Freddie Owens - Then Like the Blind Man - Orbie's Story

Vern and Fable looked at me like I was crazy.

“I think Victor’s mixed up in something. I think he’s in trouble.”

“You in trouble, you ask me,” Fable said.

“Maybe,” I said. “But if I knew for sure Victor was the one, I might could do something.”

“Stab him,” Vern said. “I would.”

Thinking we might try to melt more clouds after supper, I put the shoe box with the Rain Skull and Granny’s butcher knife in a bucket by the well. Victor had come back from Old Man Harlan’s. He’d been drinking. We all saw that he had been. He was trying to be nice about everything, rubbing Momma’s shoulders, smiling, talking to Momma and Granny.

Supper was almost ready. The afternoon thunderheads had already come and gone. There was a smell of baked ham, taters and sweet corn all through the house. Willis sat with his back against the wall in the front room, drawing a picture he didn’t want anybody to see. Vern and Fable were over on the couch, thumb-wrestling. I tried to look at Willis’s picture but he jerked it away.

Fable pinned Vern’s thumb under his. “Dat make three time.”

“Damn you!” Vern said.

Fable punched Vern hard three times on the arm.

“Damn you!”

“Ah, you boys in there!” Granny called from the kitchen. “Don’t be cussing around that a way!”

Fable and Vern looked at each other and sniggered.

I was trying to read the Body Snatcher book. Body Snatchers from outer space were snatching away people’s bodies, making copies and walking around like zombies. Victor had snatched away Daddy’s body. Now he was trying to snatch away Momma’s. I could see him standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

He’d put on a fresh shirt since coming back from Old Man Harlan’s, long sleeved with the cuffs rolled back. He’d also put on his glasses — the first time I saw them since he came back from Florida. He looked good — part Clark Kent, part Dean Martin. Still you could tell he had been drinking. He stood with his hand raised over his head against the doorframe, looking in at the kitchen. Stuck between the fingers of his raised right hand was a cigar, not like his others but long and skinny with a red band around one end. Smoke curled up from it — golden doll hair curls — carried to the ceiling with the rising heat.

I could hear Momma and Granny walking around in the kitchen, putting things on the table, dishes, forks, knives clinking together. Granpaw was in there too, in his wheelchair. Yesterday, after we got back from putting up signs and melting clouds, he’d limped off to bed without saying a word. This morning he’d got up in another one of his spells.

“Mr. Harlan’s a good man,” Victor said. “He’s got spirit.” He took a pull off the cigar and blew a bomb of smoke toward the ceiling. “Yes indeed, a man to reckon with. Reverend Pennycall too.”

Nobody said anything.

“I like the way Mr. Harlan thinks,” Victor said. “He’s got a number of good ideas.”

“Shoot!” Granny said. “That man wouldn’t know a good idee it was to jump up and bite him on the ass!”

“Mamaw now,” Momma said.

“He’s got idees all right but they ain’t none of them good. Not to my way of thinking. The kind of idees likely to keep a feller down.”

“Mamaw.”

“Don’t hush me, I know what I’m talking about.”

“A working class sentiment if ever I heard one,” Victor laughed.

“Humph!” Granny said.

There was another little quiet time when nobody said anything.

“Take this cigar, for example. It’s a Panatela.” Victor held it out for Granny to see. “Mr. Harlan has a cedar humidor full of these, wrapped in red velvet. Do you know what a humidor is Mrs. Wood?”

“What makes you think I’d want to know?”

“It’s a special box for cigars, keeps them fresh. Mr. Harlan gives these Panatelas out from time to time. It’s like his sig-nature. His way of acknowledging special occasions.”

“Humph,” Granny said. “I don’t see nothing special ‘bout no occasions around here. What with Strode sick and the Devil to pay. Orbie, Willis, all you boys! Come on to the table now! Supper’s on!”

“Okay Granny,” I said.

We all stopped what we were doing and went in the kitchen. A moonshine smell floated in the air around Victor. He looked at me first, then at Willis. Then at Vern and Fable. “You boys wash your hands. We always wash our hands before we eat around here.”

“Go on and wash up. Orbie, you too,” Momma said. “There’s a pan of warm water and a bar of soap out there on the porch.”

Victor moved out of the way. He held the cigar over the place where we would have to walk through to get out to the porch. A piece of ash fell off onto the floor. “Looks like some little Jigaboo’s going to get burned.”

Granny slammed a bowl of peas on the table.

“Victor!” Momma said.

Victor raised the cigar to his mouth and grinned. “Go on boys. Go wash up.”

“You seen him,” Fable said to Vern. “What more you want boy?”

“Don’t prove nothin’.”

“Do.” Fable looked up from the pallet to the featherbed where Willis and me lay.

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“It liked to,” Willis said.

“Maybe Momma was right. Anybody would get mad.”

Fable laughed. “You see how he look? Hot damn! I thought he gone shit hisself!”

Vern started laughing too.

Granny yelled up from the bottom of the ladder hole. “Put out that light, you boys! Go to sleep!” Vern went over to the little table next to the dresser and blew out the lamp. After while all the lights went out downstairs.

What had happened after supper seemed like proof my dream was right, like Fable said, or almost proof. The sun had gone down, and we had all moved to the front yard except for Victor who went to the trailer, he said, to get another cigar.

Granny had spread a blanket out next to the Jesus Tree. She brought out two kerosene lamps and a dinner plate. She set the dinner plate in the middle of the blanket as a platform for one of the lamps. The other lamp she kept with her and Granpaw on the front porch where Momma sat with Missy in her lap.

Willis had brought his drawing pad out, and I had my comic books. Me and Vern and Fable laid out on the blanket, looking at the comic books. Willis sat, leaning against the Jesus Tree. Overhead bloody Jesus flickered in and out of the lamplight. After while Victor appeared, standing out by the rain barrel with his arms spread wide, looking up at the nighttime sky. “The soul looks out!” he said in a loud voice. “Breathes in the starry wonder of its own war and gratefully dies!” He staggered to the porch, arms still spread. The light from Granny’s lamp set his face off in yellow shadows. “Giving up the ghost as high as old office buildings! A new mown lawn sparkles off with a machine to be married with!”

Fable and Vern sniggered.

“Hush Victor!” Momma said. “You had too much to drink.”

Victor looked at her and in a softer voice said, “But I can’t sleep with you anymore, she says.”

“You’re making a fool of yourself,” Momma said.

But Victor shouted, “The body aches out of disuse! Like a mind resting! Like a silvery saucer of light around darkness going darker!” He staggered sideways, fixed his eyes again on Momma and in another softer voice said, “There is no love anywhere, anymore, she says.”

“Lord God,” Granny whispered.

Victor tripped backward over the Jesus Tree, fell toward Willis but was able to grab onto one of the branches. Jesus rattled in the limbs. Willis dropped his drawing pad and scrambled out of the way as Victor crashed to the ground; lay there, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand. “My, my, my. Oh my.”