by Billy Coffey
A throng of hill people danced or stood swaying inside, each shadowed among bars of lantern light. Bales of straw served as pews. They were stacked along the walls in the shape of a great ring with a wide empty space in the middle. In the center I spotted both Harpers blowing into what looked like the plastic recorders we learned to play in the fifth grade. Beside them stood Todd with his guitar, trying to lead them all in a broken rendition of “When We All Get to Heaven.” Earl sat near them on the floor, his hands keeping the music’s time by tapping the bottom of an overturned oil drum.
And there among them all danced Micky, her lithe body shrouded in a dress so white it gave her the appearance of one visiting from heaven. She moved in seamless rhythm with the great shout of singing around her. Hair golden and breeze-blown. Her hands moved low to raise the hem of her gown as she leaped and charged, revealing two muscled legs. My heart pounded at the sight as I allowed myself to let go the longing I had felt at the path’s end in order that I might be swallowed by another, deep and primal and hungry.
“You see her? Where’s your momma?”
“She ain’t here.”
The song ended. A cheer rose up before dying with the sound of gasping lungs. Micky balanced herself on a bale of straw so everyone could see. The lanterns burned hard against the day’s last light. I waited. Hoped. Not once did Micky separate herself from her followers long enough for me to capture her attention, nor could she have even if she’d seen me watching. It is hard to tell what I saw through those boards. It is near impossible to tell what I felt.
Yet as I kneeled in that Shantytown dirt and inhaled the earthen smell of a hundred seasons and ten thousand rains, I could not help but think that if these services in the Pines were a mere cloak drawn down over deceit, as my father held, it was the finest performance I had ever witnessed. The way Micky moved. The command in her voice. The sureness of her every word left me convinced she believed in what she preached, and more—that she would die preaching it.
And you were all so beautiful, Owen.
Beautiful and precious and needed.
Loved. That’s the word. Everything was so loved.
And I was so beautiful and loved.
The train. That had changed her. While that was no insight, until that moment I had not known the depth of it. Our night in Simpson’s field had altered Micky Dullahan such that she was now the hub of some great wheel of spirit turning over the muck and mire of Shantytown, carrying all who joined her away. The image of her and those faces and lanterns blurred to a memory of standing inside two iron rails that shook and thrummed, glowing rocks and wooden ties that were everything wood could be, spirals within spirals and a symphony so beautiful it hurt. I mourned not that night nor even what I beheld. No. I mourned that it had not changed me at all.
There was no structure to their service. Song and prayer, confession and preaching, ran as one seamless act. A metal bucket was passed among the circle. It ended as a pile of money and vials of pills in Earl’s hands, baggies filled with white powder. The pills (some in the plastic amber vials gotten from the pharmacy, many in clear plastic baggies) were carefully set aside and guarded as Earl began counting the bills. It was every drug I knew and many I didn’t.
“This is the devil’s den,” my father said. His fingernails dug into the wood wall. “This is a place of iniquity, just as I knew.”
Voices called out above the quaver of singing. They asked for help in their debts and pled that jobs would be spared, petitioned for healing for the sick and comfort for the old, and many were voices I knew but could not place. Each of them Micky answered.
She said from atop her pulpit of chaff and hay, “I hear you all. I do, and I promise I ain’t the only one. I know all that’s happened to you. You’re beat down and struck with worry. Lives spent caught up in a way you never meant and didn’t deserve . . .” Her voice trailed off to almost a whisper, one laced with a grief Micky looked unable to name. “But you’re free now. Free a all that, and that’s where your comfort lies.” Her hand reached out. Earl glanced upward before thumbing through more bills. Micky looked like Reverend Sebolt about to give a blessing. Then she said, “Louise, give me that you’re holding.”
The name caught in my throat. Dad pressed harder against the wall. The board gave way with a creak. Through those empty spaces we watched Micky being handed a tattered Bible by Louise Townsend.
He whispered, “That’s Clancy’s wife.”
The old woman held a look of near adoration as her fingers brushed Micky’s own. Micky held the Bible and began flipping the pages.
“I been trying to read this a lot of late. All these stories and sayings in here. And I confess some a them don’t make much sense to me, though plenty does. The parts that don’t, I got some help on. But you know what all these words come down to? Only one word it all means? Love. That’s it. Love.”
Beside her, Earl offered a simple call of “Amen.”
Micky shut the book. “I’ll amen that too, Daddy.”
That’s the word she used for the man who beat her, the man who drank what meager money Constance Dullahan possessed and who had helped put her in the grave. He wasn’t Earl anymore. He was Daddy.
“I don’t know some a those words. They’re awful fancy and reach a place my head can’t go. But I know the last is truth. I seen it. I been telling you all a time is coming when I’ll have to put off this my tabernacle. I got a debt needs paying. Sooner or later, that paper’s gone be called in. Cain’t run from it. I’ll be taken.”
Todd’s voice: “We won’t let nobody take you, Michaela.”
The calls from Micky’s sheep rang in anger rather than song. She stilled them with a raised hand.
“I thank you. I ain’t thought much on it really, having too much to do in the now. But I ain’t scared.” She stepped down from the bale. “And I’ll say this. I ain’t scared for you neither. Daddy says there was once wolves in these woods long time ago. He says they gone now, but that don’t mean y’all are safe. There’s other wolves in this old battered world saying you ain’t nothing. They mean to keep you penned and quivering like you always been, but you ain’t like that no more. You got a power now called truth, and nothing of this world can stand against it. Who will lead us in our words?”
I saw her nod. Saw Micky look off toward her right at a shadow near the far wall and saw her smile, and I knew the voice that shadow made.
My mother said, “We are made of love, from love, for love.”
I felt a chill over me. In that darkness, I trembled.
Daddy turned from the wall. He said, “No. No more.”
I faced him. He shoved me to the ground and all but ran toward those two big doors in front. Even as I followed I knew myself too late.
-6-
Dad took hold of the rusting metal grip and pulled with a strength unknown to me, sliding one side of the doors open with a squeal that brought a silence down where the noise of worship had reigned. By the time I reached him, he was already inside. Those who faced him could not meet his rage. None could stand against him.
“Whore. Whore of Babylon.”
He waded past the Shanties nearest, scattering them as he upturned bales of hay and any instrument in his path, and I have no doubt that in my father’s mind he was Christ Himself, overturning the tables of the money changers. My mother screamed. Earl shot forward not to protect his daughter, his little girl, but so that he might place himself between my father and the pile of money.
Earl said, “You got no right here. This is a peaceful assembly.”
Micky looked at me in terror, though she did not yield her place in the center of the barn. She merely moved two steps leftward, where my mother stood cowering.
“Mister Cross,” Micky said. Voice even and untouched even by this. “I’m glad you’ve found us. Won’t you take a seat for a spell? Owen?” She looked at me. “Owen, would you like to come up here and help your daddy?”
Dad refused. “Don’t need
no help from you, whore. Spoutin’ your words. Poisonin’ these folk. And for what?” He looked over Earl’s shoulder and moved the small man out of his way. Set his boot where all that money lay, and those pills. “For this? You people think this here’s who the Lord is? You sicken me.” He looked at Mom. “You. Sicken. Me.”
I could not move from my place. There stood a few inside that barn who looked willing to fight should things come to it, yet even those appeared nervous to challenge my father. Not then, not that night. On that night my father looked as he must have once to all those batters he faced, right before he set them down with a fastball unseen but heard.
“We’re going home, Greta,” he said.
My mother looked a frail thing against the lantern on the wall closest to her. Beaten and defeated.
Micky said, “Greta, you ain’t got to go.”
“She does.” Dad stepped forward. He reached to take hold of Micky’s arm.
I called out, “Don’t you touch her.”
He turned to me, eyes burning. “What you say to me, Owen?”
“I said don’t you touch her. Don’t you ever touch her.”
The way he stood there. It was an expression beyond hurt and past disappointment. It was a look of humiliation.
“This girl got her claws in you too?” he asked. “That what it is? You shame me. You shame my name more’n her”—pointing to Mom. He looked at all gathered there, strangers he did not know, and I believe my father knew them as witnesses against his own life, himself the persecuted. “I ain’t good enough? That what it is? You and your momma look at me and see a failure of all I ever wanted, that what makes you both run off to some harlot what promises you better? I done all I could. Gave her everything. Gave her you. She mocks that by taking up with false prophets? You hate me for wanting more for you than what I got. I drove you out of love.”
“Love of what, Daddy? Me, or you?”
Were I a good son, I would have done what my father could not. Gone to him and knelt at his side, touched his arm or head. I would have embraced him and said, Yes, you are good enough, and whatever pains we both give and receive in life are born of a thirst this world cannot quench, and that is why we strive and suffer and fail. But I was no good son, and the space between where he stood enraged and mourning and where I kept silent and broken felt as far to travel as the years from birth to death.
He moved around the place Micky stood and into the faint shadows. I heard a scuffle beyond the light. When I saw my father again, it was my mother he touched, dragging her out by the arm. He reached me and let go of her with a small shove, sending my mother into my arms as I had so many times run to hers as a child.
He turned and said to them, “You’re all done here. You hear me, Michaela Dullahan? Earl? I’m going straight to town and calling Clancy down here. All that money you got in your house ain’t enough for him to charge you with something, all them pills you got laying here will be. Will be an’ more. Let’s see how your words of love go over in jail.”
My mother wept.
Dad took her. To me he said only, “Come on or walk home, I don’t care which.”
Micky called to him, “Please, Mister Cross,” but even she looked to understand there was no use. All of them did. The barn emptied in a rush, some in a flat-out run, knowing that within the hour Clancy and his deputies would invade Shantytown. Earl cried out the service was done. He leapt onto that pile of money and all those drugs, shoving them into what pockets he had as Micky ran forward to plead with them all to stay, don’t fear.
I took hold of her and said, “You got to get away from here.”
“I ain’t leaving. I can’t—”
“Go,” I said, and then to Earl, “Clancy’s coming. You know he is, and he’ll know Louise was among you. What is that? Heroin? Cocaine? What you think the sheriff will do?”
Earl remained hunched. “He’s right, girl. I’ll go the house, get what we need. You finish here and head up the cabin.”
“Cabin?” I asked.
“It’s an old place up along the Saint Mary’s,” Micky told me. She took my arm. “One mile east of the waterfall. Owen? One mile east. Take the dump road to the turnoff and follow the trail. Meet me there tomorrow. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Promise.”
“I will.”
“I’m gone,” Earl said. He had all that money, every bit of those pills and powders, and he left without a word. Nothing to me. Not a word to Michaela. His daughter, his little girl. That man walked out of the barn that night with all he needed, leaving behind all he believed could be spared.
There was a time—at that summer’s end, in the long years that followed—when I believed had Micky run off then, had she taken off with Earl and left her life behind, things would have turned out different for us all. I somehow doubt that now. Things are written. That is all I can say. The stories of our lives are not our own but are crafted by hands unseen for purposes often unknown on this side of existence. Let us believe otherwise. Let us hold that we alone are our own authors, masters of our fates. Let us believe that, as I once did. I hold different now. We can no more change what is meant than rip out our own pages, and we all live on borrowed time alone.
Top 8
-1-
Brosius pops out to Hairston at second, ending the bottom of the seventh with a whimper and sending our guys in from the field. Country says he’ll be right back, he’ll be out in the field for the bottom of the eighth and he’s got to go find his glove. Betsy goes with him. Half of me expects Country to take that bat out to left field with him. Carry it right along with his glove. It doesn’t seem so strange. Hitters have such strange attachments to their bats. Like Caldwell down there at the end of the bench, shipping all of his lumber back home to get it prayed over. My own bats remain in Bowie. It doesn’t matter what I use, I can’t seem to hit anything anymore unless it’s a fat batting practice pitch, but even during the years I could hit it didn’t matter what I used. The power was in me and not some piece of wood. That’s what Dad would say. Then he died, and I began to think maybe the power wasn’t in either, but in him. In my father’s undying will to see me succeed.
It’ll be Hairston, Anderson, and Bordick this inning—three veterans who have all had good games at the plate. I cast an eye to Mike. He does not look at me. The game is winding down. If our manager is planning to use me like Country asked him, it’ll have to be soon. The moon sits large over the stadium. Full moon tomorrow. Strawberry moon. I’m reaching into my back pocket before realizing it, holding Micky’s first mark in my hand.
Country comes back with Betsy and a glove that’s seen more seasons than I’ve been in professional baseball. He sits and says to me, “Goin’ in for Mora in center. Means I’ll be up second in the ninth.”
“You see DiMaggio’s ghost out there, you tell’m I said hey.”
“I’ll do that. Guess you’ll be back in Bowie tomorrow.”
“Need to be. Got a new kid on the mound don’t know his head from a hole in the ground. I ain’t there to catch him, he’s like to set the record for walks in a game.”
“That what you do down there? Hold a pitcher’s hand?”
“What any catcher does.”
Hairston digs in against Knight.
“How long you been stuck in Double-A, son?”
“’Bout five years.”
Country grunts. It’s a low sound that I don’t think he wants me to hear. “Double-A’s good ball. Maybe the best ball the minors can give you. They say it’s Triple-A, but it ain’t. That’s just a stopping point. Guys on their way up here to the Show or ones trying to get over an injury. Double-A? That’s where guys are still hungry.”
Hairston lines a single to center.
“Came up hot,” I say. “Good stick, good arm. Arm’s still there. And I got the smarts, won’t nobody say otherwise. But I think my bat’s gone.”
“Didn’t look like it earlier today. I’s standing there wat
ching you take BP. So was Mike.”
“BP ain’t major-league pitching. No. Bat’s gone. That was my ticket. Catchers are a dime a dozen. Smart ones too. One that can hit?” I shake my head. “Ain’t too many like that. Think they’re keeping me around for my head alone now. You know, ease all those hotshot pitchers they got on up the ladder. I got to Bowie thinking that was my door to the Show. Turns out the only door is me, and all I can do is let everybody else walk through it.”
Brady Anderson is up. He’s got two hits in four trips to the plate, which means he’ll sleep good tonight. Yessir, Brady will kick back in his fancy hotel room and lay his head on a fine silk pillow and wake up tomorrow knowing he’ll go to work at Yankee Stadium.
“What happened, then?” Country asks. “Where’d your hittin’ go?”
I smile a little, but it’s an unhappy grin, and I give him one word: “Grave.”
-2-
It was my second year in Bowie when Dad’s stomach pain began. He passed it off as bad food and a cranky nature, which neither me nor Mom could argue against. Nothing to be concerned with. But it persisted off and on through the winter and got worse that spring of ’98.
By late summer the doctors discovered it wasn’t Dad’s stomach at all. We talked at the least three times a week, him wanting to know how the season was going and how our pitching was holding up, me wanting to know how he was doing and never getting anything close to a solid answer. Dad always did protect me. Didn’t matter I was a twenty-six-year-old man playing minor league ball and living on his own, to him I would forever be the little boy too small for the big world. I’d wait until his talking was done and then ask to speak to Mom, who would take the telephone into a quieter spot in their apartment and tell me the truths I needed. It was his gallbladder, and it needed taken out. The surgery had already been scheduled. No, of course I didn’t need to take time away from the team. A simple enough procedure. Dad would be in the hospital a day at the most, and you know he’d be upset if you stopped playing ball just to come and sit with him, Owen.