The Blood: A Denouement

This Sunday, after Mass, we all went to the house on Williams Street and Grandma Keller made us a huge German dinner. Its our farewell to Mary Anne, and there was all of this crying, and then the next morning, Aunt Maris came back with Grange because Uncle Bill couldn’t bear to drop her off at the convent.

Granger came up to me and said, “Nate, when we dropped her off, Ma asked when Mary Anne could call home and the Mother Superior said in a few weeks. When Mom said, what if she needs to speak to her mother, the old bitch just said, “I’m her Mama now.”

I looked surprised and Granger said, “I’m tired of feeling bad about what I do. I hate priests and I hate nuns and I hate God.”

I wonder if Granger really means that. For my sixteenth birthday, Steiger comes back and he says, he’s taking Delia with him. She goes into fits and starts screaming, but he doesn’t seem to care. They’re moving to Washington.

I keep looking to the house. There’s no Delia there. There’s no hold over me. I feel sane again. Uncle Steiger taking her away was the best present I could get.

”She’s coming back for me,” Byron says. “she’s coming back for me again, and I’m going to marry her.”

June 1973, Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

It seems like Mary Anne went into the convent yesterday. I heard Aunt Claire saying to my little cousin Kate, ‘We’re going to see Mary Anne marry Jesus.”

Her convent is three hours away. We drive like we’re a funeral party or something, one car behind the other almost. Me, Byron, Kristin and Mom pile in with Aunt Maris and Uncle Bill. Their kids are all grown. Soon I will be too. Soon I’ll be going to college. Byron went to college and didn’t come back so hot. He’s with us now. Aunt Pamela rides in the backseat and she says, “If only Delia was here. If Delia and Steiger were here that would be a thing.”

I think it certainly would be a thing, and I’m sure glad they’re not, not that I don’t love Uncle Steiger, but when Uncle Steiger is around, then so is Delia and when Delia is around I don’t feel right. And she was doing stuff with Grange, and Grange is Mary Anne’s brother. Grange wouldn’t want to see his sister become a nun while he could still feel Delia on him.

The church where the nuns stay is beautiful. It doesn’t look like Saint Ursula’s at all. It’s bright with red brick and white pillars and sort of like Saint Agatha’s where the Blacks go to church, up the street from us. That’s what Mom says, “It’s just like Saint Agatha’s.” At Saint Ursula’s the mass is as heavy as it can get. It’s a lot like it was before the Pope changed everything and people could understand what was going on. I have to admit, I actually like it the old way, with all the Latin and all the mystery. And the church used to be so dark you could hardly see.

But in Mary Anne’s church, everything is bright, and there is a nun with a guitar singing,

“ Make me a channel of your peace,

where there is hatred let me show

your love.”

All the girls come in their wedding dresses, and Mom points out Mary Anne. Most of them have veils on and this one girl has some red kind of Indian dress on. Mary Anne looks so pretty and the priest gives her a candle and says something about she is called to follow the Lamb withersoever he goes. I keep whispering, withsoever, withersoever. Then all the girls are led away, and Aunt Pam says they’re going to have their hair cut off, and then they come back all in black with black crowns of thorns on their heads and they kneel and then they lay on the floor. I wanna cry for some reason. There’s this lump in my throat and I want to love Jesus. I want to not be a bad person and take those awful pills. And then the black veils come off and the white ones go on and everyone is singing.

Back home at Saint Ursula’s, I ask Father Gerlach if I could become a priest. He says that these days most orders like priests to have a college degree so I should think about that. I don’t have a taste for college or anything like that. I just saw the most amazing thing in the world. I want to be a part of it. I want to do something or be something that other people aren’t.

Even as I think that I remember that I am something that other people aren’t. It’s not like Mary Anne, who won’t have babies and who doesn’t have to take the medicine. I am a monster. Kind of. Even when I don’t want to feel it clawing in me, I can still feel it, sort of, in the inside of my throat, like a cough, leaping to get out. The Wolf.

I had a dream. I was running through the woods, and I was the wolf and there was another wolf with me. He was whiter than white and had blue eyes, and when he changed he was a tall man, blond, like my grandfather must have been once upon a time. But he was young and wild with a necklace of teeth about his throat. And I said, “Who are you?”`

He said, “The Wolf.”

Then he said, “Be the Wolf.”

I woke up covered in sweat.

I have decided to not take the medicine anymore.

Marabeth sits in the study, and she hears the clock ticking. The shadows lengthen. The door opens.

“Marabeth?”

“Loreal,” Marabeth says to her pretty new friend with the cinnamon hair.

“Grandfather says dinner is almost ready.”

She can smell it. It smelld like fried pork chops or maybe chicken, a really Southern meal, or at least a Black one? What else is she smelling? Rolls, macaroni, certainly something she’d never get on Dimler Street or know to make for herself. This is a cause for joy, she reminds herself.

“Thank you, Loreal. I’ll be there soon.”

As the door closes, Marabeth says, “Good things tonight. Only good things.”

But when she looks down at the journal again, the hand has changed. It is still her father’s, but it is shakier now.

I feel better now that I’ve stopped. The medicine and everything. They don’t know. They’d be so terrified. I’m going to go out into the woods or something. I need to go to the mountains. Maybe I can ask Grange to help chain me up in that basement the way they used to do with Dad? I don’t remember Dad. Just that he was weak and crazy, but maybe he wouldn’t have been so crazy if they had let him be himself. I feel more myself than ever. Every day of my life I feel like I’m in this fog, and I feel gross and sick. I feel so sad, like I’m under this wet blanket. Now I feel powerful and crazy. If Delia was here I would fuck her silly. I’d fuck her till her eyes came out of her head, till she was dead, and then I’d leave her on the floor and keep fucking her to teach her. The colors are so bright. I can’t stop myself from doing crazy stuff. But it’s better you know, better than how I usually am.

Most of the time I hate who I am. I hate my whole life. I try to feel better about things, but it’s like it’s no use. I try to look on the bright side, but nothing’s really bright, and I think about going to other people, to tell them, but they seem just as messed up as me. The truth is, half the time I want to die. Even now, I want to die.

You know what it’s like? It’s like I’ve got this pain, and the pain is all over. It’s in my head, it’s between my eyes, it’s in my back, it’s behind my eyes. Sometimes I feel like I could cry, and like there is no light. There’s the sun, and the lamps and all of that, but they’re like lights in paintings or on TV. There is no real light, not in me, not in anyone. Sometimes I wish I could die. And I can die, that’s true. I could jump out of the fucking window and go splat. But I don’t do it. I could take the gun Mom used to kill Grandfather, but I don’t use it. Because I’m a coward. Sometimes, I wish that Grandfather had killed me. Sometimes I think about teeth in my neck, ripping out my throat and it almost makes me giggle, to think of getting out of this life, and getting out of it in such a way. It’s not that I’m poor. I’m not poor or oppressed or anything like that, and yet, life is so hard. I feel like somedays I can hardly get out of bed .

Marabeth closes the book. She’s with him again. She’s with her father. He is a boy in an awful place, someone almost young enough to be her son if she’d gone that route, but here he is, with her again, and she doesn’t want to leave him. Her heart is with him and she wishes he could somehow know that back in the early 1970s. But now she can smell the food, smell the butter and the heat and the bread and the coffee, smell the sweet pecan pie, and she knows they are waiting, and she is powerfully hungry. Laying the book down she tells him, “I’ll be back.”