Kin

“It did.”

“Say again?”

“It did, Momma. I didn’t know why she did that. Thought she might’ve been skinny-dippin’ in the creek like she done sometimes, maybe cleanin’ the possum guts off, and Aaron had stoled her clothes, or somethin’ because she were all wet.”

“Go on…” Momma urged.

“I asked her what were she doin’ without no clothes on, and she said it was too damn hot and her dress were ruined and she’d taken a dip to wash off. I told her if anyone came along’n seen her, there’d be trouble. She said no one was gonna bother us, and then she came over to where I was layin’ and started openin’ up my belt. I told her to stop, was she crazy or somethin’ and she wouldn’t. She just kept tearin’ at my clothes till she had my…” He swallowed again, the words lodged in his throat.

“Your what?”

“My pizzle, Momma. She had it in her mouth, and I couldn’t make her stop.”

“You couldn’t stop because you didn’t want to. Your Jezebel sister had her lips on your dirty thing and you liked it, didn’t you?”

Luke nodded. Truth was, and he’d never denied it because lying was something of which he seemed completely incapable, he had enjoyed it, and enjoyed it a great deal, despite knowing that he and his sister, who was older, but only by a year, were doing something that went against nature, and worse, against God himself. But he had been unable to stop the queer, frightening, but unstoppable current of sensation that her lips evoked as she sucked on him. It had felt as if she were drawing out all the bad things, all the fears, worries, and the pain he’d carried within him since he’d first come to understand the world into which he’d been deposited. And when his seed erupted, he felt as if dynamite had detonated in his balls and would blow him to little bloody pieces. He lay there panting as the incredible, terrifying sensation ebbed away and his member slackened. Then he stared, open-mouthed, as his sister stood and spat, then walked away toward the creek. He’d followed a moment later, intending to ask her what had just happened, and why. He was hurt, a little angry, but more confused, and it seemed to steal a little bit of the color from the world, darkening it with a mystery he needed solved. He found Susanna washing herself in the cool clear water, her back turned to him, her hair wet, but before he had the chance to put to her the burning question, she spoke first:

“I love you, Luke,” she said softly, sadly. “And I’m leavin’. I know you won’t come with me, that you can’t, but I gotta go, gotta get out. I’m not supposed to be here. There’s a big world out there for people like me. Yours is here, with Momma and Papa. I wanted to kiss you on the mouth back there, but I reckon that should be kept for my husband. What we did…Lorraine Chadwick at school told me she saw her mother do it to her boyfriend and he seemed to enjoy it all right. Said it was a secret kiss, and now we got a secret all our own.” She shrugged, cupped water in both hands and washed out her mouth as if she’d just eaten a bug. “I guess I were curious, and…maybe I didn’t know stuff like snot was gonna come out…but I ain’t sorry none…. It’s your birthday’n all, and I know I love you Luke. Maybe even enough to kiss you on the lips, but like I said, I reckon I gotta keep somethin’ for my husband.”

“The seed of incest is the devil’s milk,” his mother said. “And it poisons everythin’ it touches.” Her playful tone was now gone completely, replaced by bitterness and shame. “Your Papa stood a few feet away watchin’ the whole wicked thing. You were lucky he didn’t kill the both of you that day, right there and then. Maybe he should’ve.”

Luke had nothing to say. If Susanna hadn’t sinned with him that day, he would still have skin on his privates, and maybe his sister would still be here. Of course, for a long time, he’d borne his punishment well, consoled by the knowledge that she had made it out, was on her way to a new and better life somewhere, where no one would ever find her. He fantasized about growing up and finding her, or maybe not even waiting that long. Maybe someday he would end up possessed of the same wanderlust, the same certainty that life was better Out There, and he’d travel the same path, his beloved sister waiting for him at the end of it. He knew he wouldn’t care if she were married when that time came. He didn’t want her for a wife. He loved her as a sister, and as the best friend he’d ever known. And he had always envied how much different she was from the rest of the family. She was independent, headstrong, and defiant, all traits Luke admired greatly, but never dared try to learn.

“Tell me what became of her, Luke.”

For two years he had thought Susanna gone. It had cheered him and brightened his darkest hours, of which there had been many. He wondered what she looked like, whether she was rich or poor, still in the South or elsewhere. He dreamed of her voice, and waited for her to write him with details of her adventures.

It was another summer before he found her old blue suitcase half-buried in the barren field behind the acre of corn. It was the same one he’d seen tucked beneath her arm as her shoeless feet carried her up the dirt path and away from the house, bound for town, and the strange unfamiliar lands beyond. Inside that suitcase were her meager possessions: two dresses, a pair of socks with holes in the heels, two pairs of underwear, a cold roast beef sandwich wrapped in waxpaper, a small hunk of cheese, a notebook and a small stubby pencil, and a small pink purse with a brass clip in which she carried ten whole dollars to start her on her way.

All of these things were still inside the suitcase when he’d yanked it free of the dark red earth that day years later. Also inside were Susanna’s small yellow comb, a rusted switchblade, a doll with a cracked face, and Susanna’s badly decomposed head.

“Tell me about the note.”

Someone had shoved a rolled up piece of notepaper into his sister’s right eye socket. With trembling hands, and hardly able to see through the sparkling film of tears, a sob caught in his aching throat, Luke had withdrawn the scroll and turned his back on his sister’s remains to read it.

“Two pieces from Leviticus,” he told his mother now, his tone grave.

“You ’member them words?”

There was no way he’d ever forget them. They were branded in his brain, a signpost on the border of a part of his mind he seldom ventured into. “’None of you shall approach any who is near of kin to him to uncover their nakedness: I am the LORD.’” He took a breath, slowly released it. “’The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home or born abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover.’”

“Amen,” said his mother, serenely and he could tell from her voice she was smiling. “It was his message to you, son.”

She had said that more than once before, and still he wasn’t sure whether she meant that his father, or God, had written it for his benefit. At the time, and the years had only bolstered the conviction, he’d considered it a warning. A lesson, meant to scare away whatever latent strains of rebellion might have been subconsciously forming inside him in the wake of his sister’s desertion. He remembered the anguish, the suffering, somehow infinitely worse than the day Papa-in-Gray had strapped him to a chair in Momma’s room and used his razor on Luke’s privates. The pain had been excruciating, but it was pain of a different kind. In the fallow field the day he’d stumbled on his sister’s final destination, he had sat with Susanna’s rotted head cradled in his arms as the wind chased shreds of the sundered scroll away across the field, and he had felt as if her death had shoved him into a new world, a terrible place where no one could be trusted and the ground could swallow you and your dreams. And if the ground didn’t get you, the coyotes would, or Papa would see to you with his blade and carve the sin from your soul, the skin from your skull.

“Why did I ask you ’bout this today?” Momma asked.

Luke shrugged, his mood darkened by the memory of his sister.

“’Cause you poisoned your sister,” she answered for him. “And for that she had to be dealt with. Don’t you understand that if we’d let her go, she’d’ve been corrupted even further by Men of the World, and they’d’ve sent her back to us once they’d filled her with their wicked venom, and through her they’d’ve corrupted us, destroyed us, Luke.” Her hand left his knee, and found his fingers, enveloping his warm skin in a cold damp cocoon of flesh. “We’re the last of the old clans, boy. We stay together. We hunt and we kill Men of the World. We devour their flesh so they cannot devour us. We hold them off and resist their attempts to convert us to sinful ways. We protect each other in the name of God Almighty, and punish those who trespass, destroy those who would destroy us. We are the beloved, Luke, and once the light has been shown to those who are not of the faith, they must embrace it or be destroyed. All your life you have understood this.