Scott Cheshire - High as the Horses' Bridles

A microphone came passed down the aisle, its rubber cabling falling on our feet. I looked at the mic, and wondered how many eyes were on me. Will he stand, too? Will the boy speak? Or maybe they weren’t thinking of me at all. Dad looked at me. I couldn’t read his face. I gave him the microphone.

“Thank you, son.” Loud now, he was filling the room.

“Why such speculation?” he said. “Why doubt? We have living proof. Here. In the flesh, here, my son, who stood before you filled with God and gave a number. It’s not for us to know how it’ll look.” He spoke to the back of the room. I turned with him. Mom kept looking straight ahead. She squeezed my hand. “But our Savior comes at the New Millennium. And this ”—he gestured to the TV—“this movie has no place in here. All lies…”

“Brother Laudermilk,” said the elder from the stage.

My father quieted him, his hands saying Now now now …

“Look at my boy,” he said. “Josiah, stand up.”

Mom squeezed my hand again. I didn’t move.

“He’s in shock. You see? You doubt him? A child? You doubt the Lord’s Holy Spirit.”

I still didn’t move.

“And my wife. She wears a hat so you don’t have to see her shining head. For you! You think this is sickness? This is God’s work! All of it God’s work! All of them signs we are living in the End Days, and you won’t even see it. Look to the book of Matthew. In the Last Days. The Apostle Matthew says in the End Days one shall be taken, but the other left behind—”

“Gill.” The elder was beside him now, his hand on my father’s shoulder.

“You want to silence me? Make my wife an outcast? My son cast down like some false prophet for a TV show? In here ? You bring this ”—again the TV—“this Wild Beast. Mammon! Babylon the Great in here? Why not bring money changers? It’s blasphemy!”

“Gill—” He tried taking the mic, but Dad wouldn’t let him.

“Stop looking forward! It is here! In our presence! And we have to go back for it. Back! And return to original worship, to authentic faith. Have faith in the Word of God, in what God grants, a vision for his son, my son. A healing for my wife…” He fell back against the chair behind him. The brother sitting there caught him, held him up. “For my wife,” Dad said. He seemed dazed.

I was heartbroken, for him. Confused.

“Thank you, Brother Laudermilk.” The elder took the mic from Dad’s hand. “Okay. So obviously—”

My father stood back up and shook his head, looked around the room. He wildly made for the stage, for the TV, and then he stopped himself. He turned back, and took my hand. He took my mother’s hand and pushed his way along the aisle toward the exit. Some of the assistant servants followed, in case of a scene.

We went home.

That’s when as a family we stopped going to the Brothers in the Lord. Or any church, really. Unexpectedly, I found myself actually going to church more, a weird rebellion against him. I sat there alone like Issy used to. Dad’s display had sufficiently sullied what reputation I had, and whatever capacity I had for sermonizing or for visions had been supplanted by fears that I might have an unwelcome outburst onstage, like my father. I was now the son of the man who made a scene at church, and nothing more. That went on for about a month. And then it just stopped. Partly because I didn’t know why I was doing it, and I would sit there for the duration of the service, hardly listening at all, trying to understand why I was there, and partly because I realized that not a soul there cared to speak to me.

I started telling Mom and Dad that I was going to church, but then I would go straight to Bhanu’s house and watch weekend morning TV. We held hands under throw pillows. Mom hardly paid attention, anyway. Seems like Mom slept for years, all the while getting better according to the doctors, but sleeping away her every last earthly hour. She just slept and slept and slept. I became hungry for even more freedom.

Bhanu and I started cutting school together that fall. We hid deep in the woods of Forest Park, and watched truancy vans roam along the park roads. We kissed sometimes, and I wondered if God would one day open up the earth and drop me in for loving a pagan. While I knew Bhanu wasn’t a Christian, I didn’t really know what that meant. I didn’t want to think about it, what it meant for her, or me, us, or for my family, and so I decided it was easier to not think about it at all. We only talked about it once, and I asked if she thought it was weird. We were trying cigarettes for the first time, stretched out on the cement floor of the Forest Park band shell.

We passed the cigarette back and forth like it was delicious, and she coughed. I didn’t. I had a talent for them, and I liked how the nicotine made everything slow down and go foggy. I rolled my head to one side, and blew smoke in her face. She laughed and slapped at my leg.

I said, “Is it weird that we’re different?”

She didn’t understand. “You mean how you’re so so so so white?”

Now I laughed. I said, “I mean my family. You’re not Christian.”

She looked at me like I was kidding. “You mean how you’re not Hindu?”

I looked up at the sky, but there was no sky. Instead I saw the top-ridge lip of the clamshell and I thought of a giant clam. I said, “I guess so. Yeah.”

She started to say, “I like you, Josie, even though you’re not a Hindu—” But she lost control of her voice in a sudden coughing attack made worse by the fact that she could hardly stop laughing. I thought of the giant clam, and imagined we were lying prone on its tongue.

It was a long year, and much of what transpired at home with regard to Mom or Dad has fallen out of my head, forgotten. I spent that year with Bhanu, in and out of school, a place that no longer meant loneliness for me because I was with Bhanu, and her friends, who eventually accepted me, too. She was alive and love was all around me, and it felt like nothing else unfortunate could touch me.

Later that year, there was a high school field trip to Niagara Falls. I didn’t tell my parents, and just went. Forged their signatures. It was the event of our year, and it would be all day long, with no real adult supervision, somewhere else entirely, outside of Richmond Hill, outside New York City. I bought a Ramones T-shirt from the Aqueduct Flea Market on Rockaway Boulevard even though I’d never heard one song. Bhanu mentioned them once and said they were cool and she was going to get their tapes. I never had the nerve to wear it. It looked too clean and too new. On the bus ride upstate I told her all about Issy. I told her how much I missed Issy, and was that weird? We were sharing a tall black vinyl seat and it felt like nobody could see us, we were all on our own. She said, “You’re weird, but that’s not.” I told her how I always wanted a brother, and she gave me a kiss on the cheek. What a shame kisses on the cheek never matter so much as you age.

She said, “Now you got me.”

I floated.

We slept alongside each other there in the daylight, on warm black vinyl, until we got to Niagara.

The bus parked. We stepped off and felt the mist in the air, heard the rush and gushing of the falls. We walked toward one of the railings, and the great void in the center of the falls. We wiped water from our faces and stood there, spray raining upward and needling our foreheads. We clasped our hands together, and we were silent. We looked at the white implosive hole.

“It’s so big,” she said.

I said, “You can’t even see where it ends.”

“It’s so deep,” she said. “How deep do you think?”

“No idea.”

She asked me if I’d ever read a short story called “The Wish.” Bhanu loved to read. But I didn’t read much, then, so I lied and said I’d heard of it. She said it was about a small boy who played make-believe and actually fell into one of his make-believe holes.