Works and Days

“Jewell! Jewell!”

“What, Tim, I’m takin’ a shit!” his wife called from the bathroom.

The big eared man strode into the bathroom—which had no door—and handing his wife the cordless said, “I think you’ll want this.”

“Alright—hello,” she took the phone. “CHAYNE!!! Chayne! What are you doin’? No! Naw! But what about—? They did what with the house? You’re gonna do what? Oh, Chayne! Oh, you go boy!”

Jewell talked into the cordless while she finished her business, flushed the toilet and then washed her hands and strode out into the kitchen, still talking.

“Oh, well, you know nothing’s goin’ on right here.”

As if to prove this to herself, she pushed back the gauzy curtain and looked out onto the state road, and then across it to the autumn browned fields that stretched to the distant belt of trees.

“Yeah,” Jewell said, “I’ll be over tonight. Good luck with the house!”

“What?” Mickey Wynn’s eyebrow rose.

Mickey, and his wife LaVelle, representing the fat gene of the family, were present. Felice and her microbraids were there along with Carey and Chayne’s mother and his father.

“I said,” Chayne repeated to his family, “ff you all are going be like this about it, I’ll just buy the house.”

“Chayne, you can’t just buy a house,” Graham said incredulously.

“Yes, I can,” Chayne differed, reaching into his side pocket and taking out his checkbook. “Let me show you.”

“Well shit, Chayne,” Felice murmured.

“I didn’t expect to spend this much money this soon,” Chayne muttered. He looked up to his mother. “How much is my grandmother’s house that you didn’t tell me you’re selling going for?”

“65,000!” Graham said and Chayne eyed his father with annoyance. It wasn’t his mother who had owned the house.

“Well, it’s not worth that,” Chayne said, sullenly writing the check out, “but here’s 70,000.”

His father looked at him for an answer,

“Because then you all can never tell me that you could have gotten the house for a better price.”

He handed the check to his mother. “Now go get me the papers to the house.”

“Chayne,” LaVelle told her cousin by marriage. “I still haven’t gotten used to you.”

Geschichte Falls was a mistake. That is, it should have been called Chocktaw Falls, for it lay, except for Little Poland, on the north bank of the Chocktaw River and its original eastern border had been the mill at the waterfall by Lake Chocktaw. Though there had been large German settlement at the end of the 1800s, there was no satisfactory explanation for how Chocktaw had become Guh-shick-tah, the German word for story, but as Chayne who had explained this all to him once had told Russell Lewis, there were plenty of stories in this town, so the mistake was just as well.

Geschichte Falls smelled like fried chicken, especially at the end of summer, early, early September. Especially on the walk out of the Breckinridge and down Curtain and onto Kirkland Street. After five o’clock, when the sun began to melt like butter on over the brick and stone buildings of Kirkland and the distant office buildings of the defunct downtown, it also smelled like hot, flaky biscuits, especially on a hot September day.

Russell Lewis kept these thoughts to himself, though.

Russell Lewis kept every thought to himself. Kirkland Street seemed especially dead on a Sunday. The drugstore was closed, the Dollar and Ten as well. The old man that ran the bookstore was shutting it down, locking the doors and walking away. Russell wondered if he’d ever sold a single book from that old fashioned place lined with the old and the used as well the new. He’d stopped going, embarrassed for never buying anything. He’d found a sex manual in there that showed all the different positions men and women could use, and he’d sat in a dark corner getting boners and a dry mouth while he reverently flipped through the pages seeing very common white people like his parents, wheelbarrowing, doggy styling and titty fucking. There were actual photographs and a man who looked a lot like Mr. Dwyer next door, with his erect penis caught between a woman’s large breasts.

“Vigorous thrusting can….” Russell remembered the words printed beside the picture, but he could only remember those words.

The bells from the high spire of Saint Adjeanet’s began to ring out What A Friend We Have In Jesus which meant church would start soon, but Russell only thought of quickening his pace for a few seconds. It was too hot for speed.

Riding past him on bikes were three or four black kids who came east from Colum Street and, riding erratically, shot south down Kirkland. They were not riding so fast that Russell barely heard the end of their song:

“Ain’t yo mama pretty

She got meatballs on her titties

Ham and eggs

Between her legs

I took her to a party

She turned around and farted

I asked her why she did it

She turned around and shitted!”

Russell was disgusted by the song, and also knew that he’d instantly memorized it and would hum it to himself for a long time to come.

On the walk down Kirkland he had only seen two cars and both were headed toward Saint Adjeanet’s, but when he got to the church, it was surrounded by cars for the five o’clock Mass. As the hymn ended, people were clearing off the verandah for the nave. Russell snuck into one of the side pews.

Russell Lewis liked the plainness of Saint Adjeanet’s. Past the old communion rail, over the altar and the golden tabernacle was the long crucifix, dark against the white wall. To its right, a lancet stain glass of the Blessed Virgin, to the left, one of Saint Joseph. Russell could not crane his neck to see the twelve windows right above him on the west side of the church, but the light of the sun through them painted the people and pews, and tinted the white stone aisle gold and green, blue and red. The church was crowded, but it usually was at five o’clock Mass. Russell wondered how many people had showed up to the first three that Sunday. After all there were only so many people in Geschichte Falls, and four Catholic churches.

Mr. Cordino was here with his almost girlfriend Miss Castile, and near the front was crazy Ann Ford, Father Ford’s sister. A few rows away, past the Jensen family, were Russell’s next door neighbors, the Armstrongs. He didn’t really know them. They were Dad’s friends. Actually, in this last year a lot of people were coming up to Russell talking about his father, telling him to say hello to his father and thank his father for this and that.

They never mentioned his mom. Patti was not a church person. She was a devout Catholic who said her prayers, smoked her cigarettes, drank her gin, came to Mass on Sunday, did her business and left. She did not live for choir and RCIA and bazaars or socials and so none of the church people really knew her, and they didn’t really know Russell either. How they spotted him as Thom’s son was always a miracle to Russell because even without the baggy corduroys and long sleeved plaids worn when the weather demanded something lighter, Russell looked nothing like his father. At fifteen, he was already the same height as Thom, and still growing. He was not dark haired or bold featured, but had shoulder length red hair that he had to push out of his face when he leaned down, concentrating on the hymn book with his tilted green eyes in a fine featured face.

Here in this place, new light is streaming

now is the darkness vanished away,

see in this space, our fears and our dreamings,

brought here to you in the light of this day!

Russell stood up with the whole congregation as the servers entered the church, followed by Suzie Cratan bearing the lectionary aloft, and then Father Ford in white and green.

Gather us in—the lost and forsaken,

Gather us in—the blind and the lame,

call to us now and we shall awaken

we shall arise at the sound of your name!

The Gospel for the day was Jesus feeding the four thousand after the Sermon on the Plain. The people were tired and hungry, and sitting in the warm church, his throat a little dry, the story meant more to Russell. Jesus did not feed four thousand that Sunday evening. Russell wished he’d bothered to sit up front, the communion hymn was half over by the time the usher came to his pew, and it was a long time trudging, hands folded over his groin, head bowed, before he came to the priest.

That’s when he saw a friend from the corner of his eye.

Half humming, half singing, And I will rai-aise you uu-up! And I will rai-aise you uu-up! And I will rai-aise you uu-up on the la-ast day!, Russell craned his neck across the church to make sure he was seeing right. Yes, yes it was Chayne!

“Body of Christ,” said the woman with the bad hair.

Russell wondered if he’d take Communion in his hands or in his mouth, decided for the hands, and then said, “Amen.”

Chayne is here!

And I will rai-aise you uu-up on the la-ast day!

“The Blood of Christ.”

Question or statement?

“Amen.”