Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

  “Obadiah,” she whispered. Her face slowly brightened as if the name came as a sign to her. “Obadiah,” she said.

  The name still stank in Parker’s estimation.

  “Obadiah Elihue,” she said in a reverent voice.

  “If you call me that aloud, I’ll bust your head open.” Parker said. “What’s yours?”

  “Sarah Ruth Cates,” she said.

  “Glad to meet you, Sarah Ruth,” Parker said.

  Sarah Ruth’s father was a Straight Gospel preacher but he was away, spreading it in Florida. Her mother did not seem to mind his attention to the girl so long as he brought a basket of something with him when he came. As for Sarah Ruth herself, it was plain to Parker after he had visited three times that she was crazy about him. She liked him even though she insisted that pictures on the skin were vanity of vanities and even after hearing him curse, and even after she had asked him if he was saved and he had replied that he didn’t see it was anything in particular to save him from. After that, inspired, Parker had said, “I’d be saved enough if you was to kiss me.”

  She scowled. “That ain’t being saved,” she said.

  Not long after that she agreed to take a ride in his truck. Parker parked it on a deserted road and suggested to her that they lie down together in the back of it.

  “Not until after we’re married,” she said—just like that.

  “Oh that ain’t necessary,” Parker said and as he reached for her, she thrust him away with such force that the door of the truck came off and he found himself flat on his back on the ground. He made up his mind then and there to have nothing further to do with her.

  They were married in the County Ordinary’s office because Sarah Ruth thought churches were idolatrous. Parker had no opinion about that one way or the other. The Ordinary’s office was lined with cardboard file boxes and record books with dusty yellow slips of paper hanging on out of them. The Ordinary was an old woman with red hair who had held office for forty years and looked as dusty as her books. She married them from behind the iron-grill of a stand-up desk and when she finished, she said with a flourish, “Three dollars and fifty cents and till death do you part!” and yanked some forms out of a machine.

  Marriage did not change Sarah Ruth a jot and it made Parker gloomier than ever. Every morning he decided he had had enough and would not return that night; every night he returned. Whenever Parker couldn’t stand the way he felt, he would have another tattoo, but the only surface left on him now was his back. To see a tattoo on his own back he would have to get two mirrors and stand between them in just the correct position and this seemed to Parker a good way to make an idiot of himself. Sarah Ruth who, if she had had better sense, could have enjoyed a tattoo on his back, would not even look at the ones he had elsewhere. When he attempted to point out especial details of them, she would shut her eyes tight and turn her back as well. Except in total darkness, she preferred Parker dressed and with his sleeves rolled down.

  “At the judgement seat of God, Jesus is going to say to you, ‘What you been doing all your life besides have pictures drawn all over you?’” she said.

  “You don’t fool me none,” Parker said, “you’re just afraid that hefty girl I work for’ll like me so much she’ll say, ‘Come on, Mr. Parker, let’s you and me…’”

  “You’re tempting sin,” she said, “and at the judgement seat of God you’ll have to answer for that too. You ought to go back to selling the fruits of the earth.”

  Parker did nothing much when he was at home but listen to what the judgement seat of God would be like for him if he didn’t change his ways. When he could, he broke in with tales of the hefty girl he worked for. “‘Mr. Parker,’” he said she said, ‘I hired you for your brains.’” (She had added, “So why don’t you use them?”)

  “And you should have seen her face the first time she saw me without my shirt,” he said. “‘Mr. Parker,’ she said, ‘you’re a walking panner-rammer!’” This had, in fact, been her remark but it had been delivered out of one side of her mouth.

  Dissatisfaction began to grow so great in Parker that there was no containing it outside of a tattoo. It had to be his back. There was no help for it. A dim half-formed inspiration began to work in his mind. He visualized having a tattoo put there that Sarah Ruth would not be able to resist—a religious subject. He thought of an open book with HOLY BIBLE tattooed under it and an actual verse printed on the page. This seemed just the thing for a while; then he began to hear her say, “Ain’t I already got a real Bible? What you think I want to read the same verse over and over for when I can read it all?” He needed something better even than the Bible! He thought about it so much that he began to lose sleep. He was already losing flesh—Sarah Ruth just threw food in the pot and let it boil. Not knowing for certain why he continued to stay with a woman who was both ugly and pregnant and no cook made him generally nervous and irritable, and he developed a little tic in the side of his face.

  Once or twice he found himself turning around abruptly as if someone were trailing him. He had had a granddaddy who had ended in the state mental hospital, although not until he was seventy-five, but as urgent as it might be for him to get a tattoo, it was just as urgent that he get exactly the right one to bring Sarah Ruth to heel. As he continued to worry over it, his eyes took on a hollow preoccupied expression. The old woman he worked for told him that if he couldn’t keep his mind on what he was doing, she knew where she could find a fourteen-year-old colored boy who could. Parker was too preoccupied even to be offended. At any time previous, he would have left her then and there, saying drily, “Well, you go ahead on and get him then.”

  Two or three mornings later he was baling hay with the old woman’s sorry baler and her broken down tractor in a large field, cleared save for one enormous old tree standing in the middle of it. The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree. She had pointed it out to Parker as if he didn’t have eyes and told him to be careful not to hit it as the machine picked up hay near it. Parker began at the outside of the field and made circles inward toward it. He had to get off the tractor every now and then and untangle the baling cord or kick a rock out of the way. The old woman had told him to carry the rocks to the edge of the field, which he did when she was there watching. When he thought he could make it, he ran over them. As he circled the field his mind was on a suitable design for his back. The sun, the size of a golf ball, began to switch regularly from in front to behind him, but he appeared to see it both places as if he had eyes in the back of his head. All at once he saw the tree reaching out to grasp him. A ferocious thud propelled him into the air, and he heard himself yelling in an unbelievably loud voice, “GOD ABOVE!”

  He landed on his back while the tractor crashed upside-down into the tree and burst into flame. The first thing Parker saw were his shoes, quickly being eaten by the fire; one was caught under the tractor, the other was some distance away, burning by itself. He was not in them. He could feel the hot breath of the burning tree on his face. He scrambled backwards, still sitting, his eyes cavernous, and if he had known how to cross himself he would have done it.

  His truck was on a dirt road at the edge of the field. He moved toward it, still sitting, still backwards, but faster and faster; halfway to it he got up and began a kind of forward-bent run from which he collapsed on his knees twice. His legs felt like two old rusted rain gutters. He reached the truck finally and took off in it, zigzagging up the road. He drove past his house on the embankment and straight for the city, fifty miles distant.

  Parker did not allow himself to think on the way to the city. He only knew that there had been a great change in his life, a leap forward into a worse unknown, and that there was nothing he could do about it. It was for all intents accomplished.

  The artist had two large cluttered rooms over a chiropodist’s office on a back street. Parker, still barefooted, burst silently in on him at a little after three in the afternoon. T
he artist, who was about Parker’s own age—twenty-eight—but thin and bald, was behind a small drawing table, tracing a design in green ink. He looked up with an annoyed glance and did not seem to recognize Parker in the hollow-eyed creature before him.

  “Let me see the book you got with all the pictures of God in it,” Parker said breathlessly. “The religious one.”

  The artist continued to look at him with his intellectual, superior stare. “I don’t put tattoos on drunks,” he said.

  “You know me!” Parker cried indignantly. “I’m O. E. Parker! You done work for me before and I always paid!”

  The artist looked at him another moment as if he were not altogether sure. “You’ve fallen off some,” he said. “You must have been in jail.”

  “Married,” Parker said.

  “Oh,” said the artist. With the aid of mirrors the artist had tattooed on the top of his head a miniature owl, perfect in every detail. It was about the size of a half-dollar and served him as a show piece. There were cheaper artists in town but Parker had never wanted anything but the best. The artist went over to a cabinet at the back of the room and began to look over some art books. “Who are you interested in?” he said, “saints, angels, Christs or what?”

  “God,” Parker said.

  “Father, Son or Spirit?”

  “Just God,” Parker said impatiently. “Christ. I don’t care. Just so it’s God.”

  The artist returned with a book. He moved some papers off another table and put the book down on it and told Parker to sit down and see what he liked. “The up-t-date ones are in the back,” he said.

  Parker sat down with the book and wet his thumb. He began to go through it, beginning at the back where the up-to-date pictures were. Some of them he recognized—The Good Shepherd, Forbid Them Not, The Smiling Jesus, Jesus the Physician’s Friend, but he kept turning rapidly backwards and the pictures became less and less reassuring. One showed a gaunt green dead face streaked with blood. One was yellow with sagging purple eyes. Parker’s heart began to beat faster and faster until it appeared to be roaring inside him like a great generator. He flipped the pages quickly, feeling that when he reached the one ordained, a sign would come. He continued to flip through until he had almost reached the front of the book. On one of the pages a pair of eyes glanced at him swiftly. Parker sped on, then stopped. His heart too appeared to cut off; there was absolute silence. It said as plainly as if silence were a language itself, GO BACK.

  Parker returned to the picture—the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes. He sat there trembling; his heart began slowly to beat again as if it were being brought to life by a subtle power.

  “You found what you want?” the artist asked.

  Parker’s throat was too dry to speak. He got up and thrust the book at the artist, opened at the picture.

  “That’ll cost you plenty,” the artist said. “You don’t want all those little blocks though, just the outline and some better features.”

  “Just like it is,” Parker said, “just like it is or nothing.”

  “It’s your funeral,” the artist said, “but I don’t do that kind of work for nothing.”

  “How much?” Parker asked.

  “It’ll take maybe two days work.”

  “How much?” Parker said.

  “On time or cash?” the artist asked. Parker’s other jobs had been on time, but he had paid.

  “Ten down and ten for every day it takes,” the artist said.

  Parker drew ten dollar bills out of his wallet; he had three left in.

  “You come back in the morning,” the artist said, putting the money in his own pocket. “First I’ll have to trace that out of the book.”

  “No no!” Parker said. “Trace it now or gimme my money back,” and his eyes blared as if he were ready for a fight.

  The artist agreed. Any one stupid enough to want a Christ on his back, he reasoned, would be just as likely as not to change his mind the next minute, but once the work was begun he could hardly do so.

  While he worked on the tracing, he told Parker to go wash his back at the sink with the special soap he used there. Parker did it and returned to pace back and forth across the room, nervously flexing his shoulders. He wanted to go look at the picture again but at the same time he did not want to. The artist got up finally and had Parker lie down on the table. He swabbed his back with ethyl chloride and then began to outline the head on it with his iodine pencil. Another hour passed before he took up his electric instrument. Parker felt no particular pain. In Japan he had had a tattoo of the Buddha done on his upper arm with ivory needles; in Burma, a little brown root of a man had made a peacock on each of his knees using thin pointed sticks, two feet long; amateurs had worked on him with pins and soot. Parker was usually so relaxed and easy under the hand of the artist that he often went to sleep, but this time he remained awake, every muscle taut.

  At midnight the artist said he was ready to quit. He propped one mirror, four feet square, on a table by the wall and took a smaller mirror off the lavatory wall and put it in Parker’s hands. Parker stood with his back to the one on the table and moved the other until he saw a flashing burst of color reflected from his back. It was almost completely covered with little red and blue and ivory and saffron squares; from them he made out the lineaments of the face—a mouth, the beginning of heavy brows, a straight nose, but the face was empty; the eyes had not yet been put in. The impression for the moment was almost as if the artist had tricked him and done the Physician’s Friend.

  “It don’t have eyes,” Parker cried out.

  “That’ll come,” the artist said, “in due time. We have another day to go on it yet.”

  Parker spent the night on a cot at the Haven of Light Christian Mission. He found these the best places to stay in the city because they were free and included a meal of sorts. He got the last available cot and because he was still barefooted, he accepted a pair of second-hand shoes which, in his confusion, he put on to go to bed; he was still shocked from all that had happened to him. All night he lay awake in the long dormitory of cots with lumpy figures on them. The only light was from a phosphorescent cross glowing at the end of the room. The tree reached out to grasp him again, then burst into flame; the shoe burned quietly by itself; the eyes in the book said to him distinctly GO BACK and at the same time did not utter a sound. He wished that he were not in this city, not in this Haven of Light Mission, not in a bed by himself. He longed miserably for Sarah Ruth. Her sharp tongue and icepick eyes were the only comfort he could bring to mind. He decided he was losing it. Her eyes appeared soft and dilatory compared with the eyes in the book, for even though he could not summon up the exact look of those eyes, he could still feel their penetration. He felt as though, under their gaze, he was as transparent as the wing of a fly.

  The tattooist had told him not to come until ten in the morning, but when he arrived at that hour, Parker was sitting in the dark hallway on the floor, waiting for him. He had decided upon getting up that, once the tattoo was on him, he would not look at it, that all his sensations of the day and night before were those of a crazy man and that he would return to doing things according to his own sound judgement.

  The artist began where he left off. “One thing I want to know,” he said presently as he worked over Parker’s back, “why do you want this on you? Have you gone and got religion? Are you saved?” he asked in a mocking voice.

  Parker’s throat felt salty and dry. “Naw,” he said, “I ain’t got no use for none of that. A man can’t save his self from whatever it is he don’t deserve none of my sympathy.” These words seemed to leave his mouth like wraiths and to evaporate at once as if he had never uttered them.

  “Then why…”

  “I married this woman that’s saved,” Parker said. “I never should have done it. I ought to leave her. She’s done gone and got pregnant.”

  “That’s too bad,” the artist said. “Then it’s her making you h
ave this tattoo.”

  “Naw,” Parker said, “she don’t know nothing about it. It’s a surprise for her.”

  “You think she’ll like it and lay off you a while?”

  “She can’t hep herself,” Parker said. “She can’t say she don’t like the looks of God.” He decided he had told the artist enough of his business. Artists were all right in their place but he didn’t like them poking their noses into the affairs of regular people. “I didn’t get no sleep last night,” he said. “I think I’ll get some now.”

  That closed the mouth of the artist but it did not bring him any sleep. He lay there, imagining how Sarah Ruth would be struck speechless by the face on his back and every now and then this would be interrupted by a vision of the tree of fire and his empty shoe burning beneath it.

  The artist worked steadily until nearly four o’clock, not stopping to have lunch, hardly pausing with the electric instrument except to wipe the dripping dye off Parker’s back as he went along. Finally he finished. “You can get up and look at it now,” he said.

  Parker sat up but he remained on the edge of the table.

  The artist was pleased with his work and wanted Parker to look at it at once. Instead Parker continued to sit on the edge of the table, bent forward slightly but with a vacant look. “What ails you?” the artist said. “Go look at it.”

  “Ain’t nothing ail me,” Parker said in a sudden belligerent voice. “That tattoo ain’t going nowhere. It’ll be there when I get there.” He reached for his shirt and began gingerly to put it on.

  The artist took him roughly by the arm and propelled him between the two mirrors. “Now look,” he said, angry at having his work ignored.

  Parker looked, turned white and moved away. The eyes in the reflected face continued to look at him—still, straight, all-demanding, enclosed in silence.

  “It was your idea, remember,” the artist said. “I would have advised something else.”

  Parker said nothing. He put on his shirt and went out the door while the artist shouted, “I’ll expect all of my money!”