Blood Kin (5 page)

Or maybe Miss Perkins was afraid of Sadie because she was a Gibson, and the preacher’s niece. That just might be. Most people in the town didn’t think the hollow Gibsons were right folk at all. They were Indian or Spanish or Nigger or something. Not rightly human, whatever.

They were spirited, them Gibsons. Black nasty magical.

S
ADIE RAN UP
the steps in front of Miss Perkins’ as fast as she could, holding her arms out straight in front of her. She hit the door flat with her palms, so hard it burnt, and was quite satisfied with the explosion it made when it struck the wall. She ran into the middle of the shop, breathless, eyes peeled for Miss Perkins.

Miss Perkins started to shout something, and then Sadie saw her eyes when she recognized who it was. She looked down at her magazine again. Sadie had to hold her belly to keep from laughing.

Most of the stock was the same goods Miss Perkins had always had, long as Sadie could remember. Seemed like she hadn’t sold hardly nothing out of the fancy stuff. Mostly people would buy a card or some stationery, one of the cheaper clay doodads or some ornament like a hairpin or sewing supplies or one of the dress patterns in a shiny metal box by her desk. Sadie figured Miss Perkins
had
to carry those things, else she’d never sell a thing, and pretty soon folks’d be too embarrassed to come in and browse no more. It surprised Sadie that no one else had been able to figure that out, but maybe they had, and they just weren’t passing the word around out of respect or affection or more likely good neighborliness for Miss Perkins.

There were a few real nice doodadsSadie hadn’t seen before, though — a little ceramic statue with a bright orange painted bear sniffing around a barrel that said “HONEY” on it. And a little angel with gold wings sitting on a bright blue mushroom. And a set of ivory-colored celluloid brushes, with mirror and a real cute soap container with a picture of a flower on it.

Miss Perkins was watching her close. She’d have to be careful.

Sadie had never been sure why she stole all the time, just that it excited her. It was something different; it seemed to add an extra tang to the day, made her feel like she was smarter than the people she was fooling, especially the grownups. She was poor, too. She supposed that might be reason enough, except she usually didn’t care too much for the stuff she stole. She could have done without it.

She knew it was wrong, but that never seemed to bother her enough not to do it. There was lots of things folks in Morrison did was wrong — like giving her family such a hard time because of being what they was, and other things, things that people were dumb and superstitious about. So her one wrong thing didn’t seem so bad.

Miss Perkins was talking to Alice Watkins, who’d come in to admire the ceramics lining the back shelf. Some of the finest pieces were on display there: the little shepherd with his four sheep, the scenes from fairy tales like Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Rumpelstiltskin, the eight or nine different clowns, the twelve different vegetables. Alice Watkins came in almost every day to admire, and about twice a year she probably actually broke down and bought something.

“I have that figure of the old fat man on the ledge of my parlor window so that it catches the light just so. Do you know he just
looks
at me
wherever
I go in the room? And everybody says something about it, Miss Perkins, they surely do. It’s
the
conversation piece in my house, it surely is.”

Sadie had heard the story a hundred times. Alice Watkins seemed to find a way to drop that ceramic into every single conversation. But where most shop keeps would fall all over themselves trying to be agreeable with a customer like that, Miss Perkins just looked bored, or maybe a little worse than that — annoyed.

“Your daughter ever come back, Alice?” she asked, none too softly.

Alice Watkins dropped her head a second, then straightened herself, her elbows up and shoulders back. “Well, I’m afraid not. My guess is she’s trying to start a career somewheres away from these mountains, some better place where they’ll appreciate her talents. Then she’ll probably come back with some real money, and help me out a little. My Phyllis is a very kind and generous girl. A lot of folks dont know that.”

“Hmmm,” Miss Perkins kept busy with her eyes, but they weren’t looking at that poor Watkins lady. “If she was so kind, you’d think she wouldn’t a run off without saying goodbye like that. That weren’t exactly a generous thing to do to her mother. Took your best green dress with her I hear — the one you bought right in this very shop!”

“Oh, I’m sure she was just confused about it. I used to lend her that dress all the time for, for her dates. She probably just forgot and thought that dress was
hers!
”

“Maybe. Maybe,” Miss Perkins said. “A lot of things get into girls these days. Lots of them get confused. It’s that Confused Disease, I reckon. I heard of two more girls pull something similar this year, just took off from their parents without word one. No one seen them since. Pretty awful, if you ask me.”

The Watson lady wouldn’t talk no more after that, and after a while Miss Perkins put on her invisible sales cap again and tried to sell her something. She had her back turned a little, picking up individual pieces and pointing out the detail. Sadie could feel her contentment, the quiet music playing in her head.

Again Sadie had this feeling that she was doing something she shouldn’t be doing. But she still ignored it. Miss Perkins wasn’t watching so close now. The woman thought pure poetry when she handled her own stuff, not noticing another thing in this world in the meantime.

Sadie inched closer to the celluloid grooming set. She’d never had nothing so pretty as that; she didn’t even know what she could do with it.

Her left hand was touching it, and then suddenly her right hand was just sweeping it all up into the loose folds in the front of her dress. She bunched the cloth together and ran for the door.

“Thief!” Miss Perkins shouted. “I
knew
I’d catch you at it someday!” She had Sadie’s shoulder in her big old crow-claws, fingernails digging painful little holes into her skin. “No good thief!”

Alice Watkins was bustling over to help, her big body swaying like it was going to fall on Sadie, her face determined.

Sadie twisted away and hit the front door on the run, the screen slamming against somebody on their way in. She didn’t know if the screech was the door or a person, but she felt the sudden flash of the other person’s pain. It sickened her, and raised her fear sky high. She bit off a scream.

She stopped abruptly when she was out on the front porch, so full of panic she could hardly think. She’d never been caught at it before, and now everybody was looking. All the men down at Levitt’s General were staring up her way, Mickey-Gene gaping, Petey Carter moving his mouth so fast he looked like a scrawny rat chomping away at empty air.

George Mackey was grinning like he was about to eat something all up. That slapped her awake, and made her mad, too. She started running just as Miss Perkins again grabbed the shoulder of her dress, tearing it a little as Sadie pulled away. She almost dropped the grooming set. She grabbed what she could and stuffed it all into her one good pocket so that she could run better. That pretty little soap box dropped to the ground but she couldn’t stop to pick it up.

Sadie held on to her tears, but it was hard — this was her only dress that didn’t have any rips in it. What was she going to tell Momma? And that pretty little soap box!

She jumped over the legs of the elderly fellow — Willie Philips, she thought — sitting out in front of the hardware, turned the corner up the alley past the Barber Shop. Here she almost knocked Elsa Peters down, her school teacher last year. Sadie’s face went hot with shame, to have her teacher, who’d always liked her, know that she’d been thieving.

She was climbing the dirt road above the livery when a black, wool-wrapped arm reached out and grabbed at her. She shrieked and turned, and found herself looking up into the face of the preacher.

There were harsher things in this world than the preacher’s face, but Sadie had never met up with any of them. He had a face like a stone left out in the woods long enough for the damp and moss and the tree roots and the ice to crack it in the worst way, not enough to make it look so old but surely enough to make it look wounded, deformed, messed up. Like the damage had scarred over bad and those scars were bound to ache nights when the weather was changing. Not an ache you could put your finger on exactly, what made it worse. And down in his neck right below the ends of his mouth he had these big fatty pouches, like gunny sacks full of his extra meanness. They made her think of the snakes he handled, like the pouches they kept their poison in. Her granddaddy sometimes said that meanness was a corruption and a disease. She thought about how under the preacher’s terrible face the flesh and muscle must be all infected and maggoty inside like something run over and dead for days.

One of the preacher’s scars — a crooked thing about four inches long that split his cheek from just below the left eye all the way to the jaw-line — looked like a living thing in the morning light, as if something awful had started growing in that crack in the rock face. But it was a tricky thing. Sadie had seen it fade back into his dusky skin when he must have not wanted folks to see it, like maybe when he was talking to some of the pretty young women around town, or somebody else he needed to charm.

His real name was Jake, but nobody ever called him that, not even the family. The preacher didn’t like the name.

Where you going, child?
It was like a whisper, or words you might think you heard in the wind but weren’t really there. She hadn’t even seen him move his lips. But you never did when he was angry or up to some meanness or other. She’d heard that only when he was preaching and singing at the snake-handling meetings did those lips become living things, terrible, scary alive things that could latch on to you if you weren’t watching, chew you down right to the nub.

“Just going home,” she cried, a little too loud, and he grabbed her arm so hard she thought he’d squeeze it in two.

Over the years that followed she would think a lot about what happened next — if her uncle caused what happened, or if she did, or if it had all happened by coincidence. Or if she’d just imagined parts of it. But not the slowing down part; she knew the slowing down part was for real. It happened to her all the time. Things just stopped, or slowed down considerable, and suddenly she was seeing things she ordinarily didn’t see. Or want to.

The preacher pushed her face around so that she had to look at the livery. Didn’t grab her exactly, at least not with his hands. But he wanted her to look that way, and suddenly she was just looking that way, without a word spoken or a finger lifted.

She looked, and what she saw made her cold. FredShaney, Will Shaney’s eldest, was helping run some corn through that old steam-powered corn sheller. It was huffing and puffing and its rusted parts shaking side to side like it was about to explode.

Fred Shaney had had more than one run-in with the preacher. There was Fred’s drinking and smoking, and his smart remarks about the whole snake-handling business.

Thepreacher was watching Fred in such a way it brought winter down on Sadie’s shoulders. She could almost see the ice crystals in the air. Something was going to happen.

Fred was feeding the corn into the machine faster and faster. His hands a blur.

Her eyes were paining her. Spots burned in the air in front of her face. It startedin her lower belly, and she squeezed her eyes shut trying to ignore it, but the soft ache was making her sick. She looked down; a thin line of blood had run down her leg. Sadie’s hands were burning, burning.

His hands a blur.

Red spots. His hands a red blur.

Bright red over everything.

She watched as the world slowed down around her, as Fred Shaney’s grin slowly widened and deepened as Fred Shaney’s arms were lifted slowly into the air, bright red crepe streamers tied to his wrists.

“You have to decide soon, Sister,” the preacher whispered. “You’ve reached your maturity now.”

She watched as Fred Shaney dropped into prayer, wondering if this could be her punishment for stealing.

And the other men came to hug Fred Shaney, embrace him down to ground.

Chapter Three

F
OUR TIMES ALREADY
that morning Michael had had to carry Grandma into the toilet and set her on the stool. Each time she was weaker, until her feet dragged the floor, her high-top black boots bunching the rug as he struggled to get her in. It would have been easier to just let her mess herself and then clean up afterwards. But she would have none of that. Not that he blamed her. She still had her pride, and he guessed it was his job to help her maintain it. He’d been pretty ungrateful the past couple of weeks, pretty unkind. He certainly didn’t like doing things like this for her, but he wanted to do a better job of it.