Somebody had laid out so many clothes on the bed, it looked like an outlet store in there. I put on the most normal ones that fit and went downstairs to a big dinner cooked by my grandmother and this Jane Ellen individual, a heavyset girl with long, twisty black hair and a gap between her front teeth that she stuck her tongue in whenever she smiled, which was every time you looked at her. There was so much food. I was set to founder and die happy.

  Jane Ellen was number eleven of the girls my grandmother had raised up and educated. She was in high school, worked part-time in the doctor’s office, and had lived at this house since she was eight. No discussion of where she came from before that, a mystery given the brothers around someplace not far away, with clothes evidently to spare. Not a pure orphan like me. She acted like living with my grandmother was the happiest life imaginable. They both treated Brother Dick like their pet, asking his opinions on things, leaning over to wipe off his chin. Our dinner was chicken, sweet potatoes, and green beans. His was this green milkshake thing they brought him in a big glass with a straw because one of his problems was with swallowing.

  Before we ate, my grandmother asked me, “Do you return the blessing?”

  No idea how to pass that test. I froze. Fork stuck in a piece of chicken, heart in my gullet.

  “We don’t!” she said in her gruff voice. Jane Ellen and Brother Dick laughed, and we all dug in. She asked more questions, such as why Mom took up with such a bad apple after my father died. I could think of a few answers, starting with Mom having shit for brains, but due to politeness I just said lonesome I guess.

  “Lonesome! Nothing lonesomer than getting shackled to a bully-man in his house of spite.” My grandmother looked at Jane Ellen, and for once there was no smile there. I got the idea they’d both done time in the spite house. My grandmother with her snake-handling husband, and as far as Jane Ellen went, who knew. I wanted to tell them it’s not just girls that end up inside four walls of hate and knuckles for breakfast, it can be anybody. Hate comes along and lays out the damn doormat and there you are. But I kept my mouth shut. It’s safer knowing more about people than they know about you.

  After dinner my grandmother and Brother Dick smoked cigarettes. His legs and the rest of him weren’t much count, but his hands were amazing. Tiny and clean, the fingernails rounded off, holding the cigarette like a little white bird perched in his hand, singing its song of pretty blue smoke. I tried not to stare. The brother was more like a sister, and vice versa.

  They put me up that night in the room with all the clothes, now folded and put away so I could sleep in the bed, which was the size of a ship, with tall wooden posts in all four corners, for what reason I have no idea. Like you might need to run up a flag in the night. The room smelled the same as the rest of the house, like dust and old people, and their doors had the old-fashioned keyholes like in the Peggot house. Maggot and I used to play around with those long iron keys because nobody at all cared if we buried them in the yard for treasure, tried melting them in a fire, or what. Not so here. My grandmother came and looked in on me after I was in bed. Then the door closed, and I heard the key turn and click. I was her prisoner.

  But if I could run, where would I even go? Being locked in a room, or living my life in general, no difference. The only roads I knew were full of people that would sooner run me over than help me out. I could end up as dead as my mom and baby brother on any given day. I settled on being glad this was not the day. I had a full belly and wasn’t getting rained on. Tomorrow, another story. Probably the story of getting kicked out due to being a boy.

  But this Dick person she doted on, asking for his advice and even taking it. That one I turned over and over. Then remembered what she’d said about people making their water. How he did that exactly, I couldn’t picture. But for sure, not standing up.

  27

  It took some time for her to make up her mind about me. She was one of these that is never going to be wrong, period. As regards to me: (1) No flesh and blood of hers was getting turned back over to the do-nothings at DSS. (2) She’d sooner shoot herself in the head than raise a boy, so. Getting her way was going to be a problem.

  Her opinion on her brother Dick: most people thought he was brainless, but really he was the smartest person they knew. She wanted me to hang out with him, which I was a little scared to do, honestly, due to not knowing how. I asked what happened to him to get in the wheelchair. She said he was born with a spinal type of thing, but that life hadn’t helped his case any either. Whenever they were little, the boys at school bullied him to the extent almost of death. Stuffing him in a feed bag, hiding him in a culvert, stunts like that, just for being so small he couldn’t fight back. Also for liking to read and knowing the answers in school, which everybody knows is asking for it. She was the big sister and got handy at warding off the boys with whatever weapon fell to hand, but their father had other ideas and put him in a home in Knoxville. He didn’t get a lick of schooling over there, so she took him books if they went to visit. The father wanted him out of sight, with people at church saying a cripple was punishment from God. Poor little Dick was there for years, until the rest of the family passed away and she could go get him out.

  Damn. I was still nervous to go talk to him, but less so after she told me all that. One no-toucher kid knows another, you have to think.

  His room was downstairs for the wheelchair, and usually the door stood open. The first time I went in, he didn’t notice me because of reading a book. Not regular reading, I mean gone. He and that big book were not in this house, nor maybe this world. His room was basically a living room with a bed in it. Chairs, lamps, desk, plus some medical and bathroom stuff I tried not to look at. The desk had a lot going on there, including a kite. Every wall had shelves of more books than I’d seen anywhere, school library included. Some few had the skinny spines and the colors I knew were kids’ books. I’d not seen a lot of those. Somebody one time gave me the one where the boy is hateful and sent to bed with no supper, and in his head he’s a monster and goes to this island where it’s all wild monsters like him, seriously ticked off, making their wild rumpus. I loved that. But preferred comics, which I didn’t see any of at all in Mr. Dick’s room.

  Finally I said, “Hey, Mr. Dick,” and he looked up and smiled, not that surprised. He motioned me to come in. His throat or voice box was messed up, but you could get used to it and mostly tell what he was saying. It took me a minute though to get to that point. That first day I checked out his books, asking what this or that one was about, and pretended I understood the answer. I didn’t find the wild boy one. His kids’ books had the old-timey pictures that kids now would get bored of. He must have kept every book he ever read. I asked if those were the ones his sister brought him in the cripple home, and he said yes. Which kind of wrecked me, how tragic that was. Jesus. But here these two were now, living happier-ever-after than most.

  Mr. Dick didn’t take offense at much of anything, so in time I asked some nosy shit, like how did my grandmother get such a nice house (by outliving everybody else in the family), and what did the others die of (being meaner than snakes). Did he remember my dad? Yes! At the time of my grandmother fetching Mr. Dick back from the cripple home, after her husband died, my dad was a teenager. That tripped me out, to think of him walking around in this exact house, alive and a kid. I was used to thinking of my dad as another category of being, like Ant-Man or Jesus. But a real person. That looked like me. I wanted to know a million things, like what was his first car, what sports did he play. Mr. Dick was vague on that, saying just that he fought a lot with the religious father, and then without any dad in the house to lay down the law, fought with my grandmother. Then turned sixteen and moved out. What he did between leaving this house and taking up with Mom in Lee County, which was a lot of years, Mr. Dick had no idea. Possibly nobody did. I wished I could find the book of my whole dad in that house and read every page.

  So, taking crap from a teenager that looked like me: Was this the start of my grandmother taking her dim view of boys? I had to ask. Mr. Dick smiled and shook his head no, motioning over his crooked shoulder like, way, way back. Of course. The big, stinking guys that shoved his little wishbone arms and legs in a feed sack, laughing their nuts off. She’d made up her mind long before she had her redheaded baby boy. He probably never had a chance.

  It was after her son ran off that she’d started taking in girls for their so-called educations. I asked Mr. Dick what she taught them that they wouldn’t learn in regular school. I’d already seen how Jane Ellen hit the books every single evening, homework spread out all over the kitchen table. My grandmother would quiz her or give pointers on history or even math, trig and such, which surprised me that an old person would know about. I’d thought it was a newer invention. Mr. Dick said she taught her girls to be the best in their class and not let anybody talk down to them. Same old song in other words: steer clear of the hateful boys. Mr. Dick said yes, that was it. I asked him how the girls graduated from their educations and moved out. He said generally by getting married.

  It was a long couple of weeks I waited around. Some days she’d put me outside on garden chores. Jane Ellen also, if she wasn’t at school or work. We spent a morning turning over dirt where she wanted to put in her fall collards. I could get Jane Ellen tickled over the smallest thing, talking worms etc. But that only takes you so far. There wasn’t any TV. It was usually Mr. Dick or nothing. We guys had our laughs. Sometimes we made fun of my grandmother a tiny bit. He loved her of course, but to a certain extent, she was batshit. Our little secret.

  One morning I found him wheeled up to his desk working on something, and he meant business. Not reading, he was writing. On the kite. I’d had dollar store kites as a kid, but his was not normal like that. It was homemade, out of tobacco lath and the plain paper in rolls. He said to pull up a chair, so I sat and watched him write on his kite. He had the neatest, littlest writing ever to come out of a human person. To be so crooked in his body, his lines of writing were straighter than straight. Also, slow as Christmas. It took forever for him to finish one sentence: So wise so young, they say, do never live long. Words that made no exact sense, but probably true. He’d written other sentences all over that kite. Like, a hundred of them. My eye picked out: Dispute not with her: she is a lunatic. Uh-oh, I thought, trouble with sister dear. But another one said: I am determined to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these days. I couldn’t make heads or tails. No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. And in the center, in bigger print:

  And if I die no soul will pity me.

  And why should they since I myself

  find in myself no pity to myself.

  I asked what it was about, and he patted his book on the desk that he’d just finished. Did he aim to write out the entire book on the kite? No. Just certain parts he liked the best.

  “And then what happens?”

  He pointed out the window. His hand motioned up, up.

  “You fly the kite?”

  He nodded yes. He said after he read a book he oftentimes wanted to thank whoever wrote it, but usually they were dead. His book had a name on it I’d heard of, Shakespeare. Dead, evidently.

  “So it’s like returning the blessing?” I asked.

  He nodded yes. Like that. Which my grandmother said they didn’t do in this house. Not to God, anyway. Returning the blessings to Shakespeare and them, evidently okay. You had to reckon she was on board with it because there’s no way he was going to go behind her back. Flying a kite from a wheelchair is bound to be a production.

  What finally lit a flame under my grandmother’s ass was school. That I wasn’t going. Jane Ellen was already studying for tests, and I’d not even set a foot into—what grade was I supposed to be in? All the sudden she’s acting like it’s an emergency, and I’m wondering, Where’s the fire, lady? I’d laid out of school plenty, mostly due to grown-ups wanting to get some better use out of me. Not this one. She’d have no part in me growing up an ignorant bastard. She called me into her parlor and sat me down. Asked if I had any particulars on where I wanted to go. She was sitting at her big desk that I didn’t know was a desk until she heaved open the top thing that rolled open. It took me a minute to work out what she meant by particulars.

  What grade? No. School, county, state. I couldn’t stay with her, but she wasn’t sending me back to Lee County, if that’s not where I wanted to be.

  I wasn’t used to choices. I only had a list of people I hoped not to see again this side of the grave, with Stoner on top. Next, Creaky and his farm. Old Baggy, but I already knew my grandmother’s opinions on the DSS. What she had in mind was a different setup.

  “I’ve been looking after children longer than you’ve been alive,” she said, looking at me through the top of her glasses. The glass part was divided, like an F-150 two-tone.

  “Yes ma’am,” I said.

  She turned a roller-wheel thing with cards in it that was her list of people. Names, phone numbers, but we’re talking maybe a hundred cards in that thing. Imagine knowing that many people. She was an old person of course, fifties or sixties. Time enough to round up a posse.

  “My girls don’t usually end up staying in Unicoi,” she said. “They have bigger fish to fry.” I thought of what Mr. Dick said about them marrying, so maybe it was their husbands that had the bigger fish. But I was not about to pick any fights with the spider lady that had me in her web, deciding my fate. Because that’s what this was about. One of her girls was going to take me in. We went over the different ones, what they did, if they had kids now. They lived all over. Two in Knoxville, one in Johnson City. Most had gone to college, she was proud of that. So naturally they’d end up in the city. I said I’d be real glad and amazed if anybody wanted to take me in, but please not the city. And my grandmother said okay, she understood.

  Whatever we came up with, she said she would have to square it with Social Services on the legal stuff. I knew they wouldn’t argue with her. They’d been beating the weeds for anybody to take me. Probably if she called and said, Hey, Demon is moving in with this nice ex-con child porn dealer I know, Old Baggy would say, Okay, tell me where to send the man his check.

  She asked about social security, being wise to the business of me getting money for Mom being dead. I told her about the account they set up, which got me wondering about my dad as far as cash possibilities. She frowned at the wall, tapping her chin with the eraser of her pencil. She had a little bit of a mustache, if I didn’t mention it. Maybe thinking the same. I liked the idea of her son owing me. It made me not so pathetic. We were all of us in this spiderweb.

  But all she said finally was that I needed to stay in the state of Virginia. Legalwise.

  I told her if I was going that far, I’d take Lee County or thereabouts. I didn’t know I thought that, it just came out. Because of Maggot and a million other things I’d known all my life. The Corn Dog, where I swallowed a tooth. Five Star Stadium, the Generals. The mountain everybody says looks like a face, which it doesn’t. Not seeing any of that again just made no sense. As far as Tazewell or other Virginia counties, all I knew about them was I wanted to see their asses kicked at the football games. Living there would make me a traitor.

  My grandmother said Okay, she’d see what she could do. She had girls living over that direction, one in Big Stone Gap, one in Norton. Another one in Jonesville but sadly she was dead of the breast cancer. My grandmother got kind of woeful talking about her, tough old bat that she was. This girl Patsy was taken young, a little baby left behind. Patsy being one of the first girls my grandmother raised, so that was a while ago. She still kept in touch with the husband. She could call him up to see how he’d feel about a boy around the house. Mind you, she said, even if he says yes, this deal comes with rules. A trial run, for starters. She always paid the family something to help out, but I would be expected to be a decent young man and do my part.

  Oh crap, I thought, here I go paying the rent. I did not like the sound of this house with the dead wife. Who’s taking care of the baby? A husband ruling the roost on his own? There’d be nobody to remind him kids need shoes and haircuts and the shit they don’t really want but you still have to have to qualify as a person, like toothpaste. New ring binders for school. Not to say I’d caught my grandmother’s disease, but let’s face it, guys can be dicks.

  “He’s a schoolteacher, so that’s good,” she said. “I think he’s civics, or health. Land, it’s been an age.” She was flipping through her wheel of people, looking for his card. “And something with the sports. I don’t know about that, but he’d not let it get in the way of your lessons. He’s a pretty good one. Here he is, Winfield.”

  Dear Lord in Heaven. Sorry about the million times I took your name in vain because I didn’t think you were actually there. Holy God. My grandmother was picking up the phone to call the coach of the Lee High Generals.

  I was leaving them. Mr. Dick, my grandmother, and whatever was left of my dad in the graveyard she took me to see. There wasn’t but a flat, shiny marker on the ground with his real name and how long he lived, start to finish. It spooked me to see my first name on a grave. It could have been all me, first and last, if Mom had forgiven him. The graveyard was behind a church that looked abandoned, down the road past her house. The weeds were a sight. She put on her gloves, got down on her knees, and put it all straight. She’d brought a jar of flowers from her yard to set down on him, and collected up jars that were left there before. I’d say she cared about my father more than she let on.