Summer
I gave Samson Lumen a book once. I reckoned he might’ve liked it ’cause of the whiskey priest and the Judas mestizo and that eternal power. The church can’t be destroyed, it lies outside our dawn and our death and there’s comfort to be had in that. And Samson needed comfort maybe more than anyone I ever met.
*
It was fall and we were late gettin’ to class when we saw the boys clustered round. They were seniors, tall and tough-lookin’ to us.
“Let’s see what’s goin’ on,” Raine said, tuggin’ my hand.
We heard laughin’ and hollerin’ and Raine reckoned it was just another scuffle, but then we saw the man standing there. He had white hair but he weren’t all that old. He was tall and skinny and his skin was a shade so light.
The boys were tossin’ a sunhat round.
“He’s Samson. The janitor,” I said.
They tossed it high and it landed near Samson’s foot and he stooped to pick it up, but when he did one of the boys, Jesse Cole, kicked him and he fell to the dirt. Another boy grabbed the sunhat and the game began all over.
“I feel bad for him,” I said, and Raine turned to look at me. “He’s sweet, he’s always smilin’ at me.”
She saw I was gettin’ upset and she walked into the middle. She ain’t got fear, never had it.
“Give it back,” she said to Jesse.
Samson was watchin’, his eyes squint like he couldn’t even bear the light.
Jesse was smirkin’ till he caught a look from one of his friends. I’d seen that look before, said they knew who our daddy was and who our uncle was.
Raine handed the sunhat to Samson and he took it and nodded but didn’t say nothin’.
A couple days later Jesse was beat so bad his momma called Black. Black came up to the school but no one said shit and Jesse couldn’t remember nothin’ neither.
I like the notion of karma, the causality and purity of deeds.
*
Sometimes I saw Bobby as a father, holdin’ his boy in strong arms. I imagined I was his and I ain’t even sure what role I wanted, the wife or the child. Wants and needs—the line that divides ain’t nearly bold enough.
I never saw them kiss—Bobby and Savannah—they didn’t kiss or hug or touch each other the way my parents did. And it made me so sad and so glad.
Sometimes he’d reach out and touch my shoulder and my body would burn. Sometimes I walked real slow when he was behind me ’cause once when I did that he patted me on the butt to hurry me.
I wondered if it was love, or someplace south of love, where sin ain’t nothin’ but a threat, so empty we’d laugh at it while he anointed my body with his blessed hands.
*
I wore a coat ’cause there was chill, then took it off when I got to church. I sat in the back, by the carving of the two saints locked in pained surprise, like they’d just discovered mortality was a state far beneath them.
It felt strange not wearin’ a bra.
I saw Mary and her baby; her head to the side, a bird in the baby’s hand, its wings up like it wanted to fly.
I watched Bobby glance, then set his papers down and start the slow walk over.
I took a deep breath and straightened my back, pushin’ my chest out a little. I was wearin’ a shirt so sheer I might as well have screamed dark verse at him. Maybe somethin’ about vital existence and undefiled wisdom, ’cause I was grateful for his love, it wouldn’t go wasted.
“What are you reading today?” Bobby said, smilin’ that smile he saved for me.
“The Catcher in the Rye. Again.”
Bobby sat down on the bench in front then turned to face me. “I used to want to be Holden Caulfield.”
I tried to concentrate on my breathin’ when he glanced at my shirt. I tried to stop my heart chargin’ ahead of me. Nothin’ was happenin’. When you took a step back there weren’t nothin’ happenin’.
“You don’t even know how he ended up. Could be he got married and had kids, worked in a bank all his life,” I said.
He glanced at my chest again. I arched my back a little more. That scream; it shattered the colored glass and I saw the saints and Mary and her baby cryin’ for my lost virtue.
“Sometimes I miss my younger self. I look back like I was somebody else,” he said.
“Is that what I’ll do?”
“Depends on the choices you make. Good or bad.”
“How will I know?”
“You won’t know what you’re gonna do until you do it.”
I smiled.
“Are you a good person, Bobby?”
I ain’t sure why I asked that. Maybe if there was a spell, I was seein’ if it could be broken.
“In my experience good isn’t always good, bad isn’t always bad. But sometimes people do things that cast such a far-reaching shadow it’s not possible to escape. Do I want to be one of those people? No. Have I done bad in my life? Yeah. Am I a bad man? I’m not sure how to answer that.”
“Try.”
“Only God can judge me,” he said, a half smile on his face like he suddenly realized where he was.
“I don’t want to be judged,” I said.
“You’re right to feel like that.”
“What did you do that was bad?”
He looked down, maybe to see if the stone was opening.
“You can tell me,” I said.
“There was a girl in Tallassee. She came to me and she was pregnant and I sent her to a clinic in Dayette.”
“Why?”
“She was fourteen . . . her father.”
“Oh.”
“It weren’t the baby’s fault. Is it murder?”
“No.”
“ ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.’ ”
I looked far into his eyes. “Are you okay, Bobby?”
“What is okay?”
“Maybe the golden mean.”
“We crave the extremes, like some fatal flaw.”
“I worry about you.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“I know.”
He met my eye. I dropped my shoulders. He reached forward and tucked my hair behind my ear. He kept his hand there, warm against my cheek. I looked up and saw Samson by the doorway and he was starin’ at me with eyes so sad.