Later I waded out to the rock carefully. Already an old man. And looked up. Then I lay down on it and looked up. There was the railing like a thick fence and the evergreen boughs and the hairy tufts of swallows’ nests. Like warts or moles up underneath the bridge, blotching the pale smooth concrete. Sprouting from the icy shadowy concrete. Rocks are always warmer.
“Get your mind off a that stuff,” I say. “You silly old man.” I’ll just have to get me more faith. Woke up to spring this morning. Three days after Sunday with the priests. One Sunday a month in town with them. The young one full of chat, picking me up, driving me back to the empty line of loblollies. This morning a blue jay came into the room through the smashed panes. They never came back to feed the hay. The front rooms finally collapsing under the weight. Mice and rats chattering all over, still too cold at night to leave.
He flies up in the dark above my fogging breath. The Holy Ghost. Mothermae made us kneel around the bed. Me and two sisters and brother Willy. “Baby Jesus,” she always launched out, her voice like a knife in the dark room. I imagined the white baby in Mary’s arms turning his head to hear. His baby’s face blank and not very helpful. “Baby Jesus is many colors,” she told me after my two sisters had left and Willy had been shot to death somewhere so far off we never knew the reasons. Or if it was even the truth.
Were we precious in his sight?
All the years of priests — since I first went into Delios to get her a doctor but didn’t; it dawning on me standing in front of the mission that she really did want “to go to her reward,” as she called it. They were always harping about Mary. They only sometimes mentioned Jesus. The older, fat one, Stephen, more than his young helper.
Yesterday I rose late and got only as far as the newer fence post. Today I’ll push these old bones hard and get on up to the Farm Road 3941 sign. I brought home a hubcap that says Olds-mobile on it. And a mangled tin cup I’ll straighten out with the hammer from the year the boy fell.
That’ll be fine to do. The jay woke me early enough. And what did I hear yesterday, up ahead? Those were buzzards fighting over something. I’ll take the shovel out by the garden. I remember the onion sets the young priest put in my Sunday box, “the gift box,” Father Stephen called it. “We’ve heard so much about that garden of yours, Willy. Maybe this year you’ll bring us some homegrown vegetables, okay?” I nod and look at the floor at my newest tennis shoes from out of another of their boxes. Fuck you, I think. Fuck your years of boxes. You don’t even know my name. Or where I live, a mile past the loblollies toward Monterrey Prairie 8 miles, the sign says. I nod and reach out and take Father Stephen’s hand. Fuck you white priests. I nod some more and turn, thinking of the grate, that it’s also once a month, five days after this Sunday in Delios with the two priests. “Don’t hurry,” I whisper to myself as we walk to the car. Then there’s Mothermae’s voice as I sit, holding the gifts in my hands. I was waiting for it.
“Milton,” she’d muttered in my ear that night. She hadn’t taken the time to light the kerosene lamp. And I realize how in my house now there are no light switches or plug-ins because it was built before that. I’ve always smelled wood and kerosene in the air. That is the smell of light to me. There’s a smell to sunlight across the hay that wakes me slower than a loose jay frantic along the warped ceiling.
“Hurry, Milton, and get dressed.” Hurry up to leave that other house I can’t remember. To walk for miles in the dark to the town and the hospital to see him large, always the color of a deep mud hole. The white sheets flung around him like snow in a Christmas book I could already read back then.
Next he died. The sawmill gave her some money and we moved soon. In with some relatives. The children outnumbering the adults dozens to one. Then somewhere else; losing, on the way, Willy and my two sisters. We walked up here one summer. We had walked for miles until she just turned off the road and lay down on the grassy ditch bank. “Milton, you find some place. I’m done in. Just done in.”
“Have you ever had a job? Paid in Social Security?” the first priest, the red-headed one, asked me years ago. Ran out of the mission, caught me turning away. Minding Mothermae who begged me not to bring a doctor. He pulled me in off the street, his woman’s fingers on my coat. His eyes on the trinkets I’d pinned to my jacket. Which are pretty and for good luck because they come to me as gifts off the road. On my lapel I probably wore a piece of ribbon. The tire gauge like a heavy silver pen in my pocket. I shook off his thin long fingers. Too much. All of them asking, wanting too much. From now on I’ll beg two boxes, have to come in only one Sunday every two months. With spring there’ll be food enough. Next winter maybe I’ll try to hibernate like the frogs along the outside rim of the well, jammed together, packed tight in the wide cracks in the crumbling brick wall.
Now I pull on my jacket, put my hand on the pressure gauge, and remember the white man in the long black car. He was the color of lemons under the dome light. I could see better then. The stars just above where the yellow stripe begins at the curve as thick a dusting as I’d ever seen. I stood perfectly still across the road as he got out in the cold. I heard his teeth chatter. He said, “Shit, I’ll never get there. Goddamn cheap tires.” And I heard the sneeze of air from the gauge and he reached back inside to turn off the headlights. I heard his zipper go down and I smiled as he pissed a heavy stream on the pavement. He stood over the broad asphalt patch. The sound was muffled by it. Finished, he pulled his dick several times and had trouble packing it back in, zipping it up.
Then he looked around and over at me and in one complete motion he opened his door got in started up tore off, the door slamming on its own a long ways down the road, his almost flat tire burrowing up the soft asphalt.
The next day I sat on the gravel shoulder and reached out carefully to pry the gauge out of the road; I patted the scar closed with my palms.
Now I leave my hand on its scarred barrel, the tiny plastic stick of numbers broken off in the patch. It told me then the best way and not their way though I needed the food soon after Mothermae died and I had spent the last of her money neatly folded in the bottom of the saltine tin. The real way is to keep your mind off of Baby Jesus and all the priests’ prying questions. Think of what’s really happened in front of your own eyes. Like the man giving it a couple of extra strokes in the middle of the country. The stars only inches overhead. I hate I scared him off. I’m glad he liked that stretch of road. “It’s full of lessons,” she’d say when we were old together and felt like husband and wife. We never slept apart. For comfort and warmth. “Lessons all around.” Somehow she meant Baby Jesus lessons, but I had always doubted that. Beginning the moment he turned on the bed and let out the longest lowest rush of air I have ever heard. “He’s gone,” the white man in the white coat had said to the long full ward. Everybody listening to the noise and the statement. But I thought, where’s there to go? He’s not here and wouldn’t be home or filing saws at the mill. And I doubted if he’d ever been here at all. Been at any of those places. Jesus wrapped up in it all. The priests over the years trying to add Mary as another complication. As if the more things involved we can’t possibly see the better.
Again I’m getting a late start; just like yesterday. I wash my face out of the bucket at the well. All around the house things are blooming. The pears and plums. I take what’s left in the bucket and drizzle it through cupped hands on the lettuce, the little plants the color of the young priest’s eyes.