Bobcat's Summer of Wonders(2.2): Death Comes for the Bishoprick.

We were at the door, uncomfortably trying to break the conversation: me and Mike.  Next door, Momma and Deddy come out of the house, slowly going down the steps, and they were dressed in odd clothes--old stuff, and solids, not patterns.  Ma had a dress on with black leggings underneath and Pa had shed his work clothes for something like a formal shirt, one of those 50 dollar things.

"That's that lady that I talked to" said Mike.

"What the hell did you just say!?" I said, not sure Mike had meant the trail of words that had just then fallen out of his mouth.  This was my mother his eyes were drinking in greedily from across the way.

"When I signed the contract to stay here I talked to her, in that blast-chiller place they got in yall's house" said Mike.  I had forgot she had went over the rules with him, along with Oxcart standing by, when they were doing the paperwork.  It would have been in Momma's bedroom, the blast-chiller place, as Mike called it, because Ma stayed in there all the time.

"Ya got an eye-full?"  I could feel my face starting to burn with anger.  I did not appreciate his eyes so hungry for sight of my mother.  To be fair, Marisol probably cut a good figure to other men, outside the family, but she stayed home all the time usually for want of privacy, not outside company.

"She should get outside more."(Is this butthead reading my mind?!)

"Why?" I said, feeling evil, not wanting to hear stove-up tenant Mike's thoughts on my mother, whom he didn't even know properly, anyway, and her husband, who happened my father, right there with her.

Thomas come out of the house, then, as Momma and Deddy was leaving, and he went past our outbuilding to the edge of the woods, looking like a totem of odd thoughts: monolithic, and plain, the way a schizophrenic drawing might seem plain to the trained eye, the way gibberish could seem ordinary and not hold our interest: plain.

Thomas had his hands on his hips again, and his head down, like he was a football coach, contemplating a brilliant new maneuver.  He looked almost a hundred years old, Thomas, with his white hair and his thick glasses on--those that he usually never wore unless he was reading or watching television, the thick things making him look like an old worn-down librarian, worn smooth from usage, just like the covers of old books, before they hit the rubbish bin. 

I motioned Mike to follow me, and we crossed the way through the old field grass in the backyard, towards my older brother, towards the woods at the back of the lot.

Without looking at us, still regarding the woods, Thomas said, "they went to the funeral home, Marisol and Oxcart."

"Grandma?" I said, thinking of her, though she had long been under assisted care at one of those places where they keep dozens of them, old and infirm people.

"Andrew" said Thomas.  "Killed instantly in a car accident."

"Andrew!" I said, my mind reeling, caught entirely surprised by the whole thing.  Andrew had been vibrant and active, indeed, much more so than his brothers and sisters, the last one we would expect harm to come to.

"He was asleep in the back seat of an Escalade, so the Highway Patrol put it" Thomas said.  "The thing veered lanes, went sideways and got t-boned by a big rig.  It darn near cut the Escalade in half."

"I don't think I've met him" Mike said.  "There's a lot of yall in the old woodpile, isn't there?."  The comment kind of sat there for a beat, then Mike chirped, "well, unfortunately, one less of yall."

"You don't understand, Mikey" said Thomas.  "He was the best of us."  There was a large crease that ran from Thomas's eye, the inside corner, past his nostril, and went around his mouth, shaping his chin.  That crease looked deeper and darker than ever, like somehow Thomas had been drained before walking outside here a few minutes ago.

"He was" I said after a solid, thick minute.   "He certainly wasn't like the rest of us."  I would listen to a compact disc Andrew had pressed of his music during one of the tent shows, and it was all pretty pedestrian, but it gave me a kind of pride, because it was my own brother.  But I remember too, when he left us all to go into the ministry, just after his conversion to full-on religion, he had gave us all a good talk about everything he did not like about us and our house.

Apparently, Andrew never liked the yard either, the whole time he was growing up here and all.

Or much else, as it happened.  This was like repenting in reverse, leaving all of his negative thoughts right there on the premises when he left, shedding that so he could be carefree and thinking only of selling the Gospel, later, with all that negativity neatly purged.  

Purged onto us.

"He's shed his earthly bonds" said Thomas, looking up suddenly, his glasses in the sunlight making it look like his eyes were glowing.