Читать книгу The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God - Timothy Schaffert - Страница 10

HIS thumb in a thimble, Ozzie sat on the open tailgate of his pickup. He sewed to distract himself these days, repairing years of tears in old trousers and shirts and moth-eaten sweaters. He had taught himself embroidery from a book, and he stitched a rose into the point of a collar of one of Charlotte’s childhood blouses.

When he had left his house that morning with his few baskets of peaches collected from the tiny orchard in his backyard, Charlotte had yet to come home from the drive-in. Her staying out all night wasn’t all that unusual anymore, but she claimed complete innocence, spoke of all-night prayer meetings and spiritual sweats at midnight and meditation in country ditches. “Junior’s a good boy,” she told him, “not like Gatling.” Charlotte spent most of her late afternoons lying sullen and lanky on the living room sofa, letting Junior kneel beside her and talk in her ear. In a hard whisper, the boy seduced her easily with preaching of biblical catastrophe and plague. She was at an age to be prone to any sort of depravity, Ozzie’s neighbors said. A girl Charlotte’s age, they said from their front porches and window perches, a girl so long without a mother, looks for divine undoing, for the kind of violent, snaky salvation a boy like Junior promises.

Ozzie’s fingers were a bit too big for the delicate embroidery, and he stopped a moment and rested his hands in his lap. Ozzie worked with stained glass, repairing church windows from county to county. His burned and scarred hands, with the grooves in the skin, were lately beginning to resemble his windows of glass shards. He used to be much more careful handling the melted lead for the soldering.

Though the death of Jenny, Charlotte’s mother, three years before, was certainly one of the reasons for Charlotte’s newfound religion and her skanky, psalm-reciting boyfriend, Ozzie recognized his own blame. For years he’d brought Charlotte along to the churches old and new, country and city, to remove the damaged stained-glass windows. As she waited, she stood at the pulpits and pounded her fists, faking blustery sermons, or baptized her rag dolls, dipping their yarn hair into the fonts. Then the windows, for weeks, sat in his studio as he intricately pieced back together a broken glass Jesus or nameless saint. When the sun was at the back windows, the powdery colors filled the room, touching Charlotte’s cheeks and hands as she played on the floor with the cat.

“Charlotte’s on the other side of the square,” said a neighbor as she purchased a sackful of peaches. The neighbor had teenagers of her own and spoke with a conspiratorial hush.

Ozzie poked his needle into the cuff of his shirt and walked through the flea market, scanning the crowd. He found Charlotte, still in her geisha-girl costume and wearing what looked to be pink fangs in her open mouth, lying in the grass and sleeping with her head on Junior’s chest. Junior slept as well, his hand in Charlotte’s hair. Junior was certainly not unlikable. He was as handsome as a drowned-rat kind of a boy could be, with thick black hair greased back. He carried a clarinet around with him, saying that he was teaching himself complicated jazz tunes like “So What” and “Undecided.” Charlotte met him when he worked as an apprentice at an ironworks. Above the garage door of the building was a plaster statue of Christ in an iron cage wrought with curlicues and spikes. Ozzie could just see Charlotte penitent in the doorway watching the boy stand among sparks and blue flame.

Charlotte and Junior slept next to a quilt—for the previous few flea markets, Charlotte had been selling off the stuff of her childhood. All the long-abandoned dolls and books of fairy tales and framed photos of childhood friends had been spread out across the quilt and marked with bottom-barrel prices, and Ozzie had been her best customer—last week he’d bought a tin bird he’d bought for her years before, and some faded candy necklaces. Now, next to the few things she had yet to sell, was a sign that said, “Take whatever you want. It’s all FREE.”

Ozzie recalled the words of Charlotte’s high school guidance counselor, who he had visited one recent afternoon: Don’t worry much, the woman had said, until she starts to give her things away. A sign of suicidal tendencies, it seemed. Ozzie kicked gently at Charlotte’s side—he could almost imagine his daughter and Junior sleepy from poison-spiked Kool-Aid.

“Daddy,” Charlotte said, unalarmed, sitting up to stretch.

Ozzie grabbed the box next to the quilt and collected the few things that remained. “Pickup’s parked over there,” Ozzie said. “We’re going home.”

“I’m glad you’re here, Mr. Yates,” Junior said, standing and brushing the dried grass off his jeans. Ozzie saw Junior give Charlotte a wink and a nod, granting her permission to obey her father. The gesture turned Ozzie’s stomach. “I’d like to discuss something with you,” Junior said, his eyes on Charlotte as she walked away.

Though Junior was soft-spoken, Ozzie knew there was no refusing him. Junior had no knives, no gun, and was too slight in build to pose any physical threat. His command of the family was simply the result of Charlotte’s devotion. Charlotte’s fast love for him had turned her feral and easily spooked, and Ozzie was afraid if he made one wrong move, she’d dart.

“Actually, I want to talk to you too,” Ozzie said before Junior spoke again. Ozzie picked up a Slinky from the box and let it coil and uncoil in his hand. “I don’t want you to see my daughter so much anymore.” He looked deeper into the box, his weak demand dropping off. A spark of sunlight glinted off the tip of the boy’s cowboy boot.

“Oh, Mr. Yates,” Junior said, smiling, shrugging. “‘The glory of young men is their strength, and the honor of old men is their gray hair.’”

“I’ll call the authorities,” Ozzie said. He pushed back the bangs of his hair, none of it gray that he had ever noticed. “There’s a thing called statutory rape, and it’s very illegal.”

“I don’t think you will, Mr. Yates.” Junior stepped in and put his hand to the back of Ozzie’s head. He leaned over, whispering, “‘For you bear with anyone if he enslaves you, if he devours you, if he takes advantage of you, if he exalts himself, if he hits you in the face.’” Just the sound of Junior’s voice brought to Ozzie’s mind scratchy black woodcut images of hordes of children, their eyes lidded with pestilence, of screaming angels with burnt wings, of buzzards and dead lions, all of which the boy had described to Charlotte as his picture of the end of the world.

Ozzie looked up again, his eyes only inches from the boy’s. “Don’t you have any words of your own?” he said. But he understood something about Junior. Ozzie had had his own brief bout with religion in the months after Jenny’s death—he’d wanted to sink into the open arms of the church and become disoriented by the archaic recitations of proverbs and creeds. The congregation, their Bibles and hymnals held to their faces, spoke a dark language of rapture and damnation. Ozzie had wanted no ease with the world, or easeful words to speak with. He’d wanted to be ruined for life.

Junior smiled with only half his mouth, a wicked smile, you’d call it, and he snapped a flame from his open Zippo. He lit a hand-rolled cigarette and said, “We’re getting married, Mr. Yates. That’s what I wanted to tell you. And don’t go thinking that she’s too young, because she’s not.” He leaned in again, and Ozzie felt his hot breath on his cheek. “‘Her lips drip honey,’” he said. “‘Honey and milk are under her tongue.’” As he slipped a card into the chest pocket of Ozzie’s shirt, Ozzie shoved Junior’s shoulders. Junior stumbled backward, his arms flailing for balance, until he fell into the tall base of a memorial statue that the Chamber of Commerce had installed on the courthouse lawn in honor of soldiers who’d fought in Vietnam.

“Mr. Yates,” Junior said, getting back up, a spot of blood blooming just beneath his eye from the scratch of the tip of an angel’s stone wing, “we’re told, ‘A tranquil heart is life to the body, but passion is rottenness to the bones.’”

“Rotten bones,” Ozzie mumbled. He turned and walked away with the cardboard box of Charlotte’s things.

Ozzie took from his pocket what Junior had put in: a picture of Christ, a very contemporary representation of him as pretty as a blue-eyed young girl with his long hair partly braided. He was entirely nude and nailed to the cross, blood flowing along the sinewy muscle of his arms, his godly schlong mostly hidden by shadow. His Pain, Your Gain was written at the bottom of the card. Ozzie wondered where the boy had even come across such a picture; perhaps priests handed them out in the street to seduce young people into church.

Charlotte sat in the truck, waiting, reading a tiny green Gideon’s Bible with a magnifying glass. Ozzie got in with the box, then drove away without closing the tailgate. He ignored the light thumping of the peaches as they spilled and rolled across the truck bed.

At a stop sign, he leaned toward Charlotte and smelled something sugary on her breath. Didn’t they used to say that if a baby’s breath smelled sweet, it portended a terrible sickness? As new parents, Ozzie and Jenny had been forewarned of all sorts of infanticides. When Charlotte was first born, Jenny banished Simp, the old tom, to the studio out back. Ozzie had never heard of a cat’s attraction to a sleeping child’s breath, but Jenny had been warned by all the old ladies up and down the street of the danger of such suffocation.

“Did you know,” Charlotte said, barely looking up from her little green book, “that you can break a snake’s back if you don’t handle it correctly? And there are whole churches of people who mix themselves strychnine drinks because the Bible says, ‘Drink poison and ye shall live.’ They call it a salvation cocktail.” Lightly, she delivered this information, this hint at how deeply a religious fervor had infected her.

“On my way back to the truck just now,” Ozzie said, “I remembered that afternoon we found that bat in the house. The one we had in the attic. Remember that? Your mom made me catch it in a coffee can so we could let it out in the country. So the three of us drove a few miles down a road . . . the bat crying all the way.”

Charlotte, clearly bored by the fact that he didn’t make more of her mention of snake handling and poison drinking, rolled her eyes and returned to the New Testament.

Ozzie saw that Charlotte’s lips and fingertips were berry-stained, skeletons of dry leaves caught in her hair. Her scent of sweetness had dissolved into the smell of smoke, but not cigarette smoke, smoke like from twigs and bark. She seemed weakened by her thinking about the night. Keep a tranquil heart, he wanted to warn her. Passion is rottenness to the bones.

On the corner of Elm and Oak sat one of the older churches in town, a squat, homely thing of gray stone, but with a few majestic windows depicting intricate biblical scenes. Ozzie had long wanted to get his hands on the glass of Grace Lutheran—the windows looked to have been shoddily repaired in the past, and poorly maintained, with some of the lighter-colored pieces—like the opalescent skirts of an angel—having grown dim with years of dust. And if he wasn’t mistaken, the belly of the whale was made of what looked to be rotten ruby—a rare antique red.

Ozzie pulled around the corner and stopped the truck a fair distance from the church. He opened the truck door, then picked up a library copy of Franny and Zooey from the box. He dropped the book into Charlotte’s lap.

“I’ve read this,” she said, pushing the book aside.

“And you love it,” he shouted, seethed, really. “Read it again.” He then took from the box the paper-thin plastic Halloween mask Charlotte had worn three years before, when she’d trick-or-treated as Spider-Man. That fall, the first after Jenny’s death, he’d put together an elaborate Rapunzel costume for her for a junior high party—gold and silver thread stitched into a blue velvet cloak, a blond wig with a thick braid that wrapped around her waist and fell to her feet. But at the last minute Charlotte refused the Rapunzel costume, and Ozzie took her to the grocery store, where she bought the Spider-Man mask with matching plastic smock, the only costume left on the shelf, and went off to the party looking like some hopeless urchin.

Walking back to the church, keeping close to the row of trees that lined the street, Ozzie put the mask over his face, pulling the little string of elastic over his head. With his other hand, he picked up a pumpkin from the edge of someone’s yard and carried it by its stem. His heavy breaths were noisy against the flimsy mask. He squinted to see through the slim eyeholes.

The damage he intended to do wouldn’t be serious, he told himself. And it would cost the church nothing—Ozzie had every intention of volunteering his services for the repairs, and footing the bill for any replacement glass. The church would chalk it all up to vandals, and Ozzie could finally drive by the old place with a sense of peace. He’d no longer have to see all that sunlight muddied by dirt trapped in the glass, or see how the window sagged and chipped from its own weight.

Crouching in a deep shadow, Ozzie lifted the pumpkin above his head and aimed for a warped sash in order to do minimal harm. The pumpkin crashed against the window, shattering just enough of the glass to require careful repair, and Ozzie bolted from the site before the broken rind and guts of the pumpkin even hit the ground.

Once back inside the truck, he pushed the mask up off his face to rest atop his head. As he drove off, Charlotte, who had seen none of her father’s destruction, reached into the box and picked up some x-ray specs. “You know Mrs. diFanta from down the street?” she said, putting on the glasses. “She witnessed a sun miracle. That’s when you look in the sky and see the sun dancing. That’s how she went blind.” She wiggled her hands in front of her face, as if she could see through her skin.

Ozzie looked straight ahead but watched his daughter in the rearview mirror. For years Ozzie had been looking at Charlotte, studying her, certain there’d come a time when he’d never see her again. Her absence from his life had always seemed just seconds away. And now it was as if he couldn’t see her at all, not even when looking right at her. Instead, he saw her clearly, so clearly, at thirteen years old, in the moments just before he told her that her mother had died. He had waited for her in front of the house and, with both dread and relief, watched her approach. It had begun to rain, and Charlotte struggled and rushed down the street on her roller skates, her open umbrella flailing about as she tried to keep her balance.