16

The previous night, unbeknownst to me, Rufus had not fallen asleep in the chair at all. Instead, he’d risen silently, finished the last of his whiskey, and headed for the old church.

Rufus didn’t mind walking. He’d been doing it since he’d been blinded almost twenty years now. Sometimes he lost his way, but it happened less and less these days. He couldn’t explain it exactly. People said he had a sixth sense. Over the years, he’d come to think they might be right. In the beginning, he’d just pretended to have a sixth sense, using tricks and information people didn’t know he had to fool them, to create a kind of persona, but after a while those tricks had become a part of who he was and he was able to skip some of them or not even realize he was using them. Or hell, maybe he’d just taught himself how to be psychic, how to “know” what was there without being able to see it. He wouldn’t rule it out. Not in this crazy world.

He made it home without incident, still angry, still out of sorts over the tingling he’d felt the previous two nights and his inability to even drink himself to sleep, so he decided he’d do the one thing that never failed to relax him. He found the creek bank and stripped out of his overalls and briefs. He shrugged off his T-shirt and tossed it on the ground where he felt like it would stay dry. Now, totally naked, he reached for the water with one of his feet, letting the sharp coldness sting him with the knowledge that his body would soon adapt.

Slipping his entire body into the creek, he felt the water engulf him and lift him, creating a kind of dark balance where all things could be internalized and held. Somehow he felt the stars, their pull. Sometimes that happened, especially when he was in the creek, no clothes to separate him from the wider world. Being blind helped him feel a part of things, as if he were any other living organism that lacked vision but still possessed a deep connection with these dark hollows: a tree, a rock, a creeping vine, hell, even an old shack like Ronnie’s place across the creek. Rufus believed if something had been in one place long enough, if it had heard the rain and the thunder and the swelling of crickets and the lonesome night birds, that thing—be it house or fence or bone—became something else. That it too became a part of these mountains’ great and secret history.

His head touched the soft mud at the bottom. His nose and mouth were clear of the waterline, but his ears were inside, so he could hear the pulsing of the creek as it flowed across rocks and carved its way down the mountain. He felt his eyes open, not the ones burned by acid so many years ago; those were closed forever. Instead, he felt the eyes of memory opening. His breathing slowed. A fish slipped over his belly, and it tickled as its wiggling body grazed the flesh just above his navel. The water was silk, the stars were pinpricks of heat, there were rocks beneath his hands, cool against his rough palms.

He saw the girl, Harriet. She wasn’t really a girl, Rufus realized, but that was how she’d seemed. In reality, she’d been closer to a woman, too old for the school, and also the wrong gender. It didn’t matter, though. Harden wanted her there, so she was there. He saw now she’d been like him, unsure of herself, trying to feel her way through a cruel world, looking for a way out that was hidden inside the deepest traditions and fears of the South.

Nobody called her Harriet except Rufus. To everyone else she was Harry or just “the dyke” because, unlike her twin sister, Harriet couldn’t hide who she was. In fact, she’d confided in Rufus once that other people had known she was a lesbian before she did.

“I just knew I was different,” she said. “I’m still different, I guess.”

Harden had made it clear her being “different” was unacceptable. He was a man who valued brutality and grudges, and the young staff looked up to him because he never had issues with the boys. They all responded to his gruff and commanding presence. All except Harriet. She was an outlier in more ways than one. Not only was she female and gay, she was also a good kid, not a criminal or troublemaker like the boys who’d been sent there for various crimes and transgressions at their regular schools. Harden never had a problem exposing the boys for the sniveling weasels they were. Of course, exposing people was what Harden did. His personality was like a light; when he turned it on you, you had to either shy away, shield your eyes, or stare into it straight and risk being blinded.

Rufus’s body shook with laughter, disturbing the intricate path the water had formed around him. It was funny because of the irony. He’d lost his vision because he’d turned away from Harden, because he’d been too afraid to stand up for what was in him, because he’d still been looking for a savior, someone or something outside himself to validate him, to force the world to make sense.

Maybe he was still looking for one now, too. Maybe it was time to stop.

*   *   *

Years ago, on the day Rufus had finally mustered the courage to leave the Holy Flame, he’d been looking for a savior too, except then he’d finally been forced to look inward. And what he’d found inside himself had been enough. If only he’d been able to hang on to it. But like so many of the important things in life, it had proved fleeting.

He’d waited until Easter Sunday, until the very moment he was supposed to fetch the new spring snakes. Every Easter, the church “renewed” its commitment to faith by bringing new, wild snakes into the church. They were called “spring snakes,” and it had long been Rufus’s job to bring them one at a time from their cages in the back of the sanctuary. He’d hand them each to the preacher, who would hold them up and proclaim Satan had no power in this church before slipping them into the snake pit near the altar.

When the time came for him to bring the first snake, the preacher, Brother RJ, as they called him, motioned to Rufus. Rufus stood and skirted past his mother, who patted his back, her way of showing her pride for what he was doing. He used to crave that touch, that sense of accomplishment, but for the last few years her touch had come to represent something else entirely.

He slipped out into the aisle. RJ stared at him, a smile playing on his lips. It was almost as if he knew Rufus was planning something. It was almost as if he was enjoying it, as if he had a preternatural sense of what was coming and did not believe Rufus would have the courage to go through with it. But Brother RJ was wrong, and the knowledge of this spurred Rufus on, the courage welling up inside him as he stood eye to eye with the preacher, not withdrawing from the older man’s hardened countenance. Rufus turned to get the snake from the back. All eyes watched him as he made his way down the aisle. Even then people thought him weird, different in ways great and small. He wore the same black suit that had been his father’s before he made his own exit nearly fifteen years earlier, and as a young man he liked to spend his time out in the churchyard, staring at the headstones, wondering at the bodies beneath the ground and where their souls were, how they’d slipped their skin and flown upward to a heaven the preacher said was in the clouds and filled with delights unimaginable to the mortal mind. He was a quiet young man, diffident and prone to always being on the edge of the other young men, skulking along the periphery of their tight-knit circle, always feeling alien and—yes, he would admit it—slightly superior to them. Likewise, though he found many of the young women utterly fascinating, he suspected he’d barely registered on their radar. He was persona non grata, the young man who sat up front with his mother and gave the good girls creeping skin when and if they ever happened upon his face in a dream or a random thought. Or maybe that was wrong. Would he even have realized it if a young lady had found him interesting, attractive? Maybe just mysterious. No, he felt sure he wouldn’t have.

What a fool he’d been in so many ways.

But not then, not at that very moment, in the sanctuary aisle, every eye on him, every mind fixed on what he held in his hand, a writhing cottonmouth, the same type that had struck Earl years before, nearly its twin, and Rufus found that appropriate. He held it tighter, higher, thrusting it forward as the faces on either side of him drew back in surprise and admiration.

No, he hadn’t been a fool then. He’d been redeemed then. He’d found the door to heaven and blown it open wide, except it didn’t take him where he expected to go. It didn’t take him to any shining city with gold walkways and silk flags blowing in the perfect breeze. There were no colors unimaginable to the human mind as the preacher had promised. If there was a God there at all, it was a God who was hard to know, a God who kept his eyes closed to avoid seeing the carnage the world had wrought in his name. But Rufus felt something as he walked forward, and instead of handing the cottonmouth to Brother RJ, he threw it into the air, aiming it at the stained glass that filtered the sunlight into the church like religion had filtered God into the world, discoloring and weakening it, trapping it, using it until it became a thin veneer, ready to break at the least impact.

The snake hit the stained glass above the alter, cracking it, just a sliver, just enough for real light to stream into the church. It fell on Rufus’s face, lifting him, cleansing him, redeeming him, and he felt the great eyelids of God begin to open.

“This is all lies,” he said. He had no more spoken the words than he realized they were the first ones he’d ever spoken in front of this church that were his own—not the preacher’s or his mother’s or some scripture memorized by rote. These were his words, goddamn it.

“He’s a liar, and we’re all too weak to call him on it. Not anymore. I’m done.”

And that was all. He didn’t need to say anything else, because to do so would be to whittle a wooden key past the point where it fit perfectly into the lock.

He’d been redeemed. He felt God’s eyes open upon him for the first time. As he walked out of the church, he prayed it would not be the last.