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Show Go Love/135 toward us, past Mama's head, then out the kitchen door and back in again. The flame burst in the fireplace then came at us again. Two, three seconds maybe O.W. stood and stared fiercely, like he could back fire down-that's what every fiber in his body seemed to scream-get out of my house, vou don't belong in my house. He stared, thought get out, and for a while that's what the fire did-it disappeared, long enough to get its courage up. The three of us stood there looking into space, the burnt air between us, the way people do after a Pentecostal church service when somebody's handled a rattlesnake. "Lord, God," Mama said. I could smell that her singed hair. "What on earth are you doing?" Mama said Out in the barn, the swaybacked horse said I love you and I imagined the rats in the feed room bin, how they go crazy when the light hits them, how they chew saddle leather. Life is truly miraculous, a real shocker-the way the fire walked over the trail of fumes, how it found the airy space and traversed our doorway. And O.W. standing there with his shoulders thrown back with that light in his eye. He'd brought gasoline into the house, lit the match; the fire'd singed the fine lashes off his eyes. Out in the garden east of our barn, stumpsucking Happy Boy'd walked out and was eating Mama's green tomatoes. He was singing "I'll Fly Away," remembering the green meadow days before his nuts were cut off. "Of course will live, Joey," Mama'd said. "Don't ever be like him." O.W., ox-strong cyclops of my dreams. Maybe its the noise behind my back that makes me turn, or the feel of being stared at by |
