Shaking the Sugar Tree (18 page)

“He’s seen my dick before, Mama.”

“It’s a joke to you, Wiley?”

“I’m not sure it’s anything more than that.”

“Have you no shame?”

“I got over it.”

“You’re impossible!”

“And you’re an uptight prude. But thanks for stopping by.”

“I know you and Billy used to come down here skinny-dipping when you were kids,” she said, her voice hinting there was more to the story.

“So?” I asked, taking the bait.

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe you’re so screwed up now because of that?”

“I’m gay because I went skinny-dipping with Billy when we were ten years old?”

“And you saw things maybe you shouldn’t have seen….”

“I saw Billy’s penis. Boy howdy do! Yeah, that’s the reason why I’m gay. I saw my brother’s little pee pee and the fire was lit.”

“That’s right, make fun of me like you always do.”

“If that’s true, Mama, why isn’t Billy gay too? He saw my pee pee. We shared a bedroom growing up. Doesn’t seem to have affected him much. Jesus, we used to take baths together!”

“Some children can handle it,” she said primly. “Some can’t. For some children, it’s very damaging.”

I didn’t mean to, but I laughed in her face.

“Laugh it up,” she said. “You’ll be laughing all the way to eternal hell. But I’ll be damned if you’re going to take my grandson with you.”

“You’re a trip, Mama. If you could just see how funny you are.”

“I am
very
serious.”

“Oh, I know you are. That’s why it’s funny.”

“I am tired of you mocking our religion!”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“Your whole life is a mockery of our religion, Wiley.”

“I should hope so,” I said seriously. “You should live your life in a way that keeps the pope up at night, that’s what I say.”

“You have not heard the end of this,” she vowed, pointing a finger into my face. “If your father, God rest his soul, was still alive….”

“Well, thank God for small favors.”

A puff of angry air escaped her lips as she turned and marched off.

“I
HOPE
that doesn’t become a scene in one of your books,” Jackson said, referring to my mother’s visit.

We were sitting on the rocks, fishing. I strummed on my guitar while we waited for the fish to bite. Noah stared at the water with a deadly earnestness, as if he could make the fish bite his hook by his stare alone.

“I can think of a more interesting story,” I said. “Horny single father meets hot nurse dude from the wild blue Yankee yonder. They make out on the riverbank. They fall in love, adopt eight children, and become the first couple in the state of Mississippi to become legally gay-married. It could work.”

“All that from skinny-dipping?”

“I’d have to add the nurse dude has kind eyes. Not squinty, untrustworthy eyes. Not provocative, lusty eyes. But kind eyes. Like maybe he’s a kind man. He also has a smooth, hot body, as though he does a lot of sit-ups or something, which writers are too busy to do. He also has a gorgeous cock. Overall he looks like he might have been an athlete in some other life, one of those Greek guys running around nude in the first Olympics.”

“And what would you say about the horny single father?”

“I’d say he was a bit of a mess. Lonely and looking for something he can’t seem to find. Everything he touches turns to shit. He’s sarcastic because he’s so angry all the time. But he doesn’t really know what he’s angry about. He’s almost thirty-three and it scares him because he feels like a failure. All he has is his kid, but his kid has so many health problems, and sometimes he gets a little tired of taking care of him, but he could never admit that so….”

I fell silent, feeling I had said too much.

“Maybe the nurse guy is lonely too,” Jackson suggested. “Maybe he’s been looking for someone to spend his life with, to grow old with, someone to honor and cherish. Maybe he feels he’ll never meet the right man. Maybe he sort of gave up, but then one day he met a beautiful man, a single father… and something just sort of happened and then they were in love, got gay-married, and lived happily ever after.”

“That would make it really interesting,” I admitted.

“What are the chances of a story like that coming true?” he asked.

“You left out the part about eight kids.”

“Did I?”

“That’s the most important part. Don’t you want kids?”

“I never thought about it.”

“I’ve always wanted more kids.”

“Why don’t you adopt?”

“I need to get gay-married first, have a nice house and a career, and something to offer. I need at least one pot to piss in.”

“And if you had that?”

“Well, I’ve always wanted a daughter, so we’d have to start with that. Then I think we’d have to adopt eight or nine kids just to round it off a bit. One of them would probably turn out to be gay so we’d pick that one as our favorite and we’d send him or her to college. As soon as they become teenagers, we’d send them off to boarding school because I am not going to put up with the sort of crap that I put my mother through when I was a teenager. Then we’d decide which ones to keep. I don’t know. Maybe we’d keep them all if they were nice. Or maybe we could sell a couple on eBay and recoup some of our investment.”

“Sound like you’ve got this all planned out.”

“That’s the problem with me. The things that I want are never going to happen. I always feel like I was born at the wrong time, in the wrong body. I’d make a great mom, you know. I’d love to have a mess of kids, spend my day wiping noses and cleaning up baby puke while my husband went off to work and brought home the bacon. I would have had a great time in the sixties with all that free love—I would have been a huge hippie. I would have walked around San Francisco with a flower in my ass and my dick hanging out and been quite happy living in a commune. When I was little I used to daydream about being an Indian boy, riding my pony, shooting a bow, living free under the sun. I always feel like I was meant to be somewhere else, doing something else, being something else.”

“What’s wrong with right here and now?”

“If other people would let me get on with it, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Why do you let it bother you?”

“Family. Can’t kill them with kindness. Can’t use a hammer, if only because it’s just so goddamn messy. It’s a real bitch to clean up, and I should know. So you’re just kind of stuck with them. Anyway, it reminds me of the difference between a Northern fairy tale and a Southern fairy tale.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“In a Northern fairy tale, you start off by saying: ‘Once upon a time’ and all that. In the South, we start off by saying: ‘Y’all ain’t going to believe this shit!’”

He laughed.

“Hey,” he said suddenly.

His pole was wiggling.

“You got a bite,” I said.

“Good deal!”

W
E
HEADED
back Sunday morning on the four-wheelers, making an unnecessary detour through the woods since Jackson had decided he liked riding and wanted more wheel time.

By ten we were scrubbed and dressed and ready to go to the ten-thirty mass at St. Francis in New Albany with Mama. Jackson had never been to mass, so he didn’t know what to expect. Papaw didn’t go to mass anymore, having sworn off what he referred to as the “goddamn Christless Catholics.”

While I had many fond memories of St. Francis, it was the scene of much tortured hand-wringing and endless moral conundrums.

We found an empty pew. Mama sat down on one side, Jackson on the other.

Noah and I knelt on the kneeler for a bit, saying some prayers, being pious. I wasn’t really saying prayers, just going through the motions and hoping that whatever God there was up there was a kind God, a merciful God, not the horrible old bugger who used to scare the shit out of me and now only bored me.

We got looks. Lots of looks.

My mom was happy to get looks at Noah, and chatted quietly as friends and acquaintances came over to make a fuss about him. She wasn’t so happy about the looks she got because of me, with my long hair, my bad attitude, my irreverent ways, and the cute man sitting next to me who was so clearly out of place.

It was common news that I was a fag, which was all the parishioners needed to know. Their imagination and indignation did the rest. The eyes that looked at me seemed to suggest the wish that I could somehow contain myself and stop having sex and stop being a gay boy and stop embarrassing my poor mother and family. Perhaps I was reading more into it than what was there. Perhaps not. There was no denying the way it felt.

The younger members of St. Francis were a somewhat different breed, though, and some of them smiled at me. Some smiles were of amusement, or encouragement, or simple friendship. Some were smiles of curiosity.

I was happy to see a fuss made over Noah. We attended often enough that most of the regulars knew him, or were aware of him, or had heard of him. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who he is, what with the stunted growth and extra pinkie finger and his occasional honk or hoot. He also had a darkness about his eyes that was unmistakable, like he was not getting enough vitamins or enough sleep or something. When he opened his mouth and displayed those gapped teeth, the doubles along the bottom jaw, all questions were answered.

“Mrs. Oppy told me her daughter calls Noah ‘The Boy Who Lived,’” Mama said, whispering to me and frowning with disapproval.

“That’s a reference to Harry Potter,” I pointed out.

“Still,” she said.

Before mass, the new priest, Father Ginderbach, came down the aisle and greeted Noah specifically. I hadn’t heard this priest yet. Mama liked him, which could only mean I would hate him. But he surprised me by turning to Noah and signing, perfectly:

Welcome, N-o-a-h. We are happy you came.

“Hah!” Noah grunted with happiness. He turned to see if I had seen this. I smiled an encouragement.

Thank you
, he signed back.
I love Jesus!
he added, using the special sign for “Jesus.”

And he loves you,
the priest replied.

You know sign language?

Yes. My sister is deaf.

I don’t have a sister.

You have many brothers and sisters in the church, N-o-a-h. God bless you!

“Did you know he could sign?” I asked.

“I had no idea,” Mama said.

“He said his sister is deaf.”

“He’s from Memphis, I think. They just sent him down here a few months ago. I didn’t know he had a sister.”

“He seems nice,” I admitted.

“Coming from you, that’s high praise.”

“After Father George, Saddam Hussein would seem nice.”

“Be nice, Wiley. For once. Please!”

“He was a prick,” I whispered.

“Don’t curse in church. Must you provoke me?”

“It’s so easy. Maybe you should lighten up a bit.”

She clamped her lips shut, ending the conversation.

Father Ginderbach did something else that was rather unexpected. When it came time for his sermon, he departed from the Gospel text for that day and offered his thoughts on Jesus’s admonition:
Let the little children come unto me.

He singled out Noah as being the childlike creature that Christ wants us all to be. He even signed during his sermon to explain special things directly to Noah that were not in his sermon.

It was rather extraordinary and I was justifiably flabbergasted. After years of being treated like a shameful pariah by Father George, Father Ginderbach had actually gone out of his way to welcome Noah to his church and to include him in his sermon, treating him as if he were indeed a beloved child of God, and just as important as all the other children in the pews that day.

I couldn’t hardly believe it.

Noah smiled proudly. He never had a problem being the center of attention.

“Jesus made it clear that his kingdom is made of ‘such as these,’ the little ones, and that they shall see the face of God. We must never do anything to hinder the ‘such as these,’ not when they are so important to the kingdom,” the priest said.

After the sermon, we got more looks, but these were different. These were looks of curiosity, even acceptance, even happiness that we were there. Even Mama sat up a little straighter.

For the first time in a long, long time I felt a connection with the church of my childhood. I actually felt, for a while at least, that Noah and I might have a place in that church.

I followed him in the line for Communion.

Ginderbach gave me a curious look when he handed me the host. Since I spend so much time around deaf people, I am much more tuned-in than most to the slightest look, or glance, or suggestion of expression. As no doubt was he. His eyes clearly said he knew exactly who I was—and that I was all right in his book. It reminded me of the look I sometimes got from gay priests who knew exactly what I’d been through, and who knew there was a way through it that didn’t involve losing yourself or your faith in a genuinely loving God.

The meet and greet outside after mass saw a large number of people actually bothering to stop and greet Noah like he was a human being.

“What’s wrong with these people?” I whispered to Mama.

“Maybe you should go to church more often,” she suggested.

B
ILL
, S
HELLY
,
and the kids came to Mama’s house for dinner, which Yankees like Jackson call lunch. Josh and Eli took Noah in hand and played Frisbee. Shelly and her daughter Mary, whose bosom was expanding rather rapidly, helped Mama put the finishing touches on the food.

Bill stood on the porch, dipping and spitting and drinking from the cooler in the bed of his truck while trying to make conversation as Papaw watched, smiling his secret smile.

“So you work at the hospital?” Bill said.

“I’m a pediatric nurse,” Jackson said.