Barry Hannah - Long, Last, Happy - New and Collected Stories

Out close to the loosened boat in ten feet of lake, then coming toward them slowly in only a fathom, was the head and shoulders of a giant male who could have come from nowhere but the bottom of this black spring-fed pond with dying fires around it, the church beyond still showering sparks into the purple. Almost, I’m almost dead, Betty Dew whispered. The man was seeking them. He began the moan and the tale.

Jimmy Canarsis, seven-foot savant, was known to exist by very few. Because Jimmy, devout Christian, played the piano in the church, all day, every day, alone except Sundays and Wednesday nights, when others of the tiny flock gathered around him. He was always already there then they came. The church had caught fire and swiftly. He was surrounded by it on the bench in front of the keyboard before the flames got his attention and thus was badly burned walking out of it. Exploding cheap stained glass from the windows raked his face before he made his own door getting out the back of the church. He sensed a vacuum of the steeple high behind him taking the air from his lungs and scorching the meat that remained of them. So he walked up the beaver-sieved dam and then walked through the lake on its bottom since he could not swim. He had no fear of the water, he just could not swim it. Water is good, he thought, the way the cold springs soothed his burns and cuts. The shadowed ocher not on fire was his reckoning. Head at last out of the water he saw the two human figures, their boat floating near him. He reckoned these creatures were the arsonists so he would beat them as much as the Holy Lord would allow. It seemed like in the Old Testament you could beat on a multitude of folks but in the New, Jesus was not like your football coach screaming for you to kill somebody. Because Jimmy Canarsis had played some ball for Holly Springs in his last grade of school, either the tenth or the fourth. “But ball now, they said play it but wasn’t nobody hardly playing but flatout cracking faces or attempting to chop a fellow’s knees off, and the rest of them were running away. Say you were playing Byhalia and four of them was eviling on me, testicles or eyes or I’ve had an old farm boy with them hard hands like a Chickasaw spearhead rammed clear through past my aner. I’m going to crack these’s heads until the police can come get them, but wait, these is two old women and I’m burnt to agony out of that water. Or you’d have Olive Branch or Coma, their teams weren’t nothing but so they was just out to prove something it didn’t matter, offense or defense, all eleven of them would run straight at me and lay me out every play of the game and the coaches screaming at me to be tough Jimmy, these boys ain’t even up to your tits, kill one and the others would just quit, and we’d be like ninety to two over them, they only wanted to tell their sons or grandchildren they once laid out a seven-foot man, so that’s our family story and I’m’on go ahead and die now, tell them that’s the way it was, and one that played church piano. One game the only play we had was hand off to me up the middle, over and over. The little boy quarterback never learned that one play right, he kept getting in my route down the center’s back. I’m not fast or he’d of been in the hospital more than the four times he was, flattened over like a scarecrow man fell off his stick.”

“We aren’t that interested in your football season, you’re forty or more years old. Who are you, setting these fires? Stand off us. Betty has a gun, you ugly idiot.”

All three crept warily toward a low-watt bulb hung over the door to a homemade recreation vehicle the size of two outhouses. Jimmy Canarsis was in awful pain but some righteous battle was still in him. He’d been playing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” the Martin Luther classic, when the fire surrounded him. He was not interested in the mobile hut, and now he saw Betty Dew was holding no gun, only a long screwdriver from the tackle of their boat. He saw how thin these old women were, one short, one taller.

“This man set no fires, Jo,” said Betty. “He’s burned bad. Unless by his own gasoline. I know who he is. It’s the Canarsis child, a savant, a pianist. He could play. He could play in the Ford Arts Center, but he won’t leave the church. He can drive a car but doesn’t need to, he said. His parents brought him over to my house for a medical opinion. I’d told them I’d never practiced, but they insisted I was in baby doctor school seven years and wasn’t no way you’d forgot it all and you’re called doctor as we heard on it and some said a genius where they give you a award too big to get in this living room.”

Betty detailed the case of this giant in a daze, looking past Jimmy at the tall glow of the church. The sounds of the county fire trucks, police, and ambulances were all over the night then. At last there were nineteen vehicles howling.

“It didn’t take long for me to figure out the question here was financial, to get him on some concert tour. But they were not greedy. He was a big mouth to feed and he wouldn’t leave the church. They were exasperated for him, even as church people. Where you’d never know a church could ever be. You’ve got the beavers and the hard rains. It’s always been flood land.”

“I don’t believe it’s there yet. Just the fire of it,” said Jo.

“Women, I’m going back in the lake. I can’t stand this no more. You talking about me like I’m a baby right in front of my face. And Dr. Dew a real doctor. The church is real and I’m real.”

Jimmy acted on his words. They heard him sloshing in the water and both felt very ashamed. Ashamed in a common dream, watching the fire and hearing the men around it now five football fields away.

They had nothing but a screwdriver and a cell phone, and they were eighty, healthy but each minute brought to them personally like a tornado in the night come into their frailty, a thief before their eyes could perceive that death was a train in the window, permitting no peace. You were just old guts.

ANSE BURDEN AT YOUR SERVICE. HERE IN OXFORD I’VE FOUND SIX soldiers from the ’91 desert war with Iraq. I flew the F-18 Hornet off the Roosevelt carrier, I believe. At the time I was loaded on Percodan and Dexedrine so maybe it was another. In the ready room we watched ourselves bombing and missing on CNN. Nobody else in my squadron was even nicked.

But a Stinger blew my tail off and I bailed, blown horizontally into the air as the plane was corkscrewing. The ejection seat was dead solid perfect, all it was supposed to be. I was in love with it and was not conscious the ejection had broken my back a little. It seemed I floated onto a beach of the Persian Gulf for no more than twenty seconds. I must have hit the silk at an altitude of less than three hundred feet. I believe I was in shock briefly because I was sitting in a shallow surf with black sand under me, still attached to the chute out in front of me in deeper surf water, rising up and down like a dirty white whale pulling gently at me with strings from its mouth.

Adrenaline, what a beauty, flowed through my shock and the Dex and Percodan. I felt wonderful, the finest high I’ve ever had. I was a child in an illuminated storybook, way off in a foreign brilliant home. The whale pulled on me and Persia was singing to me from across the water. And I was speaking baby talk into my radio, they said. Me down, me unhurt, me giggle, me see the spotter plane so Father will have the copter here soon.

What father? I later wondered.

I am certain it was Jesus Christ. Father, son, and brother, and most apparent of all, ghost, by all evidence. He carried a lamb under one arm and a Roman sword upraised by the other. This is how I saw him in a dream, a very hard-edged dream with red mountains behind him. Six feet tall. He was in a rough beige robe parted at the chest. Defined pectorals. Forearms lean and sinewy. I dreamt the dream that very night asleep below decks in the hospital.