A Choir of Ill Children Read Free

Drabs slid down the muddy bank on his back, wailing in an unknown language and heaving until he was out of sight.
    No matter what anybody told us after that, Maggie and I knew we were man and wife from that day forward, though we never so much as shared a kiss.
    She stares up at me now with all the passion, affection, and devotion the human heart can muster, and soon she begins to weave in the wind. Her white dress whirls like an unwrapped shroud until she eventually becomes just another part of the dark and endless night.
     
    D RABS B IBBLER IS WALKING DOWN THE ROAD NAKED when I pull over and offer him a lift. He gets into the truck and doesn’t say anything for about five miles. Finally, he looks over and I can see that he’s welling up. The teardrops are spilling down his face across the burn scars on his neck and chest. He’s been in love with Maggie since long before the day he wed her to me, but he can’t tear asunder what he helped God to unite. It’s killing him and has been for twenty years. Maybe it’s killing all of us.
    “The hell are you doing?” I say.
    “You’re going to ask me that?”
    It was a stupid question. When he’s in this state I can’t talk to him. No one can. I do my best to make sure he survives his own sorrow. If another white woman spots his flopping pecker swaying in the breeze the rednecks aren’t going to be happy with beating the hell out of him and swabbing his body with hot tar. They’re going to lynch and castrate him for sure.
    I wonder if he’ll fall into tongues again, which almost always happens when I’m in his presence for more than twenty minutes.
    “I’m going to give up the church,” he tells me. “My daddy’s church, really. I was never any good at it to begin with and I get worse with each passing week. The congregation hates me.”
    “No they don’t, they just get scared. They don’t know any better.”
    “My daddy don’t want me up on his pulpit.”
    It’s true. Reverend Bibbler preaches about Paradise but his own son frightens the parishioners off. “What are you planning to do instead?”
    “I’m not certain yet.”
    “Maybe you should keep on preaching until you figure it out.”
    “No, I want it to end,” Drabs says with a sneer. “I feel like a fraud and a damn fool up there.”
    He can still make me chuckle at the most inopportune times. “At least you wear clothes at the altar.”
    “That’s true, I do. But I’m still only lying.”
    “You’ve got enough of God in your life already. Do something else that you might enjoy.”
    “There isn’t anything.”
    His commitment to Maggie is so intense that it envelops him like the crimson nimbus of a burning flare. It isn’t a pure love but it’ll do until one comes along. He’s had many women in Potts County and fathered a half dozen children I know about. He takes no responsibility for anyone or anything except my baptism and marriage. Nothing else makes any real impression on him.
    “I’ve been having visions about you,” Drabs says.
    “You’ve always had visions about me.”
    “More now than ever,” he says, and the sorrow is so great in his voice that I want to leap out of the truck.
    “Anything interesting?”
    The angles of his shining handsome black face fall in on themselves as he frowns. “I keep seeing a Ferris wheel. It’s damn small. And a merry-go-round. The horses’ faces are all chipped.”
    My life, going up and down, around and around, broken. “That’s not the Holy Spirit, that’s Freud.”
    “And another thing . . . there’s a man who’s biting the head off a live snake, covered in chicken parts.”
    “A geek,” I say. “Jesus Christ, Drabs, don’t tell me you see me winding up as a geek.”
    “No, no, listen. It’s not you, but he’s willing to talk to you, for the price of a pint of moonshine.”
    “Six bits. Do I give it to him?”
    His fingers carelessly brush his chest scars as he nods, staring off through the windshield at the tree