“Help yourself.”
He would have rather she helped him. This was an uncomfortable experience, filled with disquiet. He remembered the unease, a child’s discomfort as he waited for his father to punish him. In that stiff silence there was nothing but the agony of him guessing. Too much food would be gluttonous. Too little would be scornful. Oh that he could simply eat like a man and be done with it. Women wanted men to be men, after all. Why else would such bounty be laid before him? Why prepare a table in the village of enemies? He piled a mountain on his plate. Food all steaming, dripping, savory, and chunky. His first real meal in years. The Pastor had a woman who cooked, but her meals suffered from an unsavory sameness. Two bites into the Widow’s meal, he almost choked on bliss. Juices came alive on a tongue that once felt dead. A million zesty kisses, each more delightful than the one before. The plate was empty and restacked in minutes.
“Mind you choke,” she said.
The Widow appeared to smile but then she pushed her chair back into the dark before the Pastor could confirm it. She ate nothing herself. Dinner was a noisy clutter of mouth sounds. Lips and gums slapping food with spit and teeth slicing, tearing, and chomping the whole thing down to paste, followed by the glorious gulp of a swallow.
He was the only one doing the eating, so she must have been doing the watching. Women loved to watch men eat, he thought. It was the last blast of primal energy that the hunter-gatherer had left to show. But whenever he raised his head, even suddenly, hers would be elsewhere, lost in her own inner space. A bitter place, the Pastor concluded, but no more so than his. As she showed no interest in watching him, he decided to watch her. She was a pretty woman, but used her bitterness to look older. The frown between her brows fought against the suppleness of her dark skin. She plaited her hair without care, but had little gray. And there was no diminishing her large, round eyes, no matter how much she scowled and shrunk them. But widowhood came too soon. She was the youngest of them in the village. Old women were better prepared. When intimacy dies, the man dies with it. There will come a time when the bed becomes a gulf and two not-young bodies give up on being one flesh. The chill of sexual heat will be the first death. The silly talk of lovers giving way to instructions, rebuttals, and refusals will be the second. His discovery of a quiet place inside his head or outside the house is the third death. Drinking the fourth. Disease and his mind rotting away, the fifth. Bathing and cleaning him like a child, then combing his hair and scooping away his shit, is the sixth death. And when the seventh death comes—when his lungs collapse, his eyes go white, and the flies know first—the sequence is as banal as dusk.
But Mr. Greenfield died young. She carried the memory like Sisyphus. This was the thing that widows did until death came for them too. God had saved her from seeing her husband’s death herself, but the drunkards saw. They said this of his death. He took four shots of rum, cursing his hard-to-please wife with each gulp, then walked in a straight line from barstool to door to road. He stepped into the loud blur of the truck speeding by and vanished, leaving nothing but the echo of metal and glass slamming into flesh.
Within a week the truck was back on the road, picking up stones the villagers broke from rocks. At the funeral, one of the few occasions where Pastor Bligh was sober, the Widow went up to the casket, whispered something, and left the church. She did not return, not to the funeral or the church. Several members of the choir, those who stood near the coffin, swore that she cursed God that day. Widow Greenfield went home and put curtains over her windows. Marriage was a journey neither she nor her husband had packed for. They had no children.
The Widow looked up and their eyes met. Her face was bland. Not relaxed, but resignatory. He looked down at his empty plate.
“Thank you. Thank you.”
“You welcome, Pastor.”
“I, I going back to the room. I—”
She waved him off and he felt dismissed and offended. But what he saw when she looked away was a woman who knew nothing more than how to live in a broken space. Had she opened up her brokenness to him? He went back to the room confused.
9:30. There was a theory that he had, which he even preached, that every person in the world had a God-shaped void in his heart, but few chose to fill that void with God. Maybe he filled his with liquor. Or guilt. Whatever, the emptiness gnawed at him. Emptiness was an unnatural state. Frustration or guilt. Is that what a Wednesday night had become, a choice between two unsavory states, with happiness anathema to either? Pastor Hector Bligh wanted a drink. They called him the Rum Preacher, but he never drank rum, preferring whiskey. Scotch had a sulfurous skin, a bitterness that punished you for thinking you had the chest hair to drink it. He thought of this. A room of drunkards, all downing a liquor that nobody could enjoy. Onanism? The bitterness of malt was the bitterness of life itself. But the drink stirred a dumb faith. A stubborn hope that at the bottom of that glass, at the bottom of his life, at the last drop of substance, there must be some final note of sweetness. There had to be. He was beyond reason.
9:45.
“I goin out.”
She was still at the table. He wondered if this was where she slept. Maybe she was waiting for her husband’s ghost to come for dinner. Maybe this night he would stay away and she would watch the roaches and mice as they pillaged the table. Then they’d gnaw at her flesh and there she would still sit, waiting not out of faith, but because there was nothing else to do. She did not answer.
There was one place to escape God’s white throne of judgment. Maybe not so much an escape, but the musty roof, rollicking ska jukebox, and lazy tongues muffled Jehovah’s thunder. The bar. Drunkenness was a communal and personal pleasure at once, a miserable state only to those not drinking. Sobriety to him was a cruel attack of conscience masking itself as awareness. If sober people were so aware, how come they only spoke truth when drunk? Give him the romance of a drunkard over the indignation of a teetotaler any day. At the door of the bar, the clink of glasses, the haze of smoke, and cheerful talk of sin welcomed him.
“The mistress is here?” Bligh asked.
“No baba.”
“She sick?”
“Why you want to know, you goin heal her?”
He looked at her, this little girl trying on a woman’s tongue for size. There was a fate for girls like her. It started with a smile and ended with several ugly children and a husband who would beat her for her rudeness.
“You said she sick?”
“Me never say nothing to you.”
He did not even know the girl. She aged before him into a woman older than what Widow Greenfield was trying to be.
“She staying home. Say she reading her Bible,” the girl finally said.
“Bible?”
“You turn echo now that you done be preacher? Yes sah, she on fire for Jesus ever since Apostle York kick—I mean, come take you spot. She into the Bible reading hard. She all a talking bout selling the bar. Poor people soon out o work.” She looked at him as if he was responsible. The Pastor said nothing. She had wanted him to say something. She was ready. The girl had an unbroken stream of expletive prepared that would have withered him where he stood. But he fed her nothing and she stood there with the stillborn response stuck in her throat, too nasty to swallow.
“What you want?”
“Scotch and soda water. The mistress, she always forget where she keep the soda.”
“But it right underneath the counter.”
“No. What I meant was … she always forget where she keep the soda.”
“You ears hard? Me say it under—”
“Is a game between me and she, just pass the soda!”
“You mean Scotch?”
“Yes, Scotch! Scotch! Scotch!”
“Hey, don’t jump after me cause bigger-balls man go make you look like bitch.”
“Leave the bottle.”
Let the Rum Preacher testify to this. He was far more comfortable at the bar than at the altar. As the head of the church he could never escape the collective weight of judgment. But that cup had passed, and sliding toward him was another, wet, golden, and tinkling with ice. What lay beyond shame, freedom? He was seven sips away from not giving a damn, fifteen from not remembering who he was, and twenty from pissing on himself.
Take it easy, Preacher,
the bartender would have said by now, but she was off enjoying company more divine than his. With her absent, there was no one to talk to but himself. He was drunk. This was usually a state of perfect peace, but something had gone wrong. Usually, whiskey could erase a sentence midway before it was even finished. Like chalk on a blackboard, the memory was never gone, only smudged, indecipherable and irrelevant. But this time memory came in waves, history he had forgotten for years. Suddenly, afflictions not his own were thrust upon him. His left eye went black. A pain ran along the course of his spine and he fell off the barstool. He tried, in a desperate fit of wheezing, to catch his breath. A force unseen hit him in the scrotum, a battering ram, a rolling calf. The Pastor doubled over, lost his balance, and fell on the floor. Whiskey and bile erupted from his stomach. His teeth chattered violently, chomping on his tongue and causing his throat to fill with blood. He threw himself into the fit, as if a spirit was trying to flee his body. Bligh’s eyes rolled back into his skull and his head hammered onto the floor.
“Jeezus Christ! Him have fits! Him have fits!” said a man beside Bligh as he fell.
“Rahtid,” said another.
“Unu fling this spoon in him mouth quick!” shouted the young bartender. “Bout him want bottle! You know say is a whole o Johnny Walker him one go fi drink?”
“Him still a fits?”
“Is the Devil in him. Me read that in the Bible,” said the man nearest to Bligh, holding onto the spoon that he had shoved in the Pastor’s mouth.
“If you read Bible, me frig with donkey,” came from the end of the bar.
“Me no business a wha,” said the bartender, “Get him out o the place!”
“Me? Me nah touch that deh, baba. You no see that him still having fits? You want him kick one o we?”
“Whoever take him out get the next three drink free,” she said.
“Like is your bar!”
“See it deh! Him stop jerk now. Alright … alright … alright … There. See, him stop shake. Now give me me spoon and get this shithouse out of me bar. Mr. Cee, you and him drag this damn Rum Preacher out!”
“Little girl, you giving plenty order to man who don’t work for you.”
“No, me ordering whichever man want him next three shot of rum for free.”
“Drag him go where?”
“Outside, down the road, straight to Hell, I don’t care. Just take him out o—Jezuss Chrise! Is what so stink? Don’t tell me say the man shit up himself! Take him out! Take him out!”
They dumped him at the gate of Widow Greenfield just as dawn sneaked in under night’s empty cover. The Widow had waited. She grabbed him by the left foot and dragged him into the house. The Widow undressed him clinically, but it would have disturbed him had he been conscious. She was matronly, even aloof. Men were children anyway, only taller.
He had no real sense of what she had done until a day later when he awoke on the dead man’s bed. In the darkness of the room they came—flashes and memories like still shots robbed of context by scattershot recollection. His head bumping across the tiles of the bathroom floor. His shirt being pulled away in one violent swoop. His feet in the air as his pants were pulled off. Him falling to a loud splash in cold water. A quick flash; the Widow rubbing her nose. A roll, a tumble, and a splash in the lilac bathtub. Lavender and soap. Wet cloth on his face, his back, his feet, and scooping between his buttocks. A hazy female. A blurred face. A hand (his?) reaching for her breasts and squeezing out of wonder, like a child. A palm striking him like black lightning. Lavender water. His chest heaving and choking, his back bouncing off blows from her hand as she forced the water out.
She pulled the Pastor out of the tub and dried him with pink towels that smelt of soap.
B
ligh woke up to see the sun cast a white glow. Never before had the room been so full of light. The walls that before spoke of evening now spoke of the vast expanse of noonday sky; the lightness of floating or being. The dead wood of the bed seemed to come alive and the carved vines grew real leaves, flowering instead of disappearing at the top. But the light carried no heat or warmth, only the sterility of electric light. Or Heaven’s light.
He had finally done it. He had finally drunk himself to death.
Every man had his own image of Heaven, shaped not by what was read or heard, but feared. His picture, loose vignettes of castles and streets and gowns and teeth all colored white, was not shaped by a dream of Heaven, but a nightmare of Hell drawn by Dante and Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlets. The nightmare followed Bligh from childhood to manhood undiminished by his growth or knowledge. To him, Hell was not just a lake of fire and blood. Hell was a place where good lives and good intentions were burnt away, robbed forever of purpose or fulfillment. Guilt, on the other hand, was left to roam free and torment. This brought about a sense of ease that even he knew was perverse: If this was Hell then damnation was something he had already lived through. But this was something else.
He knew she would appear, and she did.
Hector. These are the things that must happen to you,
whispered a voice that was strange and familiar.
She looked exactly as he expected her to. A child, cherub, fairy tale, or perhaps an old evil. A strange and familiar face. White skin, light brown hair that cascaded to narrow shoulders, and eyes with no pupils. She said nothing, he said nothing, they both knew. These were the things that must happen.
Her hair stirred even though there was no wind. He saw through her eyes to a second face and a millionth; she conjured every man and none in one blink. The girl laughed. An experienced Madonna and a divine child. She went toward him, pursing her lips as if to kiss, but from those lips she blew a hurricane. Dust whipped itself up in a torrent of screams and his world went black.