Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Sometime during the night the boys awoke and took the skeletons one at a time off the Big Mart lawn wagon they had stolen from the orphans’ camp. They brought them to the edge of the woods but not visible to the house and sat them side by side in high cane under a hickory, seated like church members who had waited too long in the pews for Rapture. The pistol went wherever the boys went. It gave them confidence, and the feeling let them sleep.

They fell asleep holding each other on the beach towels they had stolen from Pepper’s bait store. They simply wore them like ponchos and ran when he looked away. In their dreams the woman would wake them by coming to the little porch and singing in a foreign tongue, beyond Spanish.

When she began to sing, they sat up. Whole blooms had leaped to whiteness overnight. The bones sat there, passengers of beautiful white in the moonlight.

Her voice naked and not there. They forgot they wanted to see her without clothes and became only hearkening ears, like juvenile rats. This was sublime until the saxophone came in all sick from another part of the house. An even more foreign country trying to converse with her.

They imagined for a while the woman’s voice came from the mouth of the mother skeleton and was theirs alone. No saxophone could avail against it.

“You know,” Isaac said when the voice and the horn stopped, “these shirts is nasty. The one who gave them to us is just another one wanting our mama.”

He took off the black T-shirt rank with days of child’s sweat and blood drying from his cut. Jacob did the same, balling his up. They dug into the earth, an easy loam, with their hands. Buried the shirts.

“We can get new shirts when her and the doctor leave.”

“It’s Sunday and they might not. He might be having at her. Or watching football.”

“The wife would have some good shirts that her titties woulda been in.”

“We could meet them.”

“No we can’t. We ain’t good-looking enough.”

“That Lincoln-driving old fuck cut my hair off.” Isaac touched the back of his head.

“You know it.”

“That one’s ass is mine.”

“And what you ain’t finished with, I’m gonna be on it.”

Melanie slept alone and wondered if she could sleep alone another night. Too much seemed a mistake, a lack, a sucking away, she thought. Her pleasant yard, the rippling shore water, the night singing of the wetlands, did not feel kind to her anymore, in this furnace of midafternoon. Her bones felt dry. Then came evening. She wondered if this was all because of the smashed glass animals at Onward. The doves outside repeated their three-note griefs softly, never weary of them. Surely it wasn’t grief. She was awake at three in the morning. But I make animals from my loneliness , she thought.

The next night she had a guest.

She had “Greensleeves” from Ralph Vaughn Williams on the stereo box. He had brought Fantasia . She was happy he was an actor with the theater troupe. Otherwise how could he have imagined this?

He drank two very fast cups of espresso and then his moves were sudden. She had planned to talk an age, but what did she know. She asked him to hang his pistol belt on the bedpost. He chuckled and then he was all over her. It was a long hour with several engagements. She could not believe it when he took her from the rear. She felt spasms and loved him backwards as if trained to this work because she was not only older, she was old , and she couldn’t have it that she seemed naive. That would be obscene.

Then she imagined that he would want her aristocratic so there would be something to conquer, not a pliant, grateful old woman to make jokes about later. On the CD the violins were trembling, deep and long, into retreats and sighs. Moving things around was one of the great pleasures in life. Finding new figures in ordinary stuff. Like an artist , she thought. She believed they both were artists and not silly at all, not absurd unless air was.

She held her own against his withdrawals and frantic reentries. What a gift to hear him cry out vanquished as his long spurts made ropes in her. She felt very rich in secrets for hours. Blushing with them.

“I guess this is trouble,” she said to him after a while.

“I don’t know what you mean, trouble.”

He was marine-cut and muscular and did not smoke. She did. She lit a Pall Mall left from a pack John Roman forgot when they went fishing together with his wife.

“Child, our ages. Us.”

“Nobody is married. Nobody said no.”

“That’s true. So, modern times. This doesn’t feel like sin or what. . ugliness to you?”

He watched her with her cigarette. She smoked rarely but truly needed this one. She watched the pistol butt in its holster, the golden bullets, the belt hugged to the bedpost. She needed sin.

“Well,” he said, “it felt good, that good, like sin. If it hadn’t, I guess it would have just been ugly.”

“Will you want me again? I’m asking at the wrong time.”

He grinned. She wondered if he was handsome or just a fine package.

“Maybe. But even now, a sapped ape, I’d say yes indeed.”

“You were sapped?”

“Sure.”

“Thank you. One more thing. I’m sorry. Believe me, I believe in quiet too. But will you stay interested in me?”

“Yeah. You’re what brought me to the dance. I wonder what it’s like to be as good-looking as you this long. You’ve got style too.”

He dressed and drank another espresso rapidly. Then he was gone.

She walked around the house, and then she cried for a few minutes. Extremely happy. He had asked her to go with him to a high school football game. The end of August. In this heat. At Edwards, a town back east twenty minutes or so. She had forgotten this was possible, even though she had gone with Wootie all the time those years ago. “The season is hot and school is too early and this is the subtropics,” she said aloud. Then she was sad a moment. There was no seduction. She was stunned and needy and already too attuned to him. Thirty-six years old. Did he have to be exactly the age of her only child?

He had told her nothing about his business, although she had asked were there murders lately or what were the crimes he went to besides glass animals. Somebody had seen some skeletons on a lawn cart somewhere, and two fourteen-year-olds were missing from the orphans’ camp. But he spoke as if these matters might be local delusions. He had not left her out, but he had not been garrulous, as on his television five minutes.

He stood at the door just briefly, saying these things, and she was almost deaf looking at him, tall but without cowboy boots. Here was your seduction.

They knew no old things about the other. No months of dances, no convertible under the moon. But in the old days you always knew the end. People could look through you and see the children, the house, the lawn, the dog, just up the road. Not like this.

Let me keep this sweet life in me for a long while , she demanded of nobody.

Were they even friends? Or simply something else, like nothing in the old books, the old songs.

“What was your name meant to be?” asked the deputy, eyeing Mortimer’s license.

“It was meant to be what it is, goddamn free to be itself like this goddamn country.”

“ Man . You don’t hear that much. Never, in my experience.”

“Did you go to a name college?”

“Sir?”

“You stopped me for having an uncommon name?”

“No sir. I stopped you for running a stop sign on County Road 512 and Hill Bagget’s Road.”

“A country stop sign. And for having this Lexus. You thought I was a dope runner.”

“I couldn’t see much at all through those windows all smoked. These windows make us nervous. We don’t like them, you know.”