Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

“He is after me,” said Dee, blank, sad.

“You know him?” Mimi asked.

“I am his woman.”

“You are not.”

“He was trying to play with my children.”

“Child, you’re too young for him. His face is a deep map.”

“Oh no, Melanie. I’m very old. I’m all the ones that watched themselves move everywhere and go nowhere. Your face in the crowd that ain’t quite there in every picture.”

“My husband is a fool, but good mostly,” said Mimi.

“My husband turned gay in his seventies,” Melanie reported.

“Is that possible?” Mimi cried. “Then God will forgive you everything. Oh, God, I meant nothing by that. I meant you have license to be free, even dumb.” This caused a long pause, sighs, forlorn detachment.

“You gals made your deals with college presidents and doctors,” Dee said. “When your charms give out, you still got your own roof, your own music. You can piss and moan or strum a harp. You still get the roof.”

“Don’t you own your home?”

“I don’t know. Something on the verge. My kids always felt rented. Best I could do was leave them alone. Except for Emma there sleeping, the cherub. Me and her father were just clouds she passed through. I don’t think I had much to do with her.”

“Can I ask you an ignorant Cuban question?” asked Mimi. “Are you white trash, or do you just want us to think you are?”

“Well, it feels like home. It’s relaxing, really. I had every chance to choose and still do. I turned down another whole life in Minneapolis, Minnesota, one night.”

“Why was that?”

“I think I like it on the verge. I’m from people such as that a hundred years, they told me.”

“Would you be English, Welsh, French, what?”

“I would say soldier in a bus station, quick couple of spurts in a rest room at midnight with about a pint of liquor. What I am is when they repealed prohibition in Mississippi.”

“You’re very clever, Dee,” said Melanie gently.

“But I like a clean yard now.”

“Yes, yards. Light and shadow on yards down here at twilight. So much.”

“You’re very much in love, Melanie. You know that.”

“I know that, of course.”

“Well, then it is good,” said Mimi. “God allows.” Dee felt a groggy box of air around her, dusk shrunk down. Outside of which panic slept like big dogs.

The animals are in ecstasy even when they are eaten, Ulrich was telling Carl Bob Feeney. They stayed in Ulrich’s cottage or on the barge now, setting out short distances and tying up. All were sympathetic with the two except Sidney and Wren. Sidney felt the ex-priest had turned into a dog and belonged in Onward or jail. Wren’s position was that this fugitive situation would bring more law in, and you had one point in life, to get more law out. Egan, the nephew, was looking for his uncle still and keeping up his animals, himself verging toward feral because pursued by the vig.

So Ulrich and Carl Bob slept sometimes on the pews of the pontoon boat, sometimes in the unlighted basement of Ulrich’s house, sometimes in a single room in the rear of the doctor’s cabin. Harvard had threatened Sidney’s life if he revealed their whereabouts to anybody. Carl Bob Feeney might not have been the choicest seer at the lake, and Ulrich, now his secretary general, was just bogus guff mostly, but they were the only prophets they had now. Sidney threatened the doctor’s life back, but he was too busy running his old man’s store now and not doing that badly. He had a car, one of the new Chrysler PT Cruisers, a silver heartwarming car for anybody in love with the sixties Volvo coupe and forties grillwork.

One night when Egan was serving a prayer meeting at Rolling Fork, Ulrich helped Feeney break in his own house and steal his gun back, along with clothes including his old vestments, which he intended to put to new use. Feeney would not go to Onward if he could help it.

Ulrich would frequently stop talking and go quiet like a thief who had forgotten his mission. Carl Bob Feeney was a good listener because he was hearing himself now, in different words. They did not humanize animals, Ulrich and Carl Bob. They wanted to learn their language, and how indeed they had kept going despite depression, despair, even suicide. For instance, it is well known if a fire dog finds too many human corpses in the rubble, it will become inconsolable and stop looking. What of the amazing quality of forgiveness in animals? It broke your heart. Carl Bob often wept, but it did not weaken him. He had different kinds of weeping, some of it murderous, some of it clearly insane, a long purr-howl that frightened Ulrich.

“We are damned, but that is the way of the way. If you choose, you are damned somewhere else. We are deficient because we are tired of people . Bosnia, Ethiopia, Kosovo, the AIDS horror. We were not supposed to know so much despair at once. It has killed feeling for others. We are ready for the New Testament to be about dogs, monkeys, cheetahs. Ulrich, you must know we hate ourselves and accept it as right. The first thing you have to give up in belief is being admired and a friend to man. ‘Hail fellow well met’ is not a description down south, it is the vocation of most of the South. It has ruined it. We have lost something precious, Ulrich, and you must, must acknowledge this. We just don’t give a shit. Machines started it, but we finished the job. How is it possible a man could sit and read an average newspaper without attacking at least twenty people directly? Know that we are dangerous zealots now. Not just animal lovers.”

Ulrich had fallen asleep, but before he did, he was agreeing with what Feeney was saying. Then he awoke and they had a cup of fine dark coffee made on the hot plate of the steerage cabin. The coffee was too good here in the night. Ulrich brought some cigarettes out from a locker and they both lit up these Camels. He shouldn’t, but the night, the coffee, the ripple of the water and slap of bass.

“Most animals live a short while,” said Ulrich, “but I had a revelation. That we cannot know the intensity of their lives, which is hundreds of times more attuned than ours. They don’t talk because they don’t need speech. A dog, when it puts its head out a car window, smells almost everything in a county, a world we never even suspect and have no description for. That is why I am daft. I have flown and smelled the smells, Carl Bob. I have known life by my nose. That’s why the dog looks so ecstatic sniffing in the wind. They smell a thousand times more than we do. We could only know it as hallucinatory sense. Dogs are in space and time. We can only know one or the other, plodding, toddling. Not to mention hearing. And taste. Water is fifty times more delicious to them. We must not pity them, a cheap passive hobby. They live huge lives before they die. Watch how happy sleep is to them, and right next to waking. They live both at once. We are predators of not only meat but of essence, my friend. We want to be them because they have spoken to us without speaking and we can hardly bear their superiority.” Now Carl Bob had fallen asleep, the lit Camel in one hand, the coffee in the other. It was by the glow of their cigarettes that Egan found them and waded out the short way to the barge.

They were both startled by the voice from a man standing above them on the planks of the stern, just ahead of the engines. “I’m so tired, Uncle Carl Bob, chasing you. How could you doubt I loved you? How can you wear me out this way? Who is your friend?”

“I’m Ulrich. Son, he can’t go with you. We heard about your sermon. You said you had to find him and help him. But you’ve found him and you mean to follow him, don’t you?”

“I’m worn out with the dogs and cats. Come on home, please. I can’t do it by myself. Nobody can. I love them too much. I can’t get nothin’ else done. I can’t stand for one to get hurt or left out, great or small, I’m goin’ round huggin’ ’em and pettin’ ’em and cooin’ over ’em. I’m a silly ass. I’m in trouble with God. I’m in trouble for some old bodies. I’m preachin’ bad. And let me tell you, somebody broke in the house.”