by Daniel Kraus
After a time my eyes fell upon my father standing at the stove within a cloud of steam, and I became riveted by the normalcy of the apparition—Ken Harnett, not grappling with graves and the enormity of death, but clanging a metal spoon against a metal pot, stirring broth. He served soup and I drank it. Later there were crackers and water. By now it had to be at least Tuesday, and wretchedly I began to fret about the classes I was missing and what it meant for the future my mother had plotted. Was I in danger of flunking out? Suspension? This was worse than risking the wrath of Woody and Gottschalk. Then my father returned from an absence and set a stack of papers on my cardboard-box desk. “Your assignments,” he said.
Just sifting through the papers strengthened me. Though sweaty, my fingers itched for my textbooks. I would show them. I would continue to ace every exam. I would turn in work so strong they would accuse me of cheating and I would welcome the challenge. I drifted off imagining their thwarted effort. Let them try.
A cool hand against my face rose me from slumber. I blinked my eyes open and saw an elderly man kneeling above me. He had sparse gray hair and a slotted, wizened face of the darkest chestnut. He wore a white clergyman’s collar. My first thought was one of vanity: my smell, the stink of the grave, this man of God would recoil.
“Hello, Joseph,” he said. “I’m Reverend Knox.” The sonorous buzz of his voice was deep and true.
My throat burned. “Hello.”
Knox smiled so widely the hairs in his mustache pulled away from one another. Bones whined audibly as he twisted his neck to look over his shoulder.
“This boy’s got the boneyard blues.”
Behind Knox I could see my father standing with his fists in his pockets, shuffling his feet like a scolded schoolboy. “His first time. What do you expect?”
“That’s no excuse for laying him on this cold floor,” Knox snapped. “Man, you ought to have your head examined.”
“Stop coddling him,” Harnett said. “It’ll work itself out.”
“Work itself out, my missing foot,” muttered Knox. I gazed at the swaying fabric of his black pants and ascertained that, indeed, the lower half of his right leg was gone. I searched for his face and he waved a hand as if erasing the last few moments. “I got just the cure, Joseph. We gonna put your dad to work, amen?” Knox winked, then called over his shoulder. “Shake a leg to your garden, old man, and get me one of all you got. And not just an armload of nasty onions. We’re also going to need whiskey. Don’t even try telling me you got none. And two lemons, and if that means you need to drive into town, well, I don’t know what to tell you besides you’re running the Lord’s errands now. God is good?”
To my surprise, Harnett moved right away. He lifted his jacket from the rocking chair and fished his keys from the pocket. “Don’t be polluting the kid with this Lord’s errand shit, all right?”
Knox took on a philosophical tone. “ ‘It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household?’ ”
My father raised his hands in surrender and exited. Knox placed a hand on his knee and with a pained grunt lifted himself into the air. He wedged a single crutch into his armpit.
“Are you one of the Diggers?” I asked.
“Just one of Jesus’s foot soldiers. God is good? No, child, I don’t approve of hardly a thing your dad’s ever done. It’s wrong. I don’t need to tell you, you know it in your heart. But that’s Jesus’s miracle, Joseph.” Knox smiled. “Two men such as your father and myself, breaking bread? God is good! Ken Harnett’s soul is on fire, yes. But you know what that means? It means my soul is on fire, too. And the two of us, amen, we douse each other’s flames.” He patted his sleeves by means of illustration.
“You know? What he does?”
“ ‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.’ ”
I tried to bring myself to one elbow. Knox winked.
“We gonna fix you up, amen?”
It just came out of my mouth: “God is good.”
When Harnett returned, Knox shoved a wooden spoon into his hand, and now my father stood before the stove, poking sullenly at vegetables. Knox clattered a number of bottles across the counter, eventually handing me a glass half filled with a golden liquid. He limped to my father’s rocking chair, sat down, and set his crutch horizontally across the armrests.
Knox sighed, kneading his stump. “Forty years I been trying to knock sense into your fool head and forty years you been telling me to save my breath. Now I don’t have a whole lot more breath left to give, so you best let me say my piece. Amen?”
For a moment my father stood motionless. “Don’t say that.”
“When God calls my name, I plan to come a-hopping, to a land where there’s no crutches or dentures or medicine bottles no one can open. You, you’d kick and scream all the way to glory. Don’t believe a single thing put in front of your two eyes. Don’t even believe in the Incorruptibles.”
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars not to start this again,” Harnett said. “Two hundred.”
“Saint Teresa Margaret.” Knox elongated each word with exquisite pleasure. “Fifteen days after death with cheeks still as pink as posies, praise Jesus. Smelled like posies, too—every witness swore it.”
“I know tricks that could pull off the same thing,” Harnett muttered from the stove. “Give me the right chemicals and five minutes with the body.”
“Thirteen years later! They move the blessed body and upon exhumation find Saint Teresa Margaret uncorrupted still! A miracle, given unto Saint Teresa Margaret for the healing miracles she bestowed as His servant. Oh, God is good.”
“This was what, the eighteen hundreds? The seventeen hundreds? I tell you what’s a miracle, that you believe any of this.” Harnett pushed sizzling vegetables around the pan.
Knox slapped his knee and guffawed. One of his teeth was capped in gold. “ ‘I am the resurrection and the life!’ ” He laughed and slapped his knee again. “ ‘I am the resurrection and the life! Whoever believes in me, streams of living water will flow from within him.’ Visit the monastery chapel of Santa Teresa dei Bruni. See for yourself. Then come back and you explain it to me.”
“She’s been embalmed, Knox.” Harnett sighed. “And I’m not going to Italy.”
“What’s an Incorruptible?” My voice surprised even me. Knox looked pleased that I had spoken. Harnett’s reaction was less enthusiastic.
“Tell the child,” Knox said. “He asks a sensible question.”
My father chewed his lip for a moment. When he spoke, he kept his eyes on the vegetables. “There’s two kinds of preservation,” he said begrudgingly. “There’s embalming, and then there’s sort of natural embalming.”
“Like the Iceman,” I said.
“But some people,” he said, pausing long enough to indict Knox, “say there’s a third kind, whose bodies don’t decay because of their … I don’t even know. Their virtue.”
“And we call ’em the Incorruptibles,” purred Knox.
“Some of us call ’em bullshit,” said Harnett.
“Saint Francis Xavier—oh, let me tell you about Saint Francis Xavier!” Knox’s hands were raised at the level of his head in private elation. “Saint Francis Xavier, passed in 1552. You know what they said in 1974 when they examined his remains? They said, ‘Why, it looks as though Saint Francis is only sleeping.’ Or Saint Andrew Bobola, tortured and burned alive, or Saint Josaphat, who they drug up from a river! Incorrupt, each of them. Tell me now that God is good!”
There was a snapping noise as my father turned off the stove. He lifted the pan and dumped the contents onto a plate. “All of which is very interesting and none of which means a goddamn thing.”
“It means that the grave is a holding pen.” The gaiety of Knox’s drawl hardened into something magiste
rial. “It is a waiting room. It is temporary housing, amen. It means that we bury our bodies at the pleasure of our Lord and He is aware of those bodies and even, amen, possessive of them. He be using the Incorruptibles to deliver a message, Ken Harnett, that you isn’t to be down there messing around with his property. Now, put some salt and pepper on that before you give it to the child. Mary and Joseph.”
A few irritated banging noises later, my drink was joined by a plate of food: roasted slices of red and green pepper, tomato, and plenty of browned onion, plopped unceremoniously onto a bed of sticky rice. I went for it with my fingers before my father pushed a fork into my palm. After stuffing some in my mouth I washed it back with a big gulp of the liquid concoction. Instantly my throat stung and my eyes screwed shut. So this was whiskey. It hit my belly and radiated heat, and only moments later did I taste the undertones of honey and lemon. My first thought was that it was like sucking gasoline vapors. My second thought was that I wanted more, and down the hatch it went.
Knox was chuckling. “Those blues will be gone in no time,” he said. His eyes twinkled and his hands clasped at his heart. “A son. God is good. God is real good. ‘Sons are a heritage from the Lord,’ Psalm One Twenty-seven. This is a gift, Harnett. Don’t you throw it away.”
Harnett looked at the old man in a way that was almost affectionate, and in that moment I recognized two men with much history between them, two men on opposite sides of a battle who kept fighting despite an abiding respect.
“It’s a warm October,” Harnett said. “Good news for your arthritis.”
There was silence for a while as I ate and drank. The sun was sinking. Unexpectedly it caught the bathroom mirror and temporarily blinded me; my eyes filled with white light and my ears momentarily rang with a sound like ravens. When I again opened them, Knox was kneeling before me, gently taking the empty tumbler from my hand and replacing it with a glass of water. I blinked; I must have blacked out. Over Knox’s shoulder I could see my father outside, raising an axe at the woodpile. I could also see Knox’s car, a small, battered junker that had to be at least twenty years old. The reverend’s large hand patted mine, and I marveled at the pure whiteness of his palms.
“Your father,” he sighed. “I save what souls that I can, but only the Almighty knows which path your father will take.” He squeezed my wrist and I could feel a sinewy strength alive in the old man’s bones. “Remember your Proverbs. ‘Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.’ Understand? I want the Lord to have an easier time with you than He does your old man. Amen?”
I felt myself nodding limply.
“And whatever you do,” he said, widening his yellow eyes and leaning forward until I could smell his musk of coffee and peanuts and minty cologne. “You stand clear of Mr. Boggs. You do not go near Antiochus Boggs.”
I opened my mouth to tell him I didn’t know any Mr. Boggs, but then Harnett’s steps thundered inside and I heard the crash of firewood spilling upon the hearth. Knox stood, swaying for a moment before catching himself with his crutch.
“You know what my great-great-grandma would’ve prescribed this child?” Knox called loudly to Harnett. “Another whiskey, probably.”
“A mellified,” said Knox. He glanced at me. “That’s a mummy been steeped in honey a good many years. There are those who believe eating a mellified has great medicinal value. Kind of like that drink I fixed you. Mite bit stronger, though.”
“Stop messing with the kid.” Harnett kicked the firewood against the hearth. “That crap never left sixteenth-century China.”
Knox began limping across the floor. I panicked at the thought of his exit—I felt certain that Knox and the strange knowledge he was privy to were key to explaining so much about Harnett, my mother, and me. “If you don’t think they were practicing that stuff on the bayou in my great-great-grandmother’s day, then I don’t know what to tell you. Called it mummy honey, she did. Ha!”
His breaths were labored as he hopped to the door and reached for his things. He draped a scarf over his bony shoulders and pulled a hat so low it flattened the tops of his ears. He sighed and hesitated at the open door, fishing a small set of car keys from his pocket.
“Not sure when I’ll be through again,” he said. “Plenty of Diggers to see, though, and I’ll keep sending along news.”
“And telling us all how damned we are,” Harnett said.
“That too, that too. By year’s end I hope to’ve brought a couple more into the fold. Maybe you too?”
Harnett looked grim. “Maybe.”
Knox patted my father’s shoulder. “Well. I hear tell there’s a relocation coming up this winter. Could be before year’s end. I’ll send word.”
“I appreciate it.”
“And I don’t have any real news about—” Knox paused with his mouth open, then closed it. He shrugged. Somehow I knew who he meant: Mr. Boggs. “But what I do hear, it’s not good.”
“Okay. Appreciate it.”
Knox pointed at me but kept his eyes on my father.
“I know. I will. I will,” Harnett said, nodding.
Knox sighed again and nodded. He pivoted on his crutch and turned to face the dusk. He inhaled deeply before leaving.
“It may be a warm October,” he said, “but it’s going to be a hell of a winter.”
25.
IT WAS CALLED FUN and Games. How something so innocently titled could end so badly, I don’t think anyone could have suspected. With the semester nearly half over, the boring but predictable fitness tests had finally run their course. That these mindless time-killers were finite seemed to befuddle the gym coaches, Mr. Gripp and Ms. Stettlemeyer, both of whom had spent most of the previous seven weeks relaxing on the bleachers.
“Starting today, we’re going to be splitting up the class,” announced Mr. Gripp. He was a tall man who went everywhere in a sweatshirt and gym shorts and had the drowsy bad temper of someone who had been doing this for way too many years. “Girls are staying with Stettlemeyer here in the gym. Guys, you get your pick. You can do this unit Ms. Stettlemeyer has planned or you can come with me to the weight room and, you know. Do weights.”
We were scattered across the floor. Ahead of me several feet was Celeste. A circle of females kept her sealed off from Woody, who nonetheless beseeched her with puppy-dog expressions. I kept my eyes down and repeatedly told myself the same thing: Incorruptibles existed, all right, and Celeste was one of them—nothing anyone could do could damage her. My hand crept to obscure the yellowish remainder of my bruise. Keep your distance, I reminded myself, but it wasn’t because I feared her wrath. It was because I was afraid she would smell my cemetery reek, and that the wrinkling of her fine features would telegraph to everyone in the room what kind of monster I really was.
“Listen up, people! I’m calling my unit Fun and Games!” Stettlemeyer shouted from around the rubber-cased whistle she kept clenched in her teeth. She delivered everything in this fashion, which was funny enough when she was urging us to “Push it!” but downright hilarious when she was caught attempting to compliment someone’s hairstyle. There was snickering, but as usual Stettlemeyer was deaf to it. “Here’s what we can look forward to! Various light athletics! Volleyball! Badminton! Table tennis! Scooter ball! And we’ll change it up almost every session! I think you’ll be pleased by the wide variety!”
I certainly didn’t welcome the uncertainty of a “wide variety,” but the other option, the weight room, worried me even more. Located at the top of a narrow flight of stairs off the gym, it was an ominous space more or less owned by Woody and his ilk. I visualized dumbbells and weight racks and other more complicated machinery, all twisted to cruel use against me.
Gripp hitched up his shorts. “Okay, everyone who’s coming with me come with me.”
There was a tense moment during which no one moved, and then Woody yawned, slapped Rhino on the back of his shaved head, and stood. In seconds boys everywhere were scuffli
ng toward the weight room door. After a moment of herding, Gripp scanned the remaining crowd until he found the straggler, me, all the way in the rear. My skin burned as every girl in the room turned to face me.
Then Gripp shifted his gaze to where one other boy sat, on the far side of the group of girls. Like me, he was short and slim, but where my features were small and dark, his were large and freckled, and he wore his blond hair to his shoulders. He looked only vaguely familiar. Was he in my biology class? English? If so, I knew absolutely nothing about him. Well, I knew one thing: I envied his ability to skate by unnoticed.
Gripp screwed up his face as if it were his sworn duty to call out such miserable pussies. Then, maybe too old for such shit, he changed his mind and was gone. “Okay! Everybody! Calisthenic formation!” Stettlemeyer clapped her hands. There was groaning and sighing and sneakers squeaking from shiny maple flooring, followed by the mechanized configuration of orderly rows. I lurched and scurried and finally landed in the last row. I noticed the blond kid choosing a spot far from me and I was glad—by ignoring each other’s existence, perhaps we could escape the mirror images of our failures. Up ahead, Stettlemeyer cranked up a boom box and shouted, “Superhits of the eighties! Oh, yeah! Superhits of the nineteen eighties!” The Pointer Sisters were fading out; Kenny Loggins was fading in.
“Jumping jacks!” Stettlemeyer yelled along with the synthesized beat. “One, two, three, and four! One, two, three, and four!” She began strolling along the ranks, clipboard and pen in hand. I heard her shout, “Name!” and heard a voice lower than my own respond, “Foley.” That was the blond kid’s name—Foley. He glanced my way and I quickly averted my gaze, yet everywhere else I looked was even more inappropriate: ponytails swishing, boobs bouncing, the hems of shorts swishing dangerously close to buttocks. I aimed higher, at the basketball hoop, and unsuccessfully pushed away the thought gnawing like a bug on my brain: all of these bodies, young and smooth and sturdy as they were, would end up in the ground, where their bones would be sifted through by a man like my father. Maybe a man like me.