They kiss then and lay back and roll up in the blanket like a cocoon.
Chapter 28
Jean and Kim have grown close. They tell each other about their doubts and fears for themselves and their families. But Jean is also growing frailer, sicker. She no longer plays house with Kim doing made-up chores.
When she takes to her bed, Kim sits beside her and bathes her face with their precious water. Her blond hair has gone wispy and pinkish-gray with exposed scalp and her face is drawn and shrunken. She reminds Kim of the shrunken head she’d seen on Ripley’s Believe it or Not on TV.
With Lucy and Sis’ Shirley’s help, Kim bathes Jean and changes her into the cleanest of Huey’s long, dingy-white thermal underwear. Her skin is the same shade. They bury her under most of her hand-stitched quilts. They feed her, they turn her and when she starts shivering either Lucy or Kim slip into the bed with her and hold her close. Her body is all bones and heated skin.
She sleeps, she wakes, and sometimes she and Kim talk, but never about the ham for some special occasion, never about Jean’s daughter, the traitor in the camp, swapping food in exchange for a ride out of the Swamp. Kim tells Jean about her ailing faith since she denied Jesus to the police woman to save Adam. She tells about the signed papers swearing never to speak the name of Jesus again.
While Kim talks, Jean stares at her with glassy eyes. When she is done, Jean places a vein-strutted hand on hers and speaks in a stunted voice. “I’m ashamed to say it but I don’t read the bible much either.” She pats Kim’s hand.
The wind whips at the north side of the cabin and whistles through the seams of the window frames, rattling the frames.
Kim is stunned that Jean thinks she wouldn’t have read her bible. It hurts. She says, “I used to...I mean a lot.”
Jean rolls her head on her dingy pillow. “Interesting.”
Kim tries to look away, at the clutter of clothes on the next cot and the cot by the door. Why don’t the girls clean up? As if in answer, Laura shouts at somebody outside—“Hell, no. I said no!”
“After people went missing, Shelton and I both decided it was the Rapture. He lost his wife and I lost my husband and son, and then when we got together, we wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again.”
“I see.” Jean yawns, covering her mouth with the hand she’d placed on top of Kim’s.
The cold room is stifling with the sour smell of fever and the oily kerosene of their lamps, even with the drafts around the windows and door. They have flashlights too and have given one to Shelton and Kim.
Kim thinks that Jean doesn’t see and it makes her mad and she is ready to go back to taking care of Adam and let Lucy and Laura and Huey take care of Jean. After all she’s done for this woman!
Still she’s determined to convince her, something she never would have done before. “I left my bible with a Muslim neighbor back home but I’ve memorized much of what I’ve read.”
Jean’s eyes close on crinkled lids. Kim thinks she is asleep again. She starts to get up and go.
Jean opens her eyes, straining to speak louder. “I guess you missed the part about Peter denying Jesus three times before He was crucified.”
“No, I’ve read that; I know what it means.”
“What?”
“Well, it means that...that Peter was given another chance.”
“Yes, that’s true, but think about how quick Peter was to repent and move on and how God used him.” Jean sits higher, inching her way up with her back against the wall. She groans. “Could you hand me that cup of water, please?”
Kim moves toward the make-shift table, an up-turned wooden crate, by the head of the bed. The white cup is half-empty, the water sandy. She hands it to Jean. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to talk.”
Jeans sips the water and hands the cup back to her, touching her hand with her icy fingers and keeping them there. Their eyes meet. “What happened? Why didn’t you make the Rapture, or do you know?”
“I do know. I didn’t believe.”
“Do you now?”
“Yes.”
“What do you believe?”
“In Christ. That Jesus is the son of God.”
“But you don’t believe his word?”
“I do. I try to.”
“You either do or you don’t.” Jean lets go of the cup and lies back, closing her eyes and pulling the layered quilts higher with her bony fingers hooked over the hem of the top quilt. “I want to tell you about me. About what happened to me.”
“Okay.” Kim is shocked at how quickly the little bit of color she had drains from her face. Is she in pain? She has to be cold because Kim is freezing, shaking beneath the blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
“We had a nice home, before Katrina.” Jean waves her hand. “Nothing fancy, mind you...but that’s another story.
“Anyway, you can’t live in the South and not believe the Christmas and Easter stories. But that’s not really trusting in God for your needs and going to Him with your troubles. I never did. I didn’t know him, understand?”
“I do, yes.”
“I knew Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. A fluffy coconut cake was Easter.” She opens her thin eyelids and her nickel-plated, fevered eyes stare into Kim’s eyes. “It’s doubly hard this time, but I’m finding that I’m not alone like I was before and somehow that makes everything easier. When I’m hungry, it’s okay. Even sick as I am, it’s okay. His hand is on me; His spirit is in me.” Her eyes brighten, then tear up. “I have that assurance of Him seeing me to the end. What can beat that?”
Kim nods.
“God knows our hearts. He made us. He understands how human we are because He made us that way. He didn’t leave you that morning you denied him, and he didn’t leave Peter when he denied Him. You and Peter were the ones to walk away. But after the resurrection He came back for Peter and He’s coming for you.”
“How do you know that?” Kim begins to cry with her cold fist pressed against her nose. “How do I know that?”
“Because you have love. You’ve proven your love for your neighbors and God is love. It’s no accident that we came to you and you came to us. We didn’t just need the food you shared with us; we needed your love.”
***The time comes, as Kim guessed it would, when they have to go into the other cabins to search for blankets and food. Shelton and Huey have been finding dead fish, gators, rabbits, and unidentifiable husks of other animals and reptiles—all starved or diseased, they supposed. They’d long quit seeing animal tracks in and around the Swamp.
Shelton tells Kim that he and Huey will search the cabins. But Kim volunteers to go in Huey’s place, since Jean is on the edge of death and Huey doesn’t need to be confronted with possible scenes of death like the one Kim witnessed while searching the cabins for lamps.
Out in the nasty brown air, freezing in their layered clothes and blankets, so weak they walk like two old people, they make their way, north to south, cabin to cabin. Shelton going first to spare Kim, though she needs no sparing. She’s beyond shock; this is a matter of survival. This is what you do when you get almost to the end and know it but struggle on anyway, if only for one more day.
Sis’ Shirley is giving up, giving in to whatever sickness she has come down with. No fever, she says, but she aches all over. She’s having trouble “passing water.” Kim thinks she may be in renal failure.
The first four cabins are empty. Shelton and Kim suspect either the park service hadn’t furnished them yet or someone has burgled the cabins. Adam had wet one of the pushed-together cots in their cabin and they’re in the market for another cot as well as food and blankets.
Fifth cabin, end of the row: The door is open and Shelton steps inside.
“It’s a mess,” he says.
“Good,” Kim says, “finally something to plunder.”
She peeps around him, her eyes traveling from cot to cot and the floor heaped with piled twigs, moss and snapped branches. She’s so w
eary, cold and hungry that she sees spots in front of her eyes.
“Some animal den, I guess.” Shelton steps forward and stops and holds out his right arm to bar her from entering.
Wrapping her blanket tighter around her body, she waits, smelling rotted meat. “Is there a body?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I’d say deer meat or rabbit has been dragged in here by a bear.”
“A bear!” Reflexively she gazes out at the woods, all around the park, up in the brown sky. “Shelton, no. That means....”
“I know what it means.” He turns heading out to where she is standing. “We have to tell Huey, but not the others. No use in scaring everybody. This is fresh, but up till now we haven’t seen sign one of bears.”
She stands staring into his deep brown eyes. Neither saying what they are thinking: that they are about to change from predator to prey. Kim recalls something from the TV channel, National Geographic, a saying: The object is to be predator and not prey; the object is to live another day. She’d never dreamed it could apply to her.
Kim has thought about death by thirst or starvation or cold, but not by animal, which has a more real and tangible feel. A power beyond her body and resolve to protect Adam from.
Chapter 29
On an icy morning, Huey sends Lucy over to tell them that Jean has died.
It is all matter of fact and no one cries except Laura, who seems to think that her mother’s dying is all about her.
Since they found out Jean had leukemia, Sis’ Shirley had been trying to build Jean’s blood with canned beets, which nobody begrudged her and, if tainted, may have been her doom instead of the cancer.
The cold and wind and dense brown air are one misery combined and doesn’t leave much space to mourn some poor woman who has at last found a way out.
Late evening, when the wind dies a little, Shelton and Huey dig the grave in the soft earth of a peat bog. The others, draped in blankets, gather around the rooty sod mounds and watch as they lower Jean’s body into the grave. She is wrapped in one of her patchwork quilts—the Wedding Band pattern. The pastel colors stand out like flowers among the brown and wheat tones of the parched dirt.
Adam, on Kim’s hip, twists his head side to side as if expecting something more entertaining to happen. His nose is running and his cheeks are chapped and red and he keeps wiping his nose on the blanket he is wrapped in.
Kim thinks about the bear’s den in the cabin. She can imagine a black bear plodding through the thinning black woods in search of food. She longs to get back to the cabins, which she can see to her right, blocks of drab wood in the putty-brown light. In one of the cabins she and Shelton had found a rusty can of rancid lard which they’d lugged home because it was all they had found and they’d had to find something. They are running out of food and the bear has to be running out of food too.
Shelton and Huey pray first and then Kim, who, because of Jean, now can pray. She prays for a long time, standing in the windless cold, in layers of clothing, asking God’s blessings on each of them, and for His strength to make it through the Tribulation and hold fast till He comes to take them home. She prays for Laura and her baby, for Lucy with a soft heart, for Huey to continue to be helpful and caring of others and not despair, for Shelton, her gift of a husband, for Adam her next first son to be spared from the persecutions that she and his daddy have brought on themselves. Then last she prays for Sis’ Shirley, huddled against the cold on Kim’s right, her friend and helper, who she cannot imagine living without; she prays that Sis’ Shirley’s goodness will be imputed as righteousness and righteousness imputed as faith. Like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses.
Standing around the open grave, Lucy prays in a low teary voice. Amen. And then just as they are about to open their eyes and go back to their cabins, Sis’ Shirley lets out a wail. “My Lord, my Lord, don’t forsake me. Don’t leave me here when all these good folk go home.”
In the queer brown light and concentrated cold her shrunken face seems to glow beneath her brown skin. She cries openly behind the brace of glasses, while they hug and kiss her wet face—all except for Laura, standing aside at the grave of her mother. Then she says she feels light-headed and Huey and Shelton have to guide her, one on each side, back to the cabin and her cot. They pray over her and with her while Kim and Adam stay at the other cabin with the girls.
Since Laura turned traitor and told the starving girls where to find their food stores, Kim and Shelton try never to leave her unguarded and alone.
Laura goes straight to her cot and lies down, tugging a filthy white blanket up to her chin. Her rounded belly looks like a beach ball she’s clutching.
Kim has learned from Jean that Laura had been caught up with a group of marauding Goths and had come home a year later, pregnant and on drugs. She had cut herself to “mincemeat”—Jean’s word—with razor blades and knives and hardly a part of her body was un-pierced. She had burns on her belly and breasts and weighed less than ninety pounds.
The girl, turned toward the wall now to keep from facing what is coming, as well as her sister and Kim, is shaking and crying low. “I don’t want to have this baby,” she ekes out.
“It’s okay,” Kim says, sitting beside her on the edge of the cot.
Lucy standing over them joins in the chant. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
“It is not okay,” Laura shouts. “The world is shot and no place for a baby.”
Kim turns her to face her by touching her shoulder. “Don’t you know that soon your baby won’t be here to suffer?”
“You don’t believe all that crap. I know you don’t.”
“Laura!” Lucy scolds.
“Well, how would she know? Nobody else knows what the hell is going on.” Laura sits up, blasting her sister and Kim with hot breath and a demon yell. Her even yellowish teeth are embedded in puffy diseased gums. “It’s the environment, stupid!”
“I’m going to check on Sis’ Shirley.” Kim stands, going to the cot by the door where Adam is napping. She feels truly afraid and truly foolish for fearing a frail girl in this condition.
Jean never really ventured into telling her whether Laura had changed after she got home. Obviously not. She had told Kim that Laura wanted to have an abortion, but she and Huey had forbidden it.
“Get the hell out of here!
As Kim, carrying Adam, is going down the door steps, Lucy pops through the door holding her ears and follows Kim through the brown twilight to her cabin to get Sis’ Shirley, Huey and Shelton to come help.
Laura’s shouting and screaming wake Adam, and he clings to Kim, saying, “I wanta go home, I wanta go home.”
Lucy tries to calm him; she tries to take him from Kim who can barely walk for his twisting in her arms.
Dixie appears behind them, whining and reaching up to lick Adam.
They are almost to the cabin when Huey and Shelton step down from the porch. “What’s going on?” Huey asks. “Is it the baby?”
“I think so.”
“She’s gone crazy, Daddy.” Lucy wraps her body with her long arms.
Shelton tries to take Adam, to calm him. “What happened to him, Kim?”
“He woke up to hear her screaming and he’s been like this ever since.”
Adam leans into Shelton’s arms, then back to his mother. “I wanta go home, I wanta go home.”
Dixie whimpers, licking as far as she can reach.
Kim believes that at six, three years since they left the little house along the dirt road, he likely wouldn’t be remembering that place as home. This would be home to him.
“I wanta go home. I don’t wanta go with her.”
Laura is still screaming, ranting, cursing.
Okay, got it, Kim thinks, he’s remembering the woman law officer trying to take him from her.
“Nobody’s going to take you, understand?” She wipes his wet eyes with one hand. His face is crusty and cold as ice.
“Lucy, will you stay with Ki
m and help her?” Shelton asks. “Tell Sis’ Shirley if she’s up to it we might need her over at your cabin.”
Kim walks off toward the front of her own cabin, hearing Laura’s screams ripping about the park. The sun is down and the brown has thickened to the shade of coffee.
While she nurses Adam, by lamplight, Lucy sits on Sis’ Shirley’s cot and watches, biting her bottom lip. “I’m sorry.”
Kim, teary-eyed, shakes her head no.
Dixie lies at Kim’s feet, dozing and waking and whimpering. It’s as if she too has decided she wants to go home.
Adam is quiet now, almost asleep, his long lashes dewy with tears. How could she have thought he’d forget such a terrifying episode? Maybe she should have talked to him about it, let him hear her telling Shelton about it.
The wind howls around the corners of the cabin. “Lucy, will you hand me another blanket to cover him with?”
Lucy pulls a blanket from the layers on the pushed-together cots behind her. Gets up and gently covers Adam on Kim’s lap.
“Thanks.” Kim is so tired, so weary, so sick of this crazy trying. The kerosene stink from the lamp is cloying suddenly when she’d never thought much about it before. Nothing’s working, nothing can work. So why are they still carrying on as if something will change?
They can still hear Laura shouting, screaming and Huey shouting back at her. The wind howls, howls. No, it’s Laura howling.
“She must be having the baby.” Lucy sits with her elbows on her knees and her green and brown blanket draped about her shoulders. Her blond hair is hanging straight down as she stares at her ratty, worn gray and pink athletic shoes. She looks up at Kim as if for reassurance.
Kim doesn’t give it, not even in a look. This is life as it is now, all there is till they’re as dead and dried as the corpse she found. Still, she feels the need to go to Sis’ Shirley at the other cabin and help out with whatever they have to do. She thinks of it as doing what comes next and next and for the best, habit, but her heart’s not in it.
When Adam is fast asleep, his eyeballs not moving behind the lids, Kim places him on his cot butted up to hers and Shelton’s, covers him tightly and picks up another blanket and swings it over her shoulders and gathers it close against the cold.