Lexi
‘Once upon a time …’ Oren said.
Midnight was long gone. After walking us into our yard Oren’s friends had cleaned up our house. Like it was their house now. They had carried the mattresses up to the bedrooms. They had scrubbed the hearth and the floor by the window where rotting flesh had leached into the pores of the stone and the grain of the wood planking. They had set the dinner table upright. They had arranged the chairs around it. They had swept the dirt and filth out through the door to the porch. The house no longer felt or smelled like it was ours. Mom and Walter and Cristofer and I were intruders.
Oren’s girlfriend had gone upstairs and was moving furniture in Mom’s room. Out in the yard one of the bikers was dragging Lane Charles’s body toward the chicken pen. The other re-dug the pit where Tilson had buried the chickens. Then he used the heel of his boot to mark a spot to dig a pit for Lane Charles. Paul was cleaning the front porch.
Walter sat at the head of the dinner table. Broken and humiliated. His face greasy and red with sweat and fever. Mom sat at the other end. Her dress hanging low on her shoulders. As if it had become too big for her. Her eyes fiery. Cristofer sat across from me. Smiling.
Oren sat on the green chair and looked worried for the first time since he came.
Then he stood. And walked in circles around the table. Like a zoo cat. ‘Once upon a time,’ he said, ‘a boy died and was reborn. This was no ordinary boy. When he was born the first time he crawled out of a tar box as if it was a womb and his afterbirth was the hot pine drippings. He crawled out and rolled around in the dust and sand, and his father who also was a man of dust and sand loved him though others reserved their judgment. How does one love a child who has crawled out of fire? What does one do with such a child?’
‘I loved you,’ Mom said. Blankly.
‘The child’s mother decided she knew what to do,’ Oren said. ‘She would kill the child.’
‘Amon took you for himself,’ Mom said. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’
‘Who could blame her,’ Oren said, ‘with a hot and sticky dust-coated child like that? A child like that belonged in the ground. Dust with dust. Or buried in a forest where his flesh could feed the pines that grew from the sandy soil.’
‘I had no choice,’ Mom said.
Walter said, ‘Nothing that you think happened really did. Not in my eyes. Not in the eyes of the law.’