"I just need-- just need to have you in here for a minute."
"Really, Mark, that's not your style, is it? Amy needs to have a lot of attention right after school, it's the way she is. I wish you wouldn't stay home from work with nothing to do, Mark, you become quite impossible around the house." She smiled to show that she was only half serious and left again to go back to Amy.
For a moment Mark felt a terrible stab of jealousy that Maryjo was far more sensitive to Amy's needs than to his.
But that jealousy passed quickly, like the memory of the pain of Maryjo's fingers pressing into his back, and with a tremendous feeling of relief Mark didn't care about anything at all, and he turned around to the coffin, which fascinated him, and he opened the lid again and looked inside. It was as if the poor man had no face at all, Mark realized. As if death stole faces from people and made them anonymous even to themselves.
He ran his fingers back and forth across the satin and it felt cool and inviting. The rest of the room, the rest of the world receded into deep background. Only Mark and the coffin and the corpse remained and Mark felt very tired and very hot, as if life itself were a terrible friction making heat within him, and he took off his robe and pajamas and awkwardly climbed on a chair and stepped over the edge into the coffin and knelt and then lay down. There was no other corpse to share the slight space with him; nothing between his body, and the cold satin, and as he lay on it it didn't get any warmer because at last the friction was slowing, was cooling, and he reached up and pulled down the lid and the world was dark and silent and there was no odor and no taste and no feel but the cold of the sheets.
"Why is the lid closed?" asked little Amy, holding her mother's hand.
"Because it's not the body we must remember," Marylo said softly, with careful control, "but the way Daddy always was. We must remember him happy and laughing and loving us."
Amy looked puzzled. "But I remember he spanked me."
Maryjo nodded, smiling, something she had not done recently. "It's all right to remember that, too," Maryjo said, and then she took her daughter from the coffin back into the living room, where Amy, not realizing yet the terrible loss she had sustained, laughed and climbed on Grandpa.
David, his face serious and tear-stained because he did understand, came and put his hand in his mother's hand and held tightly to her. "We'll be fine," he said.
"Yes," Maryjo answered. "I think so."
And her mother whispered in her ear, "I don't know how you can stand it so bravely, my dear."
Tears came to Maryjo's eyes. "I'm not brave at all," she whispered back. "But the children. They depend on me so much. I can't let go when they're leaning on me."
"How terrible it would be, " her mother said, nodding wisely, "if you had no children."
Inside the coffin, his last need fulfilled, Mark Tapworth heard it all, but could not hold it in his mind, for in his mind there was space or time for only one thought: consent. Everlasting consent to his life, to his death, to the world, and to the everlasting absence of the world. For now there were children.
SAVING GRACE
And he looked into her eyes, and lo! when her gaze fell upon him he did verity turn to stone, for her visage was wondrous ugly. Praise the Lord.
Mother came home depressed as hell with a bag full of groceries and a headache fit to turn her hair turn to snakes. Billy, he knew when Mommy was like that, he could tell as soon as she grumped through the living room. But if she was full of hellfire, he had the light of heaven, and so he said, "Don't be sad, Mother, Jesus loves you."
Mother put the margarine into the fridge and wiped the graham cracker crumbs off the table and dumped them in the sink even though the disposal hadn't worked for years. "Billy," she said quietly, "you been saved again?"
"I only was just going to look inside."
"Ought to sue those bastards. Burn down their tent or something. Why can't they do their show from a studio like everybody else?"
"I felt my sins just weighing me down and then he reached out and Jesus come into my heart and I had to be baptized."
At the word baptized, Mommy slammed the kitchen counter. The mixing bowl bounced. "Not again, you damn near got pneumonia the last time!"
"This time I dried my hair."
"It isn't sanitary!"
"I was the first one in. Everybody was crying."
"Well, you just listen! I tell you not to go there, and I mean it! You look at me when I'm talking to you, young man."
Her irresistible fingers lifted up his chip. Billy felt like he was living in a Bible story. He could almost hear Bucky Fay himself telling the tale: And he looked into her eyes, and lo! when her gaze fell upon him he did verily turn to stone, and he could not move though he sorely feared that he might wet his pants, for her visage was wondrous ugly. Praise the Lord.
"Now you promise me you won't go into that tent anymore, ever, because you got no resistance at all, you just come straight home, you hear me?"
He could not move until at last she despaired and looked away, and then he found his voice and said, "What else am I supposed to do after school?"
Today was different from all the other times they had this argument: this time his mother leaned on the counter and sobbed into the waffle mix. Billy came and put his arm around her and leaned his head on her hip. She turned and held him close and said, "If that son-of-a-bitch hadn't left me you might've had some brothers and sisters to come home to." They made waffles together, and while Billy pried pieces of overcooked waffle out of the waffle iron with a bent table knife, he vowed that he would not cause his mother such distress again. The revival tent could flap its wings and lift up its microwave dish to take part in the largess of heaven, but Billy would look the other way for his mother's sake, for she had suffered enough.
Yet he couldn't keep his thoughts away from the tent, because when they were telling what was coming up soon they had said that Bucky Fay was coming. Bucky Fay, the healer of channel 49, who had been known to exorcise that demon cancer and cast out kidney stones in the name of the Lord; Bucky Fay, who looked to Billy like the picture Mommy kept hidden in the back of her top drawer, the picture of his father, the son-of-a-bitch. Billy wanted to see the man with the healing hands, see him in the flesh.
"Mommy," he said. On TV the skinny people were praising Diet Pepsi.
"Mm?" Mommy didn't look up.
"I wish my foot was all twisted up so I couldn't walk."
Now she looked up. "My Lord, what for!"
"So Jesus could turn it around."
"Billy, that's disgusting."
"When the miracle goes through you, Mommy, it knocks you on the head and then you fall down and get all better. A little girl with no arm got a new arm from God. They said so."
"Child, they've turned you superstitious."
"I wish I had a club foot, so Jesus would do a miracle on me."
God moves in mysterious ways, but this time he was pretty direct. Of all the half-assed wishes that got made and prayers that got said, Billy's got answered. Billy's mother was brooding about how the boy was going off the deep end. She decided she had to get him out doing things that normal kids do. The movie playing at the local family-oriented moviehouse was the latest go-round of Pollyanna. They went and watched and Billy learned a lesson. Billy saw how good this little girl was, and how preachers liked her, and first thing you know he was up on the roof, figuring out how to fall off just right so you smash your legs but don't break your back.