by S. M. Hulse
He studies me for a moment, then nods.
* * *
In the laundry room, I find a pair of Samuel’s jeans I recently mended and the old Army sweatshirt Kev gave him. A T-shirt would be better, but of course Samuel never wears short sleeves. I hold the clothes out to the pastor. “They’re Samuel’s,” I say cautiously. “I don’t have anything else.”
“They’re fine.” I listen for any hint he doesn’t mean it, but either he really does think they’re fine or he’s a good liar.
I make sure my catheter supplies are hidden in a drawer in the bathroom, pull a clean towel from the cupboard. “Take a shower if you want,” I say. “Water takes a minute to get hot.”
In the kitchen cupboards I find some dried pasta and jarred tomato sauce, and in the fridge a bagged salad mix that’s only a little wilted. I dump the sauce in a pan, sprinkle in some dried oregano and thyme, add the pasta to the larger pot. Soon I hear the water in the bathroom shut off, and a minute later the pastor emerges, his light hair damp-dark, the wet jeans wadded in one hand. I put them in the dryer, turn back to the pastor. “You’re taller than Samuel.”
“So I gathered.” The sleeves of the sweatshirt end a couple inches above his wrists, the jeans more than a couple inches above his ankles.
If only you’d put those on before tackling that tree, you could’ve walked through the creek without getting a stitch wet. As soon as I think the words I realize I can’t say them. This isn’t the time for a joke; there will probably never be a time for a joke between this man and me.
I carefully lift the pot of pasta off the stove and balance it on a wooden board I’ve set across my lap. I wheel to the sink and pour the pot’s contents into a colander, again carefully. I was less cautious as a teenager, once spilled boiling water on my leg. Didn’t even notice until I undressed for bed and saw the burn. Still have an ugly scar on my thigh. The pastor doesn’t offer to help. I would have expected him to. I wonder if he’s being sensitive, doesn’t want to make assumptions about my disability, or if he’s angry, felt a duty to cut up the tree when I asked but nothing more. I wonder if the part of him that is a pastor is at war with the part of him that is a father.
I serve the food and take my place at the table. My fork is halfway to my mouth when I notice he’s praying. Nothing ostentatious—hands in his lap, head bowed and eyes shut, lips moving quickly and silently—but I feel I’ve been caught cheating at something, and I keep my fork midair until he looks up.
We eat for several minutes in near silence, the only sounds the clink of silverware, chewing, and the clattering rumble of the dryer. The pastor studies the kitchen, his eyes gliding over the store-brand cereal boxes, the dirty dishes in the sink, the framed painting of a bowl of fruit I hung to cover the hole Samuel punched in the wall. The ordinariness of it all must frustrate him. “A little late for this,” I say, after more silence, “but I’m embarrassed to admit I’m not sure what I should call you. Reverend, or…”
“Asa,” he says. “Asa’s fine.”
“An unusual name.”
“My father was a pastor, too,” he says, his eyes still roving about the room. “A preacher. Tent revivals, hellfire and brimstone, faith healing, that sort of thing. He named me after an Old Testament king who lived a life faithful to God until he developed a foot ailment late in his life. Rather than trust God to heal him, he turned to physicians.” He glances toward me. “He died.”
His tone is matter-of-fact, and I’m not sure what to say.
“It could have been worse,” Asa continues conversationally. “My grandfather—also a preacher—named my father Judas. As a daily reminder that, quote, ‘We are all complicit in the death of Christ.’ He’s also the one that changed the family name to Truth from something blandly Germanic.”
“Sounds kind of intense.”
“You know what Emily means?”
The sound of her name almost makes me choke. Asa hasn’t announced it as he did at the prayer service, has instead spoken it with such familiarity, such ease, that it brings her presence into the room in a sharper, more immediate way. I find my voice, offer a weak, “No.”
“Neither do I. Her mother and I chose the name because we thought it was pretty. That’s all.”
I put down my fork. “I hope I didn’t take you away from her today.”
“You didn’t.” Asa looks down at his plate. “Her grandparents are with her. Catherine’s parents. My wife died when Em was a toddler. Car accident.” He touches his left hand with his right, spins an invisible wedding ring around his finger. I don’t think he realizes he’s done it. “Em’s close with her grandparents,” he continues. “They’re good people. But since the accident I’ve always suspected they resent me a little. For not being there when it happened.” He swallows. “For being alive when their daughter is not.” He turns to look out the window, though it’s dark now and I doubt he can see anything but his own reflection. “I’ve always tried to convince myself I was imagining it. But now when we meet at the hospital, they hardly look at me, and when they do…” He winces. “They blame me for what happened to Em, I think. It was my church.”
A confessional quality to his words. And now a silence, a sense that he’s waiting. I don’t know what to do, what he expects me to do. Absolve him? Assure him? He’s the pastor. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Asa jerks his head up, locks his eyes to mine. His features have hardened, and when he speaks it is with a growl. “Damn right it wasn’t.”
I’ve been half expecting anger ever since Asa answered my call—I thought I was prepared for it—but his fury so eclipses his vulnerability, is so absolute, so righteous, I know I don’t hide the flinch. Asa stares hard at me, temples bulging as he works his jaw, lips pressed taut as though he doesn’t trust himself with further speech. There’s something wrenching in the realization that anger this hot is so close to the surface. That my brother is the reason it’s there.
It’s the moment for an apology. I can feel it on my lips, automatic but genuine. But I know that if I apologize now—if I start apologizing for Samuel now—I’ll never be able to stop.
When I speak I do so very quietly, with as conciliatory a tone as I can muster, knowing it won’t soften what I say. “It wasn’t my fault, either.”
He stands suddenly, his chair skidding hard against the linoleum, his hands in fists. I don’t move. I try to believe my own words. Try to tell myself I am not my brother; I don’t deserve this anger. Asa flexes his hands, balls them into fists again. The temptation of violence plain to see. Then he shakes his head minutely and hugs himself so tightly his knuckles blanch white. I brace myself for harsh words, or worse, but when I look Asa in the eyes, I see the heavy sheen of welling tears.
“I—it’s just—” A single, choking gasp. “I can’t,” he says, and then he is gone.
* * *
I hiked back to the truck today. Wasn’t the first time I’ve done it, but it ought to be the last. They could find it. They could be watching it. I went for the radio. I scanned the stations for almost an hour—too long—but there was nothing about me, about what I did. Just music and idle talk. I hope that means they’re leaving you alone now, Jo. Still, I wish I’d found something. I wanted to know about the little girl. I wanted to know if she was still in the hospital. If she’d gone home. Or if she …
I don’t want to have killed someone, Jo.
Not again.
* * *
Sunday I consider going to church. I suppose I’m only thinking about it because of Asa. I wonder if he’s preaching to his own congregation, what he’s saying if he is. His father was into hellfire and brimstone; his grandfather didn’t sound like he was one for gentle theology, either. I wouldn’t have imagined Asa preaching like that until I saw his anger Friday.
I visit the cemetery instead. I don’t go often; it’s too public, the patch of lawn right there off First, in the shadow of Gethsemane. When the cemetery was established, it would have been on the outski
rts of town, but now it’s in the center. Most of the oldest stones aren’t stone at all, but wood, and now they’re either gone or too rotted to read. I wonder if they ever accidentally dig up an old grave that has no marker, have to silently apologize and fill the hole, try again somewhere else. So much beneath the surface of the land in this valley.
I glance at the mining memorial as I pass. The iron figure on the pedestal points toward the sky, the headlamp on his hard hat burning twenty-four hours a day. It seems a little cruel. My father and the others died in darkness. No sky. No light.
Kev’s headstone stands bright and white near the southern fence. It would be one of thousands at Arlington, but stands out starkly here. Something glints in the grass at its base: a can of Dr Pepper. Hawkins leaves one every week.
My mother’s grave is beside the paved footpath; I can park my chair right next to it. The flat stone is simple, dark and polished, BELOVED MOTHER engraved below her name. The grass has been trimmed shorter around the stone, the green blades only just beginning to curl over the edges of the marker; Samuel must have been here not long before the bombing.
I’ve always thought our mother should never have been buried here. Our father wasn’t. Still inside the mountain. It would have been better, to my thinking, for her to have been cremated so Samuel and I could scatter her ashes on the mountain later. I never said as much. It was a late funeral, more than two weeks after her death, but I wasn’t there. Still in the hospital, and then in rehab for another month afterward. I don’t know if my brother made the decisions or not, but there’s no changing them now. And if he made the decisions, if this is what he wanted—a place to visit our mother, to see her name—then I’m glad he did it.
I should have brought flowers. My mother loved daffodils. Not that she would know. I wish I believed she would. I wish I could feel her presence here. I wish I could ask her what to do. I am twenty-two, but it doesn’t feel as grown-up as I thought it would when I was a child. I didn’t know what Samuel was going to do in Elk Fork—I had no idea—but perhaps I should have. And I don’t know what to do now. Don’t know if I should try to ignore what Hawkins suggested at the Knock-Off, or try to confirm it. Don’t know what to do if I do confirm it. And though I am old enough to know this might not be true, I can’t help but believe that my mother would have known. That she would have been able to tell me what to do. That if only she were still here somehow everything would be all right. And I wish I’d brought her flowers.
I reach into my bag and take out what I did bring. The Bible is small, with a stiff leather cover, a sharp crease across the front. My mother’s gold wedding band hangs from the ribbon sewn into the binding; I touch the cool metal and then reluctantly let it go. I open the cover and look at the Polaroid tucked into the first pages: my father holding me as an infant, a smile I wish I remembered. Memories of vanished people. Then I hold the book spine-down in my hand, let it fall open to where I know it will.
The summer I was fourteen, Samuel spent weeks poring over this Bible at the kitchen table. He’d quit going to church the year before, and though I hadn’t attended regularly in almost two, I’d been glad to see him with his Bible again. His lips had moved silently, eyes tracking rapidly across the text, fingers flipping hurriedly through the pages. One evening, he called me to his side and led me through a bewildering series of begats that, according to him, provided undisputable proof that Jesus was not a Jew. A year after that, I found the Bible in the garbage can, tossed on top of a moldy heel of bread and a winding orange peel.
It always falls open to the page with the Twenty-Third Psalm. I felt relieved the first time it happened. He’d rejected the Bible, yes, trashed it like it meant nothing to him, but he’d turned to this page so often the memory of the movement had imprinted itself on the book’s spine. Even then I understood my brother was deeply troubled, was searching for meaning in dangerous places, and I’d been relieved to think he might have found a little peace in these familiar words of comfort, if only for a time.
Then I noticed the smoothed paper, the smeared ink. Samuel had run his fingers over the words dozens if not hundreds of times, I guessed, over these first few verses of the psalm. But not the Twenty-Third. The Twenty-Second, on the facing page. I knew it only for that first line Jesus had echoed on the cross—My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?—and was gutted, reading it through that day, to find verse upon verse of lamentation. My eyes fixed upon two particularly smudged lines: my heart is like wax / it is melted within my breast.
I read it again now, alone beside our mother’s grave, the Bible open on my lap, and wonder if my brother ever read all the way through the psalm. If he read far enough to reach the turn in the song, far enough to reach the relief, the praise, the gratitude. If he read far enough to find comfort.
* * *
The latest painting of the house isn’t working. My fourth failure. Adding the soil to the paint was an improvement, though I’m sure an art critic might have something to say about it, probably nothing nice: sentimental or overly literal or childlike—or worse, childish. That isn’t what’s bothering me; this painting is for me, and I don’t have to care what anyone else thinks of it. But it feels like I haven’t trusted my acrylics to do the job, yet haven’t entirely committed to something bolder.
Maybe I should try pencils or ink or even pastels. I didn’t like oils the few times I used them, but I’ve created a handful of decent watercolors over the years. Can’t quite get the idea of the soil out of my head, though. There’s something about incorporating the earth into this painting of a place, of this place.
I set my canvas aside, prop a Masonite board on my easel, tape a piece of canvas paper to it. Tap my brush against my palm. Finally I lean over and scoop a small amount of soil into a shallow dish, dampen it with a few drops from my water jar. I mix the mud with an old palette knife, dip one of my more battered brushes into the mix. Swipe it in an arc across the paper. The pigment—the mud—spreads unevenly, varying from quite dark to pale and watery. The sediment collects in the heavy tooth of the canvas paper, and when it dries a few minutes later, most of it brushes off with a single pass of my thumb.
I spend the afternoon experimenting. Use half a pad of canvas paper before switching to watercolor paper and use another half pad of that. At one point I gather mud from the creek bank, find it to be darker and redder than the soil from the yard. I collect an empty jar and a handful of coffee filters from the house. I scrape and mix and filter and pour. Try my knives, my brushes, even my fingers. Finally it occurs to me to mix the soil with water, filter it, then evaporate it. I pour some of the filtered mud into a cheap palette with half a dozen circular wells, leave it on the porch in the sun.
Might be another silly idea, and maybe more childish than the last. Who paints with mud? And for someone most comfortable with bright colors, moving toward a monochrome palette seems an odd and perhaps foolish choice. But I can’t stop thinking about the land, the literal land. The polluted creek-bed sediment that collected on the porch where Asa left his boots after cutting up the fallen tree. The sawdust-laced mud Samuel tracks through the house after work, the dusty lines and curves my tires make on the kitchen linoleum after I spend time in the barn. So much of it issues from the mountain, carried down to the valley in water and on wind. So much of it is tied to the place that made this town, the place that took so much from it, took my father and so many others. This earth. What it gives, what it takes.
Arrogant, perhaps, to think I can make use of that, create with it. But I will let the mud dry, and then I will try.
* * *
Asa comes back late Sunday afternoon. I’m packing up the winter things in the front closet and hear his tires on the drive, open the front door as he’s climbing the stairs to the porch. “Here,” he says, before I can greet him, “I didn’t mean to leave with these the other night.” He holds Samuel’s jeans and sweatshirt toward me.
“You didn’t need to bring these back.” I put the washe
d and folded clothes on my lap and back away from the doorframe, and he hesitates only a moment before stepping into the living room.
“I shouldn’t have left the way I did Friday.” It’s not quite an apology, and I’m glad.
“Don’t worry about it.” I go to the laundry room, put Samuel’s clothes on a shelf. I stare at them for a few seconds, wonder how long I’d have to stay in the laundry room before Asa would leave. I realize his clothes are still in the dryer. I take them out, hurriedly fold them, try to smooth the wrinkles. Probably why he came back.
In the living room, Asa is perched sideways on the piano bench. I put the clothes beside him, but he doesn’t touch them. He nods to the old upright. “You play?”
I shake my head. “It was my mother’s.”
Asa turns, plays a few bars, and I recognize the beginning of “This Is My Father’s World.”
“It hasn’t been tuned recently,” I say, though it’s obvious. I never learned to play, and regret missing the opportunity to sit hip to hip with my mother at that bench, to learn something so beautiful from her. Samuel plays a little. Mostly late at night, when he thinks I’m asleep, the notes coming softly, precisely. He plays simple tunes, beginner’s tunes, but with a gentle cadence that turns them wistful.
“I was wondering…” Asa touches a single key, lets the note hang in the air. “I was wondering if you could tell me about him. Your brother. I want to … I’d like to understand what happened. Why it happened.”
It’s not exactly a surprise—Asa came back for a reason, and the clothes weren’t it—but I slump a bit in my chair. “I really can’t tell you that.”
