Barry Hannah - High Lonesome

In my case nothing prepared me for my success. Outside my window two blue jays ebbed and flowed and made their hoarse quacks only for me, I pretended.

The first minister was no fool, he agreed immediately, and to a handsome figure that left me filthy with cash relative to the none I’d had yesterday. I played from a projection booth in the balcony through the hole where religious films were projected, big epics of the waddling masses under the Hebrew kings and their antagonists. The man believed devoutly in old Hollywood, especially Debra Paget in her golden halter. He didn’t count much on the abstract. He was thoroughly for the age of vision come again after two millennia’s trifling with print and its craven black and white. Next to the rolling wheels aloft, I blew during the films and even afterwards, antiphonal to the choir in the loft below, at last let make their own noise until everybody filed out and I was left alone with the hot machine. You could not see much from the projection slot except the minister in his pulpit to the right of the screen all thrilled and bent forward like a longbow and seized by his approving spasms. The people went out into the street, chatting gulls driven off an argosy. He succeeded in bringing in more of the young. I was partly responsible. I had the impression of motion through the universe, very happy there in my elevated box. Ahoy. I once owned a happy cat named Ralph who would rush out to meet people, calling to them. This was how I felt, like Ralph with his salutations, for the first time in my life.

Other Sundays I pressed forth, there is no rest in the professions once engaged, down to the ocean where a priest thought I was essential. I was in the ramparts instead of an organ they could not afford. It was a poor church although very pretty. A submerged cartoon in blue, white, green, and orange. Already I had broken my earlier rule to stick with the rich Christians. Maybe I was becoming a little Christian myself. It’s hard to tell. The priest felt very puny beneath all the colors and really, he was, with his grim whispers. He was trying for more balls, as he put it, in himself and service. I was instructed to play freeform at any inspired moment even while he talked or whenever I felt there was a lapse in worship. I was so good at this a very old man thought I was a violin. Then it was nice to go down wading in the sea and believe in God, to pretend I had girlfriends and deep acquaintances, like poor Pa with his cows and salty pals.

Back at the house I lent Pa money and stared with my new power through the notch of the tree outside my window.

But one day the curtain was closed.

Great God, they always dig the tunnel right where you love, don’t they? Somehow they have known the route all along, then they are right next to you, plundering jackals, bothered spies eating toward your heart in their envy, fiends with cutting nails and their dread offices. Just at your high tide too, everything smiling, your old parents in your hands like glass animals; the orange bitch humping herself, so glad for your arrival.

He was a relative of hers, a detective, he said, wearing an even bigger hat than the beggar and as in Pa’s dreams, his boots and long gun. You could see Pa crumpling in envy.

With my parents gathered at our eating table, he continued.

In essence, you killed her, he says. With her stroke, she could not take her eyes away from you. Neither stop your nasty suggestive horn playing every tune she most abhorred.

The whole point of her later life in fact was to escape wherever horns were. She only wanted a little liquor and great silence, poor thing.

I did not, could not, I said.

Mother witnessed against me.

Next Pa crept from his station of hunched envy. Might I have a look at your peacemaker there under the coat? he wondered.

Stand back, little missus, warned the man. After much unbuckling came out his exquisite almost interminable gun, practically a hand rifle. Unduly long and quarrelsome in its chromium. Then it was back in his coat, snapped into harness, a cruel aid to his searches and legal destruction. Pa was stunned as by a miracle snatched away in full bloom.

The man wore provocative and immense boots too. Sort of a dancing cream leather boot poured on the end of his heavy legs.

After the end you still kept on, the man scolded me. She must have been gone in the chair two days, three, while you went on mocking her.

How could you know?

You were at it even as they discovered the body. This looked to be such a decent lovely neighborhood. However.

He stared at me all over again, refreshed by pure loathing.

In my line of work you seem to find at least one monster in every block. A sorry rule, but one without which I wouldn’t be necessary at all. There isn’t hardly any kind of human ugliness can live by itself forever. It can’t keep, it’s got to leap out on parade. Then they call me.

How wonderful, said my pa, the borrower.

Who sent you? I asked. I deny everything. It was her fault, when I was young. She ate floating bread. You weren’t there.

Here is the evidence by witness: you switched from an old horn, a bent one, to a new one even shriller and more bombastic. Is this the case? He put away his notes.

It is, said my mother. He resumed.

You can’t obscure this in mysticism. Your “floating bread.” When you were young. You were hardly a juvenile when you finished her.

Bread, long brown bread floated toward her face from out of the curtains, I swore.

Wonderful and sad, my pa spoke again. I should have known, so instantly feral and willing to attack the first wounded among us.

There will probably be a fine, which I might get reduced, since you two in your ignorant disgrace, have, I feel this deeply, been the salt of the earth, ignorant of this man’s troubles.

We are ignorant, said Pa. You can’t know.

The man recited a tale of another’s crime so vile and lethal they were relieved in the comparison. Such tears of innocence gathered in Mother’s eyes I could have smashed her. Now I seemed merely a squalid pile they could talk around.

There it is, that’s how they find your route and burrow right into your works. The ruin of your ambitions, your virtues, love’s persistent dream. The orange boxer bitch turns its butt to you, slinks off with your kin, the shocked traitors. Next the imposition of a monstrous fine all of them agree is most lenient. I would be ruined for years along with my father. He was so happy, Mother and he without hope, at last, after the niggling prospects, the ray sent back from the future now and then. Finally a tragic humiliation from which there was no recovery.

I never had even time to mourn her. They took it away.

Then I was cashiered by the pastor and priest both, because the old begging had crept back into my tone. The protestations of a swatted rooster, this tone, which drove some of their sheep, they swore, into the arms of atheist gloom.

Left with memories of the sea, but like a slug launched into low tide never to swell in my horn work again, oh no. They know you.

It hardly matters now what I have paid in coin of words, angry reader, or what I have paid in time and money until a few years ago my breakout, my wives and wealth, my long hard pistol of a car. One wife hardly ever left the car, as I pressed her further and further into relating every morsel, leave nothing out. Hearing enough descriptions of other men, I finally borrowed a personality for my own.

An altogether different tale. Rest assured however that no lush ecstasy, no minutes of sweet confusion, have ever come near the woman seated in the chair, that green shawl down on her shoulders, bare, and the long bun aloft, nearing her face. She was so startled as she prepared her mouth for it, wider and wider. After that, ruin and our haunted fellowship.