Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

The Allison boys still drove when they had gas, but they did not come near the house with their hot rod. They had washed it for free at several homes and car washes where there was a good machine. We may be next thing to dead children driving this old car, but we will run out our minutes in it . The car had come out of the water and was delivered by the sinkhole and they knew a true miracle because when Hare dragged it off to put on the last touches, it wasn’t but rust and slime yet and in five days he’d come back riding down the road in this. Even Dee was impressed by the car all painted and running, and she didn’t impress easily. Now, Isaac and Jacob believed, she had to give herself to Hare at the church not too long from now.

They dreamed Mrs. Suarez would hold them like puppies for a while and let them listen when her song started. She would sing and they would live high on these notes on her bosom before they were dead by Man Mortimer wanting the bones they had lost and the car they came in. They still had his pistol. Bam, bam, bam. But knowing Mrs. Suarez, they promised, we can’t kill, we can’t be mean no more.

The dogs were pleasant strays, all grateful, shivering. Made to be a friend of man. Happy for the hands that now led them and pulled the burrs, ticks and deer lice from their coats. The hands that gave them their heartworm medicine, their vaccinations. Their eyes were bright and their coats bushy and shined. They were a smiling lot, bidding for attention from Ulrich and Egan. They snuffled over Ulrich and took him down like a short rugby team, a scrum all over the laughing man. He required them for his soul, a new shape taking up its own just lately, and felt distinctly by Ulrich as a pain in his chest.

Fixed with Ulrich as his housemate, Egan was feeling better. Another five-hour surgery at University Hospital in Jackson was over. Ulrich drove him over and back daintily in the woody wagon, wanting to stop and chase down every stray on Highway 20 past Bovina, Edwards, Bolton and Clinton. Egan allowed only two severe cases, starving and spiny. The odor, road-carboned and grease-gamey, was not that bad. At home the dogs fell on a bucket of chicken and lapped water from bowls, then slept on old blankets of Feeney’s. One a spotted hound, one a corgi and shepherd mix they named Wayne. The other after a while they called Woody, for his profession.

Egan had shaved his head, which the surgeon liked. The black cross had re-formed whole, even blacker now that it was out of the gauze. With its Gothic menace. He wore the knife back to St. Peter, who cut off the centurion’s ear before Christ could stop him. Such bad faith, such minor work. He was not proud but he was scared.

Both of them missed Feeney very much. Ulrich was certain the old man was killed in the service of his animal ministry, but he did not tell this to Egan because he himself wished to die in this manner, it did not matter when. Just let him serve. Given this tenure, he was at peace. Without cigarettes, he was even something of a worker.

Egan had a good oblong head on him. Ulrich saw this as a sign of intelligence, although the biker hair never mattered to him, he who had just a pewter scrag on his own head, and large ears. Egan joined the part of the elders, and he spoke with them on the pier more as they cleared the burned hulk of the barge and began a new one. What else was there for Harvard?

One afternoon Egan told Ulrich, “It’s time we reached out to the orphans. Get up some of the friendlier dogs, say four, howabout? I’ll help. The kids’ll love petting them.”

“I don’t know. They’re not outgoing folks. But all right, Feeney’d been with us.”

“He’d be there.”

They drove themselves and the dogs, singing songs of faith, anthems of dead ravers and prophets, Luther, Longfellow.

Today

Maxwell Raymond

Eagle Lake, Mississippi

copyright at Vicksburg Public Library

My forebears prayed give me Sherman, Grant or a

lesser general.

Ptoom and bummf , hit square.

This old mistress my rifle.

Nasty bite. I call her Mingo, the old bopster.

Bloooooom! Above the eyes the nice wide forehead.

My headshot, our whole lives.

Fill your head, Ulysses S. Grant, William T.

Sherman.

The visionary like the loaded gun.

If he waits long enough, something will happen.

Unless he rusts, unless his eyes collapse.

The dark diarist, his last words shouted, “I’m

dying, watch this!”

You knowest not what I do, Rag on the cross.

I always loved You Jesus and didn’t understand

much else.

These claims, What the Lord Wants Me to Do,

Greek, Greek to me.

I would like the straight Aramaic right from His

lips.

And why not?

This long wait with this much posture gives you

the blue soul.

I dab and idle, attendant God.

I insist my art and path be crooked, in fear there

will be a herd

Of the simple where I want to be.

Help my eyes and ears,

Or just show up, why don’t You?

Raymond was speechifying to Mimi as never before. He was nearly coherent and it frightened her. They heard a mass of gunfire across the lake from the orphans’ camp one evening.

“Now I can feel the madness of grief in the kitchen where Penny talked to the limb. When they lost the boy, I believe they became just people at last and couldn’t bear it.”

“Became people?” asked Mimi. “What were they before?”

Raymond said aloud, looking past Mimi, “Movers, actors, I’d suppose. Sellers, takers, keepers. Some come apart when they discover themselves. As somebody said, Acts mark the land, words are only its smoke, or something.

“I despise, but am in awe of, this couple, Mimi. They simply ran out of words, don’t you understand? They dealt with things you touch and hold and appraise. Bodies. Bodies and acts is what they knew.

“With drugs or without them, bodies and acts. At my deposition nobody wanted to talk drugs, but two lawyers wanted Halcyon and Xanax, I tell you. I told them, sorry, I’m a saxophonist.

“Sure, Gene and Penny were sad. And they were absent the usual compulsion to be good in sadness. Goodness is respected and often mistaken for a cure. Not only words, though, they seem to have lost even their taste buds toward the end. They went naked or wore clothes to no effect on each other. They collected money. They collected fish. They had destroyed wetlands and aviaries. Now they began nailing it all on the wall.”

“Why is it that you adore the pain and suffering of your family and others? Tell me.” Mimi stared hard at him without warmth. Now he was silent. At last. “You are in love with ruin. You get a contact high from it. You play your horn like you are sick of the notes sometimes. Why is that?”

When Mimi left, he had, he did have, a vision of his old poet mentor, speaking out of a fog at the vets’ hospital. Speaking as he had done in the late seventies.

“Oh I found my feminine side long ago, Max. It’s Edna, an old navy dyke.”

The poet did not smile.

Ulrich and Egan returned home with their petting zoo intact. They met Malcolm, who carried a rifle negligently at his left leg, telling them he was the victim of Max Raymond and he loved Mimi Suarez. The proximity alone seemed to please him. All this he told Ulrich and Egan while they looked at a few bullet holes in the woody wagon. Gene and Penny were on horseback. An accident. They were sorry.

Harvard, who worked to salvage what good timber might be left of the launch, was annoyed when Ulrich and Egan’s dogs came to the pier. He was querulous in his suffering over Melanie. He pouted in her presence and scowled. This might be her last year of radiance. Harvard hoped it was. She was unbearable to him.