High Lonesome

by Barry Hannah

  Bean, the sternest and most religious of them all, set his gun on his knees, feeling a lyric militancy and praying for an enemy. Like the others, this boy was no drinking man but unlike them he did not drink the wine from the fruit jars. For the others, the wine went down like a ruined orchard, acid to the heart, where a ball of furred heat made them reminiscent of serious acts never acted, women never had.

  The wine began dominating and the boys were willing slaves. When the music paused Lester Silk, son of the decaying army man who never made anything but fun of poetry and grabbed his scrotum and acted the fairy whenever it occurred at school, said, I believe in years to come I will meet a pale woman from Texas who plays clarinet in the symphony. Then we shall dally, there will be a rupture over my drinking, she’ll tear up my pictures and for penance over the freedoms she allowed me she will go off to the nun mountains in a faraway state and be killed accidentally by masked gunmen. Forever afterward I will whup my lap mournfully in her memory.

  Somebody must die when you hear that music out here, I feel it, said Swanly, cool-butted and naked in the little rapids but full hot with the peach wine after five swallows.

  Walthall, stopping the viola, wore a necklace of twine and long mail-order Mauser shells. He exclaimed, Send not to ask for when the bell tolls. I refuse to mourn the death by fire of a child’s Christmas on Fern Hill. Do not go gently in my sullen craft, up yours. He raised the fruit jar from his rock.

  All that separates me from Leslie Caron must die, said Arden Pal. He held his flute up like a saber, baroque over the flat rocks and frothing tea of the rapids. Pal was a gangling youth of superfluous IQ already experiencing vile depressions. His brain made him feel constantly wicked but he relieved himself through botany and manic dilettantism.

  Like a piece of languid Attic statuary Swanly lay out with a sudden whole nudeness under the shallow water. He might have been something caught in the forest and detained for study, like a white deer missing its ilk, because he was sad and in love and greatly confused.

  Bernadette cooked two chickens, made a salad, then Irish Creme cookies, for the boys’ health, she said, for their wretched motherless pirates’ diets, and Tuck drove her down to the bridge with it all in a basket. Catastrophic on both sides of the washboard gravel was the erosion where ditches of white limesoil had been clawed into deep small canyons by heavy rains, then swerved into the bogs in wild fingers. Tuck pretended he was confused as to where the boys might be in camp and guessed loudly while pulling off before the bridge into the same place he had been earlier. Ah, he said, the back of their car, Hinds County, I recognize it.

  But he said he would wait and that was perfect by Bernadette. Then he followed her, tree to tree, at a distance. Bernadette came to the head of the bluff and he saw her pause, then freeze, cradling the food basket covered in blue cloth with white flowers printed on. Through a nearer gully he saw what she saw.

  Hairy Walthall, at the viola with his root floating in the rills, might have seemed father to Swanly, who was hung out like a beige flag in the shallows. She could not see Arden Pal but she heard the deep weird flute. Swanly moved as a liquid one with the river, the bed around him slick tobacco shale, and Bernadette saw all this through a haze of inept but solemn chamber music. She did not know it was inept and a wave of terrible exhilaration overcame her.

  Tuck looked on at the boys from his own vantage, stroking the wound to his throat.

  The hermit Sunballs was across the river before them in a bower of wild muscadine, prostrate and gripping the lip of the bluff. He owned a telescope, which he was now using. He viewed all of Swanly he could. The others were of no concern. For a while Tuck and his wife could not see him, flat to the earth and the color of organic decay. None of them for that matter would have recognized their own forms rapt and helpless to the quick, each with their soul drawn out through their eyes, beside themselves, stricken into painful silence.

  It was habitual with Pal as he played the flute, however, that his eyes went everywhere. He was unsure at first then he thought he had invoked ghosts by his music, the ancient river dead roused from their Civil War ghoulments by the first flute since in these parts. He was startled by this for the seconds the thought lasted then he was frightened because they were on both bluffs and he mistook the telescope pushed out of the vines for a weapon. Perhaps they were the law, but next he knew they were not, seeing one was a woman.

  They’re watching you, Swanly!

  The boys, except Swanly, came out of the water and thrashed back to the camp incensed and indignant. Pal pointed his flute at the telescope, which receded. Then the hermit’s face came briefly into the frame of vine leaves. He could not tear himself away.

  Swanly stood wobbling in the shallows, his hand to the slick shale rock, then at last stood up revealed and fierce in his nakedness. He swayed on the slick rocks, outraged, screaming. Then he vomited.

  Keep your eyes off me! Keep away! he bawled upwards at the hermit, who then disappeared.

  Pal pointed upwards to the right. They watched too, Swanly! But Swanly didn’t seem to understand this.

  Walthall fired his Mauser twice in the air and the blasts made rocking echoes down the river beach to beach.

  Bernadette and Tuck melted back onto the rooted path in the high cane and the woman came cautiously with her basket, trailed fifty yards behind by her husband who was trembling and homicidal toward the hermit. Also he knew the boy loved his wife more than him. The boy’s nakedness to him had had no definition but was a long beige flag of taunting and every fine feeling of his seemed mocked and whored by the presence of the hermit. Tuck felt himself only a raving appendage to the event, a thing tacked on to the crisis of his wife.

  Yoo hoo! Oh bad bad boys. I’ve got a treat for you, called Bernadette. All wet in their pants they stared up to the woman clearing the cane above them, their beds spread below her. Their sanctuary ruined. Only Swanly knew who she was.

  Oh no, is it a woman of the church? said Walthall.

  There will always be a woman around to wreck things, said Pal.

  No, she’s all right, Swanly intervened, though he was still sick. He came up from the shore roots and struggled into his shorts slowly. He seemed paralyzed and somewhere not with them, an odd sleepiness on him. Be nice, all of you, he added.

  Big Mama Busybod, said Walthall. Courtesy of the Southern regions.

  Out in the sun they saw she was not a bad-looking case though she seemed arrested by a spiritual idea and did not care her hair was blowing everywhere like a proper woman of the ’50s would.

  Her husband came behind, mincing over the stone beach. She turned.

  I heard the shots, he said.

  Fools. Eat, said Bernadette. But she remained startled by Swanly and could not turn her face long from him.

  Tuck didn’t understand it, but his jaw began flapping. You boys ever bait a trotline with soap? Yes Ivory soap. Tuck pointed under the bridge where their line was set on the near willow. Tuck was not convinced he even existed now outside the river of want he poured toward Swanly. He was not interested in what he continued to say, like something in a storekeeper’s costume activated by a pullstring and thrust into a playhouse by a child. Fish began biting on the substances of modern industry in the ’40s, boys. Why they’re like contemporary men they ain’t even that hungry just more curious. Or a woman. They get curious and then the bait eats them, huh.

  Yes sir, said Walthall, annoyed.

  Tuck kept on in despondent sagery then trailed off as the boys ate and he next simply sat down on a beach boulder and stared away from them into the late bower of Sunballs across the river.

  When he twisted to look he was astounded by the extent of bosom his wife was visiting on Swanly. She was bared like some tropical hula but not. Swanly ate his chicken kneeling in front of her with his bare smooth chest slightly burned red and of such an agreeable shape he seemed made to fly through night winds like the avatar on the bow of a ship. That hussy had dropped her sha
wl down and Tuck noticed more of her in truth, her mothersome cleavage, than he had in years, faintly freckled and still not a bad revelation. Not in years atop her.

  It was eleven years ago when he had pursued illicit love with another woman. This was when his boys were small and cute. He could not get over how happy he was and blameless and blessed-feeling, as if in the garden before the fall. She was a young woman with practical headquarters in the Jackson Country Club, a thing he felt giant pride about, her sitting there in a swimsuit nursing a Tom Collins, high-heeled beach shoes on her feet, talking about storms how she loved them. Now she was a fat woman and his children were fat men and it was not their fatness that depressed him so much as it was watching visible time on them, the horrible millions of minutes collected and evident, the murdered idle thousands of hours, his time more than theirs in their change. They had an unfortunate disease where you saw everything the minute you saw them, the awful feckless waiting, the lack of promise, the bulk of despair. The woman had been attracted to him through his handsome little boys and she would excite him by exclaiming, Oh what wonderful seed you have. He stayed up like a happy lighthouse with rotating beam. She had no children, never would, but she whispered to him he might break her will if he didn’t stop being so good. All the while he had loved Bernadette too, even more, was that possible? The woman didn’t mind. What kind of man am I? Tuck thought. Was time working every perversion it had on him, were there many like him? He felt multiplied in arms and legs, a spider feeling eight ways, he was going into the insect kingdom. Oh yes, lost to the rest.

  He loved his boys but my God they were like old uncles, older than him, mellow and knee-slapping around a campfire. He loved his wife, but no he didn’t, it was an embattled apathy each morning goaded into mere courtesy, that was what, and he felt wild as a prophet mocking an army of the righteous below him at the gate.

  Now isn’t that better? his wife said to the boys, who had fed themselves with hesitation before they fell to trough like swine.

  You’re too thoughtful of us, ma’am, said Swanly.

  I’m Bernadette, she said.

  You are desperate, thought Tuck. I sort of like it. Hanging all out there, little Mama.

  Was it how you like it? she said only to the boy.

  My mother never cooked for me like that.

  Ah.

  Nobody ever has.

  Oh. What’s wrong?

  That hermit, you know. He saw me without anything on.

  She could see he was still trembling, warm as it was.

  I know how it is. She looked more deeply into his eyes. Believe me.

  What is it? said Tuck, coming up.

  This boy’s been spied on by that creature Sunballs.

  Tuck leaned in to Swanly. The boy was evilly shaken like a maiden thing out of the last century. He was all boy but between genders, hurt deep to his modesty. Tuck was greatly curious and fluttered-up. All execrable minutes, all time regained. I would live backwards in time until I took the shape of the boy myself. My own boyself was eat up by the gooks and then this strolling wench, my boyself was hostaged by her, sucking him out to her right in front of me, all over again as with me. Woman’s thing stays hungry, it don’t diminish, it’s always something. A need machine, old beard lost its teeth harping on like a holy fool in the desert. They’re always with themselves having sex with themselves, two lips forever kissing each other down there and they got no other subject. Even so, I feel love for her all over again.

  Lester Silk, Bean, and Pal studied this trio isolated there where the water on rills avid over pebbles made a laughing noise. Walthall raised his viola and spread his arms out like a crucified musician and he stood there in silence evoking God knows what but Arden Pal asked the others what was going on.

  Wake up and smell the clue, whispered Silk. Walthall wants the woman and our strange boy Swanly’s already got her.

  Swanly’s okay, Silk. He’s not strange.

  Maybe not till now.

  Leave him alone, said Bean. Swanly’s a right guy. He has been through some things that’s all. Ask me.

  You mean a dead daddy like you?

  I’d say you look hard enough, a dead both, but he wouldn’t admit it. Bean intended to loom there in his acuity for a moment, looking into the breech of his gun which he had opened with the lever. It was a rare lever action shotgun, 20-gauge. Bean worshiped shells and bullets. Ask me, he’s a full orphan.

  They blending with him, said Arden Pal. They watched us naked too. She didn’t jump back in the bushes like a standard woman when I caught her.

  Swanly came over getting his shirt.

  She’s giving me something. I’m feeling poorly, he said.

  The rest did not speak and the three, Tuck, Bernadette, and Swanly, walked up the shallow bluff and into the woods.

  Silk sighed. I don’t quite believe I ever seen nothing like that. Old store boy there looks like somebody up to the eight count.

  Walthall, who had actually had a sort of girl, since with stubborn farm boy will he would penetrate nearly anything sentient, was defeated viola and all. Lord my right one for mature love like that. No more did he heed the calling of his music and he was sore in gloom.

  Bean could not sit still and he walked here and there rolling two double-aught buckshot shells in his palm, looking upward to the spying bower of the hermit, but no offending eye there now, as he would love.

  They closed the store as Swanly began talking. She went to the house and got something for his belly and some nerve pills too and diet pills as well. Bernadette was fond of both diet and nerve pills, and sometimes her husband was too, quite positively. Some mornings they were the only promise he could fetch in and he protected his thefts of single pills from his wife’s cabinet with grim slyness. In narcosis she was fond of him and in amphetamine zeal he returned affection to her which she mistook for actual interest. The doctor in Magee was a firm believer in Dexamil as panacea and gave her anything she wanted. The pain of wanting in her foreign eyes got next to him. In a fog of charity he saw her as a lovely spy in the alien pines. He saw a lot of women and few men who weren’t in the act of bleeding as they spoke, where they stood. The pharmacist was more a partisan of Demerol and John Birch and his prices were high since arsenals were expensive. His constant letters to Senator McCarthy, in his decline, almost consumed his other passions for living, such as they were. But the pharmacist liked Bernadette too, and when she left, detained as long as he could prolong the difficulty of her prescription, he went in the back room where a mechanic’s calendar with a picture of a woman lying cross-legged in a dropped halter on the hood of a Buick was nailed to the wall and laid hand to himself. One night the doctor and the pharmacist met in this room and began howling like wolves in lonely ardor. Bernadette’s name was mentioned many times, then they would howl again. They wore female underwear but were not sodomites. Both enjoyed urban connections and their pity for Bernadette in her aging beauty out in the river boonies was painful without limit; and thus in the proper lingerie they acted it out.

  Swanly, after the pills, began admitting to the peach wine as if it were a mortal offense. Bernadette caught his spirit. They adjourned to the house where he could lie comfortably with her Oriental shawl over him.

  We don’t have strong drink here. Not much. She looked to Tuck. You don’t have to drink to have a full experience.

  Tuck said, No, not drink. Hardly.

  No. I’m having fun just talking. Talking to you is fine. Because I haven’t been much of a talker. That’s good medicine. My tongue feels all light.

  Talk on, child. She gave Swanly another pill.

  Tuck went to relieve himself and through the window he saw the clothesline over the green clover and he speculated that through time simple household things might turn on you in a riot of overwhelming redundancy. He had heard of a man whose long dear companion, a buckskin cat, had walked between his legs one night and tripped and killed him as he went down headfirst onto a commode. Cheer
ed that this was not him he went back to listen to the boy.

  But after all you wouldn’t have just anybody look at you all bared. Surely not that awful person, Bernadette was saying. I’d not let him see me for heaven’s sake.

  It seems he ought to pay. I feel tortured and all muddy. I can’t forget it.

  Just talk it out, that’s best. It seems there’s always a monster about, doesn’t it?

  I feel I could talk all afternoon into the night.

  We aren’t going anywhere.

  We aren’t going anywhere, added Tuck.

  I’m feeling all close to you if that’s all right.

  Some people are sent to us. We have been waiting all our lives for somebody and don’t even know it.

  Older ones are here to teach and guide the young, Tuck said.

  Bernadette glanced at Tuck then looked again. He had come back with his hair combed and he had shaved. He was so soft in the face she felt something new for him. In this trinity already a pact was sealed and they could no more be like others. There was a tingling and a higher light around them. A flood of goodwill took her as if they had been hurled upon a foreign shore, all fresh. The boy savior, child, and paramour at once. Swanly spoke on, it hardly mattered what he said. Each word a pleasant weight on her bosom.

  Walthall and the rest stared into the fire sighing, three of them having their separate weather, their separate fundament, in peach wine. Pal could swallow no more and heaved out an arc of puke luminous over the fire, crying, Thar she blows, my dear youth. This act was witnessed like a miracle by the others.

  God in heaven, this stuff was so good for a while, said Silk.

  Fools, said Bean.

  Bean don’t drink because he daddy daid, said Walthall. So sad, so sad, so gone, so Beat.

  Yeh. It might make him cry, said Pal.

  Or act human, said Silk.

  Let it alone. Bean had stood unmoved by their inebriation for two hours, caressing his 20-gauge horse gun.