Exit Kingdom

talking about before. Before the slugs even.
    You must of seen him grow up, says the Vestal.
    I did and I didn’t.
    You got a lot of years between you.
    We sure enoughdo, Moses confirms and stares deeply into the fire as though his entire history were contained in the flames. We got different mothers. My father, I didn’t know him. He left
before I was born. I got raised up by my mother. I knew
of
him, though, my pa. You heard about him all around the county. There wasn’t any honour or nobility to him. He was just your
run-of-the-mill degenerate. He neverhad much to say to me, nor I to him. When I was fifteen a young girl died givin birth to a baby boy she claimed was his. She was fourteen years of age, that
girl. Her boy was Abraham.
    He pauses, and for a while nothing is said. There is a pop in the fireplace, and an ember leaps out and comes to rest on the floor before them. It glows, the little burning punk, and then smokes
itself out.

    Your father raised him? the Vestal asks.
    Naw, Moses says. He never admitted Abraham was his. Wouldn’t submit to a test. Abraham had it hard. He was raised by the state. Foster homes and institutions. There wasn’t nothing I
could do – I was just a teenager. But I listened around about him. I always knew where he was. He had it hard, Abe did. Just a little scrawny twig of a boy, and nobodyon his side.
    He pauses again and looks out the window into the distant dark, and he wonders if maybe the boy is still out there somewhere in the reachable past.
    When everything went sour, he goes on, my ma got taken early. I was twenty years of age by then, wanderin here and there. I wasn’t there to protect her. By the time I got back to my
hometown, she was already gone. There weren’tmuch left at all, just a bunch of people all panicking themselves to death in the hospital. I found Abe there, took him with me. No one stopped
me. No one was stoppin anybody at that time.
    Moses breathes deep.
    Anyhow, he says, whatever took him, whatever malignancy’s got him in its teeth, he was already took when I collected him at five years old.
    The fire snaps again and fizzes.It is guttering down now, glowing red like a beating heart that refuses to stop.
    Say, he says and turns to her where she sits next to him on the couch. Back there. The thing I said about you – your soul.
    Forget it, she says. She leans her head on the back of the couch and gazes at him. Her eyes sparkle like embers popped from the fire.
    Mose, she goes on. Did you ever have a woman?You know, a real woman of your own? A wife?
    He opens his mouth to respond and then closes it again, as though something is short-circuiting in him. He opens his mouth again, and this time the words come out.
    A wife, he says. Yeah, a wife. And a kid, too. A daughter. I was supposed to meet em in Jacksonville. The caravan they were in, it never showed. Could be they’re still out there, butI
reckon not.
    He feels something in his throat, his chest. He coughs and bites down hard as though to keep something from erupting inside him.
    I would of took care of them, he says, raising his finger and pointing it hard at the Vestal, angry even. I would of killed anything – anything to come near them with malign intent. I
would of – I would of been a good – I swear I would of killed—

    His words stumble over each other, and he has no control of them any more. They are spilling out of him, and he is embarrassed. But then the Vestal stops him, perhaps in an act of glorious pity
– rises suddenly and climbs onto his lap and closes his mouth with her own so that the words stop coming. Because it is the words that are most treacherous, the words that spread like ripe
contagion,the utterance that makes things true – calamitously and inexorably true.
    Wait, he says, because the words keep coming – out of spite they keep coming.
    Wait for what? she asks.
    Just a thing I got to know, he says. How come you ran away? There’s somethin in you. You could help people. How come you don’t want to go to that citadel?
    She shrugs and shifts on top of him, her loins pushingdown on his lap.
    I don’t know, she says. Everybody’s lookin for answers. I don’t want to be anybody’s answer.
    She moves to kiss him again, but he pushes her away a second time.
    And this? he says. Ain’t this an answer?
    You big dope, she says and takes his face in her hands. This ain’t even a question.
    Then she kisses him again, stops the words dead. Dams up