“See?” he says. “It’s just tubes and wires and capacitors.”
Slowly, I nod. But it doesn’t mean I believe him; it doesn’t mean there isn’t something in the radio, even if I can’t see it. You can’t see love, either, but it’s as real as anything.
Daddy replaces the panel, plugs in the cord, and turns the radio back on. He turns the knob to the local station and the sound is still there. My ear goes stuffy, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up like soldiers at attention, and a funny, rubbery taste fills my mouth.
“Hear anything now?”
I cross my fingers behind my back and say no. The sound, all scratchy moving static, gets even louder and makes my stomach feel twisty and wrong, the way it does before I’m about to get sick. Daddy turns the radio off again, sits down on the stool, and pats his knee.
Once I sit down, he says, “War is a really bad thing,” and my stomach gets all twisty again. “Even when it’s for the right reasons. And you know how you can just forget about what you had for breakfast or dinner?” I nod.
“War isn’t like that. You can’t just forget about it. It’s too big. It makes me feel bad and angry sometimes. That’s why I come in here, so I won’t get angry at you or your momma because it isn’t your fault.”
“I know, Daddy,” I say.
“I love you and Momma, even when I’m angry. I don’t want you to think I don’t.”
“Will you always remember it?”
He smiles, but it’s the new one. “No, not always. Now why don’t you go ahead and play, instead of being stuck in here with me?”
I give him a hug; he smells of aftershave lotion and sawdust. He smells like Daddy. He puts the radio back on, and I want to run out of the garage but I make myself walk normal; the sound follows me to the big open door. Unshed tears make knots in my chest and I hold them in all the way down the street, all the way to the woods, but once I’m inside, hidden by all the trees, the knots break and I bury my face in my hands. I know why he doesn’t believe me. The monster in the radio won’t let him.
—
It’s raining so hard in the morning that Daddy doesn’t go to work. He can’t even put the big garage door up. He tries, but the wind blows the rain right in. So he sits in the garage with the door closed and it keeps raining, and then it starts to thunder and lightning and Daddy isn’t shouting or crying or anything at all, but the radio is so loud I can hear the sound, even in my room.
When he comes in for lunch, his eyes are all puffy and his mouth all tight. He’s turned the radio down but I hear the sound and even though I don’t want to eat—the stuffiness in my ear is so big it’s in my stomach, too—Momma puts a sandwich in front of me and I take a bite. I still have a mouthful of bologna when there’s the biggest crash of thunder I’ve ever heard. Daddy drops his glass. It rolls on its side, spilling water everywhere, and off the table. As the glass shatters, his face changes, all mannequin cold, and I look at Momma and her face is different, too, all teary and scared.
The air between them, between all of us, is heavy and wrong and it makes my heart hurt. I throw my sandwich down, push away from the table, and run to the garage. I hear Momma and Daddy shout my name as I turn the lock and grab the bench, shoving it up under the door handle.
“It’s not you, Daddy,” I shout. “It’s the thing in the radio! I know it is!”
The garage is too warm, but it’s chilly too, and the sound is everywhere. In the corners, creeping along the floor, in my head. I want to run back inside and hide under the covers, but I can’t. I have to help Daddy. I have to make the monster stop hurting him. I take the longest, biggest screwdriver and the claw hammer from Daddy’s workbench and stand in front of the radio. “I know you’re in there,” I say. I poke the front with the tip of the screwdriver and jump back, heart racing. Nothing happens. “You better come out.” I poke the radio again. Momma and Daddy are banging on the door and telling me to open up, but they sound far away.
The front of the radio bows out, flattens, bows out again. Like it’s breathing. I drop the screwdriver and my hand tightens on the hammer. I swing it once, and make a hole on the top. I swing it again and the hole gets bigger. The monster hiding inside starts to come out, sliding from the broken part, and I scream.
I can see the monster, but I can’t. It’s there and not there at the same time. The air is all wavery and pulsing. It goes up and up, spreading out, leaning over me. It’s bigger than can fit in the radio, bigger than me, bigger than Daddy. Both my ears go stuffy and my mouth is thick with the taste of burning rubber. I smell salt water and hear a roar, angry and loud.
I grab a handful of sawdust and throw it. It sticks to the still-growing shape and I see it I see it I see it, and I never want to see it again. The big door slides open and Momma and Daddy rush in, shouting my name. They see the monster and skid to a stop, their eyes big as dinner plates.
Daddy rushes over and grabs me, and his face goes blank. He holds me too tight and I squirm to get away. “Please, Daddy, please,” I say, and then we’re not in the garage anymore. We’re standing on a beach. Men are shrieking; guns are firing, the bullets buzzing like wasps in the air; the sand is spattered with blood. And I hear the monster, all wasp buzz and snake rattle and machinery hum, making everyone angry, making everyone hurt, making everyone want to hurt each other, and it just gets louder and louder. And way inside, deep under the hum and the rattle and the buzz, is something like laughter. I hear it in my ear and I hear it in my head, and Daddy’s arms get tighter and tighter and it’s hard to breathe. I twist and squirm, but I can’t get free.
“Daddy, please,” I shout. “Let me go! I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to stay here!” He looks at me and the sand and the soldiers and his face is empty, as though someone rubbed it with a gum eraser over and over again.
I kick and I pummel his shoulders with my fists, but his face stays the same, and I’m afraid he isn’t even my daddy anymore. I go limp and rest my head, my mouth near his ear, and whisper, “Daddy, please. Please come home.”
He shudders, his mouth opens then snaps shut, his teeth clicking together, and he lets me go. We’re in the garage again. His eyes are sad, but strong, too. He grabs the hammer and swings harder than I ever could. As plastic and glass spray everywhere, the monster pulls back into the ruined radio. The wire connecting the radio to the wall sparks and lets out a puff of smoke. Daddy shouts something to Momma and she runs over to the grey box hanging on the wall that holds all the power to the house. She flips switch after switch, but she’s too late; the monster is moving away, leaving the radio, leaving the house.
We run outside. The wires running overhead from our house to the street are sparking, and I see the thing moving inside, worm flat and snake fast. It reaches the first pole and a gout of orange-blue flames and black smoke spit out. The wood cracks; the pole breaks in half.
The thing keeps moving. As it races through the wires, the poles break one by one, heading up the street, heading away. Everywhere, sparks are shooting up, firework bright, and all the neighbors come outside, shouting in alarm. It reaches the top of the street and there’s a loud bang. My ears pop, and all the stuffiness is gone.
Everything is quiet. All the electric poles are broken and the wires are dark snakes on the wet grass, but there aren’t any sparks. The air smells like a fireplace after the flames go out. My knees don’t want to work right anymore and I start to fall, but Daddy picks me up and holds me, even though I’m too big, and I hold him back. I hold him tight as I can and he tells me everything is okay now. Everything is okay.
—
Daddy doesn’t hide in the garage anymore. Sometimes he goes into the woods and down to the creek and skips stones, but he doesn’t cry or get angry. I know because I follow him. I think he knows that, too.
He laughs now, almost the way he used to, and he smiles a lot, the kind that goes into his eyes. The kind that’s real.
Sometimes I still hear the sound, but it’s fa
r, far away. I won’t ever tell Daddy, though. I want him to keep smiling. I want him to keep laughing. I think maybe it can’t be killed, that sound, that monster, but it’s not here anymore, and Daddy doesn’t have as many bad days. That’s good enough for me.
DRAWING GOD
Michael Wehunt
The tires bite just enough when I yank the truck over, saving me from a tumble of eighty feet or more into the trees. I sit here a while staring through the streaked window, shaking my head back and forth, in a faint no. Folks call this hill First Mountain, on account of your ears starting to pop and it’s high enough to see the woods spread out in a rich quilt of treetops still summer green. It’s the prelude, a two-mile pocket of pine and oak before the greater forest opens up and climbs into the Appalachians. The dry white mouth of the sky hangs dull over the world, the pale yellow air between, with a single blemish in the whole of this near-wilderness.
It’s that wrong thing that’s pulling at my eyes. A mile out, back toward town, a needle pierces that quilt. The tip of something just above the trees, a taper, topped with what I wish I could say doesn’t look like a white cross. But never has a shape been so stark and declarative. It’s like remembering. Like I’d forgot. I roll the window down. There’s nothing to hear but I hear it anyway: a soundless clarion lifted through the blank day, rubbing my eardrums like the pressure of altitude.
Time creeps through the trees. Somebody’s gone and built a church deep in the woods, here at the feet of the mountains. I can’t claim it means nothing. As a boy, I watched this very scene drawn on a long-ago wall, at a child’s height. My twin sister drew it. There were green and blue and white crayons. White shoes planted by the pile of crayon nubs, a white dress opened up by white legs, traced with blue veins like rivers through a myth. Those veins seemed to sometimes twitch—
And Lord I can remember us children crawling through the buried church like worms in the dust of afternoons. The light always slanting through holes in the earthen ceiling. In thrall of what? There’s not a soul left to answer, and I will not or cannot. I remember—I almost hear her voice saying the cataract of God would soon fall away. Sister Heaven. Us kids all moaning and our faces smeared white. Dragging our bodies across the floor.
It’s like tumblers falling in a lock. I sit in my truck on the gravel shoulder, the Blue Ridge hunched in the distance, and certain things come sweating back through the skin of sixty-odd years. The little school and what we learned there. And the church. I’ve not thought of those places in a long time, even when they never left me.
I look out at that white shape and think up lies to tell myself. Some little one’s kite wandered lonesome out into the forest, maybe, and landed like a paper angel atop a tree. Just please don’t let it be a church steeple.
Come a day God shall build His church atop the earth, instead of beneath it. Will you be ready to get your blessings, little one? Sister Heaven rocking us against her, whispering into our hair. I push away the next part, what we kids were doing when she’d say these things. The image trembles so close, but I’ve had long practice of not seeing. I have to remind myself Sister Heaven died all those decades ago.
I close my eyes, but Cara Lynn’s there—she so often is, even all these years later, but this time we’re eight; all the shadows in the church are wrong. There are too many, swaying, and the tops of them come to points. My sister’s got a stick of white chalk and she’s dragging a big circle across the pine floor. Behind us is the sound of wet suckling and I know to stare hard at my sister’s fingers gliding, her skin dusting pale as the greasepaint on her face. I know to listen to the clack of the chalk as it hits each gap between the floorboards. Cara Lynn always liked to make the circle first, before she tried to draw God in.
My beautiful twin. She was seventeen minutes older than me—I was slow following her out of Mama, but then I followed her everywhere until our fifteenth birthday, when the world took her. Left the unheard echo of her voice in that church, whispering at me to help her figure out what God might look like.
My eyes fling open. It’s still there. The more I look at the cross, the more it doesn’t move. A kite would move, would try to free itself. You just shouldn’t look at it, Pearson. You shouldn’t have ever come to visit Cara Lynn and Mama on anything but a Sunday. The regular day.
But of late I miss my girls more than I ever have. I let off the brake pedal with what feels like someone else’s foot. The cemetery’s right down at the bottom of the hill, the first mountains drawn hazy in the near distance as I turn into the lot. The Appalachians never look close until you’re right on their doorstep. Gravel dust flumes up in quick ragged sheets. I turn the air conditioning on—it sounds as old as I am—and for a long time I sit with its breath in my face, picturing that kite trapped in the treetops. Changing the picture in my head until it is just a kite.
The lot’s empty. I get out, loose-boned and shaking with memory, shut the truck door with a rusted squeal. Already my shirt’s sticking to my back. The sky’s all parched and a kind of un-color without the whisper of a cloud, the birds struck from it weeks ago. We’ve been crippled with drought since spring. I look up the slope at the big bowed oak, under whose shade Mama and Cara Lynn are at their long rests. I search its limbs for strength.
If they could, they’d wonder why I’m here mid-week. I’m apt to wonder, too, except for the weight I’ve felt in me, like a secret about to tell itself. Sins climbing out of their closets. Everything’s been crooked and strange, discolored, the smear of sun rising again and again to simmer the earth. The days long and pale things—but this brings another memory, other things drawn on walls. Down the hole we’d crawl through—
Oh Lord help me. Heat like this has killed better old men than this one, but I make it up the rise and pass through rows of gravestones to the shadow of the Fuller tree, where my own bones will rest not too far off. It’s got to be fifteen degrees cooler under its sanctuary. The sun’s cut up through the branches, falling like hot coins on my arms. I cup my hands on my knees, wait on my heart to steady in its tired cage.
“It’s me, Cara Lynn. Mama. It’s Pearson.”
There’s always such quiet here, away from the tidy rows of headstones. They buried my girls where the roots could break open their coffins if they had a mind to, away from the white folks, but I’ve had a long time to accept that, and finally to ignore it. I treasure the shade of their laurel oak. Let it try to ease me. I’m a fool talking to graves, but who’s to say they can’t hear me down in the earth, what laws the spirit abides by after the body’s time has passed? Plenty talk to their dead. I never minded it before, which is a fine thing seeing as how I’ve been doing it for fifty-three years, since Mama passed and I was left alone to the world. I forgot to bring flowers, but it does me some good to see last Sunday’s orchids still strong and proud against the oak’s trunk. None of that heat-rot’s set in yet.
I lower myself to the ground, wary of bringing up the steeple in the woods. Mama never suspected what went on back then, I don’t think. We hid things from her out of a confused fear, and because Cara Lynn got spanked something awful the one time she asked peculiar questions about God.
I remember evenings at the dinner table, me and Cara Lynn sunken and quiet like something had been pulled out of us. Forks tapped dishes, and we could hear each other’s throats working when we swallowed. A place was still set for Daddy even though he’d been dead two years by then, with the farm hardly dragging on. I believe his empty chair spooked me more than anything Sister Heaven showed us. Once or twice I saw white paint behind one of Cara Lynn’s ears, where I’d missed a spot cleaning her face, and I’d sneak my hand over and wipe it off. Later we’d whisper across our bedroom at night, using new words our tongues couldn’t pronounce.
There was less of Mama after Daddy died. My clearest images of her involve his things. She’d sit in his rocking chair, holding his good flannel against her face. She was a sweet mother, but I have nine years of memories like that. And aft
er what happened to Cara Lynn—Mama held on another four years until the stroke, but I really lost both of them in 1960.
My sister snuck down the drain pipe from our bedroom the night of our fifteenth birthday, and two days later she was found in a mountain ravine behind the wheel of her boyfriend’s father’s car. Why she’d been driving at all, much less alone up there, is a question I gave up asking long ago. My life would have been such a different thing with her in it.
Crouched on the windowsill that last night, she told me she was going to church. I’ve always remembered it like a sick joke, one of the ones that would always upset me. We weren’t a family of faith in those late days, on account of segregation—there are just twenty-two of us in Ellijay now, a handful more back then—and on account of Mama carrying a grudge against God. That was fine by me, after Sister Heaven, but I could never figure how fine it was by Cara Lynn. I didn’t like the way she’d speak of God, how it persisted as she approached womanhood. How we got distant, somehow, how she’d come home looking tired but with the ember of excitement in the flush of her skin. But I’d give anything to snatch her off that windowsill.
I say her name and my voice sounds small here, less of my body than usual. “Was there another church? After the fire? I can’t bring myself to think the first one was real. Down in that hole. I can’t.”
Cicadas ratchet up in abrupt symphony; they were dead silent until now, and a soft-handed breeze comes through the trees. “After Sister Heaven died, I rid all that from my mind. But Cara Lynn, what if you didn’t—” and I just can’t speak anymore, what with the chirring of the bugs and the breathing of the world all around. Something wrong presses up against the skin of things all of a sudden.
I stand up quick and my knees pop. So damned many memories are swarming. The skinny trees off to the right, and the thought of a church hiding inside them. Except it’s not hiding, is it, not with that cross jutting up like a dare through the treetops.
Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2 Page 9
