Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Mortimer ignored the long car, which had wandered slowly and sadly but stubbornly down from Missouri. When he burst in all sick and bloody and woofing, his short gray parents quailed, anxious in their thick spectacles, leisure wear, hard shoes. They would have worn stilts had that been the style when they were thirty. The father spoke.

“We’d heard you were doing so well. We were going to ask you up to Branson to hear a concert with us. Before we die. The Oak Ridge Boys are back to doing gospel.” Then the father saw the blood, the muddy patent-leather opera slippers. He saw Mortimer was not ripe for a concert right now and was not young.

Just a scratch, Mortimer insisted. He had shot himself hunting for snakes. He’d gotten bored and went down to get himself a few snakes. He guessed he was old enough to think about those nasty old guns now, but he’d forgotten how they could turn on you. He’d learned his lesson. Only got three small snakes anyhow. He felt a boy in front of these elders, sick and pouted out, puffy.

Big Lloyd came outside, where Harvard waited with the boys at the bottom of the steps. In their suits they seemed to have trailed Mortimer to be of service. And in fact they brought his great Pakistani knife to him, muddy at the golden gills.

“Is that your sword?” asked Lloyd of Harvard, who held it like a trowel.

“He dropped this knife-thing on the ground when he was hurt,” said Jacob. They handed the gaudy medieval blade over to Lloyd. They seemed a crew of pleasant neighbors doing what they could. Lloyd huge and bald in a tan leather suit.

“You can go home, and I know Mr. Mortimer will thank you.”

“He don’t have to get anywhere nigh that close,” said Jacob. “We ain’t got a home anyway. He don’t seem like he used to be when he was our mama’s boyfriend and had all this money and a different car every week. He ain’t old and ruint or anything, is he?”

“Don’t you worry. He’s the same. He’s had some bad luck.”

“Is he shot in the ear or the head?”

“Only the ear, son. We’ll see you now.”

“It was an accident.”

“I know that. He told us.”

Lloyd went in, closing the door. Marcine then came out on the steps. She was seventeen but looked twenty-one, pleasantly dressed like a secretary to a spangling car-agency showroom, which Bertha was training her to be. Her hair was naturally brown and full and French-cut. She thought she knew the boys and the grandfather guy.

“You boys live here?”

“No.”

“What house?”

“We got many houses. Nature. Porches. Sleeping bags. On the water. Wherever.”

“You dress in suits a lot?”

“There was a funeral. His wife.”

“I express my regrets. I bet she was pretty and kind.”

Marcine looked across the short valley and saw Melanie Wooten standing on her kitchen walk and holding her white hair with one hand in the breeze, still looking Harvard’s way, concerned. But in her church-funeral outfit, black with white pearls at her neck. That woman didn’t die. That’s good, thought Marcine, stunned by this vision across the tops of the sycamores and giant willows. She loved Melanie even more for still living. The points of early spring greening around her.

Inside, Man Mortimer was mellower, gracious even. A fresh towel to his ear, he was expatiating on the foolishness of guns, their cowardice, their chicken distances to things, the modern cheap craven world. With adrenal glands open yet, flooding away, he asked his seated parents whose old Ford wagon that was out there.

“It’s ours,” said his mother. She was uneasy. There is no behavior for a woman in a bait store unless she fishes. The racks of prophylactics near Mother Mortimer were huge, next to brassy naked covers of magazines in plastic thermal seals. Vixen eyes of large destruction.

“Well, get your birds and bags out for Lloyd. He’ll drive it in the lake tomorrow. I’ve got something else for you. Like new. I’m putting you up at the casino hotel, first-class, long as you want. All my houses are under construction, repairs. But we’ll give a party. A fine band. We don’t have to travel to Branson, Missouri, to any concert. Good as the Oaks are. They’ll be by here soon, unless they find out you’re here and too wild for ’em.”

They did not pick up on this joke, but he was their boy all over again. Mortimer felt this too, and this time he liked it, wounded, hiding his fury.

“Son, you’re badly hurt,” said his father. His mother touched him. She had been cleaving to her husband. Edie, middle-aged but with long good legs, got Mortimer out the door and drove him to the clinic, then home to Rolling Fork.

“Man comes back soon, Mrs. Mortimer. Don’t worry. His business is big. Big, big. It wears on him, but he’s a blue-steel spring,” said Lloyd.

When Sidney at last came in the store, half drunk and full of funeral gossip, Mortimer’s parents and Lloyd and Marcine had gone. But he saw the blood on the floor and heard tales from Pete Wren, who knew little but shared it anyway. He did know that Mortimer was hurt and that his parents had come down for him.

“He’s getting weaker. I could own it all,” Sidney whispered.

In a black Ford Expedition, alone, was Bertha, dead now. The windows were smoked, nobody knew for a long while she was there. She had swallowed Valiums and barbiturates with a cold quart of Country Club. Saliva webbed down her chin. She just couldn’t take it anymore. Her age, who she was, holding the smiles till her cheeks hurt. Leading Marcine into the life. Several hours would pass before any thought to find her, because she was like good old furniture to hand. She was cordial always, yet a quiet one too, and well dressed and combed to the end. Peden wanted her badly. He thought to save her and missed by one day. Their date would have been the day after Nita’s funeral. Gone. Blood now to her belly and the rigor passing through the smile.

Harvard backed the barge away from the pier and the boys, ever quick, helped on the lines. They wanted to drive, but he was making them watch carefully. He was afraid of being close to Melanie, so they sailed downshore to his own lawn and berthed on the grass. Although the launch was mainly his project, there were several zealous pilots and many of them keen to impress their own friends who were gathered to this beauty. But Harvard did not care. He would have his grief and his boys.

They went first to the room where Nita had died and took the flowers to all parts of the house so they could see them while they ate and talked.

Another funeral at the church. Preached by Byron Egan. Peden, heart breaking, was not allowed in. Egan did not want him to see Lloyd, Edie, Marcine; the other whores and reivers, black and white; car thieves wearing white socks with suits and thick rubber-soled cross-trainers. Speed and grip. Peden sat outside in the bleak blue Nissan. He listened through a window and held his gun.

Many robins got in the church from the trees and roosted among the congregation. They were drunk from some berries and fallen persimmons. Come into the mead hall out of the chill. In Viking history, once a Christian described human life as the flight of a bird through the mead hall. The outerness afterward, eternity.

The relations of Bertha sat in one sullen and miserable huddle in the front pews. Ronny the body-shop man was among them, barely recognizing his old girlfriend Marcine. Man Mortimer and his parents sat right behind them, concerned and prim in black and white mourning clothes newly bought in town. This was not New Orleans, where they knew best how to mourn drug addicts, evening ladies and jazz mothers. This place had none of that city’s archaeology of concentrated sin.

Bertha’s casket was open because she was at peace and made lovely by the beautician’s touch. The beautician was her weeping but fastidious cousin Elka, who wanted in the Mortimer business. She wanted to take Bertha’s place and knew well what she did besides shift car papers. She knew she could be tough and loved to fornicate anyhow. Elka wore white and pink today and sat near a quartet with whom she was committing three-cornered adultery.