Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

His mother was a powerful Baptist who thought constantly of the Lottie Moon Mission and its Chinese orphans. His father was a former gunner on a battle cruiser in the Pacific, but his anguish over this remained in the form of absence. Not drink or drugs, certainly not psychological trauma, but a refusal to be anywhere much if he was not firing a gun at a Zero, the height of his life and the depth of it too. He had been aired out by a halo of lead, and his steps on this earth were light. He was not big and muscular. He remained spidery like a distance runner or a tall jockey.

Ma was navy too. That burnt-leather voice. She sucked on Old Golds, Fatimas. Smoke ran out of her like a bombed ship. She had mated twice, bringing forth Raymond and his brother. By her will, Max arrived ten months after conception. Of average height although a little thin, he was born discouraged. Too big for grade school, then suddenly too small for life, he felt.

Raymond’s mother would grab him by the throat when he was a lad. “Love the Lord, you little nit.”

“Ma, these swimming trunks are too big.”

“Excuse me, but I am feeding the heathen orphans of the world. What is your difficulty now?”

I was sent to my room to beg the Lord to have me , Raymond wrote, hitting whiskey straight from the bottle but only twice an hour. When Ma got the sad fairy organist at the church fired, she said, “What he is stays between him and his Lord. But his music blent poorly.”

It was the movies A Mighty Fortress, The Life of Luther, Ben-Hur, The Robe and others she approved. Then, for myself, I slunk to the old Royal Theater in Jackson to see the vampire films and their women breathy and innocent in their nightgowns. Like a pink supper in the rainy Carpathians. I had a mental woman, imaginary I mean, who wrote me letters from Dracula’s castle, surrounded by her friends, the beauties from the Bible movies, also almost naked and looking down at their Jew sandals. My replies to them would do whole peoples in. “I’ve had it with them. My dears, the French must die.”

I didn’t have much left for the local girls except Ruthie, a majorette, who slapped me for my thoughts and told Ma, now small and whispering like a husk in the wind. She forgave me because Ruthie wore her legs bare, spangled and strutting like a field slut. It was staggering what a humanist Ma became when Pa stepped out the last step. Her mercy took on the softness of a hound’s ears. I don’t know if this was love or only understanding.

Now that you’re dead, I have your life to play with, Ma, Mary Perkins Raymond, and forgive me for it. Guide my mercy. Endlessly rocking, and she died. She did so much good she was never bored until the time of her final sweetness.

Ruthie did love Ma and her memory. It was not this writer but Ruthie who put flowers on Mother’s grave once a month. I brought along a cup of steaming coffee from the truck stop for her tomb, unable to think of much else she enjoyed but cigarettes and orphans and Baptists. And Pa with his own tomb right beside her. I believed he had missed so many Japanese with his gun back in the forties that, disheartened, he could not smell the roses. Could not find the silver lining. I did not know a firm thing about him. A near acquaintance of his informed me that Pa was stone deaf from cannon every minute he knew me. I always thought he was a mystic. He couldn’t hear, he didn’t want to see us, he ranged solitarily I still don’t know where. The money he returned with, it smelled like dogs sometimes.

I did not throw myself on Ma’s tiny form in the coffin, but I wanted to. They keep you so far away with that last taxidermy. So much I had not done for her, never mind her orphans overseas. I was now forty-five, married twice. But I was still a boy in some kind of trouble in the room, needing to pray for myself in a smaller room, needing to regret this worm of me. I lost my bones, it felt like. They had spilled clicking around my shoes. But I was not given to histrionics, as Ruthie was, her whom I never married, regardless of all her postures.

Ruthie sinned, again and again, and cheated at cards, even stole cattle. Deceived her boys and her husbands. Then she would pick her Sunday and appear in a small church where theater had never been. She was now sorry in public for everything, everything. In a new meek dress accenting nothing. From her midheeled sensible shoes.

“I have sinned in automobiles, airplanes, under trestles, in warm ponds with cattle watching. This was partly liquor, that liar, or the chemical cocaine, that serpent. I was Jezebel who fell out of her window onto the street and the dogs licked up her blood. I have betrayed my marriage, over and over. I played all evil rock bands that there are on the stereo, at deafening volume. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Can you call this life?” Everything she should have whispered, she yelled. The churchgoers were cowed. Small children laughed or applauded.

Christ loved sinners so, better than the pious, she went on. He loved the hot blood that flowed under his cool fingers. She’d brought her own sermon and redemption with her.

I barely realized I was mad for her. There was a time, very tender, when that was possible. Just as John Roman is mad for Chet Baker, who was made for love and for horn, Chet at the end with toothless bony soul. Fell out of a window and died, I think, after being everything God gives a man. He never played the horn loud, never. Never showed off. What an ear. No running around jagged, like me, he was mad for love. To be more like Chet Baker in my heart. My good Christ, give me talent please, no more art. I loved Ruthie.

I was a success, but wrongly, deeply. Each year there was a new record of giving to the Lottie Moon Mission fund led by my mother. And I needed an appointment with Dr. God, as the Oak Ridge Boys sang. The better part of my malformation was my own. Beyond the saxophone I had no dreams. Well, a few cigarettes and looking out the window. I wondered what my essence was all through med school. As if I had one. Then the Peace Corps and back like a lost hound to the delinquent Ruthna, the hospital bed, the narcotic line. She now called herself Ruthna of the suburb Rathnar. What in my glassy delirium to do except begin dating her? But is there anything wronger than your young daydreams coming true?

Her man Harb got into a wreck. Harb, his woman and car stolen and defaced. And Harb striking me, the last blow an uppercut right through. He began hitting me in the face right then in the hospital, where I worked but was currently a patient on fluids. Now was I sorry I had run with Ruthna? Harb was a small man even at bedside. “Harbison! Harbison!” I appealed to his better nature. Such names as they give down here they make you desist when you call them out. “Have patience, man,” I pleaded with him. “I’m already in pain every minute. She hurt me too, remember? Would you like a high heel in your ass? In your dead mother’s bed?” While she spoke, standing over me, in some unknown tongue of lechery. There’s no use looking like me , she said, if you ain’t going to act it out .

Her old lover Crews was showing off his mangled leg in the parlor and collecting pills from visitors far counties away. This was Ruthna’s infamy. Nobody wanted to miss her next spree. It might be her last.

There is no doubt I carried my same love for her straight to Mimi Suarez. My Coyote. But Mimi is innocent. The band was playing at Nubie’s in Memphis, and I had to have her. I was mainly good, I thought. I was no longer a racist. I knew I could exceed their saxophonist simply in pure fury. Yet I disliked most people. If diseases could come attached to something like an ambulant dummy, I might still be a doctor. But her hair meant more to me than. . Well, there was Malcolm in the way, and I took more than his spot in the band.