CHAPTER TWO
There were no farewells or well-wishing on the morning of the journey south; only Joao and The Bishop in the darkness loading, up the old Beetle while Mother; in the distance, scratched ticks out of the folds in her arms, watching despairingly at the two men tripping over themselves trying to tie down a ceramic Jesus and a giant wooden crucifix to the top of the small car.
Eventually after much shoving and patriarchal debate, they managed to secure Jesus and the crucifix and filled the back seats with suit cases and some rice and beans, packed in poorly sealed plastic containers that would do them until they reached the city.
Both men looked to Mother and bid her a salute; The Bishop tipping his wide brimmed hat and Joao waving maniacally; smiling and whispering ‘I love you’ through the darkness to Mother who didn’t flinch or even notice her son’s call of attention; instead her eyes were the poor knots holding the rope in place.
“No whores” she yelled as the engine turned.
The old Beetle rattled like an empty can and the two men set off on their journey to save the family farm.
The small car shook and rumbled its way along the long winding dirt track that led from their small farm, through the winding countryside, up and over hills and eventually somewhere far in the distance, onto the road of death; an old highway measured not in the span of its breadth, but in a number of lives it has taken over the years. If it had a heartbeat, it would have been shot by now; or running a government.
As the car pulled away from the farmhouse, Joao watched on from the back seat while The Bishop drove and changed gears with his right hands whilst holding a torch out the window with his left. Joao sat squashed in the backseat with luggage and hundreds of carved Jesus statues all piled on top of him while in the front passenger seat sat the infamous black leather bag that The Bishop carried with him over his shoulder wherever he went; his leather strapped crowning jewel.
Joao knew not to pester his father; not whilst he was entrenched in his sermon preparations during the light of day, not when in the eve he was reclined in his swinging chair with cachaça in hand and especially not while he was driving in the hands of god; on a black night, on an winding dirt road in old rickety car with no headlights.
Instead, he sat on the back seat thinking; not about the city, but about the coming of the sun and the rise of his brothers and sisters to what would be their last coffee with sugar for some time, a time in which he dared not imagine.
The Bishop kept his eyes stern on the tiny light flickering just beyond the car’s flapping bonnet; the hinging locks having rusted away, lending the bonnet to bounce up and down with every bump in the road. He dreamt about himself as he drove and as he did, he didn’t even notice that the road was no longer there.
The engine spluttered and then quickly died as the old Beetle sat riddled and bogged in thick mud somewhere far from where they had come from and a lifetime away from where they intended to be. The sound of the accident was enough to caution a herd of cattle to move off of the roads up ahead and keep their grazing back behind their open fence.
The Bishop lay with his head against the steering wheel, blood trickling from an open cut above his eye, down his face onto the leg of his pants. His arms hung lifelessly beside his still body; his fingers bruised and twisted horribly.
In the backseat; under a mound of cases and wooden statues, Joao held his hands to his face, still bracing and expecting some greater impact; something that might wipe the consciousness from his eye. He whimpered lightly to himself as he listened to his father’s waking groans. Reality slowly washed over both of them as the aches and breaks spoke of their own accord.
“Are you singing donkey?” said The Bishop.
“Sorry sir” replied Joao, shaking now from the sea of adrenaline that washed like a tidal wave upon his conscious shore.
“Are you alive?” asked The Bishop.
“I think so” replied Joao.
“Great, that’s means I’m alive. What the hell just happened?” he said to himself.
“You were driving funny, twisting the wheel and that. Was the car broke?” asked Joao.
“Car broke?” The Bishop mumbled mockingly, “Are you hurt? Can you move?” he asked, wiping shards of glass off of his legs and pushing away with his hands, the tip of the bonnet he had been dreaming upon when it was that the car had careened into the muddy ditch.
The Bishop was first to squeeze his way out of the car. He leaned his heaving frame to the right and kicked at the door with his left foot until finally some pieces of twisted metal were no match for his culpable anger, cursing to himself about rogue cows and the devil so that Joao could hear and in doing so, loud enough so that he could deafen his own conscience, cursing at him from the tip of the bonnet that erected mockingly to his eyes, swaying back and forth in the light breeze.
His feet sank into the boggy mud as he dragged himself from the wreck. The car was ruined; the front end crumpled in and the bonnet; as he had seen, was pressed up against the broken windscreen with the wheels buried somewhere under the mud that rode up to the open door and spilled inside the car onto the worn leather mats on the floor.
The Bishop tried to move through the bog, but it was impossible to wade through so he had to lift each leg out one by one and press it further in front of him to squish his way through the darkness and find some dry road.
“I’m stuck. What are you doing donkey? Get out here. Help me” yelled The Bishop, screaming over his shoulder with his heaving chest having fallen forward into the wet mud and his legs spread like a Sunday chicken, one stretched wide in front of the other and sinking fast into the mud; his wide belly the only thing that kept his complaining mouth from quieting in the dirty wet sludge.
“I’m coming, sir. Try not to move. It will only pull you in further” said Joao, lifting himself from within a cage of suitcases and statues and having to wipe warm beans and rice from his eyes.
Joao worked his way to the front seat and kicked his foot though the broken windscreen at the blue bonnet, forcing it back down towards its worn and rusted hinges. He climbed out through the broken windscreen and sat on the end of the bonnet calling out to his father.
“Sir,” he said, “where are you?”
“Over here you idiot” yelled The Bishop sinking further into the strangling mud as his whole body writhed with the contempt in his voice.
“Don’t go anywhere. I’ve got an idea” Joao said, stamping over the bonnet towards the roof of the car, wiping delicious warm brown liquid from his arms and licking his fingers as he did.
He reached up onto the roof and pulled at the knots his father had tied only hours before.0He took the ceramic statue of Jesus and slid it slowly off the roof and put it through the broken windscreen so that Jesus’ shoulders were resting on the two front seats and his head was sitting in an upturned owl of warm beans. Then he raised his body again and undid more rope, this time taking the giant wooden crucifix and sliding it down beside Jesus’ feet and down to the tip of the bonnet where he kneeled beside it, putting his weight on the end so it didn’t fall straight into the mud.
“Sir, can you hear me, sir?” Joao asked sheepishly.
“Get me out of here you stupid… Just get me out of here” he yelled.
“Ok. I’m gonna try and build a bridge over to you. Wait there.”
“This is all your fault, Joao. You distracted me. You better fix this.”
“I will sir. I’m sorry” Joao said, slowly lifting his weight off of the end of the cross and lowering it gently towards the mud so that it lay flat across the surface.
He placed one foot on the crucifix just to see if it could support his weight and for that moment, it did. He then moved back onto the bonnet and took Jesus by the ankles and worked him backwards, being careful not to scratch his ceramic body on the broken glass by working his hands up from his ankles until he had Jesus around the waist, gripping his crotch. He then back stepped until the statue was clear of the car and he then t
urned himself around so his footing was aligned with where he had placed the giant white wooden crucifix.
Joao lowered himself onto the white crucifix then slowly took Jesus with him in his arms as he walked the wooden plank over the thick gluggy mud, whispering to his father as he tip toed along.
The Bishop turned his head to the coming sound and reached his arm out into the darkness where he could see; just in the flicker of an eye, the outline of a wounded hand reaching out to him. His mind started to drift into the surreal as the hand edged closer to his eyes and he could see along the stretch of its arm, the face of the lord, looking down upon him with sympathy saying ‘take my hand, my son, come with me to the kingdom of heaven’.
“Is that you Jesus? Did I die? Are you here to take me home?”
“Take the hand.”
“I don’t wanna die, oh lord. I have so much of your work still to do. You take Joao, he’ll do you good in heaven. Please, let me live” pleaded The Bishop to the outstretched hand.
“Sir, take the hand, I’m gonna pull you out” yelled Joao in a whisper.
“Donkey? Is that you? What the hell are you doing? Is that my Jesus?” yelled The Bishop.
“Take the hand, sir. I can get you out” Joao said.
Cursing under his breath, The Bishop reached out with his left hand while the other steadied on the surface of the mud, keeping the side of his face from sinking under. Joao tipped on the edge of the crucifix holding the ceramic Jesus by the knees and the crotch, stretching his body as far as he could to edge closer to The Bishop’s desperate grasp.
“Reach further sir, you nearly have it”
“Come to me lord” said The Bishop as the ceramic hand grazed his finger tips and with the weight of want in his soul; etching the will to survive, The Bishop threw himself up and towards the outstretched hand, soaring like eagle as the heavens lifted his body, carrying him towards the open hand of Jesus Christ.
And he clenched hard, wrapping and winding his fingers around the wounded hand like a child to their favourite toy or a drunkard to his last drink. And as his body crashed back against the thick of the mud; called home by the rule of gravity, the ceramic hand broke in two and into the mud went The Bishop, Jesus and the donkey, as his father would have him known.
“I’m sorry sir.”
“Shut up. Just shut up” said The Bishop.
The two sat silently in the mud, The Bishop thinking only of his wife’s gargantuan face frowning upon him, her trunk like arms folded over one another and her bulbous veins popping out through her leathered skin, swelling with disdain and expected disappointment.
In his head, the giant woman stood there unmoved, speaking only through the scorn that flared from her eyes and scolded; like the afternoon sun, his culpable conscience.
And he grimaced and grumbled as he slowly crawled his way up the remainder of Jesus’ broken arm to his ceramic body where he clung and rested; like a stranded whale, suffocating under his own weight and badgered by his quickly beating heart and poorly inflating lungs.
Neither spoke as time turned from dark to near light and eventually, when the sun lifted away the blanket of night to take its throne; orating the rule of another day, The Bishop and Joao were guests to the merriment of their predicament which of course, drinking from the glass of insult, they refused to see.
Their Beetle was ruined; buried deep in the mud and their possessions were scattered all about the place. Glass was strewn about the road and grassy bank like cheap flowers on an old man’s gave and there; covered from head toe in brown dry and crusted mud and clinging to a one armed ceramic Jesus Christ, lay two men, not an inch away from the side of the road.
The Bishop was awoken from his stupor by the sound of an idling engine and a honking horn and he took a deep breath; swallowing his insult as he raised his left arm into the air, calling the car back towards him.
He continued his grumbling but was drowned out by the sound of beeping from a reversing utility as within a second the headlights came into view and a hornlike tow bar pushed out through the centre as the vehicle came to a stop. The driver’s door slammed shut and standing there; haloed by the light of the sun, was a colossal looking shadow that paused under the men’s captured awe and then demurred; the light thinning the shadow, as a small woman with quickly judging eyes shook her head in disbelief and stepped down on one knee as she tied off the rope in her hands against the tow bar and the other end, around the head of Jesus.
“This some kind of kinky religious thing?” said The Lady Driver.