by Billy Coffey
As the sound of the engines fades toward the hills, Abel can only stand in wonder. The air of this early evening has taken on the calm of a thunderstorm freshly passed, hanging heavy and thick. And that thing, that sense of possibility that carried Abel from this very field not ten hours before to play a trick on Chris Jones, returns. It is a strange thing. A lovely thing.
It is a thing of terror.
-4-
Twenty dollars. Twenty dollars is all Lisa carries home.
Even that is rounding things up, her halfhearted attempt at what Roy calls “seeing the light in the shadow.” That’s what he’s always saying—You got to see the light in the shadow, Lisa—whenever days like this come around. Lisa herself prefers a more realistic (and cynical, she admits) view of circumstances. For instance: it’s not really twenty dollars in her apron pocket when she hands the rest of the diner’s supper crowd over to Nadine Heatwole, it’s nineteen and change. Nickels and dimes mostly, though Lisa knows better than to complain to Roy. You got to see the light in the shadow has got to be the most inane expression in the English language. You got to see the light in the shadow is too stupid for even one of those dime-store cards they sell down at the pharmacy.
This day, she thinks, is of a kind that will end me.
The car reeks of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, reeks like her. Near everyone in town stops by the diner at least once a week, drawn more by the promise of gossip than good food and good service, the opportunity for some to ruminate upon the trials of others if only so their own seem less. Their wagging tongues are kept lubricated by endless cups of coffee. A waitress can do okay at a place like the Shoney’s in Camden or the Cracker Barrel in Stanley, but not so much at Roy’s Diner in downtown Mattingly. Not when most of your tips are for either regular or decaf. Not when it’s just you paying the bills and the kid waiting for you at home, your sweet and beautiful only child, can’t get from point A to point B without a side trip to the emergency room.
Often and in her private heart, Lisa has given herself over to the very sense of pity and rage she long vowed to put away forever. The pity is directed inward, to what has come of her life. The rage points outward and up to some undefined section of the heavens, toward whoever is supposed to be up there looking down, for allowing things to be this way. But those times are tempered by the quarters and dollars she finds wedged under the saltshakers on the diner’s tables, which are never much but more than Nadine takes home, left for her in no small part by simple guilt.
There was a time when many in town believed Lisa beat her child. That was the best explanation for the flurry of Abel’s ailments, all those casts, until of course the truth of things came out. Now these very people are quick to ask how he fares, how they both are getting along, and Lisa will smile and say they are well and thank them for their charity. In a heart more private than the one that mourns herself, Lisa is fine having a child in such tenuous physical shape. Is even happy with it, though that truth is crammed low inside and kept even out of her own sight. Because a boy like that, so helpless and so meek, will always need her. A son like Abel will never leave.
That is why it does not matter much, bringing home only this paltry little bit that was supposed to be much more and bound for the bill at the market. Nor does it even matter that five dollars out of that sum must be fed into the gas tank or Lisa’s car will never make it home. That leaves fifteen.
And change—seeing that light.
She stops at the school to pick up Abel’s things and finds Willie Farmer (Willie to her, Dumb Willie to the rest of the town, Abel included) indeed gone as Abel had said, off to slave away in his parents’ garden. Charlie, however, is still there and still drinking. He lets Lisa into Mrs. Heizer’s room and reminds her again of the great healing going on tonight over the hill, then wraps his meaty arms about her when Lisa begins to weep.
Darnell Givens is in the post office when she pulls into the lot. He’s at the counter and Lisa can’t go in; she’s supposed to have made forty dollars today and taken most of it to him at the grocery to pay her credit. There’s nothing for her to do but sink down in the seat and hope he doesn’t see. She shakes her head at what must be a pitiful sight, this poor piece of white trash hiding from her creditor. He doesn’t spot Lisa’s grubby little Honda this time, but that may not be the case tomorrow. That’s the thing about small towns—no one can hide forever. She waits until Darnell’s truck is gone before slinking into the lobby. That familiar sense of weight presses onto her shoulders. The mailbox key is in her hand. Lisa doesn’t realize how slippery it feels.
It’s a low box, which means she has to bend down to peer inside. The tiny window reveals something inside. Quite a few somethings. She breathes deep, inserts the key, and opens the door.
If there is one decent thing to be found in the midst of such a bleak day, it is that Lisa finds little of consequence inside. There is a catalog she can dream her way through but never order from, bills she can’t pay, an overdue on the electric. But no letter. In fact, there hasn’t been a letter for close to a month now. Lisa nods, manages something of a smile as she leans against a row of mailboxes. Thinks maybe it will be over for a while, maybe he’s given up or gone. She knows this possibility is a lie, but perhaps this lie will be enough to carry her through what promises to be a hellish night.
Begging is an indignity she has refused to suffer even in the worst of times, but that’s what things have come to. There really is no other choice.
*
The house is locked when she arrives. All is quiet inside. Abel’s bedroom door is shut and he doesn’t come out, which is best. Lisa could use some time alone. She sets her purse and Abel’s backpack on the kitchen table (hard, in case he didn’t hear her come in) and takes a beer from the refrigerator out to the small table on the front porch.
They sit here often in the evenings, talking and even laughing about the day. Abel will say all he learned in school, which is usually more from his library books than his teachers, leaving Lisa to sit and stare in a kind of pensive awe. Her mind thinking, Lord, this boy is smart. Hearing him’s like listening to a grown man with an education, even as her heart breaks against some unwritten cosmic rule that her son can possess a strong mind or a strong body, but not both.
The screen door opens. Abel peeks first and then moves onto the porch, taking a seat next to her. It is a rare awkward moment between them, one filled with a silence heavier than even the humid air. In the trees that mark the lane’s dead end, a mockingbird calls. Lisa looks that way, since looking at Abel would be too hard. Abel does the same, no doubt preferring a clump of branches to the disappointment he must fear is on her face.
He says, “I’m sorry,” getting it over with. “About what I did. I’m sorry about what I did.”
Lisa takes a swallow of beer. “I appreciate that, Abel. I do. So long as you mean it, that is. So you need to be honest here. What’s our first rule?”
“No drugs,” Abel says.
“And our second?”
“Always tell the truth.”
“Just so. We might not have much but we’re rich in that, and there’s not much we can’t get through so long as we keep things that way.”
Abel thinks that over. He scratches his cast and then stops to pull a filthy pencil out from the bottom near his thumb. If that’s one of his tricks, Lisa thinks he’s got better ones.
“I’m not sorry about Chris,” he says, “because he’s mean. Principal Rexrode says he’s spoilt. That’s as good a word as I can think. He’s been mean to me the whole time I’ve been in school, and you know what’s worse? Chris is the only kid who saw me. All the rest ignore me because a what I’m like. But I’m sorry I made you upset. I’m sorry I’m gonna get in trouble, even though Principal Rexrode says I shouldn’t. He knows how Chris is.”
“I know how Chris is,” Lisa answers. “I known people like Chris Jones all my life. You think the kid versions are bad, wait till they grow up.” She smiles, tries to anyway, and rubs his ca
st with her fingers. “There’ll always be people like that hovering about, and it don’t matter if you’re healthy or not, rich or poor. You ain’t the only one in the world’s got to suffer through the days getting picked on and called names. Yes, I got upset. I still am, and that’s being honest. But what got me riled isn’t what you did to Chris, it was that all you really did was show a bully how much a bully you can be. Do you understand that?”
“Yes’m,” he says.
“You’re getting to be a man now, Abel. My man. Middle school’s a tough time for any kid, and I don’t want you to get lost along the way. You can grow to be kind or just turn sour, and at some point there’s nothing I can do about it anyway. It’ll be your choice. Light calls to light and dark to dark. It’s an important time for you now. This is what will make you what you’ll always be.”
She thinks Abel would have preferred to just be punished than to hear something like this, though it needed saying. That look is in his eyes again, the same one he flashed while sitting in the principal’s office. Offended.
He goes quiet awhile, staring at his cast, and doesn’t even look up when the mockingbird calls again. Then he says, “Sometimes I can’t take it anymore.”
Lisa’s son says this, her eleven-year-old boy. Her heart crumbles at the words. Not only because no child should ever be cursed with the sort of life that forces him to say such a thing, but because of the way he said it—with neither pity nor desperation, a mere statement of fact.
“What can’t you take anymore?”
“Everything, I guess. Do people call you names because they used to think you hurt me?”
“What?”
“You said I’m not the only one gets called names.”
“No,” Lisa says, “not because of that.”
“Then is it because I’m a bastard boy?”
“Don’t you ever use that word.”
“But I am,” Abel says. “That’s why they say stuff. Because you got a kid but ain’t never been married.”
“That’s nobody’s business. Man who was your daddy died, Abel. Nothing anybody can do about that.”
“Yes’m,” he says, though this time that mash-up of words doesn’t sound so convincing.
“There’s meatloaf and potatoes inside. Why don’t you go on and eat, then get your good clothes.”
“Where we going?”
She sighs and drains the last of her beer. “Punishment, I suppose. For us both. Charlie says there’s revival over the hill. And not a word from you, please.”
It looks as though Abel has plenty of words, though he keeps them to himself, except for the ones that say, “I’d rather not.”
“Me neither. But unless you can do a trick to make a few hundred dollars pop out of the air, I think we’re gonna have to.”
He says, “Maybe Dumb Willie’ll be there.”
“I don’t doubt it. From what Charlie told me when I went by the school again, this is something Willie’s folks would never pass up. Now get on. Food’s getting cold, and we’ll have to leave soon.”
Abel stands with as much dignity as he can muster. He pauses at the door. “Momma?”
“Yes?”
“I wanted Principal Rexrode to punish me. Everybody acts like I ain’t even alive. I did that to Chris because he’d always be mean to me if I didn’t, and I did it so I’d get punished just like anybody else would. But Principal Rexrode didn’t do anything. He says it’s ’cause it’s the last day, but that’s a lie. I know you hate lying, Momma. I hate it too, and that’s why I got so mad. Principal Rexrode won’t let me be like the other kids at school on account he says I’m special.”
“You are special,” Lisa says, and wipes a tear.
PART II
REVIVAL
-1-
Trees numbering more than Abel can count crowd both sides of the road, blanking out a waning sun. Folk say night comes to the hill country long before town. To Abel, that’s the appeal of these hidden hollers in the mountain’s shadow. He can’t see his momma’s face, just her one hand on the wheel and the other hand smoothing the wrinkles in her Going Out dress, a faded blue jumper that once hugged her curves but now would slip off were it not for the straps sinking into her bony shoulders. She mutters to herself more than to him about how many cars there are, says it’s like driving in a city instead of the country.
Abel sits still in fear of wrinkling his best jeans and a white oxford that he struggled to button himself all the way to the collar, looking out the window. The two of them have often come to the hill country on Sunday afternoons, the little car winding among ridges and meadows mostly forgotten but for those who call this place their own. For the scenery, Lisa will say, because fresh air and bright sun are good for Abel’s bones. And yet their gaze will always linger more upon tiny homes that are barely livable and the near starving people in them than on the long view of the valley below, leaving Abel with the notion there is a higher purpose to the trips. Their drives to the hill country serve as reminders that the world holds people lower than themselves, and with troubles deeper and worse.
He sees the family in the car in front of them, how the man is looking through the rearview and saying something to the woman beside him; the kids in back, three of them, turn to stare. It’s been like this since his momma fell in with the long line leading here from Mattingly. Abel knows what the town thinks of them, how they are still looked upon by some with suspicion. Not only because the man who was Abel’s daddy died before his momma could marry him. Not even because most of Mattingly (and all of Mattingly’s kids) view Abel’s being born with soft insides the judgment of that sin.
Up ahead come the first of the signs. The name Reverend Johnny Mills is spray-painted on the side of a wooden pallet turned up on its end. A black arrow points upward. Abel supposes that means keep going straight and not that Reverend Johnny Mills is presently on his way heavenward.
“Don’t sit there,” his momma says, “sulking like that. This’ll all be okay. I don’t want to be here either, Abel. We just don’t have a choice. So we’ll make the most of it together, and you just do what I say when I say it. And be kind. Don’t pay no mind to how anybody treats us. They mean well.”
Mostly it’s because they’re unsaved that the Shiffletts are treated as different. Abel being a cripple is some and Lisa being an unwed momma is more, but neither amounts to much when set against the fact they are bound for hell. And Abel grants that he and his momma are never treated badly, except for when Chris Jones gets extra mean, or the customers at the diner skip out without leaving a tip, or when Mister Medford Hoskins raises the rent again. They are merely treated different, like everybody’s keeping the same secret and Abel and his momma are the only ones who don’t know.
He has long suspected it began for his momma the day she showed up in town with a baby but no husband. For him he knows it began in kindergarten, when his momma told Principal Rexrode she didn’t feel it right to force her son into attending what’s called Weekly Religious Education. Let him make that choice, she’d said, when it’s time. And so once a week from then on, everyone in Abel’s class walked out across the back lot to the little white trailer just off school grounds to learn about the glories of the Lord and the sins of man while Abel remained behind alone—first in his own empty classroom and then, from fourth grade until now, on one of the playground benches. The playground had been Principal Rexrode’s idea. He said if Abel couldn’t get any of the Son he’d at least get a little of the sun, and then he laughed. Abel hadn’t understood how that was funny, but he’d gone along.
That’s where he’d met Dumb Willie Farmer, right on that playground bench three years ago. Of course Abel had known of him. Everybody knew Dumb Willie because he helped the janitor and because he was so dumb, struck that way ever since he’d fallen from a wagon as a boy. It had been Dumb Willie’s lunch break (“munch break” is what he called it) and he’d sat with Abel because Abel was alone and so was he. Abel hadn’t minded the co
mpany, even though he’d had to put down his book and struggle through that first conversation. Talk turned to trains soon enough. Dumb Willie lived with his folks on the farm just beyond the patch of trees that made the dead end at Abel’s road, so all the trains cut through Dumb Willie’s place too. Turned out Dumb Willie loved trains near as much as Abel did, a fact that pleased Abel to no end.
And then had come the trick.
Miss Ellie had given Abel some of her sweet tea from home and dumped it into a Styrofoam cup that he’d taken out to the playground. By the eventual ebb in his conversation with Dumb Willie, that cup had been all but drained. Abel kept talking as he poked a hole into the back of the cup. He’d said, Hey, watch this, and then gripped both sides, easing his thumb into the hole and angling the cup upward, hands easing away from the sides now, making some small magic.
Dumb Willie had sat transfixed and pronounced it a miracle of the Lord. From then on, Abel had in his possession the very thing any boy of good sense longs for in his deepest heart—a fan.
They have been inseparable since. Dumb Willie sometimes came over in the evening for supper once his chores were done. Abel’s momma made sure to bring extra food from the diner. They fished and skinny-dipped in the pond at the far edge of the woods. Dumb Willie would take Abel flying in the pastures, which was just about Abel’s favorite thing, and Abel would visit Dumb Willie’s house if he knew Henderson and Rita Farmer were gone. Those two were trouble. One time Lisa said some in town believe Dumb Willie didn’t fall off that wagon at all, that Henderson beat his boy about the head instead, only there was never proof. Abel doesn’t need proof to figure that’s how it happened. Their meanness toward their son was apparent that first day on the playground when Dumb Willie offered Abel a bit of his lunch: half a bologna sandwich that had gone green, a few crackers, and a half-rotted apple. Abel believed then that Dumb Willie’s folks were trying to murder him by starvation. He believes so still.