Sign Languages (7 page)

“Hey, look at this. Rudy, look at all this.”

Mothermae and I listened to them from the dry creek that crosses the open fields, the biggest under a cloud of dust from their haying. She held onto my neck, our breaths struggling in both our throats.

“Voiture!” I try to yell, keeping my back to it as it screams past. Make my lips move. The scrap of paper over the stove, stuck to the wall with tacks or spit. English-French, French-English, the other, thicker paper says. “Voiture!” I scream as I face the empty road that goes uphill, crosses the bridge, and climbs to the straight green line of pines. “Evergreens.”

“Hobo camp,” Rudy had said. A big blond man catching the light. His bare chest yellowed even more by pieces of hay. I could see the flecks of dirt muddied at his neck. Mothermae's face turned away. I saw them through the broken window. They tossed it all out but left our scraps of paper on the walls. Then, later, a day and a night. The evergreen straw a nice bed up on the bank in the sapling thicket. The sky cloudless until late afternoon but no rain. They burned our gleaned mattress and chest of drawers, and the heat from the diesel cracked the mirror. I saw them in it, looking down, turning black, then its weak silvered back broke.

“Niggers, I'll bet,” Rudy said. And the other man nodded before they unloaded hay again, stacking it to the ceiling; the old house groaning. They didn't seem to notice the garden, didn't say a word about the flowers. “We ought to bring the dozer over sometime,” Rudy's friend said, “and level it. Put up a decent hay barn.” But Rudy shrugged, the muscles shadowing on his back and that was then. That year.

Just a few years later they changed the Bridger Creek sign. The fall after Mothermae died they came and took it down—all full of .22 holes. I heard someone that bad winter and only at night shoot and shoot. Fifty or more times. She was sick always by then with the fever, the gas swelling her stomach like the dead on the highway. She'd let it go with a long, soft noise.

Before it had said Bridgett Creek. But the road crew didn't seem to mind. I watched all morning. They kept me from the grate I'd just found on up the hill on the other side. Now I walk carefully down the bank and step over the lingering puddle from two days before Sunday, a brief spring shower. I stand at this newer post and slowly find a barb and gently prick my thumb with it. If I squint I can see the nearest cows. Red and white faced. I smell them again and also the flowers on this vine that's creeping up the newer post. “Elegants,” Mothermae said they were. I said “elephants,” and she laughed and shook her head and wrote it on a piece of scrap we'd gleaned.

Today is the second day after Sunday; two days since the priests had their hands all over me. On the fifth day I'll go to the grate and see. Again I feel the trickle of piss before I smell it.

“Voiture,” I shout, and a calf near my hand bucks off out of my vision. I let the wire draw a prick of blood. Two cars close together. I hear it over Bridgett, the tires striking the metal plates. The boy on the crew falling the year after the water rose almost to this very post. But actually to the sign across from my house back up the closed dirt road through the evergreens, the pines. “Loblolly,” the young priest says. But I don't say a word back at him, just nod because he crosses the prairie from Delios and lets me out a mile away though there're no houses there either.

“Lives up a side road,” I heard him say in town at the mission, the front wall all glass looking out onto the street. The tables buckling under lamps and cracked leaf-green plates for sale. A white woman brings in an armload of folded brown bags. The two little girls with her all eyes and wrinkling noses, the tips turning red.

“God bless you,” fat Father Stephen says.

“And you, too,” she smiles to the old priest. The nun behind her silently shooing the girls away from the nearest table. The day's light caught up in a single blue bowl, its lip unevenly sheared off. Bringing the light up from its base, it burns along the jagged rim.

“Hey, you old fucker,” they shout from the car. I tense my back, the piss smell stronger, a cow at my bloody thumb, in focus, her eyes unmoving, sightless; she chews her cud.

Once they never said anything. Then they said nigger, coon, blackass, words spit out windows. A can once struck me on the neck. Like the worst lick I'd ever got from Mothermae. Why, I don't remember. I remember always minding. We'd “scour the neighborhood,” as she called it. “Oh, look at what this is,” she'd shout at me. “Oh Milton, they've lost this for sure. Fell out of the trunk. Child tossed it out the window.”

Once there were two shoes, the same set. They fit her until I had to rip the toe out. Her feet beginning to fill up with gas. The hay I scattered on the floor—the hay Rudy, his friend, no one ever came back for—to ease the shock of her steps. “Nope, I'll just stay put here. You go out.” The year I went out alone; the year she was sick but got better for a while.

Before the creek sign business. And long before that boy on the road crew painting the railings fell off the bridge. Head turning to me as he sprawled past the mulberry bushes I sat behind. He opened his mouth and I felt my own open wide. But we didn't know to speak or scream, and his feet hit the top of the steep bank and pitched him perfect onto the rock that's always above-water unless it's way out of banks. “It only has two speeds. Low and flooding,” she'd say. “Dry or wide open.”

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.

“How old are you?” Father Stephen had asked the year I was sick off and on. His hair jet black back then. The mission lunchroom steamy, outside the town of Delios empty storefronts taped with silver duct tape. I shrugged. Fuck you, I thought. And besides, I don't know. Sixty. Ninety.

They continued to get their hooks deeper in me. Father Stephen's hands clasped like plaster praying hands over the sheets of paper. Like the cupped hand I keep on the windowsill.

They drove me to a doctor in Brantley Cove. A small young black man. I almost said something when we were alone, but I saw his face in the mirror as he washed with green soap. Later his fingers barely touched me, gingerly along my throat and at my chest and shoulder blades. The shouts of nigger, whistling foaming full cans of Budweiser, Schlitz, which I finished off, everywhere around me. I always stand stock-still like the cows, surprised it's come back to this again.