by Billy Coffey
Bottom 4
-1-
I woke that morning after prom in a panic because I couldn’t feel my right hand. The shade was drawn tight against a dull sun struggling to leak through the bank of clouds that had moved over the mountains. Fear kept me in place. All I could imagine was turning down the covers to find the skin of my hand stripped away, whirligigs of color and chromosome in tight formation, singing their songs. It was only when I rolled over I realized my hand was pinned beneath the pillow—numbed, nothing more. I wiggled my fingers, sending the feeling of needles pricking at my palm. Like nothing had ever happened.
Yes. Just like that.
Mom knocked twice to rouse me for church. I found her at the stove, swirling eggs in a cast iron pan, and Dad at the kitchen table in his tan suit. Their smiles were laden, their words few.
Dad had the Sunday’s Record spread out before him; no headline screamed of a nearly derailed train and a group of wayward children, no story accused. The only mention of prom was one Mom attempted to make in passing, asking if I had a good time.
“Sure,” I said. “It was great.”
-2-
There were fully a dozen churches in Camden but only one Baptist; Reverend Sebolt would never allow otherwise. I broke off from Mom and Dad when we arrived and found Travis, Jeffrey, and Stephanie gathered beneath a maple near the picnic pavilion. Their faces smiled at my parents and the others who passed, but their movements were sharp and awkward and their eyes could not seem to hold steady for more than a few seconds.
I waited until it was just us there and asked, “Anybody have trouble last night?”
Travis shook his head. It was a lumbering effort that bore witness to the hangover he suffered.
Stephanie said, “My folks were in bed.”
“You do that for, Travis?” Jeffrey asked. “Get up there with that train?”
Travis shrugged as though trying to remember. “I wanna know’s why that Shantie whore got up there. I was gone move out the way. She just stood there. And you,” he said, boring his eyes into me. “The hell you doing going up there and trying to grab her? You two’s the ones stopped that train.”
“We wouldn’t have been up there if you weren’t,” I said.
Jeffrey looked at me. “‘We’?”
“That girl an’ me.”
A pale-brown cruiser limped into the lot. Two blue lights on the roof. One was cracked on the side. The car stopped near the doors, and Clancy eased himself out before going around the other side to retrieve his wife. Travis said, “Don’t nobody look.”
But the sheriff was looking. Even as he took hold of Louise’s elbow and guided her to the steps he looked, and then only looked away when he spotted the Sebolts and Jeffrey’s parents and my own greeting them from the open door to the foyer. The group lingered there for some time. Dad’s eyes looked across the expanse of cars and met my own. Reverend Sebolt sought out his Stephanie.
“Dammit,” Jeffrey whispered. “We’re busted.”
“No you ain’t,” Travis said.
“Clancy gets in there and finds Bubba,” I said, “you’ll be busted too, Travis.”
“Daddy don’t care.”
Stephanie said, “Well, mine does.”
“Wasn’t us,” said Travis. “No matter what they say, no matter what anybody else tells them, wasn’t none a us on those tracks last night. Don’t nobody say nothing. You neither, Owen. ’Less you want word to get out to that college coach a yours.”
Clancy nodded, turned our way. He went on inside with Louise aside him, and then followed Jeffrey’s parents and my mother. Dad and the reverend remained.
“Come on,” Stephanie said. “Won’t look any better for us if we all keep out here.”
We went around the front. Jeffrey suggested making our way in through the side door, which cut through the Sunday school rooms, but Travis said no, it would look guilty. At the foyer we entered. Dad handed us each a bulletin and said to me, “We’ll have us a talk later.”
Golden bars of sunlight streamed through stained glass windows adorned with stories I barely knew in spite of all my churching. The pews were polished to a shine. Banners of every color were tacked to the walls, a name of God festooned to each with ribboned paper.
I sat near the front next to Mom. She looked at me. “What happened last night, Owen?”
Though unreligious, I could not bring myself to lie in church and so answered nothing. Organ music faded and stopped, creating a bubble of silence filled in short order by coughs and whispers. Somewhere in the back a baby cried.
Reverend Sebolt cast a wary eye to his daughter. He kissed his wife, Abigail, on the cheek before striding up the two carpeted steps leading to the podium. The order of service went as unchanged as anything else in Camden: a welcome and then prayer, followed by an open call for announcements. A few in the congregation stood to remind all of Bible school coming up and the Wednesday meeting, as well as the canned food drive for the Shantytown poor. Clancy sitting at attention. He turned once, withering me with his stare.
“Like to mention one other thing,” the reverend said. “Heard through our sheriff was some trouble out at Brutal Simpson’s last night. Those who have not been blessed and sometimes cursed with young folk may not know it was prom at the high school. Seems afterward many of them decided to trespass and have themselves a little party. Also seems at least two got it in their heads to play a round a chicken with the midnight train out of Mattingly.”
Mom took my hand. Squeezed it. Every head in that place went to me or Travis or Jeffrey or Stephanie.
“No real damage done according to Clancy, who gave me permission to speak on it in church so long as I offered words of spiritual caution at the end. Which I will. Seems all them kids run off after the train stopped, so Clancy don’t know who they all was. Left behind a mess a tire tracks and beer and liquor. Shanties, that’d make the most sense. Though I can’t seem to figure why they’d take a bunch a cars and trucks up there, seeing as how they could all just walk to Brutal’s.”
Someone gasped.
“But I will mention it nonetheless,” said the preacher, “if only to hold up these as a warning to all our fine young kids here ready to graduate and get out in the world. This is as good a day as any to take stock of which direction you’ll go.”
The reverend paused. I wished for an aneurysm.
We prayed then. Baptists love a great many things, but praying over the lost and fallen away above all. Reverend Sebolt altered his sermon from the promise of the future to the folly of youth. Us kids took it like champs. Whatever guilt was meant for us to swallow didn’t take.
What did you see? At the train, Owen. What did you see?
I stared at my hand. A hand is all it was.
The value in spending most of your Sunday morning having to sit still and listen to the most boring person you have ever known go on about your own badness was always lost to me. That Sunday, however, was the first time I ever felt thankful for Stephanie’s daddy. His slow monotone was all the numbing agent any of us could have asked to quash the nasty looks thrown at us. I watched an outbreak of yawns begin in the back and build to near epidemic proportions by the time it reached Mom. Bulletins fluttered in front of red faces. Pews creaked against shifting weight. By sermon’s end only Abigail Sebolt remained at attention, and I felt for the first time that all of what happened in Simpson’s field was destined to become a mere afterthought. Was sure of it, in fact, until I heard the front door open.
I turned a little but couldn’t see for Dad blocking the way. Then he stiffened, and I knew. Jeffrey did as well, for from across the aisle beside me I heard him mumble, “Oh my God,” in a way bereft of the Holy Spirit. I turned all the way as Michaela Dullahan entered the church.
Reverend Sebolt’s mouth caught in the middle of the Lord’s name, turning “Jesus” into something akin to “Jay . . . ziz” as Micky lingered behind the back pew. Dad gathered himself enough to step forward and point to
an empty spot at the end. He could not bring himself to touch her, knowing who and what she was.
“Mom,” I whispered.
She looked. I could not tell what was on her face.
The organ sputtered to life as the first chords of “Softly and Tenderly” leaked through the pipes and the reverend cast his end-of-service net into the deep waters of souls afore him. “Should any of you have need of salvation, should your heart long for the peace and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, should your spirit yearn for quenching waters that never dry or still, then come . . . come.”
Hymnals were raised. I turned once more. At the first verse I watched Micky place one dirty tennis shoe into the aisle. Then the other. Two long legs wrapped in faded denim. Micky’s smile wavered to a grimace. Dad backed himself into the foyer. Micky bit down on her bottom lip.
She stepped forward. Faces twisted aghast and curious as she reached the end of each pew, hesitating before lurching onward. Her neck corded to thin strips of straining muscle. The organ played on even as all but a few of the outermost worshipers went silent.
Halfway down the aisle she stopped, overcome by a rush of emotion so primal that I believed the human heart incapable of producing it. It came as a muffled explosion of grief and joy, discord and peace, lost and found. The gush brought Micky to her knees directly beside my mother and me. I reached toward her in something of shock and looked to Mom for help. In her I saw concern and pity and the first flickers of love.
Micky crawled. She made the last steps to Reverend Sebolt’s feet on her hands and knees with blond hair tacked to her tears and the neck of her Metallica T-shirt slung low to the ground, Kill ’Em All printed there like red roads leading toward a promised land.
Reverend Sebolt bent to lift her. I heard him say above the music, “Now ain’t no need for all that.” He held Micky close. Stephanie’s mother joined them, and the three formed a tight circle like a huddle on a pitcher’s mound. Whispering, their jaws moving. At the song’s end they turned Micky to face a congregation so stricken that any notion of Simpson’s field had long vanished.
“Today we welcome a sinner saved,” the preacher said. “This here’s Michaela Dullahan, and I hope you’ll welcome her. The angels rejoice, my friends, for she was once lost and yet now is found.”
Amens rose up. Hands clapped. The crowd descended upon Micky in a manner familiar to that which she had seemed to fear all along, only with love rather than scolding. They surrounded that girl, friend. My mother stood first to greet her. She bid me come along but I could not. I remained apart even as Micky searched me out. And while there flowed in that holy place happiness and joy abounding, I felt touched by neither and knew not why.
-3-
“Never thought I’d see it,” Dad said over dinner that afternoon. “A common Dullahan inside our church. And coming forward, no less.”
Mom winked at me. “I thought it was beautiful. Most heartfelt thing I seen in church for a long while.”
“Best not let the reverend hear it. I love your innocent heart, Greta, but it is a gullible thing. I expect it was all for spectacle. Probably the girl’s way a heading off whatever trouble’s coming from what all happened on Brutal’s farm.” He took a bite of his fried chicken. “Which we should speak on, Owen. Where’d you go after that dance?”
“Didn’t go nowhere.” Looking at Mom. “Stayed after to help clean up and then I come home. Some a the others were goin’.”
“Who? Travis? Jeffrey?”
I shrugged.
“You tell me the truth, boy.”
“Ain’t none a my business what they do,” I said. And at the next words, my mother rose to excuse herself: “Ain’t none what no Dullahan does neither.”
“Well, maybe you should think on it then. Maybe you should think hard. Because we come too far, Owen, and we too close to the end. There’s far more ahead than behind. You got to remember that.”
“‘We’?” I asked.
He looked at me.
“We come too far?”
“That’s right,” Dad said. He pointed his fork at me and said it again. “That’s right.”
-4-
I have to get up off this bench, stretch a little. It’s Justice, Williams, and Martinez up for the Yanks, but we’re out in the field and there’s nothing for me to do, no chance I’ll get called to pinch hit or run. Shoot, Mike will hardly know I’m gone at all, he’s so busy watching Johnson out there on the mound. Only Ethan sees me duck down into the tunnel. I think I spot Country looking over at me from his spot, bat tucked against his left knee.
Down the tunnel to where the crowd noise softens to a murmur and then to nothing. Only the buzzing of the lights here, wedged inside their wire cages.
I find Scooter in the clubhouse. He nods and moves off toward his little room of uniforms and caps and leaves me to silence. I don’t know what to do. Can’t sit at my locker, can’t make a quick call home because nobody is left. Dad is gone and Mom and Micky as well. Micky gone now for years and yet still here. I can feel her lurking. Watching me. I have felt this way before.
-5-
Late that afternoon she stood waiting beneath the oak’s canopy with her hands to her hips like it was past high time I arrived, smirking in a way that did not mean mischief but more a twisted kind of joy. It occurred to me for the first time that I no longer knew what sort of Michaela Dullahan I would find on our hill. In the days since the funeral I had kept company with the poor girl needing rescued and the grieving one who pined for her dead momma, the philosophical one who had thought long on the value of even the Todd Fosters of Camden. But as my steps slowed and the smile on my face greeted her, I knew this current version was different though not foreign. This was a Micky I had known from long before. A ghost from a time when we did not yet know all we did not have.
“There she is,” I said. “Camden’s crown princess. All hail.”
She stepped forward with arms outstretched to swallow me in the way she had reached for the light of that oncoming train. Her chin turned inward to fit the crook of my neck. We turned there as though in dance. My nose filled with the clean scents of cotton and soap.
“I been waiting near forever. Almost come looking for you. We should talk, Owen.”
“Yeah. I believe we should.”
Micky broke her hold of me and took my hand. We sat facing town rather than the mountains. Somewhere close a mockingbird called from its loneliness. Wind sighed through the oak’s upper branches.
She said, “I picked some flowers by the river after I got back from the church. Took them to the cemetery. It’s still a mess down there from where they put Momma in. It’s all tramped up. Reverend Sebolt must’ve tole Barry and Gary there’s a baseball somewhere down in that ground for all the digging they did. I thought Earl’d pass out from his drink before they finished. But they’re good men. Barry and Gary. They truly are.”
“You didn’t tell me you was coming to church today.”
“I didn’t know I was until I did.”
“Thing like that,” I said, “you got to tell me. We always been careful, Micky. We ain’t never been in the same place in town except for school and the ball field. But those times I know you’ll be there and I can get myself ready. So hard acting like you’re just somebody else I barely even know. You should of said something.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You want to tell me what that was all about? Coming in there and walking down that aisle the way you did? Because I left you last night and . . .”
And what? I left you last night and thought nothing had changed? Left you and figured everything would be fine from here on out, whatever happened out there in Brutal Simpson’s field was a thing so fraught with questions better unasked and unanswered that we would come to silent agreement to never speak of it?
I dropped my chin. Micky drew her leg over mine and ran a hand down my arm. Goose bumps prickled in the dappled sunlight.
“You ever take that biol
ogy class with Mister Mosher?” she asked.
“No.”
“Well, I did. It was about the dumbest thing ever. I never could get good grades in school. Momma always said I got her looks but Earl’s smarts. Didn’t much a what old Mosher said make sense, but one thing did. About the butterflies.”
“What butterflies?”
“There’s these monarchs. Every year they start out all the way from Canada to Mexico. Like a migration? But it’s such a long ways that it’s more than any a them can live. So they lay eggs along the way. One generation flies south, the next north. On and on forever. But when them monarchs fly over Lake Superior, they don’t move directly like they should. All they should do’s go straight south, you know? Like a line. But they all swerve east first, then south. Mister Mosher said ain’t nobody knows why. But he said there’s some think way back a million years ago or something, part a that lake might’ve been taken up by one of the biggest mountains in the whole continent. It got worn away or destroyed over time, but them butterflies, they somehow remember it. You imagine that? A mountain there taller than any, ageless rock, standing unmoved while everything lived and died around it. But them butterflies keep right on flying. Swinging on around where a mountain once stood.”
“I don’t get how that’s got to do with you goin’ to church.”
“You got a mountain and you got some frail little butterflies, which one you think’ll last? It seemed like a miracle to me first time I heard that. Made me think maybe I could last longer than my days, too. That somehow even after I’m old and dead and gone from here, somebody will be around to remember me for the things I done. I think all anybody ever really wants from life is to know they counted for something and it all wasn’t to waste. That’s why I went to church. Because I ain’t a waste now. I was gived a miracle.”
