Blood Kin (9 page)

“Grans,” she said softly. There was no answer, so she moved around to face the porch. She had never seen anyone so old before. Their necks looked as if someone had let some of the air out of them. The woman stared straight ahead with pale, seemingly lidless eyes. The man looked to be sleeping.

“Grans,” she said again, a little louder this time. She didn’t know what else to call them. She was unclear as to their exact relation to her, just that they were old Gibsons. None of the family recounting by uncles or aunts ever called them anything else. Sometimes she would ask, and would get a blank stare in return. Then the uncles and aunts would debate the thing — either they were distant cousins or brother and sister-in-law to Walt — which was surely impossible — or from some other branch entirely. Some in the family claimed they weren’t real Gibsons at all, but that was a minority opinion. Uncle Jesse once said he’d heard they were Walt Gibson’s mommy and daddy, who he brought into the holler after marrying that Indian woman and building the first house. But Uncle Jesse had been real drunk at the time, so most everybody laughed. Except the preacher. They say he just turned and walked away.

Nobody knew how old they were. If you believed Uncle Jesse’s story they would have had to have been impossibly old. If you believed Uncle Jesse’s latest elaboration on his theory, also shared by Speed Sexton’s visionary wife — that the Grans were among the first Melungeons found on Newman’s Ridge by the explorers back before 1700, and that they were old even then — then they’d entered the land of myth and fairy tale. It was all craziness. No wonder folks told spook stories about them to their kids. It was hard to think about the hollow without thinking about them. Sometimes Sadie dreamed about them, perched up there on the mountainside all by themselves, like angels.

“Grans...” she said again.

“Elijah, darlin,” the old man said in a voice full of gravel and pain. “Call me that. And this here old lady...” He moved his eyes ever so slightly in the direction of the woman. “Addie.”

The old woman barely nodded her head and licked her lips with a pale, lizard-like tongue. She appeared to be blind, her eyes white, clouded over. “Sadie...” she whispered harshly.

“Bobby’s girl, out of Orson and Cleo Patty.”

Sadie nodded, and then felt like a fool. “Yes,” she said, quaking.

“Come up here on the porch,” Elijah said, then sighed so deeply it was like all the air had suddenly leaked out of him.

Two fat hounds lay under the porch steps. They were almost as wrinkled as the Grans, and at first Sadie went a little sick with the notion that they were dead, but then one twitched an ear and a lid floated lazily up a wet eyeball.

“Nice to have company,” Elijah said.

“Mail never comes,” Addie said.

“No, that’s a fact,” Elijah said. “Mail never does come, does it, Addie?”

“No...”

The door in front of Sadie was wide open. She could see a small bed, a dresser, and the rest of the house full to the ceiling with boxes of metal, jars full of buttons, straightened nails and other small things, burlap sacks filled and bulging with cloth scraps, bottles, old calendars and newspapers and greeting cards, old clothing and oddly shaped handmade wooden items. It looked like they saved everything. Some of the items on the bottom layer appeared collapsed and rotting, the decay spreading upwards like a disease.

A wooden cross, maybe three feet high, hung over the bed. The wood was stained and warped. It looked even older than the Grans.

“It’s all ass shit,” Addie said suddenly.

Elijah coughed drily a few times, until Sadie recognized what he was doing as laughter. “Never thought to swap her,” he said. It sounded like an old joke, repeated endlessly.

Sadie sat down between the two, like them staring straight ahead across the valley. “You wanted me for something, Grans?”

“Elijah,” he said.

“Elijah.”

“And Addie, honey.”

“And Addie.”

They sat that way for some time. When Sadie was younger, she might have thought the Grans had forgotten her. But she had learned that adults were like that sometimes. Talking took a while. You had to learn to use all the silences.

Across the valley she could see a ramshackle barn, a broken-down stone wall attached. She couldn’t remember who it belonged to.

“Yessir, I like them mountains,” Elijah said. “Gives you somethin to rest your eyes against.”

Down below that barn was a small sleeping cabin, looking greasy in the dim light. Dogs ran back and forth the length of the porch, jumping into the trash pile at the end and tearing it apart. A sour smell wasworking at her nose, beginning to sting her eyes. She turned her head away.

“We sold the coal rights to that land on them long deeds. Fifty cents an acre. Signed our X’s big and black as you please. Dumbest thing we ever did.”

“
The
dumbest,”Addie said.

“I put a lot into that holler. Now I cant, I cant...”

“Spit it out,” Addie said.

“Get a thing out. We owned... we owned all you see.”

Sadie looked out, trying to see as far as she thought the Grans might be seeing, and as far back. She didn’t know, but somehow she was sure they could see a lot further. They’d owned it all.

“Worked in the mines... and I was already an old man. Hell... six or seven a day got kilt. Their kinfolk couldn’t afford to bury them.”

She remembered she used to walk up that old logging trail above the Grans by herself. It was something special in the fall: you could look down into the hollow and there would be gray, pale blue, and orange trees.

“Walt, he used to shoot his meat... out there in the woods. Afore all these others come. Raised his corn down in the bottom, just enough for his bread. Used a deer skin with holes for a sifter. Fires kept the bear and deer away.”

Maybe she could stay with the Grans up into the night. That way she couldn’t make it to the church meeting and the preacher wouldn’t dare blame her because she had been with the Grans.

“Been here a
long
time, Honey. Way back afore, buried our kin above ground. Little houses... over the graves. Ever afternoon we bowed toward the bell. Dont rightly remember why.”

Sadie wasn’t sure if Elijah was talking about the Gibsons in general, or him and Addie personally.

“Oh, been here
years
. Cant recollect how long. Nobody knows where we come from, and I swear I dont remember. Seen lots of starvin times. This aint so bad. Folks used to eat the sparrows they was so hungry.”

They were trying to give her information here, memories, history. Sadie wondered what it was they meant to prepare her for, and
why
.

“Chillen,” Addie croaked.

“That’s right!” Elijah’s voice went higher. Sadie thought he sounded kind of happy. “Dont have a child you dont have nothin.”

“Once the midwives done cotched them, they yours forever!” Addie almost shouted it.

Elijah made his dry, coughing sound. “Never thought to swap her,” he said. His voice went lower. “You got
our
blood.”

Addie cackled. “Gettin creatures born is important work!”

“I promised the preacher I’d go to church tonight,” Sadie said softly. “See there, almost pitch dark already.”

“Gettin old,” Addie said. The whites of her blind eyes glowed in the dark. “Not much time. Dont need it. Dont want it.”

“Need
new
blood. Me an Addie,we got so old, full of forgettin, we got sick of it all.”

Addie began a paper-thin, brittle wailing.

“We got sick of the preacher, too,” he said. “Even if he is one of our’n. Crap gets out of hand.”

Addie rocked back and forth, her mouth open, wordless.

“You get tired of livin, keepin the feelin what it should be, stoppin it from goin bad. You get tired of ownin that. You just wanna lay it all down and rest.”

Sadie had started down the steps, trying hard not to listen.

“Other people’s got the feelin, too, Honey. Their turn now. Me an Addie, we done our part.”

When Sadie got to the path she started to run, but the old man’s words came too fast for her. “Body shouldn’t have to live
forever!
” he shouted in a breaking voice. “Time for some of this
new
blood!”

Either Addie began to scream, a throat-rending screech followed by a rattle, or it was the tearing of Sadie’s own thoughts as she stumbled down the steep path.

Chapter Five

G
RANDMA HAD DECIDED
it was time to take a break from the stories, whether because she was tired, or because she’d seen the deep lines of exhaustion in Michael’s face and was takingpity on him. He made himself stop shaking. His hands felt weak, and as if they would surely float away if he didn’t watch them.

He didn’t understand what was happening to him. When she talked about her first period he’d felt a dampness, a rawness between his legs, and a stiffness in his lower gut. When her father, Michael’s great grandfather, bit into the mouse, he’d tasted what she tasted and what her father had tasted: the sharp salt of blood and the dryness of hair fiber and the crunch and grit of bone stuff. There was danger in those stories, and it was beginning to touch him as well.

When Sadie talked about the men she knew as a child Michael felt disjointed. Each storied male brought a face, and the need to enter into another’s feelings, to infiltrate his voice. Again and again he saw his own face in her memories, as if all the stories were about him. He asked if she had some photographs he could look at. She promised to come up with some by the afternoon.

Michael went out on the porch for some cool mountain air. It was the closest thing he had now to a tranquilizer. If he’d been back in his old neighborhood he would have gone to see Bill the Pill Guy by now, an old hippy who would sell you a pill to correct any pain or trouble or anxiety described to him. He couldn’t tell you the names of any of these pills, just their benefits. Michael hadn’t believed that the fellow knew what he was doing but he’d still gone to him because his pills always seemed to work. Of course he’d been foolish, risking his health that way, but listening to his grandmother’s stories, preparing for god-knows-what, felt even riskier. He’d studied History in college — for a long time it seemed the most real, the most important discipline there was. Now he felt he had far too much of it. The past had overstepped its bounds; there was no more room for the present.

He needed someone like Allison in his life. But although he needed Allison, it would be unfair to call her now, to put her through more, to put her through any of the bad things that might come from being around him again. The last week they had been together he had been so tense, and consequently, cruel. He’d picked arguments over insignificant things — the cereal she’d bought, the clothes she wore, a damp towel left in the wrong place. Every afternoon he would make himself go outside so he wouldn’t have the opportunity to say more mean things to her.

He remembered that one of those afternoons he’d been sitting in the alley watching as a skinny gray cat made its way down the narrow lane lined with cans, bins, and boxes. Most of the cat’s fur had been shaved from the left side of its head so that its face looked almost human from that angle. An ugly scar ran from under its left eye down the side of its face almost to the mouth. Michael had assumed it was recovering from some sort of surgery. At one point it had put its paws together, looked up at the sky, and made a screeching noise.

Michael stood up suddenly and had to grab the post by the steps.
I called it Reverend
, he thought.
I called that cat Reverend.

That afternoon Grandma gave him the photograph albums to study. These were full of pictures of the Gibsons and other inhabitants of the town for generations back. Pictures of Sadie herself, her hair yellow and eyes bright. He was amazed at how closely the images matched his imaginings. But there were differences. Her father, Bobby Gibson, was much better looking than he’d imagined, dark-skinned with high chiseled cheeks, and the one image of the preacher — taken in secret, Sadie said, made him look small relative to the people gathered around him.

“Think about what you see,” Grandma said behind him. “Then feel what you see.” It was uncomfortably like being in school again.

He flipped through page after page of pictures, the same people in different settings, in different poses, at varied occasions. Layer after layer of photographs, peeling back, and each new layer told him something new. He felt his shoulders stoop, his hands palsy. He grew old, then drew back to when things were newer, the sun on his face, warming his hair.

His grandmother looked so old; her skin was like cracked porcelain, glued and reglued but with all the fractures still showing. Something had drained her, cost her, and robbed her. He didn’t have the words for it and it made him feel like a fool. There was nothing he could do for that little girl from the thirties; there seemed to be even less he could do for her now. Again, he questioned exactly what it was she was asking him to do here. Did she understand he wasn’t good at much of anything, and never had been?