This last phrase stuck in my head, singing around for a few days, Christ, chaste, chaste, Christ, until I next went to see Levi.
A plane flew over the patio and I wondered if a person in the plane could see me, or if they knew what had happened. Maybe someone was coming to take Jeremiah away, away to a prison like the one they kept my father in.
Levi was cleaning a feed bucket when I walked up to the pen that day, but he motioned for me to come over and together we walked to the shade of a small oak, and looked for twin acorns on the ground. He had his hands in his pockets as if he didn’t see the same fallen crop that I did so I picked up the funniest looking one first, which was our game, and it had two caps, one on top of the other so that it looked like a sultan from the Book. Levi and I stood looking at the thing in my hand, our heads almost touching when he said, I hate faggots. I looked up, scared, because I didn’t know the word, and then he said I hate faggots, and I’m not one of them and I’m never going to be one. Chaste was Christ, but the impotent are faggots, he said softly, then he took the acorn from my hand and held it up to his face and said Christ was not no faggot. Then he tossed it aside and said Come on, Mercy Ann, let’s go out for a ride. We had never done this before, even though once Levi had let me help him groom Blackie, and so I nodded and felt like we were true friends as Levi led me to the barn and let loose the stallion from the corral. He said This is my horse, and even though I knew I nodded and smiled because he was as proud as can be, so that his chest rounded out like the body of an acorn itself, and he kicked a bucket upside down so as to step up and swing one leg over the giant black beast. He held its matte mane then and asked me if I could ride bareback. I said Yes, of course and he reached his hand down and I took it and felt then where his palms were calloused from work, and I stepped up on that hollow bucket and lifted my skirts just enough to get a leg up and then Levi put a hand around my waist to get me on right and steady me atop that the most beautiful animal I had been on.
I was sitting there my hands hanging on Levi’s back belt to hold on, feeling the animal raw beneath my legs, its great muscles starting to move as Levi clucked, pressing his heels, the backbone articulating beneath me as if to remind me in its own syllabic motion that I was doing something I had never done before.
We had taken a few steps and I was just beginning to breathe again when I heard Levi’s Pa call his name. I turned and saw him, squinting and frowning in the sun and he said it again. Levi.
Levi did not answer, and even when I tapped my finger into his back he did not turn. Levi. He said again and I could hear he was closer and my breaths were closer, they seemed even to breathe back at me from Levi’s warm neck, and then I felt my head pulled back and my scalp was burning and Brother Downs had the end of my long braid in his hand. Levi, he shouted. And I let out a small yelp, but he would not turn and the horse, still feeling the heels pressed into his side was walking again or still, so that I had to grab Levi’s waist to keep from being pulled off the horse, and just as I thought my hair was being pulled out of the scalp which I could feel more precisely than ever Brother Downs let go and walked in front of the horse, grabbing his mane and stroking his nose to stop him. The horse snorted then and Levi’s Pa said, Off. So I slid right off, and Brother Downs did not take his eyes from his son but told me to get on home and pray, and I ran then back to the road, but I looked back one more time and the two were still staring at each other, the horse non-party with peripheral vision, the three profiles in the same plane. I heard Levi say something, and only caught that one word of that day on the wind as I turned back down the road, past Jeremiah’s and toward home where I did not pray but tried to busy myself.
When I got to Stan and Estelle’s, in the second week, Estelle announced she couldn’t take it anymore, we were going to get my hair cut so I could stop with my fishbone braiding, which is what she called it. She asked me if that would be okay, then, to be nice, but also said she thought it might be my only real chance at a normal life so I said yes.
When we went, the lady was named Sharon and she asked me in a molasses voice after she snipped it off the back if I didn’t want to keep my braid. I shook my head no, but was thinking then of Levi and the horsetail, and how if he would have braided the hair before he cut it, and tied it at two ends the way Sharon had done with mine, it would have stayed together when it was sheared off the horse.
A couple of days later, when I could get away from chores and lessons, I ran back to Levi’s and he was out working again, in the same pen, shoveling manure this time and blowing flies away from his mouth.
I called out his name and he did not look up. I called it out again and he bent over. I called it out one last time before he picked up a dried clod of dirt or manure and straightened up and threw it at me. At first I tried to laugh like it was a game, but then he threw another one that this time hit me in the front of my dress and left a mark and so I began to back away when he said, Get out of here, Harlot, get out of here, so that I began to cry, hearing him still as I turned and ran away from that house again, tearing at the scratchy horsehair tied around my wrist, clawing it off, already digging a place for it as I ran.
At school this last year, a student wrote “faggot” on another student’s locker and the principal said he would not rest until he found out who had done it. He called it a hate crime, and made it officially a suspendable offense for someone to say it or write it. Everyone seemed so bored with his passion that I did not dare ask anybody what it meant exactly. But I thought I knew something from the poor kid whose locker it was; the kid talked a little like a girl. He was sweet and shy. Nothing like Levi.
I did not go back to Levi’s after that. I saw Blackie again, though. He was trotting lightly into town, and astride him was Josiah’s new young wife, the pretty one from outside who had a different look than the rest of our blue-eyed army. She had white hair, and white skin and green, haunting eyes and a little scar on her left cheekbone, her navy dress a little too big for her body. She had a small child curve to her belly too, and so atop that regal horse she looked like a pale Mary riding in from the desert. I asked Jeremiah if that warn’t Levi’s horse and he told me it didn’t matter, told me it was a wedding present for the girl. Cadence was her name, he said. Her whiteness a shock against the night of the horse. Chaste was Mary, I thought.
They never found out who wrote the word on the locker. No one ever really thought they would, but one boy leaned over to me in science class during a lab experiment where we were watching strips of paper turn bright colors in different chemicals and he told me that he did it.
I looked up at him, and his grin, and I wondered if he was a boy from where I was from. His eyes were blue, his teeth crooked so that I had to smile back at him even though I did not think what he said was true.
They gave the kid a new locker and painted over the word in white paint that didn’t match the beige of the lockers and barely covered the shadow of the slur.
I sat on the patio as the afternoon came, finally daring to sip the watery electric yellow lemonade and feeling its grittiness on my teeth. It didn’t matter if Jeremiah confessed or not, because of all the witnesses, but I wonder if he had said it anyway. If he could whisper, I did it. I wondered if he was sorry, and I wondered if I should bring the paper outside and burn it so I could watch the smoke twist and puff its way to nothing. Send a signal to him, maybe. To Redfield. Let them know we were out here, him and I.
At the House, on Sundays, Levi would come, postured badly with new growth, not looking at me. The horsehair still lay underground waiting, I thought, for our adolescence to be over. I could not bring myself to talk to him after being mudded at, but I still wished he wouldn’t ever see Cadence atop his horse, Mary-like as she was, it wasn’t a sight I thought he would find bearable. Emma came to my house sometimes, but I did not go there, and I thought there would be time for everything to return to what it once was, but I did not know we did not have time, that the place was for me and mine a
spun ghost and in the end I did not even see Levi as we drove out, it was only Jeremiah’s figure in the field.
In the end, I did not go get the paper to read again or burn. I just sat there, staring, sipping again. Knowing that another plane would be overhead soon, because Stan told me we live under a landing pattern, which I didn’t know exactly what meant other than regularity. Knowing, also, that Stan would be home before Estelle, he would say something that had nothing to do with Jeremiah, then Estelle would come home, renewed. She would suggest I call someone at school to see what I missed. I would pretend to call someone from the sticky phone in the hall, which I had done before. We would watch TV at night, and Estelle would avoid the local news, glaring at Stan when he turned it even to the weatherman.
Tomorrow I would go to school, sit in math class, in the back, many desks away from the board.
No one would connect me with Jeremiah and his crime. This would make me feel something like disappointment.
I dumped the rest of the lemonade into a planter box made to look like an oversized boot, watched it become colorless in the pitched soil, and felt an emptiness. I didn’t understand how it was possible that Jeremiah had been in that road, picking up a stone, but also in that article, doing what he done. I wanted to know if it had all happened because of the loneliness I saw that day in him: quiet, folded, waiting for the opportunity to hold something more than a small, misshaped thing from the road.
And so here we are, back to my end.
Ashes, ashes. We all fall down.
Haley + Jeremiah and then he wasn’t the only one with a place to circle back to. I was there, too. But in a different place, at least at first. My grandmother’s front lawn. In a pink Easter dress with tiny white flowers stitched on an itchy collar.
The patio is cool and rough on my cheek.
Spinning. My cousins’ hands hot around mine. Ashes, ashes. They are going too fast. We collapse onto the half dead grass.
We all fall down.
The smell of concrete. Lying by a pool on my stomach, drying off, my body oozing a shadow of water that darkens the patio.
The clouds overhead spin and I think I might be sick but I am not.
I am laughing.
I can feel him. I can feel him trying to get at me. His weight on top of me.
We sit up and brush away bits of dried grass.
Cadence
Then like a thunderstorm it came: a murderer they said, one of ours. And Tressa was howling like a wolf. And even Lizbeth was as white as me. She kept saying, I just don’t think that’s right. And Josiah even came in cursing. First thing he did was look at Lizbeth across the kitchen where she was keeping her hands busy and says, So he’s alive after all.
Then he laughed like, ain’t it the darndest thing? And then a cloud came over his face and started pacing and ranting: He’s alive, and he done this? Strangled some girl, they said? He’s alive, so the Prophet lied. He was wrong. If he hadn’t made him leave this never would have happened. And where’s that damn one that started it all?
He stopped and looked up like he just remembered her. His fists clenched. My throat clenched in answer.
We all looked around for the littlest mother.
She was gone.
He’s trying to get inside me as the lost syllables of his name appear on my tongue like a burn,
A.
as he thrusts my voice,
MY
sound out of me like a scream that will echo all the way back to you, Emma.
Emma
Then six weeks after they said he was alive, they said my Jeremiah had kilt someone. Strangled her they thought. Definitely murder, not at accident.
Said he had become death himself, and that the Devil’s world had done ate him up and spit him out, and of course they said this and I did not believe it. Not at first. Ellen Mai’s Pa came over one dull day to tell us he was in town picking up feed and the fellow at the hardware store told him: One of yurs done kilt someone. And he’d shown him a picture in a paper and it was definitely Jeremiah, and Ellen Mai’s Pa got the story but not the paper and then came straight with it to Josiah and he told, yelled it in the kitchen for me to hear out the window on the back porch.
But whether it be truth or story I knew not. In the beginning when I heard I did not believe; I did not fathom that hands cupping over for the love of God and myself could do anything other than what they’d already done: work and hold and eat and touch, not kill, and it was Jeremiah who owned these hands, my Jeremiah who I knew better than anyone else, me left here behind him when he went to die and then did not die. I heard, but I did not believe it as I went down the backsteps.
It was a lie maybe that he was even still alive, because it ran counter to the Prophet, and then another lie about him on top. And at first I felt falsehood like an itch under my skin, and was blasphemed for more than three hours, and cried to Annalue and she shushed me and set me to calm so I went out and then later I got to lying down under the cottonwood tree with my firstborn asleep on my belly just so as I could think about it all, and whether it was a lie or a truth and get sure in my heart about it one way or the other and it was then I remembered the way Jeremiah could get all fevered, like that first time we were with one another as husband and wife are together and his face was hot and full of something at the time I thought was God’s love and light but now I know that if God could fill him up like that, then the Devil could too, because of some unwholeness in his heart that perhaps grew when he left us here in bountiful country and we left him for dead even though he was maybe not. Not Dead. Which at that time was enough to hear in itself for its own hurting, that my ghost love was no ghost waiting for me in the after but instead lived on in this world, under this sun, somewhere without me. Then on top of that I had to hear he had gone and committed a mortal sin like to ruin my then plans for our Celestial heaven, ruin it as two wet fingers pinching a wick.
But in the end what I was to learn about myself is that this murder that Jeremiah had stained his soul with was not the part that hurt the most because what I also had come to learn was that it was in fact a crime of the heart, they said, something I did not believe as easily as I came to believe he even kilt someone with his own hands. But they said it was a woman, not so much older than me, seventeen with no name I know, who he had been with, and been with before, and then she said no, she said no like some poor fool whose never lost anything before and then he took what she wouldn’t give then after he killed her with his hands they said, in a gruesome enough way to make anyone sick, like the image itself was rotten meat stink, but it broke my heart still, and so I experienced the second of what I thought then to be the two most grief-stricken moments of my life, the first being when I thought my Jeremiah was dead in the desert, and the second being when I actually ached for this girl and the way I hated her and the way I wished it had been me who was in the position of refusing, in the position of the dying. If he was going to kill some woman with his own two hands, I wanted it had been me. My neck with his hands around, my eyes getting all squoozed out and tearing, and even though it didn’t take me long under that cottonwood tree to know that I was glad to be alive, and not dead, even if living hurt, it still was there, a jealousy of that girl and her not-giving ways.
She must have kissed Jeremiah and maybe they got to be with one another in a way we hadn’t before she died, holding hands and resting their heads on each other and sharing candy in their mouths like I would have done with Jeremiah had it been written as want to happen in this world but it was not and now I am grateful as I have not been sent to a place where punishment is for all time.
But right then I wondered if she did things he liked, or if she was pretty, or if she seduced my poor Jeremiah and in killing her he sought to kill out the Devilish desire that had so taken him from me and this made more sense than anything else.
Yet that world don’t reward no blood atonement, and I didn’t think somehow that God would see us together in Celestial heaven
now that Jeremiah had broken our covenant, and I had too, but not by my choice, and so it seemed our eternal seal might be cracking and even as I began to shake about it, I thought perhaps it was good, my sitting there and figuring it out before anything else got muddled by the Devil himself. The whole past with Jeremiah might have seemed then like the Lord’s cruel trick on my as-yet-young heart had I not remembered that my Mama always said it’s not that God always make it easy, and that He don’t always work how you think He will and it’s true that now I see there was a bigger plan to my earth time and now I understand its relation to the Celestial life I was born to live, but at that time I couldn’t help but hating the way that terrible other woman had come and been murdered and in all that managed to steal my hope of some other love. My first true love I thought.
And I did wonder if that filthy girl had been with child, or had a child by Jeremiah, and if this child was somewhere, a sinewy echo of my own babe right under my hands. So I hated this girl all afternoon by that famous tree, exhausting myself until I was just breathing in and out. I let my chest fall and rise like it was the air working my body and not the other way, like I was Adam being breathered into for the first time and then I saw by His grace that even as the jealousy ate up some small dark part of my heart, making me fear an unwholeness like had been in Jeremiah, there prevailed a sense of peace as I lay under the cottonwood with my firstborn’s nothing headweight on my lap and there were the leaves rustling ever so light and some mourning dove off on its time, and I felt the earth below me as I had when Jeremiah had been with me. And I felt as if he had returned and kilt me now and let my body fall completely from this earth, heavy and light at the same time, and it came to pass that in this bodily peace, I saw the way in which I was not kilt, and how my child’s lovely head was not of Jeremiah but of his better father and as I let myself sink into tree and earth I whispered to my child:
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