by Robert Inman
Trout had known for a good while that Joe Pike was really two people: the big man you saw and another, smaller one who was tucked away somewhere inside. Trout didn’t know who the small man was. Maybe Joe Pike didn’t either, actually. But he gave little evidences of himself in tiny movements of eye, hand, mouth -- such as this business of hissing through the teeth -- mostly when agitated. You had to be quick to catch it. Most people didn’t. But Trout had formed the habit of watchfulness. You had to be watchful in a house where your mother said nothing for long stretches and your father was two people. So now, watching Joe Pike carefully, he saw this hissing through the teeth and read it as trouble, pure and simple.
“What’s he doing?” Parks Belton whispered to Trout.
Trout shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Imogene Belton glared at them. “Shhhhhh!”
Suddenly, Trout felt a great urge to get up from his pew, go up to the pulpit and take the Bible from his father’s hand, take him by the arm and say, “It’s all right.” He felt that the entire congregation, every last one of them, expected him to do just that. But he sat, as immobilized as the rest, all of them like morbid onlookers at the scene of a wreck. Finally, Joe Pike gave a great shuddering sigh and put the Bible back down.
There was a long, fascinated silence, a great holding of breath, broken only by the throb of the ceiling fans. And then Reverend Joe Pike Moseley said, “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.”
He closed the Bible with a thump. He drew in a deep breath. Then he walked quickly down from the pulpit and up the aisle, the black robe flapping about him, and out the door, looking neither left nor right. Not a soul inside the church moved. After a moment they heard the motorcycle cough to life out front. Joe Pike gunned it a couple of times, then dropped it into gear and roared away. They could hear him for a long time, until the sound finally faded as he topped the rise at the edge of town, heading west. They sat there for awhile longer and then one of the ushers got up and went through the swinging doors into the narthex. He returned, holding Joe Pike’s black robe. “I reckon he’s gone for the day,” the man said. With that, everybody got up and went home.
* * * * *
Trout woke the next morning in an agitated muddle, and for a moment he couldn’t think of what was wrong. Then he remembered Joe Pike and the motorcycle
Trout had slept badly, what little he had slept at all. He had assumed Joe Pike would return, certainly by nightfall. Apparently, so had the good people of Ohatchee Methodist, because none of them inquired, in person or by phone, during the afternoon. Whatever was going on at the parsonage or in the tortured soul of Reverend Joe Pike Moseley, best to let it marinate until Monday.
By dark, Trout was getting worried. He pictured Joe Pike stranded somewhere, sitting morosely on a deserted roadside with a flat tire or a blown cylinder. Or worse. He thought at one point of sounding some kind of alarm. But two things deterred him and gave him some ease.
The first was the physical image of his father, massive and fearless. Joe Pike had played football for Bear Bryant. He was the only Georgia boy on the Texas A&M team when the Bear went there in 1954 and piled sixty of them onto buses and took them out in the desert to a dust-choked, heat-blasted camp and tried to kill them. Most gave up, some of them sneaking away in the night, dragging their weary bodies and their cardboard suitcases to the bus station at Junction so they could escape crazy Bear Bryant. But twenty-seven of them survived to ride the bus back to College Station, including Joe Pike Moseley. Trout had never been able to fully understand and appreciate why otherwise sane people willingly endured things like that, but it was enough to know that Joe Pike did. Joe Pike weighed two hundred-fifty pounds at Texas A&M, even when Bear Bryant got through with him. He was very slow, but immovable and also brave. The Bear stuck him in the middle of the line and made the rest of the game take a detour around him. He once played three quarters against Rice with a broken wrist, until he finally fainted at the bottom of a pileup. All that was back before he became a preacher and a gentleman, of course. But even now – powerful of body, thunderous of voice – there was no question that Joe Pike was still immovable and brave. The good people of Ohatchee Methodist might think that Joe Pike was fleeing from something when he swept down out of the pulpit and roared off to the west yesterday. But Trout suspected just the opposite. He knew the look on Joe Pike’s face, had seen it often enough before. Joe Pike was going to do battle. With what? The answer to that would have to wait for Joe Pike’s return.
The other thing that kept Trout from calling for help was sheer embarrassment, both for Joe Pike and himself. He imagined that by now, Joe Pike had probably fought whatever battle he was looking for and was laying low somewhere, considering how he might return to Ohatchee without the congregation or the Bishop doing anything drastic. Joe Pike was not a man to hurry to trouble. And for Trout’s part – well, there would be snickers and whispers enough at Ohatchee High School tomorrow without sending out an alarm on Sunday night.
So Trout fretted and kept his own counsel and finally drifted off into troubled sleep in the small hours of the morning. When he awoke, the house was still empty and quiet. Joe Pike, wherever he had gone, was still there.
As Trout lay there wondering what the hell to do now, he could feel something else besides Joe Pike Moseley nibbling at the back of his brain. Then he remembered: it was his birthday. Sixteen years old. This was supposed to be something really special, wasn’t it? But there was nobody here singing and prancing around, the way Joe Pike loved to do on birthdays and Christmas and Confederate Memorial Day and any other excuse he could find to be celebratory. For such a gentle man, he loved nothing better than a good celebration.
It occurred to Trout that maybe a lot of Joe Pike’s celebrations had been an attempt to fill up Irene’s silences. A kind of pitiful denial that never really worked. Since they had taken Irene away, Joe Pike had simply stopped trying. A final admission of defeat. And now, on what should have been the most celebratory occasion of Trout’s young life, Joe Pike had gone.
Trout lay in bed awhile longer, mulling it all over, feeling a little brain-fevered. Then finally he got up and padded barefoot to the kitchen where the clock on the stove read “8:30.” Late for school. Nobody here to write him an excuse. What to do? He decided, for the time being, on inertia. He poured himself a glass of orange juice, sat down at the kitchen table, drank it slowly and listened to the silence. In truth, he decided after awhile, the empty quiet was something of a relief after all that had happened. You could only put up with so much ridiculousness. Considering that, he felt better.
Then he thought, I am alone in the house and I can do anything I want, as long as it’s not permanent damage. So he got up, took off his pajamas, dropped them in the middle of the floor, and stood there feeling the silence on his bare skin. He wandered for awhile buck naked through every room in the parsonage, ending up in the living room where he checked to make sure the front door was locked, then sat down in Joe Pike’s favorite chair and finished the orange juice, celebrating the utter novelty of it.
Even when his mother had been here, mute and withdrawn, it hadn’t been like this. A Methodist parsonage was a public accommodation. Church people would drop by at all hours of the day or night, march right in without knocking, as if they owned the place. Which, in fact, they did. A preacher might fill up the drawers and closets with his clothes and tack do-dads to the wall, but he didn’t own the place. The congregation considered the parsonage not so much the preacher’s residence as an extension of the church itself. So there was always a lot of noise, coming and going, and you didn’t wander around in your pajamas, much less buck naked. Over the years, Irene had shrunk from that. Her own silence seemed in part a protest against invasion, the only way she could get any peace and quiet.
Now, as Trout sat here doing what he darned well pleased, he considered that this, too was a form of protest over being at the mercy of other people’s silences and preoccupations. But enough of pr
otest. Empty silence or not, it was his sixteenth birthday. Nobody could take that away from him. Even if he got run over by a truck at mid-morning, the obituary would still read, “Troutman Joseph Moseley, 16…” It was a marvelous thing, like having Christmas and the Fourth of July and Easter and Confederate Memorial Day all rolled into one. And even more marvelous was the fact that he was sixteen on a Monday, the only day of the week the state driver’s license examiner would be in Ohatchee. Trout Moseley didn’t need anybody singing and prancing to get a driver’s license.
* * * * *
He drove Joe Pike’s car downtown himself and parked it across the street from the courthouse. He was waiting, first in line, when the examiner arrived at ten.
“Ain’t you supposed to be in school, son?” the examiner asked.
“My daddy said it would be all right to skip this morning,” Trout lied without blinking. “I’ve got band practice after school this afternoon, so I couldn’t come then.” Band practice? He admired his own inventiveness. The closest he got to music was church on Sunday and the Atlanta oldies’ station on the radio. But at five-ten, one hundred thirty pounds, he looked more like a band member than an athlete.
He produced his birth certificate and took the written examination. Trout had been studying for it for more than a year, had every word of the manual committed to memory. He sat quietly while the examiner checked his answers, and then they walked across the street to the car for his road test.
“How’d this car get here?” the examiner asked as they climbed in, Trout behind the wheel, the examiner holding a clipboard in his lap with a stub of pencil stuck under the metal clip.
“My daddy brought me and then walked home.”
“Who’s your daddy?”
“Reverend Moseley.”
Eyebrows up. “Joe Pike Moseley?”
“Yes sir.” Had the examiner heard about Joe Pike’s Sunday escapade? Apparently not.
Wide grin. “I used to play football against Joe Pike. Lord, he was a grain-fed young’un. And rough as a cob.” The examiner laughed, showing stained, uneven teeth. “Him and a long tall drink of water named Wardell Dubarry. Wardell would hit you low and then Joe Pike would get up a head of steam and come in high. They near about ruined our quarterback one year. You had to watch Joe Pike, or he’d take your head off with an elbow.”
“Well, he’s still grain fed,” Trout said. He put his key in the ignition, started the car.
“Played for Bear Bryant.”
“Yes sir. Texas A&M.”
“Folks never could figure why Joe Pike went all that way to play football. He could’ve got a scholarship at Georgia. Or Georgia Tech.” The examiner shook his head. “And then made a preacher to boot. You just never know about folks.”
“No sir. I guess not.”
“He doing okay?”
“Yes sir,” Trout said. “He’s just fine.”
“Well, you tell him Will Dobbins from Thomson asked about him.”
“Yes sir. I’ll do that.”
The examiner put his hand on the door handle. “Hell, turn the car off, son. I imagine you know how to drive just fine. You made a hundred on the written test. No sense in us wasting gas. Just make the Arabs richer. Come on in and I’ll write you out a temporary license.”
* * * * *
Trout drove out the highway a good way toward Valdosta with all the windows on the car rolled down, filling the car with warming April and the smell of fresh-turned earth and blossom, feeling the novelty of being alone in the car, sixteen years old, legally licensed. It was heady stuff. Someday, he thought, he might drive the car buck naked. That would be about as ridiculous as you could get. He thought fleetingly of going on to Florida. Decided against it. Thought about going to school. Decided against that too. And then he thought suddenly of Joe Pike and the motorcycle and his spirits sank. He turned around and headed home.
It was nearly noon when he got back to the parsonage. The phone was ringing, jarring the emptiness.
“Hello.”
“Trout, it’s me.”
“Where are you?”
“Hattiesburg, Mississippi.”
“What are you doing in Hattiesburg?”
“It’s on the way to Junction.”
“Junction what?”
“Texas. Listen, there’s some chicken pot pies in the freezer.”
Trout sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the refrigerator. Over the telephone line, he could hear the faint roar of traffic, the bleat of a semi’s air horn.
“Trout?”
“Yes sir.”
“You can fix ’em in the regular oven or the microwave. Directions on the package. Poke some holes in the top with a fork. The pie, not the package.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yea, verily,” Joe Pike said. “A little minor problem with the wiring, that’s all. I got it fixed.” There was a long silence from Joe Pike, broken by the dinging of a bell on a gas pump, a woman fussing at a child. Then he said, “I need you to hang in there with me, Trout. Something I’ve gotta do…” His voice trailed off. “Just hang in there, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Love you, son.”
“Love you too.”
Then there was a click on the other end of the line and Trout was left with the silence and, after a moment, a dial tone. He hung up the phone, heard the rattling of the front door. He peered down the hallway and saw Imogene Belton through the door glass. She had a key and she was coming right on in.
Trout thought, He didn’t say anything about my birthday. And then he thought, But I didn’t ask him when he was coming back, either.
* * * * *
The Bishop came on Friday, after Trout had spent the week at the Beltons’ house, clucked over by Imogene until he was sick to death of it.
“I feel like a freak,” he told Parks.
“Well, what do you expect?” Parks answered.
What he did not expect was the Bishop. But he was waiting in the Beltons’ living room when Trout and Parks got home from school. He was a trim, gray-haired man, about sixty, and he wore a black suit and clerical collar. He had good strong gray eyes and a nice smile and a firm handshake. But Trout thought of what he had heard Joe Pike say one time: “When the Bishop shows up all of a sudden, it’s most likely either death or embezzlement.”
The Bishop politely but firmly shooed Imogene and Parks out of the living room, sat down on the sofa next to Trout and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Then he said, “Trout, your father’s had a breakdown.”
Trout shrugged. “It’s an old motorcycle. He said he was having a problem with the wiring.”
“You’ve talked to him?”
“Monday. He called from Hattiesburg.”
“Did he sound all right?”
“Yes sir. I reckon so.”
“Well,” the Bishop said, “it’s not just the motorcycle.”
Trout sucked in his breath. “Is he okay?”
“Resting. A few days in the hospital…”
Trout stood, his school books clattering to the floor. “Where is he?”
The Bishop pulled him gently back to the sofa. “He’s all right, Trout. I talked to him myself this morning. Joe Pike has…” he fanned the air with his hands a bit, searching for words, “…he’s been under a lot of pressure, and I think something just got out of kilter.”
They sat there for a moment, Trout imagining Joe Pike huge and pale in a hospital bed…tubes and breathing apparatus…. Trout felt sick. Orphaned at sixteen. Both parents gone batty.
Finally the Bishop said, “Your father needs a little time and space, I think. I’ve got some friends near Lubbock, and he’s going to stay with them for a few days. And then,” he pursed his lips, musing, “I’m sending your father home, Trout. To Moseley. Maybe with his family, familiar surroundings, he can get his legs back under him. Your uncle Cicero will go out to Texas and fetch him and take him directly there. He and the minister at Moseley will simpl
y swap pulpits. I think this is best for everybody concerned.”
Trout thought about the Easter congregation at Ohatchee Methodist, staring slack-jawed as big solid Joe Pike Moseley, the most substantial of men, unraveled before their eyes. And then the curious stares of everybody at school, the hovering Imogene Belton, the half-whispers. He thought, with a rush of despair, It won’t do to stay here.
The Bishop put his hand on Trout’s knee. “I know this isn’t easy for you, Trout. Moving, right here at the end of the school year.”
Not just that. Unfair. Not just moving, but the whole business. Why should he, at sixteen, have to be the sane one in the family? At sixteen, you were supposed to be flaky, irresponsible, hormone-driven. Unfair. But, there it was.
“No,” Trout said. “It’s okay. We’ll manage.”
The Bishop sat there for a moment, then rose from the sofa, smoothing the creased front of his black trousers. “Of course there’s the other thing, too. Moseley’s just two hours from Atlanta.”
Atlanta. The Institute. Irene. That’s what the Bishop was getting at, of course, but he wouldn’t come right out and say it. Nobody, including the Bishop, wanted to talk about Irene, not directly. When you got anywhere near the subject, folks started acting like boxers, bobbing and weaving and staying out of reach of a good left hook. Joe Pike had bobbed and weaved as long as he could, and then lit out for Texas. Well, all right. Trout would pack up bag and baggage and move, unfair as it might be. But before long, somebody was going to have to sit still and talk to him about his mother.
TWO
Home. Moseley, Georgia. Trout supposed it was as much home as anyplace else. He had never actually lived there, but compared to a series of four-year stays in various parsonages, Moseley was the one geographic constant in his life. It was a place of holiday visits, a day or two at a time in the big house across the street from the Methodist Church. Never on the holiday itself, because a preacher had to be in his own pulpit for Easter or Christmas, but usually in the days after when there was still the lingering smell of a roasting turkey or a spray of Easter lilies on a front hall table. Trout was never there for long enough at a time to get much sense of the town. But you didn’t have to be there for long to know that to be a Moseley in Moseley was something special. Trout remembered what Joe Pike had said in a moment of particular earthiness: “When a Moseley farts, everybody smells it.”