Then Like the Blind Man: Orbie's Story

by Freddie Owens

  Then Like the Blind Man: Orbie's Story

  Freddie Owens

  A storm is brewing in the all-but-forgotten backcountry of Kentucky. And, for Orbie Ray, the swirling heavens may just have the power to tear open his family’s darkest secrets. Then Like the Blind Man: Orbie’s Story is the enthralling debut novel by Freddie Owens, which tells the story of a feisty wunderkind in the segregated South of the 1950s, and the forces he must overcome to restore order in his world. Evocative of a time and place long past, this absorbing work of magical realism offered with a Southern twist will engage readers who relish the Southern literary canon, or any tale well told.

  Nine-year-old Orbie has his cross to bear. After the death of his father, his mother Ruby has off and married his father’s coworker and friend Victor, a slick-talking man with a snake tattoo. Now, Orbie, his sister Missy, and his mother haven’t had a peaceful moment with the heavy-drinking new man of the house. Orbie hates his stepfather more than he can stand; a fact that lands him at his grandparents’ place in Harlan’s Crossroads, Kentucky.

  Orbie grudgingly adjusts to life with his doting Granny and carping Granpaw, who are a bit too keen on their black neighbors for Orbie’s taste, not to mention their Pentecostal congregation of snake handlers. And, when he meets the black Choctaw preacher, Moses Mashbone, he learns of powers that might uncover the true cause of his father's death. As a storm of unusual magnitude descends, Orbie happens upon the solution to a paradox at once magical and ordinary. Question is, will it be enough?

  Equal parts Hamlet and Huckleberry Finn, it’s a tale that’s rich in meaning, socially relevant, and rollicking with boyhood adventure. The novel mines crucial contemporary issues, as well as the universality of the human experience while also casting a beguiling light on boyhood dreams and fears. It’s a well-spun, nuanced work of fiction that is certain to resonate with lovers of literary fiction, particularly in the Southern tradition of storytelling.

  Then Like The Blind Man: Orbie’s Story wins Indiereader Discovery Award for literary fiction

  Freddie Owens

  THEN LIKE THE BLIND MAN

  Orbie’s Story

  A Novel

  In memory of Charley and Clara Kissel

  And to Albert and Vela Wegela

  And to Karen;

  Were it not for them not a word

  Would I have written.

  Acknowledgements

  It should first be noted that this book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly imaginary and are used fictitiously. Any resemblances (of which there may be a few) to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  That having been said, two memories served as starting points for a short story I wrote that eventually became this novel. One was of my Kentucky grandmother as she emerged from a shed with a white chicken held upside down in one of her strong bony hands. I, a boy of nine and a “city slicker” from Detroit, looked on in wonderment and horror as she summarily wrung the poor creature’s neck. It ran about the yard frantically, yes incredibly, as if trying to locate something it had misplaced as if the known world could be set right again, recreated, if only that one thing could be found. And then of course it died. The second memory was of lantern light reflected off stones that lay on either side of a path to a storm cellar my grandparents and I were headed for one stormy night beneath a tornado’s approaching din. There was wonderment there too, along with a vast and looming sense of impending doom. For these and many others of my childhood memories I must thank my grandparents. Had I not been exposed to their homespun, wizened and sometimes carping ways I would not have been able to begin my short story much less this novel. The same goes for my dear, good-hearted parents who survived the bad times to enjoy the good.

  I also want to thank Judith Guest (Ordinary People) and especially Rebecca Hill (Among Birches) for early and crucial writing guidance. Without their unsparing feedback and mentorship I might not have dealt adequately with the “false and unlikely” as it was wont to manifest in the early drafts of the manuscript.

  Literary agents Ned Leavitt and Robin Mizell deserve special thanks for their deft editorial comments and for the considerable time and energy they invested in making them. I must extend kudos to Dave King as well for a thoroughly professional editing of the manuscript. (Google Dave King Editorial Services and his book Self-Editing for Writers.) No writer I feel would manage long without such editorial guidance as Dave King provides.

  I also want to acknowledge support and guidance received of editors Tom Jenks and Winn Blevins (Stone Song), painter and tea master Shoshana Cooper, writer Rabbi David Cooper (God Is A Verb) and Boulder psychologist Ina Robbins. Thanks also to all those good friends and writing workshop attendees who gave this work their studied and undivided attention.

  Inspiration came also from years of counseling sex offenders and those prone to domestic violence and from a life of spiritual seeking, which led to encounters with Native American Shamanism, Advaita Vedanta, Tibetan Buddhism and the teachings of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

  Finally and most importantly, this book would not have been possible at all without the help and unflagging support of my loving wife and lifelong helpmate, author and psychologist Karen Kissel Wegela (The Courage to Be Present).

  Prologue

  You could say what happened to me happened to all of us. It happened to Victor, to Momma and Missy, Granpaw and Granny, to Moses Mashbone, to Willis, to Nealy Harlan and that old cousin of his, Bird Pruitt — to all the folks that lived and worked around Harlan’s Crossroads, white and black. And I suppose you would be right in putting it that way, though you would be wrong too, dead wrong, for what happened was also altogether particular to my person alone; particular and so elusive, so hard to get hold of that few in this world, least of all myself — though I had been given a glimpse to last a lifetime — would dare say it had happened at all.

  Some said it was magic. Some said no. Some said what destroyed the barn and tore the wheels off Reverend Pennycall’s police car was just a late summer storm, though of unusual magnitude, which at the time seemed a reasonable enough explanation. But the thing that put the slice of worry permanently between Momma’s eyes and pointed out the path I was to take — the thing that sent the Devil to his grave — that was more than just a storm.

  Part One

  1

  Everybody on Edge

  Thursday, June 6th 1959

  Momma and even Victor said I’d be coming to St. Petersburg with them. They’d been saying it for weeks. Then Victor changed his mind. He was my stepdaddy, Victor was. It would be easier on everybody, he said, if I stayed with Granny and Granpaw in Kentucky. Him and Momma had enough Florida business to take care of without on top of everything else having to take care of me too. I was a handful, Victor said. I kept everybody on edge. If you asked me, the only edge everybody was kept on was Victor’s. As far as I was concerned, him and Momma could both go to hell. Missy too. I was fed up trying to be good. Saying everything was okay when it wasn’t. Pretending I understood when I didn’t.

  Momma’s car was a 1950 model. Daddy said it was the first Ford car to come automatic. I didn’t know what ‘automatic’ was but it sure had silver ashtrays, two of them on the back of the front seats. They were all popped open with gum wrappers and cigarette butts and boy did they smell.

  One butt fell on top a bunch of comic books I had me in a pile. The pile leaned cockeyed against my dump truck. Heat came up from there; little whiffs of tail pipe smoke, warm and stuffy like the insides of my tennis shoes.

  It rattled too — the Ford car did. Th
e glove box. The mirrors. The windows. The knobs on the radio. The muffler under the floorboard. Everything rattled.

  We’d been traveling hard all day, barreling down Road 3 from Detroit to Kentucky. Down to Harlan’s Crossroads. I sat on the edge of the back seat, watching the fence posts zoom by. Missy stood up next to the side window, sucking her thumb. The fingers of her other hand were jammed between her legs. She was five years old. I was nine.

  I’d seen pictures of Florida in a magazine. It had palm trees and alligators and oranges. It had long white beaches and pelicans that could dive-bomb the water. Kentucky was just old lonesome farmhouses and broke back barns. Gravel roads and chickens in the yard.

  Road 3 took us down big places like Fort Wayne and Muncie. It took us down a whole bunch of little places too, places with funny names like Zaneville and Deputy and Speed.

  Missy couldn’t read.

  “Piss with care,” I said.

  “Oh Orbie, you said a bad word.”

  “No. Piss with care, Missy. That sign back there. That’s what it said.”

  Missy’s eyes went wide. “It did not. Momma’ll whip you.”

  Later on we got where there was a curve in the road and another sign. “Look Missy. Do not piss.”

  “It don’t say that.”

  “Yes it does. See. When the road goes curvy like that you’re not supposed to pee. But when it’s straight, it’s okay; but you have to do it careful cause that’s what the sign says. Piss with care!”

  “It don’t say that.”

  “Does too.”

  We crossed a big pile of water on a bridge with towers and giant ropey things looping down. On the other side was Louisville, Kentucky. After that was just small towns and little white stores with red gas-pumps, farm houses and big barns and fields, empty fields and fields of corn and fields where there were cows and horses and pigs and long rows of tobacco plants Momma said cigarettes was made of.

  I had me a war on all the towns going down.

  Tat Tat Tat Tat! Blam! There goes Cox Creek!

  Bombs away over Nazareth!

  Blam! Blam! Boom! Hodgekinsville never had a chance!

  “Let’s keep it down back there!” Victor said.

  “A grenade rolled into Victor’s lap!” I whispered. “BlamOOO! Blowed him to smithereens!”

  I wished Momma had left him back there in Toledo like she said she would. She was always threatening around like that, but then she would get to feeling sorry and forget all about it. She’d been mad ever since Victor spilled the beans about Daddy. Victor was mad too, drinking his beer and driving Momma’s Ford too fast. After Louisville he started throwing his empties out the window.

  I liked to watch them bust on the road.

  “Pretty country, Kentucky,” Victor said.

  ———————

  It was the end of daytime and a big orangey-gold sun ball hung way off over the hills, almost touching the trees. The Ford jerked over a ditch at the foot of a patchy burnt yard, thundering up a load of bubble noises as Victor shut it down.

  “Get off me,” Missy said.

  “I ain’t bothering you.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “But Missy, look!”

  A big boned woman in a housedress had come to stand in the yard down by the well. She was looking into the sun — orange light in her face — standing upright, sharp edged and stiff, like an electrical tower, one arm bent like a triangle, the other raised with the elbow so the hand went flat out over her eyes like a cap. She stared out of wrinkles and scribbles and red leather cheekbones. Her nose was sunburned, long but snubbed off at the end, sticking out above a mouth that had no lips, a crack that squirmed and changed itself from long to short and back to long again.

  Missy’s eyes widened. “Who is that?”

  “Granny,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”

  I saw Granpaw too, sitting squat-legged against Granny’s little Jesus Tree. He was turning in one big hand a piece of wood, shaving it, whittling it outward with a jackknife. The brim of a dusty Panama shadowed his eyes. In back of him stood the house, balanced on little piles of creek rock. You could see jars and cans and other old junk scattered underneath. It was the same dirty white color as before, the house was, but the sun ball had baked it orange, and now I could see at one end where somebody had started to paint.

  As we got out of the car, the big boned figure in the housedress let out with a whoop, hollering, “Good God A Mighty! If it tain’t Ruby and them younguns of hers! Come all the way down here from Dee-troit!” Blue-green veins bulged and tree-limbed down the length of her arms.

  Victor stayed out by the Ford, the round top of my ball cap hanging out his pocket. A gas station man had given it to me on the way down. It was gray and had a red winged horse with the word ‘Mobilgas’ printed across the front. Victor had swiped it away, said I shouldn’t be accepting gifts from strangers. I should have asked him about it first. Now it was in his back pocket, crushed against the Ford’s front fender where he leaned with an unlit cigar, rolling between his lips. The sun was in back of him, halfway swallowed up by a distant curvy line of hilltop trees.

  “Hidy Victor!” Granny called. “Ya’ll have a good trip?”

  Victor put on a smooth voice. “Fine Mrs. Wood. Real fine. You can’t beat blue grass for beauty, can you?” A long shadow stretched out on the ground in front of him.

  Granny laughed. “Ain’t been no farther than Lexington to know!”

  Granpaw changed his position against the tree, leaned forward a little bit and spat a brown gob, grunting out the word ‘shit’ as he did. Then he dragged the back of his knife hand sandpaper-like over the gap of his mouth.

  “I want you just to looky here!” Granny said. “If tain’t Missy-Two-Shoes and that baby doll of hers!”

  Missy backed away.

  “Aw, Missy now,” Momma said. “That’s Granny.”

  Missy smiled then and let Granny grab her up. Her legs went around Granny’s waist. She had on a pink Sunday dress with limp white bows dangling off its bottom. The back of it was all squashed and wadded, like a used hankie.

  “How’s my little towhead?” Granny said.

  “Good.” Missy held out her baby doll. “This is Mattie, Granny. She got the same name as you.”

  “Well ain’t you the sweetest thang!” Granny grinned so big her wrinkles went out in circles like water does after a stone’s dropped in. She gave Missy a wet kiss and set her down. Then her grin flashed toward Momma. “There’s my other little girl!”

  Momma, no taller than Granny’s chin, did a little toe dance up to her, smiling all the way. She hugged Granny and Granny in turn beat the blue and red roses on the back of Momma’s blouse.

  “I just love it to death!” Granny said. “Let me look at you!” She held Momma away from her. Momma wiggled her hips; slim curvy hips packed up neat in a tight black skirt. She kissed the air in front of Granny.

  Like Marilyn Monroe. Like in the movies.

  “Jezebel!” Granny laughed. “You always was a teaser.”

  They talked about the trip to Florida, about Victor’s prospects — his good fortune, his chance — about Armstrong and the men down there and that Pink Flamingo Hotel. They talked about Daddy too, and what a good man he’d been.

  “It liked to’ve killed us all, what happened to Jessie,” Granny said.

  “I know Mamaw. If I had more time, I’d go visit him awhile.” Momma looked out over the crossroads toward the graveyard. I looked too but there was nothing to see now, nothing but shadows and scrubby bushes and the boney black limbs of the cottonwood trees. I remembered what Victor had said about the nigger man, about the crane with the full ladle.

  “I want you just to look what the cat’s drug in Mattie!” Granpaw had walked over from his place by the tree.

  “Oh Papaw!” Momma hugged Granpaw’s rusty old neck and kissed him two or three times.

  “Shoo! Ruby you’ll get paint all over me!”


  Momma laughed and rubbed at a lip mark she’d left on his jaw.

  “How you been daughter?”

  “All right I reckon,” Momma said. She looked back toward Victor who was still up by the Ford. Victor took the cigar out of his mouth. He held it to one side, pinched between his fingers.

  “How’s that car running Victor?” Granpaw called.

  “Not too bad, Mr. Wood,” Victor answered, “considering the miles we’ve put on her.”

  Granpaw made a bunch of little spit-spit sounds, flicking them off the end of his tongue as he did. He hawked up another brown gob and let it fall to the ground; then he gave Victor a nod of welcome and walked over. He walked with a limp, like somebody stepping off in a ditch, carrying the open jackknife in one hand and that thing, whatever it was he’d been working on, in the other.

  Granny’s mouth got hard. “Ruby, I did get that letter of yorn. I done told you it were all right to leave that child. I told you in that other letter, ‘member?”

  “You sure it’s not any trouble?” Momma said.

  Granny’s eyes widened. “Trouble? Why, tain’t no trouble a-tall.” She looked over my way. “I want you just to look how he’s growed! A might on the skinny side though.”

  “He’ll fill out,” Momma said.

  “Why yes he will. Come youngun. Come say hello to your old Granny.”

  “Orbie, be good now,” Momma said.

  I went a little closer, but I didn’t say hello.

  “He’ll be all right,” Granny said.

  “I hope so Mamaw. He’s been a lot of trouble over this.”

  Veins, blue rivers, tree roots, flooded down Granny’s gray legs. More even than on her arms. And you could see white bulges and knots and little red threads wiggling out. “I’ll bet you they’s a lot better things going on here than they is in Floridy,” she said. “I bet you, if you had a mind to, Granpaw would show you how to milk cows and hoe tobacco. I’ll learn you everything there is to know about chickens. Why, you’ll be a real farm hand before long!”