The Reapers Are the Angels (Reapers 1)

So she goes outside and walks around the house and down the driveway and back and up into the woods overlooking the house, and she finds the electric fence and follows it around the perimeter of the property trying not to get her feet too muddy. It’s a good-sized property, and it takes her half an hour to walk the circumference of it. On the side of the house is a grape arbor with a trellis, and a wooden swing hanging from the branch of a tree. She sits on the swing and kicks herself forward and back a few times.

What are you doing?

James Grierson appears behind her and leans against the tree.

Nothin, she says. Just tryin out this swing. It’s creaky, but it works.

That’s not all you’re doing. You’ve been around this property twice already this morning. You doing reconnaissance?

Nah. I’m just put on a wonder about how the world can all of a sudden get so small you can walk around it twice in one morning.

He nods.

What you doin following me anyway? she says.

Listen, he says. Last night . . . I shouldn’t have—I didn’t mean to . . . I think it was a mistake.

What do you mean? You mean you ain’t in love with me? You mean you don’t wanna put me in a puffy white dress and marry me?

She laughs.

All right, he says, looking down at his feet. I was just trying to clarify. I was just being—

You mean I sullied my blossomin girlhood on a man who ain’t got noble projections in mind for our future?

She laughs again. He looks miserable.

When you gonna make me curtsy to your father for approval?

That’s enough, he says, and there’s a fierce anger in his eyes.

Okay, okay. I’m just joshin with you. You Griersons are a touchy bunch. One minute it’s biscuits and model ships and the next minute it’s outrage and horror. Your family is livin at the poles when everyone else has gotta make do in the wide middle of things.

I apologize. You talked about meeting my father.

He’s sick, right? How long’s he been sick?

About a year now.

That’s some sick. What’s the matter with him?

The matter with him is that he was born a Grierson. This family is a sickness.

Oh, come on now. They ain’t so bad. Maybe a little kooky, but they got heart.

Heart! He scoffs. You want to see heart? Let me show you heart. Let’s go—I want to introduce you to my father.

Hey now, she says. I was just jokin about that. I ain’t got to meet any more Griersons. I’m about up to my ears in them as it is.

Oh, you’ll like him. He’s different. He’s more relatable.

He takes her by the wrist and leads her back up to the house—except once they’re inside they don’t go up the main staircase but through a door in the kitchen that descends into the basement. It’s musty, and there’s a smell she recognizes, and when he flips a switch the lights go on and she sees a cage made out of bare wood and chicken wire, the concrete floor covered with hooked rugs.

At first it seems like there’s nothing at all in the cage. Then she sees him huddled in the corner.

Meet Randolph Grierson, James announces. The patriarch of the Grierson family, Mrs. Edna Grierson’s prized son, a monument to American aristocracy—and my father.

The head moves slowly, raising itself to expose the desiccated lips and sunken eyes, the gray skin, patches of which are fallen away and blackened at the edges. The gaze itself is muddy, as of a blind man whose eyes follow sound rather than light.

James, how long’s your daddy been dead?

I told you, about a year. See, the Griersons have a hard time letting go of things. Maybe that’s what you were referring to when you were talking about the family having heart.

Randolph Grierson has a look she’s never seen in a meatskin before. He paws at his head with torn fingertips and his skin is coming away in flakes, but his eyes are red and wet—liquid with vitality and pursuit. He looks inquiringly at the two figures studying him through the chicken wire—as though to ask the questions that are both big and simple: What is the shape of the earth and where are we on it?

He drags himself across the floor and puts his fingers through the chicken wire to reach for her. She looks down into those eyes again, weighing that puzzled gaze.

He ain’t ever seen another meatskin, she says.

No, he hasn’t, James confirms.

He doesn’t know what he is, she says.

I guess he doesn’t. Jesus.

He shakes his head.

She reaches out her hand and touches her fingers to those of Randolph Grierson.

He knows somethin’s crooked, she says, but he don’t know what. Like he’s done somethin wrong he don’t know how to pay for.

Hey, be careful. He’ll bite you if you give him a chance. Alive, he was the very picture of honor and noblesse. Dead, he’s just like every other slug.

I guess, she says and crosses her arms. He’s weak. What you been feedin him?

That’s the problem. My brother thinks he can trick him into eating pig meat or cow meat or horse meat. But Big Daddy Randolph Grierson is having none of it.

I seen it happen, them eating animals, but not much. They gotta be desperate and one of em’s gotta be a little crazy and show the others what to do.

He studies her.

You know a lot about them, he says.

I traveled around. They’re a tough job to avoid when you’re on the road.

Well, did you ever see one kept as a pet?

No, I ain’t ever seen that.

So the Griersons still have the power to surprise. In any case, I’m half amazed my grandmother hasn’t tried to feed you to him.

Sure. She loves her son.

That’s not her son.

I guess.

IT’S A grand house, and she learns to call it by its name, Belle Isle, and she likes to explore all its corners because there are things everywhere to discover. Pastel green dollhouses with white gables and miniature lead woodstoves complete with full sets of pans and shelves of old picture books that she can take down and spread open on the rug and peruse to her heart’s content. The hallways upstairs are crowded with doorways and rooms, and no one tells her not to go into them.

Once she opens a door and finds a room like a workshop. Under the far window is a table cluttered with tiny instruments, metal clips, miniature vices, dowels of light wood, splinters and flakes of brass. In the center of the table there’s a model ship held upside down on a stand, its hull half covered with toothpick strips of copper. There’s a thin layer of sawdust over everything, and she draws a smiley face on the tabletop then blows it clear. The walls are covered with world maps, and there are places marked on them with red Xs, and dotted lines, traveling routes, drawn across the wide blue oceans. She uses the tip of her finger to trace one of the dotted lines from X to X across the demarcated seas of the world.