-C.
Judas
The song goes like this:
Sally Sue Judas prances around town
Up the street and down the street in her ugly nightgown
She raps upon the table and stares up at the clock
And deals with the devil a dollar to rest her head upon
It is almost as haunting as a nursery rhyme—those with impatience and a story to tell.
My name is forlorn and funny and unkind.
My name is an anvil that reeks of old blood and is stained with memories. Most of them too old to accept as truth, but still too young to believe are lies. It is fraught with sin and stuffed with ancient betrayal.
Daddy used to say my great-great-great grandfather earned the name when he betrayed his friends and alerted the town sheriff of their role in a train robbery for a thirty dollar reward. We don’t know if that’s where it came from but it sticks to me like rubber cement and leaves me with ten thousand questions that sing silent songs when all is dark and cold.
Where I live is a hole in the ground; a pitch in the dirt that might eradicate the pretty, pretty pictures of the hardwood tree hills and Smoky Mountains you might find on postcards.
Here there are no pretty pictures.
Here there are monsters that trot around in fashionable apparel. They lurk in the schoolyards and in the locker room of the gym. They eat and drink and shit the way normal humans do, but they can’t be human because there isn’t a shred of humanity inside them.
In this place I am not a person to them at all, but an entity that requires exorcism and a boil on their perfect existence. I am not seen with sympathy or empathy but rather with disgust and hatred for all that I am…for all they wish they could pretend didn’t exist.
My name is Sally Sue Judas. My town is Willow Tree, North Carolina, just southeast of the Smokies. I am a senior at Willow Tree High and the monsters I speak of are the girls and boys that go to school with me.
I am an outcast and a loner. I did not choose to be born into poverty, but I was just the same. My hair is dark and knotted. I do not smell of perfume or soap but instead of horses, chickens and hay and go to school like this with no choice as chores need to be done.
Poverty does not afford me the luxury of new clothes or a prom dress. It does not afford me new supplies for school or the idealistic world of technology. What I have learned I read in books and my self-taught discipline is not rewarded with regard but instead with ridicule.
In this town I am a bane on their picture perfect dream of transcendence from tragic to superior.
I had no friends to call my own. There was no room for me in their circle. No one saw me and when they did it is just to torment me with names and comments about my smell.
I had no one…except her.
My friend is this:
Once upon a time, there was a family who lived in our sleepy little town. They bore children and raised them to be good people. They had a son, John and a daughter, Shanda. Their son was grown up and went to college on the West Coast.
Their daughter grew up in our town just like John. She was the girl with golden hair and cobalt blue eyes. She loved riding horses and hiking the mountains. She was raised a Christian and had no reason to hate her life.
Their daughter was kind and gentle. She couldn’t see behind the veil of goodness her parents shrouded her eyes with and never saw the monsters lurking about her.
When she actually spoke to me that day, I was sure she had made a mistake. It was an unseasonably warm October day. The leaves on the trees outside had already shifted and turned gold and orange. I thought about their transitioning and how they only became more beautiful right before their death.
“What’s got you so intrigued?” Her voice was honey, warm and soft on my tongue. I turned to look at her with my eyes down, my teeth gnashed so she wouldn’t see me shivering.
“The leaves,” I had said.
“What about them?”
“They’re dying.”
“I guess they are,” she said and I nodded, turning back to the window. “Do you suppose they feel death coming?” she asked after a long silence.
“No.” My voice was a whisper. “I think it’s more like metamorphosis. Like a butterfly that buries itself in a cocoon and then comes out new and beautiful again.”
I don’t know why I jabbered on, but she didn’t stop me from talking. She listened like she liked what I had to say.
Days go by and she continues to talk to me; starting conversations about the most insignificant things. But I listen and pretend to understand and do not show my fear about her intentions.
I passed these people in halls every day and every day they commented on my clothing or hair; anything to make me feel less than human. I want to hate them but am afraid to. Hate only gives them power and I don’t know how to defend who I am without looking foolish. Shanda begins to walk with me and people notice, stop making comments, stop telling me how worthless I am.
It feels good not to feel so despised.
The day my friend doesn’t show up for school starts like this:
On a cold March day, the skies are dark with ominous clouds and my heart squeezes just a little at the sight. I know that something is coming. I can feel it in my bones as surely as the blood that runs through my veins. It’s a chill, like right before a cold comes on and you ache in places you didn’t know you could ache.
She met up with me every morning and I was grateful for it. With Shanda I didn’t have to be afraid of anything, including my own shadow. She made me strong with kindness and when she isn’t there to greet me, I know something is wrong.
My coat wasn’t warm, but it sufficed. I pulled the collar closer to my neck and waited, missing my first class, watching the parking lot for her small red car.
It never came.
In the distance, a crow squawked and its voice tore a hole in my chest...
My nana used to speak of the black crow and foreboding. Nana was raised by the Brule Sioux Indians on a reservation in South Dakota. She said that once the crow was all white and cousin to the buffalo that the tribe fed off of. The white crow warned the buffalo of hunters and their approach. Their cousins were able to escape and for that, the tribe went hungry.
One day the old chief decided to capture the white crow and used a buffalo hide with head and horns, placing it onto the back of a young brave and sent him into the pasture. When hunters approached, the white crow squawked and called for their retreat. But one buffalo did not listen and when he came down to warn him again, the young brave grabbed his feet and tied him to a rock with string.
The council held a meeting and one—flushed with hunger and anger—threw the bird into the council fire, singeing the rope and allowing the crow to go free…but not before charring its feathers black. It swore that it—and the rest of the Crow Nation—would never interfere again.
But another legend surfaced from those blackened feathers. Nana used to say, “Sally Sue, when the black crow is near and it ought not to be, it is a telling of death fast approaching.”
There he was, with his shiny black feathers and tiny jeweled eyes, staring at me from his perch on a hardwood with sprouting new leaves.
I did not ask him why he was there because I already knew.
The search began like this:
Leaves were gathered in heaps and dusted by a light snow that made the roads too slick to drive upon. The sirens blared through the chilly afternoon and I stood outside the school, shivering and torn apart through the inside.
Shanda never came to school that day and never returned home that evening. The next day, the sheriff was at the school, asking questions and expecting answers no one could give.
My hands shook when it came up to my turn.
“Sally Sue Judas,” he said, clucking his tongue. I nodded, because I couldn’t do anything else. “I’ve heard you is friends with Shanda Malaise. Is that true?”
I nodded again.
“When was the last time you saw her?” He sat in a chair in front of me, leaning against his knees, his black pants tight against his thighs.
“Day before yesterday,” I whispered.
“What was she doing?”
“Going home.”
“That what she said?”
“Yes,” I said because it was the truth.
“No stops along the way that you know of?”
“No, sir. Shanda is a good girl. She would never get herself in any kind of trouble. It’s not her to do anything foolish.”
He nodded, looking at me suspiciously. I suppose with my family’s background I can’t blame him. But I never cause a fuss; never make them work for those paychecks.
My cousins, Billy Joe and Mack have had their run-ins with the law…so has my daddy. But I avoid these suits like the plague.
I am cursed by name and by relation. The good sheriff’s thinking is this: the apple doesn’t far fall from the tree.
“But your tree is not full of apples, it’s full of maple syrup,” Shanda told me when I explained my situation to her.
Most don’t want to admit it, but they are scared of my family. When Nana was alive, she used to hold ceremonies on our land. She used languages no one ever heard before. Sometimes, when the moon was at its peak, her fires would glow blue with magic. She used the fruit of the Hawthorn tree to alleviate female troubles and stomach aches. She was known to cure things like flu and once even cancer.
The sheriff knows this; his momma used to take him down to the hollow when he was a boy. When his legs were in braces and Nana helped him walk without them.
The room was cold, the skin on my arms rose with goose pimples. On the table, there was a can of pop and a half eaten doughnut. My stomach growled and I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast the day before. Before my friend didn’t show up for school.
“Okay, Sally Sue,” he said with a smile. “That’ll be all. But keep yourself handy, ya hear?”
“Yes sir,” I said and walked out the door with my arms around my stomach.
