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

“Ruby and Missy’s in the house, safe and sound with Granny,” Granpaw said. “Willis and them friends of yours is in there too. It’s a wonder any of us is alive.” A section of the trailer lay in front of me, the carpeted floor and part of the wall — the shelves still attached.

“I had to lift that off you,” Granpaw said.

“I thought I was in bed.”

“You was in bed all right!” Granpaw laughed. “Laying down there in all that mud. Look at you!”

Mud was all down the back of my legs, my arms.

The wind was gone now. The rain had let up. Across the road I could see Reverend Pennycall’s police car had been turned upside down. Three of its wheels were missing.

“Miss Alma’s all right,” Granpaw said. “Nealy broke a leg. I ain’t seen the Reverend nowhere. Bird neither.” Behind us stood the Jesus Tree. Granny’s butcher knife was stuck in Jesus’ back.

“I thought you was dead Granpaw!”

“I seen you thought I was,” Granpaw said. “I’m an old tom cat Orbie. I got nine lives.”

Where the well had been, there was nothing but rocks and splinters of wood. Tin cans of flowers were scattered everywhere.

“I didn’t want him to die.” I said.

“I know you didn’t.” Granpaw patted me on the back. “That’s the good part.”

“Did Jesus save you Granpaw?”

“He did that a long time ago son.”

“I mean, he saved you today didn’t he?”

Granpaw turned around with me then and we both looked at the knife. “You could say that. But that ain’t what you seen, was it?”

“No Granpaw. I saw Victor stab you in the heart. I didn’t see Jesus. What happened?”

“Well, you seen me get stabbed, so I reckon I was stabbed. But now you see the knife up there in Jesus. So that must be so too. I reckon you could say Granpaw’s dead and not dead at the same time.”

What Granpaw said didn’t make any sense. I thought what really happened was I got mixed up, that Victor somehow must have stabbed Jesus instead of Granpaw. But why would he do that? How could that have happened? Behind the hill where the barn used to be, there was a half-arc of rainbow and a fan of sunlight beaming down. Granpaw looked at me and in a voice that sounded like Moses said, “Not always what you think. Now, isn’t it boy?”

We were on the other side of Toledo on our way to Flat Rock. After that we’d be in Detroit. For a while I watched the telephone poles go by; then I went back on the floorboard, playing with my army men and wondering about school. It was already the middle part of March and getting on toward spring. We’d stayed in Kentucky until Granny and Granpaw were back on their feet. The storm had flattened pretty much everything except for the house.

I got to go to Kingdom school with Willis and the colored boys. The schoolhouse there was just one big room with tables and chairs and a pot-bellied stove, so cold in the wintertime you had to wear your coat during lessons. Momma wouldn’t let Missy go to school there. Said when we got back to Detroit, she’d explain everything to the teachers, get somebody special to help us with our schoolwork. We’d be moving back to Kentucky anyway, she said, when the house got sold.

We’d left Granny and Granpaw’s this morning before the sun came up. We’d gone only a little ways down the road before Momma had to slam on the brakes. There, in the light of our headlights — in the middle of the road — stood Moses, puffing on a cigarette.

Momma hollered at the windshield. “Moses! I swear to God!”

He had an old coat pulled around his shoulders and was taking his time, looking up at the stars, like being there wasn’t anything unusual. Finally he stepped on the cigarette and came around to the passenger side window.

“Roll the window down for Moses, Orbie,” Momma said.

I rolled it down and Moses looked in. In that wheezing, up and down voice of his, he said to me, “CLOUD boy! MIND you.”

“We thought you was dead!” Momma hollered. “We thought they’d hung you!”

Moses’ face was just black shadow, dim lit eyes between two long curtains of hair under a black hat. It was the first I’d seen of him since the cave. He reached his hand in the window and dropped a bundle in my lap. It was bone chilly cold outside and his breath came in frosty-white puffs. “mind you, BOY!”

“They been looking all over for you,” Momma said.

I was so tongue-tied I couldn’t even open my mouth. I wanted to tell Moses what all had happened. About Victor and Granpaw. About Bird disappearing. How the storm had broke every bone in Reverend Pennycall’s body. But then, like smoke, Moses slipped away and into the shadows at the side of the road. In my lap lay Granpaw’s old tobacco pouch, the Rain Skull tucked inside.

I was feeling of it around my neck as I sat on the hump in the middle of the floorboard. I had my army men lined up on the seat in front of me. Good guys against the bad.

“That’s stupid,” Missy said. She was leaning over the front seat with her baby doll. Her cast was gone. I pretended to blast away at the bad guys. “It’s stupid to do that way,” Missy said.

“I know it is. Hush now.” I was too happy to be mad at her though, happy she was talking again.

“If you know it’s stupid, why you doin’ it then?” Missy said.

I kept on blasting at the bad guys. “I don’t have to tell you every little thing.”

“Yes you do,” Missy said, but when I looked up to answer, she’d already slid down the front. Since the storm blew Victor away, she hadn’t screamed or whined around one single time.

All the pictures Willis and me drew were piled up under the window in the back. I reached up and pulled them down, spread them out on the seat in front of me on top my army men. It was easy to tell which ones were Willis’s and which ones were mine. Mine were all messy with smudged airplanes and fire and sailing ships sinking down. Willis’s were good and clean. Real pictures, his were. Of me on the porch with my drawing pad. Of Granny shaving Granpaw. Of Victor, pouring fire on Daddy. Momma and Missy in the rocking chair at the end of Granny and Granpaw’s porch.

She was going to have a baby, Momma was. You could see her belly sticking out. I wondered if the baby would look like her or if it would look like Victor. I wondered about Victor — about Armstrong and his men and The Pink Flamingo. A week after the storm Cecil had come with a package for Momma. It was postmarked from Detroit but it didn’t have any return address. In it was a Kellogg’s Cornflakes box with a Detroit newspaper folded up inside.

In the paper was a story that Momma didn’t want me to know about; but then she went ahead and read it to me anyway. A story there about Reverend Bill Jackson, ‘Black Jack’ Jackson, and how they thought he was the one got drunk and poured hot steel on Daddy. How they found out it wasn’t him after all because investigators received new information from secret people nobody would talk about. How the fingerprints and things they found pointed to Victor Denalsky because, for one thing, the night janitor lied about what he had seen. And also Victor was in with the Mob. And the Mob was afraid Daddy would do something they didn’t like, but they couldn’t say what that was. Something had to do about the Union, but it was confusing.

“Double crossed by Armstrong and that bunch,” Momma said. She sat next to me on the back porch steps, looking all teary-eyed and out of place. Between her fingers a cigarette trembled. “He done it, Orbie. Victor. You was right all along.” She stood up sadly and went inside the house. I thought I’d be happy, being right, but I wasn’t. It was like Victor had stabbed Daddy in the back and now the Mob had stabbed Victor, even after he was already dead. Me being right about things didn’t seem to matter very much. I heard Momma in the kitchen, boohooing, talking to Granny and Granpaw. “I just cain’t hardly believe what all’s come to pass. I feel so ashamed.”