Then Like the Blind Man: Orbie's Story

by Freddie Owens

  “I won’t,” I said. “Cross my heart.”

  “Cross my heart don’t mean shit,” Willis said.

  ———————

  I was cocky then. Now, with the wind blowing through the poplars and the sun playing peek-a-boo, I wasn’t so sure. I kept looking on the ground all around Chester, checking to see if there were any snakes under the gooseberry bushes. Granny’s butcher knife blade was fixed inside my belt. I had wrapped it in newspaper and put it in an old sock. Every now and then I’d feel of the handle to make sure it was there.

  Chester stopped short of a big tree root. One of his ears went around to the front. The other stayed.

  “Come up dare, Chestah!” Willis yelled. Chester backed off instead. “Come up! Come up!” Willis yelled. Chester went ahead, stopped, then stepped over the tree root and out onto an old roadbed that was partially hidden under wild bluegrass and dandelions and white dandelion-puffballs.

  “Use be da train run here,” Willis said.

  I could see what was left of the railroad tracks under the grass. They ran in both directions over the bulge of the hill. On the other side of the tracks dark green trees — Christmas trees, they looked like — crowded against one another, making a wall that ended at the side of a giant fist of rock. The rock shot straight up out of the ground and was covered in thick vines. The hill we’d been climbing continued up behind it, hidden under a bumpy green carpet of Christmas trees. White pine, Willis said they were, bald cypress and cedar too.

  Willis pointed to the wall of trees. “Mo in dare. Pa-Place I told you ‘bout.”

  I slid off Chester. Willis got his walking stick from the rope tied around Chester’s neck and slid off too. I walked across the tracks and up to the trees. They made a solid wall so thick you couldn’t see through to the other side.

  “You goes in dare!” Willis called. “Behind dem trees!”

  “There’s no way!” I got down on my hands and knees and tried to look under, but the branches were too close to the ground. I stepped back away from the trees and looked upward, up the hill. It was all green forest under a clear blue sky. “There ain’t no way,” I said.

  That’s when I heard something big — a bull maybe or a bear — snapping limbs, crashing down through the trees. Suddenly the tree-wall bulged and spat out the man I knew to be Moses except he was all strange and smoky looking, not like I’d ever seen before. He had the same long blue-black hair and it was under the same dusty black cowboy hat, but his face was like a piece of burned wood, all smoky and gray around the edges.

  Chester started back on his hind legs.

  Moses looked at me, his voice going like a seesaw. “you COME! Boy!”

  I pressed my hand against the sock with the butcher knife.

  Moses nodded. “BRING it!”

  Chester went all wall-eyed and danced backwards.

  “Whoa Chester! Whoa!” Willis yelled.

  Moses was over there in a second. He got the rope from Willis, reached up and grabbed the strap around Chester’s mouth. Chester went even more wall-eyed. He pulled Moses back into the poplar trees, kicked and snorted and showed his teeth. Moses put his hand flat between Chester’s eyes. Then he rose up and whispered something in his ear. Something good it must have been because Chester quieted right down, just like that, stood nice and peaceful like there’d never been anything to worry about.

  Moses led Chester out from the trees and gave the rope back to Willis. He walked back over to my side of the tracks, gestured for me to follow and slid back inside the wall of trees. What he did with Chester, the way he moved, so quick and springy like a cat, had spooked me.

  “It okay now,” Willis called. “Go on.”

  I looked again at the wall of trees. “I can’t see how!”

  “It easy,” Willis said. “Go!”

  “You do it, if it’s so easy,” I said.

  “Na uh,” Willis said. “I gots to stay.”

  A dandelion puffball twirled on the wind in front of me. I closed my eyes, pushed hard against the wall of trees and slid slick as butter, falling almost, right through to the other side. A field of long white boulders leaned together there, stone fingers, all pointing upward along the slope of the hill. The woods continued up there, and there was Moses standing bow-legged and balanced atop one of the boulders. I couldn’t tell if he was watching me or looking off through the trees.

  I was wearing only my Davy Crockett tee shirt and red shorts but no shoes, nothing to protect against the hard grainy stones. I had to pick my way, crawling, stepping, sometimes jumping one stone finger to another. When I came to the end of the field, I saw there was a path through the trees and that Moses had gone up it a ways. He motioned for me to follow and stepped off the path into the woods.

  “Moses! Wait!” I ran up to where I thought he’d gone in. A giant pine sailed up there taller than all the others. One of its huge bottom limbs was growing right out of the ground on the side the path was on. I heard thunder and looked up to see rain clouds moving in where a minute ago it had been clear. The trees were so still I could almost see the quiet. It was hot too, hot as a room in ninety-degree weather with all the windows closed. I stood listening to the quiet. A drop of sweat made a crooked path from under my eye down along the side of my nose.

  A tree branch cracked in the distance and I saw a shadow or the flicker of something, disappearing over a rise. “Moses!” I yelled and ran after the shadow, slipping and sliding in my bare feet on the prickly pine needles. I climbed down a place where the hill had washed out, jumped a stream at the bottom and started head first up the other side. A giant crab creature rose up in front of me. I yelled and tried to duck away but slipped on the pine needles face down. Then I saw the crab creature was just the mess of a dead tree, black bony-legged branches poking up from the ground. I got to my feet and looked up the hill. Nothing there, just more trees, the sky now full of dark purple rain clouds.

  A whistle jumped through the quiet. It came from in back of me — sharp — like a jungle bird I heard once under the big glass dome at the zoo. “Moses!” I shouted. “That you? Moses!” The trees sucked away the sound of my voice. Thunder tumbled overhead. Why won’t you wait for me? I went back the way I came; back down the ditch, over the stream and up the other side toward the whistle. I walked fast. I walked straight along the hill, till I got back to the giant pine. The huge bottom limb was there just like before, but the path was gone. I looked for the field of finger shaped boulders but saw only the slope of the hill and endless trees.

  Trick you boy. Make you crazy.

  The whistle sounded again — this time from down the hill. Then it commenced to rain. One drop. Two. Then a bunch. I half walked, half ran down the hill toward where I thought I had heard the whistle. A gray hump of rocks began to rise over the trees, small at first, then big, then bigger than big. My Davy Crockett tee shirt was soaked through with rain. I came to a place steep enough I had to dig my heels in sideways to go down. I picked my way over rocks and little ledges, all the way to the bottom of the hill. The hump went up in front of me, so big now it blocked out half the sky. It seemed to bulge and shrink back behind the sheets of rain, a great breathing creature — a dragon asleep on the ground. And that’s exactly what it looked like. On one side a long tail trailed off into the woods; on the other sat a head, big as a house at the end of a long neck. It even had horns, two dead trees bowing to each other atop the head — the head red with gooseberry bushes. The rain died to a sprinkle, but the sky was still dark, full of flashing lights and thunder.

  “Moses!” I yelled.

  My voice echoed back. MOSES! Moses! moses!

  “Don’t do me this a way! Moses!”

  WAY! Way! way! MOSES! Moses! moses!

  Again it started to rain. Smoking sheets of it blew from one end of the dragon to the other. I saw a place where the dragon’s belly had given way; a low gap big enough a person might be able to walk through. Thunder boomed overhead. I wanted to run for the g
ap but I was scared it might be the home of some bear or a lion. Then out of the dark of the gap stepped Moses. “Come boy!” he shouted and went back in.

  “Goddamn it, Moses! Wait up!” I ran across the wet rocky ground to the opening, cold rainwater splashing up my legs. Beards of cobweb hung in white shreds from the entranceway ceiling. A log laid split and rotting on the stone floor. I walked in a ways. Dripping sounds echoed in a pitch-black space that loomed to my left, a space I imagined to be huge, though I had no way of judging it. To my right was a wall of moss and sweating rock that seemed to go down along a stone passageway toward a greenish light, glowing dimly in the distance.

  “Moses!” I yelled and began to feel along the wall — the dark airy space looming behind me, the greenish light growing little by little as I went — until I came to a green-lit room, a cave-room that was round with a rounded hulled-out ceiling, everything stone solid and sweating with the damp. On the other side of the room two bumpy openings, like portholes, looked out on the rain. Through them I could see white-blue flashes of lightning, hear the sound of thunder.

  In the middle of the room in front of a little pool of water sat Moses, smoking a long stemmed corncob pipe. The water was lit green. The smoke from Moses’ pipe was green. “Come boy. Sit you DOWN!”

  “Why’d you run off from me?” I said. “I got lost.”

  “First go through the world! Then CHANGE come.” His voice reminded me of Mr. Slabodnik’s accordion back home, wheezing up loud, then dragging bottom. “COME BOY! Sit.”

  “I ain’t no puppy dog Moses!” I kicked a rock. The rock rolled a little bit in front of me and stopped.

  Moses took a puff off his pipe and looked into the pool. He started to sing. It was the same sweet song Willis had sung to the chickens. With Moses though it came out like a cat, yowling on a backyard fence. He stretched his mouth every crazy way.

  just a cLOWLser walk with thee

  GRAN-it JEsus is ma plEEee

  DAAAYly wowlking clOWse to thee

  let it be, dear LOWrd, let it beeeEEEEEE!

  At the end his mouth was stretched out so crazy I had to laugh. Moses watched me from under his hat and grinned. “YOU! think dis be FUNNY?” The way he said this made me laugh even more. Moses laughed too. “Come boy. Sit you down!” He reached around in back of him and brought up a dingy gray towel. “Dry you off BOY! Keep you warm!”

  I wasn’t cold, but I took the towel anyway and wiped myself off. I sat down and looked at the pool, a shiny green pool if you looked at it one way, a clear pool, not deep, with little pebbles on the bottom if you looked at it another. The green smoke was all over the place. It smelled like matches. I could hear rain slapping against the rocks outside the two bumpy portholes. Moses reached down to where I had the knife and tapped it with his fingers. Looking at me, he said, “put it IN BOY!” He motioned toward the pool of water.

  “It’s Granny’s knife,” I said. “It doesn’t belong to me.”

  “Put it in! See!”

  “See what?”

  “Go through the world! SEE!”

  Going through the world made no sense to me, but I got hold of the knife handle anyway and pulled it out. The blade looked gray in the shadowy cave light, its end still bent from where I’d used it to dig for crawfish. Lightning flashed outside the portholes. It made a shadow-picture of me with the knife and Moses against the opposite wall. There was another sound of thunder. The bottom of the blade started to glow. My hand began to shake.

  “Good,” Moses said.

  I watched the glow climb up to the top of the blade. Blue neon, like at the swimming hole.

  “Good,” Moses said. “NOW! Put it in.”

  I looked at the pool of water. It was clear now, not deep at all. I could see the pebbles on the bottom, pink and blue and gray. I put my hand in with the knife just under the surface and let go. The water was ice cold.

  The blade fanned this way and that till it reached the stony bottom. The whole thing glowed now, even the handle part. Then it was like the glow streamed out and away from the knife, mixing in with the green glow of the water, turned over and out like a fan or a flower until all the water was glowing, not green anymore but silvery blue. Moses swirled it with a stick. Little pearls of silver light splashed out onto the floor where they stayed a while — like beads of mercury — before slithering back in. “Look!” Moses said and took away the stick. Right away the water went like a mirror.

  In it I saw myself — a wet, tired, scrawny boy. I saw Moses too, smoky black eye sockets and no eyebrows under a cowboy hat. Behind us though were things that weren’t there before. Beams ran under the dome ceiling of the cave-room. Dried plants and thick knuckled roots hung from the beams along with rusted lantern bottoms, loops of rope and bunches of chicken claws tied together with string. I looked away from the mirror up at the real ceiling. There were the beams and things just like in the mirror. “Where’d all that come from Moses?” I asked, but got no answer.

  More lightning flashed. Again I could see our shadows on the wall. There was something else too, next to the wall, a table and chairs, boxes stacked up next to the table. Flat boxes like the ones Moses used to carry his snakes in, screens over the ends, something bumping, hissing inside. I looked at Moses. He jerked his chin back toward the room. When I looked, the table, the chairs, the boxes, the beams, everything that had been there a second ago was gone.

  “Not always what you think. Now, isn’t it boy?” Moses jerked his chin again, this time toward the pool.

  What happened when I looked at the pool confused me way more than anything else. It was like the pool or the light of the pool had somehow sucked me inside itself, surrounding me in silvery blue light. I tried to yell but no sound would come out of my mouth. I was lost in the middle of a silvery blue nowhere. Then, a little way in front of me, the light began to darken and blend, to turn into a something — the figure of a boy, a dirty uncombed little boy, lying on his belly in a kitchen, elbows underneath, writing out something on a piece of paper. He wore thick black eyeglasses too big for his head, one of the corners broken and held together with orange electrical tape. He had no shoes. The heels of his socks had worn through.

  “Hey!” I hollered, this time finding my voice. “Who are you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I bent down next to his ear. “Little boy! Don’t you ever take a bath?” I tried to touch his head, but my hand went right through. Three men and a woman sat at a table in the kitchen. One of the men pounded the table with his fist. Everybody laughed. Next to the table was a sink piled with dirty dishes — above it, a darkened window. I walked up to the people at the table. Nobody noticed. Bottles of beer and ashtrays sat everywhere. There was a big, square shouldered whiskey bottle too. It was half empty.

  The men looked like factory workers. They were big muscled and wore gray pants and long-sleeved shirts. White long john underwear showed out the necks of their shirts, the ends of their sleeves. They smoked and drank beer, took turns taking little sips from the whiskey bottle.

  One man clinked his glass with another man’s. “Here’s to the cat’s meow!” he said.

  “Pussy, pussy, pussy!” the other man said.

  All three looked at the woman and laughed.

  The woman laughed too, her face long and smiling. She was smoking a cigar. She was pretty, but kind of horse-faced with dull black hair, red powdered cheeks and wide flaring nostrils. Eyelids painted green. She sat with her feet propped up on the leg of the man next to her, her knees in the air, her dress pushed back you could see the hemline of a pair of red panties.

  She took a puff off the cigar and grinned, letting the smoke leak out small slits between her teeth. She talked like a Yankee; her words jagged-edged, deep and rough sounding like a man. “So now, who wants it first? Michael? You? Don’t be shy. You boys.” She punched the shoulder of the man next to her. “Come on now. It’s not nice to keep Momma waiting.”

  One of the men grabbed up the
whiskey bottle, took a long pull, and then passed it to another man who did the same. The third man, the one next to the woman, put it back down on the table. All three sat with their eyes lolled out, grinning at each other and at the woman. The man next to the woman grinned and ran his hand up her leg, right up to the red panties.

  The woman pressed her feet harder into the man’s leg. “Oh baby, I know what you want.”

  The man slid his fingers inside the panties but the woman laughed and slapped it away. All the other men laughed too.

  “Ma! No!” The little boy was on his knees now, looking at the people around the table.

  The three men looked at the boy and at each other.

  The woman’s hair wrapped itself around her head like a towel, one loose end hung over the back of her chair. “Get your ass downstairs! I told you.”

  “It’s my house too!”

  The men sat at the table with their heads down, waiting.

  “What did we say? Huh? Tell me. Didn’t we say to stay downstairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s cold down there!”

  “Go by the furnace like we said.”

  “You go by the furnace! There’s no light down there!”

  The woman picked up one of the ashtrays and threw it across the room, cigarette butts and all. It landed upside down on the floor next to the boy. “I’ll send you back to goddamn Salina Street! To that son of a bitch calls himself your father!”

  “Do it then! See if I care!”

  The woman turned back to the three men. “Christ Jesus Michael, give me a drink.”

  The boy started to cry.

  It made me feel sad, that woman with the factory men, smoking cigars and laughing, talking now, not paying any attention at all to the little boy. I wanted to give the woman a piece of my mind. I wanted to tell her that a Momma shouldn’t act that way. I tried to remember how my own Momma acted but that only made me sadder. I could smell the woman’s perfume, the stink of the cigar, the beer and the whiskey.