BADBLOOD_02

Itsey's small tight face was swollen and red. She and Chuckles and Apple Baby sat about the long scarred pine table and ate in silence. Dishes passed clattered. Flatware dinged sharply against tin plates. Squirrels scuttled over the snow covered roof. Chuckles chewed and listened to Apple Baby smacking. Her lips bright and wet with fat. The cooked coon set there in earthenware, sunken shape swaddled in porkrind, meat torn from its brittle bones. Chuckles looked at the coon's head and its teeth yellow sneer drawn. He chewed. Apple Baby chewed. Crows cawed. Who even sain Owalis run his mouth, Itsey said to herself, tearing up again. Tol you mama, Chuckles said, Kersey sain Lo done seen an heard him at the store. Itsey looked up at Chuckles, snot running from her nose. Lo seen him, Itsey said. Thas what I hear, Chuckles said. Lo seen him. An Kersey tell Dothan. An Dothan sain he gone kill Owalis. Everone talkin bout it. Itsey started to cry. Aint know how Lo seen an heard this, she said. Aint known at all. Chuckles looked at Apple Baby. Apple Baby shrugged. Seen Cain when I was in town last month and he tell me Lo passed on count of pneumonia. Chuckles stopped chewing. What the hell that mean then? Chuckles said. It mean Lo aint heard Owalis say nothin is what it mean, Apple Baby said. It mean Kersey a damnfool liar is what it mean. Itsey got up from the table and walked to the potbelly stove and added kindling and watched it flare up and take fire.

Dothan stood at the hole. Snow swirled about it and the hickory embers still smarted red with heat. He held his hands over the embers and felt them tingle. Ice dripped from his beard. He stood there over the firehole until he felt his legs again and felt his hands and felt the blood now running slowly about his waist and knees and feet. He exhaled and watched his breath come fast and white and then gone. Must've gone off an left the fire, he thought. Must've lit it up and set here and then gone off and left it. He watched a hare leap and stop and look. He walked out past the treeline and over the precipice and looked out at the mountains thereupon the horizon long and slumped and blue and then lighting up in patches with the sun peeking out past the clouds. He watched black birds scatter far past him beyond the mountains and the birds were not black but white in the light of the sun and he watched them fall to the treeline like pine needles spat from a fire white with heat and then come to nothing. He screamed and threw the gun and watched it fall and did not hear it where it fell.

Itsey set there in front of the fire and took a revolver and a small box from the chest in front of her and opened it. There set the chimes in motheaten black velvet. Itsey set the revolver in her lap and assembled the angel chimes, the set's brass now greened and dull, tiny seraphim moss colored, long trumpets like still greened pond waters. Itsey pushed the bells down on their base and stubbed the greengray platter with candlenubs and lit them with a shaking hand. She took up the revolver. Wicks spat and hissed then lit wavering and settled and grew true and thin, the flame suddenly moving the angels round and then faster and the bells sounding faintly and dimly about the cabin soft as the snow that fell still slowly from the sky.