Noy Holland - The Spectacle of the Body

“Oh, here and yonder. Best let me in.”

But do you think I budge?

“What you been doing, Daddy?”

He gives a little shrug like plenty .

“Watching the grasshoppers spit,” he says, and then just stands there, fatter than fat, sucking at the gaps in his teeth.

Momma sits bolt upright in back of me, spewing linch-pinned to the flagpole and fourteen million dollars. She is Queen of Nonsense now, and that gives her the right.

“She ain’t saying nothing, Daddy. Don’t mean a thing. What can I do for you?”

He says, “I just came to set for a bit.”

I say, “Unh-uh, Daddy. Ain’t no reason to live in hell and have to wind up there, too. Why don’t you just get along?”

He is nothing but a shadow against the screen, and from where I stand, flies disappear in him. I say, “You had your chance, old man. Momma’s got a thing with God now.”

It is all I can do to keep my hands from myself. Jimmy come by, just shuffled up, kind of hanging his head, making a ghost on the screen. I’ve seen it happen, I knew it was come.

“Jimmy,” I say, “how them bananas?”

He says, “I had me a dream. I was looking for you. I was down yonder on the blacktop ridge, hollering every way from Sunday. You wasn’t hearing a thing. You was down in a long valley in a little old house with a white light. You was all prettied up and your lips were red and you was just setting, looking at me, not seeing a thing, not listening.”

Ought to be something for a girl to say, but my mouth refuses me.

He says, “Come on, child. I can’t dawdle around. I got me a life to live.”

“Uh-huh,” I say. “Tell me about it, lover boy.”

“Tell me what it’s like,” Momma says to me. “Tell me what it feels like to feel like a queen.”

“Momma,” I say, “Kiwanis makes six hundred and twenty-eight pounds of banana pudding every year, and every year those boys come up from down the road a piece and go to pissing in the yellow vat. It feels a little like that, I guess — like everybody’s happy to have you, but you got some secret stinking inside.”

Anytime she finds sleep, Momma goes to smiling and kissing the air. I’ve got a notion she looks like me, practicing love in the glass. Am I doing this right? Do I look okay?

I been making ready since long back when, but — Momma, she can still turn me inside out. When she came up last night from that crazy spell, she took hold of my face like she ain’t laid eyes maybe for years on me.

“Oh, my beloved child. I thought I was living forever in that green, tumbling place.”

It was like I’d never seen her before, like she was the light of another world. “Here,” she said. “Put your hand here.”

Rested my hand on her belly — my hand pressed under Momma’s hand. “I’m all of me gone from here. Feel?” she said. “Do you feel it?”

“Listen,” she said. “Don’t matter nohow. It’s God does the things that ever get done. God made them boys piss in the pudding, ain’t nothing to do with you.”

Father, forgive.

If I ever flew, it would feel like this, like the earth is just something long gone. I got a big heart and can hold my breath, and when I go deep in this dirty river, my whole body disappears. I can feel water wanting me. I know it’s a sin, but I open my legs. I shout Jimmy’s name so it turns to music by the time that it finds air.

Oh, ain’t it a shame, my sweet, sweet Jimmy. I could have loved you good.

Father, forgive.

I lie in the woods in the heat for the train. The thing gets growing inside me, up in my gut, around and around my secret parts. It has a life of its own, and surely the hunger of a hundred horses. It is a thing of the flesh, child of the Devil, who split my momma’s pretty lips and spilt himself in her. Surely now is the time for prayer.

Dear God, sweet God, pray God.

What’s my momma ever done to you? You listen to me. Ain’t no kind of life you’re lending her.

I got the skirling sound of a train come smack between my ears. It goes, Take me. Take me , it goes. Take me, take me, take me, take me.

Do I have to do all your filthy work?

Have you spent up all your amazing grace?

You think I know better, but you got me wrong — I ain’t afraid of you. You can have this no-count soul to keep. Suit yourself. Do what you will. Tickle me pink. I can’t use it.

Glory be and to the Father, and to the Holy Son. I would let Momma sprawl on the shimmying track.

You got your doubts.

I’d say, Go on, go on. Get on with it, Momma. Let’s be done with this thing.

So he went on down there. He went there in his truck.

It rained.

Mrs. Finn was in the kitchen, kneading dough for her daily bread. Around her waist was a calico apron the mice had long since chewed through.

The last stretch, he walked, leaving his truck, with the rain coming in, at the edge of a vast cornfield. He had a sideways way of walking, the hind foot some way sluggish, likely to drag or skip. He was wearing a brown fedora, a linen jacket, a pair of just-shined shoes. He had shot two holes in the floor of his truck so the rain would run on through.

Flour bloomed from the top of the counter and clung to the skin of her arms. Hens laid eggs in the outhouse. It was a bad day for making bread.

He came through the tomato field, picking his way between the knocked-down stakes and the brown plants now bent over, a tangle where there were once neat rows.

Birds clung to the eaves of Mrs. Finn’s house. The screen was missing from the big kitchen window. Onward he came, passing beneath the shelter of the big live oak, that great swooning creature of a tree whose limbs kissed the banks of the pond. Some Yankee, Mrs. Finn surmised.

The man knocked at the frame of the front screen door and received no answer. He had come too far for this. He would burn her out if need be. He knocked at the door again. Crocodiles fed on the banks of the pond. Something big swept down from the big live oak and beat the air above his head. Then came footsteps, such soft things, slippered feet on a bare wood floor.

But Mrs. Finn did not open the door. She watched the stranger through the fly-specked screen, her fingertips pressed against it. In this screen, there was a tear, torn by the wind that tore through here she could not remember how long ago. She cleared her throat before she spoke, leaned toward the man, pressing against the screen so hard that the skin of all ten of her fingertips bumped up against the grid.

“That’s pneumonia weather,” she said.

She pointed outside with her chin.

The man’s tongue came out and, curling up, caught drops that fell from the fedora’s brim. The tear in the screen tore toward both ends of Mrs. Finn’s body.

“Leave them things on the porch now and come on in where it’s dry.”

The man’s tongue was curled up into a ditch that the rain dropped into and ran down through. He stood there. He would catch her, too. He could see Mrs. Finn was going to dive through that screen, hands wide like that, leaning toward him, pointing her sharp chin.

Mrs. Finn cleared her throat again. She eased back, said nothing. Dustings of flour left on the screen showed where her fingers had been.

“Amend me,” the man said. “I had thought your eyes blue.”

He was sitting cross-legged on the bare wood floor, tapping his chin with his finger. Mrs. Finn’s hands were in her lap. Her eyes were as bright as the eyes of a bird, but only the whites were blue — a pale blue, like the moon when it blues in a certain season.

“You are wondering why I have come,” the man said. “What there is I can tell you.”