by Billy Coffey
“That’s Dorothy over there,” Abel says, pointing to a pretty girl standing afar, “and the man over there”—he looks over his shoulder to where a big man in overalls waves and yells, “Hi. Gay”—“is Dumb Willie. He’s my friend. We come awful far.”
A voice from across the field calls out, “Gary?” Sanders has turned around again. He has his blue hands on his blue hips and is speaking from his blue mouth. “You okay, buddy?”
Gary ignores him, ignores everything. Because his boy is here. His boy has come all this way.
“I found your letters,” Abel says. “They sent me.”
Those letters. Ones Lisa said to write but to never call, never reach out, because their child mustn’t know. She would spare Abel the grief of knowing his father was a convicted drug smuggler but never allow him the truth of why, how Gary had turned to drugs after his accident because drugs made the colors go away. The weed and the meth, the heroin made the colors go away, and all Gary could see when he was high were the white and black and brown of skin. She had a beautiful soul, Lisa. That’s what he had told her the first night they met. Lisa had the prettiest orange Gary had ever seen. With her, he did not need to be high. He loved that color. It was the blacks and grays and deep browns of the lost that always grieved him, sending him back for another fix, another respite.
“It was treasure,” Abel says. “That’s why I had to come. Reverend Johnny said I’d find treasure and I did, then he said there’d be healing and a reward.”
This boy, this beautiful boy he and Lisa had made. The one already three months growing in her womb when Lisa told him she was pregnant, back when all the work Gary could find was construction and Lisa was waiting tables at the Shoney’s. They had no money. What little they kept went to fuel a drug habit already spiraling out of control, straining the love they shared and the future they held. Gary began selling, believing that to be a way out. Then transporting. He was in the mountains when they caught him with two thousand tablets of MDMA bound for Kentucky and Tennessee, leaving him weeping in front of a judge who glowed a pale yellow and who took pity, sending him here to Fairhope for his sentence rather than having him serve hard time at Taylorsville. His life gone, his wife and child run off.
“I had to see you, Daddy. Something’s happened.”
“I know,” Gary says. He keeps his hand to Abel’s cheek, to the surface of that water. “Your momma came.”
“Momma came here?”
“She told me, Abel. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry what happened.”
“Is she okay?”
“No, ’course not. She’s sad. We’re both sad, Abel. You were our boy.”
Sanders again: “Gary, you need some help?”
He’s coming over. Sanders is coming to take me away.
“I prayed so hard. I always prayed just to see you and I didn’t think I ever would. I thought you were gone from me, but then Lisa came and now you. It’s like a family, Abel. We’re like a family. Did you pray?”
“No,” Abel says, “all I did was die.”
Sanders’s hands are soft on him, trying to lower Gary’s hand. Gary pushes those hands away. Abel backs off, frightened. The girl and big man are gone into the trees. Gary pulls his son close again.
“Abel, where have you been? Have you seen it? What’s next?”
“Dorothy hasn’t taken me. That’s Dorothy over there, hiding in the trees. She didn’t tell me what happened to me, just Dumb Willie. She couldn’t say because I had to find you. Dorothy’s kind.”
“But is it real?” he asks, then asks again as Sanders again tries to still him, reaching for his walkie. The other guard is running over the rows, smashing corn and potato plants beneath his boot. “What have you seen, Abel?”
Abel smiles. “Magic, Daddy. I seen magic.”
He hears, This is Sanders, all available personnel to the garden, but only Abel’s words register. They sink deep into bones long dry and a heart long brittle as Sanders grips him hard, ripping Gary away.
“Come here, Abel,” he shouts,
(“His kid,” Sanders tells the other guard, “he just found out his kid’s dead. Gonna be okay, Gary, I promise, we’re gonna get you inside for a bit.”)
“come to me.”
Abel runs. He runs on two legs that look unfit for his body and Gary feels him in the arm Sanders cannot reach, feels the softness of Abel’s hair and lets his scruff tickle Abel’s cheek. He fills his nose with the scent of his son.
“I love you, Daddy,” he says. “I always loved you,” as Gary feels hands upon him and hears that girl talk, those hands yanking him away toward the trees and the fence.
“I’m so sorry, Abel. So sorry for everything.”
“It’s okay, Daddy,”
(“It’s okay, Gary, you just relax and come on—”)
“I’ll see you again. Dorothy says so, Daddy. Dorothy’s always right, she’s special—”
“I love you, Abel,” screaming not in anger but with joy because it’s real, all Gary has seen and sees and will yet see, all of it. “I love you, son.”
“I love you, Daddy.”
They are pulling him away, Sanders and the other guards, the blind carrying the sighted. The other convicts in the field look on. Some bow their heads. Others shout words of encouragement, telling Gary to hang in there, it’ll get better. And yet to Gary Bragg, none of them are here. The soft earth is gone and the tall trees and sky above, the pretty girl and the big man with the vacant stare. It is only himself and his boy here, the two of them linked by the smile upon their faces and the lightness in their hearts that may bear all things, a secret passed from son to father that the cares of this world mean little because beyond is another place called Home, and there the two of them will one day say hello again and never good-bye.
Never good-bye.
-6-
Dorothy does not so much watch the children at play as she does Abel beside her. Dumb Willie stands to their right. His fingers are laced between the metal diamonds of the chainwire backstop and he is hollering out, alternating between “Atta. Boy” and “Nice . . . one” as each of the pitcher’s warm-up tosses slaps into the catcher’s mitt.
There is no reason they have ended up here at the ball field down the road from where Abel’s daddy calls home, other than the gleaming bleachers offered the closest place to sit. As it is, the three of them make up a rare crowd for the day’s pickup game between a dozen of Fairhope’s youngsters. Half are spread out in the field. The remaining six huddle near the first-base dugout, waiting their turn at bat.
To Dorothy it is a scene wholly opposed to that from which they’ve fled, one representing all of what grieves her in mortals and one so alive with joy and holding all she adores. It occurs to her that Abel likely never partook in this part of growing up. The boy always had to be so careful, weighing every action against its potential consequence. Some arrive in this world already old.
“Always liked this game,” she says. “Something about it, pure and youthful.”
Abel watches the first batter, a boy no bigger than himself with dirty knees and two dulled scabs on his elbows. The bat in his hands appears as long and heavy as a pole.
“Me and Dumb Willie used to play catch sometimes. Out back of my house, or on the playground at school. We always had to use a tennis ball. I never did catch good, and I was always scared what a real ball’d do if I got hit. Dumb Willie can hum it.”
“I bet he can.”
The boy swings late at the first two pitches, putting him in the hole and bringing moans from Dumb Willie and cackles from the team in the field. The boy’s teammates urge him to choke up on the handle.
He stands in once more. Dorothy and Abel are quiet. Even Dumb Willie stops his roaring as the ball is delivered in a white blur, the boy swinging from his heels, eyes clenched with effort. They fly open at the sharp tink of the aluminum bat striking true. A chorus of screams rises with the ball, launched in a lazy arc that ends in an empty right field.<
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Dumb Willie hops, hands shaking the fence, yelling his joy until his cheeks turn crimson. The boy straddles the first-base bag and tips his cap. Abel looks caught in a place somewhere between cheer and grief at this boy he will never meet, this boy who may have called Abel a friend had things been different, had he been born in Mattingly or Abel in Fairhope, had Abel come from his momma healthy and whole. But in this world of what must be, Dorothy knows that Abel can only call the child standing tall in the field a surrogate for the life he was never granted.
“My daddy going to be okay, you think?”
“Seemed a good place over there,” Dorothy says, “and good people to look after him. Things got a way of working out in the end no matter what you do. End’s only thing that counts, really. Yes, Abel. Your daddy gone be just fine. He got something now I don’t think he ever had.”
“What’s that?”
“Hope,” says Dorothy. “A knowing that something’s waiting for him farther on.”
“What happened to him, Dorothy? Momma said he died before I was born. Maybe that’s not a lie. Maybe whatever he did killed the person my daddy was, and the person he is now is somebody different.”
“I expect most folk become different,” she says, “the longer they go on. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. I bet he’s better. He seems a kind man.”
“You think he knew I’d be born broke? Somehow they did some test, and my daddy found out? You think that was what made him do something bad?”
Dorothy looks out over those kids playing and running and throwing. Toward the trees and the road past them, cars and trucks and the people they hold and past even there, way out to where the world stretches on.
“Everybody’s broken, Abel. Ain’t a soul stands otherwise. Only thing makes you any different is you know you is. That puts you well ahead of the rest.”
“You think I’m special, Dorothy?”
“I think ain’t a one like you ever.” She smiles as best she knows and leans back, settling herself against the bleacher behind them. Putting the two of them as equal. “That’s why things gone the way they have, I guess. I couldn’t take you on, Abel. Couldn’t bear to tell you the truth of things because I couldn’t bear knowing the same. I wanted different for you, and that makes you special. You even made me want different for myself, if only once. Got it in my head maybe I could make things right as I saw them. Thought I could bring you all the way back at that spring. Leave you here for a good long while, then come to fetch you again when you’re old and gray and ready.” She turns her head, sees Abel’s face. “I didn’t want you looking back when I took you on.”
There is another clip of the bat, more cheers. Dumb Willie shakes the fence once more and pronounces what he has just seen a genuine murcle. Dorothy doesn’t look. Nor does Abel.
“What happens now, Dorothy?”
“Got to head on from here. That’s our first order of business. Longer we keep to Fairhope, more folk might figure out me and Dumb Willie don’t belong. They still looking for him, Abel. Might be more now, if Arthur don’t say those three men died when that mound collapsed.”
“Did you do that?” Abel asks. “Be honest. Wasn’t the spring killed them, was it?”
“Was their time,” is what Dorothy answers. “Was meant, one way or another. But none of that makes a difference. World’s closing in on us, and we ain’t safe. And you ain’t got much time left. We need to settle on things, Abel.” She nods her head toward Dumb Willie’s voice. “Him most of all. Got to get you gone from here. Dumb Willie can’t follow yet. There’s nowhere for him to go.”
Abel thinks. Now he grins.
“Might be.”
PART IX
HOME
-1-
Abel sees it as something of a rest, this final stretch of their long journey. They do not flee Fairhope as they did the town of Greenville, which now seems so far away. Farther even than Mattingly. It is rather that they travel slow and purposeful instead, keeping to Fairhope’s edges and hidden places so as not to risk Dumb Willie being spotted. They wait in a copse of trees along the tracks not far from town and mix quiet talk among silences that are equal parts peace and sadness at this, their adventure’s close. The train that comes is bound for Raleigh. From there, Dorothy says, they strike north and west.
They sense no danger now, no strain of going against what is meant. That long trip is spent with the three of them talking and laughing, recalling that first night Dorothy saved them and all those times after, when their saving was done by Dumb Willie or by Abel. And times as well when their way forward looked bleakest, when all the saving they needed was done by the bond the three of them had come to share. The sense that they have also been led by something greater than themselves (greater, even, than Death) does not go unsaid. Dumb Willie puts it best early this afternoon as he looks out upon the passing world and then to the faces of his friends:
“It’s. Magic. Did it,” he says. “Hebbin . . . magic.”
Somewhere west of Raleigh and in the shadows of the high mountains, Abel performs his last magic show. He has little left in the way of props, just the deck of cards in his pocket. Still, there is common agreement that his tricks are among the best Dumb Willie and Dorothy have ever seen. He bows at their cheers and blushes at their applause and wishes for no greater an audience.
They laugh, they talk, they look upon one another and remember. That long ride from Fairhope is a quiet one that Abel feels holds nothing in the way of excitement, nothing that he believes would form a memory for him to hang on to. Yet he knows now and finally that the quiet times are indeed the ones that come to define one’s life. Our wasted moments are anything but.
At a flat place along the tracks where the train picks up speed for the steep hills beyond, Dumb Willie grants Abel a final wish. He stands at the edge of the boxcar’s door with Abel’s shoes wedged against his own, clutching the back of Abel’s neck. Dorothy watches with a grin as Abel leans himself out of the boxcar and into the rushing wind. His face tingles and his hair flies wild. Beneath him, the wheels clatter against the rails. The air feels charged as he shuts his eyes and leans back his head, arms extended to either side.
Abel laughs. He is flying.
He always wanted to fly.
*
Long they walk, all this early evening and far into the night, through lands Abel thought long behind and never to be seen again. Dorothy keeps them to the deep woods. She warns Dumb Willie there can be only whispers here, and only when they warrant. The fire built for their rest is small and barely fit to cook through the bullfrog Dumb Willie plucks from a stream. Dorothy watches the trees as they prepare for their final push, ears cocked for any noise out of place.
It’s a dangerous thing you’ll try, she had told Abel before the great engine had uncoupled from the cars and left them in silence. No telling it’ll work even if we make it there.
Abel had known the truth of those words then. He knows it more now, watching as Dumb Willie commits the last bit of frog to the same earth meant to claim all things. But it must work. That is the end of it so far as Abel is concerned. He will not move on with Dorothy otherwise.
Rather than dwell on the peril of their journey’s final miles or the question of its success, Abel chooses instead to do what he knows he should and relish these last hours with his friend. The stars are gone this night, hidden above a thick layer of summer clouds.
Dorothy knows the way without their guidance. “I could find it with my eyes shut and my feet bound, should it come to that. It’s an irony.”
“I. Nee,” Dumb Willie says.
Abel explains the term in a way she finds nearly poetic:
“It means it’s Dorothy’s grief that leads us to your hope.”
Ridges and hollers lie before them in frozen roil. Hulks of trees rise like hardened shadows. The pines green even in this darkness. Abel finds himself wishing for even a pale moon to see by, if only to take in this land. He wishes to see the faces of
Dorothy and Dumb Willie, the two who have rescued him. He finds he even longs for a final look at the muted yellow cast slipping from his right arm, his crooked legs and tilting hips, if only as a reminder of what he leaves behind.
Dumb Willie ask, “Where we goin’ A. Bull?” in whispers that grow in tone and frequency the closer they look to get to the world’s very edge.
Abel’s reply is the same each time, and each time given with the same patience and kindness: “Just a little ways more, then you’ll see.”
They come to the field and the path of flattened grass that marks both end and arrival. The single light burning beyond the open door stops them.
Dorothy removes her hat and lays down her leather bag. She says, “Guess y’all best keep here a minute. I’ll go on, see what I can do.”
Dorothy walks forward as a figure steps out from the barn. A shotgun is settled against the woman’s left hip. Abel can see her mussed hair in the lantern light, her gaunt figure, the weariness upon her face.
“What we do. A Bull?”
“Need a place where you’re safe,” Abel says. “People want to hurt you, Dumb Willie. I can’t let that happen, but I can’t stay here and watch over you. Dorothy can’t stay neither. Me and her got to be heading on.”
“Home,” Dumb Willie says.
“Yeah. We’re going home. But you can’t go with us. Dorothy’s seeing if maybe you can stay here. You’d like it, Dumb Willie. There’s animals and mountains and quiet. And that garden out back.”
“It’sa. Woeman.”
“I know. But maybe she won’t be so sad now. Maybe you can keep her safe and help heal up her insides. Like you did for me.”
Dorothy is talking. Abel hears quiet rather than yelling and considers this a good sign. The shotgun is no longer on the woman’s hip but tilted toward the ground, hanging limp in her hand.
“You goin’. Home.”
“Yeah. You think you might like it here, Dumb Willie? Please say yes. It’s a good place. You’d be happy. That woman won’t beat on you or call you stupid. Maybe you could even get her to go back inside the house. It’s nice in there, better than that old barn. There’s lot of books. I bet plenty of them got pictures to look at. That woman thinks there’s ghosts in there, but there isn’t. You can tell her that. It’s empty is all. Sometimes empty can feel like ghosts.”
