long and gaunt and his hair a white bristle-brush, wanted to talk to Dad about
the murder, but Dad shook his head and wouldn’t go into it. Grandmomma Sarah
asked me if I was playing baseball this year, and I said I was. She had a
fat-cheeked, kind face and pale blue eyes in nests of wrinkles, but I knew
that oftentimes Granddaddy Jaybird’s ways made her spit with anger.
Because of the rain, the windows were shut tight and the air was really
getting muggy. The floorboards were wet, the walls leaked, and the fans
groaned as they turned. The church smelled of a hundred different kinds of
perfume, shaving lotion, and hair tonic, plus the sweet aromas of blossoms
adorning lapels and hats. The choir filed in, wearing their purple robes.
Before the first song was finished, I was sweating under my shirt. We stood
up, sang a hymn, and sat down. Two overstuffed women—Mrs. Garrison and Mrs.
Prathmore—came up to the front to talk about the donation fund for the
poverty-stricken families of Adams Valley. Then we stood up, sang another
hymn, and sat down. Both of my grandfathers had voices like bullfrogs battling
in a swamp pond.
Plump, round-faced Reverend Richmond Lovoy stepped behind the pulpit and
began to talk about what a glorious day it was, with Jesus risen from the dead
and all. Reverend Lovoy had a comma of brown hair over his left eye, the sides
of his hair gone gray, and every Sunday without fail his brushed-back hair
pulled loose from its shellacked moorings and slid down over his face like a
brown flood as he preached and gestured. His wife was named Esther, their
three children Matthew, Luke, and Joni.
As Reverend Lovoy spoke, his voice competing with the thunder of heaven,
I realized who was sitting directly in front of me.
The Demon.
She could read minds. That much was an accepted fact. And just as it
dawned on me that she was there, her head swiveled and she stared at me with
those black eyes that could freeze a witch at midnight. The Demon’s name was
Brenda Sutley. She was ten years old, and she had stringy red hair and a
pallid face splashed with brown freckles. Her eyebrows were as thick as
caterpillars, and the untidy arrangement of her features looked like somebody
had tried to beat out a fire on her face with the flat side of a shovel. Her
right eye looked larger than the left, her nose was a beak with two gaping
holes in it, and her thin-lipped mouth seemed to wander from one side of her
face to the other. She couldn’t help her heritage, though; her mother was a
fire hydrant with red hair and a brown mustache, and her red-bearded father
would’ve made a fence post look brawny. With all those red kinks in her
background, it was no wonder Brenda Sutley was spooky.
The Demon had earned her name because she had once drawn a picture of her
father with horns and a forked tail in art class, and had told Mrs. Dixon, the
art teacher, and her classmates that her pappy kept at the back of his closet
a big stack of magazines that showed boy demons sticking their tails in the
holes of girl demons. But the Demon did more than spill her family’s closeted
secrets: she had brought a dead cat to school in a shoebox with pennies taped
to its eyeballs for show-and-tell; she had made a graveyard out of green and
white Play-Doh for her art class project, with the names of her classmates and
the dates of their deaths on the headstones, which caused more than one child
to go into hysterics when they realized they would not live to see sixteen;
she had a fondness for bizarre practical jokes that involved dog manure
pressed between sandwich bread; and it was widely rumored that she was behind
the explosion of pipes in the girls’ bathroom at Zephyr Elementary last
November, when every toilet was clogged with notebook paper.
She was, in a word, weird.
And now her royal weirdness was staring at me.
A slow smile spread across her crooked mouth. I couldn’t look away from
those piercing black eyes, and I thought She’s got me. The thing about adults
is, when you want them to pay attention to you and intervene, their minds are
worlds away; when you want them to be worlds away, they’re sitting on the back
of your neck. I wanted my dad or mom or anybody to tell Brenda Sutley to turn
around and listen to Reverend Lovoy, but of course it was as if the Demon had
willed herself to be invisible. No one could see her but me, her victim of the
moment.
Her right hand rose up like the head of a small white snake with dirty
fangs. Slowly, with evil grace, she extended the index finger and aimed it
toward one of her gaping nose holes. The finger winnowed deep into that
nostril, and I thought she was going to keep pushing it in until her whole
finger was gone. Then the finger was withdrawn, and on the tip of it was a
glistening green mass as big as a corn kernel.
Her black eyes were unblinking. Her mouth began to open.
No, I begged her, mind to mind. No, please don’t do it!
The Demon slid her green-capped finger toward her wet pink tongue.
I could do nothing but stare as my stomach drew up into a hard little
knot.
Green against pink. Dirty fingernail. A sticky strand, hanging down.
The Demon licked her finger, where the green thing had been. I think I
must’ve squirmed violently, because Dad gripped my knee and whispered, “Pay
attention!” but of course he never saw the invisible Demon or her act of
prickly torment. The Demon smiled at me, her black eyes sated, and then she
turned her head away and the ordeal was over. Her mother lifted up a hand with
hairy knuckles and stroked the Demon’s fiery locks as if she were the sweetest
little girl who ever drew God’s breath.
Reverend Lovoy asked everyone to pray. I lowered my head and squeezed my
eyes shut.
And about five seconds into the prayer, something thumped hard against
the back of my skull.
I looked around.
Horror choked me. Sitting directly behind me, their pewter-colored eyes
the hue of sharpened blades, were Gotha and Gordo Branlin. On either side of
them, their parents were deep in prayer. I imagined they prayed for
deliverance from their brood. Both Branlin boys wore dark blue suits, white
shirts, and their ties were similar except Gotha’s had black stripes on white
and Gordo’s had red. Gotha, the oldest by one year, had the whitest hair;
Gordo’s was a little on the yellow side. Their faces looked like mean carvings
in brown rock, and even their bones—lower jaws jutting forward, cheekbones
about to tear through flesh, foreheads like slabs of granite—suggested coiled
rage. In the fleeting seconds that I dared to look upon those cunning visages,
Gordo thrust an upraised middle finger in my face and Gotha loaded a straw
with another hard black-eyed pea.
“Cory, turn around!” my mother whispered, and she tugged at me. “Close
your eyes and pray!”
I did. The second pea bounced off the back of my head. Those things could
sting the whine out of you. All during the rest of that prayer, I could hear
the Branlins back there, whispering and giggling like evil trolls. My head was
their target for the day.
After the prayer was over, we sang another hymn. Announcements were made,
and visitors welcomed. The offering plate was passed around. I put in the
dollar Dad had given me for this purpose. The choir sang, with the Glasses
playing piano and organ. Behind me, the Branlins giggled. Then Reverend Lovoy
stood up again to deliver his Easter sermon, and that was when the wasp landed
on my hand.
My hand was resting on my knee. I didn’t move it, even as fear shot up my
spine like a lightning bolt. The wasp wedged itself between my first and
second fingers and sat there, its blue-black stinger twitching.
Now let me say a few things about wasps.
They are not like bees. Bees are fat and happy and they float around from
flower to flower without a care for human flesh. Yellowjackets are curious and
have mood swings, but they, too, are usually predictable and can be avoided. A
wasp, however, particularly the dark, slim kind of wasp that looks like a
dagger with a head on it, was born to plunge that stinger into mortal
epidermis and draw forth a scream like a connoisseur uncorking a vintage wine.
Brushing your head against a wasps’ nest can result in a sensation akin to, as
I have heard, being peppered with shotgun pellets. I have seen the face of a
boy who was stung on the lips and eyelids when he explored an old house in the
middle of summer; such a swollen torture I wouldn’t even wish on the Branlins.
Wasps are insane; they have no rhyme or reason to their stingings. They would
sting you to the marrow of your bones if they could drive their stingers in
that deeply. They are full of rage, like the Branlins. If the devil indeed
ever had a familiar, it was not a black cat or monkey or leather-skinned
lizard; it was, and always will be, the wasp.
A third pea got me in the back of the head. It hurt a lot. But I stared
at the wasp wedged between my first and second fingers, my heart beating hard,
my skin crawling. Something flew past my face, and I looked up to watch a
second wasp circle the Demon’s head and land on her crown. The Demon must’ve
felt a tickle. She reached back and flicked the wasp off without knowing what
she was flicking, and the wasp rose up with an angry whir of black wings. I
thought sure the Demon was about to be stung, but the wasp must’ve sensed its
brethren because it flew on up to the ceiling.
Reverend Lovoy was really preaching now, about crucified Jesus and
weeping Mary and the stone that had been rolled away.
I looked up at the church’s ceiling.
Near one of the revolving fans was a small hole, no bigger than a
quarter. As I watched, three wasps emerged from it and descended down into the
congregation. A few seconds later, two more came out and swirled in the muggy,
saccharine air.
Thunder boomed over the church. The noise of the rain almost drowned out
Reverend Lovoy’s rising and falling voice. What he was saying I didn’t know; I
looked at the wasp between my fingers again, then back to the hole in the
ceiling.
More were coming out, spiraling down into the steamy, closed-up,
rain-damp church. I counted them. Eight… nine… ten… eleven. Some of them clung
to the fan’s slow blades and rode them like a merry-go-round. Fourteen…
fifteen… sixteen… seventeen. A dark, twitching fist of wasps pushed through
the hole. Twenty… twenty-one… twenty-two. I stopped counting at twenty-five.
There must be a nest of them up there in the attic, I thought. Must be a
nest the size of a football, pulsing in the damp dark. As I watched,
transfixed at the sight as Mary must have been when a stranger on the road
showed her his wounded side, a dozen more wasps boiled out of the hole. No one
else seemed to notice; were they invisible, as the Demon had been when she
picked a nose grape? The wasps spun slowly around and around the ceiling, in
emulation of the fans. There were enough now to form a dark cloud, as if the
outside storm had found a way in.
The wasp between my fingers was moving. I looked at it, and winced as
another pea stung the back of my neck where the hair was stubbled. The wasp
crawled along my index finger and stopped on the knuckle. Its stinger lay
against my flesh, and I felt the tiny little jagged edge of it like a grain of
broken glass.
Reverend Lovoy was in his element now, his arms gesturing and his hair
starting to slide forward. Thunder crashed outside and rain beat on the roof.
It sounded like Judgment Day out there, time to hew some wood and call the
animals together two by two. All but the wasps, I thought; this time around we
could fix Noah’s mistake. I kept watching that hole in the ceiling with a
mixture of fascination and dread. It occurred to me that Satan had found a way
to slip into the Easter service, and there he was circling above our heads,
looking for flesh.
Two things happened at once.
Reverend Lovoy lifted his hands and said, in his loud preacher’s cadence,
“And on that glorious mornin’ after the darkest day the angels came down and
gakkkk!” He had raised his hands to the angels, and suddenly he found them
crawling with little wings.
My mom put her hand on mine, where my own wasp was, and squeezed in a
loving grip.
It got her at the same instant the wasps decided Reverend Lovoy’s sermon
had gone on long enough.
She screamed. He screamed. It was the signal the wasps had been waiting
for.
The blue-black cloud of them, over a hundred stingers strong, dropped
down like a net on the heads of trapped beasts.
I heard Granddaddy Jaybird bellow, “Shitfire!” as he was pierced. Nana
Alice let out an operatic, quavering high note. The Demon’s mother wailed,
wasps attacking the back of her neck. The Demon’s father flailed at the air
with his skinny arms. The Demon started laughing. Behind me, the Branlins
croaked with pain, the peashooter forgotten. All across the church there were
screams and hollers and people in Easter suits and dresses were jumping up and
fighting the air as if grappling the devils of the invisible dimension.
Reverend Lovoy was dancing in a paroxysm of agony, shaking his multiple-stung
hands as if to disconnect them from the wrists. The whole choir was up and
singing, not hymns this time but cries of pain as the wasps stung cheeks,
chins, and noses. The air was full of dark, swirling currents that flew into
people’s faces and wound around their heads like thorny crowns. “Get out! Get
out!” somebody was shouting. “Run for it!” somebody else hollered, behind me.
The Glasses broke, running for the exit with wasps in their hair. All at once
everybody was up, and what had been a peaceful congregation barely ten seconds
before was now a stampede of terror-struck cattle.
Wasps will do that to you.
“My damn leg’s stuck!” Grand Austin shouted.
“Jay! Help him!” Grandmomma Sarah yelled, but Grand-daddy Jaybird was
already fighting his way out into the clogged, thrashing mass of people in the
aisle.
