Fourth of July Creek (54 page)

The deputy called Pinkerton to the door and he spoke with some other agents outside.

Pinkerton came back in.

“Someone took shots at our HQ downtown.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“I don’t know. I gotta go.”

“That wasn’t Pearl.”

Pinkerton pulled his cap onto his head.

“But I wish it were,” he said.

The boy’s eyes were open.

They grinned at one another.

“Hey, kid.”

“Pete,” Benjamin said.

Pete sat up. The boy’s eyelids sagged closed again and then opened partway to look at him.

“How’s it sleeping in a real bed?”

“Is Papa here?”

“Not now.”

“He didn’t come back. He told me to stay because I was sick. But I got scared something happened to him. Is he here?”

“He’s fine. Look, it’s still dark out. Why don’t you go back to sleep?”

The boy turned his head and the snowfall just outside the window was hundreds and thousands of little turning white lights.

“He said he’d come back, Pete, but he didn’t. I thought I had the same cold as Mama and Esther and Jacob and everybody.”

“You just have a fever. Pneumonia. You should rest.”

The boy took a deep breath and sat up.

“I feel better.”

Pete went and poured him some water from a pitcher on a tray table and gave the boy the glass. Ben sat with it in his lap, looking vaguely at a spot on the blanket.

“You guys were on the run a little bit, huh?”

A change deepened the child’s expression, as though what was on his mind was itself difficult to think.

“Were you scared? There were helicopters and things. Dogs. It’s scary to—”

“Did that man die?”

Pete cast about for something else to talk about, but didn’t find anything.

“Yeah.”

“Papa was mad at me for it. But that man was going to shoot you, Pete. Right?”

“You saved me, Ben. That’s right.”

“He was bad?”

“Yeah.”

“So I’m not in trouble for it?”

Pete looked over his shoulder at the cop just outside. The man licked his finger and turned a page. Pete wondered should he tell the boy. Should he explain how he’d blamed his father for the man’s death.

“Nobody knows that you shot him.”

“They don’t?”

“No. And we’re gonna keep it a secret, okay?”

“But if he was bad, then it was okay.”

“We’re gonna keep it a secret, Benjamin. You ever pinkie swear?”

“No.”

Pete took the boy’s hand and made a fist out of it and then untucked the boy’s pinkie and hooked it with his own.

“Say you pinkie swear to keep it a secret. That no matter what they say, you won’t tell them you did it.”

“I pinkie swear I won’t tell.”

He touched the boy’s face with his hand. His hair had gotten longer and knotted, and Pete couldn’t pull his hand through it. He tugged on the kid’s ear.

“Pete?”

“Yeah?”

“Are they gonna kill me?”

“Of course not. You’re in a hospital. They’re taking care of you.”

“They gonna kill Papa?”

“No. They’re just scared he’s gonna hurt somebody. That’s all. We’re gonna try and keep that from happening.”

“He never hurt anybody.”

“Not on purpose, I know.”

“No. Never. He never hurt anybody.”

“He hurt you a little, didn’t he? Didn’t take very good care of you. And your brothers and sisters . . .”

Ben sat back against the pillows. Pete took the glass that he still had between his legs and set it on the table. Then he put himself on the edge of the bed. What thoughts roiled in the boy’s head.

“That was Mama.”

“What was Mama?”

The boy looked askance at Pete and pulled a pillow to his chest. He gathered the covers over his folded knees. He said he didn’t mean it, it was his fault. He let the poison in. Pete asked him what he was talking about, but the boy didn’t say anything, and for a long time Pete waited, as if the thing he wanted to draw out of the child was something frozen in ice and it would only be a matter of time as the room temperature did its slow work.

Pete leaned out over his knees and regarded the tile and the cop reading outside, and when he sat back again, he said for the boy to please tell him what happened, one thing after another, just plain.

At last Benjamin began to speak. He didn’t move as he did so except to occasionally scratch where the intravenous needle was taped to his arm.

H
E SAID IT WAS
because of TV, of likenesses. The Cloninger boy alone in the den and Ben using the bathroom real quick and when he comes out the TV draws him in. The dwarves hi-ho, hi-ho-ing and now he’s sitting on the rug in the blue glow of the cartoon. He drools he’s so enraptured.

Then by his ear his mama has him. She drags him into the yard yelping like a kicked dog. She swats him a couple times and sets him on the fence. How his ear burns. He’s too old to cry about it, but he knows he did bad.

His father’s in the barn butchering two deer. Ben can see him pulling the skin from the carcass where it hangs from the rafters. He looks curiously at his son sitting on the fence, scowls, gets back to work.

From the fence Ben can also see into Cloninger’s garage, where his mother and siblings work on the freezer. Ruth and Esther stand inside it with butter knives, chipping at the buildup of ice, little flakes of white flashing with their silverware. It’s full of ice and they need to make room for the deer meat Cloninger’s letting them keep here. His brother and sisters are making snow cones with Mama, putting handfuls of the new shavings into paper funnels from Cloninger’s tool bench and flavoring them with Kool-Aid packets from Mrs. Cloninger’s kitchen. No, Ben can’t have any. Don’t even ask. He sulks on the fence, he’s been bad, shouldn’t of been watching the likenesses no matter how funny, how colorful, he shouldn’t of been in there.

Baby Ethan falls sick first. Fever, crying, then not crying.

Then all his brothers and sisters are sick. Mama too. High high fevers. Chills. Slipping around the house like it’s a ward.

Nobody wants to play.

They pray. Smear mentholated ointments, pastes that Mama pestles in the middle of her own fever. Saying that this might be it, this might be how Satan comes at the last. With poisons and toxicants. What won’t they do, these forces arrayed against them. Entrapment, fiat currency, lawyers. Now this. Sickening the family.

Except for Ben and Papa. They don’t get sick.

“Because of the ice,” Pete thought aloud.

“What?” Benjamin asked.

“The ice, there was something in it.”

Benjamin shook his head.

“No, it was the cartoon. The likenesses!”

Pete looked over at the cop, still enraptured by Billy Graham’s book.

“Okay, sure. No yelling. Just go on.”

The boy gathered some blanket about him, and Pete asked him to please keep telling what happened. That it was okay. Everything was okay.

S
EVERAL DAYS OF THIS,
these fevers, and Papa says they should think maybe of going to the doctor, but the temperatures stop climbing. Maybe because a person can’t get any hotter.

Mama says any day now, they’ll begin to mend up properly.

The Lord is strong in them
, Mama says.
He shan’t let them perish, not now.

Mama says to remember that these bodies they inhabit are thin things compared to the stuff of their souls.

A night they wake to sneezing. Paula, she can’t stop, not for three hours, the little girl is crying until she just passes out, hot as a skillet. They don’t know should they wake her or allow her the relief. Not that she can come full around anyway, her fever is so high.

Papa says he’s going for a doctor now.

Mama makes him promise not to. Would he make it easy for them to just finish us off, right there in the hospital. Just let a doctor come and assassinate them with a needle. Put them down like a vet would an old dog.

Papa says he’s not just gonna sit there and watch them suffer.

She waves him off, says she’ll pray, she’ll have a vision, she always does.

She’s running hot as a teakettle herself, but she totes the baby outside with her in the cool spring night and she prays under the stars in the meadow. Come dawn she’s in the meadow yet, talking in tongues in the mist, clutching the baby.

Papa says for Ben to do his chores. He fetches the eggs. He sweeps the porch. He cooks the eggs because Mama’s still in the meadow. He doesn’t know how to cook very well. There are shells.

When he brings him his eggs, Papa says the baby hasn’t made a sound in hours. Says she won’t let him come down to her—
I get within thirty yards of her and she says “Benjamin Pearl you take one more step and so help me God . . .” Like the Lord put eyes in the back of her head.

What else can he do, he says.

Benjamin doesn’t know what to tell him.

I wish—

You wish what.

I wish I was sick too, Papa.

It’s quiet in the house. Jacob’s muttering sometimes and Esther tells him to shut up, even though it’s not nice to say. No one comes to eat, not even Papa, he just paces the porch.

The flies get all on the eggs and Ben shoos them into a cloud, and they knock around and descend onto the eggs and the apples he cut. The flies in like poison. Like the poison you let in here. It’s because of the likenesses they’re all sick. You did put them at hazard.

Mama dances up to the house.
Joy
, she says,
joy. It’s all joy. The glory
, she says,
you can see His glory on everything like new snow.

But the children
, Pearl says.
They’re laid out.
That isn’t glory, Sarah.

They just need to anoint them with oil. She says God said to anoint them. They are as kings and queens each one. She says for Benjamin to go get oil from the Cloningers.

He looks at Papa.

She cuffs him suddenly, weakly, her arm has no power. Shouts,
I said to go!

Papa waves helplessly for him to do it.

He returns with a Tupperware of olive oil, Ruth can’t walk right, can’t even hold a pencil, it slides out of her hand and she bawls, she wants to say something and she can’t and she can’t write either. So Mama anoints her first, pours oil into her hair and kisses her head, and Papa carries her to bed and sits with her and ministers to her. She just wants to say something.

Benjamin helps Mama anoint the others. Baby Ethan whose eyes only open, just. Mama carries the little sleeper to Jacob’s bed, she won’t let anyone have the baby, and Benjamin bears the oil.

Jacob isn’t himself. He can’t stop laughing.
The joy
, Mama says,
you have the glory and the joy.
He laughs and they wet his head with oil.

Esther won’t let them anoint her. She bows up like a tomcat, and then dashes through the house and tucks herself behind the stove, which has gone cold because everyone is boiled with fever. She hisses at them. She spits.

She’s just grumpy
, Mama says, laughing, rocking the baby on the floor so her dress hikes up and bare red legs show, she’s never shown her legs before, how come they are so red.
Esther’s just grumpy
, Mama says,
the oldest carries the most burden, you see.

Jacob cackles from his bed.

Paula sneezes again.

Ruth comes for a glass of water and she can’t grip the cup. She can’t walk right.

It’s the
cartoon
. The Seven Dwarfs. Ben says to Mama,
Ethan is Sleepy and Paula is Sneezy and Ruth is Dopey and Jacob is Happy and Esther is Grumpy
. He says,
This is my fault, God is punishing me.
He’s turned them into likenesses of cartoons, which are likenesses of people, it’s all inside out now, it’s all hell now.

Ben knows that this is his doing.

But what to do.

Papa wants the baby but she won’t let him. He says the baby Ethan is not alive. His open eyes are still and his arm won’t remain where Mama places it, it keeps spilling out and she keeps tucking it back.

They argue.

She scratches Papa with her free hand when he reaches.

They scream at one another and Ben covers his ears and faces the wall.

Jacob laughs.

Ruth cries. She cries for Papa, and Papa goes.

Now Mama hisses to him,
Ben come here.
He does and she tells him to go remove the battery from the truck.

He says he doesn’t know how.

She says to come here closer.

He’s afraid.

Come on, damnit, you’re afire.

He says,
Mama I’m okay
, and she says,
get over here, so help me
. He slips over to her and she slaps out the fire only she sees and says he’ll be okay. She straightens his shirt. Kisses his cheek. Her face is like a hot coal, like passing too near the stove.

She squints at him now,
Why are you on fire?

Papa has the keys to the truck. At the sound of them dimly jangling she says to not do it, and she crawls toward him on one arm, the other with the baby tucked to her, but he just steps around her and jogs out to the truck.