Strange Children

by Sadie Hoagland

  The town will burn. I already burned one thing, His house.

  Up, up, up

  will go the smoke.

  And the black car people will see the smoke and they will come again and won’t just drive around like they’re sightseein, but take everybody’s father too and then no families will be pushin and pullin and laughin and fruckin scoldin after House.

  And we’ll be all right, Daddy, we’ll be all right.

  And still He came to her after the fire I started.

  So the new and bigger fire’ll spread fast in the yellow smellin grass and then up to the sandy old wood dry as bone and then everybody’ll be sayin Fire. Murder. Fruck. Everybody will be saying these bad words.

  The birds will fly from my brain straight into their fruckin pious mouths.

  Then the black car people will be back, back, back for us, just like they came for the Browns. The women and children and me though I a man now, and I done things to prove it to other men. I make Levi mine with my mouth, and also I seen a girl naked. Swimmin. Nobody else here fruckin like me. No. Even though I was sorry when I watched the girl. I know He hurts her, too. But I wanted to see her leg.

  Bounce.

  But when the black cars come, they’ll give Peapod and I to a new mother more like our old mother, the one who made corn biscuits. I hate my now mother. She smites me. She tells me now the Devil is in me fierce with my bad mouth and got to be beat out of me. She puts a spoon on the stove and heats it up then burns me with the hot smooth back of it when I swear. She puts it against my ribs where Jesus bled. Then she cries for the whole day like it was her that hurt.

  Fruckin whore.

  And once they take me away to someplace better, I am going to tell everyone bout the Prophet. Who he really is. I will save my little sister, too, because she dig a hole to find cold dirt then hold a fist of red soil to my skin and cool mother’s burns. Love, she, to the bone and marrow.

  Bow and Arrow.

  I will save her from the old man with melting skin who I hate because he stopped the bounce but even more because he killed my Daddy and done what he do to my mother and I know he will marry my little sister off before she even not a baby. Not even bleeding down below yet. I know he will and do to her what he does to mother.

  I burn at him.

  Yes, I will get the whole town to burn next. It will make me happy like last time when I fruckin did it. I watched it burn and the birds in my brain flapped happy, their fish-egg eyes looking all over my insides for one thing not right, but everything was right.

  But this time it will be the whole of it and Father, I will say, Lord Father I burned your world like it was my stomach and I a spoon. No cold black earth for you though, because you and your fruckin man shot my Daddy’s mouth out while no one watched. You will just have to burn to the bow and the marrow, to the bone and the arrow.

  And I and the birds will fly free.

  Jeremiah

  So if he wasn’t back out on the street already he would be soon. He would go back, went back, maybe. Back down south. Where it stayed at least half warm all year in the daylight. He would take his pillowcase, he took his pillowcase, filled with three extra shirts that Duke gave him and an LA Dodgers baseball cap Haley had given him months ago. His blade in his pocket.

  He’d hitchhike back to Pine Mesa. He had been aching for the red sand, the green valleys, the bone-colored plateaus. The giant sky. Maybe he’d get a job. Someone was always paying someone to do something for them out there, his Pa had told him once. Maybe he’d run fences. He’d stay a few weeks until he ran into someone. Pa, maybe. He had to run into someone sometime. Maybe Levi. Maybe Levi would see him, maybe Levi saw him as he moved through the town. Just passing through, he’d say. He’d say he’d never go back. Even though Levi would tell him how much everyone missed him. You couldn’t pay me enough to go back. He’d hang out and wait and then get Levi to come back here with him. They could be in this wicked world together. He could show Levi the ropes. How to buy a bus ticket. How to get a job at Pizza Hut for a while. How to ask a girl for her phone number. How to call her and hang up and then call back. How to use a knife you found under the seat on the bus. How to really get that girl to be your girlfriend and really want you and you really want her.

  How to get her back. That’s what he’d do. He’d go away for a few weeks and she’d miss him and she and her mom would worry sick about him. That he was dead on the street, or in the desert somewhere, and then when he knocked back on the door she’d jump up on him, wrap her legs around him, tell him never to disappear again.

  They could get a place together. He’d get that emancipation.

  He’d just get away for a bit, head back down to the country he missed. He’d do something. He’d get back in good with them, good with Pa. Or he’d get someone out. He’d get someone who could speak the language of perdition to come with him. Just like Lucifer, the fallen like company.

  They could travel back to this world together. He would be in charge, and he would soothe that someone.

  He would say.

  It’s not that place. It’s never going to be that place again.

  It’s all over now.

  Now you just get used to being lost.

  III

  Emma felt the first pain at night and thought Good Me what’s all the fuss this really is none too bad and even said so aloud in her solitary bed for me to hear. She, stubborn redhead, did not call for help for the first hours of the night. So I watched her sweat and smile and decide she could do this alone. She would come out of the bedroom at dawn with a sweet new baby and never again would they think her a child. She didn’t think of the danger, only the pain, what was right before her.

  And what help could they give her? They had only wet rags and hot bags of dried corn. But then the time came when she could not keep quiet, an animal sound erupted from her. A contraction came and our sweet Emma yelped, she jumped up, she tried to walk out of it like she was on hot coals, tried to run from the pain. Panicked, she ran straight into Lizbeth’s round body coming in her door whose strong hands flipped her over, bent her over her bed and pressed her thumbs hard into the bottom of her back, the seat of the spine. Emma’s yelp slowed to a whimper as the contraction passed but when the next one came she grabbed onto Lizbeth’s arm and dug her fingers in, her eyes wild, until Lizbeth flipped her back over and again pressed the two points where her backbone met her pelvis until the pain turned into something else that didn’t drown but just soaked. When that was over Lizbeth said This baby is early, I’m going to go get help by which she meant the Prophet’s fifth wife, an easily forgotten number to be when wives six and seven came along, but she had learned to distinguish herself by practicing midwifery. But Emma screamed No, afraid of being left without Lizbeth’s thumbs and so Cadence was called to move like a ghost through the night to get help that in the end was not needed. And I knew it wouldn’t be as I could see then a little spirit like a puff of smoke start to collect over her body, waiting for its time. Its beginning right here in my end time.

  The baby small but breathing. Crusted over in blood, boy. Here a boy, like extra change, would scatter. Cadence crying tears of joy, at seeing such a miracle as this, she kept saying that word, miracle. Lizbeth cutting his cord with her kitchen scissors and smiling and wrapping him up.

  Josiah now up, outside under the window, waiting to hear the first cry and out of superstition, as he had with all his other children, even the one that had died, as soon as he heard its tremor he praised God and picked up a rock for his dresser. This one was a purple-gray stone with chunks of white quartz.

  The girl on the bloody bed, torn open and crying: the pain hadn’t made her a woman but reminded herself she was a child, and the idea that this thing needed her now and would forever always was plenty to cry about.

  And I burned at the way this would never be for me.

  Annalue

  Emma survived that child’s birth and when I went to see her, she saw me co
me in and rose up and sat like a queen holding that baby. And it was a little boy and I did not think of his fate but only his small breaths as she held him out for me to hold and I held him and first thing I reached under his bundle and I did squeeze each little foot and could feel their warmth, their untwisted perfection.

  What a thing, to have a body born exactly as it should and Emma was talking about getting up and sewing some things for him out of old fabric, so bored was she with lying in, and I listened to the crick of her voice flow around these two little ears her body had made, perfect in what they had not yet heard. And I listened and wished for him the world would be a song never broken into words, but flowing always.

  Levi

  I was good for the longest time after that night in the barn but there came a point when I had to get out of the square: the square of the field I was in each and every day since Pa had decided that work that breaks the back might keep me best out of trouble, the square of pen and barn and room I shared with two too-small brothers, the square in my head that was beginnin to edge into the roundness of my pupils and corner my eyes themselves so that I saw unbodied angles where there was none God intended.

  I had to get out so I got out one night, took the car and left note ’cause if I did not I knew they would take me for real gone and grieve and then in the shock of seein me live again ’pon my return would probably kill me so as to keep the dignity of my after-grief.

  I took the old Skylark and pushed it so quiet out from behind the barn and down road a bit and then I started her up and rolled out of town with no lights, off into the night in that car I’d driven since I was ten, natural as can be, and drove flat out for those miles of dust road flanked by desert and toward the only town nearby which is called Pine Mesa and which is where I had my first coffee and where I saw that ghost of manchild called Dead.

  The sun was comin up and I woke in the car with face pressed on the cool morning wetglass of window and felt so relieved to see somethin other than curvature of my own pillow that I did not mind the crook of my neck pullin ’gainst itself with car slept ache.

  I opened that car door and felt the cold desert and saw I parked in the lot of some bright good store with the word Smith’s above it, and that a worker from there was tying a red apron over her black shirt and pants and lookin at me strange as she walked from her car to the shiny suckin doors of the place.

  I thought about goin in but the way she looked at me like I was somethin other than what I was, which was a man on his own, made me decide I would just walk ’round on the streets for while outside, and watch the sun come up and shadow different buildings with the relief of new.

  The main street only had a few bodies movin slowly ’bout it, and only two lit windows, one was a window full of pictures of houses for sale with all dark behind the display, and the other was a diner with people sittin in there drinkin from mugs and not talkin much. One man was eatin eggs, too. I stared in at them, wonderin what it was like to order your food, as they did at these establishments when I saw my breath obscurin the glass and as I went to wipe it off, someone opened the door and said, Well honey you going to come in or what? She was wearin a peach dress with white apron and was as old as Ma but was beautiful so I nodded my head even though I didn’t have but four dollars in my pocket that I warn’t even really supposed to have, but won in a bet with some boys, most of them gone now, maybe from stealing money from their mothers jars, and I went and smelled the warm sapped sweetness of a place like that, with red leather cushioned booths and tables with rounded corners and small sparklin flecks in their clean surfaces.

  Sit anywhere you like, you strange little bird, said the waitress in her maple-voice that sounded scratchy and deep but was still somehow smooth so I took seat in the back, way from the window, not rememberin but not forgettin that I was still a fugitive in the temporary and that my Pa would be up by now, milkin in his hand teats not smooth but hot, waitin to walk around the barn and see the place where the car should be, or maybe first the tire tracks in grass-scabbed mud.

  Maple-voice gave me a shiny menu then that you could spit on and still wipe clean and I read it like it was the newest Book, and was not even through the first half of three pages when she came back and said Well? When I didn’t answer she asked me if at least I didn’t want to start with some coffee and I nodded, made deaf and dumb by her and her sound.

  She brought me the coffee and I kept readin, almost through to the section where the coffee and other beverages were and she set down a thick-rimmed mug the color of teeth.

  Looks like you’re still looking, sugar, but you let me know, she said and then walked away to chat with an old man who kept calling her “toots” loudly, so that that was all that anyone could hear of what they said but I didn’t care; I was still feeding off sugar, her sayin it, like that, to me, in that voice.

  I put down the menu and decided with none to no money I better stick with what I got, and so went to take a sip of that dark steaming water. It was hot and bitter and at once worked against what I thought ’bout it, thinkin it might be sweet, for some reason, but I drank that sip slow and natural, imaginin to look like I did it every morning. And I sat there like that, sippin slow and watchin Maple and the old men come in and out, talking about weather and news and singular wives with names that were at home and I sipped until I began to feel a little pulse, quick, in my head, behind my eyes, and my mouth started to feel coated with the sin of coffee and I highed it, but I highed it most when Maple came and sat down across from me and said, Now where you running away from honey?

  I shrugged but couldn’t help smile, and she slapped her red fingernails down on the table and said, Oh Lord Almighty we got the silent type right here in booth seven, maybe he’s strong too, but he’s not hungry. She laughed and slapped her red nails on the table when she said this so I laughed too but then she said, quieter, Or are you sugar? And when I didn’t answer she said, I thought so, and slid out of the booth quick and easy and came back in a flash with bread, all buttered and toasted and cut into the shapes of folded handkerchiefs and double stacked, It’s on the house she said, hate to see a silent type drinking coffee with no toast and she winked at me then and I knew I was in love and not so impotent that I did not say I do not have no money, but rather thank you.

  I tasted the toast and its roughness and crystal butter crumbs and felt that I might truly be in some version of the Celeste. I knew back there, Pa was probably done milkin, and everybody else was already sweatin too with some kind of work, some expense of the body, back, hands, legs, eyes, these parts on them were already tired from carryin, hoein, diggin, tillin, feedin, waterin, pasturin, boilin, kneadin, churnin, seein. Only parts on them that wouldn’t be tired were their ears, and my ears were tired, the fresh-breeded tired of horse just husbanded, full of all kinds of phrases but mostly sugar and honey and Maple.

  When the sun was high nuf not to be coming anymore in windows, I asked Maple how much I owe her, and she said, If you got one dollar, then that will do just fine, so I pulled out my bills and gave her one of them and wanted to give her all of them but thought I might need the other three to put gas in the car in case the gallon in the trunk didn’t hold up. I told her thank you and smiled my best smile, which is with my mouth closed ’cause my unpretty teeth, and stepped out into town where things were happenin.

  Morning was full up and people were walkin fast, not a lot of them, but enough, they were calling out to each other and waving. There were cars waitin at the stop light and I wandered down a side street and wondered if people liked livin there, like that, and thought that I certainly would, I could go to breakfast every day and then wander around and say hi, maybe I could work at the Smith’s place, and wear a black shirt, and stand around all day helpin people with different voices and faces buyin different things. Though now that people say end times are nigh, and with my own sins so recent, I am not like to go back to this diner life anytime soon.

  But that day I was in the bellied d
ream of the beast, looking at the unreal of my surroundings, which seemed distilled by the coffee in my blood to colors possessed of something more than themselves, and my heart was beating fast, when I heard my name called in a place where no knew it.

  Levi, I heard it again. And that’s when I turned round and saw a Ghost. A ghost that looked like Jeremiah, with hair much shorter and skin darker and wearing not the black pants of us but baggy blue jeans with a T-shirt that said something I didn’t read. But he was dead, not changed, Dead. The Ghost kept walkin toward me and even said Levi a third time bout the same time I said Dead, Ghost, get away from me, and turned to go towards where I’d been, the place where no one knew me.

  But Jeremiah the Ghost followed me and I could hear his heavy feet behind me. Wait up, Levi, wait up, he said and I looked around to see if anybody else could hear him or see him and suddenly there was no one, so I glanced back and there he was walkin’ after me, close to me, so I began to run, turning up a shadowed narrow street back up toward Main street, where I knew the livin be dwellin strong.

  And that’s when that Ghost did catch up to me, right as I came back into the sun of that sidewalk I had already been on, and that’s when he near potato-sacked me tryin to get me to stop, and suddenly the Ghost was feverish, desperate, not how you thinkin the Dead, who have all of time and eternity, to really be. I said, but you’re Dead. Prophet saw you in His vision, and you’re Dead. And then he was talkin and talkin fast and as he held his arms around mine, leanin over me, I could smell animal in him and feel his warmth and stink against my back so I listened to him when he told me the story about how he warn’t dead:

  The Prophet, Levi, the Prophet lied. I ain’t dead, just dropped. He didn’t kill me and neither did anything else, not even God, yet.

  And so I told him: The Prophet don’t lie, his mouth holds the tongue of God which speaks in our language the truth of our times.