Thrown-away Child

the criminal defense of Connie’s daddy. After all, Connie’s daddy was a rent-paying member in good standing—though not an attendee—of the Land of Dreams Tabernacle.
    Little Connie, who had done exactly what her mama told her to do, held back nothing in telling of what happened after Larry’s naked body came crashing down on top of her.
    She said, I reach out and got him by his basket. I grab it with my right hand, and when I grab it I gave it a awful hard yank. And twist it round at the same time. I forgot all about that bayonet of his until I hear it drop down to the floor. Was I relieved! But then he go hit me one fierce across the head and I go dizzy. I don’t know how long. Anyway, now I grab a-hold his basket with my left hand, too, and twist it round in the opposite direction.
    Larry yelling now and we fall on the floor. He hit me a couple of licks, but they only light licks because he so weak just like Mama say. Well, we clump and bump over to the front door, making a racket. Larry trying to get away, trying to get loose of me. But I still hanging on with both my hands, twisting and twisting. I’m afraid I let him go he kill me. Which is what he yelling at me all the while—Bitch, I’m going to kill you!
    See, I ain’t got nothing to defend myself with, so I just can’t let him loose.
    Then all of a sudden Mama and Daddy, they come screaming into the parlor, and the lights go up. I never did see Auntie Hassie; she stay in the back.
    And I don’t remember just how we wind up there, but anyways Larry on his back on the couch—with the afghan hanging over it my grandma knit for us last Christmas. Larry clutching his giblets and begging like. He say, You got me! You got me! Please—you killing me!
    Mama, she step right up and say, Well die, you sonofabitch! Then Daddy, he pick the bayonet up off the floor. Daddy eyes go wild. I know then to let loose of Larry. So I do. It ain’t my fight; now it belong to the mens.
    Daddy shoulders go slouch like Larry shoulders when he make his move on me. He don’t say nothing. Daddy take up the bayonet high in his hands, then he bring down the blade on Larry bare belly. Whomp!
    Once I seen Daddy take up a cleaver, chop a goat head clean off the carcass. That’s what it look like what he done to Larry. A’course, the goat was already dead and Larry was still alive. But just the same, Daddy one mean and accurate man with a blade.
    Right away after Larry die they’s so much blood in that room it ain’t never going to come clean. And parts of Larry they come sliding out from his insides.
    But what do you know—that ain’t enough blood for Daddy. He pick up that big knife and he plunge it down and down again on Larry, slice him six ways to Sabbath. Larry just lay there taking it. I think he dead the very first time Daddy stab him swift and true.

    When she finished her stories of rain and rape, Perry’s heart was racing and his skin felt like it wanted to run away from the rest of his body. He realized his mouth was hanging open.
    “Holy jump up and sit down!” he said. “How’s an angel-looking girl like you learn about telling such unholy tales?”
    “In church.”
    “This here church, I guess so.”
    Perry spooned up the last dab of Campbell’s tomato soup that Sister had heated for him in the kitchen at the back end of the church dining room and social hall. She had also made him a sandwich of bologna and butter, and before that showed him in to Minister Tilton’s personal dressing room, where he bathed himself under a steamy showerhead cast in twenty-four karat gold and afterward borrowed a pair of silk pyjamas and a matching silk robe.
    “Every Sunday I sit there watch my Jesus window,” Sister said. “I be at peace when the sun throw the colors of heaven through the pretty glass. I don’t hear a word what Minister Tilton say. I hear it all before anyways.”
    “You think about bad things that happened to you?”
    “Don’t hurt to remember. Not with Jesus and the doves near me.”
    “What your mama mean calling Hassie Pinkney a old snake lady?”
    “Oh, you know, Auntie, she one of them believe in all that hooey ’bout the mysteries. She keep that old machine of hers and record folks talking tongues. She keep the hoo-doo snakes, too. La, them things stink.“
    “What snakes?”
    “She snag up cottonmouths from the ditch and keep them in glass tanks back in her bedroom. Feeds them worms that rot in they bellies. Auntie’s room, I