Reilly Hawkins leaned back and smiled. ‘Heard that the old boy’s nose never did stop bleeding . . . just kept on running ’til he was all emptied out—’
‘Reilly Hawkins,’ my mother said. ‘That was never a true story and you know it.’
Hawkins looked sheepish. ‘No disrespect, ma’am,’ he said, and bowed his head deferentially. ‘I wouldn’t want to be upsetting you on such a day.’
‘Only thing that ever upsets me is untruths and half-truths and outright lies, Reilly Hawkins. You’re here to see my husband away to the Lord, and I’d be obliged if you’d mind your language, your manners, and keep a truthful tongue in your head, especially in front of the boy.’ She looked over at me. I sat there wide-eyed and wondering, wanting to know all the more gory details regarding my father: a man who could right-hook a brute’s nose and deliver death by exsanguination.
Later I would remember my father’s burial. Remember that day in Augusta Falls, Charlton County - some antebellum outgrowth bordering the Okefenokee River - remember an acreage that was more swamp than earth; the way the land just sucked everything into itself, ever-hungry, never satiated. That swollen land inhaled my father, and I watched him go; I all of eleven years old, he no more than thirty-seven, me and my mother standing with a group of uneducated and sympathetic farmers from the four corners of the world, jacket sleeves to their knuckles, rough flannel trousers that evidenced inches of worn-out sock. Rubes perhaps, more often uncouth than mannered, but robust of heart, hale and generous. My mother held my hand tighter than was comfortable, but I said nothing and I did not withdraw. I was her first and only child, because - if stories were true, and I had no reason to doubt them - I had been a difficult child, resistant to ejection, and the strain of my birth had ruined the internal contraptions that would have enabled a larger family.
‘Just you and me, Joseph,’ she later whispered. The people had gone - Kruger and Reilly Hawkins, others with familiar faces and uncertain names - and we stood side by side looking out from the front door of our house, a house raised by hand from sweat and good timber. ‘Just you and me from now on,’ she said once more, and then we turned inside and closed the door for the night.
Later, lying in my bed, sleep evading me, I thought of the feather. Perhaps, I thought, there were angels who delivered and angels who took away.
Gunther Kruger, a man who would become more evident in my life as the days went on - he told me that Man came from the earth, that if he didn’t return there would be some universal imbalance. Reilly Hawkins said that Gunther was a German, and Germans were incapable of seeing the bigger picture. He said that people were spirits.
‘Spirits?’ I asked him. ‘You mean like ghosts?’
Reilly smiled, shook his head. ‘No, Joseph,’ he whispered. ‘Not like ghosts . . . more like angels.’
‘So my father has become an angel?’
For a moment he said nothing, leaning his head to one side with a strange squint in his eye. ‘Your father, an angel?’ he said, and he smiled awkwardly, like a muscle had tensed in the side of his face and would not so easily release. ‘Maybe one day . . . figure he has some work to do, but yes, maybe one day he’ll be an angel.’