Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

The preacher poured the buttermilk into a glass bowl, and mixed it with the flour, the baking powder and the baking soda and salt and all.

I looked around to see who was saying Amen.

There was a small oven on the stage. A theater prop, not a working oven. The preacher poured the biscuit batter into a silver biscuit tray and pretended to set it baking. Then he moved from sermon to eulogy.

Somehow the smell of biscuits filled the sanctuary gymnasium.

“No one knows why these things happen, but everything happens for a reason. All things work together for good, to them that love God, to them who are called according to His righteousness.”

On the front row, the mother sat beside her mother. They were weeping. Perhaps they were finding comfort in the preacher’s words. Perhaps everyone but me and my wife were finding comfort in the preacher’s words.

“And God, in His good time. . ”

The boy was dead in the box.

On the stage, the oven timer dinged. A helper delivered a foil wrapped basket of biscuits. The biscuits were warm, brown. Done. The preacher bit into one. His testimony was that the buttermilk was baked well into the biscuit. “A message of hope I have for you,” he said. The biscuit was sweet.

The mother was crying. The father sat with his head in his hands. There were grandparents, cousins. A sister. We all of us must have wanted for hope.

The preacher promised a call to salvation. The musicians took their places on stage to play the music that would make more powerful his talk.

In the moment before the musicians started their music, there was a silence. To me the silence seemed our natural state, bitter and forever. There was a burning smell from the oven. I did not want to give it meaning, but we have been conditioned to give everything meaning. Then we began to sing.

1.

A NOTHER SUICIDE. Area Code 615, the caller ID says. I answer and hear my brother’s voice. He just found out, and the funeral’s tonight. It’s the girl with the red streaks in her hair, the seventeen-year-old he brought home to Florida last Thanksgiving who smoked pot on the back porch and blew my brother in the bedroom while my parents prayed over the turkey and waited for them to wake up from their naps. Unlike the last few girls, this one was shy and lovely. She could hardly make eye contact with any adult in the house. When tickled, she doubled over and got teary-eyed. She watched football without complaining. She said she would never be any good at school. I wanted to take her home and adopt her and raise her through college.

It’s 380 miles from my brick apartment in Columbus, Ohio, to the funeral home outside Nashville, Tennessee. Six hours or so. “I’ll be there in five,” I tell my brother. “Stay,” he says. I’m already in the car driving. We spend the six hours talking on cell phones. It’s a mistake to keep Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison playing softly on the in-dash, but it’s not less than fitting. “I didn’t love her,” he says. “I didn’t want to take care of her.” He told her so, and she went to the bowling alley with some lowlifes from the community college. They passed around X, and she took too much probably on purpose and it stopped her heart. The word coming down was they were close to the hospital but didn’t take her to the emergency room because they were afraid of getting arrested. So they let her die. “You know what her mother told me?” he said. “She said, ‘My daughter loved you. Swear to god you were the only man ever treated her good. Nobody ever treated me so good in my whole life is what she said. Nobody will ever treat me so good again.’

“How do you face that?” he said. “How do you walk into that funeral parlor and let people talk to you like that when what they ought to do is punch you in the face?” America flies by while he says these things. Those rusty bridges over the Ohio, and the rows and rows of tractor-trailers idling in the vast lots in Louisville, and all the waystations that conjure brief meetings past: the hitchhiker in Shepherdsville, the stripper in Elizabethtown, the gas station preacher in Cave City. We meet at a strip mall off Nashville Pike, where I leave my car, and we ride together in his pickup truck to the funeral home near her trailer park in Gallatin. The cab has gone feral. The floorboards are littered with fast-food bags and empty plastic bottles and torn candy-bar wrappers. His skin is translucent and he is too skinny. “I told the doctor I’m not taking those pills anymore,” he says. “My sleep was all screwed up and I was hearing voices. It scared the hell out of me.” We’re flying over potholes and all the side roads now are dirt.

I wonder if he ended it with her the same reason he pitched the pills. It’s dark now. Somehow we make a wrong turn, then another and another. Dirt road shortcuts and switchbacks don’t yield much. We stop at a rural jiffy and a Mexican man points us half a mile down the road. By time we arrive the service is over. We first take the mother for catatonic in the foyer, but then she raises up and runs screaming through the sanctuary doors, and toward the open casket and throws herself over the body. Four of the men, one an ex-husband, pick her up and carry her to a grieving pew. We watch this through the floor-to-ceiling window separating foyer from sanctuary. “Don’t go in there,” my brother says to me. “I have to do this myself.” I watch him through the window.

The frame the window makes puts me in mind of a TV, and me deaf. If there were closed captions, they’d be sending pleasant words. Her family wants to comfort my brother. Their arms around him are fatherly and motherly. Even her mother calms herself and rises to kiss his cheek. When we leave he says, “I am a horrible person.” He is not, but there is no use saying. We retire to his house in Murfreesboro and recline in beanbag chairs and stare at the chalkboard walls of his recording studio and don’t speak or sleep. A pattern randomizer bounces lines and shapes across a spectrum of bright colors on the monitor beside the TV, which broadcasts chef shows all night from Chicago, Atlanta, and Tokyo. In the morning we eat biscuits and sausage gravy and bacon and cornbread at the Cracker Barrel by the interstate, and try not to talk about her at all. Before I leave town, he says, “It would have been better if it was me instead of her,” and what haunts me all the way home is I’m glad it was her instead of him.

2.

Another theft. Another embezzlement. A trail of broken promises from L.A. to Nashville. No reason to say whose story it is or who is telling the story or who went bankrupt or who got evicted, because every visit to Nashville you hear the same stories about different people. At the Sexy Sadie I say this to my brother, and he says, “Liam, tell him a story he hasn’t heard before.” Liam takes me down to the basement and kicks the wall and some of the mortar falls away. “Only thing holding this place together is the horsehair in the mortar,” he says. “This foundation was laid in the Civil War. This basement was a stop on the Underground Railroad. There’s still secret tunnels if you knock out that cinderblock right there.

“That’s your portal to a whole tiny city. It’s a merchant city, and what it’s moving is crack, meth, and heroin. Have you ever done coke and stayed up for seventy-two hours straight? Once this black guy pulled up in a limo and took us to this club where everybody was wearing a suit and a tie. He said once you go in there you can’t tell anybody what you see and you can’t come out for forty-eight hours. I can’t tell you what went on inside but I can say there were city councilmen in there, high-ranking police officers, firemen, A&R guys, ministers, hotel guys — and I mean real high-up execs — and prostitutes galore. Nobody could say whore in there. There were these big black bouncers who kept saying respect, respect. Nobody wanted to mess with these guys, and nobody would. I slept for like two days when I got out of there.”