Once, it seemed, she had been fair and full of promise. Tonight she was just cranky. Tonight she might scare the chickens. And she wanted a sweet, gooey tarbaby from the cookie box no matter what Nursy Jane had said. Sweet dead Nursy Jane. Sweet dead Sisilse Bane. Oh, the sweet dead children. How could Claud be left here being, asking luck of a white toad's stone, alive like this, while so many sweet ones perish? Once, it seemed, she saw herself as a dancer, until her dead mama filled her with enough lard and mola.s.ses cakes to change everybody's mind. Tonight she looked down at the stumps beneath her paisley robe and did not see what difference another tarbaby or two could make. Claud did not figure she was long for this world with or without. But then, a trip to the cookie box meant rumbling past Kasper John's cot.

The mountains whispered, the spreading elm fluttered outside her window. A puffy finger hooked aside the curtain so she could peer outside. Nothing else moved out there, except the watery slew. No deathdealers. No love. No hope. Nothing she could be sure of. Only wind milling in the marshgra.s.s.

These were the empty nights she fretted most. One of Kasper John's nights. She thought about the tarbaby a moment and reached a proper decision. She would just sit here, sit and think about it for a spell. The tarbaby would wait. But Kasper John, he would not wait much longer. The moon crept higher over his private slew where the flash floods ran in spring but never after solstice, where the road below their yard lay deep black and stony silent, and somehow in his sleep he felt it. These were the signs she knew too well; they inflicted strange dread upon her. Soon he would go out that door and walk. Wouldn't he?

She wondered where he might go and who he would visit there. Once or twice in the last few years she had caught him muttering to somebody outside. Always just outside the door, always far enough gone she couldn't quite make out his words. Maybe he was visiting strangers on the porch, maybe down by the road. She could never tell.

He began his travels just before his high, young voice dropped; yet for the longest time their mama never knew--and when her suspicions turned real she was afraid to ask. Claud was keen all along, almost from the very beginning. They slept side by side for so many years that Claud sensed her brother's stirrings even after he had moved to another cot. But her mama hated the unfamiliar thing, feared more than she hated. From the day her beloved husband died of yellow jaundice, fear had the guiding hand in their dead mama's life. Claud was the oldest and she could hardly remember the man. Baby Kasper John was still sucking his fingers in the crib, just drawing new breath from this world as their sire breathed his last. And from that breath onward, fear began killing her dead mama in slow degrees.

Geese flew honking threw the hills, ruddy ducks splashed down, then moved on with the seasons. But not Mrs. Turlow.

Mama never left the slew much in years to come. She didn't want to visit folks. Rarely, she would let one of her two children go down to the store in Cayuga Ridge for some necessary item, usually Claud since she was the eldest by almost ten years and the one with the most gumption. No, Claud's dead mama didn't risk much after her husband abandoned her. She clung to what little she had. She fed sweets and gravy to her only daughter to tamp down her spirit, keeping her here where she belonged with the shadow woman that bore her, and she fed ridicule to her shy child so he would never grow into a man, so he would never leave her like a man was meant to do.

Her mama gave what schooling she had to Claud and, later, Claud pa.s.sed it on to little Kasper John who didn't stay little for long. He grew tall and when the occasional crusty uncle would come down the slew to check on them, or in the brittle cold months when hunters would sometimes pa.s.s by their place and stop for coffee, why, Kasper John was forever hanging close to the older men, trying to soak up what he could, longing to match them in the endless drawl of highflown tales and sage advice. He liked the way they laughed though he never laughed himself. Sometimes, when they were friendly enough and didn't scare mama too much, she would let them camp by the road most of an afternoon with a bonfire and their kill hanging from the redbud tree. Kasper John couldn't be lured from their circle on those days until the kill was skinned and parceled out, until the last wager had been settled. And this made his dead mama very nervous. And her nervous conniptions worsened with each pa.s.sing year. She cast lizard guts upon the hearthstone, looking for an answer. In time, she shunned any and all pa.s.sersby. Love was out of the question. But Claud loved sad Kasper John, had loved him dearly, hadn't she? Surely this was true, for there was a tiny grave up in the chinquapin wood.

Claud heard his voice.

She looked over from the window.

He'd said something. It sounded like he was hailing some familiar soul, but the name was too slurred to understand.

Claud bristled; she still bristled after all these ages of his coming and going. She could just barely make out Kasper John's form in the shadowed corner of the room.

He sat up in bed. He sat up and she was breathless. It would do no good to question him, she knew that. He was asleep. He would sleep through the night.

Kasper John got dressed slowly, as was his custom, he dressed himself with care. Frozen in her moonlit chair, she watched him do it. He put on his dark trousers, his white cotton shirt, and he laced his boots with a purpose she wished she could approach. His eyes were open, his face faceless. Tucking and folding, he made his neat little bed. Then Kasper John shuttled softly across the boards, took his tobacco and papers from the fireplace mantle. Every step was like a clock wound inside him, slow-ticking and taut in this silent room they had forever shared. As he turned for the door another's voice broke the silence.

"Kasper John?"

She could not help herself. She often could not keep from calling, reaching out to him. How many nights, how many nights, how many nights?

He did not hear her of course. He was asleep. Asleep as she was awake and watching. "Kasper John."

Kasper John was elsewhere. He pocketed tobacco and papers as he moved toward the door. He opened it and went out. He was careful to shut his room and latch it, matter-of-fact as a man leaving home to go vote.

He might be back in half an hour. He often was. Looking just the same, undressing as he had dressed, and waking in the morning without remembrance. She was sure of that much. There would be no remembrance on Kasper John's part. Or, he might be hours gone, hours lost before returning to his bed.

Long after she heard his footfalls leave the porch, centuries after she heard the gravel shuffle up the road into nothingness, into the flux of water and leaf, she was still puckered by the window. The moonglow evaporated from her toadlet in the gla.s.s. The tarbaby meant nothing to her now. She dreamt awake. She dreamt she might roll across the room and take her dead mama's conjurebook from under the bed then find the proper page and go with Kasper John, walk with his long legs wherever he went; she would go dancing away, to wherever, to whoever he saw fit.

G O D L E S S S U N D A Y S.

Sunday the old preacher come knocking. Knock-knock. But Frank Jr. did not answer the door. Frank Jr. never answered the door no more when the old preacher came knocking and he came knocking every day of the week, about this time, shortly after dawn.

Why should Sunday be any different, just because an old longjawed, tuft-chinned preacherman chose to break his G.o.dless Sabbath? And Frank Jr. knew his was not the only door this preacher rapped at. There were other doors, other doors scattered round these woods. Actually, Frank Jr. seldom answered any door for anybody since his wife Althee had died three years back in childbirth, taking her killer child with her. No G.o.dless door was going to change that. Her dead. Her killer child born dead. Today, Sunday, would be no different.

No, Frank Jr. took the needle out of his arm and spiked the syringe upright on the handle of his vet bag. Frank Jr. rose carefully from his padded chair. Everybody wanted him to go out more, to come tend their beasts. But Frank Jr. didn't want to go out. He didn't want to open any doors. He didn't want to go nowhere. He didn't want to tend nothing nor n.o.body.

As the preacher knocked and knocked Frank Jr. walked out his missing back door, off the porch, and down into his root cellar, closing the overhead trap behind him. Down here he kept his beastly medicines and memories. He also kept a padded chair, a crib full of rubber nipples, and a stuffed felt pony Althee had clung to in her final hours. Down in this earthy wet womb he could once again hold close to Althee. His beloved Althee. His lost, murdered Althee, now sheltered by by-gone beasts of burden--Althee sheltered as he now was sheltered until, finally, that old preacher wandered off and away, gone until tomorrow. Gone like Frank Jr.'s lamplight would fade with his Althee and the oils of life. But today, Sunday, from his grave, Frank Jr. would bury himself from that drunk G.o.dless preacher's only G.o.dless question: "How went tizzypoke?" was all that old man ever asked. "How went tizzy...?"

P S A L M O F T H E E M U.

Listen close, but not too d.a.m.n close.

If you ever hear a drumming, a weird mumbly drumming while you lay awake nights on sweated sheets, well, it might be an emu if it ain't the sickness or the dying beat of your broke heart. I don't know if the emu loves me or anybody else, but who really gives a good gesundheit about some white boy's heartbroke heart? Ruby Ann did not.

Somehow, the minute I saw her and her manicured cousin D'Wyla coming through the trailer door with two tackle boxes I knew there was misery in my brew.

"D'Wyla's stayin the weekend, maybe longer," Ruby announced with glee, "and look, Shad, she's brung her little poochie with her too!"

I never caught the poochie's name, but I did pour it some beer before I slipped into the shower that infamous Friday night. D'Wyla dropped her two big tackle boxes on the s.h.a.g then smooched at my naked b.u.t.t before I got the toilet door closed. Not that she hadn't seen my crack before, since she was my own third cousin as well and played nurse to my doctor years ago as kids. But she wouldn't be coming to the reunion next week and that was jim-dandy with me. I figured I would get a free weekend's worth of her psalm singing and supermarket mag gossip, and besides, this upcoming family feed didn't extend quite as far as third cousins.

In the shower I gargled cold Schlitz and wondered why she and my Ruby Ann would be messing with all that hook and tackle. Neither lady had been exactly bred to skin a catfish or hoist a cane pole; come to think of it, neither of them had much grasp for anything but my Sears card and Sears was maxed plastic. Hadn't Ruby Ann and I been punching it out for the last week over that new Silvertone guitar of hers, the one I split and chucked in the smoker? Go ask the sheriff. She ran off bawling while I turned wild boar ribs on the rack and she didn't come back until she squeezed $600 in new whitewalls onto the Texaco card then wrecked her Cutla.s.s Supreme leaving Bull's Gladiola Lounge. But she was hooting happy when she came home. That was the main thing, even if only one of those new tires was still on-rim when B&B Wrecker dropped her heap Supreme in the yard. I told her I loved her and offered her a spare rib. She took it, ate it, threw it up and I nursed her all night, through the dry heaves and everything. Love conquers.

You can imagine my flabbergast when I came out of the shower a week later--only to find my little girl, our girl cousin and cousin's poochie sprawled in the floor with all those hot n'glossy fingernails. Both tackle boxes had exploded while I was out of the living room. The ladies were busy whispering, my very own pair of ticklebritches with a blue Tom Jones wavy and flipping out on our tired old Zenith. And those big tackle boxes were overflowing with chromacolor fingernails: trays and trays of magenta, orange and green acrylic nails, acetone fumes stout enough to gag a wire-sprung poochie--and d.a.m.ned if poochie didn't already look damaged as he gnawed on a tube of lip gloss. They ignored me, so I went into the bedroom and flopped with the Penthouse Forum.

My body must have been a rundown thing; because it was about threeish in the a.m. when I came around--still wrapped in my free STP Oil Treatment beach towel when I heard their weeping fit. I remember raising up for a moment, peeking through the accordion door--into the living room where a vague and dreary dream met mr. sleepy-eyes. They still sat crosslegged in the s.h.a.g, test pattern buzzing and both chicks hunched over D'Wyla's open Bible. But their tongues sounded different, queer as I recall, kind of low and siren sharp and desperate as they wrestled with something I could not hear or understand. I remember they both wore a new set of long spiked nails that kept scratching wildly at the air as they flicked pages and spilled teardrops on the Good Book. D'Wyla's were silver and my Ruby Ann's were bright fuchsia purple, the fingernails that is, and Ruby was chain-smoking Pall Malls like she always did when she was pent-up and trying to make a decision. Before my head fell back on the pillow, if memory serves, I looked down and saw that wiry pooch snuggled against my hip, sleeping it off with me.

When I woke up Sat.u.r.day morning, poochie was gone and so was my true love. Not to mention that G.o.ddam girl cousin of mine what stole her.

There was a letter, there's always a letter. This one was written on the flipside of Szechuan Juan's carry-out menu, taped to a dark Zenith screen, those airwaves cut off like my heartstrings. Yes, baby was gone it said, gone for good and she had spaken to the Lord and the Lord wanted her to straighten her life out and go back to junior college and maybe go into the prosthetic wig business with her cousin, D'Wyla. That's what the Lord wanted her to do. The letter didn't say a word about Ruby Ann's feelings on the subject except that she had a new born-again boyfriend and she probably didn't love me anymore.

That week it hit 104 degrees in the shade while I broke 101 degrees shaking and shivering in my double-wide. I did not attempt work on Monday; I took to running the air-conditioner frigid-cold, night and day, and by Tuesday I was fighting chills and fever and suicide and crunching sinus tablets just to keep on breathing. I took my Magtech field rifle out and cleaned it. I spread its lethal guts out on the kitchen table and sat there hours on end, thinking about power tools, thinking about animal sacrifice, wondering if I called up her folks and begged and sniveled if maybe they might tell me where to find her. And I would have too, if I could have stopped blubbering long enough to dial the phone.

Failure befriended me. I'm a lumberman by trade. I cut cordwood for ready cash. But I ignored my chainsaw and I ignored the feverish heat. I huffed until my reefer was all gone. I played He Stopped Loving Her Fata.s.s Today until Sir George Jones snarled in the machine.

Sometime early, early Friday morning--or was it late Thursday night?--I forget, but lost somewhere in love's horrorama I stuck my head into an empty freezer compartment. I stood waiting for hypothermal doom to set in, at the very least I'd wait until my ears hurt. That's when Uncle Orbuckle occurred to me. I got the word. I would go up and visit with Uncle Orbuckle, before the reunion on Sat.u.r.day. Soon the entire clan would flood our old homeplace down the fork from Uncle Orbuckle and there would be little peace of mind for him or me or anybody else until the weekend was done. This was my last chance.

Almost six hours later, sun breaking on the collapsed barn, I drove up through the mustard greens to his house. He did not look surprised to see me. He never did. I ate a sinus tablet then got out of my Jimmy 4x4 with suspenders and workshirt plastered to my body.

Uncle didn't seem to notice anything awry, though I'm sure he noticed alright as his long legs stretched out from the wolftrap he was lodged on, those high razor-sharp cheekbones of his catching first c.o.c.klight. Whatever happened next, Uncle O. would probably let it happen. His Choctaw eyes cut across the top of the coffee cup.

"Shad..."

"Uncle O."

"How about it?"

"She done run out on me."

"Run where you say?"

"Straight to Jesus and the welfare line fer as I care."

"Coffee?"

We took coffee together. I got a cup from the kitchen then sat drinking the s.k.a.n.ky brew on Uncle Orbuckle's porch. It made me sweat even more. My skull felt like a bubbling percolator full of hot glue. I ate another sinus tablet. After a little while I realized the coffee or the tablets or something had gotten me h.o.r.n.y. h.o.r.n.y for Ruby Ann.

"Jest fixin to go fetch them melons," Uncle O. said.

"Whose melons?" I was thinking about Ruby Ann's. And D'Wyla's.

"What's that?" Uncle O. did not hear so good since Korea.

"After melons you say?"

"Yaller-meated melons. Tilden Critchwald's got some sweet'ns this year. We'll need em fer this mess this weekend."

I pictured all our kinfolk converging on that empty homestead around the bend, before afternoon was out. Welcome to my nightmare.

"You ready fer all them kids and cranky in-laws?"

"They'll come and they'll go."

Uncle Orbuckle tossed the last of his cup at the chickens before setting it through the open window into the sink. He didn't seem too concerned about my predicament and I didn't expect him to be. This was what I required of my favorite uncle; acceptance and indifference. It was comforting somehow. Those who said he kept to himself since Aunt Nenn died didn't know him too well before. His house and yard were just more clogged, that's all.

Most folk wouldn't believe it, but my Uncle Orbuckle is a retired science teacher. He had been a good teacher, too, who found time for agriculture and schooling kids when he wasn't doctoring stock and dingoes. It was grown-ups what didn't set too well with him. All the dingoes were gone now--for the first time in my life--Uncle O. was without dingo. He said the wolves got some, the others got so elderly he had to shoot them. There was only one beast left out in the back pasture; a biological mistake, a hinny-a.s.s named Archimedes, who was born on my fourteenth birthday when Aunt Nenn fried me some birthday donuts, dipped them in chocolate then told me that little hinny had more on the ball than I did. Thinking back on it, she was woefully correct and would be until the day Uncle shot either me or Archimedes for cause. To begin with, a hinny ain't got no h.o.r.n.y to it.

Uncle O. was shoving junk out the back of his pickup by now, making room for reunion melons. When he got inside, cranking the engine without word one, I realized he wasn't waiting for daylight, muchless a lovesick drake like me. I drained hot scorching sludge down my chin and belly then ran for his pickup.

"Jist kick a s.p.a.ce, kick a s.p.a.ce," he was quick to say inside his gizmo-cluttered cab.

We were miles into the backcountry, on a hard clay road before he spake again.

"Who ya say got yer gal?"

"Jesus Christ and D'Wyla."

Soft beads cl.u.s.tered around a steep widow's peak, thick as his hide which never seemed to quite break sweat.

"Good as anybody I guess." Those black eyes stung, unsmiling as we bucked up a rockribbed incline. "Now don't let them emu scare you."

"You say emu?"

"See ole roundboy over there by that maintainer?"

We pa.s.sed a short, pink dirt farmer pouring oil into a roadgrading monster with steroid tires. He waved. Uncle O. raised two fingers from the wheel.

"One of Mitt Lufken's boys," he drawled, "used to own this parcel here. Senator Ginricky and his eminent domain come in and give that feller two bits on the dollar fer this parcel, give him that job with Smoky Iron and Chem to boot and kid let me tell ya, mineral rights never even come into the conversation. It went overnight from his hands to Park Service to Smoky Inc. with no stops in betwixt. They say he's a-drankin more and glad to have the job."

"You say emu?" I repeated.

"Sure, Shad, ole Tilden Critchwald's runnin hisself a herd of emu and they're mighty fierce when summer takes hold."

"Big ostrick-lookin things ain't they?"

"Man, emus are the future, don't you know that? Seein more and more of em around here. Just ask Tilden. Cheaper than cattle and they got em on the best menus in Houston and Atlanta."

"I don't believe it."

"Believe it. Year or so back, Tilden'd spend all mornin in that store a-tellin ya about emu-dollars, before folks up and glutted the market." Uncle O. chuckled. "He don't mention them emu much now. Unless, o'course, you insist."

We rumbled over a cattle guard a few minutes later, into the Critchwald's yard. The first thing I saw was the run of cages off beside their white crackerbox house. The cages were a makeshift telephone pole encampment, strung together with chicken wire, concertina wire, and dock pallets under a spread of valiant maples. I saw the long shaded craws and beaks of strange birds. Big birds with heads that bobbed fretfully, like their fates were sealed and they knew it and knew enough to be real nervous about it. There were about eight pens of them altogether with a feed shed in the big middle lot.

"There's Shirley," Uncle Orbuckle said. We got out and moved toward the birds.

Yes, indeed, there was a woman in their midst. I finally made out her squatty shape as she sorted through the flock. And I heard drumming. That weird drumming like an overlapping echo out of Congo Records.

"Perty bird, perty bird," she was mewing to one punk-headed wonder in particular. "Perty bird's a perty mama..."

Uncle Orbuckle crossed his arms over the fence.

"Shirley, you nursin that bird er is she a-nursin you?"

"We all fend fer ourselves, O.W., and don't you fergit it. See here, I gotta git this ole mama bird back in her pen so's I kin go to town." Shirley gave me a quick wary glance then returned to the bird she was stalking. Where was that drumming coming from, I wondered? She stepped from a gangly cl.u.s.ter of emus; they were long-legged, long-beaked and taller than she was with gullets shorter than an ostrich. They were ugly. As Shirley parted salt and pepper feathers and emerged, I noticed the feed bucket in her hand, the flabby woman barefoot in her shiny aqua housecoat.

I also got a bead on miss mama bird. She was strutting in slow-motion, away from Shirley, cake-walking toward a rank corner of the lot, where the fence sagged and rotten leaves mingled with emu droppings. The bird's great clawed feet found syncopation with the dreamy echo of the drum.

"Hear her a-drummin?" Shirley said. "She's a-drummin fer ya."

It was only then I realized the sound came thumping from the emu's throat. Just as suddenly, the bird did an about-face and came my way, eyes bulging, drumming up a storm. Her beak was shut, but I saw a steady pulse in her throat, a pulse that matched the spooky rhythm. And she winked at me. I swear on Elvis' jockstrap, she winked at me with the world's longest eyelashes and a hot s.e.xual trill sped over young Shadrack, rushing up from my Wranglers. The mama emu kept strutting my way and I got naked flashes of D'Wyla, then Ruby Ann, then D'Wyla, then Ruby Ann and D'Wyla together, long nails raking my privates. For a moment there, soaked with odorous sweat I felt nothing but love for those two naked gals and for that emu coming at me. Love and dripping s.e.x and h.o.r.n.y abandon. The emu boogied up to me, bug-eyeing my merchandise, only a fence separating our l.u.s.t as I fumbled in my shirt for a sinus tablet.

"Shirley?"

"Perty birdy, perty--my goodness, O.W., git to the point."

"Where's that ole boy o'yours? Tilden promised me some melons."

The pretty bird winked again then backed off from me. She was looking lovelier by the minute.

"Well, he's down to the store, or so he says. Help yerself to Daddy's melons. Got too many melons and no hogs to speak of."

The mama emu tossed her head, petulant and proud, she turned away--swishing her tail toward Mrs. Critchwald. The rest of the flock scattered across the pen, big emu and baby emu alike, as the barefoot woman pampered her harem queen with soft whispers and juicy tidbits, coaxing the vixen emu from their covey.

We ran the truck up the road to Tilden Critchwald's melon patch. Uncle O. eased his tires down the furrows betwixt sandy banks of watermelon.

"Sandy soil grows em the sweetest. That's why my own thumpers are generally poor, ain't fit to eat, less'n you're a swayback mule. My gumbo grows a mealy melon."