Boy's Life (69 page)

2
Faith

I THOUGHT I HAD KNOWN DEATH.

     I had walked with it, ever since I could remember sitting in front of the television set, or hunkered down with a box of buttered popcorn before the Lyric’s silver screen. How many hundreds of cowboys and Indians had I witnessed fall, arrow-pierced or gut-shot, into the swirling wagon train dust? How many dozens of detectives and policemen, laid low by the criminal bullet and coughing out their minutes? How many armies, mangled by shells and burp guns, and how many monster victims screaming as they’re chewed?

     I thought I had known Death, in Rebel’s flat, blank stare. In the last good-bye of Mrs. Neville. In the rush and gurgle of air as a car with a man at the wheel sank into cold depths.

     I was wrong.

     Because Death cannot be known. It cannot be befriended. If Death were a boy, he would be a lonely figure, standing at the playground’s edge while the air rippled with other children’s laughter. If Death were a boy, he would walk alone. He would speak in a whisper and his eyes would be haunted by knowledge no human can bear.

     This was what tore at me in the quiet hours:
We come from darkness, and to darkness we must return.

     I remembered Dr. Lezander saying that as I’d sat on his porch with him facing the golden hills. I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to think that Davy Ray was in a place where he could see no light, not even the candle that burned for him at the Presbyterian church. I didn’t want to think of Davy Ray confined, closed away from the sun, unable to somehow breathe and laugh even if doing so was only shadow play. In the days that followed the death of Davy Ray, I realized what fiction I had been a witness to. The cowboys and Indians, the detectives and policemen, the armies and the monster victims, would all rise again, at the dimming of the stage lights. They would go home, to wait for a casting call. But Davy Ray was dead forever, and I could not stand the thought of him in darkness.

     It got to where I couldn’t sleep. My room was too dark. It got to where I wasn’t sure what I’d seen, the night a blurred figure spoke to Rebel. Because if Davy Ray was in darkness, so, too, was Carl Bellwood. Rebel was. And all the sleepers on Poulter Hill and all the generations whose bones lay beneath the twisted roots of Zephyr’s trees: they, too, had returned to darkness.

     I remembered Davy Ray’s funeral. How thick the red earth was, on the edges of the grave. How thick, how heavy. There was no door down there when the minister was finished and the people gone and the dirt shoveled in by Bruton men. There was only dark, and its weight made something crack inside me.

     I didn’t know where heaven was anymore. I wasn’t sure if God had any sense, or plan or reason, or if maybe He, too, was in the dark. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore: not life, not afterlife, not God, not goodness. And I anguished over these things as the Christmas decorations went up on Merchants Street.

     Christmas was still two weeks away, but Zephyr struggled for a festive air. The death of Davy Ray had drowned everybody’s joy. It was talked about at Mr. Dollar’s, at the Bright Star Cafe, at the courthouse, and everywhere in between. He was so young, they said. Such a tragic accident, they said. But that’s life, they said; whether we like it or not, that’s life.

     Hearing these things didn’t help me. Of course my folks tried to talk to me about it, saying that Davy Ray’s suffering was over and that he’d gone to a better place.

     But I just couldn’t believe them. What place would ever be better than Zephyr?

     “Heaven,” Mom told me as we sat together before the crackling fire. “Davy Ray’s gone to heaven, and you have to believe that.”

     “Because why?” I asked her, and she looked as if I’d just slapped her face.

     I waited for an answer. I hoped for one, but it came in a word that left me unsatisfied, and that word was “faith.”

     They took me to see Reverend Lovoy. We sat in his office at church, and he gave me a lemon candy from a bowl on his desk. “Cory,” he said, “you believe in Jesus, don’t you?”

     “Yes sir.”

     “And you believe that Jesus was sent from God to die for the sins of man?”

     “Yes sir.”

     “Then you also believe Jesus was crucified, dead and buried, and on the third day He arose from the grave?”

     “Yes sir.” Here I frowned. “But Jesus was Jesus. Davy Ray was just a regular boy.”

     “I know that, Cory, but Jesus came to earth to show us that there’s more to this existence than we understand. He showed us that if we believe in Him, and follow His will and way, we, too, have a place with God in heaven. You see?”

     I thought about this for a minute as Reverend Lovoy sat back in his chair and watched me. “Is heaven better than Zephyr?” I asked him.

     “A million times better,” he said.

     “Do they have comic books there?”

     “Well…” He smiled. “We don’t really know what heaven will be. We just know it’ll be wonderful.”

     “Because why?” I asked.

     “Because,” he answered, “we must have faith.” He offered the bowl to me. “Would you like another candy?”

     I couldn’t picture heaven. How could a place be any good at all if it didn’t have the things there you enjoyed doing? If there were no comic books, no monster movies, no bikes, and no country roads to ride them on? No swimming pools, no ice cream, no summer, or barbecue on the Fourth of July? No thunderstorms, and front porches on which to sit and watch them coming? Heaven sounded to me like a library that only held books about one certain subject, yet you had to spend eternity and eternity and eternity reading them. What was heaven without typewriter paper and a magic box?

     Heaven would be hell, that’s what.

     These days were not all bleak. The Christmas lights, red and green, glowed on Merchants Street. Lamps shaped like the head of Santa Claus burned on the street corners, and silver tinsel hung from the stoplights. Dad got a new job. He began working three days a week as a stock clerk at Big Paul’s Pantry.

     One day Leatherlungs called me a blockhead six times. She told me to come up to the blackboard and show the class what I knew about prime numbers.

     I told her I wasn’t coming.

     “
Cory Mackenson, you get up here right now!
” she roared.

     “No, ma’am,” I said. Behind me the Demon laughed gleefully, sensing a new assault in the war on Mrs. Harper.

     “Get. Up. Here. This.
Minute!
” Leatherlungs’ face bloomed red.

     I shook my head. “No.”

     She was on me. She moved a lot faster than I ever would’ve thought. She grabbed two handfuls of my sweater and wrenched me up out of my desk so hard my knee hit and sent a shiver of pain through my leg, and by the time that pain got to my head it was sheer white-hot anger.

     With Davy Ray and darkness and a meaningless word called faith lodged in my mind like thorns, I swung at her.

     I hit her right in the face. I couldn’t have aimed any better. Her glasses flew off, and she gave a croaking cry of surprise. The anger fled from me just that fast, but Leatherlungs hollered, “
Don’t you hit me, don’t you dare!
” and she grabbed my hair and started jerking my head. The rest of my classmates sat in stunned amazement; this was too much, even for them. I had stepped into a mythic realm, though I didn’t know it yet. Leatherlungs slung me, I crashed into Sally Meachum’s desk and about knocked her over, and then Leatherlungs was hauling me out the door on the way to the principal’s office, raging every step.

     Inevitably, the phone call brought both Mom and Dad. They were, to say the least, appalled at my behavior. I was suspended from school for three days, and the principal—a small, birdlike man named, fittingly, Mr. Cardinale—said that before I could return to class, I would have to write an apology to Mrs. Harper and have both my parents sign it.

     I looked at him, with my parents right there in his office, and I told him I could be suspended for three months for all I cared. I told him I wasn’t writing her any apology, that I was tired of being called a blockhead, and I was sick of math and sick of everybody.

     Dad came up off his chair. “Cory!” he said. “What’s wrong with you?”

     “Never in the history of this school has a student struck a teacher!” Mr. Cardinale piped up. “Never! This boy needs a whippin’ to remember, is what I think.”

     “I’m sorry to have to say it,” Dad told him, “but I agree with you.”

     I tried to explain to them on the way home, but they wouldn’t hear it. Dad said there was no excuse for what I’d done, and Mom said she’d never been so ashamed. So I just stopped trying, and I sat sullenly in the pickup with Rocket riding in the truckbed. The whipping was delivered by my father’s hand. It was swift, but it was painful. I did not know that the day before, Dad had been ragged by his boss at Big Paul’s Pantry about messing up the count on boxes of Christmas candy. I did not know that Dad’s boss was eight years younger than he, that he drove a red Thunderbird, and that he called my father Tommy.

     I bore the whipping in silence, but in my room I pressed my face into the pillow.

     Mom came in. She said she couldn’t understand the way I was acting. She said she knew I was still torn up about Davy Ray, but that Davy Ray was in heaven and life was for the living. She said I would have to write the apology whether I wanted to or not, and the sooner I did it the better. I lifted my face from the pillow, and I told her Dad could whip me every day from now until kingdom come, but I wasn’t writing any apology.

     “Then I believe you’d better stay in here and think about it, young man,” she said. “I believe you’ll think better on an empty stomach, too.”

     I didn’t answer. There was no need. Mom left, and I heard my folks talking about me, what was wrong with me and why I was being so disrespectful. I heard the clatter of dinner plates and I smelled chicken frying. I just turned over and went to sleep.

     A dream of the four black girls, the flash of light, and a soundless blast awakened me. I had knocked my alarm clock off the bedside table again, but this time my parents didn’t come in. The clock was still working; it was almost two in the morning. I got up and looked out the window. A crescent moon appeared sharp enough to hang a hat on. Beyond the window’s cold glass the night was still and the stars blazing. I wasn’t going to write any apology; maybe this was the Jaybird showing up in me, but I was damned if I’d give the satisfaction to Leatherlungs.

     I needed to talk to somebody who understood me. Somebody like Davy Ray.

     My fleece-lined jacket hung in the closet near the front door. I didn’t want to go out that way, because Dad might be awake. I put on a pair of corduroy jeans, two sweaters, and a pair of gloves. Then I eased the window up. It squeaked once, a hair-raising sound, but I waited for a minute and heard no footsteps. Then I finished the job and slid out the window into the bitter air.

     I closed the window behind me, but for a thin slice I could get my fingers hooked into. I got on Rocket, and rode away under the sharp-fanged moon.

     The stoplights blinked yellow as I pedaled through the silent streets. My breath billowed out like a white octopus before me. I saw a few lights in houses: bathroom bulbs left on to ease the sleepy stumbling. My nose and ears got cold mighty fast; it was a night not fit for dog or Vernon Thaxter. On my way to Poulter Hill, I took a left turn and pedaled about a quarter mile more than I had to, because I wanted to see something. I coasted slowly past the house that sat on three acres and had a horse barn.

     A light burned in an upstairs room. It looked too bright to be a bathroom bulb. Dr. Lezander was up, listening to the foreign countries.

     A curious thought occurred to me. Maybe Dr. Lezander was a night owl because he feared the darkness. Maybe he sat up there in that room under the light, listening to voices from around the world, to reassure himself that he was not alone, even as the clock ticked through the lonely hours.

     I turned Rocket away from Dr. Lezander’s house. I had not pursued the mystery of the green feather any more since Davy Ray had died. A phone call to Miss Blue Glass was too much effort in this time of death and doubt. It was all I could do to fend off my own gathering darkness, much less think of what lay in the mud at the lightless bottom of Saxon’s Lake. I didn’t want to think that Dr. Lezander had anything to do with that. If he had, then what in this world was real and true anymore?

     I reached Poulter Hill. The wrought-iron gates were locked, but since the stone wall around the cemetery was only two feet high, getting in was no feat of magic. I left Rocket to wait there, and I walked up the hill among the moon-splashed tombstones. As Poulter Hill stood on the invisible line between worlds, so, too, did it stand between Zephyr and Bruton. The white dead people lay on one side, the black dead people on the other. It made sense that people who could not eat in the same cafe, swim in the same public pool, or shop in the same stores would not be happy being dead and buried within sight of each other. Which made me want to ask Reverend Lovoy sometime if the Lady and the Moon Man would be going to the same heaven as Davy Ray. If black people occupied the same heaven as white people, what was the point of eating in different cafes here on earth? If black people and white people walked in heaven together, did that mean we were smarter or more stupid than God because on earth we shunned each other? Of course, if we all returned to darkness, there was no God and no heaven, anyway. How Little Stevie Cauley had managed to drive Midnight Mona through a crack of that darkness was another mystery, because I had seen him clear as I now saw the city of stones rising up around me.