Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“Nobody knows that you shot him.”

“They don’t?”

“No. And we’re gonna keep it a secret, okay?”

“But if he was bad, then it was okay.”

“We’re gonna keep it a secret, Benjamin. You ever pinkie swear?”

“No.”

Pete took the boy’s hand and made a fist out of it and then untucked the boy’s pinkie and hooked it with his own.

“Say you pinkie swear to keep it a secret. That no matter what they say, you won’t tell them you did it.”

“I pinkie swear I won’t tell.”

He touched the boy’s face with his hand. His hair had gotten longer and knotted, and Pete couldn’t pull his hand through it. He tugged on the kid’s ear.

“Pete?”

“Yeah?”

“Are they gonna kill me?”

“Of course not. You’re in a hospital. They’re taking care of you.”

“They gonna kill Papa?”

“No. They’re just scared he’s gonna hurt somebody. That’s all. We’re gonna try and keep that from happening.”

“He never hurt anybody.”

“Not on purpose, I know.”

“No. Never. He never hurt anybody.”

“He hurt you a little, didn’t he? Didn’t take very good care of you. And your brothers and sisters…”

Ben sat back against the pillows. Pete took the glass that he still had between his legs and set it on the table. Then he put himself on the edge of the bed. What thoughts roiled in the boy’s head.

“That was Mama.”

“What was Mama?”

The boy looked askance at Pete and pulled a pillow to his chest. He gathered the covers over his folded knees. He said he didn’t mean it, it was his fault. He let the poison in. Pete asked him what he was talking about, but the boy didn’t say anything, and for a long time Pete waited, as if the thing he wanted to draw out of the child was something frozen in ice and it would only be a matter of time as the room temperature did its slow work.

Pete leaned out over his knees and regarded the tile and the cop reading outside, and when he sat back again, he said for the boy to please tell him what happened, one thing after another, just plain.

At last Benjamin began to speak. He didn’t move as he did so except to occasionally scratch where the intravenous needle was taped to his arm.

HE SAID IT WAS because of TV, of likenesses. The Cloninger boy alone in the den and Ben using the bathroom real quick and when he comes out the TV draws him in. The dwarves hi-ho, hi-ho-ing and now he’s sitting on the rug in the blue glow of the cartoon. He drools he’s so enraptured.

Then by his ear his mama has him. She drags him into the yard yelping like a kicked dog. She swats him a couple times and sets him on the fence. How his ear burns. He’s too old to cry about it, but he knows he did bad.

His father’s in the barn butchering two deer. Ben can see him pulling the skin from the carcass where it hangs from the rafters. He looks curiously at his son sitting on the fence, scowls, gets back to work.

From the fence Ben can also see into Cloninger’s garage, where his mother and siblings work on the freezer. Ruth and Esther stand inside it with butter knives, chipping at the buildup of ice, little flakes of white flashing with their silverware. It’s full of ice and they need to make room for the deer meat Cloninger’s letting them keep here. His brother and sisters are making snow cones with Mama, putting handfuls of the new shavings into paper funnels from Cloninger’s tool bench and flavoring them with Kool-Aid packets from Mrs. Cloninger’s kitchen. No, Ben can’t have any. Don’t even ask. He sulks on the fence, he’s been bad, shouldn’t of been watching the likenesses no matter how funny, how colorful, he shouldn’t of been in there.

At bedtime, Mama tells him he’s done a grave thing. That he’s put their souls at hazard. That you let some poison into your eyes and it can spread to your heart and to those you love. That evil is contagious. That every single thing you do matters, and matters forever.

Baby Ethan falls sick first. Fever, crying, then not crying.

Then all his brothers and sisters are sick. Mama too. High high fevers. Chills. Slipping around the house like it’s a ward.

Nobody wants to play.

They pray. Smear mentholated ointments, pastes that Mama pestles in the middle of her own fever. Saying that this might be it, this might be how Satan comes at the last. With poisons and toxicants. What won’t they do, these forces arrayed against them. Entrapment, fiat currency, lawyers. Now this. Sickening the family.

Except for Ben and Papa. They don’t get sick.

“Because of the ice,” Pete thought aloud.

“What?” Benjamin asked.

“The ice, there was something in it.”

Benjamin shook his head.

“No, it was the cartoon. The likenesses!”

Pete looked over at the cop, still enraptured by Billy Graham’s book.

“Okay, sure. No yelling. Just go on.”

The boy gathered some blanket about him, and Pete asked him to please keep telling what happened. That it was okay. Everything was okay.

SEVERAL DAYS OF THIS, these fevers, and Papa says they should think maybe of going to the doctor, but the temperatures stop climbing. Maybe because a person can’t get any hotter.

Mama says any day now, they’ll begin to mend up properly.

The Lord is strong in them , Mama says. He shan’t let them perish, not now.

Mama says to remember that these bodies they inhabit are thin things compared to the stuff of their souls.

A night they wake to sneezing. Paula, she can’t stop, not for three hours, the little girl is crying until she just passes out, hot as a skillet. They don’t know should they wake her or allow her the relief. Not that she can come full around anyway, her fever is so high.

Papa says he’s going for a doctor now.

Mama makes him promise not to. Would he make it easy for them to just finish us off, right there in the hospital. Just let a doctor come and assassinate them with a needle. Put them down like a vet would an old dog.

Papa says he’s not just gonna sit there and watch them suffer.

She waves him off, says she’ll pray, she’ll have a vision, she always does.

She’s running hot as a teakettle herself, but she totes the baby outside with her in the cool spring night and she prays under the stars in the meadow. Come dawn she’s in the meadow yet, talking in tongues in the mist, clutching the baby.

Papa says for Ben to do his chores. He fetches the eggs. He sweeps the porch. He cooks the eggs because Mama’s still in the meadow. He doesn’t know how to cook very well. There are shells.

When he brings him his eggs, Papa says the baby hasn’t made a sound in hours. Says she won’t let him come down to her— I get within thirty yards of her and she says “Benjamin Pearl you take one more step and so help me God…” Like the Lord put eyes in the back of her head.

What else can he do, he says.

Benjamin doesn’t know what to tell him.

I wish—

You wish what.

I wish I was sick too, Papa.

It’s quiet in the house. Jacob’s muttering sometimes and Esther tells him to shut up, even though it’s not nice to say. No one comes to eat, not even Papa, he just paces the porch.

The flies get all on the eggs and Ben shoos them into a cloud, and they knock around and descend onto the eggs and the apples he cut. The flies in like poison. Like the poison you let in here. It’s because of the likenesses they’re all sick. You did put them at hazard.

Mama dances up to the house. Joy , she says, joy. It’s all joy. The glory , she says, you can see His glory on everything like new snow.

But the children , Pearl says. They’re laid out. That isn’t glory, Sarah.