Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Ulrich was very sick, staggering. He was terrified that ruthless deer hunters would kidnap his dogs for deer season next fall, then either shoot or abandon them, as they had done many times before. He knew all the dogs’ names. He sent telepathy to them. Prayers, really. He knew he could not remain horrified much longer and live. He must get cool, take off clothes, get in the water maybe, strike his fist against his chest. They were smart dogs. He was the dummy. He had petted them too much.

Then he thought he saw a woman in a flowery dress in an alley of tall grass. Almost a flag, and foreign.

All his years came to right here. He began breathing again.

“Old man, who are you?” asked the woman’s voice, unafraid, only curious. His sight was blurring. But he knew she would be a pleasant woman. Her hair would be black like the dress with flowers. She would be foreign to America but at ease.

“We smokers must be helpful to each other,” she said coming up. She held a long, lit Winston.

“I’m a pitiful lost man. Lost my dogs. Maybe my life, running after them.” He could not recall a personality for himself before the blackout. “I need help, I think.”

It was Mimi Suarez. She was serene in her black flowered dress on a hot spring day, even in this vale of mosquitoes. Ulrich knew he was alive when her shoulders gave him pause. Spilling ringlets to her clavicle.

“I think I might be dying,” whispered Ulrich. As fatigue and repetition prepare men for death until they seek it, Ulrich felt a final tiredness. No pressing on, no other place. He sat down and all of his failures went past in a brief caravan beyond him.

The woman rested with him on a stump where he sat with his oxygen bottle. He thought of the dogs again. He thought he heard them whimpering not far off.

“You decide,” she suggested. “Either go ahead or stay behind for others. My grandmother in Cuba, and still there, told me this once when I was a little girl with an awful disease, a high fever. Only a few pictures in my young head, and them already mixed with dreams of my future in the U.S.A. I didn’t know what they were, but here I am having them. The fever left, here I am.”

They both smelled something very sweet and bad, and they heard the dogs running and whining below an old pecan farm, which had once had a mansion to go with it. Fever and then the Depression finished it off. The pecans themselves were enormous. Up to the grove was beige wheat. They saw the dogs now, and Ulrich pulled himself up with Mimi’s help, grasped his bottle. Got a bigger blast into his lungs. They made their way.

This was where they found the little girl’s T-shirt, cut to shreds, thrown over human dung, lying on an anthill a foot high. Ants were all over it. The dogs were circling and very concerned, but they had not torn the shirt. They were circling, and it was plain they were in the deepest grief over the child’s shirt.

It is this place where Ulrich died.

Little Irma.

Who had recently, during her flight, talked to the boys on Harvard’s lawn. She knew she was pursued by Malcolm, but he was crippled and she did not think he would kill her once he caught her. She was starved, skinny and alone. Malcolm would not let her have her own suicide like Bertha’s. She was on the way to becoming Bertha, she had come to the orphans’ camp with suicidal urges, which she had acted on twice in Indianapolis when she had living parents.

She stumbled upon the Allison boys in Harvard’s driveway busting up a long-dead pecan limb for the simple reason that it was whole. She did not know where she was, but the house was so wide and nice, with its pine-needled lawn, that she thought it might be a church or a fort, and she dreamed of it as if it were in a book right before her. She had had friends who lived in such homes, but it seemed two eras ago. She was playing Ping-Pong in a garage of one in Indianapolis and an old man came out of the house and said, “I see it now, child. You will become a medical missionary somewhere and be a great woman.” He was the grandfather of the house, and she took him for mad and giggled along with her playmate, but now it seemed a deep saying and a future waiting on her, if she could walk out of here now, away from Malcolm, who claimed to love her, him an old hairy man.

He loved Irma, but it was Mimi Suarez he wanted and her husband he wanted to exterminate. He was lost in waves of passion. Driving him down a gray wall. Like those motorcyclists in the velodromes at the state fair.

The boys looked like they belonged here, and she was encouraged, even in her weakness. They were her age, native to this boondockery. The pines, the briars. She felt like a ruined hibiscus, the most exotic plant she knew. Stomped, gums bleeding, perhaps white around the mouth.

“You an orphan?” Jacob asked her.

“Yeah, I’m an orphan, a real orphan, on the move. Nobody stops me,” Irma said. She almost fainted but smiled.

“Are they after you?”

“One man. I think I’m on my way to being a medical missionary.”

“You real skinny and pale. We’ll get you a cola.”

“All right.”

Jacob went off to the house and Harvard came out on the porch, but it was not clear he could make her out at this distance. A big old smooth yard.

She sat on the lawn in a sweaty Big Mart T-shirt with a little cartoon girl and an enormous flower on it. This cartoon girl had big eyes. I will work with tiny orphans like her on my shirt, thought Irma. There’s so much I could tell her. Jacob returned with a cold wet towel and she pressed it to her face and arms, then stomach. They watched her belly button with no apology. It was pretty, a deep tunneled shadow. She also had the buds of breasts in the cartoon shirt. It unsettled the boys, the idea of her, their age. They weren’t ready to be like her. In fact, they were closer to infants.

“You couldn’t live here like us, but you could stay and play with the boats Doc Harvard made us for a while till they came got you. Eat some popcorn and get ice from the machine on the refrigerator,” said Jacob.

“No. I have to walk on.” She was in a dream and taking care of foreign children in it.

When she walked away, she had only enough energy to last for the mission. She believed health would rise in her as it had many times before. I could begin with those boys. I will tell them about Jesus and Mary. How they are better than parents.

Irma suddenly heard something after a mile in the woods. She wondered if there were great apes left in these thick woods, with its little alleys of sawgrass. Then she knew it was Malcolm thrashing toward her. A thing fighting its own sweat, tall pink stumbling, hair streaming.

Irma knew he was coming from her dream mission in the foreign lands. She said to the thing, “Go ahead and eat me.”

“You notice anything new about me?” asked Malcolm.

She took off.

“You ran and made me mad, now,” panted Malcolm, covered in burrs and scratches. “You ain’t got nothing but me now. You want to see my new moves.” She ran as he was beset by an attack of diarrhea over an ant mound.

Mortimer, all he did was look. Betsy had a book about Conway Twitty. This man had changed his name from something like Vernon to Conway Twitty, from the names of two ugly towns in Arkansas and Texas. Or because he had a sense of humor, but by his eyes she did not think so, if photographs told the truth. He was a family man, upright, embarrassed by lewdness or even rumor, although he was sexy with his tunes, the writer wrote. Mortimer sat across the room watching the gigantic Japanese television while Betsy read. She tried to find Twitty in his bone structure.

She did not think of this, but it was a strictly adolescent house they occupied, nothing but a few sticks of furniture and thick throw rugs and the giant-screen television, sloppy at the base with mixed videos. Not a plant or even salt. Loaded with snacks and sodas. Otherwise a clean kitchen, no odor except the smell of manufacture.