My mother told me once that Jesus had died from tetanus after they nailed his hands and feet to the cross. For the first hour he screamed in agony, in the second hour he yelled, in the third he begged, in the fourth he whined, in the fifth he muttered. The son who spoke with the tongues of men and of angels a clanging cymbal resounding in the wind. In the sixth hour, silently, he passed. After he was taken down from the cross, and laid in the cave, on the third day he emerged with a horrible infection rife in his still-pumping bloodstream. He soon died horribly, not just from exhaustion, heat, thirst, hunger, whipping and beating, and so on, but also with the holes in his hands and feet stinging to high heaven, and his jaw locking in spasms. The Father, in his love, made His only son a human, in a world unsurvivable by His own design.
When I got a nail through my hand, in the fleshy bit between thumb and forefinger, I dragged myself, howling, to Mary’s house. I was down the ass end of Flat, a desolate spat of short grass where nothing was ever born and nothing ever grew, and we were putting up the foundation for a chapel. She seemed deaf to my cursing and hard to my kicking as she took from her second drawer a short and curved blade, used for deveining gamey animals, and nicked two incisions into the web of my skin and let the nail, along with the surrounding punctured flesh, drop into her left hand waiting below. Love suffers long and is kind, she said, patting lightly my upturned palm, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. She stood up slowly, the chair creaking, scraping across the bare wood, and turned towards the sink. She wrapped the nail and chunk of skin in a handkerchief pulled from her breast pocket, and poured me half a glass of water. Blood was trickling from my hand, shivering, and pooling on the unvarnished wood. The dog by my feet barked, and licked the underside of the table
Mary had a birth certificate, rolled up and bound in ribbon, in the hollow of her bedside table. Half a decade ago someone from the government, or a university, or somewhere, came through town and asked to buy it. He came to her house every morning for five days in a row, and then, giving up, left town without a word. He wanted it for the same reason she wouldn’t give it away: it is, to this day, the only birth certificate ever printed and stamped in Flat. The post office had been nothing but a crumbling facade and a coyote den for twenty years by the time I fell into Flat. There was one clerk who shuffled papers on top of the counter and drank from his hip flask below it between seven-ten and nine-forty am, Tuesday through Thursday. In his eighteen years of hard and noble service he stamped four marriage certificates, three divorce certificates, eight death certificates, and one birth certificate. Mary possesses four of these sixteen documents, two bearing her name, two her ex-husband’s, and two her daughter’s. The latter was the final certificate to be witnessed, signed, and marked with the star, olive, and live oak before the clerk keeled over, two months later, at ten-forty five am on a Thursday. Nobody knew how to place an order for another pat of red ink after the remaining square had dried up in the crack of summer sun that came through a hole in the roof and beamed onto the right side of the counter, harsh enough to leave it hard and useless, and scorch a strip of the cadaver’s head to blisters. Whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.
The people of Flat thereafter took to marking the number of deaths in fat, brittle notches along the front step of the old post office. This was a tautological endeavour, as anyone not blind, drunk, or a common combination of the two, could turn left, squint, and count the number of sorry wooden crosses stumped out on the outskirts of town to the East. The town had for sometime considered methods of categorisation, but it soon cleared that there was no need to differentiate funereal notches from nuptial or natal indicators, as only the former ever occurred in Flat. I begot the sole exception with my arrival, in the passenger seat of a Ford Runabout. It was a hot and early morning when we came in and it was a hot and early evening when my former companion left. Until lunch each day he would offload half-broken tools and half-rotten produce in exchange for all the little town had. Then, in an act of sublime charity, he would give it all back to the bughouse through the afternoon and evening and night, drinking himself to incontinence. This continued for the better part of the week before I heard the greasy, pained sounds of the Runabout starting up, dirt skittering wildly from beneath its wheels. It struck me bluntly in the stomach that I was being left behind. He had been sick of me for a long time, but I had been of him for longer. He left going South, and I spent the rest of the day looking for someone who’d accept a beat and shoddy band of silver in exchange for a meal and a place to sleep. I found her and her home after the sun had set and the cold of the desert had risen from under the dirt. I found that night that, where in other towns there were husbands with wives, hospitals with nurses, diners with line cooks, in Flat there was Mary.
She let me stay, and I stayed. I made myself useful, though the first few months I was only treated to do mending, washing, and running the well. In the rafters of the bughouse was a young family of Mearns quail, I would take them cuts of cornbread on Sundays. On Wednesday, September third, a man named Paul was minding the cotton gin, feeding its hungry maw rough and fluffy bundles, and his hand was crushed to bits and pieces. The racking, indomitable pains of arthritis had blunted his nervous relay, and there was a second and a half delay in the response system between hand, spine, and brain, a second and a half too long to notice the nicking and crunching of the gears. Instead of a couple fingers gone the appendage was ruined down to the wrist, and the batch of cotton was ruined down to the last threads. The town was half a man’s labour and a whole month of cotton poorer, and it was in this desperation I was welcomed into any job that needed doing. The town was in constant need of reinforcement, the roofs, the walls, and shuttered windows, against the wind that whipped up swarms of sand and gravel the size of nails, lacerating whitewash jobs and exposed forearms in the same cruel sweep. I spent the seasonal months going house to house, to bughouse, to house reattaching doors, replacing porch steps, securing rafters. I’d come home and Mary would soak cotton wool in everclear and wipe down my limbs, hushing me when I hissed at the stinging. In December the air temperature reached equilibrium and everything stilled for a time. Inside this silence was the birth of the chapel.
I wanted us to get married in that chapel. I had built it with Flat, dug holes for foundation posts, pulled up walls, and nailed in slats over the windows. I had loved Mary with Flat, her house that smelt of syrup and gas, her cautious and quiet stories, her misery and Flat’s loneliness sleeping top-to-tail like brothers. She’d cook for me in the evenings and I’d run bread and fingers over the plate until it was dry, she’d frown with her eyes and smile with her mouth and call me a dog, I’d nip my fingertip between my teeth and growl which would make her laugh just once. Curving over a basin, lye, and cold water made her joints swell and redden. I’d rub them over with lanolin, after it was dark, and press her knuckles to my mouth if they had blistered. I’d run my thumb on the underside of her wrist, where she was soft like a hare. She’d touch the underside of my chin, tell me when she was a girl back East she’d watch bullfrogs in Spring and pretend she could blow her gullet out like that too, just in that soft spot right there. Sometimes she’d pull her hand away. Sometimes she wouldn’t. When I told her I would marry her, she hesitated. She turned from me, into herself. I took her hand back into mine, slipped my old wedding band, taken from her bedside, onto her left fourth finger, and kissed her. We never spoke of it further; the ring never left her hand.
She used to wait for me in the front room. Whether I was late to get out of bed, or late coming back fixing, washing, hammering, I could see the breath of her, still and patient, and hear the weight of her chair on the thin, wooden floor. Sometimes, if the weather wasn’t too warm, too cold, too windy, or too dry, if the sun was still up and we had had quail’s eggs to eat in the past month, if her bones didn’t ache, and things were all in their place, I’d hear her humming. She hummed like she had cotton wool stuck in her throat, dry and grizzly. It was beautiful.
The day we finished the outside of the church — four walls and a roof, to paraphrase Leviticus — I had stayed late. The site had been silent with exhaustion for days, but tonight the men of the town were happy, filled with preemptive piety up to their gums. The pews wouldn’t come from Mound for another week, so we sat on the bare floor and drank. We would each bless the bottle, and pass it to our neighbour: may your faith move mountains, and may you have the gift of prophecy and fathom all mysteries, and may you give all you possess to the poor and surrender your body to the flames. We signed the cross over one another before every sip until we spoke like children.
Mary was not waiting in the front room when I made it back home. She died the way my mother did, dressed in her very best, lying face up in bed. The way peasants, farmers, and beaten old women die, have always died, if they are afforded the dignity of doing it in their own homes. I stood in the door frame to her room for hours. Then I sat in the door frame to her room for hours. I stared at her forgetting and remembering that this was our room, that this was her and her husband’s and her daughter’s room, that this was her room. I ignored the dog at my feet until it whined and tried to pull the blanket off of her still-soft body. Creatures of devotion, you and I, I said to it, holding it by the scruff of the neck. I looked through to her, and saw her through a glass, darkly.
The pews came late. Mary was already buried by the time a service was held in the First Church of Our Lady, Flat. I had already made the commemorative notch in the stair, in fact I had made two. Into the silence and faces of the congregation I uttered the first sacred eulogy of the town:
And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
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