“So Mama calls out to God every night. Praying to die. Because she misses him so much. She just can’t get over him being gone. I wish I’d gotten to spend more time with him. I wish I knew why everything has to be the way it is sometimes.
“Anyway I told her all that. It started raining. There wasn’t a whole lot to say. We were just holding each other. At first we were. Then we started messing around. Hell, maybe it was sympathy, I don’t know. She took her shirt off and got me to take her bra off. It started raining harder and harder. I remember thinking we might ought to back it out of the creek. But I guess we were too busy doing what we were doing. She didn’t want me to see her legs. I remember her saying that. About how they were all scarred up. I told her it didn’t matter. And it didn’t. It was hard to see it in the dark anyhow. And the rain was so nice. We hadn’t had any in so long.
“Are you asleep? You want me to hush? I will if you want me to. You sure?
“Well. I’ve been trying to keep from thinking about it, but that’s all I can think about now. Being in that car with her. With the rain coming down. And the doors locked. Knowing nobody was going to interfere with my life this time.
“I mean, it had been so long. I’d been waiting, always thinking something was going to happen. And it never did. I’d hidden from everybody for so long. I just withdrew from the world. Stayed in my room all that time.
She made me feel like somebody again. Instead of just a freak.
“But if you could have seen her. What that dog did to her. God.”
H
e hushed up after that. And I hadn’t said a word. Wasn’t nothing to say. He finished the rest of his beer and stuck it under his pillow and then he just laid there looking up at the ceiling.
I wasn’t sleepy. Wouldn’t’ve been no way to sleep then anyway, after hearing all that. I knew I had to say something else to him. Just didn’t know what.
Didn’t look like there was no way to fix his troubles. Sure didn’t do me no good to hear all that. Wasn’t no way I could help him. Couldn’t even help my own self. And couldn’t ask him to help me but one more time. Cause the night was almost gone. It was time for Diva to be
back, but she wasn’t. I needed her. I needed her to help me. Cause she knew better than anybody what I been through. She’d done seen me laying here all this time. She knew what had to be done. She just couldn’t do it herself. She could do a lot. She’d done done a lot.
But not that. So I was wishing she would hurry. The night was almost gone. And I didn’t want to see another one.
I
couldn’t tell Braiden everything. I couldn’t tell him all of it. There was too much that was private. Too much I didn’t want anybody to know about her. Because she didn’t want even me to see.
Her legs were ripped with scars. And I kissed all those bad places. I told her that it didn’t matter. She cried, a little, but I hushed that up. What I was trying to do was soothe her. Make her feel better. It took a long time. I don’t know what she was thinking. That I’d run away? Be repulsed? I asked her, How could I?
She told me to kiss her, that she’d been waiting a long time for this. That she’d never had a man, and I was the
first. The lightning started. The rain came down harder. That was when the little pain in the top of my head hit me. But those pains are common. They don’t always mean something. I’ve had them for so long that I don’t pay much attention to them anymore.
With the grass, everything had slowed down to slow motion. Every movement, every touch of flesh, every breath and every sound. The rain was so loud on the roof, we couldn’t hear anything else after a while. It was like a hundred little hammers all beating at once. No other sound. And just as black. We weren’t even in the world anymore. There was just us two, and the night.
We were naked together. Me against her. We started trying to ease it in. She put her legs around me. That’s the last thing I remember.
I
saw a thing I maybe dreamed. It come in the window and lit on my bed and it was a little angel child with gold hair and sandals. It looked at me and smiled and smiled and smiled. It come a crawling over my feet and over my legs and I held out my arms and the child come to rest against my chest. Put its head down against me like it wanted to sleep. I touched the gold hair. The child looked up and smiled and rested with me. We laid there for a long time, just holding on to each other. Don’t know how long a time passed. A long, long time. Things that wasn’t said flowed from the child to me and I come to understand that he or she was the one they sent to lead
me, but it wasn’t time to go. And it didn’t have to be the time to go. The child could leave, and I could stay, and it would come back for me some other time. But my arms would leave, and my legs would leave, and they wouldn’t come back till the child did again.
I touched the hair on the child’s head. It was soft and sweet. I held the child. I didn’t want to decide. I just wanted to hold the child. But finally it looked at me and I knew it was time to decide. I nodded my head. The child nodded its head. It stood up and walked back across the bed, stepped up on my knee, and stood there balanced, looking back at me. Had its hands clasped together and looking down. It pointed to the foot of the bed. And there He stood.
So you’ve decided?
Yes, Lord. Won’t I be happier there than here?
You’re leaving others behind you. What about them?
They’ll miss me for a while. One especially. But she’ll get over it.
There’ll be nieces and nephews later that you won’t get to meet. What about that?
If I don’t know them then I won’t know what I’ve missed.
Things have been set in motion that you know nothing about. It won’t be easy when it comes and you’ll wish you hadn’t wished for it.
But after that.
Yes, after that.
Will everything be explained to me?
This child will come back.
Will I be whole again?
You’re whole now.
Then that’s what I want.
It’s not what you want. It’s going to happen whether you want it or not. I could intercede if you wanted me to. You want me to?
No sir. I don’t believe I’d want that.
He held out his arms to the child. The child hopped off my knee and landed in His arms. He stood there holding it on His hip.
For what it’s worth you’ve been brave.
Thank you, Lord.
He sighed.
Well see you after while.
They left, and I didn’t know if any of it was real or not. More than anything I was scared.
I
didn’t know if Braiden was asleep by then or what. He was quiet, but I was through talking anyway. I’d said all I wanted to say. I was watching the window so I could see when the first of daylight came through it. I wanted to talk to Mama and tell her to send Max after me, and then I wanted to get dressed. I was hoping that maybe he was already on his way.
I saw her coming, just a vague white shape moving toward me out of the darkness. Swishing. I could still hear her stockings. She was still fine.
She sat down on the edge of the bed. One hand swept my hair back and lingered on my jaw.
“Not much time left,” she said.
“Time for what?”
“This. Braiden asleep?”
“I don’t know. What about my phone call? She called yet?”
She looked around. “In a little bit.”
She leaned closer, until she was lying next to me. I could feel her breasts pressing against me. I couldn’t move. The smell of her almost drove me crazy and made me think of Beth and made me hate myself. She put her cheek against mine and rested it there.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Just listen to me. His mind will go. It’s starting to already. He just like you, he ain’t gonna get no better.”
I closed my eyes, reached out, and put my arms around her.
“I went to nursing school just so I could take care of him,” she said. “Ten years. He’s the only thing holding me here. I know you in bad shape. Everybody in here in bad shape. Wouldn’t be in here if they wasn’t. You
might
have a chance. They
might
make you better. They ain’t no way they can make him better. He ain’t got no chance. He can’t lay here till he’s sixty or seventy. It ain’t right. I started out thinking I could take care of him. Way he used to take care of me. It would of been a mercy if God had let him die when he was supposed to. He ain’t got no peace, Walter. He don’t want to stay. He wants to go. His life is over.”
I said what I knew was a stupid thing: “His life’s not over.”
She drew back, drew her hands back and put them in
her lap. She sat still, quiet, on the edge of the bed, looking at the floor.
“Put yourself in his place,” she said.
I did. I felt my arms and legs still attached to my body. I felt my legs taking me down the road at night, my arm extending to punch the start button on my VCR, my fingers coming up to my lips with a cigarette. I felt Beth in my arms and wished oh God so bad that night could be here again, instead of this.
“You can’t just murder people,” I said.
She didn’t move at first. She didn’t seem like she’d even heard me. And then her hand moved to my leg. High.
“Stop fucking around with me,” I said.
“You white boys,” she said, and a slow easy little laugh came out of her.
Flat on your back for that long. Fed every meal. Rolled over like a sack of shit when it was time to change your sheets. For twenty-two years. I couldn’t take it either.
She bent over me then.
“I can take care of it,” she said.
“What?”
“You lay back. I take care of you one time anyway,” she said. I saw her hand come up, and it was dark against the pale cloth of her uniform. Her hand caught the zipper and pulled it down to her waist. She struggled out of the top of it. She bent her arms behind her back, and took off the bra and laid it aside. She leaned closer, smiling.
“Give you something like you ain’t never had, baby,” she said.
She started humming the tune, the same one she’d been
humming when she first came to see me. The field song. The picker’s song. Her breasts were right over me, just inches away. I thought about Beth. She started pulling her dress up over her hips. Then she was sliding down my belly, raising my gown.
“I do this, and you do that. Cause you don’t know what’s going on.”
It was hard to speak. She had me in her hands. I had to arch my back, and dig my fingers into the sheet.
“He my brother,” she said, and then she put her mouth on me, and Braiden started talking to me, and I was drunk, and I knew I was his last chance, but inside I was saying no, please no, hell no, forever no.
“
T
he Young Lions.
Man you know I had a granma whose daddy was a slave. He was freed and fought at Shiloh, and run at Vicksburg when he seen it was gone, that they was beat. Whole town was starving to death. Had trees, logs stuck up through the bank to make it look like cannons. People was living in caves like rats. Lost his left arm. And he lived to be a hundred and one. You know what he told her?
“Said Jenny, people has been fighting since God made the first one and they always going to. Nothing don’t change but the reasons, man. All you can do is love the ones close to you and try to do right. That’s all God expects.
God can’t be blamed for what happens to men. Ain’t God’s fault what happened to you, to your daddy, or what happened to me. Fifty-eight thousand of ours we lost. Think about it, Walter. Each one thought it wouldn’t happen to him. You know how many friends I lost? Seventeen. I mean friends. People I was tight with. Seventeen. I don’t have to tell you. I mean you get to know a man, you get to talking to him, he pulls out some pictures sometime and show you. Show you his little girl. His crib. His mama and daddy. He alive to them. They all talking about him at home, wondering when he gonna come back.
Is
he gonna come back. And then he be dead two or three days before they even know it. They don’t know you, but you know him, and you the one have to put him in the bag and zip it up. I done that seventeen times.
“World don’t change for no man. World gone keep going on. Don’t make no difference what you do, what I do. World keep turning. God got a plan for everything. Man may suffer in this world. But God got a better world waiting. I been waiting to see it twenty-two years, Walter. You ain’t no man if you don’t do this for me. I tired, Walter. I tired and I want to go home. Want to see my mama. She waiting, too.
“You think you got trouble? You don’t know what trouble is. Trouble when you laying in a rice paddy knowing both your arms and legs blowed off and are they gonna shoot the chopper down before it can come and get you. Trouble when they pick you up and you ain’t three feet long. The people in my fire team started to just let me lay there and
bleed to death. Cause they knowed I’d wind up like this if I lived. Knowed I’d lay like this no telling how many years. They ever one of em has come to see me. And they each said the same thing. You know what that was?
“We wish we’d left you, Braiden.
“You been sent to me, Walter. You been sent and I ain’t gonna be denied.”
I
t was over, finally. She pulled her clothes back together and left, and Braiden turned his face away. I was weak, and there was nothing else to say. But I knew I wouldn’t be back there. All I wanted was to be home.
I waited for daylight a long time and it seemed like it would never come. I wanted the night behind me. I smoked a cigarette, and I made a few decisions.
I wouldn’t lock myself away in my room anymore. I’d live with my family and try to help my mother. She was old, and she’d been hurting for a long time, and I didn’t want to cause her any more pain. I knew that this thing must have scared her badly, me being out for two days,
not knowing what was going to happen to me. I’d try to decide what to do about my face and my head. There were other hospitals and other doctors, and people everywhere ready to help me. I’d take Beth over to the house, and let Mama meet her, and the three of us could talk about it. That was as far as I got.