Cage's Bend (6 page)

“Why isn’t it fair?” Franklin brushed Cage’s bangs out of his face.

“I had a bath!” Cage clenched his fists, held them by his pockets like a gunfighter ready to draw.

“That was to look nice in church.” His father smiled. “And then you got dirty again. So you need another bath.”

“It’s not fair.” Cage started to stomp again.

His father whisked him off the floor by his waist. “Do you want to get spanked?”

Cage stopped struggling. “No.”

“Good.” Franklin set him down. “Get ready for your bath.”

“Let Nick go first.” Cage moved away from his father.

“All right.” Franklin took Nick from his mother and carried him toward the bathroom. Margaret sighed and turned to the kitchen sink. Cage walked quietly through the living room to the carport and on into the little workshop at the back. He crawled up on a stool and gazed at the half-complete homemade balsa wood model of the NASA Gemini capsule which his father was building him for his birthday. Sounds of kids on bicycles drew him down the driveway and out to the street.

The Magic Hour. When the world changes color. He always wanted to be outside at this time but it was always dinnertime-bathtime-bedtime. The thick bluegrass glowed with a luminous sheen. The air seemed heavy with light. The brick houses looked denser. This was the time when something special could happen, when Peter Pan or Winnie the Pooh or the Wild Things came out to play. The black mountains in the distance rose up from the golden haze like something out of a fairy-tale kingdom.

Hands in his pockets, Cage walked down Mountain View. In the Grabers’ yard some older kids, arranged like the points of a star, were playing kick the can in the twilight. Nobody noticed him as he watched them for a while and then moved on. He ambled along, humming a song from
Captain Kangaroo
. The road circled past uniform lawns. Crows flew through the fading light, looking for roosts in the treeless barrens. A car came from behind, slowed, rolled along beside him, a man watching him from the window. “Stranger,” Cage whispered to himself, and cut fast through the Shoptaughs’ yard, around their house, and on up a steep hillside. At the top was a bank of tall trees and huge round bushes circling an old farmhouse. Cage sat down by a bush and looked out at the sky, which was deep red now with bands of black clouds.

Cage knew he was in trouble. In the failing light he tried to think of something to tell his parents so that he wouldn’t get spanked: I went down the driveway to look at a cat and a strange bad man scared me and I ran up to the Heithoffs’ hill and hid. Then he remembered what his father had told him many times: “It’s always best to tell the truth.” He recalled the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. Cage made up his mind and ran down the hill as fast as he could, his legs revolving like windmills.

At the bottom of the hill he heard his father calling him. Coming near Mountain View, he saw lights winking like lightning bugs—the Graber children had joined the search and their flashlights jerked crazily in their hands as they ran back and forth along the street, calling, “Cage! Cage!”

Cage ran toward the tall silhouette of his father, yelling, “Papa! Papa!”

Franklin covered the distance in a few strides and scooped him off the pavement. “Cage. Where were you?”

Cage hesitated. He thought he would be spanked but he trusted his father’s promise that it’s always best to tell the truth. “I wanted to see the Magic Hour.”

“What?” His father looked at him closely.

The Graber children gathered around them.

“Cage sure is a daredevil,” a girl said. “He’s not afraid of anything.”

“Thanks, kids. You were a lot of help.” Franklin started carrying Cage toward home. “Good night.”

Cage relaxed in his father’s arms, sure that he wasn’t going to get spanked. A triangle of light fell on the front porch, through the open door.

“Oh, thank heaven, Frank’s got him. Good night, Helen,” his mother spoke into the phone and hung it up. “Cage, darling, where were you? You were gone for forty-five minutes.”

“The Magic Hour,” Cage said simply as his father set him down.

“Honey, you should have told me that you wanted to go outside.” His mother knelt on the carpet and hugged him close.

Cage looked at his feet.

“I’ll take you to see the Magic Hour,” she said. “Just promise me you won’t run away again.”

“I promise, Mama,” Cage said.

“Cage, that was very serious, you running off,” she said.

Cage didn’t say anything, suddenly uneasy.

“We’re going to have to punish you.” His mother shook her head sadly. “You know you’re not allowed to run off by yourself. You can’t run off every time that you have to take a bath.”

Cage looked at his father.

“I’m sorry, little man, but you broke the rules, rules for your own good,” he said.

“I told the truth,” Cage said. “Like George Washington.”

“That’s good, son. You must always tell the truth.” His father’s voice was soft and slow. “But you still broke the rules.”

Cage saw Nick peeking from behind a door down the hallway.

“Not fair.” Cage pulled away from his mother.

“It is fair, son. You have to follow the rules.” Frank sat down in a chair and held out his arms. “Come here, son.”

Slowly Cage walked over and bent over his father’s thigh so that he was looking directly at Nick, who saw their father smile slightly when their mother said, “Looks like he’s laying his head down on a guillotine.”

Cage pressed his lips together, tensing his body as his father whacked him hard three times on the bottom, and he did not scream or cry despite the stinging that surged through him, despite all the fury. He pushed himself up without saying a word and ran down the hall, past Nick, who was wearing a one-piece pajama suit with footies. From behind, their father called, “Nick, back in bed. Cage, get ready for your bath.”

“We’ll read
Jeremy Fisher
,” their mother nearly sang. “I promise.”

Harper

O
n the TV behind the bar, thousands of kids my age fill Tiananmen Square in China. I wonder if they have any chance of bringing down the government. They look much poorer and much braver than the students drinking and shouting around me, oblivious to the demonstration.

“Something the matter with the beer?” Alice asks from behind the bar. She’s a kindly local in her thirties. I usually flirt with her after a few drinks, which she tolerates with good humor.

“Nah, I just don’t feel like drinking,” I sigh.

“Bad day?”

“Waited three hours for my brother to show up for dinner, then hitched out here and now I don’t feel like drinking.”

“You just missed him. Billy had to throw him out. Cage kept jumping up on the bar with his guitar. Left with that Sylvia girl.”

“God, I’m sorry, Alice.”

“I like Cage. He’s welcome back. But he’s out of control these days. Needs to lay off the jack.”

“Yeah, I don’t understand what’s happened to him.” I put some cash on the bar. “Night, Alice.”

I walk about a mile in pitch-dark before some girls pick me up and drop me off at my place. Bone-tired from six ten-hour days, I read a few pages of
Siddhartha
and fall asleep around midnight, planning on crashing until noon. When I wake up, Cage is staring at me at the end of the bed, strumming his guitar. Freshly shaved, his hair swept back with gel, he’s wearing a blue blazer and white pants. His eyes are electric. “Harpo, listen to this song I just wrote.”

Nick and Cage are Irish twins

Born in sixties in the very same year,

The sons of a preacher and a Tennessee belle

who met on a Carolina pier.

Nick likes to spend time alone,

an introvert who’s kind of shy.

Cage likes to run with the pack,

’Cause he’s another breed of guy.

Behind him Sylvia, who would be quite pretty if she wasn’t so anorexic, sits in a cloud of ganja smoke, nodding in time. She’s wearing a dress and a cashmere coat. Her eyes are just as wild. The wind-up clock on the dresser shows nine-thirty.

Nick’s studying to save the world,

Always knew what he wanted to be,

While Cage was a man cast adrift who

Found himself on cold northern sea.

So let them be the kind of men they are,

Let ’em alone and they will both go far,

Let ’em do whatever they each choose

’Cause they’re wearing different-size shoes.

“What do you think?” He sets the guitar on the floor.

“It’s great.” I yawn. “But Nick’s dead.”

“No, he’s living the greater life, that’s what Dad would say. You know what today is?”

“Yeah, I haven’t forgotten.” I rub my eyes.

“Right. We’re all going to church.”

“I’m a humanist. I don’t go to church. Are y’all tripping?”

“We’re coming down,” Sylvia says.

Sylvia parks her new Saab a block from a little stone Episcopal church. Climbing out, we hear hymns coming through the open front doors.

“Hurry up, sports fans, we’re late.” Cage pulls his guitar from the open window and starts across the street.

“I’m not going in if you take the guitar.” I sit down on the hood.

“It’s a legitimate way to worship.”

“Not in there it’s not.” I start to pull my tie loose.

“Leave it,” Sylvia tells him. “Harpo’s right.”

I follow them into the nave, where shafts of light slant through the stained glass, making bright circles on the wine-colored carpet. The church is fairly full. About a hundred people are standing, reading a psalm in unison: “Wash me through and through from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin.”

“Cage, this way,” I whisper, nodding toward an empty pew to the side in the transept.

Cage shakes his head. “The front row’s always empty.” He starts up the center aisle, reciting along with the congregation from memory: “For behold, you look for truth deep within me and will make me understand wisdom secretly.”

The congregation sits down before we reach the empty pew. I feel their eyes on us. Cage smiles like a movie star, guiding Sylvia up the aisle with his hand on her elbow. A teenage girl with long blonde hair smiles back at him. From a high lectern a woman begins to read the lesson. Sylvia sits down, Cage kneels beside her. I sit down just as the congregation rises to sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Nick sings louder than anyone and he sings well. After the hymn everyone remains standing while an old bald priest with a hearing aid comes down the center aisle where an acolyte holds a big Bible open to the Gospels. I’m trying to follow the reading from Luke when Cage whispers, “Didn’t you used to hate it every Sunday when the ushers passed the plate and everyone tossed in dollar bills? Like Pop’s salary was coming out of the plate, like we were a family of beggars, you know?”

“Yeah,” I whisper back. “It made me feel like Dad was inferior, like he became a priest because he couldn’t make it in the marketplace.”

“Think of what a good speaker he is. He could have been a great politician. And he was a good role model.” Cage smiles. “Did you ever want to be a preacher?”

I laugh through my nose.

“The Holy Ghost never summoned you to the pulpit?”

“No.”

“I feel the Holy Ghost creeping up on me now,” Cage says a little too loud as everyone in the congregation sits down except for him.

A woman across the aisle glances at us.

“The Holy Ghost is calling me to be its instrument,” Cage says a little louder.

“Sit down, Cage,” Sylvia whispers.

“Let me by,” he says softly, smiling.

“No,” I say. “Sit down now.”

Placing one hand on the railing, he vaults over the pew front and dashes forward in time to cut off the old priest, the only other person in the church standing, at the steps that lead up to the pulpit.

A few feet away the rector is seated in a tall ornate chair in front of the empty choir stall. A heavy man with a black beard and warm eyes, he looks puzzled. When he rises to his feet, his face grows stern and he says in a salty voice, “Cage Rutledge, what on earth—”

“I beg your pardon, Father Farlow, but the Holy Ghost has summoned me to preach this beautiful summer morning in your stead,” Cage says loud enough for all the congregation to hear. Father Farlow must see the light in his eyes, for he suddenly looks cautious and says nothing. Cage bows to him and then to the old priest, who, with a confused expression, is adjusting his hearing aid.

Cage brushes past him and mounts the lectern. He projects his voice the way he did when I saw him at the Vanderbilt theater in
Fool for Love
two years ago: “Good morning, brethren.”

I realize my mouth is hanging open. I shut it as my mind goes into a mode akin to once when I was driving Cage’s car near Sewanee, spinning out of control on ice, and time seemed to slow down, and I calmly recovered from a couple of 360-degree turns while absorbing every detail. I turn around to gauge the response of the congregants, who appear to have woken up from a daydream. A couple of young married men are grinning while their wives look concerned and a number of elderly folks can’t make out who is in the pulpit. The mother of the girl who smiled when we walked in now looks suspiciously at me.

“I won’t keep you long,” Cage says in a deep, confident voice. From a distance he appears to be a specimen of perfect health, tan and handsome in his blue blazer as if he had just stepped off a yacht.