Country Hardball

by Steve Weddle

  The man nodded. “Mind if I sit with you for a bit?”

  “Free country, I guess.”

  The man sat down on the curb. “Name’s Obadiah Roberson. Everybody calls me Brother Obie, though.”

  “I’m Rusty. That’s what everybody calls me.”

  “Well, Rusty, I expect there’s a big turnout today.”

  “Yes, sir. Guess so.”

  “You family? Friend?”

  “I go to school with Staci. Went to school, I mean.”

  The old man looked off at the needles blowing down from the trees, dark-tipped clumps spiraling down, propeller-like into the gravel.

  “She was a good person,” Brother Obie said.

  “How do you know that?” Rusty blurted out. “You didn’t know her. I don’t even know who you are.”

  “I hadn’t seen the family in a decade, but they’re good people.”

  Rusty squinted, then cocked his head and nodded. “Hey, I remember you. You used to be the preacher here.”

  “Not for a while.”

  “You quit?”

  “The Lord has use of me elsewhere.”

  “Wish he had use for me elsewhere,” Rusty said.

  “And why is that?”

  “Look around, man. This place sucks.”

  “All God’s world,” Brother Obie said.

  “And where was God when Staci needed Him?”

  Brother Obie didn’t say anything.

  “I mean,” Rusty said, “I been thinking, right? The Lord works in mysterious ways. The Lord never gives you more than you can handle. My mom’s been saying that for the past week, and now you go how it’s God’s world. Well, if it’s his world, how about a miracle now and then, right?”

  “A miracle?”

  A car pulled up beside the two of them. Ken Moody rolled down his windows. “You fellas okay? Need a lift?” They shook their heads and he waved, drove on.

  “How about it?” Rusty asked. “How come God couldn’t save her?”

  “What would you have the Almighty do, son?”

  “I don’t know. Walk on water. Raise the dead. How come God only did stuff like that in the Bible? Why can’t he help people now?”

  “You think the Lord doesn’t help people now?”

  “He didn’t help Staci, did he? Nobody did. Nobody ever helps anybody around here.”

  Brother Obie reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a pac A4 hadckk of cigarettes. Took one and offered the pack to Rusty. Rusty shook his head. Obie lit one, put the pack back into his jacket. “You mention walking on water. So you’re familiar with the story?”

  “Yeah. They’re all out on the boat and Jesus walks on the water and they all freak out.”

  “Like a magic trick?”

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  “You know, in the Gospel of Thomas, right after Jesus walks on the water and heals a leper, he saws Mary Magdalene in half.”

  Rusty laughed. “I think you might be making that up.”

  “That’s why the Council of Trent voted that one out of the canon. Pope Paul the Third hated magicians.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “But they left the lion pulling the rabbit out of the hat in Revelations. That’s just good, clean fun.”

  “All right. Now I know you’re making it up.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Rabbit out of a hat? Sawing a lady in half?”

  “Is that crazier than walking on the water? Getting wine from a pitcher of water? Feeding thousands of people with a couple of fish?”

  “You telling me the Bible is made up?”

  “No, son. Just that you’re reading it wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You asked me why didn’t God do what you wanted.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You did. You wanted him to, what did you say, ‘save’ Staci McMahen. You wanted that, and you asked why God didn’t do what you wanted.”

  “I didn’t mean he should save her because of me. I meant he should save her because, you know, because of her. A good person. Like why would God let that happen to her? To Staci?”

  “Let me tell you about Jesus walking on the water, Rusty.”

  “I know the story already.”

  “No, you don’t. Jesus and his followers were at the fishing village of Bethsaida. The Son of Man had been teaching to the crowds, feeding the multitude with two fish and some bread, and at the end of the day, he climbed a mountain, away from everyone, to pray. The disciples went back to the boat for the evening. In the middle of the night, the boat had drifted far from shore and the disciples onboard were struggling against the storm, the waves. They looked up and Jesus came walking across the water, climbed into the boat, and said, ‘It’s me. Have a little faith.’ See, they had thought he was a ghost. Then they floated across the water and all the people in the towns wheeled out their sick for the Son of Man to heal.”

  Rusty nodded. “All right. Longer than what I said, but same thing.”

  “The story is about faith, son. About the calm in the storm.” Obie took a long drag from his cigarette, tried blowing rings into the air.

  “You saying trust in Jesus? How does that bring Staci back? I’m saying why can’t we have a miracle now? Jesus does a thousand miracles a year back before videotape, and now he won’t do any?”

  “ ‘ hadckRusty, do you know where Bethsaida is?”

  “Where Jesus walked on water?”

  “Right.”

  “In the Bible, I guess. I don’t know.”

  Obie turned up the heel of his shoe, crushed out the cigarette, and put the butt into his pants pocket. “No one knows for certain. See, there are camps set up on either side. Bethsaida Julius, east of the Jordan River. And then there’s Bethsaida Galilee, which is where four or five of the disciples were from. You see, ‘Bethsaida’ means ‘fishing village,’ so there could have been more than one place.”

  “So what?”

  “Well, if this is where Jesus walked on water, where he fed thousands with two fish, then wouldn’t you like to have a jar of sand from here? Maybe you could sprinkle it on your arm if it breaks. Use it to perform miracles.”

  “I don’t think it works like that,” Rusty said. “So what does it matter?”

  “Oh, it matters a great deal. You have scholars and believers arguing one Bethsaida, two Bethsaidas. It matters a great deal to them.”

  “I guess.”

  “See, Rusty, they are like the townspeople who brought out their dead and dying. They want the Son of Man to perform miracles. Magic tricks. And these matter a great deal to them. To these people, Jesus Christ was a traveling magician, walking on water, making the blind see. He was a miracle man.”

  “I know. That’s what I’m saying. He could pop into the church right now and raise the dead. So why won’t he help her? Why can’t he save her?”

  “I could tell you the Lord works in mysterious ways. I could tell you that the Devil brings wickedness upon us all. But that isn’t what matters right now. This is not a logic exam, son. This is the day that Staci McMahen’s family grieves for their loss, for the darkness that extinguished a light. And this is the day for faith. It doesn’t matter how many Bethsaidas there are or whether Jesus walked across the water. The miracle isn’t the number of fish he had. The miracle is the feeding. Don’t worry about the walking on the water, son. Focus on getting in the boat.” Brother Obie stood, dusted the back of his pants. “Reckon you ought to get back inside, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You knew Staci, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. The last night, I mean, when she went missing, that night she was talking to me about stars. How they’re close together but the closer you get, how they get farther away.”

  “You miss her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell them that. Get in the boat with them. Have a little faith.”

  • • •

  Rus
ty was standing at the front doors of the sanctuary, thinking about what Brother Obie had said. Have faith. Belief. Trust. Close your eyes and pray. Give yourself over. Rusty closed his eyes, pictured himself and Staci back at school. Pictured that day when the Red Cross came to the school, everyone laid out on the lawn chairs in the teachers’ lounge, blood easing through the tubes. His friends eating Little Debbies from a tray. Taking the “Give Blood” T-shirts from the box. And Staci ou h talking to one of the women there about blood and needles and the woman calling it “life’s liquid.” And how Staci had said she wanted to be a doctor after that and he’d talked to her about the pre-calc class coming up. And how she’d written that half-page note in his yearbook. Not something about how it’s been great to be in class with you or you’ll go far. But a real note about how much it meant to her that he’d helped her with the math. Like, how much he had meant to her, he thought. And then he thought about how the girl who wrote that note to him, who’d laughed when he’d told her the first derivative of a cow was prime rib, how he’d never be with her. Not ever again.

  He heard a clanging thump from the parking lot. He turned, saw Mr. Pribble’s legs poking out of the back of his truck.

  He walked to the truck, saw F. T. Pribble staring up at the sky. Pribble turned his head. “You one of the girl’s classmates?”

  Rusty turned around, wondering if the deputy was still inside. “I was. Yes, sir. You okay?”

  “They don’t want me inside there.”

  Rusty looked around for help, for someone else. “No.”

  “Can’t say as I blame them.”

  “No.”

  “You see how clear the sky is?” Pribble asked. “How empty?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I might have had a little to drink today.”

  “Okay. I need to get back inside.”

  “I just wanted to say something to them. The people on the inside,” Pribble said. “Just, I don’t know.”

  Rusty looked up at the thin blue sky. “You sure that isn’t a star there?” He pointed.

  “That’s an airplane, kid. All by its lonesome.”

  Behind him was a sanctuary of people. People with jobs and cars and guns and houses. A multitude of people. And there would be more. There would always be more, coming together. The funerals. The fundraising concerts. The church service. People putting on their suits. People standing inside the building, talking about faith and hope and charity. People talking about miracles.

  In the sanctuary, Staci McMahen was gone, face up to the sky while the unconnected people around her walked, one step at a time, to frown at her parents on the way to dinner at Wiley’s, gas at the mini-mart.

  The moment with Staci, that moment in the field when everything was clear, when for just that blinking second everything made sense, that was gone, too.

  Rusty stepped up into the bed of the truck, sat down on a tackle box. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Suit yourself.” Pribble sat up, leaned against the back of the truck. “Tackle box. Slide that over, will ya?”

  Rusty hunched up, pushed the box along, sat down in the bed of the truck.

  Pribble pulled out what was left of an Early Times pint, drank down through the backwash. “Good shit,” he said, closed his eyes. “I just wanted to say something to them,” he said. “Say how bad it was. How it’s all this spread all over all of us, right? How it’s like this cloud, like how it’s come down, right? On us all.” He looked around the bed of the truck,qmean H searching for something. Coughed something over the side of the truck and leaned back again. “Can’t nobody even say anything. You say you’re sorry for what happened, they think it’s your fault, you know? Like the one who does that, apology, the one who gives the apology, I’m sayhome. And they

  HARVEST

  PART ONE

  I put down the tray of deviled eggs, minus the three I’d just eaten, at the end of the church’s homecoming picnic table.

  “Are you trying to get in trouble?” A woman’s voice from behind me.

  I turned to see a dark-haired woman in a yellow T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of blue sneakers. She was about my age, grinning at me. I found a plastic fork, stabbed another deviled egg, and handed it to her. “They’re my grandmother’s. You should try one.”

  She took the fork out of my hand. “No, you’re putting those in the desserts.” She ate the egg and handed me the fork. “Those go up that way.” She nodded toward the church, at the other end of two fifty-yard-long tables.

  My grandmother was up by the church, talking to people I used to know. Cousins of some sort, mostly. Small talk. Gossip. Did you hear about so-and-so? The sort of nothing we use to fill the emptiness between waking up and going to sleep.

  Lawn chairs were clicking open around the church, filling the field and the gravel parking lot for the homecoming lunch. Long, wood-planked tables under dying oak trees. Cardboard boxes lined 6 like set the with foil, piled with fried chicken. Clear bowls of salads, layered with beans and cheese. Pots of turnip greens with chunks of bacon and potato. Silver trays of mac and cheese. Black-eyed peas. Chocolate cakes with damp icing and pies with six-inch meringues. And me with a tray of deviled eggs at the wrong end of everything.

  I ate another egg.

  A little bit of relish. Just enough horseradish. The red powdery stuff on top and that airy yellow fluff with a little bite. The cold, wet, chalky shell holding it all together. I started walking toward the church. “You just gonna leave ’em be?” she asked. I looked back at the eggs that were left, wedged between a plate of cookies and what looked like lemon pie.

  I stopped. I’d been trying to do better. To be better.

  So I turned back. “Maybe someone gets to the end of the table and realizes they forgot to get deviled eggs.”

  “So you’re leaving them there to help people out?”

  “Yeah.” I wasn’t sure what to say. “I’m thoughtful.”

  “Nice to meet you, Thoughtful. I’m Cassie.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’m Roy.”

  “I know that. I’m staying at my uncle’s old house for a while. Horace Pennick.”

  “Can’t say I know him.”

  “He was friends with your grandfather.”

  “That right?” I asked. She nodded. I wasn’t sure what to say. “Guess a lot of people were.”

  “Yeah. He passed away a few years ago.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Thanks.” She nodded, licked some deviled egg off her fingertips, then reached for another egg. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  I took another look at her. Tried to picture her younger. Shorter. “No. Should I?”

  “I was down here some summers. Family reunions at the civic center. You and Danny Jacobs set that tractor on fire that time?”

  “Yeah. I guess I remember that.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Guess it was.”

  “Looks like we both turned out okay.”

  “Depends on how you look on it, I imagine.”

  “I mean, I heard you’ve been in some trouble. You know, people talking.”

  “Plenty to go around, you know? Everybody makes their own kind.” I looked toward the church, but didn’t see my grandmother. Didn’t see anyone I knew.

  “Yeah.” She peeled back the foil on a plate of cookies, taking one and handing me another. Chocolate chip. The thin kind, fresh from the oven, folding over like a Salvador Dali clock in your hands. “I know a little something about trouble myself.”

  I laughed for the first time in a long while. “Yeah? You put a box of Little Debbies at the front of the table?”

  She grinned back. “No.” She used the tips of her fingers, pushed loose strands of hair behind her right ear, smiled. “Maybe we can talk about our troubles some other time.”q,an H

  • • •

  “How come you’re always in the shit, son?” Sheriff Modisette asked me, jabbing a red bandana at the flaps under his chi
n.

  I said I didn’t know. I looked around the clearing, over to the few acres my grandmother had kept after she’d sold off pieces here and there. A little fishing pond down the hill my grandfather used to like, she’d told me.

  The sheriff walked around, looked at the body. “You sure that ain’t anybody you know? You willing to swear to that, son?”

  “I didn’t say that. Just said he wasn’t a friend of mine.”

  “Deputy over there said you said you didn’t know this here fellow. You saying the deputy was lying to me?”

  “No, sir. He asked me if this was a friend of mine. I said he wasn’t.”

  “You trying to be a wiseass? You got any idea how big a stick I got to fuck a wiseass?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “You telling me you do or you do not know this person we found bereft of breath on your property?”

  “Looks like Randy Pribble, Sheriff. But this ain’t my property.”

  “No?”

  “No, sir. It’s my grandmother’s. I don’t have any property.”

  He looked at me, snorted. “No. Don’t imagine you do.”

  Another deputy came along, whispered something to the sheriff. He never took his eyes off me, nodded, started to cough up something, then swallowed whatever it was. “You know how this looks, being right here by y’all’s property and all.”

  I said that yeah, I knew how this looked.

  Some people in uniforms and windbreakers were setting numbered cards around the ground, taking pictures, making notes. The sheriff and I walked over to his cruiser. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I pulled away.

  “Son, maybe you forgot what happened to Dale Thomas down at the bank? Or maybe you think I forgot?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Maybe you think I don’t remember what you did to him?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So you’ll understand my interest in having this little chat with you vis-à-vis this here dead man on your property.”

  “Yes, sir. But I did my time for what happened to Mr. Thomas.”

  “What happened to Mr. Thomas? Shit, son, you happened to Mr. Thomas.”

  I nodded.

  “And I don’t need to hear none of your ‘extenuating circumstances’ bullshit, you hear?”