Free The Stories of Richard Bausch by Richard Bausch Page B

through the door, groaning with the weight he was carrying in the heat of the summer day. She seemed merely curious, watching him. As he got free of the doorway, she leaned into him and said, “Hey!” loud, as if he were a long way off. Father Bauer dropped the box on his foot. Then he hopped in a small circle, holding the foot, yowling, “Merciful heaven,” at the top of his lungs.
    He said this three times, as Myra, smiling, strolled away from him.
    “I saw him hit a boy in the back of the neck yesterday,” she told us. “He’s not a very nice man, even if he is a priest.”
    Of course, we never went back to St. Ambrose Church. And she never went back to her job there, as a secretary in the day school.
    Myra likes going to new and different jobs, and we’ve already been to many different churches. We’ve attended services in every denomination of the Judeo-Christian South, and two or three of the Middle Eastern and oriental variety as well—these in Washington, D.C., only seventy miles north and east of us on Route 29. Myra doesn’t seem to be looking for anything in particular, either. She wants to experience the ways people find to celebrate having been part of creation, as she once put it. She isn’t really batty in that particular way. Not religious, I mean. She doesn’t think about it. The term
creation
is a convenient rather than a necessary expression. Her religious feeling is all aesthetics.
    Lionel is less impulsive. His lunacy is more studied. He loves orchestrating the impressions of others. Once, with Myra’s help, he got a real estate agent to show us a house that was for sale in our neighborhood. The name he gave the agent was Mr. and Mrs. Phlugh. (“That’s P-h-l-u-g-h,” Lionel spelled it out for the trusting agent, “pronounced the same as the virus.”) As the poor man walked them through the house, Myra began coughing and hacking like a victim of tuberculosis in the last throes of the illness. “Is she all right?” the real estate agent asked.
    “She’s done this since I’ve known her,” Lionel said, then coughed himself.
    By the time the agent ushered them out of the house, he too was coughing, perhaps in sympathy, though it might also have been the result of anxiety and embarrassment. “Thank you so much,” Lionel said to him, coughing. “But I think we’ll keep looking. I want my house to be a place I can retreat to, you know—like a—like a sanitarium.” He turned to Myra. “Don’t you think, dear?”
    “Yes.” Myra coughed. “Like that. Something quiet as a clinic.”
    “Right. A clinic.” Lionel coughed so deeply it caused the agent to step back from him. “This is a great house,” Lionel went on, coughing, “but not for the Phlugh family.”
    Lionel is a qualified accountant, but he’s currently between jobs, waiting to take up a position with the State Planning Commission. It seems to Elvin and me that they are both perpetually waiting for a new job to start. Lionel’sreal passion is playing mandolin in the hillbilly band he started up the year my mother was pregnant with Elvin. One of the other men in the band, the banjo player, a man named Floyd, recently got married and moved to Tennessee to take a job in his father-in-law’s distillery. No one has replaced him, though Lionel has auditioned several players, so the band hasn’t performed in months, and that source of income is dry. The woman Floyd married is a few years older than Floyd, and once Lionel brought her into the house and introduced her to Elvin and me as our real mother. Elvin divined what he was up to almost immediately.
    “I knew that,” he said, nodding at the woman.
    I was momentarily flustered. Lionel saw it in my face and reached over to take me by the wrist. “Well, we got Patrick anyway.”
    Elvin has always been skeptical about everything. When Myra developed appendicitis that year, Elvin thought she was joking and ignored the moaning and crying from her bedroom.
    At the