A Choir of Ill Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

in a tube wasn’t pertinent. The wheel of the universe didn’t turn when the cream went bad. Logarithms, geometry, and algebra did not apply to the height of the river during flood season.
    And who exactly could afford the time for that sort of schooling? Crops needed planting, fence posts fixed, grandpa’s colostomy bag cleaned out, and rituals to be performed. The new houses became hovels filled with pigs, goats, and buckets of slop. There are men who do not yet trust lightbulbs.
    The vacant hospital that bore my father’s name couldn’t run without the sick and eventually closed its doors. Kingdom Come had found its medicine in the granny witches and bog bottoms for a hundred years, and the doctors wouldn’t take eggs or turpentine in trade.
    Draining the swamp was impossible and everybody knew it. Even my dad knew it, I think. It was an act of arrogance and pride on his part, and he deserved whatever happened because of his conceit. Despite an army of screaming machinery and a parade of two hundred men, he never cleared a whole foot of the bayou. Each failure brought him closer to the living heart of his own hatred.
    My father loved my brothers better than me, which I can understand and even respect. He cared for them in the same way a hostage learns to show regard for his captor, as the tortured comes to welcome the rope, and a suicide grows eager for the skinning knife of his own flaying. This is a rare and ultimate grace.
    He had no other choice, which means that his love, too, added to the killing of him.
    Evil followed my father through every minute of his life, including the final instant when he threw himself into the mill. Palpable, omnipresent, and altogether indifferent. It’s an anguish I’ve come to understand over the years. I fill his clothes and shoes. We are nearly the same size and take up almost an equal amount of displacement in the world. We are virtually the same height and weight, with the identical name. His void lives on, awaiting me in this house, beyond the weeds, at the center of the shower, and breathing heavily in back of my truck.
    I am as grounded to my brothers as if I were one of them. Which I am.
    So I continue checking the paper for a missing six-year-old kid or some word on my mother, and still there’s no mention of either.
     
    A BBOT E ARL IS A HELL OF A SQUARE DANCER EVEN IN his robes. He hikes them up and shows off his salt-stump knees to everyone at the barn dance. There are trails and spatters of blood across his skin because he’s a penitent who’s sewn catclaw briars and thorns into his vestments. He calls out with an occasional “Yee Ha!” which he doesn’t consider to be talking. He can only speak at sixth hour, according to his vows.
    I keep waiting for Drabs to show up but he doesn’t. I look out the windows at the dogs cowering in the dirty straw. Maggie stands on the other side of the barnyard, wary, gliding easily away from me whenever I move toward her.
    We circle like angry, heated beasts.
     
    T HEY HOLD A TOWN MEETING TO FIND OUT WHAT TO do about the dogs being kicked, but folks are so scared to leave Spot and Cody and Byron and Sienna and Criswell and all the others behind for the evening that only a few people show up. Cat lovers mostly, I suspect.
    Sheriff Burke is having a hard go of it, pawing his chin. “At this time, we have no suspects.”
    “No suspects, you say!” shouts Velma Coots, who has given a pinkie hoping to get to the bottom of this, and she expects no less sacrifice from the police. “I believe that every man wearing size twelve shoes is a suspect, for sure! That’s how it seems to me. And don’t you turn a blind eye to any woman with big feet either.”
    There is hesitant agreement and some nods of approval from all around the room.
    Burke is a little man who suffers from short guy syndrome. He’s piqued and always keeps his hat and boots on to gain the extra few inches. His insecurities show through every time he tries to