by Kyle Minor
Nils made his jokes: We go to the police. We go to the old macoutes. We go to the CIA. We go to the missionaries. We go to the priests. We go to the American soldiers. But the only place we went was home. I have lived here since I was five years old, Angela, and this country is the only home I really know, but the older I get, the less I understand this place. I hate it that you left, but all night I dreamed about that bundle in the blanket, and I was so happy it was not you.
Please, love: don’t return to me.
Q & A
Q: What do you do in heaven?
A: Drink liquor, blow fire, and pray.
Q: Big G doesn’t mind?
A: With Big G, you have to make your own fun. The streets are paved with gold and lined with jewels. The sky shines with emeralds, diamonds, and rubies. The buildings are constructed of marbles of greens and reds and the fiercest blue. But the edifices are all facade. The storefronts are empty. Nobody needs to sleep or eat or make money, so nobody has to work or make a home. Big G made us crowns, but all we’re supposed to do is throw them at His feet. All the songs are triumphant and resolve to a major key. It’s pretty boring after a while.
Q: Why drink in heaven?
A: It’s a sad place. The climate is milder than hell, but they get the movies and the hard drugs. I’ve spent whole decades making carvings of bricks of heroin I can’t inject, lines of cocaine I can’t snort. All we do most of the time is remember the good bad days, tell stories about them, make books to hold the stories. I once spent a century honing a seventy-ton rock into compliant and foldable pages. I bound them with iron. But most of the time we run toward acid-free paper. I’ve written 397 books so far, but that’s nothing. You should see how my friend Joyce works. She writes so many thousands of books I’m not sure even eternity will be time enough to read them. It’s a grind, if you ask me.
Q: What do you pray for?
A: You always start with the obligatory praises, to butter Him up. Then you ask for more liquor.
Q: How do you blow fire?
A: Take a big suck of air. Pour 151-proof rum into your mouth. Hold a fiery torch near your mouth, at a seventy-five degree angle. Spit for all you’re worth.
Q: How does Big G spend His time?
A: Ducking our questions.
Q: What is the purpose of this book?
A: A catalog of stories and sadnesses, beginnings and endings, the stuff of childhood, death. Nothing new can happen here, so all you do is think about the days of life when possibility hadn’t been ripped from you forever, when anything could happen, and wonder why so much was squandered, so much wasted.
Q: What things do you remember most often, besides your sadnesses?
A: My little brother had a hamster named Eddie. We built him a magical castle made mostly of glass cages connected by plastic tubes, and lined with wood chips we changed every day. We gave him a kitchen, a bedroom, a TV room, a billiards room with a bidet, a concert hall, a gymnasium, an art studio, a science lab, a hall of mirrors, and a room filled with purple smoke. But all Eddie wanted to do was run his hamster wheel all day. It made a terrible noise. He ran himself to death. He only lived five months. You should have seen his face in the little shoebox casket. He seemed relieved.
Q: How does Big G decide who gets into heaven?
A: It’s as arbitrary as everything on the earth. No rhyme or reason, except this: To whom much is given, more will be given. From whom much is withheld, more will be withheld. How long can this go on? Can you help me find a way to end this?
Q: Do you have anything left to say?
A: Only the same things turned over again and again, as though turning them again will bring some new insight. But the new insights are the same as the old insights. Heaven is a hamster wheel.
Why won’t my heart stop beating?
SUSPENDED
THE LOCKER ROOM WALLS WERE PAINTED puke green and lined like a cage with metal hooks, and red mesh equipment bags hung from the hooks like meat. One of the bags was swinging, and I was swinging in it, and Drew McKinnick slapped at it and did his punching, and the janitor got me down.
What did my father say to the principal, and how many times had he said how many things? My boy is not eighty pounds yet. My boy is in the seventh grade. My boy is not a linebacker. Can’t you see I love my boy? If you had a boy to love what would you not do?
What did the principal say to my father? Did he say he had a boy and the boy got caught drinking in the tenth grade and he kicked his own boy out of school, same as anybody else? Did he tell my father what he told us once a year when they brought the boys into the gymnasium and left the girls away? I loved and love my wife, and she is not my ex-wife, not praise Jesus in the eyes of God, despite her running off with the Navy captain, despite it all I wait and wait and one day she will be restored to me. I know it in my heart of faith, I wait as Hosea waited, now let us pray.
Whatever passed or did not pass between them, this once it did not matter how much money McKinnick’s father gave the school, or how many animals he had veterinaried to health, or how many ordinances he had sealed with his mayor’s seal. This once I came home beaten and bruised and told my father, “They suspended him for three days.”
That night I slept and dreamt of three days free of red ears flicked blood red and slapped until I heard the ocean. The bathroom was mine to piss in, free of fear of footsteps from behind, one hand in my hair and the other on my belt, the painful lifting, then my head beneath the commode water.
That afternoon I skip-stepped to the bus, the Florida sun high and hot, and this once thinking the heat balmy and tropical rather than stalking and oppressive. Then, somewhere between the Route 7 and the Route 8, somebody grabbed me by the collar and slammed me against the black bumper. At first I thought it was him, because it looked like him, same dog teeth, same mocking smile, but bigger somehow, and how had it been kept from me he had an older brother?
“You think you’re something,” he said, and lifted me until my feet were off the ground. He was as big as my father. “You ever run crying on my brother again, I’ll beat you within an inch of your life, you hear me? I wouldn’t mind breaking you.”
He had me up against the back of the bus, and somewhere somebody had taught him how to do it, and his brother, too. I can see their faces now, but younger, fleshier, their father pressing their bodies to the wall, and then, older, leaner, their sons looking down at their fathers in their fear, learning.
LAY ME DOWN IN THE BLUE GRASS
MY HANDS HAVE NOT KNOWN MUCH LABOR. I mix oils and acrylics, gouache and watercolor. On this day I don’t paint except in my head. I lack the skill for such dark images as my mind invents. The color palette runs to crimson and deep purples, with brilliant yellow and chartreuse accents where shadows should darken. Imagine a Kentucky mountain as a landscape turned to anger and needing to purge by the rushing of waters. Boulders are flung loose from earth, and massive living trees propel forward as missiles and lodge in the sides of steep rock walls.
Idleness is out of place here. My wife and her three brothers contemplate digging a new well. Their father, seventy-three, is driving the lawn-mowing tractor but not cutting any grass. He’s pulling my sister-in-law and her two small children in a trailer. He’s taking them to the horrible abandoned place where a nineteenth-century barn has crumbled to tangles of moist rotting lumber that used to be a nesting bed for a colony of feral cats, some descended from a stray blooded Persian once owned by my wife. The cats are gone now, and so is Danny, our nephew. Four days ago he walked toward this woodpile with a loaded shotgun and blew off his head. A swarm of flies has taken residence here. The air is thick with decay, and the earth is still soiled with viscera.
•
My wife’s youngest brother, Steve, stands thigh-deep in the creekwater and swings a sledgehammer. From my upstream vantage-point he is John Henry, efficient as a piston, chiseled and thick as two grown cedars. Some years ago a layer of concrete was poured above the boulders and
bedrock. He pulverizes it with each blow. The water absorbs the powder and washes it down the mountain. He breaks through the concrete to the layer of stone below and keeps swinging. A pile of debris accumulates beneath him. He lifts the shards and rocks, some large as his upper body, and carries them to a shallow place where the water runs faster. He stacks them against the current and says a brief word in praise of beavers, then goes to work shoveling out the filling reservoir behind his dam. He digs past six feet, so deep he can walk the floor and submerge himself.
This is a wild place. Deer run freely and there are no property lines. Brown bears wander these hollows, and even a buck deer can end a man. Poachers run the logging road at night and slip into the darkness. Marijuana plants grow under cover of protected forest, and these gardens are rigged with homemade booby traps meant to maim if not kill. Venomous snakes wander the hills and valleys and take a few dogs each year. My father-in-law owns the top of this mountain and a hundred acres besides on two others, all carved from the Daniel Boone National Forest and bought for a song. A lone logging road bisects the open range of woods and that only because he granted the federal government a ninety-nine-year lease as a hedge against brushfires.
The creek usually runs behind the two farmhouses as a trickle, but sometimes flash flooding accompanies a heavy rain. Once every fifty years the creek jumps its bed and the mountain resurfaces itself in a fit of violence. Rivers used to do this and still sometimes do, despite the best efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers.
This is a Second Amendment place. In the smaller farmhouse where my nephew Danny lived his father Dan keeps two assault rifles, three loaded handguns, several hunting rifles, and the shotgun. Those at least. Other firearms may be stashed in the walls and floorboards. Tables on the back porch are domino-lined with ammunition. Shells are inexpensive and dizzying in their variety. Some bullets can pierce armor and others are made to explode into three hundred fiery pellets on ejection.
Most evenings Dan and Danny sat on the back porch and practiced firing across the creek at a makeshift target range of aluminum cans, glass bottles, and wood cutouts resting on a steel cart. Some nights they hiked upstream to the wooden ruins and shot into them. Just outside the oversize windows overlooking the back porch and the creek beyond and the target range and the pens where Danny kept the golden retrievers for breeding, Dan has hung two homemade bird feeders stocked with sugar water and just enough vanilla to keep the hummingbirds coming back. The smaller bird with the red underbelly is named Meany, and he drives the prettier green-and-gold bird from feeder to feeder, unwilling to share his swill even if it means he will spend the afternoon policing rather than drinking.
We gather by the creek and admire Steve’s dam. The children swim in the deep water, and my father-in-law teaches me to skip stones. Smooth, flat, rounded stones without protruding edges tend to fly farthest. The skillful thrower keeps his hand low to the water and parallel with it, and looses the stone with a slight level flick of the wrist. The old man can skip a stone nine times, for a distance of sixty feet. He has been perfecting his technique for almost seventy years. He believes that all things work together for good and has posted the Ten Commandments on his front lawn in defiance of secular courts faraway.
My wife says when she dies she wants her brothers to cut down strong timbers with their axes and build her casket with their hands. We are to carry her up the mountain, to the high place where she dreamed as a child of building an A-frame log cabin overlooking the valley and where a person with keen eyesight can achieve a vista and survey as much of Appalachia as an olden hill family might have seen in a lifetime. We’ll drive our shovels into the soil and let the dirt mix with our sweat and seep into our pores. We’ll breathe the dust we have stirred up and lower box and body into the ground with knotted ropes, then take our spades and fill the grave with earth, tamp it down with our feet and plant sod in the spring around the simple marker, here lies Deborah Jayne, remembered by those who loved her. She says grieving must be physical, mourning underscored by exertion.
We will bury Danny tomorrow in the more traditional way, in a Lexington cemetery. The coroner thinks Dan unstable and only yesterday cleared him of suspicion of homicide. In the state capital of Frankfort, the autopsy was conclusive. My father-in-law has inspected every well and septic tank on the property for signs of disrepair. His sons inspect every engine of every car, truck, and van gathered on the grasses between the farmhouses. In grave situations, my father-in-law has been known to counsel the Shalom peace of the Lord to passersby, then pass blood in the privacy of his own bathroom.
At the funeral, lies are told in the name of comfort. Speculations. Maybe it’s possible Danny did not mean to kill himself but tripped and discharged the shotgun by accident. The preacher lives by traditions and says we have gathered to celebrate a life and that he’s seen some long faces in need of lightening up. He uses biscuits and the ingredients for making them as a visual aid to let us know that a tasty life is made from bitter parts. He gives an old-fashioned call to salvation and not a hand is raised. The reconstructed face in the casket is not recognizable as anything except poorly cast wax. Later his mother says he would have hated the eyeliner and mascara they’d applied to him.
The lies obscure truths we would like to quiet. Danny heard voices under the ground and daily walked outside with his Glock to find and silence them. Some of the hill people say the mountain is riddled with caves and that the older people knew how to get to them but that the old knowledge is dying away as development encroaches upon the old ways. They say that soon there will be no water witchers with divining rods to approach by foot and point out the best places for well-drilling. Danny spent three months in Arizona with some exorcists who claimed demons were whispering in his ears. I believe in the doctors whose antipsychotic medicines Danny regularly neglected. The mind is sufficiently vast for myriad voices to find a place to hide.
Church and cemetery are separated by the greater part of Lexington. Police cars stop traffic for the funeral procession, which is fifty cars deep and slow, in observance of custom. The endless winding from road to road, left turns through red lights and then rights again until an essentially straight path feels circular, leaves me in mind of a hearse-driver perhaps lost with unrelated sadness and leading without benefit of directions or map. The rain starts with droplets at the church steps and turns quickly to downpour in near-opaque sheets. We navigate by taillight.
We wait in our vehicles at the graveside but the rain does not subside. Matt leaves his van and steps into the deluge and beckons the other mourners to follow. Slowly they emerge with umbrellas and ponchos and newspapers held above their heads. Some young people wade unprotected into the falling water and let it soak their clothing to the skin as if their grief required washing or as penance for sins of omission. Maybe they wonder as I do what time spent or what intervention might have changed the course of things.
The rain does not relent as the body is lowered into the grave, nor does it cease during the ninety-minute retreat into the high places. The storm has battered our mountain, and the road to the farmhouses is blocked by fallen timber (the road is in fact named Fallen Timber Branch Road) and many of the concrete and wooden bridges near the base of the mountain have been swept away by mudslides or washed away by the rising creekwaters.
Nearer the top of the mountain, our cars and trucks dig deep trenches in the open fields. A hundred-year-old cherry tree has toppled and her strong roots point skyward, the ground beneath sucked away by flash flood and gravity. The propane tank has loosed its steel moorings and settled dangerously close to the larger farmhouse. The well is inoperable, its pumps dashed to pieces. The porches are filled with debris spit outward from the rapids. Tall grasses now bend hunched as old men, and the southern field is strewn with loose gravel that once filled a driveway hundreds of yards away. My wife says the mountain itself is grieving. Steve’s dam has broken and the waters rush onward toward the valley.
All the b
reeding dogs have been sold or given away or run off. In a season of speculation, emus were raised from eggs alongside adolescent shelties and golden retrievers in five electrified pens. A spry golden retriever named Mandy mothered nearly half the puppies who grew here. She was the family pet allowed to run free. One evening last autumn she came home with one crippled leg. She’s grown white in the face but still runs with her limp after treats of dried beef. Dan is watching her run and I can see it in his eyes: Dogs should not outlive children.
Conversation has ceased and my wife and her brothers have resumed their chores. Last month a local hunter and my father-in-law agreed on a price for the rental of the lower level of his farmhouse to the hunter’s daughter and her two college friends. Now the hunter has returned to help clean debris from the common area between the farmhouses and regravel the driveways. All of them strike the ground with their shovels, using more force than their task requires. Mandy cowers beneath an aging car. In the distant woods my father-in-law is alone and talking.
The day Danny was born, Dan saw that the boy had no fingers on his right hand. Dan cursed God and drove away into a storm. He says a bolt of lightning struck a telephone pole and an arc of blue electricity briefly danced upon the hood of his car before dissipating into the ground. Tonight it is dark on our mountain, and we are far enough from the city lights to see the milky plenitude. To be sure, we are hoping for a sign. The distances between stars are now calculable but what passes for mourning is harder to measure. We have photographs and folklore. We have words and hands. We can sell the cherry tree. We can fix the water pump. We can build a new dam. We can dredge a new path for the creek and make it a canal. We can shout out into the quiet of the hollow and hear our own voices echoing: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The words come back plaintive, longing.