by Silas House
Asher rents them two chairs and an umbrella where they can doze, worn out from grief and fear. They awake and Asher buys thick Cuban sandwiches and thin fried plantains from the beach café. Asher wolfs down his food, wiping up sour cream with his last plantain but Justin simply stares at his sandwich.
“Eat, Justin. You’ll be starving later.”
“I can’t,” he says. He won’t look at Asher and his eyes are hidden behind the big, cheap sunglasses Asher bought at the café to hide his face from anyone who might take note of them. “I can’t just sit here and eat while she’s laying there, dead.”
“We have to keep living, buddy,” Asher says.
“She was so good to me,” Justin says, his voice breaking. “And to Shady. She always made a little extra bacon just for him.”
“I know it. We were lucky to know her.”
“We should be there with Evona,” he says, turning to his father. Asher finds only himself reflected in the lenses of the sunglasses. “It’s not right.”
“Just a little while longer,” Asher says.
Justin dabs one of the plantains into the sour cream and chews it without any kind of enjoyment. “I can’t,” he whispers, and spits the food out. “I feel like I’m gonna be sick.”
After a while Justin falls asleep on his side with his hands folded beneath his cheek, his mouth open in mournful exhaustion.
Asher watches him. What a failure of a father he has become. He has reduced his child to hiding all day on a beach, sleeping in a plastic chair by the ocean, on the run. He has turned him into someone who can’t even mourn a person he loves without being whisked away into hiding.
He is a coward for leaving Evona. He shouldn’t have, even if she did insist. He has been a coward his entire life, always afraid to do the right thing. He will never forgive himself for leaving her, the same way he will never really get over knocking Zelda down, the way he can’t get over not being brave enough to marry Jimmy and Stephen, the same way he’ll never be able to take back the day he turned away Luke for being himself. Some things we can’t take back, no matter how hard we wish.
23
The low growl of thunder wakes him and when his eyes come open he sees that Justin is curled up in his beach towel resting peacefully. All down the beach people are snatching up their towels and coolers and chairs while the wind plucks them back, carrying some of these things tumbling down the sand and into the water. The boy who rented the chairs and umbrella to them is trying to wrangle everything off the beach before the wind takes it all.
Greenish-black clouds hover low over the ocean, grumbling toward land. Lightning kicks around in the bottoms of the clouds.
“Hurry!” a woman cries out to her little boy, who is still in the water. She’s holding a white safari hat to her head so it won’t blow away and Asher is thinking Let that go.
The umbrella planted between Asher and Justin is rocking in the wind. A rainbow-flag beach towel blows past, settling on Justin’s face for only the briefest second but long enough for him to rise up like he’s coming from deep water, about to drown.
“What is it?” he hollers out just as the corner of the towel slips from his face and sails on down the beach, stretching its corners out like a magic carpet.
The umbrella rental boy runs to them. “Sorry, folks, but I have to get this stuff in.” He has to holler over the wind. His white polo shirt works up his back in the wind. “Y’all should get off the beach.”
Lightning zigzags down and touches its tips to the waves of the ocean, causing the last remaining people to get a move on. A couple women and kids let out little yips as they run past.
Asher hustles his chair back up to the stack to help out the rental boy, who’s standing back on the beach, holding Justin’s chair and watching as their umbrella sails away, bouncing once on the sand before hitting the water.
“Justin!” Asher yells over the thunder. The clouds have taken the sun so it’s almost dark except for the glimmers of lightning. “Come on right now!”
The sky opens up just as they reach the Vespa and the rain falls in big cold blocks. Asher has felt rain like this only the day of the flood. Before they knew how high the water would rise, he had stood on the porch while bolts of lightning like these had split the sky in two purple halves. Asher fires the engine and puts the gas to the Vespa and they speed away, like a zipper being unzipped, through the black parking lot. Asher drives them through the rain, hunched over so he can see as the raindrops sting his face. Justin curls against his back.
He is wetter and colder (that rain came from some place not of this earth, some cold, high place) than he has ever been before, even during the flood. He can’t stop thinking of Bell and how soon she will be lying under the wet ground in storms like this and the rain will pound on the dirt and seep down through the soil until it eats into her casket and fills her mouth and eyes with water and sand and rocks. He thinks of how only a couple days ago she was tapping away on her piano and making such pretty music. Justin hugs his father’s back and Asher thinks his son might be crying a little while they ride along. He wishes he could, too. He needs to, but the tears won’t come, even though this would be the perfect time, when nobody would be able to tell his crying from the rain on his face.
Asher is trying to get back to the cottage but the rain is falling too thin and hard, like needles into his eyeballs. Lightning crashes silver all around them. All he can see is the big old church up ahead of them on Duval, so he pulls in there and makes a run for the door, pulling Justin alongside him.
24
As soon as the doors close behind them the world quiets. Several people have taken refuge in the church, but they are all sitting still and silent in the pews, some of them with their heads bowed. Yellow lights dot the sanctuary in the dim gray of the afternoon but occasionally the big stained-glass windows are lit by lightning, showing off their bright colors: reds and blues and greens as rich as pieces of hard Christmas candy.
In one window Asher sees the Sermon on the Mount. Christ stands tall and straighter and brighter than anyone else, dressed in red while the others in the scene keep their eyes on Him. His favorite passage in the Bible, the passage that stayed true to him no matter how he believed.
There is a huge white shell offering holy water at the door. Since he has never been taught to use holy water or cross himself it is best to not do either. Bell once told him that what she loved most about the Episcopal Church in Key West was that everyone was welcome and that nobody had to do anything.
But they are soaked to the bone and Asher hates to get the wooden pews wet, so he and Justin stand in the foyer. Besides, Asher is embarrassed to be in a church wearing swimming trunks, a drenched tee shirt, and flip-flops. He has never felt so ridiculous or out of place. Asher riffles his hand through Justin’s hair and uses the end of his drenched shirt to wipe at his son’s face and get some of the water out of his eyes. Already a little puddle has formed on the tiled floor around Justin’s feet and he is shivering.
A priest appears with a couple of towels. At least Asher figures he is a priest because of his white robe and the green sash draped around his neck. He offers the towels up on his palms like a little treasure.
“Thanks so much,” Asher whispers, seeing how long the priest’s eyes linger on his face. The man recognizes Asher; he is sure of it.
He nods, smiles down at Justin, then looks Asher in the eye again.
“The Holy Eucharist will be given at five-thirty,” he says. He is probably in his early seventies but there is something youthful about him. No lines on his face at all, and a kind of boyishness in his eyes. “You’re very welcome to stay with us.”
Asher tries to help Justin get dried off but the boy pushes his hands aside. “I can do it,” he says. “I’m not a baby.”
They sit in the pews with the towels under their wet shorts. More people come down the aisle. One of the women bows to the altar before she slides into her pew. The man with her crosses himself
before following her. Forehead, heart, left shoulder and then the right. Asher watches and a strange sort of envy warms his chest. Envy because these people are so certain in their way of worship. He isn’t sure if he had ever truly been that way.
Outside, the storm is lifting. Weak light eases through the stained-glass windows and Asher can no longer hear the rain pounding on the roof.
Another man appears up front and sits at the organ where he plays “Wondrous Love,” one of Asher’s favorite songs. Sometimes after Sunday dinner Zelda had put it on her old record player. Asher can feel the vibrations of the organ in the wooden seat of the pew even though they are far in the back of the church, and this sensation is so large to him that he feels the music has become God and God has spread through every part of the church, even into the floor. When the choir rises—he hasn’t even noticed them until they stand—to sing the words, Asher thinks he might not make it through the entire song without breaking down. Hearing the song makes him feel as if Zelda has walked into the room and is staring him down, reminding him of what he has done to get Justin away from her.
Asher realizes that everyone in the pews is standing and singing, too. When people lift their voices at the same time, when they join together to pray, God pauses. That’s what Asher believes.
“What wondrous love is this, O my soul, o my soul,” they sing.
Asher thinks about how thickly Bell had believed even when so many people were telling her there was no use, that no God believed in her.
Three priests or deacons—Asher doesn’t know which—prepare the communion table with a red cloth and lots of gold. They have certainly never had any gold in the Cumberland Valley Church of Life. Asher isn’t sure how he feels about that, but he likes the ceremony of it all, even though he has a hard time seeing everything from the back pew. He thinks one of the men looks a lot like the deacon who used to bring communion out to Bell’s on Sunday evenings, but there is a long distance up to the sanctuary and he can’t be sure.
Everyone in the church is still and silent and the air feels expectant.
Asher can think only of Bell. He recalls an early morning when he had swept her porch, collecting sand and dirt from the floorboards, moving it all into a neat little pile which he brushed up onto the dustpan and then sprinkled into the ambrosia at the corner of the steps.
The sounds of morning in Key West sounded like prayers. They especially had on that morning. Strange birds in the palm trees, singing high, sharp notes. The supping of the colored water against the sides of the pool. Asher had loved everything, even the sounds of bicycles rolling along the street, and the crow of a rooster hopping among the tombstones in the cemetery, or the purr of an airplane (a silver chip on the sky, catching sunlight) coming in, bringing new people, or one leaving, taking away the ones whose time on the island had come and gone.
That morning, Bell was playing “All Creatures of Our God and King.”
She had left her front door wide open to let in the morning air, so he could see her at the piano, arching her shoulders into the music, head thrown back and eyes closed. Usually she only played but this morning she had sung: a big, solid voice like the resounding notes on an organ. Asher had moved his lips to the lyrics, audible only in his own mind:
Thou rising morn, in praise rejoice
Ye lights of evening, find a voice.
O praise Him! O praise Him!
Alleluia, alleluia
Asher thought alleluia the most beautiful word he had ever heard. Bell swayed her head back and forth, feeling Alleluia, savoring it. He had tasted Alleluia on the air that morning.
He wants more than anything to go forward and receive communion. It has been too long.
The row in front of them has already moved into the line.
Asher knows this is foolish of him, to tempt the priest that way, to stand in display of all these people, many of whom are most likely local. But he stands and motions for Justin to follow him. They wait in the line and watch what everyone else is doing because this is not how communion is done in their church at all.
They kneel at the rail and put out their hands like the others, keep their heads bowed. Asher realizes no one is looking at them; everyone is concentrating on the holy task at hand. Then the wafer is dissolving on his tongue
(The body of Christ, the priest says)
and Asher’s lips are on the golden cup being held out to him
(The cup of salvation, a whisper, but something familiar about the voice)
and he is taking communion with his own child, a thousand miles from home, on the run, in hiding. He feels as if he is taking his first full breath in a long while.
When he has swallowed the wafer and the wine Asher looks up before moving out of the way for the next row of people to take their place at the communion rail. And there before him, the cup trembling in his hand, is his brother.
Luke.
Asher steps away from the rail and into the small room off the side of the sanctuary. He can’t believe it as he watches Luke hand off the cup to another priest so he can rush out to them. He can’t seem to catch his breath. Right here, all this time. Right under his nose, just waiting for him to find the church, the place he should have gone first. But Luke, a priest? He would have never thought that. Not that. Only when Justin hisses up at him “What is it?” does he realize he is standing there with both his hands over his mouth.
Then there is Luke with his white robe ballooning out around him because of his haste. As soon as Luke reaches him, he wraps Asher up in his arms. They are hugging and there are no words and although Asher always imagined that he would burst into tears upon finally seeing his brother again, he doesn’t. He laughs in disbelief.
“Luke,” he says, grinning. “Luke, Luke.”
25
Darkness has taken up residence when they return.
No flashing lights, no cops, nothing. They stop at the corner of Olivia and Elizabeth Streets and then ride the Vespa on up to the fence of Song to a Seagull, quiet. The tiny chatter of crickets—night sounds are so much smaller here than back home—and nothing else.
So they go on into the courtyard.
Every light in Bell’s house is on, and Evona’s half of their house is lit up, too. Shady trots out to them and jumps up, his front paws on Justin’s chest.
“Oh God, where have you been?” Evona comes off the porch and throws her arms around Asher’s neck.
“We stayed at the beach, then the church,” Asher says. “I should’ve come back sooner. I didn’t know what to do.”
“It’s alright,” she says. “It’s good you left. They were here for a couple of hours or more. Two cops, the coroner.”
She motions for Justin to sit with her on the wicker love seat. Shady jumps up there with them and perches his head on Justin’s lap. Evona keeps hold of Justin’s hand. Asher can’t stand to look at her cried-out face. He reaches out and strokes Shady’s head and Shady licks at Asher’s fingers, a bathing that says I missed you, I love you, I’m so glad you’re here.
“What happened?”
“She had heart disease. She knew for a couple years, that she might not make it very long. I never thought she would go so soon. They had told her that if she ate right and took her medicine she’d be okay for a while.” In the gray shadows he watches as she wipes at her face.
“Need me to check on the guests?” Asher asks.
“One set left. I guess it freaked them out. The other couple has been gone out on a boat all day. I think they went to the Dry Tortugas.”
“They should be back soon, then. The boats dock at dark.”
“She was all I had,” Evona says abruptly, as if she has not meant to say that aloud.
Asher gives Justin the look that means for him to move over, so he hops down off the love seat and takes Shady with him down into the shadows of the yard, where they settle by the pool.
“I’m here,” Asher tells her as he sits down next to her. He holds her against him and does
n’t say anything else for a time.
Asher is thinking about where Bell’s body is right this moment. He hopes she is not in some morgue with bright lights ticking above her. And what about Luke? Is he sitting in some small room—he doesn’t even know where his brother lives despite the catching up they were able to do briefly in the church courtyard—studying about all of the years he lost with Asher and Justin? Is he thinking about how he doesn’t know his nephew at all?
He can see Justin clearly in the light coming up from the pool, sitting on the edge with his feet in the water and Shady panting beside him. Every once in a while Shady quits breathing hard so he can lick at Justin’s ear.
Asher listens to the little waves washing up against the edges of the pool. He looks over at Bell’s house where all the lights have been left on. He knows Evona couldn’t stand to look at the house with the windows all dark.
“There was something about you she took to right away,” Evona says after a while. “Bell either loved people completely or she didn’t like them at all. With you, it was on sight. That’s worth something. To have someone like her give you their approval.”
I reckon it is, Asher thinks.
26
The sky is the pink of grapefruit meat as they sit on the beach together, looking out at the Atlantic. Evenings in Key West are calm down here at Smathers, where the homeless folks gather at the turquoise picnic tables to eat and drink and tell big stories.
Asher and Luke sit just beyond the tables, on the cooling sand of the beach. Asher has slipped his feet out of his flip-flops and digs his heels into the sand but Luke’s long toes are firmly planted in his leather sandals. He used to wear the same kind back in Cumberland Valley long before any other men would have even dreamed of wearing shoes that revealed their feet. Behind them the homeless men are quiet, playing a card game or eating Vienna sausages from little blue cans. There is nothing but the breeze in the palms and the lonesome cry of a gull that paces along the water’s edge, looking out to sea.