Read Online Blood Kin by Steve Rasnic Tem - Free Book Online Page B

she could. She then put her face up to a wide crack to see what those nasty men were up to.
    She knew her granddaddy was right — not everybody in the state was like the folks she had to put up with every day — and not every man was out to get every young thing he could, but how could she really know for sure when those were about the only men she knew anything about?
    Her daddy was sitting on the floor with a bunch of men playing dominoes. This was a regular weekly thing, although Sadie was pretty sure they almost never finished a game. They either broke up with a fight or got too drunk to handle the tiles proper. This was the kind of ignorant stuff that gave the hollow people a bad name, but she didn’t know nobody else behaving like her sorry daddy and his friends.
    “I’ll just take me one from the boneyard.” She saw her daddy dip into the stock of unused dominoes. She knew everyone else there: Uncle Jesse Gibson; Luke Grogan, whose wife committed suicide last winter and everybody was saying he hadn’t been home in a month; Speed Sexton, whose wife May was said to have visions; and Buck Willis, a dreamy sort of fella who nobody knew a whole lot about. He never said that much about himself and what he did say didn’t make much sense.
    “Your turn, Buck,” her daddy said. All the men waited, watching Buck’s face like it was the most interesting thing they ever seen.
    “Shit or get off the pot,” somebody finally said.
    “I was just thinking...”
    Her daddy groaned.
    “No... I was just thinkin how I farm only the flat patches of my place. I figure it must be because I was Gyptian oncet, you see. I member it clear as a bell. I member livin a long, long time ago. And I member hot weather, so hot the eggs was fryin inside the chickens. And I member sand.”
    “Make your damn play, Buck,” her daddy said.
    “Maybe us Melungeons was Gyptian in the oh-riginal,” Buck continued.
    Her daddy slapped the boneyard, scattering the dominoes all over the room. “Hell, let’s do some bettin! ” he shouted.
    “I’m too drunk to bet wit you,” Luke said. “Hell, you’ll do most anything for a bet, Bobby. Aint sportin to bet wit you.”
    “How bout you, Jesse?”
    Uncle Jesse had been drinking a long time. Most days he started right after breakfast. He pinched a wrinkled picture carefully between two square-tipped fingers.
    “Ah, Jesse.” Speed, also quite drunk, sounded as if he was ready to cry. “Why you want to look at that thing for?”
    The other men didn’t say anything. Sadie had seen the picture before. A funeral picture of Jesse and Lilly’s first child, a daughter who died when she was two; it was faded to a pee-yellow brown. The little girl wore a dainty silk gown and was leaning against a pillow held up by a man’s rough-looking, stained hands. Uncle Jesse’s hands, Sadie figured. Her eyes were closed. First time Sadie saw it she’d asked if the little girl in the picture was sleeping. Lots of folks kept funeral pictures — if the child died young and hadn’t had a picture taken it was considered a last chance to get a record to remember them by. But she’d never known anyone else to carry one with them.
    “One of these days I’m gonna find who killed my baby,” Jesse said. “Lord’ll help me, and Lord help me when I do.”
    No one said nothing. Everybody who knew Jesse was tired of arguing the point. His daughter died of the small pox.
    “Come on, boys,” her daddy said. “I need some bettin done here. Help keep me outta them mines.”
    “Help keep us all outta them mines,” Luke said.
    They were all scared of the mines. Most everybody had at least one relation broke his back from a rock fall. Sadie had seen her daddy do this before. Talking about the mines got some men into a betting mood. She thought it kind of funny that he should use that. Her daddy was scared half to death of them mines. He’d worked one week in that mine at Tempco and he wouldn’t talk about it, but