Page 2 of Blood Hymn

They didn't grow up with her.

The bathroom is the size of a closet. The vent is above the door. Six inches by twelve, the old kind with the slotted grille and the two screws that were stripped before either of us was born.

When I was nine and she was eleven, we used the vent in our mama's old room for things we didn't want found. Letters. A pocketknife. The list of names of everybody at school who'd called us trash. I told her once you could hide anything in a vent because grown men don't look up.

I stand on the toilet, put my fingers through the slots, pull, and the grille comes out of the wall in my hands.

Behind it, wrapped in a Piggly Wiggly bag and taped shut, is a composition notebook. Black and white marble. The kind you buy for a dollar in August.

I sit on the tile with my back against the tub, open it, and the first line is in our code.

We made it up the summer I was nine. Every letter three over, every third word backward, and the numbers are the hymn numbers from the old red Broadman book, so 1 is 302 and 2 is 45 and you have to know the hymnal to know the year. Nobody else on earth can read it. That was the point.

I read it standing up. I read it sitting down. I read it with my back against her bathtub in an apartment they scrubbed of her. It takes an hour, and by the end my hands aren't shaking anymore because they've gone past shaking into something still.

June. Deputy parked outside the diner again. Third time this week. Doesn't come in. Just sits.

July. Brother Douglas asked me to stay after Wednesday service for counseling. Said the Lord had put me on his heart. Said I had a look about me. He put his hand on my knee when he said it.

July. I told Aunt Charlotte about Douglas and she said I should be grateful somebody was looking out for my soul. She said it in a strange way. Like she'd said it before.

August. There's a word they use. I heard it through the wall at the council meeting. Cleansing. They said it like it was a thing you schedule.

August. Marcus Sawyer stopped me in the Dollar General and asked was I still living alone. I said yes before I thought. I saw him write something down in his truck.

September. I think they did this to Mama.

September. I think they're going to do it to me.

The last entry is dated two days before she died. The handwriting is worse. She's pressing too hard; the pen's gone through in two places.

They're coming tonight. Charlotte called and said come to the church, there's something you need to hear, and I know what it is now. I know what the cleansing is, it's the gathering, it's Halloween, they do it every year at the gathering and they've done it forever. I can't run. I tried the car and it won't start. I know who did that too.

If you're reading this, Evie. If you found the vent. Make them pay. Every one.

Under it, five names. Then a line, and a sixth name, underlined twice.

Marcus Sawyer.

Deputy Cole Landry.

Brother Nate Douglas.

Dr. Raymond Marsh.

Malcolm Harlowe.

Judah Harlowe.

And in the margin next to the first name, small, an afterthought: Sawyer barn — Old River Rd.

I close the notebook.

I put my head back against the tub, look at the ceiling where the vent is, and breathe, in and out. I think about my sister sitting on this floor with a pen going through the paper, writing to me in a code we made up when we were children, because she knew I was the only one who'd ever come.

I came, Dee.

I'm sorry I'm late.