No one turns to address him, this latest entry, but his tiny face is as smooth as fresh-baked bread. His yellow hair lies as bright as butter against his forehead. It’s the rustic swain from my papadaddy’s funeral. The primitive evangelist, now a dazzling sprite. My homemade angel from Halloween night. No one turns to address this unlikely import from rural upstate, but I’m so shocked that his half-forgotten name erupts, unbidden, from my lips.
DECEMBER 21, 1:01 P.M. HAST
The Inevitable Result of Operating Heavy Farm Machinery While Overdosed on Xanax
Gentle Tweeter,
In the salon of the Pangaea Crusader, I cry, “Festus!” and the twee towheaded visitor turns to regard me with his luminous blue eyes. He actually sees and hears me. More to my surprise, my father’s Skanky Skankerton mistress also casts her urine-hued eyes in my direction. She follows my gaze to Festus. Impossible as this seems, Babette sees us both, and her rubbery lips curl like store-brand hot dogs sliced lengthwise and fried in lard for a hardy upstate petit de jeune. Her eyes narrow to trembling slits and her shoulders arch like those of a wary barnyard cat. Her ample sweater-bound chest heaves with each breath. Even as I watch with the skeptical eye of a supernaturalist, Babette’s fingernails grow from the length of a kitten’s to that of a panther’s.
My upstate consort lifts one boyish arm straight, his miniature hand, held palm out, no larger than a fully blown pink crocus, and he addresses her. His voice sounding deeper than you’d expect, robust and resonant, he says, “Be gone, vile succubus.”
My parents, oblivious, huddle together to examine the Beagle book defiled with dingus blood they think gushed out of my angelic woo-woo.
And yes, I may be romantically smitten with this blond tyke in bib overalls, but I do know the word succubus. If this charge leveled by my diminutive hillbilly flame is accurate, it would explain Babette’s ability to see me. It might also explain the uncanny hold she seems to exert on my normally Camille-addicted father. My gratitude to HadesBrainiacLeonard, who reminds us that a succubus is a demon who takes the form of a human female in order to seduce and destroy men.
Holding Babette at bay, wee Festus bids me come to his side. “I venture to this earthly place,” he tells me, “on behalf of your grandfather.”
“My father’s father?” I ask in hope.
Festus regards me, his buttery forehead crossed with a single wrinkle to betray his Ctrl+Alt+Puzzlement. “I refer to Benjamin, who resides in perfect happiness for all eternity in the kingdom of Heaven.”
My Papadaddy Ben, he means. “So he is in Heaven?” I ask dubiously. We’re standing here looking at Papadaddy’s skin-banana slime spouted all down the front of my nice shirt, and he’s in paradise?
Festus nods. He studies my expression more closely. “Know you, maiden, any valid reason why Ben should not be in the presence of the Almighty?”
Ah, Festus, how I’d missed his stilted Pilgrim-speak. I ask, “How come you can see me?”
“We two can speak,” Festus says, “because I am no longer of the material world.”
Poor Festus.
I offer my condolences. “Were you killed by French-kissing?”
“Combine accident,” he says with a baleful smile.
Forgive my gloating, Gentle Tweeter, but I knew it. From the first time we met at my papadaddy’s homespun hayride funeral, I guessed that’s how Festus’s life would be resolved. A dozen years spent pulling weeds and plucking chickens and then, bam, he’s chopped to a pulp by farm machinery. Oh, how I envied his dramatic fate!
He goes on to explain, “Forever am I to serve as an angel.” Offering me his peewee hand, he says, “And my mission is to find you, my grail.” He says, “I am sent here, Miss Madison, because the Lord our God is in dire need of your help.”
DECEMBER 21, 1:16 P.M. HAST
The Purpose of My Awful Life—Revealed!
Gentle Tweeter,
There’s a Heaven.
There is a God, and not just Warren Beatty.
Paradise exists, Gentle Tweeter, but that fact provides little solace to those of us assigned to spend our eternity elsewhere. My upstate Festus has become a sparkling, itsy-bitsy angel, while pudgy me is enduring fiery, sulfurous lakes of crap and The English Patient. I’m happy for him. Tickled pink. Really, I am, but such inequitable social moments weren’t covered in my not-slight schooling on etiquette. Fortunately, this difficult exchange is truncated by the insistent ringing of the salon’s telephone. Babette answers it with a curt “Yes?”
Eyeing Festus and me, she listens to the caller. After a moment, she snaps, “No, I do not want to take a consumer product survey.” She says, “Emily, how did you get this number?”
My mom’s telephone rings, and she retrieves it. My father’s rings.
My eternal gratitude to you, HadesBrainiacLeonard and PattersonNumber54 and CanuckAIDSemily. Your timing is spot-on.
“Chewing gum preferences?” asks my mom, incredulous. “Leonard, baby, is that you?”
My dad says, “No, I never buy the lambskin ones.”
In the ensuing telemarketing chaos, young Festus spirits me from the yacht’s salon. We escape down passageways and through hatches. In our giggling flight, we dissolve through bulkheads and Somali maids, tasting paint and semi-digested plantain curry, until we arrive in my long-sealed childhood stateroom. There, we find the drapes drawn, the lights out, the air-conditioning chilling my Steiff bears and Judy Blume paperbacks to archival temperatures. Every stray hair and pot of strawberry-scented lip gloss has been preserved as carefully as a diorama in the Smithsonian or the Museum of Natural History. Dead as we both are, my sturdy squire and I, we are, nonetheless, two unattached persons seeking refuge in a locked room with a bed.
Too steeped in romantic possibility is my ghost heart to ignore this turn of events. I recline on the bed’s satin coverlet in what I hope is a not-unappealing pose. Into my ghost mind, unbidden, unwelcome, comes the image of my cigarette-smoking, wigless, panty-free nana stretched the length of my identical bed in the Rhinelander penthouse. To vanquish this image, I pat my postalive hand on the bed beside me and say, “So… you’re an angel; that’s cool.” If my Festus is unaware of my history of mauling fragile man parts, I’m not eager to educate him. Neither am I certain whether he knows my soul was damned to Hades. Finally I venture, “So, Heaven’s great. Don’t you think?”
Festus smiles at me with the same condescending sad-eyed expression my mom uses when she addresses the United Nations General Assembly. A flood of pitying tears, barely contained.
Undeterred, I say, “Yeah, Heaven is tons better than I figured it would be….”
Festus silently continues to regard me, his lips trembling with compassion.
Defensive now, provocatively I ask, “Hey, when the combine machinery tore you to shreds, did it hurt? I mean, did it rip off your hands first? How did that work?”
At this, Festus settles his angelic self on the bed beside me. “Do not be ashamed, Miss Madison,” he says. “For I know you’ve been discarded by creation to spend forever in the scalding anus of Hades.” His placid face says this without a hint of malice. “I know that you suffer constant starvation with nothing to slake your hunger and thirst save a mighty banquet of fresh urine and excrement….”