Cover Story: Blessed in the garden

In town the porn is soft. It gets hard out in the hollows. Preacher Massey’s been selling it to us out the back of the Exxon station since I was a kid. I heard him cackling once to my half-brother Billy, wiping gas off his fat fingers, “I’d rather hear a small boy fart than a fat lady sing.” Billy told me he was trisexual. He’d try anything.

Billy let me watch the videotapes he sold us, except on Sundays. That’s when Preacher Massey or, now lately, Billy, would give the sermon at Mt. Zion Church. When one of the parish came to visit us at home, Billy’d welcome them at the door for a while, fluttering his fingers behind him. That meant I should ease the tapes off the VCR into a flour sack.

He raised me as best he could after Momma died. Billy was only 19. I was 8. All I remember the day they took her to the funeral home is him chopping wood behind our double-wide and turds backed up in the commode cause the septic tank was full. A dead stink in the trailer. After they put her in the pick-up it was dark. Billy pulled our sleeping bags out of the trailer so we wouldn’t have to sleep in the smell. He lead me by the hand down the hill. We went way out to the fields, past the cows, and then we laid down in the wet grass, side-by-side, and listened to Red Creek gurgle over the smooth stones. Billy leaned over and said, “Our Momma’s gone now. You know what that means?” I nodded. But I didn’t know.

Frankie was my best friend in school then. Once he pulled me in close for a secret, making an O with one hand and a pistol with the other. He said in a low voice, slipping the O around the barrel of the pistol, “The man pushes his thing in the girl. Not while you’re both standin’ up cause that’d just push her away. No. Slide on top of her. Then you pee a little.”

I thought about this. His eyes were wild and I thought he was holding his breath. “What if you ain’t got to pee?” I asked.

“Then you drink a coke and come back and try again.”

When I was 10, Billy went to study for a diploma at a preacher school outside Nashville and I lived for a while with orphan kids at the mission. But Billy’s school burned down and they sent the student-preachers home, half-baked. On the news they said Satan worshippers burned it. Billy came home and started drinking, laying round the house, watching porn. Then, one day, he got saved. Just like that. He come outside wild-eyed like he gets and bristles on his face, smiling his smile. He asked me, “You know what being a Christian means?” I shook my head. “Means never having to say you’re sorry. God has already forgiven you.” That’s when the trouble started. Billy had stolen money from Mt. Zion church. They locked him up at Bland County Correctional.

So for a while I caught rides to school with Frankie and his momma. Frankie’s momma would roll down the window in the mornings and drive like that a while, the wind whipping her hair back. It fluttered like a sail. She’d sing over the radio at the cold, “If you’re not gonna love me, I’ll give you somethin’ not to love.” After she dropped us off at the busport, she liked to veer the truck up onto the sidewalk where the cheerleaders stood around, to hear them scream. She hated cheerleaders. I told Frankie his mother was a riot. He’d spit and grit his teeth when she honked the horn getting off school property. “Jesus Christ,” he’d mutter, “Jesus.”

She was gorgeous, though, his momma. Hair like wheat. Made me wish I had mine. Someone to hold lemonade out to me after I cut grass or pulled weeds. Ice cubes stacked one-two-three-four going clink-clink in the glass. Frankie’s momma pretty much loved him. She was good. I stared at Frankie’s face sometimes, finding his momma there. He looked more like her than anyone. One morning after she dropped us off we were standing around the busport talking, staring at the cheerleaders, and I started looking at Frankie’s face. Just staring at it. Next thing I brushed his face with the back of my hand. Everybody started looking at me. Frankie said, “What are you doing?” Next day Frankie told me his momma didn’t think she could give me no more rides to school cause I might be a fag. I never got over that.

So I started catching the schoolbus. Honey Sweet — swear to God that was her name — held up her skirt for me to look at her bloomers. She was 15 then. Cotton-white panties with baby-blue polka dots the color of her eyes. Dark hairs peekin’ out. Towards each other, like foldin’ hands in church. The windows were open on account of the heat in that oven shaking and shaking, bouncin’ up and down, leanin’ round the curves. Everybody sweating. Her skin glistened below her eyes. When I saw her in church on Sundays I thought about those hairs curling under her skirt. Praying along with her. I couldn’t stop my head from thinking.

In 10th grade, two years before Billy got out of jail, Honey said to me out of the blue in English class, “I think that if a boy gets his hand on your snatch then he should call you? At least once don’t you?”

“Snatch? Snatch? Honey, don’t call it that,” I yelled at her. She glared at me, suspicious, tangling a few strands of hair around one ear like girls do when they’re thinking. Her mouth widened, to teeth and dimples. She liked me. I smiled back. I liked her too.

A couple of weeks after we’d been sitting together on the bus, she got her license and we drove out to the top of East River Mountain to play hooky.

“I wanna try my ways with you,” she said, a weedstem twirling in her mouth.

“What?”

“I wanna try my ways,” she blew it out, “with you.”

I toed the dust, hiding a smile. Was I her beau? I scraped my shoe across the clay in a half-circle. She finished it with another half-circle.

“You’re gonna try your ways with me?”

“I’d like to,” she said. We looked away at the cliffs. The wind raked across the mountain, blowing red clouds into the air, spreading claydust on the parking lot. There were no other cars.

“You my beau?” she asked, pulling at the gold chain around her neck.

“Shoot,” I said.

“What?”

“We know that much.”

We started dating. We would take each other’s clothes off. I learned when her month caught her by surprise because she only had on one sock. When I asked her about her bare ankle, she’d flip me off.

Her dad kicked her out when she got pregnant. Went out to look for her. Took her back. Kicked her out again. Made us get married. “Honey Sweet” became “Ricks” and everybody said it was a shame, messing that name up.

I got a job pouring acid at the potash plant. Starting hacking brown chunks. Honey’d put her hand on my chest and say “Aww, tsth.” But, all in all, we were happy.

Then it went to hell. Billy got out of jail. Doing his time, he had soaked up the Bible. Verses spurt out: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; Behold, all things become new.” Corinthians 5:17; John 5:28, 29 “Resurrection of the Damned”; Matthew 25:34 “Come ye blessed.” A week after he got out and moved back into the trailer, Honey saw blood floating in the toilet. I was at work. That blood was our baby’s only appearance. She called me at work and I took her to the hospital. It was awful. She didn’t even get to get fat like she’d wanted to.

Last Sunday we went to Mt. Zion church. My friend from intermediate school, Frankie, was there, but he didn’t talk to me. He looked mean now. I was proud hearing Billy preach. He knew a lot of verses. People stared at the cardboard model of the proposed church he had made. After his sermon they stuffed dollars into the box and became “part of the dream.” Not Frankie. I think he thought Billy might run off with the money again. He stared at me for a long, long time while the people mushed their money into the slit. With Methodist grace he strode out of church into the sun like the poor farmer that he was.

We’ve been together five years now, Honey and me. And Billy too. We got food. Billy’s out preaching. Honey works at K. Rogers supermarket. She comes home at night in her blue getup and falls asleep on the bedspread. She can’t have kids.

Here’s a thing. When we make it I usually ask Honey to turn over. She looks at me real soft and smiles and gets on her elbows and knees. I’m curved and it fits snugger. She don’t mind. “Either way,” she says. “What you want, darlin.” Billy walked in on us once — she was backed up to the edge of the bed and I was standing behind her. She turned her head and yelped.

“Git! Billy git!” I chuckled. Then she looked at me. “Whyn’t you lock the door?” She knows there’s no lock on that door. She wants our own place. Or Billy out. But how am I supposed to tell Billy to get out? He raised me.

A few weeks later Billy sat me down beside the creek to explain that only in the missionary position does God love his children. “We ain’t baboons,” he said. I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t think anybody cared. That’s what I’m thinking about tonight walking with Honey, the crickets trilling and the creek slithering across the meadow like a S. A long, dark snake, with moonlight on its back. We’re walking holding hands like Adam and Eve. We work our way under a weeping willow by the creek and run our toes through the crabgrass. The branches split beams of light that milk-wash Honey’s hair. We’re sweating on account of the heat. It’s getting hotter than hell. We take off our clothes.

I slide on top of her. Slow. It don’t happen. I try again. In. In some more. All the way in. Out some. All the way out. But it’s no good. Honey smiles real teasin’ like, evil. She’s got the devil in her. The devil, boy. I’m achin’ for her to turn over and she knows it. She smiles cause she wants me to know she knows it and I can see her teeth and gums. I look at the cows lonely on the hillside, on all fours, dreaming of fodder. Honey turns over, giggling, and whips her hair back and it catches me in the face. I blow a few strands out of my mouth. She giggles. Then she hushes.

Under that tree glowing and water bubbling, those willow smells, it’s like Eden. I want it to last. I hold on to the taste of her mouth.

When I’m there I growl. She giggles and gnarls back at the moon. We hold each other and roll. Green ribbons stick flat to our backs. I remember what Billy told me about baboons and think about his cardboard model of the new church. How Honey cried in the hospital five years ago when the doctor told her she lost the baby. She cried and cried. She kept asking, “Why? Why?” Frankie the other day at church. How he stared at me over the money box, and the time I touched his cheek at the busport.

“Honey,” I whisper.

“Hm?”

“I’m good, ain’t I?”

She giggles. “You’re great, sugar.”

She didn’t understand. I lay on my back and look at the stars. They look like pinholes in an old blanket. Maybe God peeking through one at me.

“Hey,” she ruffles my hair, “Hey you. Hey Grizzly bear.”

I grunt. Then I bite her on the shoulder and she laughs and snorts at me. I reach over and get a handful of creekwater and splash it on her back. She screeches like a bat. Then she throws water on me. The water is cold but it gets warm fast.

Mohit Bhasin moved to Atlanta from Boston seven years ago, but grew up in the Appalachians of West Virginia. He works at Grady Hospital.??