Chatters on the Tide

  Chapter 13

  Standing behind the plywood screen erected behind the musicians on the bandstand, Harold shuffled back in forth in the mud. He stopped and leaned against a tent pole, noticed that it had a sticker which said “property of Jos. B. Halligan Funeral Home.” It was a huge green affair, and had been patched a number of times, so that the rain was making it through in a dozen places.

  He looked around the side of the screen at a crowd he estimated at almost fifty. They were in folding chairs, holding children, programs, fans, bibles, anything to keep their hands occupied, their feet in the muddy grass. The mud took him back to the night at the bay. They were just like him, caught up in the mud and looking for a way out. He had taken the deal, had let the ghostly figures in the bay lift him out of the mud and water on to the shore. These people, he thought, were looking for their own kind of deal, for a way out of the mud they were trapped in.

  The band was playing an up-tempo version of a hymn he couldn’t name but that he could almost hum along with if he concentrated. But concentration was impossible. Kilby had told him not worry, that something to say would come to him as soon as he got in front of The Congregation. Kilby was wrong. Concentration was not coming. He wanted a shot of bourbon followed by a pot of coffee and a half a pack of cigarettes.

  Sister walked up to him, wearing a skirt and blouse that would have been in style in 1985, her hair pulled back into a bun. The hairdo made her lips stand out even more, and her full skirt, tight at the waist and down to her ankles, did the same thing for her hips.

  “You look hot.”

  “Beg pardon Prophet, should you speak so? This is a house of the Lord,” she said.

  “I meant sweaty hot.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her words deferential but her body language flirtatious. “It’s warm in spite of the rain.” She ran her hand along his arm. “The farm’s been good for your body and your face. Now your flesh is as strong and beautiful as your spirit.”

  “Thanks, but I’m nervous. I don’t know what to say to these people. I know they are going to be hanging on every word I say. It’s hard.”

  “You are a prophet. Be yourself. You can’t say anything wrong.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Harold said.

  “Look here,” she said, and pulled him over to peek around the screen.

  From this angle Harold could see that on the crowd’s side the screen was painted with a mural of The Last Supper. The four sections of the massive thing, each panel a full sheet of half-inch plyboard with two-by-fours along the back for stability, were connected with hinges. It struck Harold that Jesus, in this version standing behind the table in the center of the scene, had a hinge in his groin.

  “Brothers and Sisters,” Kilby was bellowing into the microphone, “I know you are all aware of who we have in our midst this evening.”

  The applause was loud. Kilby had to wait for it to die in order to begin again.

  “He is here to speak to you. As honored as you all are to have him here, imagine my joy at having the Prophet in my home these last two weeks. He is a still a newborn, humble with the acceptance of his new role, and my family and I are equally humble as we teach him the truths of the flesh, and he shows us the truths of the Holy Spirit. It is a joy beyond measure to now hand the microphone to our prophet, the Prophet, Harold Greg Mooney. Give him your praise.”

  Harold went up on the platform, which looked like someone had removed a deck from the back of their doublewide trailer and donated it to The Congregation. The clapping and the amens died down, and Harold could hear the rain hitting the tent and the faint squishing of feet in the mud. The smell of sweat and hay and earth was strong, but he could make out the aroma of soap and Old Spice coming off of Kilby’s hand as he took the mike. The bright lights around the platform made the air hotter, staler, and more humid than it had been behind the screen.

  “Thank you for coming out on this awful evening. If heat-stroke doesn’t get you, the mosquitoes will,” Harold said.

  They stared back. A fellow in the second row smacked at something on his arm.

  “See there? That’s what I’m talking about. Little demons will drain you dry out here.”

  The rain, the tent, the plain round faces staring back at him, it was all around his head like the humidity and the bugs and the heat, making his skin weep tears of fear and unease.

  “But you didn’t need a prophet to tell you that, did you? No, you didn’t. Truth is, I don’t feel much like a prophet. I’ve only been with Kilby and his family for a few days, but they’ve treated me with as much or more care and respect as anybody ever has, so when Kilby said I should get up before you and say a few words, I felt I had to. He said I should say whatever I feel like, because a prophet can’t misspeak, after all, he’s a prophet. So here goes nothing.

  “Like I said, I don’t feel like one, I feel like a man who’s trying to feel his way through a dark field at night, and who keeps stumbling over things in the dark. We have that in common. You people are trying to find your way too, and sometimes you stumble. But you get up, and you keep going, doing the best you can, trying to do the right thing. This is the part where Kilby would throw in a reference to scripture to back up his point, but I can’t do that, because I don’t know the scripture. He says that doesn’t matter because a good tree can’t bear bad fruit, and I hope he’s right. I don’t want to lead you all astray. I want to tell you that I’m the worst kind of sinner, that I’m lazy and shiftless, and selfish, and my good works are few...”

  “We are humble before the Lord!” someone called out, and there were a half dozen echoes of “Amen!” close behind.

  “...but I am here, for whatever that’s worth. Teach me what I need to know to be your prophet. I want to learn, I want to know, I want to have faith...”

  “Teach us Lord!”

  “...I want be more than a piece of flesh...”

  “The flesh is weak!”

  The cadence of the call and response buoyed Harold, and he could feel the current lifting him. When it was over, he couldn’t even remember what he had said, but he felt good, felt cleansed and wide awake. He had been hot miserable, and lethargic, but now he was burning alive, sweating like a fresh plow-horse just hitting a stride he could keep up all day.

  Sister stood at the back of the center aisle like a bride, and held out her hand. Harold came down off the stage and walked between the two halves of The Congregation, shaking hands and allowing them to reach out and touch him as he walked down the aisle to Sister. The band had begun to play again, and the crowd was clapping with the rhythm.

  She handed him a towel and took his hand, leading him out into the rain, through the mud, over to the waiting truck. Sister opened the passenger door for him, but he gestured for her to sit down.

  “I want to drive,” he said.

  “Sure,” she said getting in.

  He got behind the wheel. The keys were in. He fired up the truck and put it in gear.

  “Kilby and them will be home later. They have to clean up and all.”

  “Next time I’m staying to help with that,” Harold said. “I have to set an example for them. It’s just that right now I want to get back home and do some thinking while my head is clear. I haven’t felt this good in, well, it seems like years.”

  “I won’t bother you,” Sister said. “You won’t even know I’m there.”

  They went down the dirt road. Mud splashed up, but the rain washed it away. He looked over at her. Her body moved in the seat with each bump they hit, made her shape come alive in his imagination. He looked back to the windshield and as he did, he felt her touching his hair and stroking the nape of his neck.

  “Is that bothering you?” she asked,

  “No, it’s nice. But you know I’m married, right?”

  “What do you mean? I’m just being sisterly. It’s a sisterly touch.”

  “Be honest
. You’ve been making eyes at me since I got here, right?”

  “I was being honest. I’m touching you like a sister now, but I could touch you like a friend, or I could touch you like a wife. Like a daughter, or a sister. Any way you like.”

  He kept his eyes on the tricky roadway, trying to focus on the sloppy clay dirt and gravel in front of the truck. She kept touching him, slid over beside him with one leg on either side of the stick shift. His jaw was working at the temples as he chewed on the situation. It would not break down and slide down to digestion, but instead sat there in his mouth so that he could not breathe or speak around its cud.

  She stopped stroking the nape of his neck and put her head against his shoulder. He could smell her hair. The fragrance was of roses.

  He turned off the dirt onto the main road, an unmarked one-and-a-half lane aggregate strip winding off into nowhere. The ride was smoother now, and there was a lull in the rain. He rolled down the window a crack and turned on the vent for air, beginning to relax, but his jaw was still working. Chest and arm muscles were burning from his prolonged and stressful grip on the steering wheel. He let them rest, opening his hands, riffling his fingers, and consciously propping up his posture.

  Leaning against his shoulder and chest, Sister felt with her cheek the lessening of his tension. She reached down and began to touch his thigh. He looked over at her to tell her to stop with his eyes, but hers were down.

  He opened his mouth to speak. The cud was still there. He cleared his throat and swallowed hard. Resignation, tension, and all possibility of speech went with it, slid down into the oblivion of his guts. Without warning he pulled the truck off the road beside a field of soybeans, killing the headlights.

  Harold didn’t kiss her but went straight for her throat, pushing her back into the passenger side glass, sucking and biting. She looked away, exposing more neck. Her hand came up to the side of his face. Harold pulled it away and pinned it to the door, his free hand struggling to feel every inch of her at once. In the tight space he could smell her rose hair, and their sweat. She put her free hand behind his head and pulled him into a series of kisses that made his breath hiss in his nostrils. Kissing her was like chasing butter cream, fluid, elusive, and rich. Her skirt was taught in the vee of her legs and interfering in the press of his body against her. She raised her leg and her muddy pump smeared a wet stripe on the pants leg of Harold’s jeans.

  It was cold. Harold looked down, startled by the sensation.

  “Just mud,” she whispered.

  “Mud?”

  Mud and hands in the dark water, Bonnie, a drink, a cigarette, his Acura parked by the long bridge over the stagnant bay. It all came back to him: the far away lights, the smell of oyster shells and barnacles on bridge posts, algae and nettles streaming and cloying at his face, the reek and rot of the bay, the threat of things unseen among the reeds.

  He sat up and pulled on the headlights. Turning the ignition, the starter made a grinding sound. The motor was still idling. He had never killed it. He got back on the road, riding along quietly on separate ends of the bench seat. After a few minutes, he stuck out his right hand and she took it politely in her left.

  The rain had picked up again when they pulled up in front of the farmhouse. Harold didn’t wait for a break in the downpour. Letting go her hand, he smiled uncomfortably at her and jerked his head in the direction of the house. When he opened the door and ran for the porch Sister ran too. They stood on the porch together soaked.

  “I feel nasty,” Harold said.

  “It’s nice,” Sister said. “I like the rain. It makes the crops grow, and I like the feeling. The mood.”

  “Not me,” he said. “I’m gonna take a bath.”

  “A bath?”

  “Well, a shower anyway,” he said. “You know what I mean.”

  “So you’re gonna get out of this shower and go stand in another one? That’s funny,” she said giggling.

  Harold rolled his eyes and went inside, leaving the boots he had gotten on loan from Ben on the porch by the front door. Through the front room, past the old upright piano, down the hall to the right past the old photographs in their oval frames under ancient convex glass. At the end of the hall Mother’s bedroom door was open and he could make out her quilt-covered bed and pink flowered pillows. The bathroom was halfway down on the right. He entered, shut the door, and tried to turn the old key, but it had been painted in place half a century ago and wouldn’t budge. He shrugged and started the water so it could warm while he undressed, draping his wet clothes across the radiator. His feet left prints on the green linoleum flecked with little gold and black flecks. There was no shower stall, just a hoop to support an almond shower curtain over the claw-footed tub. Like everything else in the house, it was older than he was but it was clean. He stepped in and tried to relax in the hot water.

  The steam was so thick he could barely breathe, and once he started to relax, he felt he was too hot. He backed off the heat and let it run tepid, looked up into the brass sunflower of water and shut his eyes. He stood that way for a long while.

  “Better not hang out in here too long,” he whispered out loud. “Sister’ll be sneaking in to join me. Hell. Maybe that ain’t a bad thing.” For the first time since he had come to stay with them he considered getting her out of his system by himself while he was alone. But the door wouldn’t lock, and he didn’t’ feel completely comfortable. The truth was the he had not felt comfortable, in any meaningful way, since he had separated from Bonnie. He shut off the water and got out, taking a towel off the wooden butler standing beside the tub.

  As he stood on the bathmat drying himself he thought he heard footsteps in the hall.

  “Sister, is that you? Don’t come in here, I’m naked!”

  There was no answer. He froze so he could hear every sound. A creak. Another. The delay between them seemed like someone trying not to be heard. He imagined what could have happened while the shower’s sounds made it impossible for him to hear anything, remembered Kilby’s warnings to keep the house locked up tight even during the day when they were at home.

  “Quit fartin’ around,” he said. “I can hear you out there.”

  He put on the towel like a skirt, lapped it over and tucked it in under his belly button. He went to the door and stood there unable to decide if he should open it slowly, yank it open, or hold it shut. Harold froze there in indecision, listening for another footstep. Someone had to be outside door where the last creak had sounded. He put his shoulder against the door and took the knob in both hands.

  A crack that shook the house and made him jump back from the door rattled the blue glass over the living room mantle and knocked a photo off the hallway wall. Harold heard the frame hit the floor and the glass shatter, sounding like it was a mile away coming after the bang that dulled his ears. Sister began to scream over and over again, refilling her lungs and emitting the same shriek again and again. She could have been anywhere, could have been in the next county, in the yard, or just down the hall, he couldn’t tell. Harold banged the door shut out of instinct, then regrouped and jerked it open.

  To the left, at the edge of the living room carpet where the hall ended, Sister was standing with her hands in fists by her temples, screaming and screaming and screaming, her eyes staring at something. Harold jerked his head to the right following her eyes. Ben was on the floor, face down in the hallway with his shotgun beside him, almost at the corner where the hall turned left to go the guest room.

  Past Ben, through the door straight ahead, he could see right into Mother’s room. A flashlight had fallen in the open doorway, the only light there. He could see the window on the wall opposite the door, one curtain hanging straight down, the other pushed out into the rain coming down in courses. Standing in the middle of Mother’s bed was a goat, black and bulge-bellied, with a patch of white on its throat. One horn was curled and came down along t
he jaw, the other arched up and back as it should. It was dripping wet and shiny and tossed it’s head as if shaking off a yoke.

  Harold stepped out of the bathroom doorway and knelt beside Ben, rolling him over. He couldn’t tell where the blood was coming from, but his hair was wet with it and every crease of his man-boy face was irrigated with red. He was breathing though, and his eyes were open a little.

  Sister was still shrieking. She reached a pitch that was impossible for her voice to create of its free will, feet prancing, her open hands now waving in the direction of Mother’s room. He looked at her then back toward the goat, which had hopped off the bed and begun to come down the hall. Harold let go of Ben and picked up the shotgun. He raised and pointed.

  The goat reacted by turning about, hopping back onto Mother’s bed, and lunging for the window. Only it’s front feet made it out, belly slamming the sill, legs and hooves banging and splashing water on the faded wallpaper beneath the window. Its head was outside. As it flailed, the straight horn came back and broke a pane. It struggled there for a moment then fell jaggedly out of the window into the storm.

  “Oh my god oh my god oh my god,” Sister said. Her screams finally done, she ran to join Harold and Ben. Together they got Ben into a sitting position. Harold pulled off his towel and wiped Ben’s face and hairline, unconcerned about his nakedness. He found a lump topped with a gash over Ben’s left ear. He held the towel there hard.

  “He ran,” Ben said. “Ran him off out the window.”

  “The goat’s gone,” Harold said.

  “The man,” Ben said, “the man, not the goat...”

  “Lock the windows!” Sister said.

  Harold let her take the towel, stood up and began to run around the house shutting the windows, which were all open a few inches to let in air. He stopped in the guest room and pulled on a pair of pants without bothering with underwear. By the time he was done, Ben and Sister were at the kitchen table and Ben was holding a fresh cloth to his head with a Ziploc bag of fresh frozen limas from the freezer. The shotgun was on the table by his elbow.

  “What happened?” Harold asked.

  “I came up to the house,” Ben said, “and the front door was standing open. When I came in, Sister was standing in the front room, and she said there was somebody rummaging around in Mama’s room.” Ben’s hand was shaking the frozen beans like a rattle. “So I grabbed the shotgun out of the front closet there, and went down the hall...”

  “It was dark down there, I couldn’t see Ben or the guy who was down there...” Sister said.

  “I couldn’t either. I was sneaking down, and I was going to peek around the corner into Mama’s room, but when I got to the corner, he hit me and the shotgun went off. I guess it scared me so much, I wasn’t expecting it, but the shotgun barrel came up and hit me in the head, or either he banged it up and made it hit me in the head, I don’t know for sure. It was fast and it was dark, so I don’t know.”

  “When it happened,” Sister said, “the man dropped his flashlight, and it came on and rolled into the spare bedroom...”

  “That was my flashlight,” Ben said. “If fell out of my pocket, not his.”

  “Oh,” Sister said.

  “Where did he go?” Harold said.

  “He must’ve gone out of the spare bedroom window,” Ben said.

  “What did he want? Did he take anything, or say anything? And where did the goat come from?” Harold asked.

  They didn’t answer, and Harold stood there feeling strange.

  “Did you even see him? I mean clearly?”

  “He was after you,” Ben yelled. “He was going to take you and leave the goat in trade!”

  Harold turned around again. Ben’s eyes were down.

  “What?”

  “It’s the Disciples of Demeter,” Ben said. “A black goat is the symbol of The Devil. They would’ve taken our prophet and replaced him with the sign of Ol’ Scratch.”