Sister Sadie knows just how much father’s hand has shaped us. There are all sorts of stories and secrets waiting to spill from her pregnant eyes. And this night could use such a flood, a raging torrent of verities, which I know she’d whisper softly; her easy grace, even in the darkest hour, sometimes disturbs me. She knows of wild things I have only read about in old books full of dreams and silverfish. She dances with herself through empty hollows of the moon’s transparent lunacy; I watch her with bones humming, she mellows my marrow.

Tonight, we’re on the back porch, and she is handling her rye better than I ever could. She’s my big sister, smaller than me, still just a little girl in my eyes. She’s filament thin and her skin is paper lace. There’s a lonesome trail of roses tattooed to her left arm, silver rings shaped like serpents, cats, and eye of Horus, on her right hand; she waves and they freely chime. When she’s half-lit she sings all of the old ballads mama taught us, mostly Carter Family, Cline, Williams Sr., Orbison, Kristofferson, and Elvis country. She sings with wounded sparrow in her throat, and I only know the half of it – the shadow of that wound. Sometimes I join her, our voices and common scars mesh together, and the tragic tapestry turns luminous for a little while.

When Sadie lights up this way, she seems to push back all the darkness, they way the golden light pushes back the black of night, when the bar door swings open. Then things inevitably shift and change, her moods and dark appetites are now predictable. She leaps out of her chair as if shot in the back; her eyes are two purple circles of hungry vultures, and I know the omens can’t be propitious. She talks to me the way she used to talk to daddy and his friends, her tongue both honey and cyanide. She lifts her dress, exposes fruit both ripe and forbidden, not for me, but rather for the face inside the memory she is suspended in. She dances and her body seems to vibrate and howl; it carelessly jackknifes. Now she is defined by vipers, and I promise myself that I’ll take her with me to mass in the morning, yet I still can’t look away. I’m sick with myself, and this rye just won’t douse the flames, instead they rise and taunt me..

Sadie goes back inside the house, and I remain on the porch. I can hear animals stalking one another out in the canebrakes. I can hear the wind, its dry heat, hissing viciously, a cornered rattlesnake ready to strike. And it’s then I remember, and my heart palpitates, my drifting mind finds the memory of mama, it lingers and stings. That violet dawn we found her down in the canebrakes, a ruined blue angel whose wings never did unfold. Eyes wide and dry, raw and red, two pools of blood pudding; unable to produce a tear, staring upwards forever; reminding me of the spots on the sphinx moths that were drawn to the orange glow of our bedroom window, harmless papery things that turned into monsters in our dreams. Her own bra strap was wrapped tightly around her neck, her pale tongue all slack, sad against her cheek, saying nothing at all. She was naked and I wanted to cover her, cover Sadie’s eyes too; everything seemed so still, so fragile and indecent, inside that scene. No mercy was offered, no laughter in that slaughter.

Mama didn’t even make the front page of the county gazette; the very same day a lost child was magically extracted from a disused well, filthy and starving, looking like a compact Al Jolson, but still very much alive. She had to wait until daddy confessed three days later for that. Aunt Sookie let them use our favorite snapshot of mama, she looked just like Irish McCalla in it, her smile all deciduous sunshine, eyes soft and sincere.

Sister Sadie is all I have left now. We were raised together and we’re gonna fall that way too. Tonight was a night just like any other. I sit and listen to the wind whistle a threnody through the canebrakes, a place I often send my mind into, as my body resists the urge to follow. Instead I go back inside the old house, foraging for ink and paper, afraid to lose this feeling, which I need to preserve in prose. There’s no method, I’m a writer not an actor, a selfish one at that, content to remain unknown. I hear Sadie upstairs opening drawers and breaking things of no value, she is searching for her works, the same way I am searching for these words; something stronger than this feeling.