Jesus in the Mist , livre ebook

Jesus in the Mist
STORIES
Paul Ruffin

The University of South Carolina Press
© 2007 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2007 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Ruffin, Paul.
Jesus in the mist : stories / Paul Ruffin.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-57003-699-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-57003-699-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Short stories, American. 2. Southern States—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.U362J47 2007
813.54—dc22                                   2006101063
ISBN 978-1-61117-120-4 (ebook)
For Amber
Contents
Acknowledgments
PART I
When Momma Came Home for Christmas and Talmidge Quoted Frost
Harvey Watson and the Angel
The Queen
Jesus in the Mist
In Search of the Tightrope Walker
Teaching Her about Catfish
The Natural Man
PART II
The Well
Time of the Panther
J.P. and the Water Tower
The Day J.P. Saved the South
The Hands of John Merchant
Crows
Hunters
Acknowledgments
My gratitude goes to the following journals and anthologies where these stories initially appeared:
“Crows,” Louisiana Literature
“The Day J.P. Saved the South,” New Mexico Humanities Review
“The Hands of John Merchant,” New Texas II
“Harvey Watson and the Angel,” Louisiana Literature
“Hunters,” New Texas
“In Search of the Tightrope Walker,” Connecticut Review
“J.P. and the Water Tower,” Southern Review
“Jesus in the Mist,” Louisiana Literature
“The Natural Man,” Crescent Review
“The Queen,” Pembroke Magazine (originally published as “The Boat”)
“Teaching Her about Catfish,” New Growth
“Time of the Panther,” Cross-Timbers Review
“The Well,” Kansas Quarterly
“When Momma Came Home for Christmas and Talmidge Quoted Frost,” Idaho Review
PART I
When Momma Came Home for Christmas and Talmidge Quoted Frost
“Talmidge,” she said across the living room to her husband, who was stretched out on the couch with his camouflage clothes still on from a deer hunt earlier that Saturday morning—it wasn't quite eleven. He was in his socked feet, muddy boots just outside the kitchen door, where she asked that he always leave them. White shag did not clean up easily. He stirred at her voice but did not open his eyes.
“Tal- midge! ”
Then he did open an eye and even turned his head a bit toward her.
She had been sitting a long time staring at the Christmas tree in general and at a great frosty blue ornament in particular, almost four inches across, hand blown and therefore not quite round but close enough that no one could tell without close inspection. It had been her mother's favorite over the years, passed down for four generations, probably the oldest one she had and the dearest to her. It even had its special velvet-lined box that a snow globe had come in.
“Whu-ut?” he finally said.
She slowly rotated her head in his direction until her eyes met the one that he had open.
“Talmidge, how far can you throw a softball?”
He turned his head back in alignment with his body, which looked all the world to her like a great mound of leaves raked up to haul off or burn. The little ridge of hair he still had, with not so much as a trace of color left in it, resembled a horseshoe made out of dirty ice and wedged down on his head, the skin clamped between its prongs red as a blister. A front-end man at the local Ford place, he spent most of his weekends on that couch when he wasn't hunting or fishing, usually with the blaring television on, whether he was watching it or not, and flipping through the channels like it was a game and he was way behind. Such, Darlene had decided, was the general nature of the Southern male. If he had read more in his life than a stack of magazines, mostly having to do with guns and hunting and fishing, he never let it show. She had never seen him with a book in his hand, except for a tattered reloading guide he kept in the shop with all his man stuff.
He had been a good husband and provider for nearly twenty years, and she loved him, but, Lord, he was so rough around the edges, with not a dram of romance in him. Every time she thought she had him housebroken—in all the ways a woman would mean it—he reverted and went back to being the same man she met at the door every weekday evening: greasy and shopmouthed and smelling of beer and cigars. The mechanics had a daily ritual of meeting at a joint after work and drinking beer and smoking and griping about the owner of the dealership. She put up with it, since it kept him happy.
“Did you hear—”
“Two hundred and seventy-two feet, eight-and-a-half inches,” he said. “If the ball ain't wet and it's a still day.”
“That far? ”
He rolled his head toward her again. “Hell, Darlene, get real here. I ain't thowed a softball in ten years, and I got no idear how far I can thowe one. Maybe from here to the road.”
“Which is not all that far,” she said.
“And then only if I had a ball and a reason to thowe it, and I ain't got either.” He belched and rolled his head back and dropped his chin on his chest.
She saw no advantage in pushing, so she let him drift off to sleep. Before his lips had begun to puff and flutter, she had the blue ball off the tree and in its padded box. There was plenty of time, plenty of time.
For eight months now her mother had sat quietly on a bookshelf in the guest bedroom, six or seven pounds of gray bone ash in a plastic bag inside an urn made out of something just slightly cheaper than Tupperware and that inside the ordinary cardboard shipping box she came in, courtesy of the U.S. Post Office, which didn't even have the common decency to ask anybody to sign for it. They left her momma wedged in the mailbox like a carton of Mississippi State cheddar cheese, with the lid flopped open where any dog could have lifted on his hind legs and carried her off and maybe scattered her across the lawns of people she had never known and would have hated if she had. But Darlene didn't complain, just gave thanks that she got to her before the dogs did and brought her in from the weather.
Pitching cremation was not an easy thing with the old woman, since she had it fixed in her head from the time she was a little girl that on Judgment Day all the bones in the cemeteries would rise up and reassemble, knee bone to thigh bone to hip bone and all that, and walk forth to wherever it was they caught the freight that would take them off to Heaven. Darlene had a hard time making her understand that skeletons can't even get up out of the grave, much less walk, without tendons and muscles, which the worms would have taken care of, twenty-year gasket guarantee or not. And what were they going to do once they got off at the Pearly Gate Station and got their marching orders, sit around and clack their boney jaws together all day singing hymns of praise and gazing out on streets of gold, gold there was nothing to spend on, even if you could scoop some up?
She and her mother fought often about what the old woman called Darlene's lack of faith, but Darlene's final argument was always that faith, like anything else, occasionally runs into a wall it cannot penetrate, especially one that's built of scientific fact. She found it much easier to reason with her fifth-grade students, who carried their parents' beliefs on their shoulders like heavy baggage, than to deal with her mother and her notions of what happened to the body after death.
It wasn't until a family friend chose cremation and her momma heard about how sweet it was for the family to sprinkle her ashes in all the places she loved that she began to yield to the notion. It was like God had sent a messenger to help Darlene out. And what a messenger.
Old Miz Melvinson was the chosen one. She went to the same church as Darlene's folks before her father died and her mother withdrew into her shell, and they both belonged to a quilting group called the Stitch and Bitch Club, only her mother hadn't been to a meeting in months. She never attempted a stitch at home, but she fervently practiced her bitching. Miz Melvinson dropped by one Sunday morning to have some ice cream and whiskey with the old woman—what they called bourbon sundaes. They sipped on them and reviewed the rumors of the day until they just drifted off to sleep in the plantroom chairs and drooled and dreamed until well on over into the afternoon.
Darlene usually went over there on Sunday to spend a little time with her mother. It was that, or the old woman would insist on moving in with them, which Talmidge had already put his foot down about. “She moves in, I move out. It's that simple.” That's what he had said.
They were all three seated there, the two old women snoring and Darlene flipping through a Southern Living , when Miz Melvinson rol