Free Sign Languages by James Hannah Page A

“I’ll be okay. You, too,” he said more than once.
    And so I tried this and that. For a long time we drank whatever we could find. And some nights I’d stay in the quarters with someone from work.
    Now at the ancient fence—a few rotten posts, the rusty wire sticking up from the pine needles like some red leafless vine—I turn away from where my road goes on to cross the bar ditch and connects with Farm Road 3941. Instead, using the shovel as a cane, I move slowly through the saplings so I’ll come out onto it a long ways from the house. My ribbons flutter in the slight breeze. I ease across a low spot and cross another abandoned road. I stop to breathe but I don’t sit down. That day I’d been on the road until after dark. I crawled up this slope and sat listening to them in the car. The windows were down. They rocked its stiff springs. She kept saying, “There, right there. No, right there.” But he didn’t seem to be getting it right. He shouted “Nancy,” and the woods came back with its sounds of frogs, an owl far away along Bridgett Creek.
    They began again. Something I could never do. Only once and I melt away to sleep. The small house in the quarters full of people noises and the heavy odor of kerosene and boiled supper. She called it my dick. What I’d thought of as my thing, what Mothermae had called it when she washed me in the metal tub we’d gleaned from somewhere.
    We fought and drank and sat on the porch. And everything else, I guess. Years ago. She’d drink the whiskey we got in Mason jars and at almost sunup she’d hit me with her fists as we lay on the bed. I’d jerk awake, the others beginning to get up. Coughs and the last deep snores from the soundest sleep. “Goddammit,” she’d shout, “I can’t even sleep. Why can’t I sleep, you bastard. Laying there snoring. Get out, goddammit. Go on home to ‘Mothermae I.’”
    â€œNothing turned up yet?” Mothermae’d ask. And I’d shrug and walk back into Luxor to drink and sleep with her. With Kay.
    Until I couldn’t anymore. When they burned most of Shady Bend down. Black and white. And Kay just sat on the porch, drinking, and never let the jar touch the floor. Hugging it between her thighs.
    I stepped over one of the white bastards outside of town. Someone had laid him out cold, a brick propped against his temple.
    But I don’t count any of that. So maybe I didn’t lie to the first priest or later to Father Stephen and the thick heavy Jesus, now a grown man, on the wooden cross on his vast chest. “No, I’ve never had a job.” Besides, all that was before Social Security shit.
    She still sewed. Up to the very end. And I complained about my back for years until one day I just stopped in the middle of the sentence because both of us were tired of hearing it.
    People came to me over the road. I gleaned the road.
    Like now, when I come up out of the ditch, deeper here than anywhere else except at the grate where it drops sharply into the creek. That’s tomorrow. I admit I’ve pushed it up a day. One day only. That’s bad enough. I won’t do it again. Never have before, that I can remember. I can’t begin to be haphazard now; I’ll miss something valuable.
    Today the clouds are low. The gray light is warm. The asphalt is damp though there wasn’t rain last night. Along here once a car ran off the road and rolled through the fence—the posts, metal now, were spindly cedar then. I heard the whump of it all from the house.
    No one was killed. Or even hurt. Back then the road was slow and the cars heavy and strong. I helped two white women up the bank and we talked for a long time until a delivery truck for a meat-packing plant stopped. We shook hands and waved. I heard the wrecker at the car the next day, but I didn’t go look. I already had a pair of earrings and leather gloves which I