The Deacon took a long slow drink from his own glass and said, “Ahhh,” and licked his lips. He folded his hands and leaned into the table. “Jessie.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Clarence Jessup Tell,” Deacon Broscious said, turning those words into song.
“In the flesh, sir.”
The Deacon’s smile returned, brighter than ever. “Jessie, let me ask you something. What’s the most memorable moment of your life?”
“Sir?”
The Deacon raised his eyebrows. “You ain’t got one?”
“I’m not sure I understand, sir.”
“The most memorable moment of your life,” the Deacon repeated.
Luther felt sweat bathe his thighs.
“Everyone’s got one,” the Deacon said. “Could be a happy experience, could be sad. Could be a night with a girl. Am I right? Am I right?” He laughed, his face folding all over his nose with the effort. “Could be a night with a boy. You like boys, Jessie? In my profession, we don’t cast aspersions on what I like to call specified taste.”
“No, sir.”
“No sir what?”
“No, sir, I don’t like boys,” Jessie said. “No, sir.”
The Deacon showed them his palms in apology. “A girl, then, yeah? Young, though, am I right? You never forget ’em when you were young and they were, too. Nice piece of chocolate with a ass you could pound all night and it still don’t lose its shape?”
“No, sir.”
“No sir you don’t like a fine young woman’s ass?”
“No, sir, that’s not my memorable moment.” Jessie coughed and took another slug of whiskey.
“Then what is, boy? Shit.”
Jessie looked away from the table, and Luther could feel him composing himself. “My most memorable moment, sir?”
The Deacon clapped the table. “Most memorable,” he thundered and then winked at Luther, as if, whatever this con was, Luther was somehow in on it with him.
Jessie lifted his mask and took another swig. “Night my pops died, sir.”
The Deacon’s face strained with the weight of compassion. He dabbed his face with a napkin. He sucked air through pursed lips and his eyes grew large. “I am so sorry, Jessie. How did the good man pass?”
Jessie looked at the table, then back into the Deacon’s face. “Some white boys in Missouri, sir, where I was reared?”
“Yes, son.”
“They come and said he’d snuck onto their farm and killed their mule. Said he’d meant to cut it up for food but they’d caught him at it and run him off. These boys, sir? They showed up at our house next day and dragged my pops out the house and beat him something fierce, all in front of my mama and me and my two sisters.” Jessie drained the rest of his glass and then sucked back a great wet hunk of air. “Aw, shit.”
“They lynch your pops?”
“No, sir. They done left him there and he died in the house two days later from a busted-up skull. I was ten year old.”
Jessie lowered his head.
The Deacon Broscious reached across the table and patted his hand. “Sweet Jesus,” the Deacon whispered. “Sweet sweet sweet sweet Jesus.” He took the bottle and refilled Jessie’s glass and gave Luther a sad smile.
“In my experience,” the Deacon Broscious said, “the most memorable thing in a man’s life is rarely pleasant. Pleasure doesn’t teach us anything but that pleasure is pleasurable. And what sort of lesson is that? Monkey jacking his own penis know that. Nah, nah,” he said. “The nature of learning, my brothers? Is pain. Ya’ll think on this — we hardly ever know how happy we are as children, for example, until our childhood is taken from us. We usually can’t recognize true love until it’s passed us by. And then, then we say, My that was the thing. That was the truth, ya’ll. But in the moment?” He shrugged his enormous shoulders and patted his forehead with his handkerchief. “What molds us,” he said, “is what maims us. A high price, I agree. But” — he spread his arms and gave them his most glorious smile — “what we learn from that is priceless.”
Luther never saw Dandy and Smoke move, but when he turned at the sound of Jessie’s grunt, they’d already clamped his wrists to the table and Smoke had Jessie’s head held fast in his hands.
Luther said, “Hey, ya’ll wait a—”
The Deacon’s slap connected with Luther’s cheekbone and busted up through his teeth and his nose and eyes like shards of broken pipe. The Deacon’s hand didn’t leave his head, either. He clenched Luther’s hair and held his head in place as Dandy produced a knife and sliced it along Jessie’s jawbone from his chin up to the base of his ear.
Jessie screamed long after the knife had left his flesh. The blood climbed out of the wound like it had been waiting its whole life to do so, and Jessie howled through his mask and Dandy and Smoke held his head in place as the blood poured onto the table and Deacon Broscious yanked on Luther’s hair and said, “You close your eyes, Country, I’ll take them home with me.”
Luther blinked from the sweat, but he didn’t shut his eyes, and he saw the blood flow over the lip of the wound and off Jessie’s flesh and spill all over the table, and he could tell by a fleeting glimpse of Jessie’s eyes that his friend had exited the place where he was worried about the wound to his jaw and had realized these could be the first moments of a long, last day on earth.
“Give that pussy a towel,” the Deacon said and pushed Luther’s head away.
Dandy dropped a towel on the table in front of Jessie, and then he and Smoke stepped back. Jessie grabbed the towel and pressed it to his chin and sucked through his teeth and wept softly and rocked in his chair, his mask gone red up the left side, and that went on for some time, no one saying anything and the Deacon looking bored, and when the towel was redder than the Deacon’s hat, Smoke handed Jessie another one to replace it and tossed the bloody one behind him to the floor.
“Your thieving old man getting killed?” the Deacon said. “Nigger, that’s now the second most memorable moment of your life.”
Jessie clenched his eyes shut and pressed the towel so hard against his jaw Luther could see his fingers turn white.
“Can I get an ‘amen’ on that, brother?”
Jessie opened his eyes and stared.
The Deacon repeated his question.
“Amen,” Jessie whispered.
“Amen,” the Deacon said and clapped his hands. “Way I figure it, you been skimming ten dollars a week from me for two years now. What that add up to, Smoke?”
“One thousand forty dollar, Deacon, sir.”
“A thousand forty.” The Deacon turned his gaze on Luther. “And you, Country, you either in on it or known about it and didn’t tell me, which make it your debt, too.”
Luther didn’t know what else to do so he nodded.
“You don’t need to nod like you confirming something. You ain’t confirming shit to me. I say something is, and it very much is.” He took a sip of whiskey. “Now, Jessie Tell, can you pay me my money or it all done got shot up your arm?”
Jessie hissed, “I can get it, sir, I can get it.”
“Get what?”
“Your thousand forty dollars, sir.”
The Deacon widened his eyes at Smoke and Dandy and all three of them chuckled at the same time and stopped chuckling just as fast.
“You don’t understand, dope ho’, do you? The only reason you alive is because, in my beneficence, I kindly decided to call what you took a loan. I loaned you the thousand forty. You didn’t steal it. If I was to have decided you stole it, that knife be in your throat right now and your dick be in your mouth. So say it.”