And when the end comes truly, I hope somebody remembers that I said that.
But Jeremiah said, Well he must a lied, ’cause here I am Levi, Levi here I am. He lied, Levi, he lied ’cause here I am. He tried I guess, Pa leaving me nowhere to die of anything but I wasn’t ready, no I wasn’t, so I walked, walked, into the wilderness and wandered until I came here, and then I went other places, too.
I shook my head and told him no, no, pushin my arms out ’gainst his brace, when he finally let go me but kept hold my arm so as to give me Indian Burn. He twisted the skin of my forearm in counter motions like it was rope and I winced but did not scream because now people were watchin, and could see us both and this was in fact the same Indian burn that Jeremiah had done unto me since I a child so I understood as my skin twisted back on itself that whether it was true about the Prophet or not, it was true that this boy was not Dead, but Jeremiah changed over, unless maybe he was a ghost with a body, made corpse-real by the Devil.
Okay, I told him, Uncle, and he let my arm go all wrung and red with hands, and he put his hands in his pockets and said somethin quietly, he said Maybe the Prophet didn’t kill me, but still he shouldn’t said someone was dead when they was alive, having hitched to Pine Mesa, trying to make by workin fences and saving to go back to the big city up north, where he said he already been if I believe him.
That’s when I saw, sittin, rubbin his mouth, squintin into the sun, how dirty Jeremiah was, and a new kind of dirty, not the under-nails-sweat kind from field work, but somethin else, a more all over grime that seemed to be not just on top of his skin, but under it too, and I began to wonder what kind a life he lived now that he was not Dead and he must a saw me lookin at him ’cause then his face got bright and he put his big hands upon my shoulders to square me and he said, You’re here Levi, and you run away and if you want to stay here with me, Levi, he said, you can. We’ll have some fun, and we’ll save better together, and then we can go to the city, where there are other boys too, we all help each other out. His thumbs squeezed against the bone of my collar and he said You ran away right? And he sat there waitin, smilin in a way that made me suddenly hate of myself and him, who didn’t belong there among the wicked, but belonged somewhere else, where nobody lied and where my Pa sat in the corner at night and told soft tales of Moroni. So I said all quiet but stern, like I was talkin to a breaking-horse, No, I just visitin.
Jeremiah let me go with a little push then and laughed, covering his mouth, and shakin his body back and forth in a way that made me think he wasn’t really laughin but tryin to get his body to do so before he stopped and said Look, Levi there ain’t no visiting, you are either here or there and right now you are here with me.
And now when I think back on this moment I see Jeremiah with his dirty pale skin, and his weasely laugh and I think it was really the Devil there that I encountered that tried to buy me for one of his own.
But then it was Jeremiah I saw and I got mad then, ’cause I also saw the way Jeremiah was tryin to boss me still like we were little ’gain even though I fought him plenty and ’cause I still didn’t know why the Prophet would name him Dead if he warn’t so, I said, For all I know, you’re a soot-souled Ghost I am crazy to listen to, even though I was quite sure he was not no Ghost and I could see it in that face of his, the way it hurt a little to think everybody think he Dead, even his mother Lizbeth and my sister Emma, so I quieted my voice then and told him I was goin back, even though I wouldn’t a said it to myself ten minutes before, that’s when I knew I had to and would.
I told him that and asked him then what in the world I was supposed to tell my sister Emma, and I asked him why he had not let anyone know he was not Dead.
Which is when I saw his shoulders crump a little and I thought maybe it was ’cause I had said Emma’s name but then he said Well, I didn’t know I was Dead. Then, That Prophet really would kill me if I told now, don’t you see Levi?
And I saw that he was a pilgrim without ship as he said, Then I have to be out here without no one, and I was thinking I felt sad for him and was about to put hand on his shoulder and tell him that I would go back and make him live again for his people because I was feeling a bravery but soon as he saw some pity in my face, or maybe just because he was crazy he put his hands out and waved me away and then he began to laugh that same silent mouthy laugh, rockin his body back and forth ’gain.
Don’t even worry about it, though, and don’t get me wrong, little brother, I’ve had my good times. Real good times, not like back there, and I have learnt a lot, and I could teach you, boy could I teach you. Not just how to survive, but to have a little fun too, and then Jeremiah the undead put his arm around me and steered me down past the diner where I hoped Maple warn’t watchin me yoked by the arm of a boy ’specially right then as I was blushin because Jeremiah asked me as I saw our reflections in the window I knew from behind, if I had ever gotten to any girl.
When I made no answer he laughed again from his mouth, a sound I did not like no more and I pulled his arm off my shoulders and started walkin ’gain, tellin him I got to be goin back.
I told him I was out for a trip, doing a favor for my Pa, and we both knew this last part warn’t true so then I crossed my arms, wishin we were still in front of the diner now, and I said got no interest in becoming one them apostates, or even more like you.
Then Jeremiah smiled at me for the first time not mean-like and without that laugh and said only Oh, come on, you don’t want to try it? I know girls prettier than Ellen Mai, he said, and easy, too, and I could even get you a beer if you want to try, and then you’ll know what it feels like to be a man, not like our Pas, but a real cowboy.
And when he said this I felt like I had when Maple asked me if I wanted coffee, there was temptation in my face, different yes but maybe more smite-calling and so I understood that I was in fact in a place where the Devil could be anywhere, and he was in fact in front of me livin in Jeremiah and tryin to seduce me with the honeyed voice of promise, so I told him nah and so he asked me if I warn’t afraid and punched my arm and so I told him to get on back to hell and started walkin backwards toward the Smith’s.
Then Jeremiah said Oh little brother, hell don’t mean a thing to me, and you can bet that that place you holding so high in your head will burn just as quick, everyone out here wants it gone ’cause it’s so backwards. It will be gone maybe before you even get your yellowed soul back there, and believe me when it goes, it will smolder worse than hell itself. Jeremiah laughed ’gain and I began to think I was not afraid of him, I was bigger than I was when he died, having grown all winter by two inches, and it warn’t the same as it was, and now I was angry for all he’d said.
I stopped walkin backwards then and told him to go away, get Dead again. You may be alive, but your soul is yoked by that Devil’s ghost and his corporal pleasures, and he started laughin then and sayin, Don’t you get it, Boy, the Devil ain’t here, he’s back where you going, he’s running that place and then he paused and sucked his cheeks in before he said, but if you want to go back, suit yourself, just say hello to that harlot sister of you and yours.
So then I did what I maybe would not have done had I not started the mornin watchin Maple walk back and forth from the counter where she leaned, talkin, or to the tables where she put a hand on a hip and smiled, and I punched Jeremiah with the side of my fist which ached in the knuckles later but which buckled him over, surprised as he was, and which made a man run across the street toward me, yellin Hey Hey Now, and another woman and her dark-haired child stop and stare but that was all background because I was lookin at Jeremiah as the man and his plaid shirt came to stand between us and pushed back on Jeremiah who looked ready to hit back, and held him while he said, spittin on the man’s shirt as he spoke, Levi, you be back, and when you are, we’ll get back on this and then we’ll have some fun because even if you go back, run back, coward, run back on down that road, you were here, and I saw you.
And so I turned an
d walked away, my hand shakin, still curled in its fist so I held it to steady it as I walked slowly down to Smith’s trying to keep eyes dry and not yelp out the greater disappointment I felt: the thinking that the world was in fact so cruel as to resurrect a version of Jeremiah, who I never liked all that much, on the one day I was just trying to let some air in, trying to get some roundedness to the things I saw when I closed my eyes at night and felt the body so tired it would not even let the brain get to dreamin.
As I got in the car and drove back to the flat land of Zion, I was sad and angry also ’cause I didn’t know what Jeremiah said that was right, but I knew it was somethin even though I warn’t like him, and didn’t want to be like him, but it was true that I had taken the car, and pushed it out oh so quiet and left. I had left the work that God had left for my hands to do and I had come into hell thinkin I was at the gates of heaven even though somewhere I always knew from the Book and from my gut that the land itself would not be any heaven in the end, nor would it be true hell, but rather the mediocre ground of cottoned-out mouths and suffering until a true change come, which may or may not be now but I hope it is not because I am afraid of hail and brimstone and also dogs.
And then I wished I could go back and tell that Maple who I really was, a follower and a believer and I wished that I could rewrite the note I left that mornin that said “I am not Dead, just Out, back later” because now I knew Dead was some other person to be and if you were that you were alive in un-hell and if you warn’t you were runnin back to a place you didn’t know anything outside of, really, or maybe really dead, not knowing it, and going home. And when on the road the farms turned desert, it was high sun time and so I knew that the work would still be there for me, and I would be left out to work into the night, with no one else nigh.
Indeed it was and I did, work, with the first star out and I did replay everything Maple-voice said to me and tried to cleanse the part about Jeremiah and I imagined that everything would be okay as long as it was Alive that I was and am, and that comin back, havin gone, had not rendered me Dead for writin my state of not bein it.
Though I also knew, muckin at dusk time, that knowin this thing bout Jeremiah, that he was alive, and that the Prophet was the first one to call the livin Dead, would save me somehow in a way that was like the world I’d just left, strange and full of real angles of light and other. I didn’t know how to place it other than to imagine myself bearing a gift like I was some wiseman, holdin out until I had finished my work time and my Pa had finished his silence and was ready for belt-back father-son speech and then I would look at him a way and he would know I have somethin for him, brought somethin back.
And I did and he did listen bout Jeremiah not bein dead and about what he said about why the Prophet say him so and he looked up past me, and slipped the end of his belt back into the loop doubling it over so the leather was two layered thick, fittin, and then he nodded and left. He left to go think, or confer, ’cause he and Josiah were building somethin, I didn’t know what at the time but maybe an ark of some sort. One that curved and sailed and winded away from the Prophet and one that I hope now may lead us all into a better promise for those shinin rays that come to lift us once this land becomes frostbitten again. And hearin with witnessed certainty that the Prophet had lied on behalf of God was somethin my Pa listened to with his face graven, and I knew the part of him that was listenin and he would know it was the same part of me that made me leave with that old Skylark and write note sayin I still continuin life and it was the part in him and me too that wanted change and new air and I told him what I knew and he understood and I was helping him, being a part of something big and nautical but not yet navigable and this made me feel somethin over everybody even though.
Even though, I knew that if I ever let on that I knew that that’s what he was doin, or that that was why I was doin my tellin, my throat would like to be cut like a pig and my desert death would not be no lie, but the corpse truth, ’cause as my Pa said when he first started takin his belt off that night, he’s got plenty more sons.
Manti
It goes worse. No curse in my mouth, no nest in my heart, no rubber eye in my hands.
He came again. He fruckin came again and came again and each time after mother with her spoon burns me and cries and then she got big in her belly so quick with His coming in the afternoon that I knew he’d been coming at least since early last fall. In the Sunday afternoons. In the time after House. In the time after He talk and talk to the fingers of people below the steeple palm and even Peapod and I are fruckin there.
He come come come.
He bringing God’s word to my gone mother but that’s not all he bring.
Worse and big. Her belly.
Worse enough to read the Book. I know a fruckin Book that starts I, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father. I know this book but I want to write my own since mine can’t start that way, no. Having no Daddy, no. No goodly parents.
Better to start at the fruckin end. I soon go to rest in the Paradise of God, until my spirit and body shall again reunite, and I am brought forth triumphant before the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah, the Eternal Judge of both quick and dead. Amen.
So mine will start: aMen. A. Man. Quick.
He comes six times that I know. Six slices of Him. Mother fruckin smiles like a sick dog. He shuts the door and makes the meanness out of her. He prays into her. I hear him purifying. Thump thump thump. I take Peapod outside and show her again:
Rock. Paper. Scissors.
No sound now. No collar straightening. A. Man. Quick—walks away. And all his talk of seeds. I watch him and with my eyes I burn burnt burn the trail he walks. He fruckin knows it, too.
Fruckin whore.
Rock.
Paper.
Scissors.
Dead. Dead. Dead, Mother says we’ll make the bird her belly hatches. She’ll be quiet, she says.
She’ll be quiet.
Emma
When Levi let spill from his mouth that word dirt that was so damp I knew right away it must have the same truth as God’s good earth, I did not know what to say. I opened my mouth and then shut it like most never because there was nothing that came due to the layers of him all in my head, not only him as I remembered, and the way we were together in a love of such ethereal proportions and his mane hair and his bluebird eyes, but also him in my memories as the image I had made of him dead, and it was a less pretty shape of dog-bitten sun leather skin rotting, his body a sacrifice to our figtreelove and these images were both real to me and so to learn that one might not be real only made me wonder if they were both not real, so that in hearing he was dead once, and now alive again, it was as if there was some cancellation of his existence in my life so that I had dreamt our whole sweet error.
And it’s true when he told me I did not yet know God’s great plan, and it’s true I did not know what to say but it did not take long before I knew what to do. Levi stood there outside my Mama’s house, leaning on the horse fence, still talking, all about him, how he looked now, what he was doing, and trying to make some new image in my head but I had enough Jeremiahs and so was not inclined to listen and besides there was a tightness growing in my chest and making its way to my hands and so I leaned toward Levi and pressed my first finger into his dry lips even while they moved so that they stopped half open and then I pressed Levi’s chin until they were closed and then I turned around and I walked the dusk-prostituting road back to the place I deem home, where I thought Jeremiah might come back to now that he was alive, out there in the big black world doing things I did not know and things I thought that I would probably not ever know because I could not go, with a child feeding off me most hours and even if I could have gone I would not have, I would not have because he had not come back.
Even with no words for Levi I still had a certainty and I felt to know what to do with the tightness, with the feeling and it was like some oth
er body I moved in as I came into the kitchen and told my husband who was then washing his hands I needed to see him in the west, which was where my room was, and I walked up the stairs and into my boo dwar without pause knowing that he would be behind me, hearing before they were there his booted steps, and undoing my dress fast, a button pulled loose to the end of its thread so that I already had a later and something to do in it, but for then I took off even my underthings so that I stood naked as I never had before him, hoping I was healed from that early birth, when he came into the door. His face made a look like surprise and then his mouth twisted as if to laugh or cry and then he went all last page and asked me plain as day what I was doing and that is when I should have known what to say because the answer was there and simple in my hands and my chest and in the mouth of Levi but instead I did not say anything but walked toward him with my still small hips and udder breasts and I went to kiss him and I put my lips to his, trying to start it, to be a wife for a second time, and he put his sarsaparilla mouth back into mine, and I put my hand on the back of his head and pulled him to me strong as I could and with my second hand I went to the button of his black pants and as I put my fingers between his hot grown man stomach and his pants to make space there, he pushed me back.
He pushed me and I did not fall over backward and then he looked at me, his lips red from mine, and then he hit me across the cheek.
I felt the mark as maybe something I wanted more than the other: a reason to hate him. And the sting woke me up and I bent over and Josiah said something I didn’t hear, and didn’t listen for and then he left the room and I fell onto the thin red quilt and held my hand to the heat in my face and let the water and salt come into my mouth, my eyes, my nose as I let myself hear Levi for the first time when he said Jeremiah was dirty and so I saw him in my mind, a third Jeremiah who was not skin-eaten dead but was somewhere I could not picture, and he was whole and he was dirty and he was making his way north and here I was naked and south stuck.
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