Blew: Incarnation

“‘yes’ he says, setting there bolt upright with jest the tears running down his face, at peace now, with nothing nowhere in the world any more to anguish or grieve him.”
William Faulkner
The Mansion

The water was over my head and I knew it was cold, but it didn’t feel cold, not after the first shock of falling in was over. I felt myself sinking and tried to grab a piece of ice, but it slipped away and my hands held only more water. Underneath the surface, down where the suckers live, the river was beautiful—clear and peaceful and inviting. I thought I heard you calling my name and I remember surfacing at least once, but the will to return wasn’t as strong as the desire to see what was beyond. The hard current became gentle the farther I fell. Even more gentle than your words of comfort when I told you I was a bastard. Remember that day? It was August of last year—on my eleventh birthday—and we were in your pea patch. We picked peas until we filled our pails, and then we lugged them down to the river’s edge, and I ate like a pig at a trough. Remember the salt shaker you brought with you? I watched as you split the pods and sprinkled white grains over each pea, taking your time as if you had all the time in the world and as if that task was the most important in all of life. As I gobbled the peas, scrapping the pods against my bottom teeth, I watched you patiently at your work and wondered why some of that patience didn’t run through my veins. We’re cousins. Some of our blood is the same, yet you got patience and I got what? Wildness like Ma? Lust like Pops, the daddy I never knew? When I realized I had a choice—I could struggle to save my physical life or I could surrender it—I realized I had more power beneath the water than any of you had on dry land. In that instant I knew I would follow Pops. I would disappear and no one would find me and then nothing would matter—not patience nor impatience nor living nor dying nor bastard nor claimed. I drifted down, down. I saw an old tire rooted in the muddy bottom. Next to it was Grandpa’s canoe, grass waving through its holes. I saw a baby’s skeleton. It was intact. I picked it up and held it next to my jacket, but it soon scattered. A hand reached for me and as it held mine my body released its spirit and gave up its ghost. Remember the nuns telling us something about Jesus giving up his ghost? We laughed so hard you wet yourself. My ghost just gave up its pee, you said, as you pulled off your panties and twirled them around your finger. You weren’t ashamed, not then. You believed in God then. You hung your underwear on a fence post to dry in the sun while we continued picking strawberries. You kept your dress wrapped tightly around your legs, tucking it underneath your bottom as you squatted before a new patch. No peeking, you told me. No peeking or you’ll burn in hell. I told you I didn’t believe in hell, that I figured it was just a place the pope or Father Gray had made up to scare us into being good. You told me not to say such awful things, that God would strike me dead on the spot, and you were afraid I’d burn forever in hell. But I kept it up—kept telling you there was no hell, no limbo, no purgatory. That the priests and nuns were liars. That there probably wasn’t even a heaven. I asked you where these places were. Were they under the earth? Then why didn’t we see them when we dug graves and threw dead people in? Were they in the sky? Then why didn’t airplanes fly into them? Were they in space? Then why hadn’t Sputnik run into them? You told me being Catholic meant we had to believe because Father Gray and Pope Pious XII would throw us out of the church if we didn’t. I told you I wanted to be thrown out—thrown out the back door of our church right through to the front door of the Mennonites’ on M-28. I didn’t know what they believed, but I knew the McCrary boys were Mennonites and they liked to shoot bullets into the Jesus sign. I figured if those boys weren’t afraid of going to hell for filling Jesus full of holes, then their church was the one for me. Remember? You started to cry. You told me I was wrong. There was a heaven as well as a hell, and it didn’t matter where they were. That was God’s business, you said, not ours. You spilled your berries all over your dress and wouldn’t let me help you put them back in your glass. They stained your fingers red and left red marks on your dress. You gave up—threw down your glass, snatched your panties, and ran home. I picked up what you had left. You always picked clean, but I just picked—throwing stems and leaves and green berries and rotten ones into my container. I told you I cleaned them when I got home, but I lied. I dumped them into a bowl, stirred in lots of sugar, and spun everything around in the milk until it turned pink. The berries tasted just as good as your spotless ones. I didn’t often lie to you. When my spirit left my body I was near you. I followed you down the road as you ran for help. Couldn’t you feel me beside you? I tried to tell you I wasn’t in the river, but you wouldn’t listen. When the grown-ups found the flesh that had housed me and washed it off and dressed it in my Sunday suit and laid that clean, dry flesh in the coffin, I tried to tell Mr. Kelsey I wasn’t in the box, but standing next to him, admiring the corpse, just as he was. When people came and looked at the skin I’d lived in and cried over it—saying it was too bad, he was too young to die—I tried to tell them nobody had died. That what they were looking at was just a doll—that I was alive and near them. I heard people crying for the dead thing in the coffin but when my flesh had walked among them—sometimes lonely, sometimes afraid, always restless—there had been no tears. Why did people now cry for the empty thing? Father Gray and the nuns cried too, but I don’t think they were crying for me. I think they were crying because they knew they’d have to find another boy to pick on and that might not be so easy now that I was gone. When Mr. Kelsey drove the corpse to the church in his fancy black car and they wheeled the dead thing down the aisle, Father Gray covered the coffin with smoke from the incense burner, and I watched his eyes. He was afraid, much more afraid than he was the Sunday I caught him doing something sinful to an altar boy, the thing he had wanted to do to me until I threatened to kill him and then he threatened to kill me if I ever told a soul. I put my invisible eyes next to his and stared at him until his eyes watered. Remember? He almost dropped the burner. He was scared by something his physical eyes couldn’t see but that his spirit knew was more real than the empty things surrounding him.
Don’t cry for me, Katie. I’m in a strange place. I can’t describe it to you because I didn’t learn words on earth to tell you what it’s like here. It’s different is the best I can say. It’s not what I expected. I haven’t found our idea of God yet or maybe I have and just haven’t recognized it. I’m sorry I left you, but I’m not unhappy where I am, and I’ll wait for you. Don’t hurry. I’ll wait as long as it takes for you to join me because I love you and waiting is easy now that I’m free of my flesh.