Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

“We take, we take without even a thank-you, when if we open the door for some woman we’d like a thank-you, would we not? The other day I opened the door at Big Mart for a woman, a woman shall I say better dressed than I. She had just used food stamps, in her lizard high heels, and going toward her Cadillac where children shouting vulgar things waited, and this woman never even thanked me for my little courtesy.

“How do you think you would feel if you were God? Would you feel unthanked for the universe that is yours? Almost any animal is more beautiful than anybody here today. What were they before the contract of the Garden was broken? For their eyes speak better than our best senators today. They use a language we can’t understand, so we kill them, tear them apart, even sell their parts for aphrodisiacs. The poor rhino’s horn. The liver of the poor black bear, poached by bowmen too cowardly and lazy to work alongside the rest of us in the fields of the Lord. I want my uncle and Mr. Ulrich back, wherever they are. They are apostles from the Kingdom. They have been Paul on the road to Damascus, they have seen the light and quit killing.”

Egan then began the — poetry, was it?

“Dee, thy charms shall not always be sweet.

Minister, thy rituals of the cross turn to babble.

Woods walker, thine feet shall be taken from you,

and proud ladies’ man, you are a boil on a

cadaver.

Be so happy he has not made you suffer yet, like

the animals, eaten

For our sins.

The snake may be kind, we cannot know. Even

our gentlest kill them with

Expedition, the automatic twelve-gauge shotgun.

The snake spoke and was made to be despised,

Even though they may be babies, mothers, they

stay alive

And as friendly as they can manage. But they

spoke. Now we cannot reach out

To them, many of us.

Born into a bad cause, lost at birth,

We late Confederates so proud and stuffed.

There was a time when we smiled and charged the

hills of artillery.

There was a time we did not doubt.

Now you lounge, rain in the trees outside, but you

see nothing.

You charge only at the sports store, the toy store,

the Radio Shack.

You have no cause, no belief, you don’t even have

faith in faith,

Or a prayer for a prayer. There is no paved golden

heaven ahead.

It is the Garden of Eden behind. We have already

seen heaven. Else

What else has this life on earth, this pavement

among throngs

And squalling choirs of sycophants, been preparing

us for?

Prepare to get naked and talk to the animals, right

now!

Given to us by the Lamb, the fisher of men.

But now the question. What are the animals going

to do about the overpopulation

Of so many billions of ugly people?

For we have fed on the blood of our own.

We are not even kind to our own retarded that so

fill the Southland.

We go off to other states and make fun and literature

And Hollywood movies about them.

The Best Southern Art On-screen is Stupid and

Heartwarming.

But you do not know what is beyond the window

of your own home.

The crumbs in your navel are your history.

We have pretended that Sherman caused anything

in the South too long.

We have spoken of the fall of Vicksburg as if it

mattered.

Wretched spectators, heads just out of your

mama’s womb.

Buy me sumpin, Ma. Plug me in.

All this blindness without no ON knob!

Parasites flourish in the lesions of bitten mother

sharks.

Shut up! Shut up! And talk to the animals. They

have soul, they have art.

Shut up and live with your gorgeous neighbors!”

Frank Booth lay in the hospital for three weeks. He had already had four operations. It was mid-September, but the heat had not broken as he waited for the last, a three-hour procedure by an expert plastic surgeon from Florida, in St. Dominic’s hospital in Jackson. He was fifty miles from Vicksburg, almost seventy from the lake, but only eight from Clinton, where Mortimer watched his big-screen TV for the return of the perverse evangelical bard he had seen only once. Perhaps it had been public-access television. He couldn’t remember, so he kept a vigil. He had acquired a taste just lately for a motorcycle, a Norton like Facetto had, a Commando. He had leather suits already, and he looked good with a knife and a monster key chain.

Frank Booth opened a letter block-printed and addressed to his room at St. Dominic’s. His hands trembled. Only three others knew where he was and he didn’t want two of them knowing. But he owed them jewelry, and he was an honest man. He barely recognized himself in the mirror even still, and he liked that. He felt hidden, passing for a thin-faced hermitic and pale sort. The letter was on good stationery but in printing like a child’s.

OLD FRIEND, HAVE YOU NOTICED MY OWN PATIENT FRIEND ON YOUR SAME FLOOR? HE CARRIES A FROG GIG AND HE’S BAD TO DO FOLKS’ EYES WITH IT AT NIGHT OR JUST ANY OLD TIME IT IS SHUTTY-EYE TIME. MAYBE YOU COULD GO THE MAX AND HAVE ZERO EYES .

Large Lloyd had printed the note for Mortimer. Lloyd was very literate and helped Man a little with writing it but did not ask what it could be about.

Jacob and Isaac fished in the cove and swam. They were childish, changed. They pretended it was a familiar activity under the gaze of their mother, who was not watching at all. She wondered too why the boys came close to her all softly of late to mimic a time with her they had never had.

She was drinking on Melanie’s porch. They had one day become friends. Dee quickly realized she’d always liked Melanie, just had a wearying time believing she was sleeping with Facetto. But Dee knew a woman in actual love when she saw one. It might turn out pathetic, but it was true. Melanie did not act as if much between them had ever been less than pleasant, and for people like her, it might be they didn’t register bad looks. These things were too foreign to their style.

So they drank and talked, joined by Mimi Suarez, who had recently performed at Almost There with her husband the saxophonist. The tone of his horn was sweeter now, blending with Mimi, with the lustrous hair and hot legs and little dresses. She seemed a good Cuban woman from Fort Lauderdale, and Dee could live with envy, for she had been envied and still was. Being envied was a burden, but these three could afford it, especially with the tequila and gin and vodka. Limes, salt, olives, whatever you wanted on the tray. And as for Mortimer, Dee was still certain she had won that night, although she had required stitches from Dr. Harvard with his old kit, whiskey and her big lie about a run-in with an electric knife.

She sat up and paid attention now and then to her boys, as she had seen Mrs. Cleaver and others do on ancient television shows. They were above the cove a hundred and thirty yards, and the grass was gray-green in the minor heaven of light when the subtropics finally cools. It is all man could want of this planet’s seasons. Many fall in love with anybody and vow marriage simply because they are in this lush afternoon light. Mimi bent to Dee’s beautiful daughter, Emma. She gave her a few glass animals that made a family.

“I know now,” said the Coyote, “that I want to have a child too. Seeing her almost makes you pregnant.” The animals were exquisite in her small palms. Pins of light from hooves, snouts.

Dee had lately come to like the gin, the tonic, the lime, the tingle. When she looked at Mimi again, she grew almost weepy with coziness. Then she felt daughterly to the old lady. It was a family, if you had steady gin. She was fluid in folks. She swam in Mimi Suarez, legs kicking down that canal of hers. Crying out hello, hello. These thoughts did not surprise her. But the next one did, so she said it.