Free Sign Languages by James Hannah

blooming. The pears and plums. I take what’s left in the bucket and drizzle it through cupped hands on the lettuce, the little plants the color of the young priest’s eyes.
    â€œHow old are you?” Father Stephen had asked the year I was sick off and on. His hair jet black back then. The mission lunchroom steamy, outside the town of Delios empty storefronts taped with silver duct tape. I shrugged. Fuck you, I thought. And besides, I don’t know. Sixty. Ninety.
    They continued to get their hooks deeper in me. Father Stephen’s hands clasped like plaster praying hands over the sheets of paper. Like the cupped hand I keep on the windowsill.
    They drove me to a doctor in Brantley Cove. A small young black man. I almost said something when we were alone, but I saw his face in the mirror as he washed with green soap. Later his fingers barely touched me, gingerly along my throat and at my chest and shoulder blades. The shouts of nigger, whistling foaming full cans of Budweiser, Schlitz, which I finished off, everywhere around me. I always stand stock-still like the cows, surprised it’s come back to this again.
    I don’t build a fire in the stove to fry the bacon they gave me that I keep in an old metal bicycle basket deep in the well. The wires icy to the touch. Instead I take some of her ribbon off the nails near the back door. Two yellow ones which bring with them a laugh of hers about something or other.
    I tie them in my beard, let them dangle on my chest. The yarrow has begun to spread near the door; I try not to crush it as I get down on all fours and pull out the twisted shovel with the shattered handle. As I walk down the road that circles the house and goes down through the evergreens that block it from Farm Road 3941, I smell the jonquils. And I want to let Mothermae listen to my mind thank her God and Baby Jesus that it’s warm again and I’ve come out of the cold to see the road, to “glean it clean,” she’d say. Glean it. Glean a word I believe sprouted from black bottomland cotton fields. A word I love.
    â€œNo, I never worked. My legs never been right.” And we looked at one another until he smiled and nodded. “That’s all right. That’s all right.”
    So I lied, Mothermae. Okay, you smiling, compassionate man, I walked into Hopkins when I was twelve and she cut across Mecham’s Prairie to Luxor to mend clothes in a converted garage. I could read. I sat for centuries in the dark filthy room. The old man droned on and on. Stomachs growled all day. We all itched lice. The dark, near the muddy floor, under the desks full of mosquitoes drinking constantly, raising purple welts. Spring thunderstorms melted the cardboard windowpanes. The damp curled paper.
    Later I came with her past the windowless garage to the sawmill icehouse. In the awful August heat I loved the wet sawdust floor, the blocks of ice warped and irregular rising to the ceiling. The clunk of metal tongs, the shower of ice from their deep bites.
    Nigger this, nigger that. The oldest, who ran the hand-cranked crusher, named Nigger Boss.
    But soon there were troubles. The whites laid off and waiting for someone to cuss, to yell at from store porches and through screened doors.
    No work for anybody. The cross-tie mill burned. We woke that night smelling it on the dry wind and walked down to the Farm Road—just dirt then, the scant gravel beat to the sides—to watch it. The sky free of town lights. It was wonderful and Mothermae shook her head and cried. Took my arm and trembled.
    Somehow she worked on. She saved almost all of her money in a metal saltine tin.
    I never went to see the destruction. Now there were shootings all over. Whites drunk and mad. Black folks trying to be absolutely quiet and still in Shady Bend, the nigger quarters down the hill from the icehouse.
    No work. The last time I saw the icehouse, we walked through its empty dark caves, me and Boss.