Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

“Partly, partly. Just stopping by, how you do. Ship in a storm. Winter is cold and wet and dull. On old Mortimer, he might not care about much. How the woman at the store said. He gambles some, but he don’t care. He’s like kind to animals.”

“He is ?” put in Ulrich. “Then we could be friends. We could be eagles together.”

Egan and Peden looked at Ulrich, a benign affliction, standing plump in his suspenders in front of the woodstove. Sandals over big wool socks. Vast assless pants. He smiled at Sponce, and Sponce knew him for a father.

Peden relaxed from the news in this boy’s narrative. He put his arm around the boy’s neck, smelled the oil and sweat, drew back. Peden was from nowhere people in Pocahontas, and his formative years were much staring at kudzu, wondering how it could be faster than him or his uncle Ed and do whole school grades in just one summer. He knew this boy better than he knew himself.

He crossed the room and raised his pistol, only a.22 but a Buntline barrel on her, hollowpoints, long rifle. The illusion of self-defense. It looked like a gun.

“We’ve got a choice here. I’m not worried about that car, I’m worried about your brothers. But brother Sponce, can I have a gun and love Christ?”

“You asking me?” asked Sponce. “Yes. I do. Or have. Christ used a whip on the money men. Turning the temple into a money changer.”

“Let me ask you this, then. Where is the temple?”

Sponce couldn’t answer.

“You want to get a bath and clean clothes while I’m making you some tamales and you think about it?”

“Yes sir, I do.”

“A man has to sleep with as many animals as possible,” Ulrich blurted. “But not in the sexual way. By no means. An execration. No. Just get in the bed there with them, invite them on in, know their smell and their cold nose. You smell the good dirt in their fur. Fur is individual. No two alike, like a snowflake. It ought to be a state law.”

The others listened, but he was through and at peace.

It occurred to Egan that every one of them in the room was old beyond his years except Ulrich, who looked like a stupid, lined boy. Harried and singed into senescence, red in the eyes, the rest. They were rushing to die.

She called him into the room to watch her die but then said she didn’t want him to suffer and tried to send him out. The moment was vague, but the nurse told him she was gone. So Harvard’s wife, Nita, died in their bedroom in their house, a large stone one, overlooking the lake and a front lawn full of century pine trees eighty feet tall.

Isaac and Jacob lived in Harvard’s front room now. The ’48 was parked behind the garage. That Mardi Gras car. These strange boys he had pulled off the roads with some order of new strength. How he loved them. They loved Nita, and she smiled at them the last week too.

Harvard did not have deep thoughts the two days her body was gone to prepare for the funeral. He would drive her in the pleasure barge to the church in the glen, where Egan would preach the funeral for a woman he had never seen and Harvard would ask himself, Where the hell have I taken us when this man Egan stands at the gates facing either direction?

He had useless thoughts and intense ones. Such as the storms that gathered then left, so you wondered were the same storms simply circling the lake. Such as nobody has ever left home. Nobody has brought news back from anywhere. Every awful scene rotates to somebody else, and they will not believe it either.

Nita, honey. Fifty-two years with you. Married in ’48, so I had to have the car too, along with the boys. This may be a miracle, something meant beyond my plans. I hope so. It felt like it. Without the boys I’d now be dead, I think. He thought of Melanie. It sometimes happens that the wife outlives her husband by thirty years. But more often, two.

He hated God for putting Melanie Wooten there in the years of his wife’s suffering. Melanie, to be looked upon, enjoyed in the abstract, comparing always too favorably with Nita. Even I can believe in God if I hate enough. Please, to spit in somebody’s face.

To the few who knew he had the boys, their mother, the sheriff, a couple of the inner circle of sane oldsters, he offered no apology. He had to have them, that was all. He found a pistol and some shells in their car. He was not certain who wanted to harm them or needed this car so much. They were cloudy on it themselves. He drove them to school, the pistol on the floor under his seat, handy. If the killer gave him time to get it out while he stood there like a sack of salt with a bull’s-eye on it. They would stay there two months while the couple honeymooned and the stepfather got established, Harvard said. The car was stolen, and he wondered if anybody was seeking it. He helped them wash it, but he would not let them drive it.

Harvard and the boys talked, wearing suits and carrying Nita in the repewed common galley behind the wheel of the barge. Just them alone with the casket. The stained glass around it deep purple with greens and yellows. Harvard had done a magnificent job, as if it were all for Nita, bless her after the waiting and torture.

Way over across the lake, insectile mourners stood on the shore of the glen waiting for the boat, Harvard’s hand-crafted tribute. Nita now in dignity denied her by the suffocation of her last months. Pain that will have it out with a good person until that person hates herself, loved ones trying even harder to love and deny the confusion. The tiny mourners stood in back of a church newly painted and air-conditioned. Plain, with little trim and a squared Georgian softness collected by its steeple. It was Raymond’s church now, and the old cemetery next to it was clean and fenced and greenish.

Mortimer saw the barge pass below the bait store and wanted it all over again.

He loved the elegant and slow now. The machines that had never rushed him, the old carriages that had never harried him, the tender old verities, but what were they? Things like church, dogs. Football. Children wrestling in the glen. Those good people. Not a finer man in the county than your postman daddy, what’s his name? And your mother the postlady, the chicken lover.

Mortimer had a club already. Pals. Women to look at or pet him. It was good to be off the cock farm in many ways. This cool point of view where beauty in women shriveled back to what it was actually worth. You stick with Edie, Bertha, Marcine. Good country people, trustworthy. You got a rich old fool in a handmade boat and had what? Mortimer wanted back the good past. The times that woman had taken from him, eight years back.

It was time to sit back and smell the room. Harvard. Never cared for him. Understated aristocrat, somebody said. His lake, his thin hands. His wife died on him anyway.

Mortimer knew he had graduated into old, which made him new blood, the youngest of the old. It was strangely good to know this. He could start having an overview, seeing he was always meant for the center. Neither the chills nor the fevers of before. Maybe I cut because I want them to have no face too. Because if you’ve got somebody else’s face, you never had one, there ain’t no memory of you.

Peden had taken his youth. He was given little choice. Mortimer had come in the window with a club. A mistake he would not have made earlier on. He imagined Peden was weak and easy because he’d seen him drinking just the day before.

Maybe I should burn Peden’s house and him in it. He’s got nowhere else. Even if it failed, it would flush him. He needs to be in my club. We can meet and talk about nothing but faces. A support group. Name it “What Am I, Chopped Liver?” Get on public-access or PBS. Shoot the show with the junkyard in the background. Close-up of scars and sharp metal edges. My people. Here, let’s see your face and its problems. Would you get a light on that? Oh Lordy. Too bad they don’t still have elevator jobs, or folks that live in belfries.