The Weight of Glass

by Stuart Heatherington

  “O Lord, how my adversaries have increased!” His thumb came against his tongue, stroking the pages backwards. “‘For Thou hast smitten all my enemies on the cheek—thou hast shattered the teeth of the wicked. Praise the Lord!’ I like that passage. It has a certain flair to it.”

  Without looking away I told him exactly what I thought. “You’re crazy.”

  “Say you’re sorry,” Warren said. “I’m waiting. Don’t make me wait for long, sinner. We know what happens when you make me wait.” He sat there, having found a passage of scripture he liked, and read silently.

  If my eyes could have spoken for me they would have done so in a tremble of fear, because I was shaking so badly I could barely bring the shape of his features into focus. Tears drifted across my eyes like a wedge to a nightmare I could not make stop. Beneath that, the twinge of anxiety in my stomach reminded me of the first time I’d been caught in a fight and hadn’t known what to do.

  I sat there rubbing the numbness out of my cheek and listened to the whistling sound filling my left ear. A knot rose on the back of my skull where I struck the bedpost. Under the touch of my fingers, it was spongy and molten and threatened to burst through my skin. I let the silence of the room speak for itself.

  “Am I gonna have to pray for better hearing? I declare my ears must be going bad, because I can’t hear you, son.”

  “Don’t ever call me that. I’m not your son. Until hell comes to reclaim you, I’ll never—”

  The book came like a branding iron on the right side of my face. Blood filled my mouth. I swallowed it back with a gasp, staring down at the foot of my bed in a complete daze.

  “‘To Thee, O Lord, I call. My rock do not be deaf to me. Lest, if Thou be silent to me, I become like those who go down to the pit.’ Psalms 28, verse 1, in case it done slipped your mind. Now what do you have to say to me?”

  I stared at the support boards blurring in my vision and chanted it like mantra, “I’m not your son. I’ll never be your son.”

  “You best understand my calling, sinner. The will of the Lord will turn a deaf ear unto you.” Warren’s eyes froze. “I warned you not to play with that boy; his father’s a whore to the ways of this place. That’s why you never saw Kelby in church on Sundays.” He clasped hold of his Bible and held it in the air. “Taylor Moorehouse worships the flesh. Satan’s little brown bottle of poisonous seed. And Heeeeee will go through life a servant to him that walks in the shadows of men’s hearts and minds.”

  I leaned off the edge of the bed, repulsed by the Good Shepherd’s face.

  “There it is! I can see the hate now, sinner. But I won’t let you fall in the pit.” A warm, crusty smile replaced the two rows of crooked teeth. “Trust enough in that.” His whole face shook as he snared my hands, thumbs squeezing the blistered palms. Pain flowed up through my arms like hot pokers set to flesh. I wanted to scream for help as his nails dug deep into my skin, locking down onto me with the strength of a vice.

  “Pray with me, Lee. Don’t drag me away with the wicked and with those who work iniquity—who speak peace with their neighbors, while evil is in their hearts. Requite them according to their work, Oh Lord, and according to the evil of their practices—”

  “Get away from me, you freak!” I pulled my bandaged wounds back into my chest to protect them from further harm. Face wet from crying, I kicked across the bed.

  “As long as I’m on this earth I will walk beside you and save you from yourself. You can always trust in that. Always and forever, sinner. Can you say, Amen?” He stood, singing as he walked out the door. “Oh, what a friend we have in Jeeeesus. All our sins and grief’s to bear…”

  The sound of his humming died away with the rest of him. After he left, I looked at my hands. Blood trickled down my wrists and rolled under the cuffs of my shirt. I dabbed my palms together, blotting the gauze a dark, velvety red. When the bleeding stopped, I prayed a bolt of lightning would kill my stepfather or that he’d step off a curb in town and be carried halfway down the road with his face plastered through the grill of a truck.

  It wasn’t until the filtered sound of the front door clapped shut that I stepped out of my locked bedroom, and not until I heard car tires churning across gravel that I dared move downstairs. Over my right shoulder hung the tie Mother would strap onto my neck for the last time, a Windsor knot that lay perfectly under my collar. I would wear it to her burial five days later.

  *****

  July light flushed the windows of the church and reflections of the stain-cut glass perfectly mirrored the Savior. Inside, from the third row on the left, I grieved for the Moorehouses as they approached the coffin that would hold their son’s lasting image so tightly in the ground; Kelby laid out in a suit of dark blue, almost identical to mine; the part in his hair troubled and thick where it settled back on his crown—I’d never seen him comb his hair a day in my life. Makeup muted his skin a shade whiter than I remembered it and acted to hide the acne he had always struggled to control.

  Becky Odel swayed behind the seat of the pedal organ, its deep notes filling the church eaves. The heat from the summer sun acted to bake the congregation in a thick sweat, as most of the women carried handmade fans. Both my sisters’ legs ripped from the wooden pews each time they shifted their weight, bringing terse stares from Vera Smalley one row forward.

  A small group from the choir, dressed in green robes and darkened with stains down their sides and backs, sung two stanzas of “Nearer to Thee Oh Lord.” When they finished my stepfather stood, long legs sliding across the floor as they had when he entered my room earlier that morning.

  “Every head bowed, every eye closed,” he whispered.

  He offered up a short prayer. His eulogy was respectfully glowing and to a point, hopeful: claiming God had places for a boy of Kelby’s grand nature. That heaven’s doors, so full of mercy and light, would open wide to welcome him in and only now would he come to know his savior in such wonderful ways. Truly children are blessed in the eyes of the Lord. But I knew that to be a lie.

  The Good Shepherd closed with another prayer and asked the pall bearers to step forward to begin the procession to the church cemetery. Walter Osgood, the local pharmacist, Yancy Byers, Jamie Odel, owner of the Red Rooster Grill, Lowery Watkins, Cal Simpkins, and Rory Dobbins, all church deacons, acted to carry Kelby’s coffin.

  Jamie Odel walked past me, thick chest barging out from under the weight of the coffin, his neck a corded mass of banding muscles beneath his collar. He frowned when he passed by. His meaty brow bent up through his hairline in a backwash of well-seated wrinkles, as if loose skin was shifting over the top of his head. And one eye was exceedingly lazy, something people grew particularly nervous about.

  As they preceded down the aisle, three men to either side of Kelby’s coffin, hands linked tightly around the large brass rings jutting off from the casket sides, Mrs. Moorehouse stood up in her pew, shaking off her husband, and screamed at the front of the church, “Don’t take my boy and put him in that ground until I say. All of you got no right to do that.” Then to her husband, face buried in the floor. “Tell ’em. Damn you. You be a man and tell ’em, they got no right to our boy.” It took several minutes for them to pull her down. Her strength taken away, both legs drug behind her like a broken doll.

  After the burial ended, I found myself talking to Walter Osgood under a poplar tree that stood out from Kelby’s resting-place. He could talk about anything without coming off as a know it all, although I got the feeling he was. If he had something to say, it came without regret or a second thought to the outcome of his words.

  “Mind?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  He picked out a cigarette from the pack he found in his jacket and lit it in the crease of his mouth. He stared at the pack in his hand, eyeballing the opening, then with a surprised look on his face, crushed it tightly in his fist and dropped it into one of his pockets. “Heard what you did. Whole town’s talking.”

  I nodded
in agreement. I missed my friend and something beyond the pain of my hands could feel that hurt deep in the bones of my arms.

  He rattled a cough at the ground. “Damn. Losing a child’s hard on the soul.” He blew out a ragged cloud of smoke and tried to change the subject. “Consensus feelin’ in the town’s that you’re a hero.”

  They were wrong, of course.

  “Yep. In a way, you are. Problem is, a hero’s welcome leaves you hurting. I’ve found that out from experience.” Then he whispered almost as if to no one, “God awful shitty feeling ain’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. It sure is shitty.”

  “What I want you to understand is that you need to put this behind you before long. Don’t go making yourself suffer over things you can’t control.”

  I loosened my tie with one finger, careful of my hand, and leaned my back on the tree. “I shouldn’t have left him out there.”

  “Nothin’ you could do, Lee,” he replied easily.

  Mother walked out of the church and down the steps and out into the common area in front of the parking lot. She waved her hand above her head.

  Walter Osgood pushed off the tree and placed a hand over his eyes to shield away the sun. “Looks as if somebody’s in need of your services.”

  I stood there watching her. “She’s ready to go.”

  “Let’s not keep her waiting.”

  We walked that way not exchanging another word between us.

  “Hello, Olivia. How are you?”

  Mother spread her fan open and stirred up a breeze at her neck. “As good as can be expected. And you?”

  “Same old thing.” He implied with a heavy grin. “I shut down the pharmacy until around noon today so that I could attend the funeral. I’ll be heading back directly though.”

  “Yes, I suppose you would.” Mother pondered the face on her watch intently, and asked the pharmacist, “Would you mind terribly if I asked you a favor—I could use your help.”

  “Why not,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  At the top of the church steps, the door to the congregation opened back on its hinges and out clamored my stepbrother, Marcus. Taylor Moorehouse and his wife, both disheveled and bleary eyed, stood right behind him. Mrs. Moorehouse supported much of her weight on her husband’s outstretched arm as they began descending the stairs. Marcus bent over and snapped down the doorstop with practiced ease. That was his job on Sundays, handling the front doors so that his father was allowed to greet the church congregation as they filed out. Marcus looked as if he worked at Smith’s Gas Shop the way he ran about cocking the front door, then closing it, running down the steps to our car, opening the door, sprinting back up the steps to Mrs. Moorehouse’s side and taking her other arm. I half expected him to pick her up and try and carry her on his back.

  Mother turned back to Walter, who still trailed after Kelby’s folks as they made their way down. I saw him shake his head slightly and wondered if he was as dumbfounded by the distraction of my stepbrother as I was.

  “Warren has a meeting with Becky Odel.” Mother elaborated on her reason for help. “So he can’t drive the Moorehouses back as we’d originally thought.”

  “If that’s what you need. Don’t even worry about it. I’d be happy to give ’em a ride. The least I could do.”

  Mother offered him a generous smile and placed her hand on his arm lightly. “Actually, I’m seeing to that already. What with Kayla breaking apart like that, she could use some help at home, I’m sure.”

  Walter raised his eyebrows up at that. “Wouldn’t want to argue with you there. So what do you need me to do?”

  “Well, I was wondering if you might take my children home and drop them off. Then if you could bring the baked dishes I left in the oven back to the Moorehouses’.”

  “Don’t even consider it. It’d be my pleasure,” Walter said.

  “When you get back, there’ll be lots of food laid out, and if you have time you’re more than welcome to have a bite to eat or I could fix you a plate to take when you leave.”

  “That’ll be fine, Olivia.”

  She turned to me. “Your sisters and brother are around back. Why don’t you go and fetch them, please.”

  “All right,” I said.

  I walked around the corner of the church. “Paul. Darla. Let’s go. Mr. Osgood’s taking us home.”

  Amy had a batch of wild daisies in her hand when she looked up from her knees. Darla, having picked one or two flowers herself, dropped her small collection and brushed past me, headed to the car.

  “What are you doing? Give me the things.” Amy leaned over to pick up the ones our sister had dropped.

  Paul sat on the steps with a pocketknife, carving a point onto a broken stick. When I got to him, he buried it in his pocket.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “No where.”

  “Where’s no where, Breath?” I said, calling him by his nickname. His breath odor, in the last year or so, had taken on a certain rotting smell when he got too close.

  “It’s none of your business where I got it.”

  “I’m about to make it my business. Now let me see it.”

  He reluctantly pulled it out of his pocket, flashed it in my face, and stuck it back in his pants before I could get a glimpse at it. The freckles on his face shone brightly in the noon sun like mica sprinkled over the surface of granite.

  I stepped forward, pissed off then. “That’s my knife isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s not.” He almost sounded convincing.

  “You lying, little booger-eater,” I said.

  His face squinted in a rage. “Don’t call me that.”

  “I don’t see why not. You are what you eat.”

  “I’d whoop your ass if’n we weren’t around all these people.”

  “Did you hear this?” I turned from Amy back to Paul, nearly laughing. “You keep sayin’ that, but I’ve never seen you follow through on your word. Now give me the knife back, or I’m gonna make you sorry. And I mean it.”

  “I said it’s not yours.”

  “Then where did you get it?”

  He hesitated a second and looked past my shoulder. “I done said, around.”

  “Around where, Breath?”

  “Call me that again and they’ll be pullin’ me off your head.” He pushed me in the chest.

  “Breath,” I said. “I’m gonna give you to the count of three. If you don’t hand me the knife back, I am gonna fix your booger-eating habit by breaking your nose.”

  “You think you still scare me, Lee?”

  “Why are you arguing over that?” Amy stepped between us.

  “He’s been in my room again.” I grabbed his face from the side and pushed him to the ground. “The little thief stole my knife. The one Dad gave me before he died.”

  “Just stop it!” Amy swatted at me and turned to help him up, but he refused. “Give him the knife back, Paul. Don’t be such a burden today, please.”

  “Why don’t you go jump outta tree, Amy? I found it. It’s not his.”

  “Watch your mouth.” Amy stood looking at him on the ground. “Then where did you get it?”

  I took a step forward to finish the job when he didn’t answer. “He’s useless.”

  “Come on, Paul,” Amy said. “That’s what I’m talking about—don’t be this way.”

  My brother managed to get up on his feet again. “It’s mine.”

  “Then say goodbye to your nose.” I lunged to grab his shirt.

  Paul threw up his hands in defense. “I found it on the kitchen table. Don’t touch me! I swear to God I’ll stab you with it.”

  I drew my eyes over him.

  “Give it to me.”

  “Do it, Paul.” Amy started to reach for it.

  He jerked away. “How do I know it’s yours?”

  “Because I had it when I was with Kelby that day!” Spit flew out of my mouth. “Mom washed my jeans. It was in there. You know it’s mine, you little s
hit. Give it back. I’m not kidding. If I ask you again, I’m gonna flatten your nose.”

  Paul dug a hand down a pocket and pulled out the knife. “Why did Dad give it to you anyway? You ain’t nothing.”

  “What does it matter? You were too young when he died.” I yanked the knife from his grasp and opened it. The smile on my face began to fade to fury. The tip of the blade was broke off about a quarter of an inch from the end. Along the sharp edge of the steel, extending from the tang up, were dull chips in the honed finish. The last thing he ever gave to me was ruined. I snapped hold of his shirt and twisted hard, his toes dragging in the dirt as he lost balance. “What did you do?”