Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

His recovery usually lasted a week, and he was a very good man afterward for a very long time. When he was sober, he expressed the sentiment that he wished the Book of Revelation had never been written, and that it might even have the hand of Satan in it.

His speech and dress were clean. The clothes were the best of the Salvation Army and he loved suspenders with a good brogan, no cheap second-tier leather. Perhaps he wanted to be a bit old-timey or reminiscent of his own old wise uncle, who had been a barber and taught private guitar lessons. Peden was once a barber too. He played original interpretations of anything on amplified violin. The black fellow across the hollow who was his monitor wished he would not do this. Peden’s amplifier was powerful. It had been abandoned on Highway 20, almost in Peden’s lap, and it still had the name and logo of a heavy-metal outfit, its former owners, painted on it.

Peden drove a Comet, a thing out of the age of Sputnik. Low expectations. But he could fix it. He couldn’t fix everything, but he could fix this weary orbiter. When he was drunk and driving it, he imagined he was riding a hydrogen bomb to Los Angeles. But when Peden was sober, he was apt to wonder if there was a god, or not simply a divine wind of oratory investing man, and this divine wind was blind and deaf and cared not in whom or at what time it manifested itself.

Peden had not meant to either be a lay preacher or play electrified fiddle. But look here, he couldn’t help himself, and he had no models for these behaviors. He could not name one electrified violinist. He knew no other preachers but Byron Egan, whom he had met recently in their common run back and forth from ruin. And what of those pastors who were always Christian and wore new three-piece suits and had the ears of large congregations? Byron Egan said they were lucky but soft, for even Christ was not a Christian until the day he needed to be and knew it.

Cars were pulled up near the shack at the portals, wide-open storm-wire panels with the chain lock hanging down. There were too many cars. Mortimer recognized some of them, he thought, and listened to a harangue of some sort in the shack proper. One of the first whose back he saw was Frank Booth. Then the back of Dee Allison herself, and Sponce, who seemed to be handing her off to some other young fool. The other young idiot held something interesting in his hands. The keys to the ’48 coupe. Mortimer knew them well. Didn’t even bother taking the rabbit’s foot off, the thick thief. He looked around for the car but didn’t see it. He knelt behind a shed and listened to Peden go on to this large group, and he saw many he knew, was in fact intimate with. They spoke back to Peden, young but creased in his large tweed suit and vest. When he became a Christian, the lay preacher took on the appearance of the actor Strother Martin. And he began wearing suits, also of the Salvation Army.

The furniture about him was nicked but pleasant enough. Mortimer set the plate for him. He owned him. Without rancor until the loss of this automobile. He’d even send over Lloyd, or Edie, to keep him from burning his furniture after a drunk, as he attempted. Some days you wish you’d married an ugly woman and somebody in your world would stay grateful , thought Mortimer. And do their job and smile .

“What we make with our hands, what we worship. .” Peden was going on. The rest was long, spotty although sober, Mortimer noticed. Eavesdropping on his own property was making him angrier by the minute.

“I have been under airplanes, under cars,” Peden said, the smoke from the chimney pipe rising upward with his voice in cold air. “God has given me the ends of cars where dead convicts, ladies, babies and little puppies were flung against dashboards. This is my vision, my garden, brothers and sisters and uncles. He has given me the Jaws of Life to pry the poor victim dead or alive from the bunched steel where a snake could barely crawl through. Like if a chicken truck hit a Volkswagen.”

“Amen,” said Byron Egan, standing toward the front of the room.

“People are forgotten as soon as they are slaughtered, except by a few loved ones, you know that?” Peden went on. “Forgotten in these stains of blood you will find on the seat covers and floorboards, and ceilings around this yard. Don’t even take the little ones with you if you look.”

Peden raised his arms in the big suit. He did not look funny, just thicker than one supposed. “The Lord has given me this junken place, freed me of drink and drug, and sent a friend, Byron Egan, all the priest a Christian American ever needed. And best, He has given us His Book, which every man and every woman can read.”

Peden breathed long, for this was difficult, and Mortimer felt the sensation of another man standing up amazed inside his own body. Familiar shape, with its khaki sports jacket and its safari boots recently removed from the pelt of floor rugging in his great Lexus. “I announce that Dee Allison is Mrs. Harold Laird, and that Harold Laird is her husband. May the Lord bless this couple, I would say young couple, but a teenage separates them, as it were.” Dee lowered her head and Harold was not amused, although he liked Peden, who could have gotten the law on him before his confession and seeking of mercy. Harold wished he knew where the boys had taken the car. “Her last husband, Cato, is present, I believe, to confirm the divorce has been finalized and that he approves this union and defies any who might stand against it. And Harold has vowed to be the loving father and mentor of her four children. I say Cato, you are Cato?”

A tall man of graceful carriage, hair still black and thick, in a nice wedding suit, gray, leaned forward, as if he had learned a courtesy faintly European, a roll of the hand and a bow in the affirmative, and a calm smile on his well-cut face.

“Cato is here in protection of the boys and of his other boy or man, Sponce, for a while. The agreement to his protection and his support has been amicably decided upon, and his custody of the young Emma for an agreeable while during the honeymoon period and other adjustments. He seems a fine man, Cato, and will be a father to this favored lass, who smiles every time she sees him enter a room, and this makes her mother happy too. And they will be father and daughter in Toronto, Canada, for as long as the mother assents. Except for the filth and low-mindedness, he would still reside in the U.S.A., he says. Well, the America I know could have kicked Canada’s ass all the way back to Paris and London, but out of the generosity of its great high-minded cleanliness of spirit, it has refrained from that minor task. But why am I going on like this at a wedding? I would surmise I am now out of control and will hand the services off to Brother Byron Egan. I do hope I have married the right people here during this spell. I don’t feel shipshape right now and I apologize. Remember the good words, if they happened. I’m going to go take a nap.”

Egan stepped up and indicated a seat between Sponce and Emma. Cato looked discomfited but was trying to smile warmly. His smile grew thinner, then curved back with a will.

Mortimer could make out no more than a third of this matrimonium and was by no means certain whether anybody had been married, but he was amazed and baffled by the presence of Cato, Dee’s husband, who sent checks from Toronto. He was a better-looking and better-preserved man than Mortimer expected. Otherwise, he was outraged any ceremony was transpiring on his property, and in a junkyard. Why not the church, and what was Egan? Here he seemed to be only a lackey.

Egan’s face was three-quarters healed, and he looked the same but leaner, and his head was shaved. He had cut down severely on the number of rings he wore, and he now went with a woman named Lottie who sat in front of him admiringly. An ex-junkie, alumna of various mild lunatic communes, in which she was invariably the leading advocate and then the first to pack off. Now a nurse, mildly religious, wild for teas of all nations, a smoker, good legs and quite defined high rump, baby lips. She had recently become an advocate of sexual abstinence, which was killing Egan, and he preached to her as well as the flocks, wooing them both.