by C. E. Morgan
Allmon just stared into the depths of the man’s eyes, which were recessed and recessing, unknowable. The man looked and looked at him as if he’d never truly looked before, as if the boy were a strange species coming suddenly into existence in front of him. His eyes were full of wonder.
“You look so much like your momma.”
“No,” said Allmon, too sharply, drawing back. “I look like Daddy.”
The Reverend sighed through parted lips. He knew that the child didn’t know what he had meant, couldn’t understand the import. His chest clenched, nausea and exhaustion taking him over. Allmon held his gaze angrily and then two things happened: the Reverend closed his eyes in defeat, and Allmon seemed to understand he had won a victory at his grandfather’s expense, and the knowing filled him with shame. He immediately reached out and placed his hand on his grandfather’s chest and said, “Grandpa, you ain’t washed your hands and feet. You can’t go to bed all dirty.”
“Mmm-mmm…,” said the Reverend, as if he were trying to speak through lips that had been glued together. Then he rasped out, “I been tired … since … forever.”
“You got to get up and wash.”
But the Reverend didn’t reply, his brow creased, uncreased, creased and his left hand opened, closed, opened like a great bud trying to decide whether to bloom or not. The child was watching the changing weather of the man’s large face with a rapt attention. The face wasn’t paying him any mind now. He shouldn’t have said anything about his daddy, he felt almost sick about that now. “You mad at me, Grandpa?” he whispered.
With effort the Reverend said, “I ain’t … never been mad … a day in my life. No. The Lord, he just … been getting mad through me. He maketh the spirits his messenger … and a flame of fire his ministers.”
For a moment, there was silence. “I ain’t nothing…”
Allmon fought the urge to shake his shoulder. “You Damien Emerson Marshall.”
“… but a burning light,” he said.
“But—”
“Ain’t I said I pray ceaselessly?” he said upward with confused irritation.
“Don’t go nowhere,” said Allmon, though it was a silly thing to say; the man’s body was weighted down by a weight heavier than all the water in the river. The nausea was easing somewhat, but he was indescribably tired. He’d had pneumonia once in the long-ago past and this feeling was not unlike that. But that sickness had been almost pleasant. He had worked on a sugar-beet farm starting when he was eight, but when he got the bout of pneumonia his father, Paul, and his mother, Jenny, had put him to bed for two whole months and fed him garlic soup and raisin biscuits. That child—the child he had once been—rested for two months from his labors. And then the labors returned, and they never went away again.
The man’s mind was loose and roaming by the time Allmon returned to the room with a raggedy pink washcloth and a pan of water sudsy with Ivory soap. He moved as stealthily as a mouse, because he could detect motion behind the Reverend’s heavy lids, the obscure, private motions of his eyeballs. But the Reverend wasn’t asleep. He said, “Every day, Lord,” accusingly into the silence, as though that silence itself had dared to question him.
Allmon took up one listless, heavy hand, which had fallen over the edge of the bed. Allmon placed the warm, wrung washcloth over the hand, and the Reverend opened his eyes once and looked at the boy in blank curiosity; he didn’t even seem surprised, only watchful, and didn’t resist at all. Carefully, Allmon scrubbed the long fingers and the swollen knuckles, round and dark as buckeyes. Warm, wet across the palm to the wrist, which bore the striping of years in wrinkles. Then he placed that unresisting hand back on the bedspread and, picking up his pan of soapy water, circled round to the other side of the bed. He repeated his task on the Reverend’s left hand.
Through this the Reverend’s breathing was deep, calm, and even like the beat of an easy heart. His eyes opened and closed occasionally, but when his eyes were open, they were fixed on the ceiling cracks, crowded with black speckling mold.
When he was done with the left hand, Allmon climbed up on the bed on his hands and knees and untied the skinny black laces on the man’s dress shoes—he always wore dress shoes from Bakers—and pried them off his large feet with some effort, followed by the socks. His grandfather’s feet were startlingly ugly, with deep, flaky calluses all around the edges of them, the bony tops covered in risen veins like worms. His feet stank of vinegar, so Allmon tried to hold his breath as he scrubbed around the flaking heels, in between the toes and over the nails, which were ridged and thick and discolored. He noted the wiry gray hairs on the topsides of the knobby toes.
When he finished, he returned the rag to the water and eased himself slowly off the bed, so as not to disturb the man who had now fallen asleep, and he took up the tray in both hands. He crept out of the room, turning off the light with the tip of his nose. He considered saying good night, but didn’t.
Now he was tempted to be lazy and just leave the dirty water in the pan on the bathroom floor, but he expended the extra effort to empty the pan in the bathtub, where the water swirled darkly away. Then he walked down the hall to the kitchen, the bright lights reintroducing him to life. Two men were still sitting at the dining table, which was just a metal banquet table, probably a cast-off from the church basement. Allmon blinked in the fluorescence and held a hand to his brow, and he experienced the strangest feeling that he was just waking up, emerging from a deep and placid dream. The men seemed to look at him strangely, as if they’d never seen a kid before and didn’t know how to behave in the presence of one. They appeared almost shy, but Allmon wasn’t feeling shy himself. There was power in him tonight.
One of the men cleared his throat and said, “The Reverend all right?”
“Yeah.”
“You fixing to spend the night here, son?”
“Naw,” Allmon said, but he must have sounded hesitant, because the same man said, “How you getting home? Gonna take the Metro bus?”
“Yeah,” said Allmon, and made a move toward the parlor and the front of the old house.
“It’s dark. Let me walk you to the bus stop,” said the man, making a move to rise from his folding chair.
But Allmon felt beyond all that. He didn’t even look at the man as he moved past him, saying only three words: “I ain’t afraid.”
* * *
The next morning, when the Reverend did not appear at breakfast, one of the men in the house ventured into his room and found him there with his eyes half-open, a glass of water spilled over the red Bible on the nightstand. He had died of a heart attack sometime in the night.
When Marie heard the news, she sat for a long time on the plaid couch without moving, whipsawed, saying nothing with her blanched hands pressing down on her hair. Then she stood and with no tears in her eyes, said, “Now we got nothing. Now we really got nothing.”
* * *
She wouldn’t let him go to the funeral; she didn’t want him to see another body. So, lying on the old mattress alone, he made a list of who had left so far: (1) Daddy; (2) the Reverend; (3) Momma—she had gone off to the funeral but should have stayed, because he was still here, Allmon was still alive! A groundswell of original feeling surged upward from the very center of him, but he fought it with a clamping of his heart and pressed his palms to his cheeks until his face hurt. A headache formed along the tender contours of his skull, but he welcomed it. It was different from the Reverend dying, different from being abandoned. Still the Reverend rose up in the dim circlet of his pain and presented his stern, inscrutable face and his hand that opened and closed—now a bud, now a dark fist—and the ache set the child’s teeth on edge, and then Mike Shaughnessy’s pale face, all knife-cut angles, said, “I’m coming for you, because you are my son in whom I am well pleased.” Allmon’s heart finally gave in and, with abandon, he tasted the saccharine sweet of self-pity for the first time in his life, but without any sense of the bitter aftertaste to come.
/> * * *
She was standing over him, exhausted beyond endurance, her eyes dry ever since the disease had wrecked her tear ducts, and held a telescope and a bag of children’s books in her hand. It was all she’d taken today from the Sycamore house, which the Reverend had left to the church. She had no idea why her father had even owned a telescope—he was a man who talked about heaven but trained his eyes on the earth, because heaven didn’t matter, only the kingdom. While she stood the tripod by the bed, her son couldn’t move, caught in the vise of his migraine, but the sound of her movements echoed down the hallway of his mind. Marie wanted to say, “I tried to protect you, but I can’t do it anymore. All I have left is pain,” and he wanted to say, “Please don’t be sick,” and she wanted to say, “His eye may be on the sparrow, but he must love me less than a little brown bird,” and he wanted to say, “Don’t ever leave me alone again,” but all she said aloud was, “Allmon, now you’ve got to learn to love yourself more than me—by any means necessary.”
In a moment she’s asleep, and he’s dragging the leggy Celestron to the front window that overlooks Knowlton’s Corner and, using his own bodyweight as leverage, he tilts the stiff black arm high, so when he peers through its narrow aperture he can see the sky. But he only catches the white streetlight across the street, and in the transforming miracle of refraction, the light shatters into a rainbow of spectral color with no recognizable form. He rears back, spooked, but realizes it’s only the streetlight—a boring white light boring into the boring dark. As if not sure what to trust, he peers and watches it explode out of itself again. His heart begins to beat loudly at the door of something: this light in the telescope is wilder, bigger than what he can see with his own eye. Had his art teacher not said white was the presence of all colors, that it contained all the visible world? Only now in this moment does the Reverend truly dim and die like a match going out, and in his stead the white grows deeper and more real. He’s grieved and confused in this world where the stars are up and down, where everyone has fallen asleep, where his father doesn’t come, where he stands in what he has no words to call the intermundane black between heavenly bodies. Up high, the moon sheds its small light for the world’s unintended children. He remembers the word Scipio, and he thinks maybe it’s the name of a star.
* * *
Seventeen months and three days after the death of the Reverend Marshall, a small white envelope arrived. The presence of Marie Marshall was requested at a pre-appeal disqualification hearing in the investigation of her involvement in attempt(s) to defraud the welfare system. Marie’s mind balked—she didn’t sell stamps, she worked her regular hours, never more, and she’d always been prompt, polite, showing up with her paperwork at her reevaluations and—
Oh shit, the car. The car that Mike had given her that she hardly ever used except to buy groceries in College Hill, because the IGA in Northside was so awful, the car that had sat there with Chicago plates in an unused alley two blocks away, unnoticed by anyone until a towing sign appeared, and she finally had to hustle up the money to reinstate her expired license and buy plates and insurance. She’d been unable to make the payments after a few months but kept the car for emergencies. You weren’t allowed a resource worth more than $1,500. But what was she supposed to do? Throw away her only real resource? No, maybe it wasn’t about the car after all, maybe it was some kind of technicality. There was no need for panic yet. She just needed to show up looking proper—her hair straight, clip-on pearls—and keep her damn mouth shut.
But showing up to anything was getting harder and harder. Work had become a farce of trying to look busy and efficient when she could barely function. It hurt her hands so much to type that sometimes she just cried at her desk. A consuming fatigue had filled her from the inside out, and no amount of sleep repaired it. Because her tear ducts had stopped producing tears, it felt as if acid were being poured on her eyes every moment of the day and night, all the thousands of nerve endings exposed to the air, her eyelids turned to sandpaper. She made just barely too much to qualify for Medicaid but couldn’t afford private insurance—not that they’d insure her now anyway, given her current symptoms. Most of the time, she felt she’d been invaded by an alien. She didn’t know how to get it out of her body since she hadn’t allowed it in in the first place. It just arrived one day, like she was accidentally pregnant with her own dying. It was pain’s version of the virgin birth—you never did it with death, but somehow he screwed you anyway.
The number 17 bus got her downtown by ten, and she only had to wait an hour in the loud, overcrowded lobby before being called into the windowless hearing room, but that was about an hour longer than her nerves could take. When they finally called her name, sweat rings had soaked through the lining of her suit jacket.
Two people sat behind a table—a black woman and a white man with a beard like Santa Claus. The white man was opening a three-ring binder, reading from something that looked like a script.
White man: Sit down.
(Defendant sits, smiles; tries to look innocent and calm)
Black woman: You’ve been called for this pre-appeal hearing—
Defendant: I thought this was my hearing.
Black woman: Let me finish, please. You’ve been called to hear the charges against you and respond if you choose to and begin preparation for the hearing, which will be held in five weeks’ time.
(Defendant nods, compliant but clearly worried)
White man: We have reason to believe you’ve defrauded the welfare system by owning, but not declaring, a late-model vehicle. We know that you recently reapplied for a license and were fully insured on that date. Would you care to respond at this time?
Defendant: No! (turns to woman) I mean, no—listen, someone gave me that car! I didn’t pay for it myself—I wouldn’t have money to pay for something like that on my own! My ex gave me that car.
Black woman: So you own the car.
(Defendant closes her mouth, realizing her mistake)
White man: (clears throat) Ma’am, your hearing will be held in five weeks’ time. Until then, your benefits will be suspended.
Defendant: My what? No, wait! (scoots forward on metal chair, turning from the man and staring earnestly into the woman’s face) I’ve got a boy. I’ve got a very, very good little boy. I need to get those stamps or he doesn’t get enough to eat. Listen, please, you need to believe me.
Black woman: This paper says you still work for Dr. Herman Bischoff in Northside.
Defendant: I do, but it’s not enough hours. It covers the rent, and I can’t hardly even do that! Listen to me, please—I am sick. There’s something wrong with me. I know you don’t understand, but you have got to believe me. I’m sick, and I can’t do anything about it, because I’m broke, and I can’t go to a specialist. I promise you, it’s a fact. I’ve got nothing in this world right now! No parents, no brothers and sisters! I’m so sick I can’t hardly work, but I can’t stop working or what—or what? What are we going to do? Does the world just want us to roll over and die?
(Long silence, then the black woman looks down at the paperwork. The defendant, instead of crying, turns stonily to audience, proceeds monologue, barely audible:
Lady, I was looking at your face and I was trusting in the familiar, your plum eyes and wide nose. Your color. I thought it was a homing beacon, that brown—like it was saying, talk to me, I’m dark and lovely too, talk to me, my ears are open like God’s ears are open, and I speak your language, because we’re family.)
Black woman: Well, I don’t know much, but I do know that if people like you would spend half as much time seeking better employment and education as you do crafting your stories, your children would be a whole lot better off. And that, Miss Marshall, is a fact.
(Defendant, still facing audience, concludes monologue:
I pray there’s a God—and he disowns you, you black bitch.)
* * *
A long time ago, she had called out, I’ve got a surprise
for you! Your daddy’s coming home! But that was long, long ago—why was life so long? Now she called out with a voice that had lost even the memory of buoyancy, and her son came to her dragging his feet like he could intuit some imminent loss. He stood there before her, twisting on his legs the way he used to when he was younger, but he wouldn’t look up. He directed his dread at her feet.
God, the twisting! It set Marie’s teeth on edge, and she wanted to grab him, make him stop, force him to understand without having to say the words. Her eyes were burning with an acid that was driving her insane and, God, here was this child she had given life to and he had no sympathy for her at all, didn’t know her at all; children thought only of themselves and their own needs. Love and resentment infected her maternal heart in equal measure. She wanted her own mother so powerfully then, more than she ever had. It was such a goddamned lie that time healed all things!
She just said, “We’ve got no more food stamps.”
Allmon looked up at her in surprise. “How come?”
“That’s not your concern,” she said. “You’re the child; I’m the mother.”
He said nothing, but she saw him recede into the worried space behind his eyes. Where he had been twisting, now he just looked straight ahead. When her hand made a move toward him, he jerked away.
Her hand hovered in the space between them as she said, “We can’t stay here. I can’t afford it. We’ve got to get out by Friday.”
“Where we going?” he said smally.
“I don’t know,” was the only honest reply.
Tears filled his eyes and he said, half question, half accusation, a word he had never said in her presence before: “You fucked up.”
The involuntary strike of her open hand across his cheek coincided with her cry: “Don’t you speak to me that way! I’m your mother!”