by Sam Torode
Next to that, I found a blue hardback book, Sex Secrets in Marriage by Dr. Herman Waldo Long. Where the heck had he found that—the pawn shop? Good old Craw.
I finally came clean and told Wilburn and Millie about Father’s accident and the lost money. I detected the hint of a satisfied smile on Uncle Will’s face, but he offered to take up a collection among the relatives.
“Father won’t take charity,” I said. “That’s why he wanted me to keep it a secret.” I didn’t have any problem taking charity, though. For a wedding present, Wilburn gave us an old Model A that he’d been repairing in the barn.
“Only one string attached,” he said. “Y’all hurry back to Texas. Don’t go disappearing on us like your father.” I promised we’d be back—and maybe I could convince my parents to return, too. As crazy as it seemed, I dreamed of Father rejoining the Golden Melody Makers and getting them on the radio. I could hardly imagine what it would be like to hear him pour his heart into a real, honest-to-God song.
Just as Sarah and I were about to leave, Uncle Will came out onto the porch holding an apple crate full of papers. “Almost forgot,” he said. “Malachi’s been getting mail here ever since he left. Only a letter or two a year, but it adds up.” He packed the crate into our trunk. “Don’t know why I saved these—guess I figured he might come back someday.”
I looked down at my feet. “I almost forgot something too—your boots.” I started to pull them off.
Uncle Will put his hand on my shoulder. “You keep those. No matter where you go, you’re a Texan now.”
+ + +
We didn’t get to make love on our wedding night, or the night after. The trip to Remus was a three-day’s drive on hard leather seats, and Sarah’s body was as sore as mine by the time we got there. Consummating our marriage was turning out to be a bigger challenge than fighting the demon. After all we’d been through, though, and with my parents’ fate in the balance, sex wasn’t the first thing on my mind. Well, maybe it was, but I did a good job of pretending otherwise.
When we pulled into my drive, Father was sitting on the porch with a red bandana across his face, strumming his old guitar. I was shocked—I thought he’d smashed it years ago. Mama came running out to meet us. They hugged Sarah and declared that she was the daughter they’d never been able to have. “The Lord has brought joy from ashes,” Father said. “I’m grateful for all that’s happened—even my blindness. My only regret is that I’ll never see my grandchildren with my own eyes.”
I was beginning to wonder if there’d ever be any grandchildren. No way was I going to make love for the first time in my old bedroom, right down the hall from my parents.
That evening, I asked Father what he meant when he said he was grateful for his blindness. “Ada was mad as a wet hen when she found out I’d sent you away,” he said. “She thought sure you were dead. To pacify her, I told her to fetch the Bible and read to me from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ ‘love your enemies,’ ‘turn the other cheek’—I hoped something would sink in and keep her from killing me.”
Father tilted back his head. “But as she read, I realized that I was the one who needed it. My eyes were opened—figuratively, at least—and I heard the words of Jesus as if he were speaking directly to me. The more she read, the more I saw myself—not in Jesus or his followers, but in the Pharisees, the teachers of the law. All these years I’d been fighting my enemies, I missed out on the most important thing: love.”
He pointed to the bandana around his eyes. “I was so stubborn, God had to blind me to show me the truth.”
In his moment of epiphany, Father seemed to forget that he was blinded by a bird, not God. Then again, Scripture says that the Spirit descends as a dove and works in mysterious ways.
+ + +
The next morning, I brought Father the crate of letters Uncle Will had saved for him. Most of them were from the same place: “Artesian Mfg. & Bottling Co., Waco, Texas.”
When I asked Father if that rang a bell, he had to think about it for a minute. “Now I remember. One of my friends convinced me to invest money in a new industry—soda pop, I think it was. Let this be a lesson to you, son—never waste your money on some fool scheme.”
I opened the most recent letter. The fool scheme in question was Dr. Pepper soda. “Dad—it says here that your original investment of twelve dollars is now worth fifteen thousand.” I dropped the letter in amazement.
Father slowly shook his head, then grinned. “Which goes to show you, son—don’t listen to a word your old man says.”
About noon, when Brother Lester and the Baptist elders dropped by to give Father his one-day eviction notice, they were shocked to find us celebrating. “Brothers,” Father told them, “as the great Davy Crockett once said, ‘You can go to hell—but as for me, I’m going to Texas.’” As we yipped and hollered, the elders tumbled out the door and ran away, falling all over each other like the Keystone Cops.
In all the excitement, I almost forgot Craw’s catfish liver salve. That afternoon, I asked Father to remove his bandana, and I smeared the pungent brown paste over his eyelids. All I said was, “Don’t ask what it is, but it might help.” I rubbed it on and wiped it off twice, with no change in the cloudy white film over his eyes. Then, the third time, the scales peeled back, flaked off, and floated away like snowflakes. Father threw his arms around me. “I was blind, but now I see—praise be to God.”
Maybe the Spirit works through catfish entrails, too.
+ + +
That evening, after packing up the few belongings I cared to take back to Texas, I brought Sarah to the stump behind the house and dug up my secret lockbox.
I was a bit embarrassed to show her at first, but we both had a good laugh over the French Lady. “You kind of look alike,” I said. “Maybe it’s the black hair.”
“And our armpits,” Sarah said. “I gave up shaving when I swore off boys.”
I took my page of hand-copied verses from the Song of Solomon, and we hiked out to the lake. There, we lay on the grass in the cool night air, and I read the verses to Sarah. Years before, when I’d written them down, they seemed so dirty. Now, they seemed the most beautiful and innocent words in the world.
When I ran out of verses about breasts, Sarah unveiled her own under the silvery Michigan moon. She lay beside me and we sang a song of our own, our bodies communing in a language more ancient than any spoken tongue.
Mama’s health books had introduced me to the scientific side of sex, and Dr. Herman Waldo Long had given me a few helpful pointers. But those science and technical books didn’t tell half of the truth about sex.
As Craw once told me, some truths are so big, so far beyond our understanding, that the only way we can grasp them is through a myth. Sex is like that. It takes a poem to express the deeper truth of the experience, the part that goes beyond what we can see. Anatomical drawings and Latin terms couldn’t begin describe what I found between Sarah’s legs.
Before that night, some parts of the Song of Solomon didn’t make sense to me. Like this one:
My beloved put his hand by the hole of the door,
and my heart was moved for him.
I rose to open to my beloved,
and my hand dripped with myrrh,
and my fingers dripped with sweet smelling myrrh
upon the handles of the lock.
Now I knew what ol’ Solomon meant by “myrrh.” Sweet, indeed.
And so, on the banks of Leach Lake, I realized my life’s ambition to make love to a beautiful girl before the Rapture. What else was left for me?
To make love again. And again.
And again.
Tarry longer, O Lord.
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel is a retelling of the ancient Jewish tale of Tobias and Sarah (as found in the Book of Tobit), set in the world of my grandparents, who met and married in Texas during the Great Depression. It is dedicated to their memory.<
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I love to hear from readers, so drop me a note at [email protected].
—Sam Torode