A Savage Wisdom

by Norman German

  “Nothing too serious, I hope,” Nevers jested. “How about the most important event of my life?” He chuckled.

  Toni Jo turned sideways to see him while he talked and she worked. His eyes looked quickly up into hers, and Toni Jo wondered what he had been inspecting—her back? legs? behind?

  Nevers began melodramatically, “Long ago, in a small but booming Texas town—oil, you understand—there was a boy nobody paid attention to. He was an orphan. Yes,” he said, holding up his hand, as though fending off sympathy, “it’s a sad story but true. One by one the boys, some of them his best friends, were adopted by parents with shiny cars and mink stoles. He was a neat, well-mannered lad of middling good looks. Year by year, on into high school, he made the best grades in his class.”

  Nevers had been peeling the red strip from a pack of Lucky Strikes. He paused to tack a cigarette to his lips and scrape a match on his shoe sole. When he resumed talking, the white stick bobbed up and down in his mouth.

  “That’s when he noticed that girls didn’t care a hoot about eggheads. They went for the lettermen, especially football players.” Nevers took a drag at the cigarette, then parked it on the edge of the carnival-glass ashtray. “He wasn’t a big fellow, mind you. Even smaller than myself, I’d say. But he was determined to make the varsity by his sophomore year and spent the summer doing wind sprints and hoisting feed sacks at the general store. By his senior year, he was the star player. I’m skipping over the minor details, you see.”

  Her hands occupied, Toni Jo gave a big smile and a series of exaggerated nods.

  “Seriously, now,” Nevers resumed, “I . . . I mean he—he was a local hero, enshrined in the pantheon of his alma mater’s trophy case, apotheosized in glass. Don’t laugh, Toni Jo, this is true.” Nevers tapped the cigarette on the tray and, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, took a long pull. “Know what a pantheon is? Doesn’t matter. He was a man among boys, among heroes a god. The girls gathered ’round the display case to admire his photographs. He was throwing the javelin, jumping hurdles, swinging a bat, driving for a layup in the playoffs. Suddenly, it was the last football game of the 1926 season. Two-thirds of the starters from the previous year’s championship team had graduated. Halfway through the season, the boy no one paid any mind to three years earlier was the sensation. He played both ways. He intercepted passes, drop-kicked and returned punts, ran for touchdowns.

  “The team was six and one, tied for first with Tyler. It was a crisp Saturday in mid-November. Perfect football weather. The Kilgore Diablos had home field advantage. The teams worked back and forth like two armies of equal power. On a sweep, the boy body-blocked a safety and a tackle at the end of the half to let his quarterback score. Then the kicker missed the extra point. Down seven to six, they retired to the dressing room. During the third quarter, the sensational flanker couldn’t seem to get open. He had a worthy opponent, the state’s hundred-yard-dash champ. With forty-five seconds left in the game, the Diablos returned a punt to mid-field. Three running plays later, they were two yards farther back. The officials informed the coach and quarterback there were six seconds left on the clock.”

  Nevers took a final puff and stubbed out the butt. He observed the lace hem of Toni Jo’s slip peeking from under her dress.

  “Go on with the dishes,” Nevers teased Toni Jo, who held a plate suspended in mid-air. “Win or lose, that plate’s gotta get washed.”

  Nevers noticed a rack of soap suds floating on her breast.

  “In the huddle, the quarterback panted heavily, a drop of sweat and blood about to fall from the end of his nose. He straightened his old leather helmet and looked around. ‘Any ideas?’ he asked.

  “The boy spoke up. ‘Dial my number. I been setting this sucker up the whole second half. I’ll fake left, fake right, and go left. Or fake right, fake left, and go right. I got him trained like a hound dog. You throw me the ball and I’ll run that son-of-a-bitch all the way to the state line.’”

  The sarcastic tone of Nevers’ voice had disappeared.

  “The quarterback called his number. The boy faked right, feinted left, and stayed left. He ran for the scoreboard as fast as he could. He knew he might have gained only a split second on the safety. With half a field, the defender could close the gap if he lost a step by glancing behind him. He was on the ten-yard line when the whistle blew. He looked back. The live ball was spiraling down over his head. He jumped and tipped it with one hand and it floated just out of reach. Two more strides and he snagged the pigskin just before it hit the ground. He dashed into the end zone, touched the ball down on the run, made a J, and looked at his quarterback, then the hometown fans.

  “It was a moment frozen in time, the quarterback’s arms thrust in the air, the steady roar of the crowd filling his ears, a blizzard of confetti snowing down from the bleachers.

  “He had reached that pure, calm height only a few reach and almost none survive because they keep trying to recapture that moment and then, failing, try again and again until their spirits are crushed. He had seen it happen before. Washed-up sports heroes, Titans gone down in defeat to midgets. He ran to the back of the end zone, where the boys working the scoreboard hung the numbers. 12 to 7. He continued onto the track, then through the open gate and into the fading sunset.”

  Nevers pulled another cigarette from the pack in his pocket. He struck a match with his thumbnail and touched the flame to the end of the tube, inhaling deeply. With utter boredom, he lifted his eyes to Toni Jo, who was astonished into photographic stillness. He blew a cloud of smoke across the room, judging the effect of his story on Toni Jo by a rising nipple where the cloud of suds had melted into a damp spot.

  “Then what?” Toni Jo said.

  “Then nothing. He had finished his life at the school. He died. What would you do for an encore after a season like that?”

  “He killed himself?” Then Toni Jo remembered the story was about Harold Nevers, the man sitting at her kitchen table. “You couldn’t have killed yourself, you’re right here.”

  “In a manner of speaking, I did,” he said. “This kid hid . . . I hid in the bushes till everyone went home and the stadium was dark. I walked to my dorm and waited for lights out. Then I went up to my room, changed into my street clothes, took what I needed, and walked away from that part of my life. That night, I slept in the train station until the morning paper arrived. Headlines. Can you imagine that?” Nevers stretched his hands out as if unfolding a banner six feet long. “‘Nevers Boy Snags TD Pass, Keeps Going.’”

  Toni Jo stared at him in disbelief, trying to imagine anyone doing such a thing, wondering if she would have the courage to leave her life behind without knowing what lay ahead.

  “Hell, it’s just a game, Toni Jo. I finally got smart enough to realize that. In an instant, watching the confetti drift onto the field in the dying light, I realized it was all nothing. Football. A game somebody made up. You run up and down a field chasing some inflated cowhide while bare-legged girls cheer.” He crushed another cigarette butt in the ashtray. “I mean, what’s the point?”

  He looked up at her.

  “War. Now there’s something. Men die. They lose arms and legs. Their eyes. I’ll tell you something. I was nine when the Great War ended. I saw the veterans coming home on crutches or riding wheelchairs, bloody bandages on stumps, their heads wrapped in gauze. I watched them for weeks, looking for defeat. Slowly, they gathered at the barbershops, the post office, the store fronts. They began to talk. They chanted the names of places I had never heard: Versailles, Verdun, the Marne, Kemmel Hill, the Argonne forest, Flanders. Then they talked of what they did and what it meant and worked on through that to how they felt, the anticipation before combat, writing last letters in the trenches, two and three and four battles, their nauseous fear, and then they finally got down to it, each in a different way, searching for the right words. Then one said it and they all looked at him, knowing they would never have to say it again. ‘The euphoria of battle.
’

  “I went home that night and prayed. That night and the next three years, I prayed for war. I still remember it. I got down on my knees, thinking that might help, and I put my hands together, gazing up at the picture on my dorm wall—Jesus in the Garden, sweating blood. ‘Please, God,’ I prayed, ‘bring us war in my time.’ When I was twelve and war hadn’t come, I was exhausted, plumb tired of repeating those words for months of years.”

  For several minutes, Toni Jo had been standing transfixed, facing Nevers, listening to him talk while observing his fingers as they handled cigarettes and matches. Her arms were bent at the elbows, her hands in the air like a surgeon’s just scrubbed.

  “You keep standing there like that,” Nevers said, “and those dishes’ll never get done.”

  Toni Jo apologized and went back to work. Nevers noted the curvature of her calf muscle as it tapered to her ankle. Neither said anything for a while. Toni Jo finished washing and rinsing the dishes and started on the silverware.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, Harold, what—you don’t have to talk about it if it pains you—what happened to your parents?” Nevers looked at her, in no hurry to tell the story. “Or do you know?”

  “I know what I was told,” Harold said. “I don’t know whether it’s true. What I mean is, there’s no way for me to find out if it’s true.”

  Toni Jo continued to wash the forks, knives, spoons, her ear turned in his direction.

  “I asked when I was around six years old or so,” Nevers began. “Mr. Johnson, the owner of the Village, he told me I was too young to understand, to ask later. Every year on my birthday I asked until he finally told me. I was thirteen or so by then. He said my father had been a farmer. They lived ten miles outside of Kilgore. The doctor instructed my father not to wait until the last minute to bring my mother into town. Eight months along, she went into labor after pumping water at the well. Screaming for him to hurry, she grabbed a blanket and climbed into the wagon bed while he hitched the horses. He pressed the team to its limit, not daring to look back and check on her. At the doctor’s house, he hollered as he reined in the horses at the porch. The doctor came running out with his bag. When he tossed the blanket back, he knew immediately my mother was dead.”

  Nevers looked at Toni Jo.

  “My head was out of her body and I was struggling for breath. Strange as it sounds, my mother died before I was born. The doctor’s job was simple, I was told. All he had to do was pull very hard. At least that’s what Mr. Johnson said. Later, I suspected it might have involved more than that.”

  Toni Jo was focused on the forks and spoons, rinsing and placing the pieces in the rack three and four at a time. Without looking at Nevers, her silence indicated she was waiting for an explanation.

  “I have scars on the back of my neck, but I don’t remember ever getting cut there,” Nevers said.

  After giving this some thought, Toni Jo said, “And your father?”

  Harold’s eyes were steady on her face, studying the effect of each statement. “Drank himself to death in six months. That’s what Johnson said. No aunts, no uncles. No grandparents.” He stopped. “Can you believe that?”

  Toni Jo looked up, momentarily forgetting her task, and slid her finger across a knife blade. She gave a brief, sharp cry, dropping utensils into the porcelain basin with a ringing clatter. Nevers jumped to her aid. Toni Jo clutched the finger with her hand, his hands enclosing hers, the blood running over the tip of her finger and mingling with the dish water to form a rivulet that trickled down her forearm and dribbled off the point of her elbow as the two looked first at the wound and then at each other.

  “It’s nothing,” Toni Jo said dismissively. Just a little paper cut. These things always bleed more when you’re washing dishes. It’s the warm water, I guess.”

  Toni Jo’s eyes glanced skittishly about his shoulders, chin, ears, and hair, her heart beating stronger. Finally, their eyes met. Nevers reached down and kissed her on the forehead, then softly on the nose, then her lips, Toni Jo lifting her face up to his and returning the kiss. He let her hands drop and moved his around her waist, pulling her closer. She reached to the back of his neck and touched him gently, forgetting the cut, feeling gingerly for the scars necessary to bring the rest of this living man into the world.

  Her eyes closed, he kissed her deeply several times as she explored his face tenderly with her fingers. Lazily, in the light-headed swoon of first caress, desiring to see the passion on her lover’s face as well, Toni Jo opened her eyes and withdrew in horror at the handsome, blood-spattered visage so close to hers.

  She let out a whimper of fright, then, realizing what had happened, a short laugh of relief that sounded like the squeak of a mouse stepped on in the dark. They both laughed at Toni Jo’s laugh, Nevers still not comprehending the cause of her fear. After explaining, Toni Jo worked on his face with a dishcloth, then dabbed at his collar, diluting the blood there before it set. Then she sent him out to the porch swing to cool off while she tended her injured finger.

  * * *

  Toni Jo approached the front door ten minutes later. In the dark living room, she paused at the screen to watch the new man in her life. Lighted by a bare bulb, he was rocking on the swing, smoking and humming, one hand pocketed. Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee. It was the song he had whistled in the cafe a month earlier, she remembered. Toni Jo stepped onto the porch. Nevers continued humming as she took her place on the far side of the swing. For a while, they pushed the swing gently back and forth with their feet.

  “Are you a religious man, Mr. Nevers?”

  Harold laughed. “Not exactly.” He withdrew a knife from his pocket, cleaned under a fingernail, and returned it to the pocket. “I like that song, though. We sang it at the Village services every Sunday. I guess I don’t think about the words.”

  He began to move his side of the swing in a motion opposite that of Toni Jo’s side. She smiled at the sensation.

  “Most of my experiences with church have been comic.” He tapped the ash from his cigarette and, with the glowing cone, extinguished a mosquito parked on his wrist. “Comic or outrageous.” He thumped the cigarette out into the yard. “Want to hear a couple of stories?”

  Toni Jo smiled. “Sure. You tell good stories.”

  “Okay, let’s see.” He stopped rocking and leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees. “Mr. Johnson—remember him?—he owned the boys’ home. Johnson was also a Presbyterian minister. He conducted a chapel service every evening at six. He read scripture and talked calmly from the pulpit, and by my tenth year I was beginning to think God was a pretty dull guy. Oh, sure, there was Noah’s flood, a burning bush, plagues of locusts and all that, but that was a long time ago. I guessed God was getting tired in His old age and had run out of all the really good stuff.

  “During services, I sat with this guy named Horace. One day, Horace’s long lost aunt or somebody came to take him away. He had already packed his things—they fit in a small cardboard suitcase—and was ready to leave after the Sunday evening service. Horace sat in the middle, between me and his aunt. Near the end of the sermon, this aunt reached down to get something out of her purse. Whatever it was, she couldn’t find it. Horace jabbed me with an elbow, then jerked his head to the right. His aunt was bent over digging around in this big purse the size of a trunk—you know, moving the canned goods to another aisle and letting the dog out to play. It was like an entire world in there.”

  Toni Jo giggled and slapped Harold on the arm.

  “So there she was, bending over, her dress splayed open at the neckline, bare-bosomed as Eve on Creation Day. Not even a slip on. And there they were, hanging like forbidden fruit just out of our reach. Full and round, tapering to warm pink points. I thought they were the most beautiful breasts I had ever seen. And I was right, of course, since I had never seen any before then. As her hands darted in and out of the purse, her breasts worked up and down like alternating pistons. For some reas
on, Horace thought this was funny. He kept glancing back and forth from me to them, like he didn’t know which to look at. Then he reached over and cupped his hand to my ear. The message started as a whisper, then spasmed into a laugh and came out loud, like an emotional proclamation of faith. ‘There really is a God,’ he fairly shouted. Mr. Johnson paused in his sermon, his eyes falling directly on Horace. I was fighting back my laughter and doing a good job of it until Mr. Johnson, either seeing what we saw or thinking he had finally reached some poor benighted soul, said enthusiastically, ‘Amen, brother Horace. Amen.’”

  Toni Jo, her palms over her face like the Praying Hands, had for some time been suppressing her response in order to hear the story out. Then the dam burst and she howled with laughter, running her shoes on the wooden porch.

  Suddenly, she put her bandaged finger to her lips. “Shhh! You’ll wake Mama.”

  “Me!?” Nevers said. “You could raise the dead with that chicken cackle.” For a while, the two rocked the swing in synchronized or alternating rhythm, Toni Jo or Harold breaking into laughter that the other contagiously echoed, each batting at a variety of insects beginning to gather around the light bulb on the porch ceiling.

  “Why don’t you kill that bug-magnet,” Nevers suggested.

  Toni Jo stood up, leaned halfway into the house, and smacked the button switch on the wall.

  “That was a funny story,” she said, reaching for the swing with both hands like a blind woman, her eyes not yet adjusted to the dark. “You said you had another one?”

  “Yes, but this one’s not funny. It’s outrageous.” Nevers paused to think. “One week, a bunch of the guys heard about a tent revival coming to town and wanted to go. At the public school we attended, some of the holy-roller kids invited us. We’d heard all the rumors about snake-handling and speaking in tongues and drinking strychnine. Hell, compared to Episcopalian services, this sounded like a circus to us. So we figured we’d have us a good time and—.”