Alchemy
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Appalachian Alchemy free porn video
The only thing my daddy ever gave me was a bullet, and even that was secondhand and rightly meant for someone else.
Silas Long pressed it into my nine-year old palm the day he killed Daddy. Plucked it out of my father’s unfired .357 and curled my hand over the metal like he was giving me a shiny, new quarter.
His breath smelled like single-pot whiskey when he leaned in close and said to me, ‘Book,’ people was already calling me that, ‘you ain’t old enough or learnt yet in the ways of the county. But this bullet belongs to you. I done kilt your daddy clean. Our dispute is resolved, way I see. Now if’n you get on in age a bit and feel like I wronged you or your daddy in any way, you come on down over the hill, past the white birch, and you give me this here bullet any way you think is right. If we ain’t cross, you hand it on over slow just like this and I’ll know we good. If we still got churn between us, you can try to give it to me quick like I did your daddy. Either way, I don’t reckon I’ll ever set eyes on you again ‘cept behind a crosshair ’till we get this all sorted. You reckon?’
He repeated it until I answered. After I choked out the words he walked over and placed a second bullet from Daddy’s old revolver in my older brother’s palm and set him straight too. Evan gritted his teeth the whole time, but he answered at the end just the same.
‘I reckon.’ He was older than I was, and more used to the ways of the water. He was twelve.
Afterward, old Silas took his straw hat from his head and ran his hand through what was left of his pale, corn silk hair. It was wet and greasy in the midday sun, and his overalls framed a cotton shirt heavy with armpit stains. A length of rope secured his own gun to his waist. It was an old Ruger that look more horseshoe than firearm but that had put daddy down right and clean just the same. Silas blew out a long breath and said, ‘It’s damn hot, I tell ya. Got enough sweat in the crack of my ass to douse a candle.’
I shielded my eyes and looked up at the sun. It was the hottest August of my life, and the river bank where we were standing offered scarce protection. I was summer skinny, little more than a hanger for my oversized cotton shirt and baggy trousers. They had been my teenage cousin Darren’s, before he got sent to jail a summer earlier for selling at Hazard Community and Technical College. The sleeves bunched something awful and the pants were shapeless on me, the bottoms dirty from walking. My brother just stared straight ahead. Darren’s clothes looked better on him on account of his height. Neither of us wore shoes. Both of us were brown as oak trees and Injuns.
Silas just kept on like our father wasn’t lying dead a few feet away. ‘I sure could go for something cool to drink. Your mama still making that sun tea? Lord above, that was the best tea I ever had in my life. I don’t know how she made it. Always tried to get her to tell me. Never did.’ He paused. ‘I was in town couple weeks back. Down at The Poke. They got brown sugar. Well, not brown sugar. Regular sugar, like, ‘cept it’s brown. Say it’s raw. Didn’t taste no different to me. Said it was the way sugar supposed to be.’ Old Silas laughed. ‘You think that’s true?’ he asked neither of us in particular. ‘You think God got a plan for a little thing like sugar? You think sugar got a destiny?’
After a long pause, Evan said, ‘I reckon.’ Whether he was answering about the sugar or still replying to the first question about the bullet, I couldn’t tell.
Silas turned around absently and stared off toward the woods in the direction of his shack. I thought about running up behind him and trying to jump up on his back and choke him to death. It was a boy’s thought. If that old Ruger worked once, it’d probably work twice. And even if it didn’t, the old man still had enough strength in his spotted hands to throttle a river rat like me.
I pointed the bullet he had given me at his back and squeezed the casing hard between my thumb and index finger. I prayed to God, asked him to send the lead flying from my fingers, but he did no such thing. He must have been busy thinking about how sugar was supposed to be.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Evan hold out his hand too. I briefly wondered if he was praying on behalf of his bullet as well, but decided that he wasn’t the type. Evan was a lot tougher than I was. He didn’t need God for anything. If he wanted his bullet to go off, he would have just yelled at it until it did.
After holding it up high so that the sun shone off of it, Silas made a show of tucking Daddy’s gun into the length of rope on his waist. ‘Now, I’m a take this here wheel-gun. I ain’t stealin’ it, now. I’ll leave it on the stump down by my sister’s place. I mean to give you boys a mite bit to think before you take it up.’ He smiled now, as genuinely as he could manage. His teeth looked like the keys on the piano at church. ‘You is good boys. This thing here between your daddy and me weren’t nothin’ hot-blooded. Just river business.’ He walked backward, eyes on us until he reached the trees. ‘Y’all take care now, you hear?’
Then he was gone and it was just me and my brother and our dead father.
Evan, who hadn’t moved an inch since Daddy went down, ran over and kneeled by his head. I walked slowly, my new bullet trembling in my hand.
I’d seen a dead body before. My Grandma had died from snuff two years back. Her lip had been eaten away by cancer, and what it didn’t finish, the doctors picked over so much that when she died, she looked like she didn’t have no mouth at all.
The men at the funeral home had tried to help. They built her a new mouth out of whatever it is funeral homes build new mouths out of. They even curled her lips up, gave her a little smile. My crying had bordered on the hysterical. ‘What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with her mouth?’ Grandma’s lip had been messed up since I could remember, but I’d never, in my entire life, seen her smile.
Even still, Grandma had been laid out like a package, neatly prepared for heaven, hands clasped and eyes closed, like God was some divine postman, coming round to pick up all the old ladies with man-made smiles and clutch them tight to his breast so that he might deliver them from perdition.
Daddy wasn’t anything like that. Silas had fired two bullets, both on target. The first had caught Daddy in the throat, tore out the whole left side of his neck. The second shot had caught him in the shoulder, spinning him so that his body was twisted in the grass. His upper body rested awkwardly on one arm. It was like he was hugging the ground, while his pelvis still faced the sky.
It looked a bit like he had fallen down drunk, which I had seen many times. I kept waiting for his eyes to pop open and him give me that grin and ask, ‘Book, you know why God invented bourbon?’ And no matter how I answered, he’d slap me and say, ‘God didn’t invent bourbon. Elijah Craig did. Don’t you let nobody take credit for the endeavors of a son of Kentucky, not even the Almighty. He’s just jealous ’cause the best his boy could do with water was wine. It’s sour grapes.’ And then he’d laugh until he spit.
Dressed in britches and an undershirt and blood, he looked nothing if not unprepared for heaven. It was hard to imagine God coming all the way out there, on that rural route, to pick up my daddy and take him to heaven. No, the river would take my daddy. I could hear it calling for him just a few feet away, gurgling with excitement.
Evan looked up at me with red eyes. ‘Give me your bullet,’ he said.
‘You cryin’?’ I asked him, realizing as I did that I could feel tears on my own face.
‘Naw, I ain’t crying. Don’t be stupid.’
‘Well, I was only asking ’cause you look a little like you been cryin’.’ He really did look like it, too. I’d only seen Evan cry a couple times. Once when he was ten, fell out of a tree we was playing in and onto a pile of saw wood. Even then, it had only been
a little squirt of water, and understandable with him standing there with a plank sticking up out of his head like a comb on a rooster, blood burbling out like a spring. The other time was a year later. He’d taken his thumbnail clean off with a hammer while we were building a fort in the woods. He’d nearly beat me to death with the same hammer when I tried to kiss where he hurt himself like Mama always done with me when I got hurt.
‘The milkweed’s burstin’,’ he said and gave me a glare. ‘I ain’t no pussy like you, Book. Now go on and give your bullet. You don’t know how to use it no way.’
I clutched my bullet to my chest and took a step back. Evan was right. I didn’t know how to use it much. Daddy had let me shoot his gun before. But each time I got scared by the kick and dropped it and ran off. Still, the bullet had been given to me and I valued it in the way that nine year-olds valued any possession, because they had so few. Plus, I aimed to get it into Silas Long even if I had to feed it to him.
Evan stood and I worried for a second that he might take the bullet from me. I knew from experience that he could have. Once, when Becky Bailer had come looking for me to play kickball, my brother had held me down in front of her and asked me if she was my girlfriend. When I didn’t answer, he spit into my open mouth and held my jaw and nose until I had to swallow it. Becky had left in disgust and I prayed that night for God to turn me into a pillar of salt like he had Lot’s wife. He didn’t do it.
‘You ain’t gonna need it,’ he said. ‘I mean to kill the old man. I’m the oldest. Mine by rights.’
I couldn’t argue with his logic. I still didn’t want to give up my prize. ‘I’ll keep my bullet just the same,’ I said, and set my jaw as hard as I could.
I must have looked fiercer than I felt, because he left it at that. ‘Fine. Keep it if it makes you feel better, baby.’
It did make me feel better. As much better as anything could make me feel.
Evan looked back at Daddy, then after Silas, then the other direction, toward our own shack. He did this several times, as if making some great decision. ‘I need to get mama. You stay here.’ And with that, he walked off, toward our house, clenching his bullet, his not quite little boy shoulders squared against the weight of the world.
Once he was out of earshot, I sat in the river loam by Daddy and sobbed myself ugly. I cried until the phlegm in my throat got so thick that I choked on it. And then I threw up until my ribs hurt before curling up on my daddy’s back and hugging him longer and harder than I ever had. In life, he had never been very fond of hugs. In death, he offered no complaints. The back of his shirt smelled like sweat and unwashed cotton and I rubbed it into my nostrils until the end of my nose turned sore.
We lay like that, my father dead silent, the river and me babbling, none of us saying anything, until I heard singing.
At first I thought it was the river itself, learned to carry a tune, the voice was so high and tinkling. It harmonized with the splashing and hiccuping of the water, until I could scarcely tell the two apart.
Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears
While we all supp sorrow with the poor
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears
Oh hard times, come again no more
It’s the song, the sigh of the weary
Hard times, hard times come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door
Oh hard times, come again no more
When she stepped out of the treeline I thought maybe God had found my daddy after all, and sent an angel to carry him home.
But she was too short to be an angel, and I imagined that even being pious and humble and above earthly possessions and such, that an ambassador of the heavenly host would have on a dress that wasn’t so ratty and knees that weren’t so dirty.
She stopped her singing like a startled bird and looked at me through a hayfield of hair. The girl was towheaded and pigeon-toed, barefeet black with the clay of the riverbank. She was ugly in the same way as a baby bluebird–all plain colors and odd bones, but with the potential for reaching the same cast as the sky on a summer day. We were about the same age. I was taller. Barely.
Eyes as wide as freshwater mussels opened up behind her waterfall of curls when she spotted me and Daddy. A basket, half-full of coneflowers, was held in front of her by arms that were red and crisscrossed with the remembered caress of dogwood trees. It occurred to us both that I was hugging a dead man, and then, only an instant later, that we knew each other. The comfort of the second discovery did not outweigh the awkwardness of the first.
She moved slowly, without saying anything, tiptoeing around, as if she were afraid of waking my daddy, which we both were fairly sure was impossible. I was all of a sudden intensely aware that I had gotten my hands and arms bloody in all my hugging and sobbing. My face was also smeared with a healthy portion of snot. I was somehow more embarrassed by the latter than the former.
When she had satisfied herself that the situation was exactly as it appeared, she said the only things there were to say, I suppose.
‘You Marshall Merrick, ain’t you? We done had Sunday school together two years ago.’
I nodded that I was.
She paused only a second before asking the second obvious question. ‘That your daddy?’
I nodded again.
There in the irrefutable light of the evidence, she came to the same conclusion that I had, no matter how hard I tried to arrive at a different one. ‘Well…he dead.’
I worried that I might burst out crying anew. I could feel my lip wavering. I closed my mouth hard and fought the urge. In the process, I pushed the salty taste of snot against my tongue.
‘You know who kilt him?’ She had the real and true hill-speak, like Mama, like she couldn’t open her mouth enough to get the whole word out. By comparison, my speech pattern was practically cosmopolitan.
I gritted my teeth. I couldn’t even manage a nod this time, but the pinch of my face let her know I did.
‘You gonna tell?’
In most places, it would have been a strange question. I didn’t know that then, however. All I knew was Lee County. All I knew was the river and its ways, and, as Silas had said, I wasn’t even all that clear on those.
I took pride in my answer. It was the only thing that had given me any measure of worth since that first bullet had hit. ‘I ain’t.’
She chewed on the corner of her mouth as if testing the feel of my answer. It must have satisfied her in some way, because she nodded once, though not at me in particular, and then went to the edge of the river. After turning her feet sideways to get better traction in the mud, she eased her way on down to the water. Once there, she began to gather up some more flowers for her basket.
I felt a twinge of loss at her moving away. Within a few minutes, she had picked all of the purple petals and was making to walk on down the bank, away from me and my snotty nose and dead daddy.
‘I ain’t been cryin’ much,’ I said to her.
She looked me over. ‘I reckon you has.’
‘I ain’t,’ I answered.
‘You has. It look like you done about as much crying as you could of…and you been sick too.’
I blushed furiously. I wanted to slide down and hide below Daddy’s back. Just let her walk on by. I also couldn’t bear the thought of being alone again. I didn’t know what to say, so I just gave her a tough look.
It must have worked, because her expression softened and she said. ‘It ain’t no thing. I cry sometimes.’
‘It’s different. You’re a girl.’
‘I don’t see what that has to do with it. Girls and boys both got eyes.’
That had to be the stupidest thing I had ever heard. I meant to tell her that it was. That she didn’t know nothin’ about nothin’. But I d
idn’t.
As she started to leave, I worked myself up to say it. ‘You’re Kelsey Graves. Silas Long be your uncle.’
She shrugged to indicate that she thought this was pretty obvious.
‘Well, your uncle is who shot my daddy, and he give me this bullet, and I aim to kill him with it, and he is gonna be sorry because I’m gonna make him sorry.’ I meant to say all of that with venom, but the venom got all mixed up with the snot and the tears and it all came out kind of quaky.
Her face turned hard for a second, but she nodded again. ‘That’s your right, I reckon.’
The next part spilled out of me. ‘Your uncle is an awful man, and after I kill him, he gonna go to hell and burn for what he done to my daddy.’
‘That ain’t for you to be knowin’, Marshall Merrick. God don’t take no counsel from river boys. And Uncle Silas ain’t no awful man. He bought me a chocolate bar for my birthday and he plays banjo and he made me a swing in my yard.’ She stood defiantly, back arched, feet dug deep into the mud and dared me to argue that these things weren’t true.
I couldn’t, but nor was I willing to back down. I imagined Silas Long with his stringy hair and bulging belly picking and grinning and throwing Hershey bars between songs. ‘I still mean to kill him.’
Kelsey clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and stormed off down the river bank in a rush. At least as much of a rush as she could manage with the mud sucking at her feet after every step.
‘Go on then, go!’ I shouted after her before burying my face in the now cool skin of my father’s neck. I burrowed deep, trying to block out the sun, the wind, even the sound of the river. But mostly to block out the growing feeling of loneliness that was moving in on the heels of Kelsey’s departure.
I was so successful that I didn’t even hear her come back, and it was only her shadow falling over my clenched eyes, shade on shade, that alerted me to her return.
When I looked up, the sun was brighter than I remembered and black spots danced around her face, which was haloed by the light.
I could tell she was sacrificing some length of pride when she spoke. ‘I’m sorry my uncle kilt your daddy.’ And then she set her basket of flowers down beside me and turned and walked away once more.
‘Are you giving me flowers?’ I called after her, still half-blind.
‘I am.’
‘What am I going to do with flowers?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘I’m a boy.’
‘So you keep saying.’
‘I ain’t no sissy.’
‘I reckon not.’
‘…thank you…I guess.’
She looked over her shoulder and gave me a little smile. Her hair was a mess. Her dress was a mess. She was a mess. But her smile was perfect.
I smiled back before realizing that it was the craziest thing in the world to do.
‘Hey,’ she said, far enough away now that she had to raise her voice for me to hear. ‘Why does everybody be calling you ‘Book’?’
‘I like books,’ I shouted at her.
‘You do?’
‘I do.’
‘That why you talk so funny?’
‘I don’t.’
‘You do.’
‘…’
‘I like it. It’s pretty.’
‘I’m a boy!’
‘I’m convinced.’
‘Boys ain’t pretty.’
‘Some are. I can’t hardly read at all.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘I could teach you a little. Sometime. If you want.’
‘Maybe so.’ She continued walking.
‘Okay.’
‘Okay.’
‘I got a lot. Books, I mean. More than any other kid in Beattyville, I s’pose.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m still gonna kill your uncle.’
‘Okay.’ She vanish around the bend of the river and was gone.
I had to admit, it was a little less lonely with the flowers. And it seemed fitting, what with Daddy being dead and this being the closest he would come to a proper funeral.
****
Mama was tall for a woman, long-limbed and slender as a willow branch. I could see her coming before she broke the wood, stepping as quickly as she could with her odd off-kilter gait, towering over Evan. And if I had been able to right Daddy and stand him up straight, she’d have been taller than him too. My brother carried a mess of chain and dragged our winter sled behind him. Mama carried only her burdens.
Nadine
- 08.04.2022
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