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Show Go Love/189 that will o,p£njigain to the world where fish leap house high and a solitary youth paddles out a riptide. "What I'm saying is that Mama didn't lose her fight. I can prove it. People swivel heads, swallow, look quizzically at the salvation score on the jumbo screen teletron The pallbearer who's a cop checks his watch "Yesterday I talked with some of you here right now. One of you said, ""These last few weeks, Josie'd call me once a day and ask for her laugh fix. I'd say, "Well which one should we talk about first, the preacher or the deacons," and we'd laugh until we cried.'" Maybe the man who entered late is Shawn Terrence Lord, whose puzzle pieces are entirely reconstructable in my'pocket Maybe he's not afraid of O W. anymore and is ready to turn his face full to the light, let himself be seen the way Mama saw him Maybe Lord can speak to Mama's capacity to love? I'd like to slap his ass just as bad as O.W.'s The hell with Davey too Who'd he think he was, showing up when I was forty years old. "And another one said, 'I was in love with her. Everybody was. She's the best damn dancer in Lonoke County.' Stand up. Raise your hands in the air." Behind me, Dell Walker, that's a-goddamn-nough he says. "How is it then, I'd like to ask, that my mama, Josephine Harvell, gets remembered? Say? For a salty joke about Baptist preachers and deacons? What kind of wife was she? What kind of mother? Swollen, bleeding inside. Say?" "Say," a voice from somewhere in front of me. "I was with her at Bill Clinton's inauguration. People were dancing after, and before I knew |