the dark spaces beyond the door.

In the short dusty hall grit crunched under Sadie’s shoes. Granny Grace pushed the lantern into the dark, open doorway on their left. Sadie squinted, at first seeing nothing, or not understanding what she was seeing, just bits and pieces, an axe driven into the floorboards near the center of the room, and stacked behind it the severed arms and legs, of chair after chair, pieces of tables and drawer sets, all kinds of furniture chopped and splintered and stacked like firewood.

Granny whistled through her missing teeth. “‘Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,’ as they say in Matthew. Looks like the preacher done took it literal.”

“What
is
this?” Sadie could hardly breathe.

“I dont know, child. I reckon it’s the room where he does his frustratin.”

They crossed the hall into the next room. Something soft brushed against Sadie’s face. Thinking it a cobweb she lifted her hand and felt cloth. Granny raised the lantern. Ladies’ dresses, hats, lingerie, hung from the ceiling. Granny moved the lantern around, shining it on the walls layered in more dresses, nightgowns, corsets and slips, a brassiere or two, a waterfall of what her Aunt Lilly called “unmentionables.”

Sadie picked up a small pile of green cloth on the floor in front of her. It was a flimsy little dress, and there was a tag inside.
Miss Perkins’
it said. Sadie thought back to that day in the dress shop when she’d lifted the pretty little celluloid box. Mrs. Walkins talking about her missing daughter Phyllis and that green dress. The dress was suddenly a fiery pain in her hands and Sadie dropped it, tried to look away from it. She started to say something but Granny Grace kept moving the lamp, finding more and more things.

The lantern light flickered past a dusty, empty chair, but when Granny’s arm brought the lamp back around a woman was sitting there in her undergarments, weeping softly as she removed her rayon stockings. There was something watery about her, and the undergarments too, flowing and transparent. She looked up suddenly, staring at them as they stood in the doorway. Her mouth gaped wide, the opening rapidly growing larger as her lips and the skin around them cracked and blackened and peeled backwards and away from teeth and bone.

Sadie’s mouth made a noise and then the others rushed in, a flurry of pale flesh and liquid bone, hair rustling like dead weeds and dry leaves falling into bits and filling the air with their choking dryness and perfumes gone both sour and thick with a smothering sweetness. Sadie ran out of there and into the hall and then another door, turning around when she’d realized her mistake, but maybe turned too far because the next door didn’t lead her into anything she recognized but another door and another and it seemed she could hear her own footsteps running away from her into distant parts of the house.

And then she was in a room that slithered. She couldn’t see nothing, but she could feel the shifting around her, the folding on top of folding, the bend and the curve of muscle, the intense focus on her, the new warmth in the room. And the sound was almost nothing, just scale across scale, punctuated now and then by a dry rattle like seeds in a gourd.

More crunches beneath her shoes, and curled debris along her ankles. The air stank, but she couldn’t place the smell. It made her think of decayed things, and places that hadn’t been cleaned in a very long time. Everything waited for her, but she couldn’t move.

Then footsteps and a light behind her as if somebody set fire to the room. The room was full of cages. The snakes twisted as if suddenly aware, their heads coming around, eyes reflected yellow from the lantern. But some were so large they could hardly move.

“Over there,” Granny croaked softly behind her. “That one.”

The light shifted a little, and there it was. The cage was slightly taller and wider than the others, and the front of it was hinged on one side, latched on the other. In the bottom of the cage was that big floppy Bible. Curled up on top of it was a giant copperhead, its jaws open so wide Sadie thought she could see all the way to the bottom of its insides.

“I’m gonna open that cage and get the snake out. You get that Bible.”

“What? No, Granny — how’re you going to do that? Can you talk to snakes?”

Granny cackled. “Child, you must think I got the real dark magics! No sir, I’ll wiggle a little, sing a little. I seen the preacher do it oncet. Cant see why I cant do the sames.”

“No, Granny, I cant...”

But Granny Grace had already started moving, gliding back and forth toward the cage and wiggling herself so hard bits and pieces of all the stuff she carried with her all the time started falling off and knocking and clanging on the floor. She was saying words, too, or saying/singing them, words like bugga loo and Sally too hedaya heyday hoo so sad so sad and lonely my my body and soul, sad words and excited words and speaking in tongues kind of words and words like in that song she heard folks said was popular a year or two back.

Then Granny reached out and slapped open the cage door and that copperhead flew out its entire length mouth open like a stocking chewing its way up a leg. Sadie shook and squealed and Granny backed up against the wall swinging the lamp back and forth between her and the snake. “Move girl!” she cried and Sadie did, though it confused her with the light swinging back and forth so her hand missed the cage the first time. “Sadie Gibson! Get that Bible now!” And then she did, clutching the thing to her chest and turning around. Granny made a final low sweep with the lamp above the floor that caught the snake and sent it flying like a broken stick and the two ran through the house and out the screen door onto the porch and into the yard and almost to the woods before Sadie stopped.

“Wait!” Sadie said, bent over and breathing hard.

“You okay, child?”

“What if it isn’t the right Bible?”

Granny snorted. “It’s a Bible, aint it? Big and floppy like a dead bird or somethin. I seen him carry it around.”

“What if he has more than one and this one isn’t the same one, the special one?”

“Well come here, then. You take a look and say what you think.”

Sadie shook her head. “I dont know. How would I know? You’re the special one, Granny.”

“Child, I’m also the one dont know how to read. Just bring your eyes over here and tell me what they see.”

They sat down together in the grass and Sadie opened the Bible on her lap. There were all kinds of strings and ribbons and strips of newspaper and such marking places in the book, and she went to each one looking for something that might tell her what she was really looking for. The preacher had drawn lines under a lot of things and drawn boxes around certain sections, and there were words written in the margins and between the lines she could barely read. Real words and nonsense words and made-up words that still made her agitated and sick in her belly. The words eventually gave way to doodles — circles and targets and crosses and such that got more and more complicated, smooth lines leading into crooked lines that spiraled down into and around the words. Then there were all these animal drawings with their heads and legs cut off, the blood dripping down and pointing to certain words. There were faces, too, faces with three eyes, then four, then six, horns and wings and long skinny tails coming out of the heads as if the heads were their own separate animals. Then there were these crude drawings of naked people, especially women with their breasts and that place between the legs exposed. Pictures that weren’t very good, more like what a naughty little boy might draw and not like a grown man at all. But that made them even worse and she was ashamed to look at them how dirty they made her feel and thinking that was the way her own daddy looked at her body.

Then there were the drawings of snakes, snakes everywhere of all different sizes crawling up and down between the pages and along the tops and bottoms, and big long snakes that would wrap around two pages together all at once, and then that naked man with the big black hat and that snake where his man thing was supposed to be.

Then there were the painted pages, done with what appeared to be nail polish in bright reds, greens, silver and gold, the polish making hard, stiff areas and wrinkled areas in the Bible like small creatures had crawled in between the pages and died.

These painted areas made mouth shapes and head shapes and sometimes wings, sometimes horns and tails. And sometimes the preacher had left a Bible verse or two exposed and highlighted inside one of the mouths or maybe inside a belly as if the words had been eaten by a demon. So sometimes when she looked at a picture he’d made Sadie would read the passages out loud as well so Granny Grace could hear them.

So in Peter she read that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved,” and there was all this fire on the page and all these screaming faces. And “the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt” as the colors ran down the page onto the bodies that burned or vanished below.

In Matthew “there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now” and there were the golden gates painted across a spread of pages, and the fire that rolled out of them to burn the world.

And in Revelation, “the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world — he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him,” and the painted fire destroyed page after page, and rising out of that fire the form of the dragon with his great black wings, his snakes riding upon them.

She handed the Bible over to Granny Grace, not wanting to touch it no more. “I’ll keep it safe,” Granny said. “The reglar church meetin is startin soon — you’d best be down there.”

Sadie shivered then. “But why? I dont want to know one more thing about what that man thinks!”

“He dont let you quit, member? Least not without a fuss, and right now you dont need the attention of a fuss. Less suspicious if you’re there. After all, we’re takin his Bible away from him, and that’s his mind and his heart writ down in there, his whole bein and his whole plan about what’s to be. He aint gonna be none too happy when he finds it missin!”