High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (4 page)

“I can’t.”

A wave of applause echoes from beyond the curtains.

Pullsey lightly claps. “Brother Kizowski is a fine man, and a very good speaker. Big shoes, buster,” he says.

“What?”

“To fill. Big shoes to fill. You’re on in how many minutes?”

Josiah bites at a fingernail.

“Okay, okay, c’mere.” Pullsey sits on a stool and waves the boy over like, Right here, kiddo, relax.

“What?”

“You’re hungry, right?” He reaches under the stool and grabs hold of a gray metal lunchbox.

“What’s that?”

“Lunch,” Pullsey says, and hands him one of three sandwiches carefully wrapped in foil.

“My mother wraps them like this,” Josiah says, biting into ham and yellow cheese. “Hey, what happened to your hands?”

“Chicken pox,” Pullsey says. Rubs them together, cracking a knuckle. He puts the left hand in a pocket, the right behind his neck.

“I never noticed. Why’d you get chicken pox?”

“I was a kid. And kids get chicken pox.”

Josiah wipes his mouth with the cuff of his jacket. “I didn’t.”

“Not yet.”

Josiah chews. “Maybe God punished you with chicken pox.”

Kizowski is booming, but it’s muted some by the curtains. Pullsey and Josiah are surrounded by the lush cloth, a fiery red-orange. Ropes and sashes dangle from the backstage spotlights.

“Seventy years we live, brothers and sisters,” Kizowski says. “In the case of special power, eighty. And the scriptures tell us it is
this
generation—not
that
generation, or
any other
generation, understand—but
this
generation will by no means pass away until the Day of the Coming of the Lord.”

Clapping, clapping, and then it’s quieter.

“Amen,” says Brother Pullsey, offering a single quiet slap at his chest. He looks back at Josiah, and says, “Okay, that’s enough.” He brushes the boy off the stool.

“You hit me,” Josiah says, not really believing it even as he says it.

“I didn’t hit you. I just need my seat. And I’m sure you know what it is to be hit. Or maybe you don’t, and you should.” He looks to the stage. “Shh, he’s almost done.”

Pullsey walks back toward the curtains. Kizowski points two fingers at the crowd, then heavenward, raised above his head like goalposts.

“Are you an electrician? My uncle’s an electrician,” Josiah says from behind. “But I don’t think he can do this kind of stuff. You must be a genius.”

Pullsey turns, and boy is this guy grinning. “I know you since you’re this big.” He thumbs the top of his kneecap. “They’ve been spoon-feeding you forever.” He turns away, and Josiah hears him mumble something about his mother’s breasts—that she still feeds Josiah her breasts?

Josiah says, “I heard you cuss. What did you say?”

“I did not cuss,” Pullsey says, and faces Josiah squarely. “‘Your breasts are like two young ones, like the twins of a female gazelle.’ Read your Song of Solomon. The Bible’s full of boobs. And,” he leans forward, “I didn’t hit you.”

Josiah pulls back, not in fear, but in surprise. He walks back to the stool and he claims it. “So how come you’re not an elder yet? Most of the old men are elders.” He takes a bite of the sandwich and pushes at the temporary wall.

Pullsey almost takes the bait, but says a brief prayer instead. For patience. And a small prayer for Josiah, the twelve-year-old whiz kid from Richmond Hill who they say knows the Bible by heart. Exaggeration. “We all have our parts to play,” he says. “And today, mine is making sure every word gets heard. You about ready?” He motions Josiah to please get off the stool, but the kid just doesn’t give.

“Off the stool,” Pullsey barks. “Now.”

The boy drops his head like a corrected pup, and he moves.

“It’s almost time,” Pullsey says. “I’ll walk you out there, buddy, and we’ll get that mic just right.”

Josiah looks up, defeated, but also half-smiling. Not so bad a feeling to be told what to do. He puts his hand in his right jacket pocket.

“What have you got?” Pullsey asks, not really interested.

Josiah turns away and takes out a
Star Wars
figure from inside his jacket. He carries one everywhere he goes. If his father knew, he’d be in big trouble. He likes how, with an action figure in his hand, the world around him becomes another world, a bigger world. Stones become mountains. Holes become bottomless pits. He makes like the figure is climbing his tie, swinging from a rope, and then he puts it back in his jacket.

“You’re gonna be fine,” Pullsey says. He squeezes the boy’s shoulder, massages his bones. “Break a leg.” He rubs at the boy’s slender blades, and hears Kizowski declare from the stage: “Yes, brothers and sisters, please join me in welcoming our next and very special speaker.”

“That’s your cue,” Pullsey says. And Josiah makes like he’s ready, but Pullsey does not let go.

“Brothers and sisters, our young and gifted Brother Josiah Laudermilk.”

The applause is especially long, as if the crowd is trying to coax the boy out from backstage where Pullsey holds on to his lamb-white neck. And Josiah can hear his father clapping. It’s gotta be him, a deliberate, hard and hollow cupping of the palms. Loud, loud, loud. Clap, clap, clap. Not fifty feet from where he stands. This gives him strength. The boy looks up at the sound man, who now looks down at the boy. He’s just a boy. Their eyes meet.

If you stay backstage, you’ll stay a boy forever.

He steps out onto the stage.

“Be careful out there, big man. Knock ’em dead.”

*   *   *

Carlo Senior tells them to shush it.

Issy whispers, “You hear that? You hear they said Josiah?”

Always angry before he got in the Lord, but now with church on the weekends and the family Bible study, Carlo Senior acts like a real man, and sometimes he’s even so kind, never so pissed anymore. They call him Brother Famosa. Got church privileges, too. Brother Famosa’s a greeter on Sundays, and maybe one day he’ll be a servant brother like the other men who help out the church with their business. The microphone handling, the money boxes. Oh, and Sister Hilda Famosa just balloons when she sees him opening the door, and welcoming the congregation every Sunday morning. She wishes Carlo Junior would follow his lead, but his head is only in one place, all the chicas bonitas. And Havi—she’s worried about Havi, how he looks up to his big brother. Issy does, too. She hands the boys thin spiral notebooks and five-color push pens, tells to them to write down a check mark whenever they hear the name Jesus.

Oh my God, here he goes.

Carlo Senior reaches across the empty seat beside him, and presses his finger to Havi’s mouth like “Shhhhh.” Smacks him on the back of the head. Issy inches forward and away, because he knows Havi’s father will hit him, too. “You two be quiet,” he says. “People are looking.”

“Thas Josiah, Papi,” says Havi.

“Like I don’t know? Who you think watch the door when the elders had a meeting, stupid?” Carlo looks at his son like he’s daring the boy to get this wrong. He lifts his chin like he’s looking down his nose. “They even ask me to shake his hand. Because they know he needs to act like a man. You should be like Josiah, inmaduros.”

Carlo leans straight as his wife rubs his back, Okay, okay, thas enough.

“Thas Josiah!” Issy whispers to Havi.

“I know, stupid. Thas why my father hit me.”

Sister Hilda Famosa says, “Shhh.”

So Issy pushes the red tab on his push pen, opens his spiral, and writes: “We should make him see us”

Havi takes the pen and writes: “Josiah’s so weird”

Issy writes: “We should make him see us”

Issy waves.

He looks at Sister Famosa, and waves at Josiah again. She puts out her hand, You gimme that. She gives Issy a look that does more than any kind of slapping from her husband.

*   *   *

Gill watches his son step out from behind the curtains and slowly walk across the stage toward the podium. Kizowski waits with an open hand. Gill crosses his fingers, and then hides this small superstitious gesture beneath his legs. Earlier this morning, he told Josiah his best chance for success is to fast get the audience’s attention, maybe start with a joke. Maybe start with a knock-knock joke. Up there you’re a salesman! And so you have to sell yourself to the crowd. Gill should know, he’s sold everything from aluminum siding to Simoniz. Advertise, Advertise the King and His Kingdom, born a Jehovah’s Witness, he preached from door to door until the day he finally up and quit. They sang and they recited: “Stay Alive till ’75.” But they were wrong. So he took his wife and boy and he joined with the Brothers in the Lord. Look how lovingly Kizowski takes Josiah’s hand, how he bends and whispers in the boy’s ear. Five years now with this new family.

Gill thinks of family Bible studies at the dining room table, with warm bowls of popcorn on special nights when Mom’s in a shiny good mood, Who wants butter on their popcorn? I’ll melt it on the stove. Bible-study magazines spread on the table like treasure maps. My father, too, Gill has told them, and his father before him, how long we have waited! Four of the Laudermilk men, generations awaiting His return, and all in the blink of our Heavenly Father’s eye. Who could’ve hoped for a son like this? Just look at him! So much more than his only child, as if Gill is ever lifting his son skyward, toward a burning sun going dark on the coming Great Day. The boy holds a promise of something extraordinary, a genuine love for the Lord, somehow an echo of authentic worship. Born with a belly full of Holy Spirit language, Josiah is their ticket home, a taste of the early time before the world forgot about the Good Book. Look at him! Up there! Onstage! So proud! My boy, clearing his throat! Gill’s never been one for stages, that kind of pressure, never given sermons outside his home. But this? His boy onstage in front of thousands and delivering God’s Good News? It’s sort of like he’s up there with him. Beside his son. The sermons
are
partly his.… Sometimes he forgets how young the boy is—“You can’t spell ‘theocracy’? Here, let me show you”—and then sometimes, oh boy, how his young son gets too big for his britches—his own father used to say it about Gill …—But this look, why this look? Why is Josiah just standing there, and not yet saying a word? Gill looks at Ida, who looks straight ahead and takes his hand (he uncrosses his fingers). She squeezes. But the Laudermilk calling is a prophetic one. No matter how close to fulfillment. Their calling is the searching itself. Dig out meaning from the pages.

Dig, boy, dig! And speak!

*   *   *

There is an air of apprehension in the hall, a buzz and mumble of concern as the audience sits and waits. But all the boy can do is look out at the smear of faces.

He’s nervous and feels alone. He can no longer find his mother’s face in the crowd.

So he offers up a small and unexpected prayer, a strange silent prayer, asking the Lord for his help and good guidance. He cups his hands together as if he were holding a scoop of river water, and blows lightly into his palms; this is his prayer. He tosses this prayer out into the wide space in front of him, beyond the microphone, off the stage, and into the sea of people. It’s a gesture charged with an almost innocent significance, a naive grace. The audience is taken with this slow movement, reading in it all kinds of story. Some see Noah toss a dove above the tops of flood-buried trees, and others catch sight of John the Baptist, hands upturned, offering a life-giving dunk. Josiah sees only his own small hands, and then unexpectedly, and maybe not accidentally at all (because maybe this is, in fact, how prayers are answered), his mother’s face in the void between his separating fingers.

Josiah turns slowly to his left, and then slowly to his right, like Kizowski does, both good moves to buy time. Then he turns back to his mother.

The boy says into the microphone: “Knock, knock.”

Is this a joke? Is Josiah telling a joke? Issy can’t look away. Havi is not paying attention, but something is going to happen, Issy knows it.

Josiah looks slowly from side to side, scanning the audience. And now Josiah is staring. Issy tries to see who he’s looking at because the boy has stopped, is looking out straight ahead. At his family? Or maybe he’s just scared shitless—if Carlo Senior caught Issy just
thinking
a word like “shitless,” he’d definitely get smacked on the back of his head. Josiah’s scared, and Issy sees it, but something is now on the verge. Issy senses it, even though he doesn’t have the words, something like great years of light are coming from the boy onstage. Not real rays but something like a vision of what great light waits for Josiah. This is what a good future looks like, a mother, a father, and probably college, girlfriends and money and blessings from God because not everyone can be special. He knows Havi is jealous, always jealous of anyone who has more than him. But Issy is happy to not be jealous. So, again, he waves to his friend at church.

Hey, Josiah, look over here.

And the two boys have their moment. It’s quick and definitive, like two cars passing, a flash of recognition. Or maybe like that ribbon flash of a setting sun that erases every last bit of foreground, like when your eyes adjust and the sun becomes a backlight, and the world is made knowable, and real—
this
is how Josiah comes to see his friend Issy, and how he comes to see the great crowd. Where’s Issy’s girlfriend in the yellow dress? His mother? There she is, and she beams like a momentary flash, a beacon. No more a color mass of pinks, and browns, yellows, and reds, and every fleshy color there is. No more a haze of many faces. This is how he sees Issy—and Issy’s waving?

For a few stretched seconds Josiah is filled with a rushing desire to run, to run with Issy and all the other boys, off to who knows where. He rubs the toy figure in his pocket, and suddenly he is no longer hungry, like he’ll never be hungry again. His mind settles. It slows. And he sees out there, all the faces, each one, every face, everyone a guest in His great house. He fills up inside with heat and with light. Puts a hand to his ear, miming to the crowd, and he actually says: “I can’t hear you. I said, Knock, knock.”