Monday, December 17, 2012

Chapter Fourteen

     Thorne finished his sermon and the band members ambled back toward their instruments and the crowd began to curve in toward the aisle. Their bodies moved and their knees buckled with odd timing. Thorne came down into the middle of them and held his hands out to his sides. Jacob looked behind him at the cages. The snakes were flipping their tongues between the chickenwire and hissing.
     When the music started, the parishioners shuddered like a cold body and a woman fell to the floor and writhed as though her muscles were shot through with electricity. Men and women leaned over her and shook their hands back and forth while they tapped their toes in rhythm with the music. Thorne stepped around her and watched while her lips moved wildly and her fingers shot out at jagged angles. She rubbed her heels on the floor and arched her back and she shouted “Fibbilitee mygravee hmmmmm, hmmmmm, hmmmmm!” and the folks dancing around her cried “Amen! Amen!” Thorne took a rattlesnake from someone’s hands and wrapped it around his shoulders. It pressed its head against his cheek and he lowered his eyes to stare at it; Jacob watched as its thin red tongue slipped out across the whiskers growing short across Thorne’s lip. The pastor straddled the woman on the floor and cocked his head toward the ceiling and, eyes closed, stretched his arms above him and shouted nonsense at the sky.
     The aggression with which the little house shook startled Jacob. The worshippers were fat, lean, old, child, gray, wed, widowed and all of them sweating like the sides of soda bottles. The smell of the air began to rise and come up over the top of them, mixed in with their shouting and the music and became a thing of such immense weight its burden could actually be felt settling on their shoulders. Several of them at a time broke rank and went to the side of the room to crouch against the wall and catch their thick, mustardy breath. Jacob stared at one point in the center of the dancing and each body began to lose its shape; the crowd became one writhing, stamping mass, like a thundercloud caught in a bedroom, a herd of beasts crowded into a kennel.
     Several older women were circled around someone at the side of the pulpit, and when Jacob looked closer he could tell it was Sadler, and that she was holding an infant, and that the infant was hers. He knew it because of the way the baby’s eyes opened, because of the way it tucked its chin into Sadler’s skinny chest. The women parted and walked behind her and she used the child’s blanket to wipe tear stains from her cheeks; the group of them went outside and some minutes later Sadler returned empty-handed. She looked up at Jacob, still standing with his hands behind his back, and his eyes said something like Why didn’t you tell me? and her eyes said something like There are things I don’t want to say out loud.

     He couldn't bring himself to leave. Though everyone had gone from the yard and there were no more children scrambling in the woods, he'd not seen Lee or Thorne come away from the house. A light still shone in a room in the very back, and Jacob came down off the drive far enough to make out people moving inside. He saw Thorne, who'd removed his cowboy shirt. He stood smoking a cigarette, yellow stains at his armpits and bold drops of sweat beading at his nose. An old man came into the room – Dr. Wesley - , followed by Sadler, and when Lee came in he switched off the overhead and the house sat in total darkness before a black light came on and Jacob could see the bright blue pop of Thorne's t-shirt and the preacher's skin became that of a phantom, grayish and electric as though filaments had been stretched the length of his arms. Sadler's blonde hair was brittle and wild. They had turned on music - the rumble of a long-drawn cello slid under the window sash and out into the darkening forest.
     Jacob lowered onto his haunches and pressed into the first layer of fallen orange leaves, closer to the house and farther away from any place common sense expected him to be. He watched Thorne set his hands on the girl's shoulders and the preacher pressed her with some force down onto her knees and her body disappeared from where Jacob could see anymore. He eased up to the side of the house and leaned against its clapboard edge and the vibration from the cello emptied itself into his aching chest.
     It's time to go, he thought.
     The little whispering sobs of a girl.
     Words from the mouth of her father.
     A prayer in an old man's voice.
     Lee had gone.
     He stood, set his eye in the corner of the window to where he thought the smallest piece of his head would be visible should they look outside, and watched Thorne tip a pitcher of liquid over the head of his daughter. It slid slow down her shuddering shoulders and into the cracks of her clenched fists. It glowed blue-green and the way she moved altered its path like a dancer wearing strands of beads. Her dress shrunk against her chest and the liquid pooled beneath her knees. Her bare feet slipped back and forth in it, sliding in arcs by the shoes of the two older men, who were silent and somber and seemed to be getting no pleasure from what the were doing to the girl.
     When the boy Lee said blood from behind, Jacob's fingernails dug into the windowsill and the strength fell out of his legs. He turned and Lee was crouched in the brush, picking at the leaves and grass.
     “S'posed to be lamb blood,” he said, “but ever so often they use cow blood 'cause they couldn't get at no lambs.” He raised his head to look at Jacob and one of his eyes was darker than the other, rings of bruise going outward from its center like an eclipse.
     “What are they doing?” said Jacob. This event was something altogether different from the service he'd just witnessed. He held the flat of his hand against his breastbone.
     “It's a thing my dad came up with. A ritual, I guess. A sin offering.”
     “What’d she do?”
     “Ain't no specific sin. But we live in sin, Jacob. Sadler's sinned. The spilling of that blood is like... an atonement, I guess.”
     Jacob looked back through the window. The men had gone and Sadler was wiping streaks of blood away from her eyes and flinging it at the floor.
     “Why don't they do it outside?” he asked. It was all he could think to say.
     “Smell of that blood attracts animals,” Lee said. “Coons cain't get enough of it. It cleans up real easy off that linoleum.”
     “You're okay with this?”
     “What I am or ain't okay with isn't something that comes up much around here.” The boy pointed a shaking finger at his eye. When he left, he patted Jacob on the back and told him it'd probably be best if he moved along with his life real soon. Go back into town and get him a proper shrink. Do some talking. Get over what you need to get over. Your plans is ruined here.

     Jacob waited for almost an hour for Sadler to come out of the house. The men had left her alone to stand up, tiptoe through the blood drying on the floor, and turn the light on. She was covered in a red so deep it was almost purple, and it darkened in streaks that came down from her eyes. She tried to mop blood from her armhairs and from her neck with paper towels, but when she’d used them all up she looked like a stain on the drywall, her rib bones popping in and out with her sobbing.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Third Interlude

     There was a day that they talked about for the rest of her life.
     Both of their families knew the story; their friends knew the story; hell, even some of the people whose lawns Jacob mowed had heard him tell the story while he drank their ice water and picked dirt from underneath his fingernails.
     It is the nature of things in West Virginia that every so often one stumbles across a small patch of earth so beautiful and untouched that it’s easy for him to think he’s the only person who’s ever tread that land. Jacob and Jessica found it outside of Frankford. They drove his pickup into a holler and laughed nervously as the stone road turned into stones on a mud path and then, through an aluminum cattle gate, dusty tire ruts in a green field surrounding a farmhouse that nobody’d lived in for a generation or more. A creek wound against the land and turned sideways at a rock wall and moved some more toward the Greenbrier. The porch was held up by stacks of bricks. Out back, a barn with no doors, and way far up on the hill several cows grazed easily in a world they owned almost entirely by themselves.
     The kids parked and held hands and explored what they’d found. They peered into the house, decided which room was the living room and which was the parlor, spit into the half-open cistern out back, and tossed rocks at an old rusty milkjug. They decided that whoever made the shot first would cook dinner that night. Neither of them could do it. Pizza, then.
     Sometime while they were planning their future children and thinking that a house such as this one would be a perfect place for a family and kicking the tops off of unbloomed dandelions, they heard a rapid thumping noise from the barn. Jacob picked up a rock and Jessica held the back of his shirt and the two of them crossed up the hill and wrapped their necks around the doorframe and there was the bed of a pickup truck come unattached some years ago with the cab having been driven away. They waited. Jacob peered into the hayloft and held his rock up shoulder-high. The old truck frame began to jolt up and down, banging its hitch on they concrete slab it had been resting on, and the whole thing made such a squealing, awful racket that the kids backed up from it and watched it from what they judged to be a safe distance. The box lifted a dozen times or more, and each time several feet in the air. Jacob loosened Jessica’s fingers from his back and approached the barn opening alone.
     “Ho-ly shit,” he said, swinging in an arc ten feet away from the truckbed. “Jess, stay right there.”
     “What is it?”
     Jacob went to the frame and wrapped his fingers around some spot of purchase. He squatted and thrust his legs upward and the truckbed lifted and, underneath, a calf scuttled crazily in the mud until its hooves found grip and it shot out from under the truck and came running staight in Jessica’s direction. She crouched and covered her head and Jacob laughed until he couldn’t bring in any more air.
     The calf finally slowed halfway up the hill behind the house and eventually stopped and looked back at Jacob and Jessica, who, shocked, looked back at him. He stared at them for a minute and swung his head around and went off to find his herd.
     Three years later, Jacob and Jessica found out the owner of the farm had died and they offered her son a more than fair price for a fixer-upper. They moved in after the last snow thawed in late April.      

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Chapter Thirteen

     They were on the porch when Thorne came. His churchgoing outfit was much the same as the previous evening – a striped gray cowboy shirt, snakeskin boots, and light blue slacks buckled at the front with a cross. He tipped his hat to Jacob and said good afternoon. He said nothing to his daughter. She stared at him like a nemesis, not recoiled but the opposite, arms crossed in front of her chest and chin stuck out, the fighter proving her toughness. Not one of them spoke; they crossed the yard in silence, they started down the main road silent, they came up on the waiting congregation silent.
     A number of the men talking in front of the church were dressed as Thorne was dressed. None of them had a woman within arm's reach, and in fact the women were gathered in an entirely separate section of the yard, under the shadow provided by a lopsided eve and the few flimsy branches that hung out over the grass. Children played balancing games on rotten tires beside a department store swing set. The pastor cut through the crowd and unlocked the front door of the house and they followed, in no obvious hurry, into a roughly painted room with pulpy wooden floors and an assortment of secondhand musical instruments leaning in the corner.
     A few of the men dragged folding chairs across the sanctuary and picked up guitars. One sat behind an electric piano. Another took up sticks and leaned back behind a beginner's drum set. Thorne had constructed a makeshift pulpit from a podium whose face was still covered with dried wood glue where a company crest had once hung. The dusty arms of a ceiling fan whipped around uncomfortably close to the tallest members' pomaded haircuts.
     The snakes were not kept hidden. They hissed and rattled from three wooden lockers in front of the podium and every so often one of them would slip its tongue through the grid of chickenwire on the door, testing the air for whatever it was these people thought they could ignore. The lockers were cinched shut with bailing twine and smelled faintly of compost and the specific sweat that seeps out of a man when he's scared. Jacob kept his fists crossed in front of himself and shuffled sidewise toward the farthest corner of the room. Sadler stood in front and looked over her shoulder and he knew she was asking him if he was okay.
     He was not ready for the volume and enthusiasm of the band. The guitars squealed as the amps came on and the drummer rolled his sticks deftly across the skins in front of him. The house moved and shook like a rickety boat as the congregation came together as one body and began to sing and raise their hands and stomp in ill-counted rhythm. A middle-aged woman in a floral dress stood barefoot in front of a microphone and sang

               I'm covered by the blood
               I'm covered by the blood
               Jesus has washed my sins away
               I'm covered by the blood of the lamb.

     A man with a great belly and legs that tapered impossibly into black high-tops clamored to the wall beside Jacob and leaned against it. “What do you reckon?” he said. His coal black voice cut roughly into the din from the front.
     “What do I reckon about what?” Jacob shouted.
     The man's beard was flecked with dried mustard and spittle. “You're new here, ain't you?”
     Jacob's eyes were wide and concentrated on the back of Sadler's head. He nodded.
     “I ain't much for the music myself,” the man said. “I'm here for the copperheads. The rattlers. I catch 'em. Quarter 'em. One of 'em gets fiesty I take him home and spit roast him.” His jowels swung when he talked.
     The song ended and the room pulsed with moving bodies and fractured sound shot out toward the walls and windows. Jacob and the fat man stood leaning while Thorne raised his hands for the commotion to go easy and touched a Bible to his shining forehead.
     “In some way,” he said, his congregation settling down into three rows of folding chairs, “we are all of us young in the Lord. In the way that a perfect circle can not be drawn by even the steadiest of hands, a perfect knowledge of God's gift is impossible to procure.”
     Amen.
     “We want him to believe that we believe in him. We want to be good for him and to do right by his word.”
     Amen.
     “Have you been saved?”
     Yes, pastor, we've been saved.
     “Is there anyone in this room who needs saving?”
     A few heads turned to look for Jacob. Thorne stood still and looked directly at him. Sadler did not move. Jacob tried to cave in on himself.