3
Until James Lee’s third year up in the Ozarks in Taney County, Missouri, the same ritual was repeated on a weekly basis. When Uncle Arlen returned from the lumber camps or the lead mine he sometimes found regular work at, he would take Marilynn Hope from the attic loft she was sequestered in and drag her bodily down to Bryant Creek. Along with James Lee’s Auntie Maretta, they would read from the Book of Common Prayer as Marilynn alternately whimpered and growled like an animal.
Though James Lee grew strong in the simple ways of hill folk, the taint on his mother never lessened. She was a filthy, mad thing dressed in rags with wild, glistening marbles for eyes. Uncle Arlen kept her tied up in the loft where she ate insects and shit herself, whispering to those no one else could see and scratching odd symbols and words into the roughhewn walls with her long yellow nails.
But once a week…purification.
James Lee would sit in the dirt, scratching around with a stick, watching with disinterest what they did with the crazy woman. Uncle Arlen and Auntie Maretta would drag her out with a rope looped around her throat. They’d strip her and toss her into the creek, jumping in with her. Taking turns, one would read from the prayer book and the other would dunk Marilynn into the water, holding her under until she quit thrashing. Uncle Arlen said it would drive the demons from her through baptismal in “Christ’s very waters”.
James Lee had seen it done many, many times, but it had not helped. Though at three years of age he could not understand nor fathom what it was all about, he knew whatever it was they were doing didn’t work. Dunk her, preach to her, dunk her some more, preach some more. He decided it was probably a game…but one only the adults could play. Because whenever he tried to edge closer, wanting badly to splash in the water, too, Uncle Arlen told him to keep away, keep away, hear?
But after three years of proper baptizing and the Lord’s word, Marilynn was no better. So Uncle Arlen imprisoned her in a shack in the hills above the cabin so they wouldn’t have to listen to “that heathen madness no more”. James Lee wasn’t allowed to go up there. Uncle Arlen and Auntie Maretta took care of the crazy woman’s needs-feeding and watering her like any of the stock on that hardscrabble farm.
It was a hard life up in the Ozarks, miles and miles from anywhere that might have been considered even remotely civilized. James Lee attended a ramshackle school over in the next hollow yonder, learned to read and write. The other children kept their distance, for they knew he was the son of the woman up in the shack, the woman everyone knew was “teched in the head”. The kids said-but only behind James Lee’s back for even as a schoolboy he had a virulent, raging temper-that the crazy woman ate rats and snakes and toads. That she had two heads, one she gibbered with and one she ate with. But maybe, too, they kept away from James Lee because they could smell something on him, something bad.
So he clung to the Cobb farm, slopping hogs and cleaning pens and picking rocks and chopping wood. He took great, unsavory relish in watching Uncle Arlen put chickens to the hatchet. Liked how their blood spurted from their necks and how, even when dead, they seemed to live on.
“ Can folks do that, Uncle?” he asked one day. “Even if they’s all dead?”
Uncle Arlen made to swat at him as he often did, but held his hand back, fixed him with those fierce, unforgiving eyes. “Boy…that is, folks is dead they’s jus’ dead is all, they cain’t walk about and such and if’n they do…” He stopped himself there, scratched at his beard. “Well, they cain’t boy. They jus’ cain’t.”
“ But-”
“ Ain’t no buts, boy! No back to work with ye! Mind me, boy!”
And the years passed and James Lee got bigger and the children gave him a wider birth except for Rawley Cummings who took it upon himself to tell James Lee that he was no better than the crazy woman in the shack yonder. That, given time, he would drink piss and rut with hogs, too. It was a given. James Lee…though three years younger…jumped the boy like a mountain cat with a thorn digging into its ass. He kicked and punched, bit and clawed. It took four boys to pull him free. Schoolmaster Parnes gave him a good thrashing for that one and Uncle Arlen beat him so hard he closed both his eyes.
To which Auntie Maretta said, “Not m’ boy, not m’ sweet little angel Jimmy Lee…don’t ye lay a hand on him! Don’t ye dare lay a hand on him!”
So Uncle Arlen ceased beating him and took the hickory switch to his wife instead. But that got it out of him. Like other times when he got heavy with his fists, he went up into the hills to do some drinking. When he came back, he was better.
The Devil was purged.
One night, when they thought he was sleeping, James Lee heard them talking by the stove in hushed voices.
“ Don’t never wan’ that boy finding out, hear?” Uncle Arlen said in his gravelly voice. “Don’t need to know that woman’s his mother.”
“ Never ever,” Auntie Maretta told him. “Why, Jimmy Lee…he’s m’ boy, m’ big and proud boy. He ain’t like her, cain’t ye see? He’s like m’ own flesh.”
“ He ain’t though, woman,” Uncle Arlen pointed out. “Place he comes from…well things jus’ ain’t right there. Ain’t proper.”
Auntie Maretta chewed on that for a time, decided she didn’t like the taste and spit it right back out. “He’s more mine than he is hers. Don’t ye see? Lord above, sometimes I wish she’d up and expire.”
“ Woman, now she’s kin.”
“ Y’all wish it, too, Arlen Cobb.”
“ In a weaker moment, yessum. But, hell, ain’t happenin’…she’s up in the shack doin’ what she does and livin’ on…how can that be, woman? How can that be? Don’t even freeze to death proper in the winter…now how is that?”
But Auntie Maretta didn’t know. “Hexed, is all.”
“ I jus’ worry about that boy…he carries the taint on him and ye know it. What’s in her is in him. Blood’ll tell and it’ll tell every time. Cousin Marilynn ain’t scarcely human, I figure. That whole brood is cursed…Jesus, lookit her old man, kilt himself and what! And him a preacher.”
“ Easterners,” Auntie Maretta said. “They ain’t right in the head.”
“ Neither is that boy…he likes blood and killin’ too much. Like his mama, he carries the taint on his soul…”
James Lee was thirteen when he heard that.
But it hadn’t been the first time.
He didn’t know all the story, but he knew enough by then to put some of it together. That crazy woman was his mother and they had come from back east, from some awful place of witches and tainted heredity and things too awful to put into words. At night, he’d lay there and think on it and think on it some more. One way or another, come hell or high water, he was going to learn what it was all about. He figured his first step was to climb up into the hills and get a look at… at his mother. He was banned from going up there, but maybe knowledge was worth a good beating.
The very next winter he got his chance.
A bad blizzard had set its teeth into the Ozarks and snow was drifted up near the windows which were locked tight with patterns of frost. Rags had been stuffed in the cracks to keep the wind out, but there was still a chill in the cabin. A chill that set upon you like something hungry if you strayed too far from the fire. James Lee was sitting before it, working out some arithmetic problems by candlelight. His Uncle and Auntie sat at the hardwood table, him with his pipe and her with her knitting.
Whenever Auntie Maretta caught his eyes, she’d give him a sly, secretive smile that spoke of love and trust and faith. A look that said, yer a good boy and I knows it.
Whenever Uncle Arlen caught his eyes, he gave him a hard, withering look that simply said, mind yer
