Where the well had been, there was nothing but rocks and splinters of wood. Tin cans of flowers were scattered everywhere.
“I didn’t want him to die.” I said.
“I know you didn’t.” Granpaw patted me on the back. “That’s the good part.”
“Did Jesus save you Granpaw?”
“He did that a long time ago son.”
“I mean, he saved you today didn’t he?”
Granpaw turned around with me then and we both looked at the knife. “You could say that. But that ain’t what you seen, was it?”
“No Granpaw. I saw Victor stab you in the heart. I didn’t see Jesus. What happened?”
“Well, you seen me get stabbed, so I reckon I was stabbed. But now you see the knife up there in Jesus. So that must be so too. I reckon you could say Granpaw’s dead and not dead at the same time.”
What Granpaw said didn’t make any sense. I thought what really happened was I got mixed up, that Victor somehow must have stabbed Jesus instead of Granpaw. But why would he do that? How could that have happened? Behind the hill where the barn used to be, there was a half-arc of rainbow and a fan of sunlight beaming down. Granpaw looked at me and in a voice that sounded like Moses said, “Not always what you think. Now, isn’t it boy?”
30
Home
We were on the other side of Toledo on our way to Flat Rock. After that we’d be in Detroit. For a while I watched the telephone poles go by; then I went back on the floorboard, playing with my army men and wondering about school. It was already the middle part of March and getting on toward spring. We’d stayed in Kentucky until Granny and Granpaw were back on their feet. The storm had flattened pretty much everything except for the house.
I got to go to Kingdom school with Willis and the colored boys. The schoolhouse there was just one big room with tables and chairs and a pot-bellied stove, so cold in the wintertime you had to wear your coat during lessons. Momma wouldn’t let Missy go to school there. Said when we got back to Detroit, she’d explain everything to the teachers, get somebody special to help us with our schoolwork. We’d be moving back to Kentucky anyway, she said, when the house got sold.
We’d left Granny and Granpaw’s this morning before the sun came up. We’d gone only a little ways down the road before Momma had to slam on the brakes. There, in the light of our headlights – in the middle of the road – stood Moses, puffing on a cigarette.
Momma hollered at the windshield. “Moses! I swear to God!”
He had an old coat pulled around his shoulders and was taking his time, looking up at the stars, like being there wasn’t anything unusual. Finally he stepped on the cigarette and came around to the passenger side window.
“Roll the window down for Moses, Orbie,” Momma said.
I rolled it down and Moses looked in. In that wheezing, up and down voice of his, he said to me, “CLOUD boy! MIND you.”
“We thought you was dead!” Momma hollered. “We thought they’d hung you!”
Moses’ face was just black shadow, dim lit eyes between two long curtains of hair under a black hat. It was the first I’d seen of him since the cave. He reached his hand in the window and dropped a bundle in my lap. It was bone chilly cold outside and his breath came in frosty-white puffs. “mind you, BOY!”
“They been looking all over for you,” Momma said.
I was so tongue-tied I couldn’t even open my mouth. I wanted to tell Moses what all had happened. About Victor and Granpaw. About Bird disappearing. How the storm had broke every bone in Reverend Pennycall’s body. But then, like smoke, Moses slipped away and into the shadows at the side of the road. In my lap lay Granpaw’s old tobacco pouch, the Rain Skull tucked inside.
I was feeling of it around my neck as I sat on the hump in the middle of the floorboard. I had my army men lined up on the seat in front of me. Good guys against the bad.
“That’s stupid,” Missy said. She was leaning over the front seat with her baby doll. Her cast was gone. I pretended to blast away at the bad guys. “It’s stupid to do that way,” Missy said.
“I know it is. Hush now.” I was too happy to be mad at her though, happy she was talking again.
“If you know it’s stupid, why you doin’ it then?” Missy said.
I kept on blasting at the bad guys. “I don’t have to tell you every little thing.”
“Yes you do,” Missy said, but when I looked up to answer, she’d already slid down the front. Since the storm blew Victor away, she hadn’t screamed or whined around one single time.
All the pictures Willis and me drew were piled up under the window in the back. I reached up and pulled them down, spread them out on the seat in front of me on top my army men. It was easy to tell which ones were Willis’s and which ones were mine. Mine were all messy with smudged airplanes and fire and sailing ships sinking down. Willis’s were good and clean. Real pictures, his were. Of me on the porch with my drawing pad. Of Granny shaving Granpaw. Of Victor, pouring fire on Daddy. Momma and Missy in the rocking chair at the end of Granny and Granpaw’s porch.
She was going to have a baby, Momma was. You could see her belly sticking out. I wondered if the baby would look like her or if it would look like Victor. I wondered about Victor – about Armstrong and his men and The Pink Flamingo. A week after the storm Cecil had come with a package for Momma. It was postmarked from Detroit but it didn’t have any return address. In it was a Kellogg’s Cornflakes box with a Detroit newspaper folded up inside.
In the paper was a story that Momma didn’t want me to know about; but then she went ahead and read it to me anyway. A story there about Reverend Bill Jackson, ‘Black Jack’ Jackson, and how they thought he was the one got drunk and poured hot steel on Daddy. How they found out it wasn’t him after all because investigators received new information from secret people nobody would talk about. How the fingerprints and things they found pointed to Victor Denalsky because, for one thing, the night janitor lied about what he had seen. And also Victor was in with the Mob. And the Mob was afraid Daddy would do something they didn’t like, but they couldn’t say what that was. Something had to do about the Union, but it was confusing.
“Double crossed by Armstrong and that bunch,” Momma said. She sat next to me on the back porch steps, looking all teary-eyed and out of place. Between her fingers a cigarette trembled. “He done it, Orbie. Victor. You was right all along.” She stood up sadly and went inside the house. I thought I’d be happy, being right, but I wasn’t. It was like Victor had stabbed Daddy in the back and now the Mob had stabbed Victor, even after he was already dead. Me being right about things didn’t seem to matter very much. I heard Momma in the kitchen, boohooing, talking to Granny and Granpaw. “I just cain’t hardly believe what all’s come to pass. I feel so ashamed.”
“They ain’t nothin’ you done anybody else wouldn’t have. Not with what you had to face,” Granpaw said.
“That drawing Willis made drove him crazy, Granpaw. He almost choked me to death. Said Orbie and little Missy would be minus a mother if I didn’t toe the line.” Momma boohooed a while, then said, “I should have seen what was coming. My own little boy had more sense than I did.”
“Your own little boy had help.” Granny looked through the screen door to where I was sitting out on the back porch. “Ain’t that right Orbie?”
I tried to make myself small.
Granny smacked her lips. “You can’t keep nothing secret from old Big Ears out there.”
“I didn’t want to believe it,” Momma said. “I didn’t believe it – till I came across those papers.”
“From that box,” Granpaw said.
“I come across that letter from Armstrong said the investigation had turned against Victor, I knowed they was something bad wrong,” Momma said. “I should have got away from there then. I should have run.”
“You looked so pitiful tied up like you was,” Granny said.
“He violated me, Mamaw. In front of Missy.”
&n
bsp; “Shhh,” Granny said. “Orbie’s still out there.”
Momma let out a big sob. “I could have spared my kids! I could have spared you and Granpaw!
“Shhh,” Granny said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
Momma blew her nose. “At least Nealy had a change of heart.”
“Hell he did,” Granpaw said. “I threatened to tell Judge Beechum about his moonshine. That changed him.”
“I’m so ashamed I don’t know what to do,” Momma said.
“Blind love,” Granpaw said. “It’s the Devil’s Confusion.”
Momma boohooed even more then, making deep gulping sounds and blowing her nose.
“Powerful blind,” Granpaw said.
When we got to Flat Rock, it was getting dark and had begun to snow. There was the ‘ding ding’ sound the hose makes when you run over it at a gas station. Momma stopped the car and somebody knocked at the back window. I looked up at a man with orange hair and freckles, wearing a hat like mine with a winged horse. I rolled down the window.
“Never thought I’d see you again,” he said, smiling a big happy smile. The snow fell straight down in the lights of the gas station behind him. “Let’s see… Your name is…?”
“Orbie!” I almost shouted. “And you’re J C!”
“That’s right. Good memory, son. I see you’re still wearing the hat.”
Momma looked back from the front seat. “Who you got there, Orbie?”
“That man, Momma! It’s J C!”
J C looked in through the back window. “Evening Ma’am.”
“Ruby,” I said. “Her name is Ruby. She’s my Momma.”
Missy stood up on the front seat.
“And who’s this pretty little girl?” J C smiled.
Missy put her fingers in her mouth and backed away.
“It’s all right hon,” Momma said. “Say hidy.”
“Her name is Missy,” I said.
“How do you do Miss Missy?” J C said.
Missy kept her fingers in her mouth and said nothing.
“How can I help you Ma’am?” J C said.
“Fill it up with reg’lar,” Momma said. “And check the oil please.”
“Right away Ma’am,” J C said.
“He’s nice, ain’t he Momma?” I said after he had gone to do the work. I showed her the inside of my hat again, the letters J C stitched in blue. “He was good to me. He was gonna show me how to pump gas, but Victor wouldn’t let him.” A shadow passed over Momma’s face. J C finished with the gas and came around to the window on Momma’s side.
“Oil was fine Ma’am,” he said. “Three dollars for the gas.”
“You take checks?” Momma said.
J C nodded. “You can make it out to Sunshine Mobil.”
Momma wrote the check and handed it to J C along with her driver’s license.
J C smiled. All his freckles smiled too. “Says here you’re from Detroit Ma’am. Going up there pretty soon myself. I understand there’s work up there.”
“There is,” I said. “My Daddy worked in the factory.”
Momma gave me a look, but smiled anyway. “He worked in the steel mill at the Ford Rouge.”
“Is that right?”
“I don’t mean to be nosy,” Momma said. “But how come you looking for work up there? Don’t this place belong to you?”
“No Ma’am,” J C said. “I’m just a manager. Work on cars occasionally. I’ve been looking for something with a little more pay.”
“We’re moving to Kentucky,” I said.
“Is that right?”
“Uh huh. To Harlan’s Crossroads! I’m ten going on eleven now.”
“He don’t need to hear about all that Orbie,” Momma said.
“That’s all right Ma’am.” J C handed Momma back her driver’s license.
“He gets excited,” Momma said.
“No I don’t,” I said.
I thought J C would walk off then, but he didn’t. He took off his hat, ran his hand through his hair and put it back on. “I was wondering Ma’am. I was wondering if you might know of anybody up there that I might talk to? About a job, I mean. Or maybe your husband would be the one to ask.”
“My husband’s dead,” Momma said.
J C rested his hand on the door above Momma, waiting for the answer to a question nobody had asked. Leaning a little forward he said, “I’m sorry to hear that Ma’am. Really, I am.”
Momma drew back a little. “Ain’t no call to be,” she said, her voice going all deadpan. “We all have to go sometime.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s so,” J C said. “It’s just. Well. It must be difficult for you I mean. I see you’re in a family-way.”
“I am,” Momma said. “But that’s no concern of yours.”
“No Ma’am. I didn’t mean to say it was.”
There were no other cars at the gas station and almost no traffic on the road. The kindness in J C’s voice matched the kindness in his eyes. It seemed to be settling softly over everything like the snow was. I listened to the snow ticking against the front window, wondering why Momma was being so mean.
“I better get back to work,” J C said. “I’m sorry for your trouble, Ma’am.” A big truck wheezed by the gas station, slow grinding its gears up the road. J C made a move to walk away.
“Hold on a minute,” Momma said. She got out a piece of paper from her purse, wrote something on it and gave it to J C. “I cain’t promise you nothing but here’s the name and number of one of Jessie’s friends. He works at the mill.”
“I appreciate this Ma’am.”
“Tell him I sent you,” Momma said. “Ruby Denalsky. The name is on the check.”
“Thank you Ma’am.” J C looked in through the window at Missy, then at me. “You kids take care of your Momma now. Nice seeing you again, son.”
Momma started the car and pulled away. J C smiled and tipped his hat at her, but I could see in the rear-view mirror that Momma wasn’t smiling back. When we got out of Flat Rock, the snow came thick in the headlights. Momma’s face was in the mirror, inside the orange glow of her cigarette, her eyes frozen to the road, lips unpainted and stretched. I had the thought she might be like that a long time.
I looked out the front window, listening to the back and forth noise of the windshield wipers. The snowflakes zoomed into the headlights, making swift white lines right for the car. They glowed like the blue light had glowed, only white. I thought of the power Granpaw said was inside me. Power to dissolve clouds. Contrary Power. I couldn’t wait to get back to Kentucky. I felt again of the pouch around my neck. Up front the snow lay white across the road. Past that it was all dark.
The End
Introducing
FREDDIEOWENS.COM
THE BLIND MAN RECORDINGS
Writings Made Visible In Voice
You can now hear THEN LIKE THE BLIND MAN / Orbie’s Story read aloud by the author at freddieowens.com where an audio podcast of the novel replete with sound effects and musical loops is in the process of being recorded and serialized episode by episode and may be listened to for free.
About The Author
Freddie Owens is a poet and fiction writer whose work has been published in Poet Lore, Crystal Clear and Cloudy, and Flying Colors Anthology. The author is a past attendee of Pikes Peak Writer’s Conferences and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and is a current member of Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop in Denver, Colorado. As a licensed professional counselor and psychotherapist, he for many years counseled perpetrators of domestic violence and sex offenders, and provided therapies for individuals and families. He holds a master’s degree in contemplative psychotherapy from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Born in Kentucky and raised in Detroit, Owens drew inspiration for his first novel, Then Like The Blind Man / Orbie’s Story from childhood experiences growing up around Harlan’s Crossroads, Kentucky. His lifelong studies of Tibetan Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta not to mention his encounters with N
ative American Shamanism are also of note in this regard.
THEN LIKE THE BLIND MAN: Orbie's Story Page 29