Welding with Children (2 page)

I started thinking about my four daughters. None of them has any religion to speak of. I thought they'd pick it up from their mamma, like I did from mine, but LaNelle always worked so much, she just had time to cook, clean, transport, and fuss. The girls grew up watching cable and videos every night, and that's where they got their view of the world, and that's why four dirty blondes with weak chins from St. Helena Parish thought they lived in a Hollywood soap opera. They also thought the married pulpwood truck drivers and garage mechanics they dated were movie stars. I guess a lot of what's wrong with my girls is my fault, but I don't know what I could've done different.

Moonbean raked in a gaggle of jacks, and a splinter from the porch floor ran up under her nail. “Shit dog,” she said, wagging her hand like it was on fire and coming to me on her knees.

“Don't say that.”

“My finger hurts. Fix it, Paw-Paw.”

“I will if you stop talking like white trash.”

Tammynette picked up on fivesies. “Mamma's boyfriend, Melvin, says
shit dog.
”

“Would you do everything your mamma's boyfriend does?”

“Melvin can drive,” Tammynette said. “I'd like to drive.”

I got out my penknife and worked the splinter from under Moonbean's nail while she jabbered to Tammynette about how her mamma's Toyota cost more than Melvin's teeny Dodge truck. I swear I don't know how these kids got so complicated. When I was their age, all I wanted to do was make mud pies or play in the creek. I didn't want anything but a twice-a-week nickel to bring to the store. These kids ain't eight years old and already know enough to run a casino. When I finished, I looked down at Moonbean's brown eyes, at Nu-Nu's pulsing head. “Does your mammas ever talk to y'all about, you know, God?”

“My mamma says God when she's cussing Melvin,” Tammynette said.

“That's not what I mean. Do they read Bible stories to y'all at bedtime?”

Freddie's face brightened. “She rented
Conan the Barbarian
for us once. That movie kicked ass.”

“That's not a Bible movie,” I told him.

“It ain't? It's got swords and snakes in it.”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

Tammynette came close and grabbed Nu-Nu's hand and played the fingers like they were piano keys. “Ain't the Bible full of swords and snakes?”

Nu-Nu woke up and peed on himself, so I had to go for a plastic diaper. On the way back from the bathroom, I saw our little book rack out the corner of my eye. I found my old Bible stories hardback and brought it out on the porch. It was time somebody taught them something about something.

They gathered round, sitting on the floor, and I got down amongst them. I started into Genesis and how God made the earth, and how he made us and gave us a soul that would live forever. Moonbean reached into the book and put her hand on God's beard. “If he shaved, he'd look just like that old man down at the Pak-a-Sak,” she said.

My mouth dropped a bit. “You mean Mr. Fordlyson? That man don't look like God.”

Tammynette yawned. “You just said God made us to look like him.”

“Never mind,” I told them, going on into Adam and Eve and the Garden. Soon as I turned the page, they saw the snake and began to squeal.

“Look at the size of that sucker,” Freddie said.

Tammynette wiggled closer. “I knew they was a snake in this book.”

“He's a bad one,” I told them. “He lied to Adam and Eve and said not to do what God told them to do.”

Moonbean looked up at me slow. “This snake can talk?”

“Yes.”

“How about that. Just like on cartoons. I thought they was making that up.”

“Well, a real snake can't talk, nowadays,” I explained.

“Ain't this garden snake a real snake?” Freddie asked.

“It's the devil in disguise,” I told them.

Tammynette flipped her hair. “Aw, that's just a old song. I heard it on the reddio.”

“That Elvis Presley tune's got nothing to do with the devil making himself into a snake in the Garden of Eden.”

“Who's Elvis Presley?” Moonbean sat back in the dust by the weatherboard wall and stared out at my overgrown lawn.

“He's some old singer died a million years ago,” Tammynette told her.

“Was he in the Bible, too?”

I beat the book on the floor. “No, he ain't. Now pay attention. This is important.” I read the section about Adam and Eve disobeying God, turned the page, and all hell broke loose. An angel was holding a long sword over Adam and Eve's down turned heads as he ran them out of the Garden. Even Nu-Nu got excited and pointed a finger at the angel.

“What's that guy doing?” Tammynette asked.

“Chasing them out of Paradise. Adam and Eve did a bad thing, and when you do bad, you get punished for it.” I looked down at their faces and it seemed that they were all thinking about something at the same time. It was scary, the little sparks I saw flying in their eyes. Whatever you tell them at this age stays forever. You got to be careful. Freddie looked up at me and asked, “Did they ever get to go back?”

“Nope. Eve started worrying about everything and Adam had to work every day like a beaver just to get by.”

“Was that angel really gonna stick Adam with that sword?” Moonbean asked.

“Forget about that darned sword, will you?”

“Well, that's just mean” is what she said.

“No it ain't,” I said. “They got what was coming to them.” Then I went into Noah and the Flood, and in the middle of things, Freddie piped up.

“You mean all the bad people got drownded at once? All right!”

I looked down at him hard and saw that the Bible was turning into one big adventure film for him. Freddie had already watched so many movies that any religion he would hear about would nest in his brain on top of
Tanga the Cave Woman
and
Bikini Death Squad.
I got everybody a cold drink and jelly sandwiches, and after that I turned on a window unit, handed out Popsicles, and we sat inside on the couch because the heat had waked up the yellow flies outside. I tore into how Abraham almost stabbed Isaac, and the kids' eyes got big when they saw the knife. I hoped that they got a sense of obedience to God out of it, but when I asked Freddie what the point of the story was, he just shrugged and looked glum. Tammynette, however, had an opinion. “He's just like O. J. Simpson!”

Freddie shook his head. “Naw. God told Abraham to do it just as a test.”

“Maybe God told O. J. to do what he did,” Tammynette sang.

“Naw. O. J. did it on his own,” Freddie told her. “He didn't like his wife no more.”

“Well, maybe Abraham didn't like his son no more neither, so he was gonna kill him dead and God stopped him.” Tammynette's voice was starting to rise the way her mother's did when she'd been drinking.

“Daddies don't kill their sons when they don't like them,” Freddie told her. “They just pack up and leave.” He broke apart the two halves of his Popsicle and bit one, then the other.

Real quick, I started in on Sodom and Gomorrah and the burning of the towns full of wicked people. Moonbean was struck with Lot's wife. “I saw this movie once where Martians shot a gun at you and turned you into a statue. You reckon it was Martians burnt down those towns?”

“The Bible is not a movie,” I told her.

“I think I seen it down at Blockbuster,” Tammynette said.

I didn't stop to argue, just pushed on through Moses and the Ten Commandments, spending a lot of time on number six, since that one give their mammas so much trouble. Then Nu-Nu began to rub his nose with the backs of his hands and started to tune up, so I knew it was time to put the book down and wash faces and get snacks and play crawl-around. I was determined not to turn on TV again, but Freddie hit the button when I was in the kitchen. When Nu-Nu and me came into the living room, they were in a half circle around a talk show. On the set were several overweight, tattooed, frowning, slouching individuals who, the announcer told us, had tricked their parents into signing over ownership of their houses, and then evicted them. The kids watched like they were looking at cartoons, which is to say, they gobbled it all up. At a commercial, I asked Moonbean, who has the softest heart, what she thought of kids that threw their parents in the street. She put a finger in an ear and said through a long yawn that if the parents did mean things, then the kids could do what they wanted to them. I shook my head, went in the kitchen, found the Christmas vodka, and poured myself a long drink. I stared out in the yard to where my last pickup truck lay dead and rusting in a pile of wisteria at the edge of the lot. I formed a little fantasy about gathering all these kids into my Caprice and heading out north-west to start over, away from their mammas, TVs, mildew, their casino-mad grandmother, and Louisiana in general. I could get a job, raise them right, send them to college so they could own sawmills and run car dealerships. A drop of sweat rolled off the glass and hit my right shoe, and I looked down at it. The leather lace-ups I was wearing were paint-spattered and twenty years old. They told me I hadn't held a steady job in a long time, that whatever bad was gonna happen was partly my fault. I wondered then if my wife had had the same fantasy: leaving her scruffy, sunburned, failed-welder husband home and moving away with these kids, maybe taking a course in clerical skills and getting a job in Utah, raising them right, sending them off to college. Maybe even each of their mammas had the same fantasy, pulling their kids out of their parents' gassy-smelling old house and heading away from the heat and humidity. I took another long swallow and wondered why one of us didn't do it. I looked out to my Caprice sitting in the shade of a pecan tree, shadows of leaves moving on it, making it wiggle like a dark green flame, and I realized we couldn't drive away from ourselves. We couldn't escape in the bastardmobile.

In the pantry, I opened the house's circuit panel and rotated out a fuse until I heard a cry from the living room. I went in and pulled down a storybook, something about a dog chasing a train. My wife bought it twenty years ago for one of our daughters but never read it to her. I sat in front of the dark television.

“What's wrong with the TV, Paw-Paw?” Moonbean rasped.

“It died,” I said, opening the book. They squirmed and complained, but after a few pages they were hooked. It was a good book, one I'd read myself one afternoon during a thunderstorm. But while I was reading, this blue feeling got me. I was thinking, What's the use? I'm just one old man with a little brown book of Bible stories and a doggy-hero book. How can that compete with daily MTV, kids' programs that make big people look like fools, the Playboy Channel, the shiny magazines their mammas and their boyfriends leave around the house, magazines like
Me,
and
Self,
and
Love Guides,
and rental movies where people kill one another with no more thought than it would take to swat a fly, nothing at all like what Abraham suffered before he raised that knife? But I read on for a half hour, and when that dog stopped the locomotive before it pulled the passenger train over the collapsed bridge, even Tammynette clapped her sticky hands.

*   *   *

The next day, I didn't have much on the welding schedule, so after one or two little jobs, including the bed rail that my daughter called and ragged me about, I went out to pick up a window grate the town marshal wanted me to fix. It was hot right after lunch, and Gumwood was wiggling with heat. Across from the cypress railroad station was our little redbrick city hall with a green copper dome on it, and on the grass in front of that was a pecan tree with a wooden bench next to its trunk. Old men sometimes gathered under the cool branches and told one another how to fix tractors that hadn't been made in fifty years, or how to make grits out of a strain of corn that didn't exist anymore. That big pecan was a landmark, and locals called it the “Tree of Knowledge.” When I walked by going to the marshal's office, I saw the older Mr. Fordlyson seated in the middle of the long bench, blinking at the street like a chicken. He called out to me.

“Bruton,” he said. “Too hot to weld?” I didn't think it was a friendly comment, though he waved for me to come over.

“Something like that.” I was tempted to walk on, but he motioned for me to sit next to him, which I did. I looked across the street for a long time. “The other day at the store,” I began, “you said my car was a bastardmobile.”

Fordlyson blinked twice but didn't change his expression. Most local men would be embarrassed at being called down for a lack of politeness, but he sat there with his face as hard as a plowshare. “Is that not what it is?” he said at last.

I should have been mad, and I was mad, but I kept on. “It was a mean thing to let me hear.” I looked down and wagged my head. “I need help with those kids, not your meanness.”

He looked at me with his little nickel-colored eyes glinting under that straw fedora with the black silk hatband. “What kind of help you need?”

I picked up a pecan that was still in its green pod. “I'd like to fix it so those grandkids do right. I'm thinking of talking to their mammas and—”

“Too late for their mammas.” He put up a hand and let it fall like an ax. “They'll have to decide to straighten out on their own or not at all. Nothing you can tell those girls now will change them a whit.” He said this in a tone that hinted I was stupid for not seeing this. Dumb as a post. He looked off to the left for half a second, then back. “You got to deal directly with those kids.”

“I'm trying.” I cracked the nut open on the edge of the bench.

“Tryin' won't do shit. You got to bring them to Sunday school every week. You go to church?”

“Yeah.”