Bitter Sun

by Beth Lewis

  I opened the front door to the yeast stink of beer and a gentle, rhythmic snoring from the armchair. Jenny, still angry at Momma, made quickly for the kitchen. She poured a glass of water with a couple of ice cubes from the freezer box, then hobbled upstairs. She didn’t care about making noise. Momma wouldn’t wake. I got myself a glass of water and, once Jenny was safely upstairs, I went to check on Momma. The TV fizzed on a blank channel and a line of smoke trailed up from the armchair.

  Momma lay with her head on her shoulder and half a Marlboro burning to ash in her fingers. An empty six-pack of Old Milwaukee tall-boys on the floor.

  ‘Hi, Momma, I’m home,’ I whispered, trod lightly to her, picked the butt out of her hand. The pillar of ash collapsed onto the floor. An hour later and they’d have been scraping charred Momma off her chair.

  When I shut the TV off she stirred. Didn’t open her eyes but knew I was there.

  ‘Hi, baby,’ she said, slurred and thick with sleep.

  ‘Hi, Momma.’ I took her empty hand in mine. ‘Let’s get you up to bed.’

  ‘Mmhmm.’

  She let me pull her to standing. Put her arm around my shoulders and leaned hard on me but I could take it. She was my momma, my bones were built for carrying her. I don’t think she opened her eyes the entire way down the hall, up the stairs, into her room.

  ‘You’re such a good boy, John Royal,’ she said as I sat her down on the edge of her bed. ‘You’re my best thing.’

  I knew Jenny could hear, right above us, and I knew Momma’s words would be like those stones hitting her all over again. The selfish part of me didn’t care and was still upset at Jenny for acting so strange so I didn’t try to hush Momma.

  I kissed her on the forehead and guided her head to her pillow. It was too hot for blankets but I draped a sheet over her up to her waist. Momma always said she couldn’t sleep without her ass covered, even if she was sleeping in jeans.

  As I turned to go, Momma found my hand. Eyes still closed, she shuffled over in bed and pulled me down beside her. Arm over me, her heat on my back, her breath on my neck. Smell of beer and sweat but I didn’t hate it. It was Momma smell.

  ‘I love you, John Royal. My best thing,’ she murmured right up close to my ear.

  Jenny couldn’t have heard that.

  ‘I love you too, Momma.’

  Then she squeezed me tight and we lay like that. Her breathing soon turned deep and slow, her arm became dead weight over me, pressing me down into the mattress.

  A creak from the upstairs floorboards said Jenny rolled over in the bed we shared. I was giving her room, I thought, to stretch out her leg and not be bothered in the night. I fidget. I kick out sometimes. If I caught her knee with my heel I’d never forgive myself. Really, it was for the best I sleep down here.

  It was hot as Hell that night and Momma’s sauced-up body heat doubled the sweat on me. But I didn’t move. I must have slept because I remember waking up. Momma’s snores in my ear and the blue dawn light in my eyes. And Jenny. Standing in the bedroom doorway, blazing. The bandage on her leg was red through and a river ran down her shin. Then she was gone and her footsteps, uneven with the limp, trailed off down the stairs. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath of Momma, then, despite myself and all my will, I drifted back to sleep.

  When I woke again Momma was gone. Sound of running water rushed up from the kitchen. I sprang out of bed, sticky and hot, and ran upstairs. No Jenny. Her leg needed attention, I needed to help her before her and Momma got into another fight. Where was she?

  Downstairs, into the kitchen, and there. With Momma. I froze. Momma had filled up a basin and got some clean bandages. Jenny sat up on the kitchen table, wincing through a smile, while Momma redressed the wound.

  ‘Morning, sleepyhead,’ Momma said when she saw me.

  She pinned the fresh bandage to Jenny’s knee then, to my shock and Jenny’s too, dipped her head and kissed it better.

  ‘You’ll have a hell of a scar to show, sweetpea,’ she said, not a hint of slurring or hangover.

  I couldn’t move. Jenny and Momma, getting on, kindness and pet names. It was like I woke up and stumbled right into the Twilight Zone. That one with Barry Morse and the player piano that made people act strange when a roll was playing. I almost listened for the music. Don’t question it, Johnny, you’ll spook them.

  ‘Go on now, both of you,’ Momma said, ‘get ready for school. I’ll drop you both in.’

  Jenny and me looked at each other then to Momma. Surprise must have been clear as glass in our faces because Momma clicked her fingers and said, ‘Go on, get.’

  ‘Thank you, Momma,’ Jenny said and I think she wanted to hug her then but something stopped her. Years of memories maybe, a survival instinct or something like it. Instead she slid off the table and we both got ready for school.

  Momma drove us. Dropped us by the front doors.

  ‘Have a good day, babies,’ she said, hanging out the car window.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ we both said, climbing out the truck.

  ‘Be careful of strangers, you hear? After they found the poor girl by the lake, you don’t know who might be a killer in this town.’ Her eyes fell on Jenny. ‘The thought of anything happening to my babies …’ She shook her head, almost welled up, then waved to us and drove away.

  I could count on one thumb the number of times Momma drove us to school. When she was gone, I couldn’t speak. This wasn’t the other side of the coin, this was a whole new coin on the spin.

  ‘What …’ Jenny started.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘She was …’

  ‘I know. What did you say?’

  Jenny shrugged. ‘She found me in the kitchen trying to change the bandage and, maybe the blood freaked her out, I don’t know.’

  Whatever this new Momma was, we didn’t want to jinx it. We didn’t say anything else about it, just went to class, and carried the tender feeling with us.

  8

  All through school, ignoring the gossip and sharp looks, the question after question, the shouts and stifled giggles at the cuts on my face and arms, two thoughts rolled around in my brain. First, what I’d say to Pastor Jacobs and second, how the hell I was going to solve a murder. Come three o’clock, when I finally got to the church, my head emptied of anything useful. I even thought about asking the pastor how to identify a dead person but quickly shook it away.

  I didn’t like Pastor Jacobs’ office, tacked onto the back of the church like a toenail ripped but hanging on. The tang smell of damp and the uneven floor set my stomach rolling the moment I walked in. Momma told me it was a trailer from Paradise Hill a few miles out of town, that trash land where the junkies and dirty women lived in double-wides. They say the previous owner, one of those fire-and-brimstone congregants, donated his home in his will. The man slipped away in his armchair, Momma said, it was a week before they found him, took them a month of airing and four deep cleans to get the smell out.

  ‘Where was it?’ I asked.

  The pastor, still standing at the door after letting me in, said, ‘Where’s what?’

  ‘The armchair.’

  I scanned the room, looking for some sign of it, four depressions in the carpet from the corners, a stain maybe. Jacobs lowered himself gently into his chair, a big leather thing a kid could get lost in. He rolled up the sleeves of his black shirt, adjusted his stiff white collar. His eyes darted across the map of cuts on my face but he never asked about that.

  ‘Ah, the rumours,’ he said instead, warmth in his words, ‘I’ve heard several so far. A man was murdered for a pack of cigarettes and wasn’t found for a month?’

  Something in me sunk. Had Momma just told me a beer-soaked tale she’d heard at Gum’s?

  ‘Mrs Ponderosa from the Gardening Society said a jealous wife poisoned her husband in this trailer. Left him and ran away with the Clarkesville sheriff who covered up the whole thing. Or maybe the old guy killed himself, I can’t remember. Probably
he just died of disease or age, if he died at all. Which did you hear?’

  I felt stung, foolish, still standing in the doorway. ‘Momma said the man died in his armchair.’

  ‘The Paradise Hill church man. That’s a good one,’ he smiled and it was a real smile and that sting of foolishness in me disappeared. ‘Personally, I prefer the one about the man who killed his neighbour over a can of dog food. You hear that one?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I’ll tell you sometime.’ He gestured to the wooden chair on the other side of his desk. ‘Grab a seat, son.’

  I did and the strangeness of the trailer faded. It was just a room. Just an office, painted and decorated to the best it could be. Despite the damp smell and the heat my chair was comfortable. The pastor pulled off his white collar and dropped it into his desk drawer.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone I did that,’ he said and winked at me. ‘I’m meant to be on duty and in uniform at all times.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said, unsure who I would tell anyway. Momma? God?

  He was younger than I thought. I saw that now he was in his own place, relaxed as he could be in that black shirt. The deep lines and shrunk-back hair seemed more from hard living than long living. He studied me, tapping a pen on his desk, like he was working out how best to ask about Mora and us sleeping down at the Roost with her. The longer he was silent, the more my nerves fizzed.

  ‘Johnny.’ He paused. ‘Can I call you Johnny? Do you prefer John?’

  Nobody had ever asked me that. Momma and Jenny and Gloria and Rudy called me Johnny but never asked if I liked it.

  ‘John is fine,’ I said and he smiled.

  He wasn’t the same as the other day in the station. There was none of that victorious lion I’d seen with Samuels, he was calmer, relaxed. That feeling of safety came back and a deep sense of calm settled over me like a blanket on a cold night. I had my farm and my pastor and my God, and that’s a mighty army to have at my back.

  I sank into my chair. ‘So …’

  ‘So,’ he said, fingers playing on the desk, not catching my eye like he didn’t know where to start, what to say. The clock ticked on the wall and, outside, I could hear two women chatting on the sidewalk.

  He felt it too, I could tell, the awkward silence, so he half laughed and blurted out, ‘You’re not in trouble, okay, John?’

  I smiled, wanted to laugh a little at his nerves but I guess it was the first thing he thought of. Grown-ups say stuff like that when you’re so deep in shit you can’t swim your way out.

  ‘I know,’ I said and he went back to tapping his fingers.

  My eyes went to the wall behind him, scanned a poster showing off the birds of Barks County, a Dodge car calendar stuck on April, and a map. The whole world laid out flat, every country a new colour, with strange lines and numbers all over it.

  He followed my eyes to the posters, the chair creaked as he turned. I thought he’d explain the map. Miss Eaves did that when she saw a student staring, she’d go, ‘Good eye, that’s the Mississippi delta’, and launch into a talk about drainage basins and steamboats. Pastor Jacobs didn’t.

  I kept staring, averting my eyes every time he tried to catch mine, suddenly thinking this was a mistake, I should be home working on the farm or in study hall with my friends. The calm ebbed away. I hoped he would take the hint and let me go, stick true to his you’re not in trouble words and forgive me for saying I’d come here. While I waited for him to speak, in my head, I reeled off the names of the birds on the poster. Such wonderful names, they rolled around my brain like snowballs. I knew them all without looking at their labels. Golden Plover. Kestrel. Redstart. Baltimore Oriole. Green-Winged Teal. And that one, the Lincoln Sparrow, I’d learned from the book Momma gave me. Name them all, Johnny, and a hundred more until this hour is all used up.

  ‘Hang on,’ the pastor said and his change in tone made me look at him. ‘We’re not doing this right, are we?’

  Jacobs stood. He wasn’t that tall but with the trailer’s low ceiling, he was a smiling giant, ballooned into the space.

  ‘It’s hot as the devil’s shit in here,’ he said and whipped his hand to his mouth. ‘Don’t tell anyone I said that.’

  He looked like a schoolboy caught with his hand in the jam, giggling, red-faced.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  He swerved around his desk and past me, flung open the door, but there was no cool relief, only more swelter, more heat, and the buzz of insects attacking a butterfly bush.

  ‘You know, John, the summers here are something else.’

  As we walked, he took a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. The sheen returned a second later.

  ‘You shouldn’t do that,’ I said, then clamped my mouth shut. Don’t go telling a grown-up what to do, Momma said, especially a pastor, or he’ll put you on a fast track to Satan.

  He glanced down at me, dabbed the cloth on his upper lip. ‘Do what?’

  ‘Wipe it away,’ I said, pointing up to his forehead. ‘It won’t get a chance to cool you down if you get rid of it.’

  I’d told Jenny the same last summer. I’d wanted to tell that joke Samuels a few days ago. Sweat’s there for a reason, the body knows what it has to do, we just have to listen to it.

  ‘Is that right?’ Jacobs said and I saw that kindness in his eyes I’d seen in the station. ‘I’ll bench the handkerchief from now on. Thank you, John.’

  I swallowed. Unsure how to respond. But when I looked up at him again he wasn’t the looming giant sending me to Hell, he was a man who helped me and my sister by fending off the sheriff. He was a man who listened and the more I talked, the more he seemed to listen.

  But I wasn’t sure I knew what to say yet. I still hadn’t unravelled it all in my head yet, not Mora, not Jenny, not the way it made me feel, because I didn’t know how it made me feel except sick. Except scared. But not of a dead body. Of my sister. Could I really tell him that? Could I let him think bad of Jenny?

  Royal business stays on Royal land, Momma said. But my mind kept flipping. One moment, I’d have spilled my guts the second he asked, in the next I’d clam up and want to get the hell away from him. Maybe Pastor Jacobs was only talking to me because he was a gossip like the kids at school and wanted answers, not because he truly wanted to help. The heat, the man, the conversation, all combined inside me. Sharp fluttering filled my insides. Felt like birds on my bones.

  Out of the back of the churchyard, we crossed into the fields. A path cut through the wheat and led up to Barks reservoir. Older kids went swimming there after church on Sundays. Momma said it was too deep for me and Jenny, we’d drown no question. Now I’ve told you that, Momma said with a smile, it means that if you go there and you die, I won’t be crying over either of you.

  ‘Look, John, check out that beauty,’ Jacobs said, squatting down beside me, arm on my shoulder, pointing.

  A hawk, a northern harrier, one of my favourites, hovered above a spot in the middle of the field. Held there, as if on a wire straight from God. The bird stared, tiny movements of its wings kept it level in the breeze.

  ‘You see that white patch on its tail?’ Jacobs said and I knew he was about to tell me what it was. I kept quiet, let him tell it.

  ‘That’s a northern harrier. He’s spotted a mouse.’

  So intent, measured, patient, and yet, with one turn of his wings, he could strike, quick as a bullet out of a gun. We watched for a few more seconds, then, as the pastor shifted, muttering about his bad knee, the harrier dove. Into the gold wheat, gone for a second, then up into the air, a twitching tail caught in its talons.

  Jacobs clapped. ‘Just magnificent.’

  The hawk landed at the top of a tree and ripped apart the mouse. I couldn’t take my eyes away. In seconds, tear, crunch, gone. That was all it took, a strike, a shot, and the mouse was ruin and wreck just like Mora. One second, one bullet, and she was a body, not a girl.

  ‘That’s
a hell of a bird,’ Jacobs said, standing up and leading me away, back to the path.

  ‘The British just named a jet plane after it,’ I said and the pastor looked at me, one eyebrow raised. I clammed up. Momma always said no one likes a smart-ass.

  ‘They did, huh?’

  I nodded, waited for him to question me like Momma would have. Where did you hear that? Was it that teacher who told you?

  ‘Well,’ Pastor Jacobs said, ‘that doesn’t surprise me in the least. It’s a beauty.’

  And he smiled at me and accepted what I said and that was new for me and it felt good. Really good. I kept my eyes on the harrier until we passed through a stand of trees and into the next field. Jacobs kept quiet for a while as we walked, until the hawk was far out of sight.

  ‘As much as I’d love to,’ he said. ‘We aren’t here to talk about birds, are we?’

  Cold flooded up my bones. He picked a length of wheat and twirled it in his fingers like those baton girls at school.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘That’s all right. We can talk about something else for now. But eventually, we’ll tackle the big stuff.’

  The Mora stuff. The Jenny stuff. Black worms squirmed in my gut. It felt strange to be out there with just him, despite wanting to, despite agreeing to it. I felt exposed, like walking bare-ass through nettles and poison oak. The rest of Larson was in school. Rudy, Gloria and Jenny were in study hall without me, talking about the Civil War and President Lincoln and some amendment. We had a test on Friday and I didn’t know my dates and I was here instead of there.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, balled up my fists at my sides, kept walking, hoping Jacobs wouldn’t notice. Jenny needed me. She always forgot how to spell Gettysburg. Why did I have to miss school, miss her? I suddenly hated myself for agreeing to these stupid sessions. Nobody else was out of class, just me. Just the freak John Royal. And when this hour was up I’d have to go back there, to the Roost, to the lake, to that depression in the dirt where the body lay and I lay.