Lexi
Walter had built Mom’s studio in the shade of a live oak. Spanish moss hung from the branches and lay on the ground and on the shed roof. Mom kept the door and windows shut in the July heat. An oven to bake her paint on the canvas.
I knocked.
‘What?’ she said. Which sounded like Go away. Mom had never learned manners.
I knocked again.
The door opened. Fleshy was the word for Mom. Paint flecked her skin and her hair. She smoked a cigarette. Sweat smelled from her body. But when she saw the stranger she pursed her lips. Asked, ‘Who are you?’
‘An admirer,’ he said. ‘A great admirer.’
She looked at him. Uneasy. I thought she would slide back into the shed and bolt the door as she sometimes did. But she said, ‘You’re welcome here.’ She stepped into the yard as if she’d been waiting for him forever. The man in the blue suit looked at me like it was all a big joke. He was dangerous. A nameless man. A man of lies. But I didn’t care. Didn’t care. Didn’t care. I wanted something. Needed something.
And he was something.
Mom told Walter to put away his gun and bring drinks. The way he looked at her she could have said to stick his hands into the fired-up kiln. But he went to the kitchen. He might argue and look like she’d twisted his balls but he always did what she asked. On his own he might have shot the stranger as easy as he slapped the backs of my legs with a strip of green pinewood. Which he did whenever Mom wasn’t watching. As easy as he hit Cristofer when Cristofer got on his nerves. Which was always. But if Mom woke in the night and wanted a glass of milk he all but offered to drive to a farm up-island and squeeze a cow’s tit so she could have it fresh. True love Mom called it. It smelled to me something like fear.
Now Mom asked the man in the blue suit, ‘What do you do for work, Mr …?’
‘Edgar,’ the man said. ‘You can call me Edgar.’ Wink without a wink at me.
We sat on the front porch. Mom had put on a dress but hadn’t wiped her face. ‘What do you do for a living, Edgar?’ she asked.
The yard was quiet except for the springs screeching on Cristofer’s trampoline. Tilson had stopped hammering the chicken fence and disappeared. To get drunk. Or to visit the half-brained woman he called his wife. Though she lived in a different house. And he went to her only when her real husband was out. Whenever Walter nagged at him for disappearing Tilson would put on a pained face. He would point at his belly and say, ‘I got stones.’
Edgar Allan looked at me. Looked back at Mom. He said, ‘A hundred years ago people would have called me a Resurrectionist.’
‘Huh?’ I said.
‘That’s what they called it,’ he said. ‘Now I’m a procurement specialist. I find organs for transplants and cadavers for medical study. I work with the dead for a living.’
‘What a strange job for a young man,’ Mom said.
‘No stranger than anything else about him,’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t say it’s a calling,’ he said to Mom. ‘It’s a paycheck. Most of my business is cadavers. Medical schools have certain times of the year when they need them. The rest of the year I work on my hobbies.’
‘Collecting art?’ Mom said.
‘Sure,’ he said.
I asked, ‘Why did people call it Resurrection?’
‘For a long time no one regulated it,’ he said. ‘Resurrectionists stole bodies from the morgue or dug them out of the ground. So they made people rise from the grave. Now we sit in our offices. I want to do something else though.’ He said it like an afterthought. ‘I want to start a theater.’