by Barry Hannah
“What did you think we wanted to hear?” asked Egan. The boy worried him with his hungry look. “You been looking for your little brothers?”
“Partly, partly. Just stopping by, how you do. Ship in a storm. Winter is cold and wet and dull. On old Mortimer, he might not care about much. How the woman at the store said. He gambles some, but he don’t care. He’s like kind to animals.”
“He is?” put in Ulrich. “Then we could be friends. We could be eagles together.”
Egan and Peden looked at Ulrich, a benign affliction, standing plump in his suspenders in front of the woodstove. Sandals over big wool socks. Vast assless pants. He smiled at Sponce, and Sponce knew him for a father.
Peden relaxed from the news in this boy’s narrative. He put his arm around the boy’s neck, smelled the oil and sweat, drew back. Peden was from nowhere people in Pocahontas, and his formative years were much staring at kudzu, wondering how it could be faster than him or his uncle Ed and do whole school grades in just one summer. He knew this boy better than he knew himself.
He crossed the room and raised his pistol, only a .22 but a Buntline barrel on her, hollowpoints, long rifle. The illusion of self-defense. It looked like a gun.
“We’ve got a choice here. I’m not worried about that car, I’m worried about your brothers. But brother Sponce, can I have a gun and love Christ?”
“You asking me?” asked Sponce. “Yes. I do. Or have. Christ used a whip on the money men. Turning the temple into a money changer.”
“Let me ask you this, then. Where is the temple?”
Sponce couldn’t answer.
“You want to get a bath and clean clothes while I’m making you some tamales and you think about it?”
“Yes sir, I do.”
“A man has to sleep with as many animals as possible,” Ulrich blurted. “But not in the sexual way. By no means. An execration. No. Just get in the bed there with them, invite them on in, know their smell and their cold nose. You smell the good dirt in their fur. Fur is individual. No two alike, like a snowflake. It ought to be a state law.”
The others listened, but he was through and at peace.
It occurred to Egan that every one of them in the room was old beyond his years except Ulrich, who looked like a stupid, lined boy. Harried and singed into senescence, red in the eyes, the rest. They were rushing to die.
She called him into the room to watch her die but then said she didn’t want him to suffer and tried to send him out. The moment was vague, but the nurse told him she was gone. So Harvard’s wife, Nita, died in their bedroom in their house, a large stone one, overlooking the lake and a front lawn full of century pine trees eighty feet tall.
Isaac and Jacob lived in Harvard’s front room now. The ’48 was parked behind the garage. That Mardi Gras car. These strange boys he had pulled off the roads with some order of new strength. How he loved them. They loved Nita, and she smiled at them the last week too.
Harvard did not have deep thoughts the two days her body was gone to prepare for the funeral. He would drive her in the pleasure barge to the church in the glen, where Egan would preach the funeral for a woman he had never seen and Harvard would ask himself, Where the hell have I taken us when this man Egan stands at the gates facing either direction?
He had useless thoughts and intense ones. Such as the storms that gathered then left, so you wondered were the same storms simply circling the lake. Such as nobody has ever left home. Nobody has brought news back from anywhere. Every awful scene rotates to somebody else, and they will not believe it either.
Nita, honey. Fifty-two years with you. Married in ’48, so I had to have the car too, along with the boys. This may be a miracle, something meant beyond my plans. I hope so. It felt like it. Without the boys I’d now be dead, I think. He thought of Melanie. It sometimes happens that the wife outlives her husband by thirty years. But more often, two.
He hated God for putting Melanie Wooten there in the years of his wife’s suffering. Melanie, to be looked upon, enjoyed in the abstract, comparing always too favorably with Nita. Even I can believe in God if I hate enough. Please, to spit in somebody’s face.
To the few who knew he had the boys, their mother, the sheriff, a couple of the inner circle of sane oldsters, he offered no apology. He had to have them, that was all. He found a pistol and some shells in their car. He was not certain who wanted to harm them or needed this car so much. They were cloudy on it themselves. He drove them to school, the pistol on the floor under his seat, handy. If the killer gave him time to get it out while he stood there like a sack of salt with a bull’s-eye on it. They would stay there two months while the couple honeymooned and the stepfather got established, Harvard said. The car was stolen, and he wondered if anybody was seeking it. He helped them wash it, but he would not let them drive it.
Harvard and the boys talked, wearing suits and carrying Nita in the repewed common galley behind the wheel of the barge. Just them alone with the casket. The stained glass around it deep purple with greens and yellows. Harvard had done a magnificent job, as if it were all for Nita, bless her after the waiting and torture.
Way over across the lake, insectile mourners stood on the shore of the glen waiting for the boat, Harvard’s hand-crafted tribute. Nita now in dignity denied her by the suffocation of her last months. Pain that will have it out with a good person until that person hates herself, loved ones trying even harder to love and deny the confusion. The tiny mourners stood in back of a church newly painted and air-conditioned. Plain, with little trim and a squared Georgian softness collected by its steeple. It was Raymond’s church now, and the old cemetery next to it was clean and fenced and greenish.
Mortimer saw the barge pass below the bait store and wanted it all over again.
He loved the elegant and slow now. The machines that had never rushed him, the old carriages that had never harried him, the tender old verities, but what were they? Things like church, dogs. Football. Children wrestling in the glen. Those good people. Not a finer man in the county than your postman daddy, what’s his name? And your mother the postlady, the chicken lover.
Mortimer had a club already. Pals. Women to look at or pet him. It was good to be off the cock farm in many ways. This cool point of view where beauty in women shriveled back to what it was actually worth. You stick with Edie, Bertha, Marcine. Good country people, trustworthy. You got a rich old fool in a handmade boat and had what? Mortimer wanted back the good past. The times that woman had taken from him, eight years back.
It was time to sit back and smell the room. Harvard. Never cared for him. Understated aristocrat, somebody said. His lake, his thin hands. His wife died on him anyway.
Mortimer knew he had graduated into old, which made him new blood, the youngest of the old. It was strangely good to know this. He could start having an overview, seeing he was always meant for the center. Neither the chills nor the fevers of before. Maybe I cut because I want them to have no face too. Because if you’ve got somebody else’s face, you never had one, there ain’t no memory of you.
Peden had taken his youth. He was given little choice. Mortimer had come in the window with a club. A mistake he would not have made earlier on. He imagined Peden was weak and easy because he’d seen him drinking just the day before.
Maybe I should burn Peden’s house and him in it. He’s got nowhere else. Even if it failed, it would flush him. He needs to be in my club. We can meet and talk about nothing but faces. A support group. Name it “What Am I, Chopped Liver?” Get on public-access or PBS. Shoot the show with the junkyard in the background. Close-up of scars and sharp metal edges. My people. Here, let’s see your face and its problems. Would you get a light on that? Oh Lordy. Too bad they don’t still have elevator jobs, or folks that live in belfries.
Booth entered his mind, and he turned on Pepper’s old stool, where he lounged while Sidney was at the funeral. He suddenly thought Pepper stood behind him. He was shaken, all alone here in the store.
&nbs
p; I give surgeons work, he thought. I take the vanity out of my friends’ lives. I make them face the music of their essential selves. Oh, it’s hard to be sincere these days. All these things I have done, and yet my work seems never to be over. Because this lake is mine and I didn’t realize it. I am expanding without panic or even plans. There’s many a little girl to be friends with out there. The ones that won’t rush you. My video work. A man that stays busy ain’t ever in trouble.
He looked about the store at all these expensive devices for pulling spiny, scaly meat out of the water. He didn’t understand it. Never had. Even doctors and rocket scientists at it. He was limp with innocence. He was no longer planning. Just heard a voice in his ear, getting louder.
Booth, I’ll cut your throat where you stand, and I don’t never have to ask why you look like this now. I could’ve done it before at the ball game. I let you go. You hearing me?
But he had nothing on him to cut with, and the nearest pocketknife fifteen feet away on the wall. What he loved now was a Pakistani three-quarter machete with a brown, green and yellow handle and golden gills on the blade. But it was in the car and remained only an exquisite hypothesis even when it was in his hands.
His own pool, his houses, his spirit. When he was certain nobody was in the store, he said to himself, “Hardly anybody does anything by hand anymore.”
It was a strange vacant bright day, this funeral day for Nita Harvard. Not a speck of a man or woman, not a single fishing boat out there on the water. The wind was out of the east and the fishermen knew it was hopeless.
“We come to begin a church and send away a neighbor to what this church and all love is about,” began Byron Egan. The trombones had just quit, and unknown mourners were present just for them, the band without even a name. Brown, yellow, black faces, posing as friends of Nita and Harvard, or now of her corpse. Nita had never been a mingler even when healthy.
Egan had had a difficult time with this one, and he felt he was turning into liquid in front of Max Raymond, harsh witness, and his lot.
“She did not go to church,” he said, “but Nita Harvard, what I hear about her, lived a life that deserves a cathedral. Her sense of humor, her fairness, made life more lovely and lively for those around her. What else can we demand of a neighbor? Flowers, tennis, a life graceful and generous. Even so, old fool cancer got in her and really tried to lay her low. But now where is she? High, high in a new church, launched toward heaven with its new friends and old.”
At first Harvard thought it might be a sort of tag-team eulogy, with Peden stepping up, but this man only brought a tape of Nita’s favorite tunes. “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “What’s New?” These went across nicely on a big Sony jambox, and the funeral was over except for the churchyard cemetery with its small tent over her loamy slot. She had barely looked at the church while living. She practiced a distanced Episcopalianism and did not especially like people.
Mortimer could see the church, a white thimble across the bumpy water blown easterly from the bait house.
Somebody he was talking to and hustling years ago told Mortimer there was a town at the bottom of the lake. He thought of his own town in Missouri. He imagined it underwater. His parents’ hair straining upward, circled by the corpses of suspended chickens. His parents were wearing their postal outfits. Stupid in this fixed image, they had a kind of hopeless love on their faces and no opinion at all. They neither cursed God nor acknowledged Him. In death, if they were in fact dead, they carried on, changing nothing, being nothing, walking their gray lives along the rut in the ground.
Mortimer could live on no middle ground. The fact that his last fight had reduced him nearly to ectoplasm terrified him. He had a nostalgia for himself. Now he toiled with the binoculars and cursed eagles who intervened between his eyes and the pleasure barge.
Harvard manned the boat, still alone with the boys on his way back to the cove dock. He did not want travelers. This was duly noted by half his friends, who had dressed less for the funeral than for the pontoon yacht ride and were ignored. Some had worked on the new craft and were angry. There can be no second maiden voyage, and having to wait on the shore struck them as rude and unfair. They watched these yard pups go solemnly with him in their new little-man suits; many groused.
Mortimer, with the big Pakistani blade, walked slowly, bently down to the cove. He saw the willow sticks budding where the snakes had lain. Where he had fallen and shrieked. The pontoon boat chugged without hurry its three miles. The boys had never had this view and it made them children again, knowing where they lived from the water’s point of view. They felt tiny and good. They were proud of themselves for holding out against this waving mass their long years.
“Hidey,” said Mortimer from the winter willows. “You ain’t trying to land on my side of this lake over here, are you?”
They saw the big blade and were only thirty feet from his face.
The head was floating toward them, the singer’s tall waved gray hair and the smaller creased face. He might now be Earl Clyde, lounge hawker and crooner, sixty-five and still going, reaching deeper and deeper into his throat for a tune. They saw the blade but then only his shoes, a spangling black pair of opera slippers. Could they be? Only Harvard knew what they were and doubted his eyes.
Who could remember a gun in a launch amid boarding his wife’s casket, the funeral, the suiting up of the boys, the pouts of old friends when they couldn’t come aboard, the sermon and music by bike scum, one of them with a black tattooed cross on his cheek? Who could remember?
The boys had the pistol. They had never forgotten. Isaac raised it, the original bullets in it. Five of the eight went off, but the child was no shooter. So he got Mortimer only once through the earlobe on the left, which hurt a great deal. His hand went to his ear and he howled briefly, the blade spinning as he let it go, nicking him across the shin.
Harvard saw a great deal of smoke for such a small black gun. He could not believe any of the five shots had hit nearly what was meant by it. He wheeled the boat into the dock but was all over the place, like a semitrailer on ice, berthing it.
He recalled the head shrieking in the willow sticks and now the thin body beneath and the opera slippers dancing on the early spring grass. The thing went up the hill like a black goat. The boys were fascinated. Mortimer was so much littler, benter. He could not move very fast, but he loped now to his car, holding his ear.
Harvard docked the boat with their help on the lines. He was having a stupid dream in which the boys were not at fault. He wasn’t over the shock of Isaac firing the weapon. He was no longer particularly sad or angry.
Melanie, outside her kitchen door, looked down to them with a hand over her eyes against the western sun. She waved.
She was dressed well, in black. He didn’t know whether she had been to the funeral. But he had been conscious of her the entire day. Released to feel what he would.
SIXTEEN
IN THE BAIT STORE THE PARENTS OF MAN MORTIMER were waiting. Lloyd, Edie and little Marcine were in the store too, with the elder Mortimers, who had just shown up at the car agency. They had come in a long old Ford wagon with canaries caged in the back. The gang was fascinated.
Mortimer ignored the long car, which had wandered slowly and sadly but stubbornly down from Missouri. When he burst in all sick and bloody and woofing, his short gray parents quailed, anxious in their thick spectacles, leisure wear, hard shoes. They would have worn stilts had that been the style when they were thirty. The father spoke.
“We’d heard you were doing so well. We were going to ask you up to Branson to hear a concert with us. Before we die. The Oak Ridge Boys are back to doing gospel.” Then the father saw the blood, the muddy patent-leather opera slippers. He saw Mortimer was not ripe for a concert right now and was not young.
Just a scratch, Mortimer insisted. He had shot himself hunting for snakes. He’d gotten bored and went down to get himself a few snakes. He guessed he was old enough to think about those nas
ty old guns now, but he’d forgotten how they could turn on you. He’d learned his lesson. Only got three small snakes anyhow. He felt a boy in front of these elders, sick and pouted out, puffy.
Big Lloyd came outside, where Harvard waited with the boys at the bottom of the steps. In their suits they seemed to have trailed Mortimer to be of service. And in fact they brought his great Pakistani knife to him, muddy at the golden gills.
“Is that your sword?” asked Lloyd of Harvard, who held it like a trowel.
“He dropped this knife-thing on the ground when he was hurt,” said Jacob. They handed the gaudy medieval blade over to Lloyd. They seemed a crew of pleasant neighbors doing what they could. Lloyd huge and bald in a tan leather suit.
“You can go home, and I know Mr. Mortimer will thank you.”
“He don’t have to get anywhere nigh that close,” said Jacob. “We ain’t got a home anyway. He don’t seem like he used to be when he was our mama’s boyfriend and had all this money and a different car every week. He ain’t old and ruint or anything, is he?”
“Don’t you worry. He’s the same. He’s had some bad luck.”
“Is he shot in the ear or the head?”
“Only the ear, son. We’ll see you now.”
“It was an accident.”
“I know that. He told us.”
Lloyd went in, closing the door. Marcine then came out on the steps. She was seventeen but looked twenty-one, pleasantly dressed like a secretary to a spangling car-agency showroom, which Bertha was training her to be. Her hair was naturally brown and full and French-cut. She thought she knew the boys and the grandfather guy.
“You boys live here?”
“No.”
“What house?”
“We got many houses. Nature. Porches. Sleeping bags. On the water. Wherever.”
“You dress in suits a lot?”
