Sign Languages

HISTOIRE DE MON TEMPS

“Voiture,” I say, listening to the whine of the pickup’s mud tires on asphalt. Know it’s on the ridge behind me, a mile away. I turn my back to the road. Imagine that my weak vision goes far beyond the four-strand barbed-wire fence to the cows I can smell pissing. To the newest calves I hear now in this new early March grass. Up to the hills covered with some oaks but mostly pines Mothermae called “evergreens.”

“Voiture,” I say when the sound changes. Passing over the bridge where the grate opens. I almost piss on myself, my hand cupped in my open overalls. I feel then smell a trickle. Mothermae pulling the chocolate skin back, the head a pink like here, these phlox at my feet. Flocks of sheep, I used to think. I almost turn to look at the coming truck. Voiture I picked up right here against this post. The one I watched them replace the year we spent most of the summer outside when they brought in the hay.

“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.

I don’t build a fire in the stove to fry the bacon they gave me that I keep in an old metal bicycle basket deep in the well. The wires icy to the touch. Instead I take some of her ribbon off the nails near the back door. Two yellow ones which bring with them a laugh of hers about something or other.

I tie them in my beard, let them dangle on my chest. The yarrow has begun to spread near the door; I try not to crush it as I get down on all fours and pull out the twisted shovel with the shattered handle. As I walk down the road that circles the house and goes down through the evergreens that block it from Farm Road 3941, I smell the jonquils. And I want to let Mothermae listen to my mind thank her God and Baby Jesus that it’s warm again and I’ve come out of the cold to see the road, to “glean it clean,” she’d say. Glean it. Glean a word I believe sprouted from black bottomland cotton fields. A word I love.

“No, I never worked. My legs never been right.” And we looked at one another until he smiled and nodded. “That’s all right. That’s all right.”

So I lied, Mothermae. Okay, you smiling, compassionate man, I walked into Hopkins when I was twelve and she cut across Mecham’s Prairie to Luxor to mend clothes in a converted garage. I could read. I sat for centuries in the dark filthy room. The old man droned on and on. Stomachs growled all day. We all itched lice. The dark, near the muddy floor, under the desks full of mosquitoes drinking constantly, raising purple welts. Spring thunderstorms melted the cardboard windowpanes. The damp curled paper.

Later I came with her past the windowless garage to the sawmill icehouse. In the awful August heat I loved the wet sawdust floor, the blocks of ice warped and irregular rising to the ceiling. The clunk of metal tongs, the shower of ice from their deep bites.

Nigger this, nigger that. The oldest, who ran the hand-cranked crusher, named Nigger Boss.

But soon there were troubles. The whites laid off and waiting for someone to cuss, to yell at from store porches and through screened doors.

No work for anybody. The cross-tie mill burned. We woke that night smelling it on the dry wind and walked down to the Farm Road — just dirt then, the scant gravel beat to the sides — to watch it. The sky free of town lights. It was wonderful and Mothermae shook her head and cried. Took my arm and trembled.

Somehow she worked on. She saved almost all of her money in a metal saltine tin.

I never went to see the destruction. Now there were shootings all over. Whites drunk and mad. Black folks trying to be absolutely quiet and still in Shady Bend, the nigger quarters down the hill from the icehouse.

No work. The last time I saw the icehouse, we walked through its empty dark caves, me and Boss. “I’ll be okay. You, too,” he said more than once.

And so I tried this and that. For a long time we drank whatever we could find. And some nights I’d stay in the quarters with someone from work.

Now at the ancient fence — a few rotten posts, the rusty wire sticking up from the pine needles like some red leafless vine — I turn away from where my road goes on to cross the bar ditch and connects with Farm Road 3941. Instead, using the shovel as a cane, I move slowly through the saplings so I’ll come out onto it a long ways from the house. My ribbons flutter in the slight breeze. I ease across a low spot and cross another abandoned road. I stop to breathe but I don’t sit down. That day I’d been on the road until after dark. I crawled up this slope and sat listening to them in the car. The windows were down. They rocked its stiff springs. She kept saying, “There, right there. No, right there.” But he didn’t seem to be getting it right. He shouted “Nancy,” and the woods came back with its sounds of frogs, an owl far away along Bridgett Creek.

They began again. Something I could never do. Only once and I melt away to sleep. The small house in the quarters full of people noises and the heavy odor of kerosene and boiled supper. She called it my dick. What I’d thought of as my thing, what Mothermae had called it when she washed me in the metal tub we’d gleaned from somewhere.

We fought and drank and sat on the porch. And everything else, I guess. Years ago. She’d drink the whiskey we got in Mason jars and at almost sunup she’d hit me with her fists as we lay on the bed. I’d jerk awake, the others beginning to get up. Coughs and the last deep snores from the soundest sleep. “Goddammit,” she’d shout, “I can’t even sleep. Why can’t I sleep, you bastard. Laying there snoring. Get out, goddammit. Go on home to ‘Mothermae I.’”

“Nothing turned up yet?” Mothermae’d ask. And I’d shrug and walk back into Luxor to drink and sleep with her. With Kay.

Until I couldn’t anymore. When they burned most of Shady Bend down. Black and white. And Kay just sat on the porch, drinking, and never let the jar touch the floor. Hugging it between her thighs.

I stepped over one of the white bastards outside of town. Someone had laid him out cold, a brick propped against his temple.

But I don’t count any of that. So maybe I didn’t lie to the first priest or later to Father Stephen and the thick heavy Jesus, now a grown man, on the wooden cross on his vast chest. “No, I’ve never had a job.” Besides, all that was before Social Security shit.

She still sewed. Up to the very end. And I complained about my back for years until one day I just stopped in the middle of the sentence because both of us were tired of hearing it.

People came to me over the road. I gleaned the road.

Like now, when I come up out of the ditch, deeper here than anywhere else except at the grate where it drops sharply into the creek. That’s tomorrow. I admit I’ve pushed it up a day. One day only. That’s bad enough. I won’t do it again. Never have before, that I can remember. I can’t begin to be haphazard now; I’ll miss something valuable.

Today the clouds are low. The gray light is warm. The asphalt is damp though there wasn’t rain last night. Along here once a car ran off the road and rolled through the fence — the posts, metal now, were spindly cedar then. I heard the whump of it all from the house.

No one was killed. Or even hurt. Back then the road was slow and the cars heavy and strong. I helped two white women up the bank and we talked for a long time until a delivery truck for a meat-packing plant stopped. We shook hands and waved. I heard the wrecker at the car the next day, but I didn’t go look. I already had a pair of earrings and leather gloves which I wet and stretched until they fit.

Today it’s a raccoon. Sometimes it’s a possum or a dog or tabby cat from somewhere far off. Or maybe they’re let out here by people tired of the trouble. Once I helped a man chase down a beautiful red bird-dog who’d escaped when he’d stopped to take a piss. He’d given me two dollars and a can of beer from a yellow cooler he had on the passenger’s side. He asked about something I had on my jacket or in my hair and I think I told him all about it. And he asked more and I saw he understood everything I said.

I dig good and deep. The raccoon whole, not a sign of broken skin anywhere. Those are the best kind. Before I nudge him in with my toe, I squat to look at his face. His teeth are exposed in an even line. Tiny and sharp. Locked into either a snarl or a grin. And I consider Mothermae’s opened mouth and the man I stepped over once leaving Luxor. At this point I always worry about dying and not being buried at the house with her, up under the pears. If it’s not sudden, I could go to the priests. Or lay down out here with a note pinned to me. Or maybe just stay inside with the birds banging into the walls.

This morning I rise before the sun and bring up the bacon and light fat pine pieces in the stove. There’s bacon and one egg from the priests and a handful of chicory coffee in the pot of rolling water.

“Silly old man,” I mutter, eating at my table made out of a door. But I still don’t think much about the grate or my silliness about it — my making it into some big deal which it’s not. Instead I get up and gently pry out tacks with my thumbnail and take the ancient yellow pieces of paper and sit down in the open doorway; beyond my feet the new dark green mint running in all directions like crazy. And though I don’t lift my head still heavy from sleep, stiff from the cold nights and warming days, I think beyond the scraps. “Bruno Hauptman Executed.” We’ve had that forever, huh, Mothermae. I watch her hands take it down. Putting it back, she matched tack and hole perfectly. “State Rep. Wallston Convicted.” “The Eagle Has Landed.” Sometimes some of the story. Never all unless it’s there right on the back. In the gift box they put pamphlets and tracts. About Mary mostly. Seldom about Baby Jesus grown old on Father Stephen’s chest. Never God himself, I think. But sometimes the green-eyed younger one slips in a Reader’s Digest or, once, an almanac.

I have read those. Looked at the pictures. But these from our walls are the best. I remember where I found this one about white men on the moon. It was the year the drought burned up the garden, the pears dropping easily, still the light green of mossy places in Bridgett Creek. As hard as stones.

The year white men landed on the moon. I imagined I could see them that summer. But black folks would have showed up better, I laughed. Like periods in the newspaper. Like ticks on the white face of a Hereford in the farthest pasture up the hill from the grate, the road going on to Monterrey Prairie 8 miles away. There there were black folks, white men, too. But I’ve never been that far. The white men on the rising orange moon closer than those at the Prairie.

Today I’m anxious to get there; too anxious maybe. I know I’ve cheated; I’m going a day early. Once a month. And I thought about traveling there once every two months and right now my mouth’s dry as can be.

I hurry myself up. I wash my face, put back the bacon, ignore the sprouting lantana, the first white veins showing along the buds of the tea rose. Though I walk down the road trying to recall its fragrance. “Milton it’s wonderful. Milton, look at what you’ve found us,” she’d said, me pulling her up the road. She stood about here and looked around but I pass on, walk through the memory. Don’t stop to look back. Pears. Tea roses. Sometimes the recollection of Rudy’s strong body all over the place. On the porch. The sounds of hay lifted up, thrown down. For years we thought maybe this spring they’ll remember. Or this winter the feed will run low. If they come, they’d come across the field where the road crosses a dry stream and edges around a hill. But they never did. Rudy on the moon maybe.

Now I ease across ditches, enter sapling thickets, emerge on the road as the sun comes up behind clouds pink and orange. The bridge, the hill ahead blurred, washed all together, a dark sweep to the west. The sun on my chilly back. It’ll get stronger.

That first day was terribly hot for late summer. I thought of the icehouse. I remembered Kay. I had forgotten the porch and the whiskey; the smells of Shady Bend.

Mothermae was dead, but the boy hadn’t fallen to the rock yet. Sometime in there, in between whatever the in-between is. I try to keep it all straight, but I don’t think I can anymore. It’s like something has worn out. But I could see better at least. Terribly hot but no drought. The thunderheads came on late in the afternoon, at almost sunset, their bottoms blossoming red like roses, the lightning like the day’s sun. There’d be some rain. Not much but enough to give things a drink, a sigh of relief. I was walking, expecting that later.

I had never crossed the bridge. The sign peppered with holes. I stopped there, put my little finger gently in the holes, saw the jagged exits. Thirty feet to the rushing water, green like young lettuce. The road going uphill on the other side. Sharply up into thick evergreens and gone over the top toward Monterrey Prairie 8 miles.

“Just stay away from it, you hear me? That’s going too far. It’s full of water moccasins and greenbriers anyways,” she’d said. Some fear, respect, darknesses in her words I understood but didn’t, too.

So we always turned back the other way. Seldom gleaned up to the creek. Only sometimes, if we spied something shining in the sun. Something of interest.

Now I cross it. Without fear. But that hot day I must have been breathless. Like I was stepping on the moon. A nigger on the white face. The green water below boiling around the large flat rock. Then there was the car. Voiture. I heard it ahead in the evergreens the other side of the hill and I ran toward it, past the other sign full of holes and dropped down the rough concrete along its side, my skin scraped away. The swallows’ nests over my head, my feet sticking through a mulberry bush.

The car come and gone. Only its sound present. Clanking over the metal plates, air rushing through the railings. I must have been old even then.

Now the best path is the easiest. Cross the road, hang onto the sign with its wrong name. Swing slowly until my shoes touch the head wall. Drop two feet and walk under. A natural path here. All the way to the mouth of the grate. The outlet of a drainpipe at least four feet in diameter. The hole set back at an angle into the cement, rusty iron rods the size of my fingers broken, bent upward, trapping whatever comes down from beyond the top of the hill.

I sit and lean back against the concrete. It is damp, still cold in the shade. I wait a moment. I wait even longer.

That past day not magic, not Mary or Baby Jesus. Though she would have said all that. And she’d looked at me as she often had. Her eyes drawn almost shut. “Behold the lilies of the field,” she’d say. “The birds of the air.”

The niggers of this land.

But it was close to magic, I guess. Everything coming all at once.

I laid against the grate, my hands all scratched up and beginning to bleed. I sat up slowly and looked up into the black hole. There was a mound of leaves, paper, metal shining, all of it dried into a wad of stuff. I crawled toward it but before I reached out the voices came to me over my shoulder.

“As pleasant a way as I know.”

“Better than anything, I’d say.”

A woman’s and a man’s. Then laughter. And I see myself gasping for air like when the wind howled down the stovepipe and smoked us out into the open.

Angels, Mothermae?

The sounds of them crystal clear and floating on the heat waves. Bright and distinct right at my feet. Passing through my head like a breeze.

But I’m not a believer, and so I scrambled past the tangle of greenbriers just in time to see them drift around the bend. In a long low wooden boat. A canoe. Their voices still coming back over the sandbars and the flat rock they almost scrape. The first and only time I’ve ever seen anyone for any reason on Bridgett.

White angels if angels, Mothermae. Angels with parasols and fishing tackle.

I turned around to glean the mess of rubbish, teasing out the tight bundle until I screamed, yelled, heard my voice for the first time in days, weeks. Louder than I’ve ever heard it before.

I beat it up the bank, heard it coming up after me. “Oh,” it kept saying. “Oh, oh, oh,” like great gusts of wind.

Below me the fingernails painted red, chipped, the hand crooked, pill bugs all over it, up against the grate, bundled in the tight dry weeds.

I held the sign; we swayed together. The sun right overhead for a long time. I thought of Bruno Hauptman, saw the picture of the baby they found. Stuffed up in a culvert like a parcel of things you ought to want to look at.

Now I laugh. Then I laughed too, later. “You’re getting old, you goddamn sure are,” I’d said. I begin to sort through this month’s deposit. But there’s been little rain to bring stuff down. There’s nothing here, but I’m not disappointed. It happens a lot during the dead of summer. Once there was a whole book, its pages barely faded. The Waitress Murders. I still read it once in a while. Catalogs. Huge pieces of cloth that come in handy. I think maybe the bicycle basket came from here.

Now the heavy plaster hand is on the windowsill. I put a candle in its palm. It was probably from one of those store dummies. I love to remember that gray-headed man scrambling up the bank yelling. And after I’d had the laugh, I wondered if my voice had carried down the creek’s channel to the people in the canoe. Had they said, “Shhh… listen… what’s that? Listen!”

“My God, it’s a person.”

There’s a chance all that didn’t happen the same day, the day I discovered the grate. But I think it’s so.

Gifts from God, Mothermae? Sometimes there are vague and distant noises. The rumble of thunder, the hiss of snakes from out of the mouth of the pipe. But it’s not Baby Jesus turning his head this way, is it? Most likely it’s a trick of the wind, or the pipe travels under a road, opens near some houses or a factory.

Coming out of the cold into the spring is the best time. I’m already thinking about planting some peppers. When I want to talk I’ll go into town to the priests. I’ll ask them about Mary, say I’ve read those brochures and they’re interesting. Get the two of them really going. Or I’ll take the shovel and walk down and dig up the asphalt patch. I’ve done that before. And when they show up in their yellow dump truck, I’ll come the long way out of the woods without anything in my hair or beard. Sit and drink Pepsis with the black boys stripped to the waist and shining. They think I’m a hobo. They ask me questions about my travels that make the white foreman laugh and shake his head. I answer them as best I can.