Special thanks to Gary Dreslinski for putting me in touch with Fey in the first place and making this possible.

Everything Life Carries On Without

The Sunday after Jeffy Larue turned eighteen, his great-uncle’s sermon came across all tinged by the birthday, like it was some kinda change on the wind portending Heaven knows what. Reginald Larue — everybody just called him Regular — had gone religious after that strange St Joseph’s Day at the end of the old world, had spent them two years after walkin’ away from a train wreck readin’ nothin’ but the Bible and barely speakin’ a word to anybody that wasn’t a question outta the blue, like “Why is Man made so’s evil can be pleasurable?” or “Can we be genuinely happy for the good fortune of others if we ain’t sharin’ the benefit, and is that happiness just a selfish way of takin’ on part of their pleasure as our own?” No matter what a body answered, Regular just nodded, without offerin’ his own view on the matter, a habit that continued through his mail-order seminary education and establishment of the Lowland Carry Church in one of the old barns.

Sometime after folks stopped dyin’, the farmhouse at Lowland Carry had come to be a kinda driftwood pile for the Larue clan of Jackson County, Mississippi, an accretion of kinship like smokin-yellow on the Old Fella’s tooth. The carry’d been an abrupt gash in the land, an artificial creek built in the eighteenth century by Old Will Larue to connect two tributaries of the Singin’ River, but it’d filled up over the ages with mud and wishin’ nickels and whatnot, and Old Will had lit out for the territories to find his fortune in gold or furs sometime around Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. Lowland Carry’d passed on to his son, and his son after him, and so on down two hundred-summat years, and when it came around that ain’t nobody was passin’ by no more, everybody livin’ forever, it was one of them places nobody stood to inherit cause nobody left it behind.

One Larue after another wound up there, not cause the world was actually gettin’ as crowded as they said on the TV it was fixin’ to, but because by damn it felt that way, and if you were gonna be elbow-to-elbow with the world, it may as well be the part that smelled familiar. Five generations shared that house and its outbuildings, all of ‘em gettin’ older but no nearer the grave, and only one of ‘em seein’ it all as normal: Jeffy, the youngest and last, born on St Joseph’s Day a year exactly after death wore out, and about six years before mosta the world got mandatorily contracepted.

Growin’ up, that’d meant havin’ a life with what seemed like a thousand aunts and uncles, everybody he knew fixin’ to have a hand in his rearin’. He was the youngest Larue and always would be, the only one born after — well, after. Mighta been legal to have kids for a few years after him, sure, but it weren’t practical, with the extra tax, the insurance, the tariffs on clothes and formula and toys, you name it, every little thing the government could do to shoo would-be parents away before finally there was nothin’ to do but put the ol’ foot down. Hell, already there wasn’t a schoolteacher left in Jackson County, and barely any in the whole damn state. You wanna learn trigonometry, boy, you wanna learn chemistry? You wait till college, then. You wait till you’re grown for them things.

“When I was a child,” Regular said durin’ his sermon, his voice vibrant and deep like you’d imagine an old grey bear’s, “I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” He went on talkin’ about how St Paul’d been talkin’ about himself at the time, and about spiritual growth, but now it was true for the whole damn race, the whole damned planet, seein’ as how even ducks and monkeys and shit like that had stopped dyin’. About how, you know, this whole thing — folks said that a lot, “this whole thing,” like no name people came up with for it stuck around — this whole thing put a responsibility on the world. When you turned eighteen, Regular said, you put aside childish things. In the old world — “the world of my birth,” Regular called it whenever it came up, which was a good deal — you coulda got married, coulda had kids of your own. Maybe you weren’t a full-grown man yet, but you weren’t a child neither.

So too with the world. It wasn’t full-grown yet, but it’d been let outta the playpen. Question was just what kinda responsibility got put upon it.

After church, Jeffy went down to the south end of the carry with some of his friends, down to where the Lowland cornered up to one of them nameless creeks. The water wasn’t as blue as it’d been in springs when he was a kid, but Jeffy reckoned that could be his eyes and his memory. Everything looked better when you were long gone from it — ain’t that how everybody always talked about the old world? Well, he had his old world too, he figured.

Jeffy had five friends he hung out with: Jim, his youngest uncle, was twenty-five or twenty-six or summat now, and kept John Henry and Amber Lynn from pullin’ too much “I remember the old world, I ain’t no ‘last litter’ like y’all is” shit on Jeffy and Omega, the fifteen year old black kid whose rich parents had decided they could afford him cause they really wanted a little brother for their daughter Kae Leigh. Y’all don’t remember shit ‘cept the kind in your diapers, he’d tell ‘em, which had been funny as you please when Jeffy was thirteen, but these days he kinda wondered what Jim was doin’ still hangin’ with ‘em.

It was hard bein’ around the grown folks so much. The way they looked at you when you was young, it was like they thought you was touched by something. There’d been what the news called “a rash of pedophilia of epidemic proportions” a few years ago during what you’d figure was the last gasp before the whole world said goodbye to children, everybody now bein’ in puberty or beyond, all the world needin’ a shave in the mornin’. It was like, as kids got rarer and rarer, them fellas who maybe had it lyin’ deep within ‘em, that latency, that potential, they grabbed ‘em while they could. Sometimes that’s how Jeffy had felt, the way folks looked at him, and he’d made jokes about it with the other kids, times like this when they was splashin’ around in the still-too-cold spring river waters, shirtless and shoeless and bitin’ the filters off cigarettes. But what he didn’t tell ‘em was that mosta the time, it didn’t feel sexual. It was some kinda longing, yeah, but not for his body, and hell, not for him. But he hadn’t figured out much beyond that, ‘cept that it hadn’t gone away, eighteen or no eighteen.

“Happy birthday, Jeffy!” Kae Leigh shouted as she jumped off a split-apart rise on the bank into the water, cradling a bottle of Kentucky rum to the wet red T-shirt that clung to her breasts. She didn’t mind you lookin’, but if she kept her shirt on, it meant she didn’t wanna be more’n looked at. One of them simple rules the grown folks couldn’t seem to piece together.

“Hell,” Jeffy said, tossing an empty beer bottle at her bobbing head. “It ain’t my birthday no more anyhow.” The bottle missed her head, and John Henry grabbed it from the water, tossing it into the recycle sack they kept down here. Grown folks mighta fucked the world up some in their day, but now that everybody had to live in it forever — well, it was like what Jeffy’d heard about his granddad A-Train Larue, that a man might be a straight-out slob in the world, but put him in prison and he’d keep his cell neat as you please ’cause he knew he didn’t have nowhere else.

“Close enough,” she said, and finished off the bottle, a good four or five shots of rum and not the cheap stuff. She peeled her shirt off, all slow motion like on the Diet Coke ads, mucked up a little ’cause she had to tangle the bottle out of the sleeve before tossin’ it behind her to John Henry. That was all the damn coaxin’ Jeffy needed, and he took his clothes off on the bank so he’d have somethin’ dry later and wouldn’t get a chill, waded out in that frosty ball-shrinkin’ carry, and grabbed Kae Leigh or maybe she grabbed him — with all them hands on all that skin, it was hard to ref that particular call.

They screwed against the old blue PVC slide been built when they was kids and came down here for different kinds of playin’. Everyone else hooted and hollered at ‘em, which got into a contest for who could call the best name for screwin’, started by Jim’s “beast with two backs” and on through Omega’s “c’mon, Code, toss cookies in her Tuesday,” which kinda stopped everybody short ’cause he had to explain what the hell he was talkin’ about, but it got everyone on a thread of urgin’ him on, tellin’ him to “puke,” to “blow chunks,” to “cough somethin’ up into the old pute, Jeffy!” Kae Leigh tossed some encouragement in, too, her eyes bright on him as sweat beaded at her hairline despite the chill in the air and water.

When he was done, everyone hooted and whooped and Jim and Amber Lynn took their turn, Amber keepin’ her skirt on and just liftin’ it up as Jim did her from behind against the railin’ of the old foot bridge, that wood screakin’ with each thrust, everyone clappin’ their hands to that beat and laughin’ like one of them old-timey garden parties.

By evenin’, they were all drunk and half-naked and kissin’ the edge of sunburnt. They’d gone through countless cans of the black kids’ beer and cheap wine, the combination of which left a filmy sour aftertaste on Jeffy’s mouth that even Kae Leigh and Amber Lynn together couldn’t kiss away, but he didn’t discourage ‘em from tryin’. He thought about it while he was layin’ in the weeds with Amber, the sun reflectin’ orange in the water in that way that caught your eye and made it hard to see, everybody quieter now, the smell of dank pot wafting from where Jim and Omega were huddled over a whiskey bottle bong. Amber had taken his hand in hers and just moved it under her shirt, across and between her breasts, as he watched the way her skin moved in response to the pressure, like every part of her was leanin’ towards his fingertips.

That there, that was such a nicer thing than “blowin’ chunks” and shit like that. Now he was gettin’ older, he was more into touchin’ than sex, cause sex was like this thing everyone made fun of even when it was all they did. It was like you had to do it, but nobody ever took it serious — it was like you may as well have been pissin’ in the river. All the books he read for school, either they didn’t have sex at all — which he thought was weird till Jim pointed out they didn’t have anybody usin’ the toilet neither — or the sex was all emo. Hard to come by, somethin’ you had to win, and more often’n not somethin’ that screwed you over.

Amber was a lot more relaxed, quieter, when they were just touchin’ — when she screwed, she twisted and groaned and hit her hands against things. But now she just smiled, eyes closed, guiding his hands. “My father’s left,” she said in a lull, all low and kinda singsong.

“For where?” he asked.

“I didn’t know if you’d heard, your family bein’ so big. He’s gone west, gone to Texas.”

“Aw geez, Amb.” Theoretically you might go to Texas for all kindsa reasons, includin’ buyin’ a gun and takin’ pictures of the Alamo, but when people said gone to Texas that ain’t what they meant. They meant the body in question had been took up with the spirit, joined up with them crazy folks who said it wasn’t right livin’ forever, it wasn’t right not dyin’, even if you didn’t have a choice in it. They went out to all that empty land in Texas — not always Texas, there were other places people went — and played dead. Didn’t eat nothin’. Didn’t drink nothin’. Didn’t move, didn’t talk, didn’t fart, didn’t open their eyes, lay there wastin’ away till they got to that point where people didn’t get any skinnier for some reason — that place where you couldn’t hardly breathe you were so tired, but you couldn’t die. “That shit’s fucked up. He didn’t try to talk your mom into going or anything?”

She shrugged, her smile twitchin’ a bit. “I think he mighta. I think maybe she gonna go too. I seen her goin’ through the closet like maybe, maybe she’s packin’ up. I dunno what I’m gonna do, Jeffy.”

He kissed her neck, lips parted and barely touching her skin, like he knew she liked, and she stroked his stomach distractedly.

“What’s Regular say about all that?” she asked him.

“Not much,” he said. “I mean, it ain’t wrong, it ain’t like it’s hurtin’ anybody and there ain’t usually kids to leave behind, people to neglect. But I think it ain’t correct, either. Regular won’t come out and say that, though — he says in times like these, it ain’t given to us to know God’s plan for sure.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I dunno, I been thinkin’ about it all, the whole thing. Even before Pop left, and before I knew he would. Maybe it’s like what people say sometimes, this is Heaven. Cause if it ain’t, what is? What was?”

“They used to think Heaven was a place,” he said, layin’ back in the weeds and watchin’ the moon. “I mean an actual place, you know? Like a high mountain. The way Armageddon’s a place in Israel. And Hell was probably, like, some boneyard or somethin’, some potters field. Well maybe it is, you know? Maybe Heaven is a place. Maybe them grown folk fancied it up too much and that’s why they’re all fucked up about it now.” As the sky started to dim, John Henry went home ’cause Sunday night was the night his family had evenin’ supper, and Kae Leigh and Omega skedaddled off ’cause their family had supper every night, and breakfast too.

Jeffy and Amber were quiet, kissing each other everywhere but the mouth, and soon there was no sound except Amber’s skirt against the coarse grass as she pushed against his body in desperation for somethin’. When she got up, Jim was waitin’ for her, bloodshot and smiles, and he took her arm as he walked her home-or-wherever. Jeffy didn’t have nowhere to go but the farmhouse, which was how everyone else got there anyway.

There wasn’t a specific evenin’ meal night at Lowland Carry, ’cause there was plain too many people in the Larue clan and some weeks you’d just have to be happy with your lunches or nothin’ but milk an’ eggs, but Regular had him a turkey wing or a coupla chicken wings every Sunday night, and Jeffy sat down to table with him, with a plate of wheat bread slathered in cane syrup and a little creamtop from the milk jug, which he cut up methodically with a knife and fork. He had mixed feelins, watchin’ Regular gnaw the skin and meat off them bones, not that he was a vegetarian or nothin’ but ’cause when he ate meat — and relished it as much as Regular seemed to be — he was aware of it more’n anything else he ate. Nothin’ died no more, nothin’ but plants and little bacteria bugs and whatall — you wanted a chicken wing, well, you had to cut it off a chicken that you knew was gonna keep on livin’ even without it, although eventually the wing’d grow back, sometimes a bit stumpy for the trouble. How exactly that was any worse’n killin’ a chicken to eat it, Jeffy couldn’t figure — but it unsettled him all the same, and maybe it was simple as that killin’, death, wasn’t somethin’ he had any experience with.

Regular knew it got under his skin, and eyed him as he licked the grease off his fingers. “Something’s got to be on your mind, boy,” he said. “Make you sit there watchin’ a man eat while you barely touch your own bread. You waitin’ cause you haven’t had a mind to say grace yet?”

“Yes sir,” Jeffy said. “No sir. Thank you God for this our blessin’, give us strength to do your will, Jesus Christ Amen.” He took a bite of the bread, still mullin’ the day over.

“Well?” Regular asked, and put the plate of bones to the side.

“Amber Lynn Bullock’s father’s gone to Texas, Regular. You heard?”

The old man nodded curtly. “Heard from his wife this mornin’ after church. Think she gonna join him. Them kids too, Amber Lynn and that cousin they took in.”

Jeffy nodded and didn’t know what else to say, what else to ask of this man who’d turned to God at just the moment He’d turned most mysterious, and hadn’t looked back since. “I guess I can’t figure out what I think about it.”

Regular took his pipe tobacco out of his breast pocket, his cherrywood pipe out of his inner jacket pocket, and started tampin’ the one down into the other. “You of a mind to go lay down and possum? Make like you’re dead and maybe the Good Lord’ll get fooled and take you into Heaven?”

“No sir, I ain’t.”

“You think Mr Bullock a damn fool?” There were only three kindsa fools in Regular Larue’s world — fools, damn fools, and Yankees — and everybody was one of ‘em.

“No sir, I don’t guess I do. Never had reason to think so before.”

Regular nodded. “You gonna miss her if she leaves?”

“Yes sir, I reckon I’ll miss her a long time.”

The old man lit the pipe and shrugged. “I reckon you know your mind, then, Jeffy.” He passed the pipe over. “Go on outside and have a smoke if you like.”

Jeffy blinked in surprise. “From your pipe?”

“Ain’t mine any more. You’re a grown man. Grown man needs somethin’ to keep the body occupied while the spirit works at a knot. I got other pipes, boy.”

Regular wasn’t much for gift giving, and was even less for gettin’ thanked, so Jeffy just nodded and left with the pipe, knowin’ that was the best he could do for showin’ gratitude. The bowl was still faintly greasy where Regular’s chicken-eatin’ fingers had been, and the pipe had a heavy feel to it, rich and ancient. Jeffy went out on the back stoop where there weren’t no lights but the stars, the torches of the camp down the hill, and the distant gleam from the nearest neighbors, the McLeans who lived a good two miles away. In the dark, the cattle slept, waitin’ for mornin’ when they’d commence to munchin’ on Mississippi grass again to keep their milk flowin’. The chickens in the coops clucked once in a while, full on Mississippi corn to keep their eggs layin’.

The old ox road wound through the farmlands, and a pair of headlights swung down across it, draggin’ a car in their wake laden down with all the things a body might bring along for a long trip — beat-up luggage and a Coleman cooler and faces against the windows peerin’ out like a goodbye was somethin’ they could stare down. Jeffy watched it, watched them familiar brakelights retreating far away like the gleamin’ red eyes you might catch on a fox goin’ after your chickens. It wasn’t the Bullocks, it was some of the roamin’ laborers who’d been helpin’ to put some new buildins up across town. But the starkness of them lights in the dark, cuttin’ a swath beneath the stars, got him thinkin’ about the possibility of her leavin’, and he took the pipe and the trifold plastic pouch of tobacco and walked the road towards the Bullocks’.

He stopped when he’d got up the hill, to stuff more tobacco into the pipe — which took a couple tries to light, Jeffy bein’ new at the art — and lookin’ down at the farmhouse, he spent a few minutes watchin’ his Aunt Sarah. She was forty now, maybe forty-one, and there she was: sittin’ in her room playin’ with dolls. She had three dolls, all of which had been hers since she was a kid. Now, Sarah wasn’t crazy, although there were some folks in town — and some on the farm — who’d titter and say otherwise, which is why it dismayed Jeffy to see she hadn’t drawn the blinds. She loved them dolls. She wouldn’t play with ‘em if anyone else was around, but you could overhear her sometimes, narratin’ their little lives, dotin’ on ‘em.

She’d been pregnant twice when she was young, lost the baby both times, the first on purpose. After the whole thing … well, she had three dolls, didn’t she. One for each of them babies and one for the one she coulda had in some other world where she was allowed. She did good work as an accountant and helped out with animal control when they needed it — if she wanted to play with dolls, by damn let her. Her husband hadn’t seen it that way, but these days couples didn’t stay together for any kind of forever — a body got restless just thinkin’ about it.

It was a long walk to Amber Lynn’s, and he expected to run into Jim on the way, but either Jeffy’s uncle had invited himself in or he’d taken the truck across the fields, which he did some time to relieve the boredom of long nights. He passed Kae Leigh and Omega’s house, strobe-lit by television and them nice soft white lamps, and gave a little wave when he thought Kae mighta been lookin’ out at him, but one casual enough that he wouldn’t look a fool if it was some firefly she’d spotted instead.

The lights were off at the Bullocks’ when he got there, but Jim’s truck was in the driveway and so was Mrs Bullock’s station wagon, so Jeffy prowled around, peerin’ in windows tryin’ not to look creepy. There was a nightlight by the bathroom downstairs, and in its glow he saw ‘em: Amber Lynn, her cousin Staci, Mrs Bullock, and yes, Jim Larue, all layin’ right there on cots in the living room. He let his eyes adjust to that dim light, and then tried the front door, finding it unlocked.

None of ‘em moved. He could hear their deep soft sighs, but didn’t know if they were actually asleep or just … well, whatever it was people did. Meditatin’, he reckoned. This musta been some fucked-up notion of a compromise solution — wherever they’d gone, be it Heaven or Hell, it sure wasn’t Texas.

Amber looked so peaceful, her soft skin glowin’ television blue on her left side where the nightlight hit it. Staci was still frownin’, asleep or not, but she’d always been a sour girl. Mrs Bullock, well, she looked — resigned, he supposed, if that was a word you could use for someone pretendin’ they was dead. Jim was unreadable. Jeffy’d never been any good at readin’ expressions on family — the faces looked too much like his own, and so in Jim’s thick brows and high cheekbones he saw longing, lust, frustration and doubt.

He remembered bein’ eleven years old and havin’ Amber more or less babysit him, although his folks hadn’t called it that. She’d fallen asleep in the summer heat on the sofa while sitcom reruns from the old world played on the hand-me-down Panasonic flatscreen, and for the longest, most stifling hour in the life of a man he’d debated to himself the ethics of feeling her breast through her shirt. Weren’t no consequences, he told himself, nothin’ but the shame of discovery. Couldn’t be killed, and pain didn’t hurt when you knew that. Grown-ups were too dazzled by kids to really do much by way of discipline. Weren’t no Heaven to miss out on, no Hell to be consigned to, and far as he could tell, no God worryin’ about what went on in this world anyway. Maybe his Heaven’d finally filled up, and that was all the boat could take — and he lost interest with everythin’ outside it.

And now here she was — and her cousin too, cute in that disappointed-by-life sorta way, and Mrs Bullock had clearly been responsible for a lot of the good looks in the family. Here she was, and Jeffy could do anything he wanted to her, and even if she knew he was doin’ it, the only way she could stop him would be to give up her game of possum. And why was she playin’, anyway? To make her mother happy? To — keep her company, somehow? To belong to somethin’? Or was she just givin’ up?

Jeffy smoked his pipe there, sittin’ back in a chair he drug in from the kitchen and lookin’ for any signs of anythin’ — lookin’ to see if anyone tossed, turned, mumbled in their sleep, and nobody did. Maybe — well by Christ, maybe there was somethin’ to it. How the fuck was he supposed to know what to expect from death or any semblance of it? He ain’t seen anything die but wildflowers in winter, crumpling to brown and disappearin’ long before spring.

The bowl of the pipe burned his fingers eventually, and he set it down, reachin’ over to pat Amber’s arm. It was warm, soft, them tiny little hairs like the faintest wisps of down feathers. He moved his fingers across it, pushing down the fabric of her shirt where it had bulged up a little, so that it — and through its thin cotton, his hand — was pressed flat against her chest, just below her breasts. It moved slowly and deeply up and down with her breath. He’d read some people learned to stop their breathin’ — that there was a whole, well, a movement if you’d call it that, of people who felt you had to stop your breath first, try to stop your heartbeat, so you could finally pass on. Like death had become a challenge — like it wasn’t about livin’ right no more, it was about dyin’ right.

He squeezed her breast, and then pulled his hand back, disturbed by how warm she was, and how carefully unresponsive.

Jeffy picked the pipe back up and tapped its ashes into the bathroom sink, runnin’ some water over ‘em to make sure they were out, and as they sizzled in the porcelain and the first hint of sunrise started to touch the windows, the church-like silence of the livin’ room was broken by Mrs Bullock lettin’ out an abrupt, chainsaw-like snore that shook her body before she settled down again.

Well, he ’bout leapt out of his skin, but then grinned, the grin turnin’ so hard he started to laugh and had to hold the side of the door for support, and the laughter turned to cryin’ soon enough, but that was all right. He picked Regular’s pipe back up and headed back to Lowland Carry, thinkin’ maybe — for the first time — maybe Sarah might like some company playin’ with her dolls.

THE VINE THAT ATE THE SOUTH.

The kudzu took over the stone field, the northeast field where once they’d dug a foundation for what was gonna be a Golden Corral but the bank never approved the loan. Grampa cashed the check for the land all the same, and his old Lincoln sat just over the property line, on blocks cause Gramma said if he hadn’t got the sense to fix her up when he was livin’ there was no sense doin’ for it now he wasn’t. Pop hates it when she says things like that. Pop’s Gramma and Grampa’s son and Adamae’s only parent, just as she’s his only natural-born child. Right now he’s off on a toot, which is how come Gramma’s got Adamae out in the stone field plucking up kudzu blossoms.

Adamae has never been to a Golden Corral because Gramma says restaurants are just a waste of money for any able-bodied soul, and Pop tells her he’ll bring her and means to, but never gets around to it on account of when he goes out it’s usually with a woman or cigarette-smoking men, and they don’t eat places where little girls ought to be. But she has heard from her friend Jimmy that they have a buffet, which is when they put all the food out on a big table and you can take whatever you feel like eating, even if what you feel like is just mashed potatoes and noodles and no peas at all. They have salmon, which is a kind of fish you can’t get from the creek, a kind of giant red shark with a swordfish horn, that’s what she pictures.

The kudzu blossoms are shaped like Christmas trees, flower-purple and bedsheet-white, church colors. They only grow when it’s hot like this, and Adamae is glad it’s now and not winter, because when Pop goes off on a toot without some kudzu sweet tea afterwards, he’s a grouch for days and sometimes throws things at the wall, like a baby. She has a basket she fills with blossoms, and Gramma will steep them with mint and sugar until the tea is deep and rich. Adamae likes kudzu jelly, but not the tea — the tea tastes like pot liquor without the pork. But sometimes Gramma will fry up some bread in bacon dripping to go with it, and Adamae likes to sprinkle powder sugar on it, so it tastes like donuts at the church potluck.

There’s a stranger looking her over amidst the vines.

Kudzu grows like a lava flow, and it’s up over his knees from where it grasps onto remnants of that stone foundation. He’s in jeans and a T-shirt and as old as Pop, she’d say, in a wide-brimmed hat that keeps the late-summer sun out of his eyes. From here he smells like sweat and company.

“Hi,” she says shyly, when he doesn’t say anything.

He nods absently as though she’s interrupting. “You’re so awkward,” he says matter of factly. “Not an ugly duckling, but — you’re not pretty at all, are you?”

Adamae’s ears warm and she doesn’t say anything.

The stranger lights a cigarette. She smells it over the smell of the blossoms in her basket and the pigshit on the breeze. She smells his aftershave. “It’s okay,” he says. “That makes sense. That makes sense. Who’s your favorite person in the world, Adamae?”

“My grandfather,” she says right away. “Wait, he’s dead. But he’s still my favorite.”

He nods and looks off at the horizon like he’s waiting for something. “Well, that doesn’t really do me much good, does it. You won’t remember any of this later, talking to me. Don’t be scared. Just get on home. Today’s the day your father dies.” He sounds irritated and for a minute she thinks he’s threatening Pop. She waits for him to leave but he doesn’t, so she takes the basket of blossoms back even though it isn’t enough, not if Pop has been drinking a lot. Kudzu tea takes care of hangovers, takes care of drinking. But you need a lot of it.

Her father’s found hours later in the west field, heart attack while trying to dig a stump out. There’s broken glass around, broken Mason jars smelling like corn liquor.

#

Years later, Adamae leaves the Star-Lite theater crying because it wasn’t enough for Jimmy to dump her, he had to do it right there during the previews and then get up from his seat and move three rows up to where Sheila was sitting, so Adamae could see them — see them canoodling, Gramma would’ve called it. He did it just to be mean, and why? Because she won’t put out? She’s not a prude, but he’s not the right guy, she’s too young, and they were only seeing each other for two months. You give a guy a little bit, a handjob after two hours of coaxing in the lot behind the Waffle House, and it opens a door, it makes him want all he can get from you.

She doesn’t want to go home and have to explain why she’s back early, so she drives to the diner in town, the one teenagers aren’t likely to be hanging out in because it’s square and the old waitresses frown down at you if you’re — canoodling. She’s not the only irregular there — at the counter is a stranger, with a wide-brimmed hat resting on the stool next to him on top of a crumpled-up coat that’s a little too warm for this time of year when you can get by fine with just sleeves. The man is easy and smiling and Becka behind the counter obviously likes him because she put whipped cream on his cherry pie.

For no reason at all she blushes after a second of watching him eat cherry pie. He makes her nervous without even knowing she’s there.

She has French-fried potatoes and a child-size chocolate milkshake she dips them in, letting the remnants of the milkshake melt in the chrome flute once the potatoes have been eaten. For some reason he’s still there when she leaves, and when his car won’t start she offers him a ride to the mechanic’s, since Gibby Tarton’s is in the next town over and there’s no taxi service this time of day.

He says just the right things, and it’s funny, because what he says is so perfect that hardly any of it sticks with her — as though memories keep track of what didn’t fit, and he just slides right in as cozy as bluejeans in a Buick. He says she’s pretty, he says she looks sad, he says just the right thing about Jimmy without sounding false or making too many assumptions, and they wind up having sex in her car, parked on the far side of the yard before the bend, far enough from the main road that she’ll see anyone coming along, but not yet visible from the house or Gramma’s garden. It would sound a little queer if she said this out loud, but he smells like her grandfather, and she loves that.

It’s her first time, and he doesn’t say anything about that, which she is oddly grateful for. It starts because when he kisses her, he does it in a way that’s never happened before — it’s not simply that he’s a good kisser, because she’s been kissed by good kissers before, it’s that he kisses her as though he already knows her mouth. He kisses her like he’s savoring her, tasting her, and that quickens her pulse and makes her feel hot and light all over, like down feathers and the peaches at the top of the tree, closest to the sun.

After, she feels full and drained, sore, liberated, awake. He’s passing through on his way to a business conference and she’ll never see him again. He’s made that clear without having to say it and sounding mean; made it clear in a way that comforts her and lets her be as she wants to be without worrying about seeing him at the ramps festival in a week, with garlic on his breath and their eyes darting away from each other like the arrows in diagrams of magnets. Everything he says is just right, even the offhand comments, the little things. He loves her favorite album, a Sleepy John Estes record she bought at a yard sale a year ago — she doesn’t know anything about it except her love for it, until he tells her about country blues and Blind Lemon Jefferson, pentatonic melody and Robert Johnson, “who sold his soul to the devil, you know,” he says, “not far from here, at the crossroads. He waited for the devil to show up, and sold his soul for the ability to play the blues like nobody else. Not far from here at all.”

She wants to kiss his neck and doesn’t, but later she’ll wish she had, and later than that she’ll remember it like she did. “How did the devil know to come?”

“Every man knows to come,” he says. “He always keeps an eye out for when he’s needed.”

He’s bothered, and keeps looking at her searchingly. “You’re so young,” he says. “But you still — you still look like you. I didn’t mean for this to happen, not when you’re so young. I thought we would just talk.” She’s flattered, relieved, and feels years older. Maybe he took her for eighteen when he first saw her eating her French-fried potatoes in the diner. But even if he was prowling for someone younger, she forgives him for it, because no harm came to her and nothing happened she didn’t want. She feels immensely grown-up for seeing the world this way, as an exchange of needs and wants. Like the air the plants breathe into our mouths.

He leaves her with a secret, and her life always feels different for it. She never wonders about him, just wraps him up in a box, the box of that day, thinking of him like the angels of the Old Testament who arrive for what needs them and then vanish.

The kudzu has overtaken her grandfather’s Lincoln, clasping it like a fist veined with vines.

#

In college she’s raped by a masked assailant who knows her body too well, knows her clothes and the feel of her skin, and she has had too few lovers for this to be true, she has had too few lovers to even understand why she can recognize the touch of familiarity, but it chills her more than the physical violation. And then she feels guilty, in the months to follow, that the sex isn’t what she hates most about the rape — doesn’t that make her a slut? And if it does, doesn’t that mean she deserved it? She knows this isn’t true, and would never say it. But the deep shuddering shame would be easier to bear if it were her fault.

She joins the Campus Christian Fellowship the way her Gramma said she should have, to have safe people to surround herself with, or a healthy dose of guilt to purge herself with. She really isn’t sure what she’s looking for. But he’s there, this boy who looks at her with this undisguised wonder that makes her curl into herself. He looks familiar but not in any significant way. He’s not unattractive, but there’s no — no spark, no tingle. They go out on two dates, because he’s so obviously enamored of her that she feels it would be mean not to, and she takes his membership in the CCF to mean she doesn’t have to worry about him, not on two dates. She’s right. He doesn’t try anything.

But he looks at her. He looks at her a lot, watches her, and she has overheard him asking other people about her, about things she likes, where she’s from, things like that. It bothers her and flatters her at the same time.

#

They run into each other again a year after college, when she takes a job as an associate sales supervisor in a company that sells carpeting to office buildings, including his on the same block. Somehow he looks more familiar now than in college. “Adamae,” he says, grinning. For a moment she remembers him being taller, remembers having to look up at him, far up. She shakes it off. He gives her a few tips on good restaurants in the area around the office, for lunch, and even offers to take her to Golden Corral after work, which she accepts. She’s been before, but it feels like the first time, as though that little girl in the kudzu has somehow been brought forward to that buffet. Salmon is nothing like a shark, now.

They talk about all kinds of things over the next months — the way the past is always fading but never dies, the country blues music they both love, the dead men in their families and the cologne her grandfather wore. He has a knack for making offhand references to things that make her head spin as memories are drug up, happy times, formative times — as though he has a list of passwords to open her up. Whatever she thought of him in college, she’s his now, and he’s hers — the devotion in his eyes is like a drug, and for the first time she feels no jealousy in a relationship, no envy, and it’s as freeing as removing a pair of cement shoes. She can’t fathom the possibility of him showing interest in another woman. It makes her more confident.

He’s attentive and affectionate, and listens to her. It’s almost uncomfortably perfect sometimes — she feels swept along, and by the end of the year they’re living together, living in sin, the subject of gossip in the secretarial pool. He quickly proposes and she accepts, and everything seems wonderful — Gramma even likes him, and likes that he doesn’t drink.

He works in a research lab doing work no one seems to understand, even — she realizes after a year — the other men he works with. They fear him as much as they respect him, and she pieces together that despite his easy ways with her, he commands great authority at his place of business. It makes her proud of him, and proud to be his. Things are good.

But then they aren’t. He comes home after a car accident leaves him uninjured but covered in a deer’s blood, and for weeks he’s shaky, as upset as she’s ever seen him. They still make love, but he makes her face away from him. His heart is no longer in the wedding preparations, and when she lets some of them slide, he says nothing. It’s as though he’s hoping she’ll forget to marry him.

#

She confronts him.

“It’s nothing,” he says.

The chink in the armor, the stutter in his easy ways, brings to light other things about him. He doesn’t have any female friends. He barely speaks to hers, or to the wives and girlfriends of his male friends. He’s competitive, but only if he can study a problem in advance or gamble on the outcome of something — at sports betting he is ridiculously adept, and when Todd makes a joke about it, he glowers at him. Todd is soon transferred to Maine.

Sometimes the length of his hair or the exact style of his beard seems inconsistent from day to day. It’s silly but it’s true. They’re the differences only a wife or fiancee would notice, but they’re there — a man who trims his beard doesn’t trim it exactly the same way every time, and regrowth isn’t enough to explain how his face feels different three days in a row.

She comments on it at one point, nervously, and he stiffens next to her, then distracts her with such an obvious change of topic that she knows she’s rattled him but doesn’t understand how or why, doesn’t know what she’s done wrong.

He finally tells her, when she brings up the wedding.

“I’m a time traveler,” he says.

He isn’t given to metaphor and she waits for an elaboration, and when it comes, it has to do with his work, and how he was recruited straight out of college because of a paper he wrote in mathematics, and how math geniuses do their most important work when they’re young. He was recruited young, when he was still malleable — his word — and not blinded by his own knowledge. And he contributed some mathematics that helped shape a project that invented time travel. That’s what he tells her.

“I was — I — I missed you,” he said. “I remembered you from the church group in college, you were perfect right away — you were just what I wanted — you even liked the same music I did! So I –”

His hair is abruptly an inch longer and the rest of what he says is a practiced speech. She realizes by the end of it that he has been rewinding time again and again until he gets it right, and sometimes she hears the reverberation of him overlaid upon himself. He found her, he says, that’s his word. Like malleable. He found her in different times and got to know her. He put a Sleepy John Estes record in a yard sale bin because he knew she would be there. He found out what cologne her grandfather wore.

“And,” he stumbles, nervous, ashamed, “when you were — when you were young, I was only there to ask you questions, I had talked to you so many times before, at different times in your life, just idle conversation waiting in line, and things like that — but you were — after you broke up with Jimmy.”

Of course, of course it was him, and now it seems obvious. The smell of her grandfather’s cologne on his neck, which years later he — a younger he — would ask her about and she would identify, unwittingly aiding in his seduction of her.

She leaves him.

#

He’s been a wreck, he tells her, and he has some fucking nerve. She hangs up on him and changes her number, doesn’t see him again for two years, not as far as she knows.

She’s suspicious of everything she enjoys now. Her life, her personality, tricked her — collaborated with him in the trap. She listens to Blind Lemon Jefferson and it makes her sick. She examines memories over and again, wondering where he is in them, trying to remember offhand chat in bank queues and dentists’ offices. Those strange little confessions we make to people waiting for the same bus. Those little pieces of ourselves we casually and freely give away because they’re worth so little on their own, never thinking of how they could be stitched together.

“You bastard!” she says. He’s finally tracked her down, she got a new job on the west coast and he found her anyway, under her cloud of dark hair that used to be dirty blonde.

“You stalked me!” she says. “That’s what it was. They have a word for it. You manipulated me! You made me love you!”

“I didn’t make you love me,” he practically growls at her. He can’t look her in the eye. “I made YOU. The music you like, the food you like, the life you want, I inspired it all. I made you into someone I’d be perfect for, where’s the harm in that? I designed you. Like guiding a hoop with a stick, like blowing on a feather in the breeze. You can’t hate me, you’re not made for it.”

She hits him, and he hits her back. Before he cleans up and returns to a time when she loved him, living in the little moments he’d left behind by opening her up to his advances, he hits her back. Before he comes to miss her enough that he waits for her in the dining commons parking lot, he hits her back. And the kudzu creeps, foot-a-night vine, covering the Lincoln in its clutches, covering the stone field, covering her father collapsed by the old stump, and the smell of Mason jar moonshine.

In addition, if you follow the Saint of Daybreak link at the top of this page, you’ll find that I finally posted the rest of the novel. Sorry for the considerable delay in the middle — a couple of major projects landed on my plate right at a time when revising the earlier drafts wasn’t something I could do a little bit at a time.

The anthology I Am This Meat includes my horror story “When Everybody Comes To Your Birthday Party.”

And for the first time since giving up the ghost of respectability and becoming a full-time writer, I’m participating in National Novel-Writing Month. You can read my creepy spookhouse novel Greywhistle as I write it, throughout the month of November.