Kind of Kin Read online

  Kind of Kin

  Rilla Askew

  Family Tree

  Dedication

  For the two Carmelitas in my family

  y para las familias separadas en todo el mundo

  Epigraph

  A little more than kin, and less than kind.

  Hamlet, Act I, Scene II

  Contents

  Family Tree

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: A Felon and a Christian

  Sunday | February 17, 2008 | 12:30 P.M.

  Monday | February 18, 2008 | 4:30 A.M.

  Monday | February 18, 2008 | 8:45 A.M.

  Monday | February 18, 2008 | 8:45 A.M.

  Monday | February 18, 2008 | Morning

  Monday | February 18, 2008 | 9:55 A.M.

  Monday | February 18, 2008 | Evening

  Monday | February 18, 2008 | 5:30 P.M.

  Tuesday | February 19, 2008 | 6:45 A.M.

  Tuesday | February 19, 2008 | 5:30 P.M.

  Tuesday | February 19, 2008 | Night

  Wednesday | February 20, 2008 | 7:30 A.M.

  Wednesday | February 20, 2008 | 7:50 A.M.

  Wednesday | February 20, 2008 | 8:20 A.M.

  Thursday | February 21, 2008 | 1:30 P.M.

  Part Two: Gone Astray

  Sunday | February 24, 2008 | 10:40 A.M.

  Sunday | February 24, 2008 | 11:55 P.M.

  Monday | February 25, 2008 | 2:57 A.M.

  Monday | February 25, 2008 | 7:00 A.M.

  Monday | February 25, 2008 | 7:00 A.M.

  Monday | February 25, 2008 | 1:30 P.M.

  Monday | February 25, 2008 | 1:30 P.M.

  Monday | February 25, 2008 | 5:00 P.M.

  Tuesday | February 26, 2008 | Morning

  Tuesday | February 26, 2008 | 5:15 P.M.

  Tuesday | February 26, 2008 | Evening

  Tuesday | February 26, 2008 | 6:00 P.M.

  Tuesday | February 26, 2008 | Night

  Tuesday | February 26, 2008 | 7:30 P.M.

  Tuesday | February 26, 2008 | Night

  Tuesday | February 26, 2008 | 10:45 P.M.

  Tuesday | February 26, 2008 | Night

  Part Three: Welcome the Stranger

  Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | 6:15 A.M.

  Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | 7:30 A.M.

  Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | 8:00 A.M.

  Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | 8:45 A.M.

  Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | Late morning

  Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | 10:45 A.M.

  Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | Afternoon

  Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | 1:30 P.M.

  Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | Afternoon

  Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | 5:30 P.M.

  Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | 8:00 P.M.

  Part Four: Postlude ONE WEEK LATER

  Saturday | March 8, 2008 | 7:00 P.M.

  Saturday | March 8, 2008 | 7:00 P.M.

  Saturday | March 8, 2008 | 7:30 P.M.

  Saturday | March 8, 2008 | 7:30 P.M.

  Saturday | March 8, 2008 | 7:45 P.M.

  Saturday | March 8, 2008 | 8:00 P.M.

  Saturday | March 8, 2008 | 8:00 P.M.

  Saturday | March 8, 2008 | 9:30 P.M.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Rilla Askew

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  A Felon and a Christian

  Sunday | February 17, 2008 | 12:30 P.M.

  Sweet Kirkendall’s house | Cedar, Oklahoma

  “Your grandpa is a felon,” Aunt Sweet said. “A felon and a Christian. He says he’s a felon because he’s a Christian. Now, what kind of baloney is that?” She jerked the bib strings tight around Mr. Bledsoe’s neck. The old man coughed. “Sorry, Dad.” Aunt Sweet loosened the ties and snatched a baby food jar off the table. She pointed the spoon in her left hand at me like I might be fixing to argue. “Tell him I’ll be up there tomorrow. You tell him I said he’s got a serious amount of explaining to do.” She scooped up a dab of prunes. “Open your mouth, Dad. Carl Albert, hurry up.”

  My cousin kept licking the Cheez Whiz out the sides of his sandwich like we had all the time in the world, which we didn’t. Visiting hours start at one, the preacher said, and it was already twelve thirty. I heard a car motor outside and I ran to the front room to look, but it was only old Claudie Ott driving her Chrysler home from church. I squinted across the railroad tracks and the highway toward First Baptist at the far end of the street, but I couldn’t see Brother Oren’s car coming.

  “Dustin Lee! Get back in here and wash your hands!”

  I did like she said. My aunt’s kind of high-strung at all times, but for sure I didn’t want to cross her right then because Uncle Terry got called in to work the night before and he hadn’t got home yet. Aunt Sweet wanted to go with us to see Grandpa but she can’t leave Mr. Bledsoe by himself on account of one time he rolled his wheelchair out the door and straight across the highway to the E-Z Mart and everybody’s afraid he’ll get hit by a BP truck or something. I thought to ask her how come she didn’t make Carl Albert stay home so she could go, but I was afraid she might take the notion for me to be the one to babysit the old man instead. He’s all right but I can’t stand to watch him eat, and anyhow I wasn’t about to take a chance on missing out on seeing my grandpa. When I came back in the kitchen, Aunt Sweet was still trying to get Mr. Bledsoe to open his mouth.

  “Aw, hell,” she said, and jammed the spoon back in the prunes. I don’t know where she got the name Sweet. It don’t exactly fit her. Anyhow, her real name is Georgia. She reached up over the sink and got down a different jar. “Look here, Dad. Peach cobbler, your favorite.” Mr. Bledsoe isn’t her real dad—my grandpa is. Mr. Bledsoe belongs to Uncle Terry, and he’s not even his dad, either. He’s his stepgrandfather. “Carl Albert,” Aunt Sweet said, “if you don’t hurry up with that mess, I’m going to take it away from you.”

  My cousin licked faster. I don’t know how come he can’t eat a sandwich like a normal person but he can’t. I popped him in the back of the head on my way to the sink. He swiped at me and missed, but he didn’t say nothing. He didn’t want to get any more of his mom’s attention. He gave me the look, though, like Don’t worry, Dustbucket, I’ll get you back. We been fighting more since Grandpa and Brother Jesus wound up in jail. That’s Brother Jesus Garcia, from over around Heavener. They locked him up with Grandpa, but they took all the other Mexicans someplace else. Aunt Sweet don’t like us calling him Brother Jesus. She says it’s a sacrilege to call somebody after Our Lord and Savior. She don’t even like to hear us call him Brother Hey-soos, and that’s his real name. Carl Albert says Grandpa’s going to get sent to the state pen and there won’t be no place for me to live except in town with them, and if he’s got to share his bedroom with a dweeb, he’s going to make the dweeb pay. He says they aim to throw the book at Grandpa for transporting illegals and our only hope now
is the Supreme Court of America on appeal, and that could take years. I said having Mexicans in your barn don’t mean you’re transporting them—this was in the bedroom that first night when we were getting ready for bed—and Carl Albert said, “Use your brain, Dustface, they had to get there some way.” I punched him then, and he jumped me and got me down with my arm twisted till I hollered, “Okay, okay, I give!” But really I didn’t. I aimed to get him back. That pop on the head at the table was just a reminder.

  In the kitchen I dried my hands on the dishtowel and told Aunt Sweet I was going to go watch for the preacher. “Holler when he gets here,” she said, pressing the spoon against Mr. Bledsoe’s shut mouth. “Come on, Dad,” she said. “Open up.” I hurried to the front room and squinted along Main Street past the closed video store and the boarded-up bank building with its caved-in roof from the straight-line winds last April until I seen Brother Oren’s car backing out of his driveway. I yelled toward the kitchen, “He’s here!”

  When the preacher’s rattly old Toyota pulled in, Aunt Sweet was waiting with me on the porch in her pink rodeo boots and her bluest jeans, which goes to show how much she still thought she’d be going to the jail with us when she got dressed that morning. She was shivering because she didn’t have on a jacket. I had on my black hoodie with the hood pulled up, not because I was cold. I just like my hood up. Carl Albert came racing out the front door in just a T-shirt and still zipping his britches. He squeezed past the preacher coming up the steps and ran out to the car so he could grab the shotgun seat. I tried to lag back, but Aunt Sweet told me to go on. She had her arms crossed and her mouth set, so I did like she said. I took the long way around, though, by Mr. Bledsoe’s ramp. Carl Albert leaned up for me to flip the seat forward, and when I climbed past him, he knuckled me a good one, but I didn’t do nothing, just settled into the backseat. I was still biding my time.

  I felt kind of bad that none of us had made it to church that morning, especially with Brother Oren giving us a ride to Wilburton and all. I was kind of hoping Aunt Sweet might be explaining about Uncle Tee getting called in to work, but it appeared more like she was bossing him by how Brother Oren just stood on the porch in his brown suit, looking down at the concrete and nodding and frowning. He kept reaching up with his fingers to rake his skinny hair across the top of his head. Come on! I was saying in my mind, come on, come on, come on. When the preacher got in the car, he gave us a big grin. “Tell you what, boys, we’ll stop at Sonic on the way home and pick up a sack of burgers.” He said it like that was what Aunt Sweet had been telling him, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t. The preacher laid his arm across the top of Carl Albert’s seat and twisted half around so he could see how to back out of the driveway. I looked at my Iron Man watch. It said 12:42. Wilburton’s thirteen miles from Cedar, so traveling sixty miles an hour I figured we’d actually be three minutes early. But then east of Panola we got slowed down behind a semi hauling a giant piece of drilling equipment that took up half the road. We were practically crawling. I was about to go out of my skull. “Can’t you go around him?” I said.

  Brother Oren glanced back at me. “We don’t want to be breaking any more laws, do we, boys? It’s illegal to pass on a yellow line.”

  “Yeah, Dustball,” Carl Albert said. “Don’t you know nothing? Quit bouncing. You’re making my seat rock.”

  “We’re going to be late!” I said. “They might not let us in.”

  “They’re not going to keep you from seeing your grandpa, Dustin. Just relax.”

  But I couldn’t. I counted every gas rig and dead armadillo and roadside grave marker from Panola to Lutie until finally, finally, we got to Wilburton, and the preacher turned off Main Street and drove to the courthouse and stopped next to the little cinder-block building with the chain-link fence out back. There’s no sign saying it’s the Latimer County Jail, but you could maybe guess by the barbed wire strung crossways along the fence top. I leaned around Carl Albert for the door handle, but the preacher said, “Hold on, Dusty. We’ll wait here till they bring your grandpa out.”

  “Bring him out?” I said. “He’s coming home?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Right then the back door of the jail opened and out into the fenced yard came five ladies in orange coveralls like the guys at the Poteau Jiffy Lube wear. They were blinking a little, looking around, but they all went pretty fast over to one side of the fence and lined up.

  “Shoot,” the preacher said. “I was afraid of that.”

  “What?” I said.

  “What?” Carl Albert said.

  “Oh, it’s women’s visitation first. I get the times mixed up. It’s been a while since I’ve been up here.”

  People were getting out of their vehicles all around us, and that was the first I noticed other cars and pickups parked in the alley and next door in the VFW lot. Mostly it was guys getting out of their trucks, but there were also a few little kids and one gray-headed couple in church clothes climbing out of a Mercury Grand Marquis. They must have all been from Wilburton or someplace, I didn’t know any of them. Inside the fence a deputy sat in a tall chair next to the building keeping an eye on everything while the families came and stood in front of whichever prisoner was theirs. Well, that part was kind of sad, how the lady prisoners would reach through the fence to touch their little kids’ hands.

  “We’re not going in?” I said.

  “There’s no room inside for all the visitors they get now.”

  “What about when it’s raining?” Carl Albert said.

  “Everybody gets wet.”

  “Man,” Carl Albert said.

  “When women’s hour is over, they’ll bring out the men. Then you can see your grandpa.”

  “You mean we got to sit here an hour?” Carl Albert said.

  “Half hour,” the preacher said. “Y’all want to go to Sonic now and come back?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I do,” Carl Albert said.

  “You just ate,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t want to just sit here. It’s boring.”

  “Y’all could go take a walk. You could walk around Main Street.”

  “Nothing’s open,” Carl Albert said. “It’s too cold.”

  “I’m sorry, boys. I should’ve called to check which was which. But it’ll be time before you know it. Here, I’ll turn on the radio.”

  But the station he put on had church music, which didn’t really help anything. Carl Albert kept messing with the glove box, opening and shutting it and twisting the lock. I guess the preacher felt bad about getting the times mixed up because he didn’t tell Carl Albert to quit, so I had to do it. Not that he paid me any mind. Carl Albert’s only a year older than me but he acts like he’s the boss of everything. He found a Swiss Army knife buried under all the papers in the glove box and that kept him busy a while, pulling out the little scissors and nail file and stuff. I watched the people by the fence. It wasn’t that cold out, just sort of chilly, and the sun was shining, but the lady prisoners looked cold anyway in their orange outfits with their arms wrapped around themselves. Everybody was smoking except the little kids and the old couple. Carl Albert was right though, it was boring, because you couldn’t hear what anybody was saying, and plus it was weird how the lady prisoners kept smiling with their bad teeth and you knew they didn’t mean it. I mean, how could you be really smiling if the only way you could touch your little kid’s hand was through a chain-lin
k fence?

  After a while Brother Oren turned the radio off and started saying things that made me nervous, like for me not to worry, they’d had the prayer chain going since they got the news about Grandpa being arrested Friday night. He was talking to me, not Carl Albert, because I’m the one that lives with Grandpa. I’ve lived with him practically my whole life, or anyway as far back as I can remember, and if he gets sent to prison like Carl Albert says, that’ll be the second time everything has gone from bad to worse. Brother Oren said he was going to speak to the deacons about whether the church might want to take up a special offering. I was scared to ask what for.

  “They’re going to throw the book at him,” Carl Albert said. “You watch.”

  “Quit saying that!” I punched my cousin in the neck. He turned around and went to whacking at me across the seatback, but I scrambled over behind the preacher.

  “Boys! Boys! All right, let’s get out, it’ll be time here in just a minute.”

  So we got out and stood by the car. Carl Albert started complaining about how he was cold, and I said, “You should’ve wore a coat, Clodhead,” and he said, “You should’ve changed your ugly face, Dusthole,” and the preacher said, “Boys, please.” Finally the deputy signaled to the lady prisoners that they had to go in. They took their time putting out their cigarettes and touching their kids through the fence again and then they all filed inside the building and the families went back to their vehicles and left while other cars and pickups were pulling in to take their place. The yard behind the jail was quiet and empty-looking with just yellow grass and bare brown spots along the fence where the grass was worn off and the dirt showed. Then the jail door opened and the men prisoners started coming out. There was more of them than the ladies so they had two deputies to guard them instead of one. Man, I never knew we had so many criminals in Latimer County. You only hear about people getting robbed or murdered every once in a while here, so probably the crimes these men did weren’t so bad. Or maybe like my grandpa they weren’t even criminals but just Christians and felons, the way Aunt Sweet said. Brother Jesus came out the door combing his hair with his fingers, and then way at the back of the line here came my grandpa, and I took out running.