I turned half to him, keepin my hand on Star of Celestial and he dropped his hand from my shoulder, and I met his father eye and I nodded.
Only to the woods, ears up.
I nodded ’gain, keeping my mouth closed and my tongue high up in it.
And no word.
He held the comb toward me and I took it.
And pray like you, and then he trailed off and kicked at some hay and turned and walked toward barn door, stoppin to look at a bent nail on the frame, pushin at it with his thumb and saying Huh, before walkin out and leaving me to tail, still full of mud and burrs. Leaving me to do as before but in secret, to try to make myself invisible like I had left, like I was already with Jeremiah, ridin in cars and workin fence lines, not there at all, but someplace else where I could be seen but only by those invisible to God.
I kept at my work and knew I’d stay till dark, feelin already that my presence was some callus on the community, the beginning of an end, where the river of the Prophet’s voice would no longer be one fluvial sound but would fork off in part, with me in some small logged-up eddy tryin not be seen. And even in these later days—I still wish it was never me that no one wanted here.
Cadence
When you grow up with people that drink and get high and get mean, you learn to smell the change in the air. It’s like a slight shift in the light, not so loud as a cloud over the sun, more like that sun still shines bright but has looked away from you. Changed from yellow to white in its rays. You get to be real good at knowing when’s a good time to take a walk. To get outta dodge. And I hadn’t felt that in a long time. And then, suddenly, in Redfield. Long before the day when the FBI or whoever they are came for the second time. I felt it in the air—in the past months as fall blackened to winter and then winter exhaled spring. A first visit from these sinners as they call them, a fire at the Prophet’s house, an anger stuck like dirt under Josiah’s fingernails, and then his dead boy back alive again by witness and then dead again by prophecy. That wild woman on the edge of town, Crazy Beth, growing a belly for anyone to see and I saw it when Lizbeth sent me to her house with a box of spring lettuce. And the Prophet. Silent. Silent while his people sit pawing in the darkness. And then this second black car, a faceless force of no-good evil. Well the car means I better get together my plan for getting outta dodge because I’m no fighter. But a survivor. And sometimes that means running.
So if they take Josiah away I will go home, not home to him or home to my stepfather or home to my mother, I will just go home to the people I belong to, the ones I know ain’t better than me ’cause half of them I know are worse. And when they take him, I know if I tell anyone that I am leaving that they will surround me, other wives, all Sisters, all will surround me if I try to leave with them knowing. Their gums will pull back and they will fold their arms and I will cave in and stay and be alone in a place full of words, but not him. And I won’t even be able to say how I will feel when he is gone from here so I won’t stay, and I won’t tell anyone I’m leaving. I’ll sneak out at night and I’ll ride my horse back to town, with baby or no baby. I don’t know yet because since I lost that last one I still ain’t betting on this one.
I’m gonna ride my dark horse out of here because without Josiah I got no place here. I cannot work like this, in the dirt and flour and wood, without his hands at night rubbing my back, or his voice telling me how good I am. I can do it for him, and not any wives, not Lizbeth, and certainly not Tressa. Not even sweet Emma, really. And I felt God’s love for me but wasn’t sure what that love was without Josiah and his love, his favor. It was him, really. Even as I fit in here, and I will stay until he goes and then I’ll ride away into the night.
Lizbeth thinks he won’t be taken, ever. She says we worry for nothing. But I remember the news, the frenzy over the conviction of Holden Brown, and I know they will tear this place apart if they get the littlest chance. But first, they will take him. And I will be gone, gone with my horse.
When I first came here, and he first give me that horse, I was afraid. He thought it was because the animal was big and strong but no, it was the color of its blackness, the real absence of any light whatsoever and the way it was alive with that dark, that shining eclipse in the silhouette of a horse you could see from just bout anywhere. Looking at him was like looking at a hole in the day, like you could fall into him and come out in a place stranger than this one. My body, even as it carried that first unborn sadness, felt like paper next to his.
But when I first rode him I understood what everyone said when they said he was an angelic animal. He was big, but he was also smart and gentle. I didn’t have to be a good rider or dig my boots hard to get him to go where I wanted and so I loved that horse, and loved riding in a way I had never loved anything back home. And so I’ll take Blackie with me, and I’ll go and have something new in that old place. And he and his night body will keep me from smoking and drugs and drinking and bad men.
Maybe I can get a nice job at the post office or somewhere else that is clean and automatic-like.
But I won’t stay here, providing as a place as it is. There is too much dust and work and drabness in color and me and my new baby, God willing, will find somewhere else. The horse, the baby, and I, we will all be all right, like he says, I am one that has survived the Devil’s breath hot in my face and though I don’t tell him this, it’s been elsewhere too. He breathed in my mouth and on my boobs and in between my legs so that my body was all his ashen mark before Josiah found me and brought me here and washed me clean through and made my blood red again and gave me that dark horse.
No Josiah don’t know how fallen I was, just like he don’t know that I will leave when they take him. Just like he don’t know for sure that they will take him because he doesn’t know them. Josiah doesn’t know that they been talking about this for years in Pine Mesa: When is somebody going to take them down? They’re breaking the law, someone got to do something. And this chatter, from high school locker rooms to gas station trucker talk, has been spinning and spreading, and all that being said for so many years has to gather up and get something done eventually. And now that they been for yet another visit, this time to ask questions—making us sound the alarm, which is really a cowbell and tells the children to say that Lizbeth was their mother, the ones too young to do that kept silent by their elders, and all the wives but Lizbeth had to hide away in the dirt under the house while people walked above us not smelling us, not hunting us, but wanting us to be in their sight—they will be back. Because the one thing these people and my people have in common is the dislike of anything halved.
And when they came this second time, the car stopped in front of the house. It had driven by once and seen Emma outside, and so Josiah gave Lizbeth a look and went out to invite them in while us other wives went down to the cellar. The interview took over an hour, they asked questions we couldn’t hear, and Josiah answered words we didn’t know. Emma and Tressa and I sat down there quiet and still, smelling the earth and the ferment of winter’s food. It was cold and we shivered and were sitting hunched forward but when I tried to move just a little, slow, hushed, Tressa shot me an accusing glance. She thinks I’m a spy, an outsider, someone come in like a weed to take over even though I’ve never stepped on no toes and done my best to avoid the whole foot. It’s gotten worse since I got pregnant again, so it was kinda a good feeling when I found out that it were one of her children, Josiah told us later, that almost had ruined it because he ran out to look at the detective’s car and the lady officer just getting ready to leave crouched to him and pointed at Lizbeth and said, Is that your mother? And he looked at her with his true mother’s fat cheeks and shook his head, and Lizbeth turned white and Josiah yelled for the child to leave the people alone and when they tried to ask him again Josiah had to tell them to leave that child, he deaf and dumb and don’t need your pestering to boot, before he picked the kid up by the arm and swung him back through the doorway.
Lizbeth waited the
n to make sure half hour after they left before she opened the hatch and the daylight came through to us so that we understood how used to the half dark we’d gotten.
So we came out of the pantry all cramped from our hideaway, and Tressa brought a jar of canned pears up to open and eat while we listened to Josiah tell it all. I didn’t know how she could eat that country candy at a time like this, and wondered that no one else accused her of that she always said I had: disloyalty.
But we sat there and Josiah said it would be all right, that he had answered their questions and even though Tressa’s child had nodded in that most crucial of moments, he didn’t think they had any probable cause. And he used this term with deep seriousness and he laid his head in his hands and rubbed the skin of his forehead against his skull.
He said it would be all right, and there would be no meeting like the time they drove through before, and no fire to put out, and we would all sit and eat and pray together. And he looked years older and when he put his hand on my knee, heavy and warm, I began to wonder why I’d thought him younger. Wonder why I’d thought it was a good idea to come out here and into this place where just like every other man, he would leave. But he would leave me to wives, one who was just then licking her chops with the stick of pear juice, and another who was too young to do anything but play like a grown up, and another that was too good to share her husband but did for some reason I’ll never know.
That day turned to night and day again and each minute since I’ve been waiting to hear the sound of some car. The wheels on the dirt road spitting into town, lights off but still churning our hand-laid gravel as they come to take him.
I’ve been waiting and so will be ready and, in the commotion, I’ll go soft-footed to the barn. Go with only a gray sweater that Lizbeth knit me and a necklace Josiah gave me when we were wed—an arrowhead he found tilling the field that is as black as that horse only cold and heavy on my breastbone. I’ll go as he goes, so that I may even go first and even if I don’t, I won’t be left behind. Go and not be left, and the baby if he’s here by then will ride with me, bumping along on my boobs, ignorant as sin of how fatherless this world really be.
I saw Him ask, and I saw Him cry, bent over silence like it was the body of a dead lover.
And when He could squeeze no answer from the sky between his open hands, He felt wet in the back of his mouth and made good on a promise to himself.
He called His boy Daniel to him in his parlor in early morning and whispered in his ear, and Daniel’s mouth turned ungodly upward carve, a grin that disturbed even his father as he said right Father, and took his lurking and lanky teenage body (a boy I could have been in school with) out of sight and the Prophet stared after him. And when he was gone the Prophet suddenly noticed that leaves were erupting slowly, tender curled pinches from the branch outside His May window and He thought this was a sign, a benevolence, and sighed.
Manti
Too much trouble, daddy. She will be quiet she said.
Worse: dawn. She was fuckin quiet as she said. She waked me and give me a bundle with a sleepy swollen small face. Shhh she tell me. Put this bundle in the crick. Put this bundle in the crick quiet. No splash. Float it way to Jerusalem.
No, Mother.
Yes, Manti.
Worse. She says it will be for Peapod. For me. For her. More burnt spoons. Less canned beans. For me.
Worse. She begs and I want to fuckin hit her. I hit her. I push her away and I take that bundle that weighs nothing and I walk past my own meanness and it follows me like a goat outside into the smoky blue morning and across the back field toward the crick and the deep part and the water that will carry away all His autumn and winter Sundays. Fuck.
The crick is rubbing its water wings together, gurgling and soft. The sound of all time, before and after fathers and thirst and swallowing.
There it is.
Could be a drop, a nudge, a gentle bedding down of bird in water but not before I see what all those shutdoor prophecies of afternoons made. I fold back the white cloth and dig out the face in the bundle. Shut eyes. Tiny breath. White putty up its nose.
Sister.
Worse. No pleasing bar for me. No crickdrop. No erasing.
I rewrap and set the bird by the big cottonwood.
The town will burn for this.
The bundle between two root humps with a face up.
The fire will spread fast in the yellow-smelling grass.
Like a felled beehive.
We’ll all float in smoke to Jerusalem.
But no buzzing just little wake-ups.
I look at it and think how fruckin little it is, how much life it don’t have to live and maybe I want to cry and maybe I don’t care and maybe I want to feel light for this thing that gets to fall asleep here.
It’s not that it’s easy. Not for me and not for Peapod.
So I walk away.
I fruckin leave it by the tree and summer is comin again suddenly and I go back through the horse field where the beasts stand still.
I stop and watch them and there they are, not carin. I stand rooted on the dry earth and feel the whole world comin up behind me. I can hear its heavy footsteps but I don’t even turn around instead I just watch those tail-flicking horses staggered like candles on the altar at the House; flickering now and then, and burning, burning, waiting, waiting,
and
allthetime
dyingdown
to the quick.
Manti: A tree can be a mother, roots stir in their earth, awake as arms around a sleeping babe.
Too small to know this is not always how it is. It cries until shapes of light in the soft new leaves above lull it to sleep. How does it know that sleep isn’t milk? That light isn’t love? That the sound of water is not its mother’s voice?
This place, this place, would break any heart. And when darkness falls, even the smallest knows that something is not as it should be.
Mary
Most of the time I don’t mind my own stutter, most of the time it’s my Mama and my Pa and other people of here that mind. For me, it’s the way God made me, and I know the Prophet will see that when He comes back and it’s time for me to be his wife.
But the day I found the dead boy in the field, I wanted to speak nice and clear. I wanted to go into the kitchen and stare until they all knew I had something important to say and then I wanted to say it crystal clear, all the words smooth and round as bearings, I wanted to say:
There is a dead boy in the field.
His name was Manti, and I knew this, but thought it would be better to just tell them that it was a boy first and foremost, shocking as it already was, but of course I did not imagine my Mama to slap me on my face and call me a tongue-torn liar, which maybe she wouldn’t done had I said right out that it was Manti, out there, in the far pasture, his body folded over itself and his eyes looking up for Jesus and the blood coming out his nose in a small winding line like a river and his skull smashed in good right above his left temple.
I know all this because I looked at it close so as to memorize what God do to children who don’t behave themselves. I don’t know what Manti did to get this blow, but I knew he wasn’t a good child, but even a bad child and was always trying to act all older than his twelve little lonely years. I looked so as to remember but my Mama didn’t want to hear about it in the kitchen, she said Hush child just let’s go get your Pa and show him where instead a telling it all over Zion, Go! She say, get, and I led my Pa then, out to the field, with no words but just a hand and we stopped when he saw the boy and I heard him say the Lord’s name in vain and then he stooped and brushed a fly away from the face, but it was useless because flies were newly woke from spring and had found him and so were many.
Pa asked, with his hand o’er his mouth, hadn’t I seen what happened and I said no, I saw something laying in the field and not moving and so came over, and he said then Mary, looks this boy’s been kicked in the head by a horse, and then stood up and l
ooked at the six horses there as if he deciding which to shoot but none were grazing and all were agitated as if they did not like this new dead flower on their green fuzz grass.
Pa told me then to stay away from them horses, give more distance than usual and go get a blanket and go quick. So I ran to the house but looked back to see my Pa whisper some words and then reach down and pick up that poor boy, whose neck flopped about, too, and carry him toward me, toward the house, too.
I brought the blanket from my bed ’cause it was the only one I could find I knew I would not get whipped over taking, and brought it down to Pa as he laid the boy on the kitchen floor and shut his eyes with his thumb and swore again and told my Ma to keep everybody out of the kitchen because she had just then began to say over and over again, Good me, good me and so needed something to do, and so stood guard at the back door and told me to watch the front and I did but I also saw my Pa cover that boy’s bloody head with my blanket and for the first time that day I felt my soul to be a fear.
It’s not that I hadn’t seen a dead one, before, I had: my little brother by Tressa died not two years ago and though I don’t remember much of him being alive I do remember him dead, because he was sick and in his room and we were all waiting and then he was dead and I went to his bed to pay my last respects with all the other children and I touched his little hand and it felt like sandstone not skin, pink and dry, not damp like palm.
Yes yes I had seen something like it before, but different because it was not a sudden thing I found in a field like a piece of old leather or even a Judas napping ’stead of working and I could not help but also think of my brother, a real sinner too, and his own end that would be forthcoming if it was really the time when God gets to setting the righteous up to be by themselves.
My Pa left to go tell Manti’s mother Beth, who I was afraid of like everybody else and his baby sister, who looked to be covered with some sort of sugar or flour or dirt at all times and I waited there with my back to the body and my Mama with her back to me so we could each look out the way we were supposed to and watch that no one came in, and also that no spirit came out, though Pa didn’t say that last part, I felt it to be true because I knew Manti and he was sneaky.
Strange Children Page 18