Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Lovie the clown, the star of the Knick-Knack Circus, who for a laugh would pull strings of sausages out of her baggy sleeves, trip over her long rubber shoes, pour a bucket of water over her head, smack herself with a fly swatter, and allow Bassie’s mongrel sheepdog Alexander the Mutt to chase her around the Big Top, that ring of rocks and pebbles roofed by red streamers stretched from tree boughs. Lovie was the one who always led the singalong with which July Family Reunions drew to their ceremonial close, as dozens of hot, salty-sweaty, sunburnt, stuffed, inebriated, sleepy Hayeses swayed against one another while they sang the medley that made up the credo of their impossible church: the ones they called “happy songs.” Always songs like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” “I’ve Got the World on a String,” “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby,” and other such rollicking rose-colored lies about the sunny side of the street. How, thought the adult Raleigh, could a woman like Lovie, who had lost both her parents, half her siblings, random parts of others, both her own breasts, who’d lived through a heart attack, her husband’s bankruptcy, the deafness of one son, the two divorces of another, the refusal of her eldest, Jimmy, to give up, at forty-five, his pathetic fantasy of wedded bliss with his nymphomaniacal cousin Tildy Harmon; who’d lived through the Depression and World War II, not to mention the world since then, not to mention what the people in it were doing to each other and what God was doing to them; how could Lovie think Life was a bowl of anything except ashes? Unless, as Aunt Victoria told him, Hayeses never looked up from the card table long enough to notice disaster crashing through the wall; never closed their mouths long enough to notice that they’d thrown their lives away like the wasted food Lovie called on the imaginary Fifi to throw out, when there was a world out there ready to kill for the leftovers. Never noticed that their easy profligate love was not enough, and never had been.

  Raleigh had always thought Victoria was right in her appraisal of The Family; she was the sanest of his relatives, the only one who made any sense. But what of this first-born Hayes, with whom our hero so identified? The truth was that just as he accepted her dismissive synopsis of her siblings (including her annoyance with his father Earley for being a stubborn, irresponsible, improvident, irrational ne’er-do-well), so, in a sense, Raleigh had for many years reduced his favorite aunt to her siblings’ tags about her: their big sister Victoria Anna had devoted her life to carrying God’s supplies out to the darkest corners of the third world; she had done so at the complete sacrifice of “a real life”—which to them meant a husband and children in a house in Thermopylae—done so out of motives in which (depending on the speaker) Christian fervor, Communist leanings, celibate feminism, and an inexplicable dissatisfaction with “home” were mixed. They talked about her without judgment or comprehension. “Well, she’s not the marrying kind.” “Likes to keep to herself, never did like sharing our room, put a lock on her closet, oh Lord, I couldn’t even believe it, ’member that?” “She’s gone to do the Savior’s work.” “She’s got this notion about advancing the races or something, I don’t know.” “She lets men see her brains and that scares them off.” “She can’t stop speaking her mind, I guess.” “She can chew up your face all right, but she doesn’t mean what she says.” “She’s a lot like Mama.” “Remember the time when Vicky Anna just blew up out of nowhere at the table and kind of went crazy; heaven sakes, we all just sat there with our mouths open; it’s a wonder they didn’t fill up with flies.” “She’s just kind of a mystery, I guess, don’t you?” They saw but did not grasp her ambition, they heard but did not feel her irony and anger. They infuriated her by loving her without understanding, by giving her, upon her forced semiretirement from World Missions, all their shares in the house on East Main, as long as she promised never to sell it. They offered it as “a little surprise” on the benighted theory that she was the only one in the family without “a home,” the insulting assumption that now it was time for her “to start to have a real life”—she who had been more places than they had ever heard of! She told them, “Thank you, but I suggest we sell the house and divide the profits equally.”

  “Sell Mama and Papa’s house? Oh, Vicky Anna, you know you don’t mean that! Besides, what would Flonnie do if you sold the house? Heaven sakes!”

  What Flonnie did was move out the day Victoria took possession of the property. Flonnie Rogers understood more about Victoria Anna Hayes than did any of her siblings except the one closest in age, Earley, the first-born son. Possibly, Flonnie understood more than Earley did. Certainly she knew more than Earley’s son ever was to imagine. Despite the fact that from the first day he met her, Raleigh began to build a bond with his world-traveling godmother, forged of their shared impatience with the happiness of their blind relations, our hero now knew little more about Victoria Hayes than he had learned the day they met. But that particular day had been, for other reasons, a momentous one for Raleigh, and he was far too preoccupied with his own secrets to sense any secrets his aunt might be hiding behind her clear level ice-blue eyes.

  At the age of eight, in the presence of his relations and from the episcopal hands of the bishop (who by the laying on of those hands that day had confirmed the boy’s membership in the church), Raleigh Whittier Hayes, his knobbed knees shaking, received his first taste of the dry wafer and warm sherry known as the body and blood of Christ. “Yeeuck!” said his cousin Jimmy Clay. “I sure wouldn’t want to drink Jesus’s blood. You ought to come to our church. It’s a lot lot bigger than this one. A lot! Hopabobalopalong Cassidy! And we don’t drink blood like VAMPIRES. Whhooooooo!”

  Two decades were to pass before Raleigh Hayes took his cousin’s advice to join the popular Baptists. At the time, he pulled primly on his new bow tie and replied with a precocious grasp of the Elizabethan compromise, “You don’t have to believe it’s really blood, dopehead, it’s supposed to help you remember Jesus died for other people. You don’t know anything.”

  “Yaga Yaga minka linka chinka to you!” Having dutifully memorized the lessons of faith for this occasion, Raleigh was prepared to be catechized, and was disappointed that no one but Jimmy Clay bothered to challenge his knowledge. He had really expected something a little more momentous, something along the lines of the boy Jesus’s stunning the rabbis in the temple. At the noisy reception, his father brought the bishop over, but this beautifully robed elderly Yankee only shook his hand, and failed to make any queries about the Ten Commandments or to demand the Lord’s Prayer. Instead, the man wisely puffed on a slim expensive pipe, sipped wine, and told stories about Earley Hayes.

  “Your father here has given me a considerable amount of trouble, young man. Did you know that? But he’s very special to me. I ordained him as soon as he got out of seminary, July, I believe it was, Earley, or wasn’t it? Most attractive candidate I’d seen in ages, certainly down here.” The bishop dismissed the South as an Anglican wilderness with a wave of his wineglass. “Then, before I can place him, he drives up in the middle of the night and tells me he’s in a ‘crisis of faith!’ Has decided to be a trumpet player!”

  Earley Hayes leaned down to tie one of his son’s brightly polished black oxfords. “Come on, George. That was the summer Grace Louise died. I went off my rocker.”

  The bishop’s puffs on his pipe acknowledged the cost of bereavement, then he leaped ahead. “So, Raleigh, four years later, in comes this father of yours again, as if he’d just stepped out in the hall. He tells me Father Farell here at St. Thomas wants him as his curate, and he’d like my blessing.” He took the pipe away from his lips and put the glass in its place. “Horrible wine, Earley. By ‘blessing,’ you know, he meant the job. He’d had the good sense to marry your mother. You, young man, were soon to appear, and it was time to put away childish things.” He smiled at his pipe. “And so, Raleigh, this is a very pleasant occasion for me. My faith was rewarded, my judgment—I should say, my gamble—paid off. An indulgence of pride to boast, but I trust forgivable on this happy day. Because your father
was a fine curate, a fine chaplain overseas, and now that the war, we must thank God, is over, he’s making a good start as rector. I only wish,” the bishop glanced around the small, sparsely furnished lounge, “there were some way we could build up the membership down here.”

  Earley Hayes grinned, his thumbs stuck in the belt of his black cassock. “We could, George. All we have to do is consolidate with the Negro Episcopals. Poor Chester Haroldson at Holy Advent can’t even pay his fuel bills. Invite them in. Right?” He winked a sky-blue eye down at his son, who studiously buttoned his new jacket and wondered if they were going to ask him to recite the Creed.

  The bishop handed his rector his empty wineglass. “For everything under heaven, there’s a time and a season, Earley,” and he turned to chat with Mrs. PeeWee Jimson, having already ascertained that hers was the largest pledge in the parish.

  This poor bishop had, of course, publicly indulged his pride in Earley Hayes just a year too soon. Already, if he’d paid closer attention, he would have noticed that Sarah Ainsworth Hayes pulled slightly back whenever her husband took her arm to bring her into a conversation. By the following summer, she’d asked Earley to leave their house. Earley, living in sin with the pregnant Roxanne, had asked the Reverend Chester Haroldson not only to preach but to say mass, and asked Haroldson’s entire and entirely black congregation to attend St. Thomas’s Easter Sunday services, the most important social event on the church calendar. By the following summer, the vestry of St. Thomas had asked the bishop to tell Earley Hayes he was not the sort of shepherd they had in mind, and the bishop had done so. ‘“This shabby situation,” he’d said, with a sad puff on his pipe, “I take as my personal mistake, my personal shame, and, I say this, Earley, with sorrow, my personal loss. But I will not reassign you in this diocese nor recommend your transfer to another. You’re still, of course, an ordained priest. Only you can renounce those vows; but as you’ve seen fit to renounce every other—”

  “Oh, George,” said (ex) Reverend Earley Hayes. “You’re such a by fuck pompous ass.” But none of this had been predicted the day of Raleigh’s confirmation. All the Hayeses were happily gathered that day, not only because they loved coming together for any festive or ceremonial occasion—particularly if it involved one of their own—but because Raleigh’s godmother, Victoria Anna Hayes, had just flown in from Hawaii, back from the Far East for the first time after, a twelve-year absence from Thermopylae which her siblings blamed completely on the Japanese, since it was impossible for them to imagine anyone’s not coming home sooner unless physically constrained by world catastrophe. Victoria, still wearing her trim blue WAC uniform, was the last of the Hayeses to return from the war (of those who were returning—Whittier and Big Em’s husband had both died overseas for their country), and everybody was showing Vicky their spouses and children and whispering about the little surprise party for her that evening at “Papa’s house.”

  The first thing Victoria Anna Hayes said to her godson was, “It’s not going to be much of a surprise if they keep talking about it, is it, little boy? How do you do, I’m your aunt Victoria Hayes.” She held out a white-gloved hand and briskly shook his small one.

  “I’m Raleigh Whittier Hayes,” he solemnly replied. “I’m named for my godfather Whittier. The Nazis blew up his plane. You’re my godmother.” He was staring at the ribbons over the breast pocket of her jacket. “I didn’t know they let women fight in wars, but Paschal says you killed a million Japs.”

  “You can tell Paschal, he’s confusing me with Harry Truman,” she said. “Did you get those stamps?”

  “Yes, ma’am…Thank you.”

  “You look like your grandfather. My papa.”

  “No, I don’t.” Raleigh was horrified to hear himself compared to a speech-garbled spastic legless man in a wheelchair. “I look like my daddy.”

  She gave her nose an angry pinch. “Your daddy looks like my papa. He’ll look more like him too, if he keeps on smoking and drinking. But try to tell a Hayes to use their head. Do you like stamps?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’d like to see all those places you saw.”

  “Then do it, little boy.”

  Raleigh could think of nothing to reply to this command, and was beginning to tug at his bow tie under the scrutiny of steel-blue eyes intensified by the startling dark tan of her face. It was a very handsome, but not a very comfortable face; the nose was too sharp, the chin was too strong. Her hair, sun-bleached the color of bronze, was trimly cut, and she wore no makeup or jewelry. Like her hair, her figure was trim and orderly. In the silence, Raleigh was driven to say, “I’m almost eight.”

  “I’m almost thirty-five.…When you’re that age, you won’t think it’s so old. Besides, then you won’t have to do what people tell you anymore, when they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  This psychic reading of his thoughts was the first inkling Raleigh had of a shared sensibility with this brisk, tanned woman. It prompted him to confide, “I got confirmed today. I had to study all summer, and now I get to take communion.”

  She crossed her arms, her wrists brown between the white gloves and the gold buttons of her sleeves. “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why do you want to take communion? If you’re going to do a thing, you’ve got to have a reason. Unless, of course, you’re a Hayes.”

  Raleigh crossed his arms; his blue jacket also had gold buttons. “You’re a Hayes.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “How come?” he challenged her. “Did you change your name or something?”

  She stared back down at him. “Or something,” she said, adding, “I brought you a present in my steamer trunk. From a place called New Guinea.”

  “What is it?” Then, “Thank you,” he remembered to say.

  “Wait and see.”

  Raleigh put his hands into the pockets of his new blue suit pants. “I do have a reason. Why I took communion. But I don’t want to say it.”

  “Fine.” Victoria was whisking her hand to brush away the smoke of her brother Furbus’s cigarette, as he came over and stretched his thin arm around her shoulder. She finished her sentence. “You don’t have to say a reason, little boy, but you ought to know it.”

  Furbus grinned. “Vicky Anna, oh oh oh you beautiful doll, listen to this one. There were these two Catholic bricklayers working on the sidewalk outside this whorehouse. So a Protestant minister comes along and goes right inside, so the first bricklayer says…”

  Raleigh did have a reason for deciding to join the church, and he knew very well what it was. He had drawn up a private contract with God in which he was prepared to offer dutiful faith in exchange for two favors: (1) that the Almighty stop his mother from being sad, and (2) that He invest Raleigh himself with superhuman physical strength, just as He had earlier done for Samson (and Raleigh had no worries about doing anything so ridiculous as allowing a silly girl to get near enough to cut his hair). In offering this exchange, the eightyear-old cast aside a skepticism already disposed to doubt Superman and Santa Claus. He would take a chance: if adults honestly believed that faith could move mountains, then Raleigh was willing to see if it could enable him to pull an automobile. For this was the test he’d devised to verify whether or not that wafer was the magic pill it was reputed to be. He would pull a car down the street, just as Samson had pulled down the temple.

  The desire for strength was not a new one; Raleigh had always hated being thin and frail, particularly when he was powerless to stop his father from flinging him happily in the air, or his hefty cousin Paschal from sitting on his chest and tickling him. So drawn was the boy to feats of brawn that despite his shy dislike of public display, he’d asked to be his uncle Hackney’s assistant in performances of the Knick-Knack Circus, where the barrel-chested baseball player starred as “Hercules Hackney the Man of Steel,” whose easy lifting of barbells, picnic tables, and even of Big Em, awed the small child. It was Raleigh’s job to hand Hackney the bike chains to snap, th
e old golf clubs to twist into hearts, the tin cans to crush atop his head. For this privilege, he even allowed Lovie to pin a tablecloth around his neck as a cloak.

  It was not surprising that Raleigh should worry about his frailty during the final war years, when all the male grown-ups had vanished, leaving a house of women (half of whom themselves disappeared during the day, in overalls and hair nets; returning at night to listen with frowns to the radio talking about “Yanks pushed back,” and “Corregidor fell,” and “Allied forces bombed Hamburg yesterday,” and other cryptic statements whose meaninglessness made them scarier). It was not surprising, when his father (gone for more than a year, not to fight, but to help fighters say prayers) had told the toddler to take good care of his mother and be a strong little fellow on the homefront. On the homefront, Raleigh did what he could: he kept his light out after dark, he helped his mother count her ration coupons at the grocery store, he pulled his wagon behind Lovie as she marched down Main Street pounding on doors and demanding nylon hose, toothpaste tubes, rubber tires, and anything metal that wasn’t nailed down. But Raleigh worried. Even after his father returned and grown-ups started cheering by the radio at night, he brooded on his weakness. He lay on his back waiting for airplanes to roar out of the big slow clouds, fearful that if the planes came, he would not be quick and strong enough to grab the bombs before they fell, and hurl them back at the sky. Certainly not big enough to stop the “20,000 TONS OF T.N.T. DROPPED ON JAPS,” that his mother read about in the Thermopylae Sun that summer of 1945. He certainly wasn’t big enough to catch an A-bomb and throw it away.

  In the autumn of that year, Raleigh’s anxiety was not alleviated by Emperor Hirohito’s surrender. In fact, it grew. His mother was going away for a short while because “sometimes grown-ups need to be alone to think about their problems, and sometimes they can’t solve those problems, and sometimes lives have to change, and we have to be strong.” And she’d begun to cry, a sight so rare and dreadful that her son began to cry as well. That night, he offered God his proposal: solve his mother’s problems, make him as strong as Samson, and he would believe.