1.

(1922)

  Peach blossoms had fallen but the fruit wasn’t yet ripe. The caravan of two trucks and five cars rolled down a rutted south Georgia road.

  All Fords– the only motor the Reverend trusted.

  All black– the only paint color Henry Ford trusted.

   Hour after hour the scenery stayed the same: loblolly pines and galberry bushes, sumac and wiregrass; unpainted tenant cabins with broom-swept yards, adrift in sea after sea of weeviled out cotton fields.

   Every so often in a sliver between field and forest Gabe Silver glimpsed a yellow-red creek, sluggish and opaque, with just enough sheen to tell it from a muddy road. The air was thick with first flush mosquitoes. The convoy barely outdrove them. Road banks bristled with goldenrod. The ditches glinted with mica.

   The only way Gabe knew he was truly moving, (that the red clay road wasn’t a treadmill, that the scrub pine and cabins weren’t painted scenery turning endlessly on two giant drums, the same ones they’d passed an hour or a day or a year ago) was the occasional black snake stretched across the road.

   Big Oakey drove the spool truck, loaded down with tent canvas, poles and rope, bringing up the rear. He swerved every time, just enough to slice the snakes in two. From his roost in the truck bed, nestled in the canvas bundles, Gabe felt the lurch. He’d look back to see two snake halves wriggling toward each other. Like somehow they could get rehitched.

 Big Oakey cut up worms as a boy, but he was grown now.

  Mostly Gabe looked up. How many hours and miles in the last eight years passed with him laid up in that canvas like a hound dog on a pile of feed sacks? More than a thousand, less than a million. He took up the study of clouds as his specialty, and not just finding shapes in them.

   The Reverend’s wagon was jammed with books. While the other boys looked for limericks and naked pictures, Gabe read them cover to cover, over and over. Even though he knew them by heart after the first pass. Hermeneutics and history. Greek and Latin. The natural sciences, including Darwin

 ( “Know your enemy, boy, better than he knows himself.”)

Apologetics and chrestomathy. Chemistry and animal husbandry.

   Literature was thinner, but choice: all of Shakespeare, lots of Twain, most of Poe and Homer. And Chaucer.

 ( “A silver dollar for you when you point out someone on our roads who wasn’t on his.”)

  One of the few books Gabe pinched and kept for himself was a water-damaged copy of The International Cloud Atlas of 1896. Hand-tinted photos of cumulus, stratus, nimbus. Text in all three languages of international science. Gabe picked up the book’s German and French just as fast as he did most else. Ready to compare notes with the first Bavarian meteorologist he ran across, the odds of which were pretty low out in the middle of bumfuck. Especially with the Huns still licking their wounds from the Great War.

  That day the clouds were lined up east to west, same as the light breeze and the caravan’s path of travel. The clouds converged toward the horizon in tidy rows like streets in the sky. Cumulus radiutas. No rain. Not anytime soon. Gabe laid back, sun-warmed canvas the best medicine he knew for the constant pain of his fishhook spine. He imagined the heat softening his crooked back like a stick of butter, unfurling its curve till it reformed, straight as anyone’s.

   It was months since they’d last loaded out the big rag Gabe now nested in, since they’d needed anything more than one or two of the smaller side tents, and mostly not even those. Instead, they set up for smaller crowds and one night stands in Oddfellow’s halls, fish camps, or revival grounds. Or even an afternoon of sidewalk hustles for pocket change before a quick blow off. In those months, Gabe had worked out a divot in the canvas shaped just like himself. Every time he stood and looked down at the subtly curved fabric cleft he’d pressed into being he was surprised.

   What felt to Gabe like a giant difference between him and the rest of the world, looked in that  concave fabric mirror like the most lightly cupped hand. But the whole world spun on such slight differences, whether shade of skin or shine of suit. If he ever wanted to pretend otherwise, well, nothing came easier than hard truth.

  He opened his eyes to trace the endless line of cloud streets overhead. The cleared flatland the caravan traveled made for a wide horizon. Gabe imagined those cloud streets up in the sky lined with cloud houses. Then he picked one out and moved himself in, judging it a pretty good fit, familiar to boot. Substantial as any home he’d ever known. Eight years now spent on the road, with no idea where or who he’d been before that night the Reverend took him in. The flux of the road suited him fine. Pissing in ditches and washing in creeks was like living in a cloud house. Weightless but not formless, drifting but not invisible.

   Gabe cocked an ear and came back to earth when he heard the slight change in pitch of the lead car downshifting, turning off the road. One by one the rest fell in line behind.

  He pulled on his boots, ready in two shakes, like a farm boy waking up to milk cows, then clambered on top of the big canvas bundle to see where the cars up ahead were bound. They headed up an overgrown drive, lined with dusty magnolias and strung across with spiderwebs, toward the ghost of an old plantation house. What remained were just two chimneys standing sentinel over a caved in cellar. Kudzu had taken it all, just as it would someday take everything that stood still.

   He pushed away creaky magnolia branches and brushed spiderwebs from his hair. The lead car, a quarter mile ahead, was already pulling behind a stand of cedars out back of the vine-clad ruin. The dense blue green grove had once masked slave cabins from sight of the big house, a layout repeated a thousand times across Dixie, then abandoned in Sherman’s wake. This was their favorite sort of roost; an evergreen screen set far back from the road. Either a spring house or a creek nearby. Enough ghosts to keep the locals away.

    Like a dowser smelling water, the Reverend caught the whiff of towns long before they came up on them, a valuable skill while travelling off the main roads, sticking instead to criss-cross rabbit-ways found on no map. The few road signs they saw featured an arrow and a town name but stayed silent on the subject of miles. It wouldn’t do for them to come up on a town unprepared, not knowing what game they were to run. Casing a new town was like stalking a deer– best stay downwind till you it was sighted good and solid. Soon as they stopped and stretched, Gabe would light out with Big Oakey and Savannah to eyeball whatever crossroads or county seat lay ahead.

  One by one behind the stand of cedars, the vehicles circled up to a stop like a wagon train. The circle claimed their patch, held the night at bay, allowed for clotheslines strung from car to car, and described where everything went, from latrine to campfire. The Reverend Wyoming Kitchen drove the lead automobile and everything else. Already he was out and striding the circle’s full radius. He might as well have pissed on the whole shebang to mark it as his.

  The rest of them, stretching and yawning, piled out in his wake. Fourteen in the Reverend’s flock all together, birds of mismatched, molting feathers. Grace Hamby, the pudgy mulatto gospel soprano climbed down from behind the smaller truck’s steering wheel. The bucktoothed Shannon Family orchestra, parents and two daughters, scrawny and teasable, huddled to themselves. Jimmy Flynn, lead spieler and basket-passer-in-chief motored openly with Humdinger the Baptist, (Christian Magician). They snuck around for most else, keeping up appearances and fooling no one.

   The barbershop quartet were an odd lot, like mangy golfers, always on the lookout for a new tenor or bass to fill out their foursome. Baritone Colin Hafkey was the only constant, and he also saw to  the Old Testament Flea Circus. By consensus he got a motorcar all his own. Sam Pickens, the mournful, neurasthenic advance man stayed near the bottle hidden in the oldest, most broken down Model T. Big Oakey always made Savannah ride shotgun on the spool truck, handy for him to pick on. Which left Gabe to fend for himself. As he’d always done.

  Big Oakey and Savannah started unhitching  the trailer from Sam’s decrepit Ford. Gabe set off for water. He found the pump house up on slightly high ground, just behind the ruins. The door was off the hinges, the pump was rusty, but Gabe soon had a couple of five gallon lard buckets full to sloshing.

  The work never ended– hustling water, gathering wood, setting up and striking tents. It made Gabe strong. He supplied the smarts himself. The Reverend always insisted Gabe go along on the scouting trips. He said “Be foolish not to send you, Gabe. Nothing averts the gaze faster than a scrawny nigrah boy or a cripple. You’re two for the price of one– might nigh invisible.” But the Reverend weighed his reports more heavily than he did the other roustabouts. Gabe often got final say on questions of how fat the purses or how dumb the rubes.

  As he walked down from the pump house, Gabe spied a shiny silver sliver off at the pasture’s edge. River or creek didn’t matter much to him. He just wanted a good splash once they got back from town. Back in the circle nothing much was happening. They’d wait to hear if there were pickings ahead before setting up. If not, they’d pick up sticks and move on.

  Big Oakey hopped behind the wheel of Sam’s decrepit flivver, with Savannah beside him while Gabe cranked the starter. The Reverend said shiny motorcars drew suspicions. Sam carried this belief to a depressing extreme. His old rust bucket, from back in the aughts, had corroded brass and mice nesting under the hood. You could navigate it by watching the road through the holes in the floorboards, a dare Big Oakey was dumb enough to take again and again. The engine caught, Gabe hopped in, and they were off.

  Big Oakey got up to top speed fast, blowing down the dusty road at thirty miles an hour. In a matter of minutes they saw turpentine stills across from a sawmill and knew they were on the outskirts. Gabe gave up long ago knowing or caring about the names of these low horse towns, rotating among Podunk, Pixley, and Bugtussle the way civilians might say ‘yesterday, today, and tomorrow’. The boys pulled off the road before the main street commenced, split up, blended in, and set to work.

  Gabe took to the main street, staying off the plank sidewalk. More mules than horses, more wagons than automobiles. So far so good. He scanned the storefronts for more clues. The Reverend didn’t like signs of sophisticated trades like osteopaths, Chinese laundries and stand-alone sewing machine agents. No picture shows, lawyers or Jews either, the surest markers of a town getting above its raising.

   Gabe weaved in and out, dodging hitching posts, counting churches, spotting no quarter given to Seventh Day Adventists, Catholics or other heathen exotics. The Christian Science reading room was a plus, marking a crowd who’d fall for anything. He peered into a hotel lobby, spying just two plaid-vested traveling salesmen dozing beside nearly empty cuspidors. Those fellows were the main conduit for dangerous big city ideas like suffragism and the League of Nations. No worries here.

   He listened closely to the voices on the street. Not a Yankee in the bunch. If these lop-eared clodhoppers weren’t bored out of their gourds and ripe for the plucking, his name wasn’t Gabe Silver. And short of a birth certificate or other such improbables, that was the name he was sticking with.

 He veered off the main drag following the smell of frying catfish straight to Darkytown. This was dangerous scouting, his skin color no longer conveying invisibility. Here someone might just grab hold of his ear and demand “Who’s boy are you?” But it was also where blind tigers and bawdy houses were likeliest to lurk. The Reverend would want to know if a town had demon rum and scarlet women he could rail against, and just where to find them after the show. Gabe could sniff out corn squeezings or lilac water at thirty paces. Two short blocks past the livery stable he hit paydirt on both counts.

   All in all, a peach of a place, ripe and ready to pick. Who knows, they might even bust out the big tent. Do them all a world of good, a legit score after weeks of nothing but the old wibbly-wabbly. Gabe would much rather see the Reverend barking the devil out of the tree, his natural calling. Much more dignified than throwing three card monte on top of scuffed shirtboard back behind the rail sheds or peddling pelagra cures out of a beat up valise.

 In less than a half hour Gabe circled back, only to find Big Oakley and Savannah shooting craps in the shade of the Model T. Worse and worser, those two. Positively useless. He rode back, wind in his sails, wind in his hair, letting Big Oakey’s boring blather about poontang blow right past him.

  The boys found the Reverend in his camp chair under the shade of a pecan tree, cracking nuts and knuckles, for all the world like he owned the plantation. Which it seemed, for the next night or two, he would. After the boys’ report, the camp started into the cheerful buzz of set up, buoyed by the prospect of dignified work in the coming days. The Reverend never said too much about the state of their nut, but they all knew the signs of tapping out. Pickings had been slim, but at last the smell of sawdust on that tent floor and dollars in the collection plate felt almost real.

   As Gabe grabbed a washcloth and headed in search of water, the Shannon sisters broke out their ukuleles. Their voices (so much prettier when the girls were heard, not seen) advised him to ‘pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’. Gabe sighed.

  As he crossed the pasture toward the river, cows were clocking out, headed back to distant barns. Gabe followed one of their paths through the scraggly grass to a stand of sycamores at water’s edge. He undid his overall straps, draping the bib over his arm as he approached the bank. The fast-moving stream he found was not the usual brown sludge. Near clear, it coursed over and around good-sized boulders. He stripped off, bundled his clothes and boots, and skittered down from rocks into water.

  Gabe no more remembered learning to swim than he recalled learning to speak, tie his shoes, or dress himself. His memory began that night the Reverend found him, age ten or so, huddled up, bloody and silent at a country crossroads. The old fraud took him in, gave him a name, a job, and a tribe. When he saw how Gabe took to learning, Reverend Kitchen also provided an enthusiastic (if sporadic) education. But Gabe knew things that surprised them both, and plenty else he never let on about.

  Like Greek. And Latin. Late at night, in strong moonlight he’d turn to his mildewed copy of Metamorphoses (rescued from under the Reverend’s washstand) and ponder its mysteries.

‘Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim.’

Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.

Even though that was his motto, it wasn’t on his mind when the first stone caught him in the ribs.

  Gabe had gone from splashing to swimming, then on to floating, eyes closed, ears underwater. He had no notion of the three barefoot farm boys looking down on him from the far bank until the oldest and biggest of them took a rock about the size of a goose egg and chucked it at him underhanded. It startled more than it hurt, but as Gabe scrambled to standing in the waist-high water, the three of them spread out fast. Hurting looked next.

 “Looka what we got here, boys,” said the pack leader, a rawboned redhead with a bristle cut and a sneer. “This hunchback nigger thinks we wanna drank outta his bathwater.”

  “Hey boy, don’t you know they’s white folks on downstream from here,” said a wiry farmhand in a flat cap. “If we ain’t gonna drank out the same fountain as you in town, we sure as shit ain’t gone drank nothing you been splashing round in.”  As Gabe turned back the way he’d come, he was surprised to see the third boy halfway across the stream, picking his way from rock to rock. In just a moment he sprang onto the damp sand and Gabe found himself cut off at the center of their triangle. As if on cue, all three boys bent at the waist and without taking their eyes off him, began piling up rocks.

 “What’s wrong with you anyhow? How’d you come to get bent up so bad?” the third boy called out.

  “Looks to me like he’s got the polio,” replied the redhead. “What you thinking, boy? Ain’t you supposed to be shut up somehwheres, with you own kind? Or you set on getting us all crippled up too?”

“Ain’t polio,” said Gabe.

“What you say, boy?” asked the redhead.

“I say I ain’t got polio,” replied Gabe. “Doctor say so.”

“You talking back to me, boy?” said the redhead, as all three of them stepped in. “I don’t know how it goes in whatever charity hospital you done broke out of. Round here our coloreds know better’n to sass.”

 “You asked what’s wrong with me. I’m just saying,” said Gabe, seething inside but outwardly cool as milk . “I always been like this. Born this way, I reckon.”

  “Well now. You just keep flapping them big lips of yours and see where that gets you. Perry? John Lee? What you boys thank?”

“I thank this here rocks getting mighty heavy,” said the boy in the cap. “I’m either gone drop it or chuck it, one or t’other. What’s it gone be, Frank?”

 The redhead paused and smiled, tossing a stone from hand to hand. Gabe was torn between his clothing bundle on the shore and the deeper water a few dozen yards further downstream. Frank, the redhead, broke the silence before he could move either way.

 “Well, I worry about daddy’s cows dranking this water, but I suppose it cain’t get no worse. A little blood ain’t gone hurt them none.” With that he drew back and slung the rock at Gabe hard as he could.

     Frank’s aim was as good as any country boy raised tossing cow chips, which is to say dead on. The rock caught Gabe square behind the ear. His world exploded in a flash of white light. Before he knew it, another cracked across his elbow. Pain ricocheted around his whole body. He wanted to drop to his knees and curl around the hurt, but his instinct to flee was even stronger. As the third stone went whizzing past him and fell harmlessly into the moving current Gabe took off. He knew he’d never make the fifty yards straight to the shore.

 As the boys reached down to reload, Gabe charged into the rushing water toward the scattered boulders Perry had used to cross the stream. His tormentors let out with wild, high whoops, hardscrabble, hand-me-down versions of their granddaddy’s rebel yells. Their keening animal sound raked the little glen as they popped back up to standing, each now with rocks in both hands. Gabe bent low, making himself as small a target as he could, running like a soldier on a muddy battlefield.

   They let fly with rock after rock, pegging Gabe in the small of the back, the shoulder, and the base of the skull, whooping even louder with each hit. The boys bounced from side to side and pumped their arms in the air in an ugly frenzy of excited movement. They smelled blood. Gabe’s heart was racing as he closed the distance to the boulders.

  “Grab you some rocks and get on ahead of him,” Frank yelled. They did just that, racing along the bank, long, flickering shadows among the sycamores in his periphery, to stake out new positions in front of Gabe. Now he could see the projectiles coming his way and stood a little better chance of dodging them. But that was no advantage when Frank hurled one underhand, straight in and low.

   Everything slowed down as Gabe saw it coming right for his eye socket, then all vanished behind a curtain of pain as it connected square on. He heard the crunch of bone shattering inches from his ear and for the first time Gabe screamed out. His primal wailing cry excited the pack. Their whoops grew even wilder.

   Gabe dropped to his knees, water up to his neck, eyes closed, pain searing his skull. He regained his footing and stumbled forward a few steps, blind, feeling his way. He forced his eye open only to find it blurred with blood and swelling fast. The row of boulders were close now, but as the boys waded in ankle deep, so were they.

  Gabe threw himself toward the big boulder right at center, clawing for traction on the mossy wet surface. The stone surface was close enough to protect his face. The boys reached down, grabbing river rocks for their next barrage, but their aim was thrown by the slick projectiles. This round all clattered off the boulders around Gabe, none hitting their target.

  His fingers found dry niches above the waterline, and he clambered up, sprawling and naked, onto the sun-warmed surface. Gabe heaved himself up to a low crouch, breath ragged, blood dripping. He covered his damaged eye with one hand, his privates with the other, frantically searching out an escape route with his one good eye.

   The whooping yells ceased, the trio was suddenly intent and closing in. They were now calf-deep, on uncertain footing, slipping and catching balance, but tensed and ready to spring. Gabe whipped around– upstream or down, near bank or far, he was cut off. In desperation he looked up, the only direction left to him. There he spied it.

  Above the next boulder, a single long sycamore branch bent down, one knobby joint hanging just out of reach. Gabe saw the boy called Perry climbing up on top of the boulder path, maybe twenty feet away. Any second now he would find his footing and close that distance. The other two were closing in from below. The boys saw Gabe spy the branch, judging the distance and the path in one desperate searching look. Frank screamed “Get him, boys.”

   In a half dozen long strides, his toes grabbing unlikely traction, Gabe propelled himself toward the space where rock reached up and tree reached down. He leapt, momentum carrying forward and up, arms stretched out long, fingers reaching. Sun froze flashing on the water, all sound fell away, nothing was real right then but rushing air, flying body, and closing target.

  Gabe caught it. Momentum carried his body on past the branch, but his two-handed grip on the rough-jointed sycamore knuckle held strong. His legs swung out, then back under him, dangling beneath the knob. The impact set the limb to a slow bounce, which Gabe’s jerking scramble upward made worse. But the tree and branch both were massive, used to absorbing far greater shocks than the impact of one desperate boy. Gabe chinned himself up, grabbed hold with first one then another forearm, and pulled his whole body up onto the thick limb, holding it tight as the lifeline it was.

    There was no time to catch his breath. Below he saw the pack closing in, all three boys now up on the boulders. Gabe’s weight, slight as it was, pressed the branch down, that much nearer their grasp. Through the leaves, each one the size of a dinner plate, Gabe spied a next branch, and one after that. He pulled himself up, then again, climbing higher and higher on ever more slender limbs. Beneath him the boys leapt and snarled like dogs, flinging themselves again and again at a target just beyond them.

  Looking down, Gabe caught sight of what they, with their eyes focused upward, didn’t yet see. In nooks all around their feet lay stones the size of a fist. Gabe knew he was still in range. He looked up and saw one last higher limb nearby, a little past arm’s reach. Gabe judged that from that perch he’d be well above their rocking. Even as the thought crossed his mind he saw the boys catch on to the fresh ammunition scattered round their feet. They scrambled to re-arm themselves, and Frank shouted, “There’s moren one way to skin a coon. Come on, fellows.”

  Gabe bounced at the end of his branch, pushing the limb to greater and greater springing arc. He braced himself, then let fly on the branches upswing. In the moment he caught hold of the highest branch, his luck shifted both down on the ground and up in the tree, turning fast on three distinct sounds.

   First came the blast of a shotgun, echoing around the dell, silencing all else.

   Next was the familiar voice of Reverend Wyoming Kitchen, bellowing out, “That’s enough of that. You boys either get or get an assfull of buckshot.”

   The third sound, fainter at first than the other two, was the cracking of a sycamore limb. Gabe hung there by his fingertips, twenty feet above the boulders feeling the limb give way under his weight. He could even see the split growing wider, in an awful moment of suspense that stopped time. Everywhere but around the axis of that single feeble bough, the world ceased to spin.

  And then he was falling. He strained to turn in the air, to reach out for any of the branches now hurtling past, but gravity held terrible sway, all else bowing to its fierce dominion. The fragment of branch he tangled with tilted him backwards so the last thing he saw was sky. The last thought that crossed his mind was “Cumulus radiatus. No rain today.”

  His back hit the boulder with a sickening crunch, square on. Just where his spine curved most.

   Breaking open the wonder to first light.

   He glanced off the rock and fell into the rushing water face up, floating on the current like a leaf. His eyes, one damaged, one not,  were both shut.

   He didn’t see the three boys turn tail and run away without a backward glance.

   He didn’t see the Reverend fling himself down the bank toward him, rushing into the creek, his black suit coat soaking to still deeper black.

   The only sensation left to Gabe was sound.

A thousand voices sang in harmony with the resonant quaver of seven golden celestial globes.

Ancient lyrics, crisp and joyous, heralded the miraculous birth.

  The sound echoed within Gabe’s skull, and was somehow also tuned to the water, the sand, the rocks, the air, the light. It filled the glen. It stopped the Reverend in his tracks, wet to the knees and dumbstruck.

 

Gloria in excelsis deo

et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis

Laudamus te.

Benedicimus te.

Adoramus te.

Glorificamus te.

    The rest of the troupe raced from the camp toward the grove of sycamores. One by one they stopped along the bank. They stared down at the incomprehensible sight in the water just beyond the Reverend. Gabe no longer floated downstream, caught now in the swirl of a tiny whirlpool leeward of a boulder. Water flowed all around him, washing away the blood. He slowly spun in place around his own axis,  like the second hand on a pocket watch.

And…

There…

Extending out from the center of his back, still unfurling, reaching out into the water, holding the boy, their host, aloft, cradling him, with their thousand feathers gleaming platinum, white, and silver, arching with majesty and power, finding their first full span:

Gabe’s new wings.

 

copyright 2014 john gibson. all rights reserved.