“We might have some at the house. Ain’t no point in you standin’ here. Don’tcha know the courthouse is shut on Sundays?”
“Is it Sunday?” He held a tightness in his dark brows that stretched to his elbows.
“Yep.”
For what felt like a very long time, he made a quiet study of me. I picked up the bag of groceries and held it like a shield to my chest. Finally he asked, if it was indeed Sunday, why I wasn’t in church.
“Never am.” I shrugged. “Dad will go. He don’t make a regular thing out of it, though. He says the courtroom is his church.” I leaned in as if whispering were the only way to say, “My dad is Autopsy Bliss.”
He too whispered, reciting the last bit of the invitation: “With great faith, Autopsy Bliss.”
I made room for a man and his limping dog. Once they passed, I stepped closer to the boy. “You’re really Satan?”
“Yes.”
“The big man Lucifer?”
He nodded his head.
“The villain of the story?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“If you’re the devil, then you’re the bad one. That’s just the way it is. Well, come on then.”
“Where to?”
“To meet the man who invited you.”
3
… wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 4:24–26
FROM THE LOOKS of it, his overalls were his only wearing. Was that a year’s worth of dirt on the strap? The cuffs of the pants? How long did it take to fray the denim like that? To lose the button? To rip that hole by the knee, the biggest of them all?
The only spot not worn was the seat. Did he never sit down? Too busy getting that dirt caked into the thread. That dust settled into the pockets. In some areas, the denim was so thin, you could see his skin lifting like shadow through the thread-baring weave.
He didn’t walk like other boys. There was no bounce, no thrill of movement. I could see him low and deep, peacefully wise below the grass line of the cemetery.
His skin reminded me of when I had been woken by high-pitched screeches outside my window. I rolled out of bed, pressing my face into the screen. It was too dark to see anything, but I knew the birds were close from their battle sounds and the whooshing thud of their wings.
The next morning, a feather lay on the ground beneath my window. It was black on the tip, but the closer it got to the quill, the black began to gray into an almost hurting brown. I thought it a sore color for a feather to have. When I saw the boy, I thought it made for even sorer skin with its reddened tinge.
Once we came to the residential lanes, I watched him as he carefully studied everything from flies on roadkill to a tangle of barbed wire rusting in a field. They were poems handwritten by nature to him, and he was as fascinated with them as I would’ve been about a ticket to the World Series.
“How do you say this place?” he asked.
“Whatcha mean?”
“I mean, the name of the town. How do you say it?”
“Oh, well, most folks think it’s pronounced like the past tense of breathin’. You know, like you just breathed somethin’ in. But it’s not like that at all. Say breath. And then ed. Breathed. Say it so the tongue don’t recognize such a large break between Breath and ed. Breathed.”
He repeated after me.
“Yeah, just like that.”
I knew by looking at him, he was the type of boy who got up with the sunrise, already tired, and worked until the sunset, shrunk to the bone. He knew the resilience of a seed, and the vulnerabilities of it also. The blessing of a full field and the destroyed hope of a barren one.
I wondered how many times those dirt-crusted fingernails had tried to pry growth from a drought. How many times those small hands had thrown buckets of water from flooded plains. He knew how to jar and can vegetables the way I knew how to play Mario Bros. We were in the same world, yet to me he smelled of rocket fuel.
“Your eyes…” I stared at his irises, never having seen such a dark yet sparkling shade. They were like July foliage in the sun. “They’re so green.”
“They’re leaves I took as souvenirs from the Garden of Eden.” He said it so certain, I couldn’t doubt its truth.
A truck backfired. Or maybe that was just what that group of kids sounded like as they came bursting from around the corner, nearly knocking the boy over. At first I thought his hands were up in order to catch his balance. Then I realized he was reaching out to the kids. Each sleeve or arm that came close enough he tried to grab hold of but couldn’t. They were passing him by as if he should know better. As if he should know he could never be them. Joyous and free and in pure bliss.
There was someone in the group falling back, calling my name.
It was Flint, always Flint. The boy with Coke-bottle glasses and one eye lazier than the other.
“Hey, Fieldin’.” He ran in place as the others kept forward. “We’re goin’ out to the river for a swim. You comin’? Mason swears he seen an alligator in there.”