Warm Dark Stone

[CharmedFan28]

I am finding the serious side of this story interesting. I think Cade and Donovan are so suitable for each other because they make each other happy. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!

 

[ChrisGibson]

All i can really say is thank you. When I knew I would be coming back to these characters, I didn't want to come back to them with the same problems and keep telling the same story, and it seems like this semi painful installment is working out. They do make each other happy, Cade and Donovan, and they really do understand each other. Yes. They are soul mates.

 

[ChrisGibson]

“What do you do when you tell a story?” Cade asks him.
Donovan always answers a question with a question. He says, “What do you do when you write a song?”
“I just play it,” Cade says.
“Go and play one,” Donovan says.
Cade gets up, and when he gets up he’s sure that his answer wasn’t entirely true, and sure that Donovan knows it too. Donovan is lying on his back ,fat on chicken and biscuits. He was so sure he wouldn’t have that last piecw, but there it is, he did, and Cade comes back, though he has been playing since he picked the guitar up and lifted it over his shoulder.
“This is old,” he says and he sings. “I wrote this last year. I’m just getting to it now.”
Once Cade has a guitar in hand, he always sings what he is saying, even before the actual song beings.
He sings, “I think I like it.”

Today is the first day you wake up
and do not mind the sun in your face
It is seven degrees and you ask him
where the fuck he’s been
You are now determined
To determination join hope
To hope join joy
Those old cigarettes were bad for you
From now on try the news ones
You can’t eat those donuts everyday
Try these instead
You thought in the back of your head you knew
that everything they said was bullshit
Make your own bullshit
Mix it in the ground
Grow wildflowers!


He says, “Now I know what you mean.”
“What I mean?” Donvoan speaks and Cade is not sure if he is being innocent or drowsy.
“When I write, when I sit down to work on a song, I put a bunch of words down and a lot of tunes, sometimes I find the right tune. Some times the tune comes right away and then the words come next, but a lot of times I play with the words, and then I look at them, and the way that a sculptor pinches away the clay he doesn’t need, I get rid of the words, the words that are redundant, or not quite right, the words that don’t describe things as they are. I keep working on it until I get to something true, and then I throw the lie away.”
Opening one eye and smiling, Don says, “Well then you know. Now you know.that’s what I do.You can lie in real life to whomever you have to, but you should never lie in your stories.”
Very often Donovan starts by saying just one thing, and then he realizes he is not finished. He starts off not really feeling much like talking, and then he realizes that now that he is talking, he is not completely through. He rises a little and says.
“Because when you tell your story, the story is the one time you are telling it to someone who cannot see your face and you cannot see theirs. I remember creative writng classes.”
“I hate those.”
“Yes,” Donovan said, “and the people would go around and read in front of each other. What truth could you tell once you knew you would have to read it out loud to a room full of people looking at you. But writing is secret. Poetry is secret. They have those slam poets, those streets poets who are always performing, but that’s vanity. That’s bullshit, really. They might tell you bards did it in ancient times, but bards were not singing their own songs. They weren’t singing about their periods and abortions, their insecurities about their penises or skin color. When you are writing from the heart of the very specific you to meet the heart of a specific other, then faces are in the way. You have the printed word and voices. Even personality is in the way. In the secret of reading and writing you can tell the truth. In fact you must tell the truth. It’s your only purpose.”

Incongrously, Cade thinks about anonymous sex. About those times when he would meet men he didn’t know who did not know him in a dark room and have the most intense unions, fusion without persona, oneness without the ties of future duty, unions without false story. Touching, kissing, licking, humping, moaning, crying, fucking, spilling. That became its own story, an absolute and essenitial, terrible and mighty truth.

He needed to go back to that house. He needed to go back to the house he’d stayed alone in for two days, that had come alive when Donovan had entered it, when Donovan had brought Rob and ensured that his cousin would follow and Don had filled the house with the smell of roasted chicken bathed in butter and sage and the chicken had come from the oven fat and proud of itself. The skin was crisp and sweet like candy. Cade needed to go back to that house and deal with it when it was empty and charmless, and be there for his father if his father ever woke up.
During the summers he returned to Ely and stayed in his mother’s house, the same house where she still lived on Taylor Street. Even then Deanna made sure she never came home. She was always doing something on her breaks, Habitat for Humanity, working in a traveling circus. One year she had been digging wells in Appalachia.
“It’s not because I really want to build houses for people,” she said had. “I just don’t want to be at my own.”
One summer she had got a job on a cruise ship. Cade was working at the ice cream parlor during the day, then at night he would stop home and go to Nash’s house. Now and again he ate there.
“It’s nothing to do in this place,” Nash said as they sat on the front porch of his house looking at empty Johnson Street, “But I like it.”
Across the street were other houses, and beyond the high trees and down the road was downtown and then the beach.
“Hey,” Nash said. ‘You wanna do something crazy?”
`Cade didn’t ask what. He just got up and Nash got up and they went to Nash’s car. Nash drove to downtown, and then just outside of the little downtown with its stone court house and two story shops, and he stopped in front of Cornerstone Church.
“What are we doing?” Cade asked.
Nash didn’t answer. He just went around the back, took out a key and opened it. He walked through the narrow back halls Cade vaguely remembered and came out into the long offices.
“It’s empty,” Nash said, offhandedly. “There’s no one here, so don’t even worry.
Now there would probably be cameras. In fact, Cade imagined, after what had happened this day there would have had to be cameras. Nash went to the office door that read Skip McDonald, Assistant Pastor, and then he unlocked the door and went in.
` Cade expected some kind of trauma. He expected to feel something. Instead he felt like he wasn’t quite sure he remembered this office. In his memory it was so claustrophobic. Now it was big, and it was cool with the air conditioning. Dark at the end of the day. Unremarkable in its religious kitsch and modern office furtinure.
While Cade was looking around, thinking all this, it took him a while to process what he was now hearing, and he turned around and saw that Nash, legs wide apart, was pissing on the carpet.
“Take that,” Nash, said with the last two precise squirts, and pulled himself back into his shorts. There was a steaming dark puddle on the wet carpet and Nash said, “He fucked me right here. He put my face down in the carpet and he fucked me right in this spot where I peed. He sang to me. He said, Jesus wants you for a sunbeam. And then he said that he would have been a good man if I didn’t tempt him so much. I was the Devil and he needed to do something about the Devil. He said,” Nash continued almost tonelessly as he walked along the shelves, and found a photograph of Pastor Skip and his wife, “that he needed to FUCK the Devil.”
With precision, Nash smashed the picture against a table.
He took up a laptop.
“This is mine,” he said. “I need one. I’m taking it. You take something too.”
Cade didn’t speak. Skip had never said anything like that to him. Cade was numb. None of this seemed real, but he knew he hated Skip McDonald. He remembered him playing music to youth groups, and he crossed the room and took his guitar.
“You know how to play?” Nash said.
“I’ll learn.”
They locked Skip’s office up snd went to the front, to the sanctuary. It was like a large and empty ear. There was the stage, or was it the altar? where the choir sang. Nash said there was a contemporary band that played now.
“I was in it the last few years.”
They stood in that place, and then Nash, who had never said anything about sex outside of what Pastor Skip did to them both, turned to Cade and said, “You wanna have sex? You wanna have it right here?”
Cade Richards envies, when he listens to Don, or when he reads Don, how his lover always knows exactly how he feels, can remember things so well. Cade knows he did things, but he can’t always remember the feeling of them or the reasons around them. He recounts them, sometimes, almost clinically. Sometimes they are like the plots of movies he’s seen, and not his real life. He knows he and Nash had sex on the floor in that empty church. Cade was a Catholic. This place was just a glorified theatre to him. He hadn’t been with anyone since before he’d paid for Ashley’s abortion. He didn’t even like to touch his own body. Gradually remembering, the feeling come’s back to Cade’s memory. He remembers he and Nash, both fucking on the floor, holding to each other. None of this had just been a lark. They needed revenge. They needed to get back at this man as best they could, and at this place, and they needed each other. They needed to feel.
“It wasn’t just having fun,” Cade remembers. “That sex wasn’t just fun. That orgasm wans’t just fun.”
He remembers it now, the two of them in the darkness, both clinging to each other as the coming ripped itself from their bodies like lava from Krakatoa. They had cried out, filled the audiorium with a desperate almost weeping noise. An eruption of so much slick semen pumped out between their bellies that it dizzied their bodies. The world spun, Cade’s legs lifted and curled back, and Nash’s body wriggled like he was trying to leave his skin. Starbursts of red and blue swam before their eyelids. Grasping and gasping, they left their anger and found true feeling again.

“We did what we could,” Cade said. “At the time that was all we could do to take back any power we thought we’d lost. To feel like people again. No matter how silly and vulgar it sounds.”
But Donovan never judged.
“That’s where you got your guitar from?”
“Yeah,” Cade said. “It’s funny how I don’t think about it. Funny how it doesn’t traumatize me or anything. I just felt like… I’d better learn to play it. Maybe that’s a metaphor. You know? Making something good out of somehtig bad.”
Then he said, “But I should have—we should have reported that bastard. We should have done something instead of pissing on his floor. But at the time that’s all we knew to do.”
“Whatever happened to Pastor Skip?”
Cade smiled as they were driving toward Frey’s house.
“Eventually someone did do something.”
“What about Nash?”
Cade’s face looked blank, and then he looked very sad.
“Things don’t always turn out for everyone. But then you know that, Don.”


MORE IN A COUPLE OF DAYS

 

[CharmedFan28]

That was an interesting insight into songwriting. This is an enjoyable story. I am sad to hear we won't hear more of Nash. Will we find out what happened to him? Great writing and I look forward to more in a few days!

 

[ChrisGibson]

Well, Matt, i'm glad you asked. Nash is not gone from our story and we will return to him. We will find out everything. I wouldn't do some shit like that you you! I will ask you though: what was the insight into songwriting, cause I forgot what Cade says. Also, I noticed something and wanted you to notice it too. Cades signature instrument came to him from his abuser. What do you think that was about? And cast your mind back to Rossford and remember that Dylan's signature instrument came from Nick Ferguson, a forty five year old he was sleeping with when he was fourteen and fifteen. I didn't do these things intentionally, but when I realized them it made me ask the question: just because Dylan went into that relationship on his own, and made it happen, and just because he said he was eighteen, does that clear Ferguson from being an abuser? After all, it's hard to imagine not stopping and wondering if Dylan really was eighteen, or if a forty something year old couldn't be using a freshly minted eighteen year old. Just a few things floating in my mind.

 

[CharmedFan28]

The insight into songwriting I thought was just that their songs were so personal to them. I did notice about Cade's instrument came from his abuser, I don't know what that really says about his songwriting. I don't know what to think about Dylan's situation either but he certainly did what he wanted to do.

 

[ChrisGibson]

CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER THREE

That night, before Freddy knew everything, he realized he’d been getting angry at his brother for years. He was so angry with his sister he’d forgotten it. He heard on the radio one morning an article about how angry people who did not express it went from being passive aggressive to harboring private resentment and then ended up in anxiety. And he realized that, in some way, Cade was always leaving. He had spent years asking Cade to stay, to be be around like an older brother should, and watching him walk away. Cade wouldn’t stay at Dad’s house. Cade wouldn’t stay in town, and that first night at the hospital, Cade wouldn’t stay at Mom’s. He locked himself away, like he always did, and stayed in that big old house by himself. Not that the grey blue bungalor with the plain porch was so huge, but with just one person it was plenty large.
On Cade’s second night back in Ely, before Don came to get him, Freddy asked Cade if he would sing.
“I don’t have my guitar. I didn’t really grab anything. You needed me, so I came without thinking.”
Was that true? Freddy had never thought he was that important. He’d thought just the opposite. He said, “I have mine.”
“You have a guitar?”
“I do. It’s not very good. It needs tuning.”
Cade looked at him and then said, “Alright.”
Freddy imagined Cade wanted to know when he’d begun playing the guitar, where he’d gotten it from, and Freddy didn’t much want to say he’d gotten it because Cade got one, because he thought, in the back of his mind, that maybe he might play with his brother one day.
He brought it, and Cade surveyed it with a little amusement and some affection.
“You weren’t lying,” he said. “This really is a bit of a mess. But,” he began, brushing the strings with the back of his hand, “with a little love, we can get this back to life.”
While he tuned the guitar, their mother came down.
“That’s real pretty, Cade.”
“Mom, it’s not even a song.”
But then at last, he began to sing a song, and Freddy knew it was from the album he used to listen to, Cade had picked that song for him.

“I'm a ship, I'm a ship, I'm a ship
Out on the sea
None of my love…”

He stopped and looked at Freddy.
“What?”
“It was your song. You sing it too.”

“Floating wild come back to me
So I write you a letter, I'll write you a letter
With this here pen
Don't make me wait, don't make me wait
'Cause I'm your friend.”

As Cade sang, and even now that Cade had gone, Freddy thought of other nights, when his brother who may have not always been around, but never begrudged Freddy his company, and had started growing a fringe of facial hair at eighteen, would be home for the summer, on the porch playing, and Nash would be there with him, not singing, but listening, letting Freddy join in, hit Cade’s cigarette, watch Nash and his older brother smoking, taste beer on the porch. Mom never minded that.
He wanted to be them. He did not want to be the Nash that came along later with sallow skin like rouch tissue paper and dirty hair, but the boy with full firm golden skin and the radiant face, hair the color of butter and gold in his eyes. And he wanted to be his brother, alabaster to the gold of Nash, black haired to the golden. He wanted to be the best of the friendship between them.
The music was still in him and so was that summer night and the summer nights after.

“Plant me in the garden
Don't you let me roam
'Cause love is a feeling like a warm dark stone
Plant me in the garden
Don't you let me roam
'Cause love is a feeling like a warm dark stone.”

He is biking in the wide, dark and undangerous night across town, through downtown where the high school kids are on their cruise lap, to his mother’s house. Cade and Nash are not on the porch. There is the yellow light of Cade’s room. He goes to the garage and gets the ladder. He never thinks of coming into the house like a normal person. It’s not why he’s here. He climbs up the side of the house and looks into the window. Mom has put up the white lace curtains that are enough privacy for anyone looking from downbelow or across the street, but not for this. Through the sheer whiteness, in the golden light of a lamp covered by Nash Taylor’s shirt, he watches his brother, long and white and coverd in some places with the softest dark hair, kissing, stroking turning around and around with the golden form, the round hills of ass, the round sleekness of thigh that is Nash. Freddy watches the gold bodyand the white one, the light and dark move together on that bed, and everytime they touch Freddy aches. When they kiss, his eyes sting with longing and his body shakes. When their mouths and fingers do things to each other, it physically hurts Freddy. He wants to cry out please let me in! Please. Love me. When his brother, kneeling, comes in Nash’s hands, heat like sunstroke sears Freddy and he almost faints and falls from the ladder.



All summer he pretty much knows when to come. When he sits on the porch and sings with them, his face is hot and his heart is light, and it hurts all at the same time. He knows he shouldn’t come back and watch them in private, but he can’t help it. Tumble and tumble, and one body face down, the other body covering, Cade’s white butt cheeks flexing or Nash’s golden ones as they pump, limbs twisting, thighs encompassing, voices crying out, laughter, the kissing of eyes and lips and mouth an hair. He cannot stay away from it, Sometimes it is dark and he watches as best as he can. Always his cock throbs with a holy longing.

Yeah, love is a feeling like a warm dark stone
Love is a feeling like a warm dark stone.

The next year when Cade comes home, Nash never comes over. The next summer there is no Nash in the upstairs bedroom. That summer, Freddy often stays over, sleeps in that room where Cade was with Nash and hopes to absorb from the walls, the lamp the bedsheets, some of the love of that summer. But Cade seems tired a lot, a little frustrated, and there are rumors that Nash is into drugs.


Yeah, love is a feeling like a warm dark stone
Love is a feeling like a warm dark stone


MONDAY: THE RETURN OF COLOSSUS OF RHODES

 

[CharmedFan28]

That was a great conclusion to the chapter! It was nice to read some more of Nash. I especially liked the last line "Love is a feeling like a warm dark stone." I look forward to more of this story soon and to more of Colossus Of Rhodes.

 

[ChrisGibson]

I like the line too. I wish I could take credit for it, but when I heard the song for the first time in years, I knew the name of the story and what the story would be about. So, let's be thankful for the Be Good Tanyas

 

[ChrisGibson]

F O U R

UNFINISHED
BUSINESS​

“Whatever you are in, I am in. Whatever we’re in, we’re in this together.”

- Isaiah Frey


That second night they all stay in Mom’s house, their house, the house they knew. All the time he lived in Ely he hardly ever crossed town to see Dad, or to see his brother for that matter, who drifted down from Dad’s place to stay during the summer nights. After Ashley, after his dad gave him the money it seemed to put more of a wall between he and his father, not less. He was always embarrassed about it, always wanted to pay the money back, always thought the money and the whole event was better not remembered. And now his father was in the hospital in the middle of town, down a block and behind Cornerstone. All of his weird life was here in one place the size of three street blocks.
Mom had suggested they all get Burger King, and she was about to pay for it like they were children. Cade felt distinctly like an asshole for not being nicer in the hospital. Freddy was letting Mom pay for his Whopper when Cade swept in and said, nevermind, “I’ve got us all covered.”
They sat in the kitchen eating, and Cade felt something. If he was more poetic, or more full of shit, he’d say he felt like he wanted to cry. But he felt like he wanted to be better, not be so angry. He felt like he needed to come here more often. He looked at his mother, and there were lines in her neck and around her eyes. When had she started to get old? Her hair was colored. It used to be a very natural blond, but there was that orange in it that he associated with cheap Midwestern hair dye. She was tired, life was tiring, it was so hard, not kind, nto easy. It was a wonder if you made it through.
The other day he has seen a post on the Internet and it said that people needed to stop being victims and the reason ninety nine point nine percent of people failed is because they couldn’t get out of a victim mentality. He’d been angry. He deleted the post because whoever wrote that had never known that victims were real. Anyone only had to watch five minutes of news, see the trails of people traveling through Central America to Mexico, being raped across the desert into America only to be imprisoned and then turned back, to know that the world was a big altar. Not all the sacrifices made it. And there was his mother, with her own hard times. He put his hand over hers and kissed her on the cheek.
“Why, thank you, Cademon,” she said, smiling, shocked, and he felt like an asshole that she was shocked by his love.
After dinner he cleaned up and put his coat on. When his mother asked him where he was going, Cade said, “Just on a little walk.”
“Be careful out there. It’s so cold. And it’s supposed to snow again.”
He kissed her on the cheek, and left, going down Mitchell street and walking toward downtown. Every place in Ely proper was only about ten minutes walk to downtown. How had he become this university creature, ironic, playing folk guitar, that Don had met, when at the end of the day he came from here But then, he supposed, most university kids came from here and were trying to make up for it.
He went walking because he wanted to find love agan. He wanted to think of himself as loving, but he looked back on so much of what he had done, especially in Ely, and saw himself as a creature sorely lacking in love. Not someone who wants love, but someone that, in those last years, love could not get to and someone who, after so much had happened, wasn’t able to love as he should. He was beginning to. He was getting better at it, and he thought, Maybe I’ve come back here so I can really get it right, really be a good person again.
Come back to the fucking scene of the crime.
He stopped in front of Holy Angels, the old brick church where they had gone before Mom had decided they should go to Cornerstone. It was on the corner of Randolph and Wait, and it felt in need, not just trustworthy but old and needing someone’s love. He remembeed how chilly it would be in the winter, how hot in the summer, with those great turning fans that blew so loud turning Mass. He remembered the smell of incense and the faint smell of toilet water, the rickety creaking of the wooden floors, the Do Not Walk Up sign over the steps to the old choir loft that could no longer hold a choir and no one could afford to fix. This was no Saint Peter’s Basilica.
He came up the steps into the hollow ear of the the porch of the main door and rattled it. If life was magic and if magic was like movies, the door of the old church would open. But the church was locked. He thought, if I could light a candle and kneel at the altar, I could find love again. But if he could light a candle and kneel at the altar, he’d feel ill at ease like he usually did in empty churches and wonder about the mice that were probably skittering about. The first small flakes of snow were falling. His mother was worrying. Home was where love was. It was time to return.

He was in sweet spirits when he came home, when he sat with his family for a while and they planned to go to the hospital about ten tomorrow. He had offered to drive his mother to work. They watched some television for a half hour and then went to bed, or at least Cade did, and he was surprised by how tired he felt.
But peace is tricky, and once you’ve found it, it’s almost as if anything pops up to steal it away, and so he woke from a dream worried and angry, and he didn’t want to think about it. Don always said, write it down, write it down, for Don was used to his nightmares, and the nightmares generally revolved around past family struggles and parental resentments. Cade woke up feeling disgusted and angry. He walked around his old room in this house, and was glad and upset at the same time not to be in his father’s house across town. He finally walked downstairs into the kitchen and the light was on, and Freddy was there.
“You couldn’t sleep either?” Freddy said.
“I had a bad dream.”
“About dad?”
Cade shook his head. “Not really. Not exactly.”
Freddy didn’t try to parse that out. He just said, “You want some cocoa with Scotch in it?” and showed his cup.
Cade nodded, and his brother mixed the cocoa and the hot milk that still sat on the stove with its thin skin. Cade was almost surprised because his brother never did anything for him, and Freddy poured in so much Scotch that Cade wondered if he would be able to taste the cocoa.
“I was so worried when Dad had his stroke,” Freddy said. “I still am. But I was worried about us not being together.”
Freddy was quiet for a while and then he said, “I was worried of being on my own with it, I think. Just me and Mom’s fear and Dad’s… coma. I needed you all.”
“I left a message with Deanna,” Cade said, “but I haven’t heard from her..”
“Me neither,” Freddy said.
“I went walking around to old Holy Angels.”
“To light a candle like they do in the movies.”
“In the movies churches are open and you can do that. Every church is locked now.”
“You’d think in Ely that wouldn’t be the case,” Freddy said, shrugging. “I mean, it’s Ely. What would happen?”
Then Freddy said, “Do you remember Cornerstone? When Mom made us go.”
“Made me go. You wouldn’t.”
“I was an ass.”
“Or just strong.”
“No,” Freddy disagreed. “If I was strong I would have left Ely.”
Freddy said, “Did you ever know that pastor, Pastor Skip they called him?”
“Yeah,” Cade said. “I new him.”
Freddy looked at him for a long time ,and then he said, “Well that fucker went to jail for a long time.”
“What?” Cade sat up.
“Yeah. This kid reported him. Turned out he’d been molesting guys for years. Like teenagers. Little boys. And mom said that the reason she left the Church—the Catholic Church—was because of priests, but, can you imagine, all the time this cree—”
Freddy stopped talking.
After a while, Cade realized Freddy had stopped talking.
At last, Freddy said, “I hadn’t thought about it until now, but I’m just going to ask: he didn’t hurt you did he? I mean, you weren’t part of that?”
“Nash was,” it was easier for Cade to say. Then he said, “I was too.”
Freddy made a pained noise. He started to reach out to touch Cade, then stopped, unsure of his reception.
“I wonder if that’s why all that stuff happened to Nash,” Freddy said. “If that’s why he killed himself.”
“We don’t know he did it on purpose.”
“He O.D.ed,” Freddy said. “He was just twenty-five. You’re right, we don’t know but…. Is that why you’re always so unhappy? Because of what that man did?”
“I’m not always unhappy,” Cade said. Then, “Am I?”
Suddenly, Freddy took his cup and smashed it against the wall. His hands balled into fist and he banged the table.
“Don’t wake Mom,” Cade put a finger to his lip.
“I’m so mad,” Freddy’s voice shook while he tried to whisper. “I’m so fucking mad. How could that pervert do that to you? How could he hurt all those people? Nash? How can you just go around doing shit like that to kids? He hurt you. He hurt you Cade. How could he do that to my brother?”


Donovan curled into the window seat and watched as the snow began to fall again into the dim blue night. He lit a cigarette and positioned his beer in the window sill before dialing his mother’s number
“Hello, Son,” Adrienne Jones said as her son blew smoke out of his nostril on the other end of the line.
“I just wanted you to know we were home. Well, not at our home, but at your nephew’s home. We’re at Isaiah’s.”
“Where were you before?”
“Cade went off to Ely because there was trouble with his dad.”
“You told me.”
“And then he called and said he needed me to come and get him.”
“So you had someone drive you.’
“No, I drove myself.”
“You can’t drive!”
“I can drive a little, Mother.”
“But it’s so little it doesn’t count, And you’re blind as a bat.”
“I know, but I couldn’t find anyone else, so I took the Land Rover—”
“You took the Land Rover!”
“And got stuck in the snow. And then I was found, and it’s a very long story.”
“Oh, my God. You almost died.”
“I don’t think I did.”
“That was dangerous.”
“Yes, that’s why I didn’t tell you until now.”
“Donovan Shorter, I do believe you’re proud of yourself.”
“I am. A little bit. Now that it turned out.”
“I should hit you.”
“You should, but you’re in Wallington, and we’re in North Fall.”
“Well, don’t you go driving around tonight.”
“I promise I’ll never drive again.”
“I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.”
“I can’t either. Not really, Mommie. But what’s going on with you?”
“Kim was over here. You know she gets dumber and dumber every day.”
“I agree. She doesn’t get smarter. I’ve been telling you that—”
“We’ll you’ve been telling me a lot. You can be a bit of a nag sometimes.”
Donovan blew smoke out of his mouth.
“I’m supposed to be the nag. Not you. Anyway, have you ever had Chinese food?”
“Yes. We both have. We all have.”
“No,” Adrienne said, impatiently, “I mean real Chinese food. Because I was watching na documentary on the History Channel, and on it they were eating dogs, I mean, huge dogs, long dogs, like the ones that run, what do you call the ones at the race track? The ones on the sides of the buses?”
“The Greyhound buses.”
“Yeah.”
“Greyhounds.”
There wasa pause and then Adrienne Jones said, “You know, you can be a real smart ass sometimes.”
“Well, what the hell did you think the dog on the side of a Greyhound bus was called?”
While Cade looked on, Isaiah Frey said, “We all know he’s not getting off that phone anytime soon. Follow me and I’ll show you where you’re staying.”
“Why they serve Greyhounds at the restaurant down the street from you?” Cade heard Donovan demanding. “Where the hell would they get them from? No, the Chinese restaurant doesn’t get its good from China.”
Frey took him through the house to a room upstairs, and while Cade was putting up their bags, Donovan was saying, “I’m getting off this phone now, Ma. Do you want to talk to Sayah?”
“Not really, but tell him I love him.”
“What about Javon and DJ?”
“No,” Adrienne decided, “I never really managed to care about them. Don’t tell your cousins that, though.”
“I love you, good night.
“Love you too.”
“Goodnight.”

MORE TOMORROW

 

[CharmedFan28]

It was nice to return to this story. I still feel so sorry for Cade and all the other guys that were molested by the priest. I think it was a big step for him telling his brother. I don't know what is going to happen with his Dad but I am interested to read whatever happens. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow! I hope you have a good week.

 

[ChrisGibson]

Well, I hope you have a great week too. I'm really enjoying our time in this story, and I wasn't sure about it when I started telling it, but I'm coming to love it too. Cade's past and all of the things that Pastor Skip did are unbearably painful, which is really why for the most part, I didn't describe them.

 

[ChrisGibson]

Isaiah Frey lived in an ordinary two storey dormered house in a neighborhood lined with similar houses on a steep hill over the river He had originally bought it with his friend Melanie and their student loan money, and then, over the course of time, bought Melanie out and now Rob lived here with him. As he led them upstairs, Cade remarked to Felix that the house seemed bigger on the inside than it did on the out. Later, while they were preparing for bed, Frey came down the hall with Rob at his side. He was a little taller than the redhead who was in pajama pants and a snug wifebeater and stood beside him, his arm wrapped about Frey’s waist, his hand brushing his side as if he couldn’t wait to get him to bed.
“That bed is robust. It doesn’t squeak of anything, so you all feel free to fuck and be crazy, and loud a you want to be.”
Without any self consciounss, Frey squeezed Rob’s ass and said, “I know we will.”.
The red head looked smitten, grinning almost idiotically as he touched Frey’s shaven head.
“I haven’t had my way with this man the way I want to in—”
“A day,” Donovan reminded his cousin. “You’ve been gone a day.”
“Is that all?” Rob’s green eyes looked at Frey not quite believing it.
As the two lovers went down the hall to their bedroom, and Cade shut the door to his own he said, “Are we like that?”
“I hope so,” Don said. “I never saw much of a point in staying with someone you didn’t want to put your hands all over.”
Dopnovan said it staidly, from where he sat in front of the mirror in his tee shirt and pajama pants, rubbing cocoa butter into his winter dry skin, and rubbing oil on his scalp. He yawned and Cade said, “Are you ready to go to sleep?”
“I had actually thought of reading a little bit. Or writing in my journal. You know, this is sort of the closest thing we’ve had to privacy in days.”
“I’m going to bed,” Cade said.
“Oh,” Don said, as he capped the lotion. “Well, all right then. You look happier.”
“I am happier. The last days have been… a revelation. You can only take so much revelation.”
“That’s what Saint John said.”
“What?” Cade began. then, “Oh, I get it.”
He chuckled and then he said, “Don, you think it’s time for bed?”
“I just told I was—”
“Don,” Cade said.
He had bathed and changed into jogging pants and sweatshirt almost as soon as they’d come into the house, but now, standing before Don, Cade simply pulled down his jogging pants and his pensi stood out thick and bobbing, pointing at Don, dark and olive from its mound of dark hair.
Donovan stood up, fluidly pulled down his pajamas and lifted his tee shirt. He did not worry about his belly or his imperfect body. He did not turn off the light. He wondered why he’d been so slow to comprehend his lover’s desire.
Donovan called him over and took him in his moth, his tongue landing on and over Cade’s thick round head as he felt strong hands on his shoulders, quivering while Don was holding him like that, the two of them united, Cade trembling while Don sucked on him and ran his own hands over the soft firmness of his ass. Cade had known sex, and lovers. He had been the object of sex, but with Don he felt sexual, large. What had once been powerlessness was now lightness turning to light. Cade undressed and they came to the bed together, making love in the yellow light of the room, starting and stopping to laugh, to chuckle, to rest, to caress, to be startled by the lightning of lust, to massage and be tender before and after the revelation of orgasm the way lovers could.
In the middle of this Cade got up to use the bathroom, pulling on his jogging pants and closing the door behind him. Across the hall, without abandon, he heard the laughs, the shouts, the cries, the moans so deep they went into Cade, of Rob and Frey, and knew they were being honest about what they had said before. He went into the bathroom and when he came out he listened to their lovemaking, the bed creaking fiercely, the swearing, the “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” that matched the furious creaking and must have been Rob’s voice, the tender cries and pleas that might have been either one of them. Even though Cade had just come a few minutes ago, he was fully hard again, and the desire being fulfilled behind that door, made him rush back to his room to create the same thing with Donovan who was ready, waiting, and without weariness.


Isaiah Frey believed life should be as good as it could possibly be. You had to be as good as you could be, as kind as you could be, have as much integrity to whatever you thought you were on this earth to do, and you had to have as nice a life as you could, as much comfort and pleasure as you could. There should always be something of a party about your life. There might be rough times. There certainly would be, but one was not here to be a martyr.
Believing in God did not matter. Faith did. There was a difference. One had to walk in a devoted way, he said, and what that way was no one knew but you. The only God that ever was was the God you met. He had gone to church for years. And then, one day he had stopped. It was more complicated than that. Everything with Isaiah Frey was. He had been watching a television show where a woman, a devout Catholic like himself, had turned her back on God or at least the Church, The whole two seasons she had a great wooden crucifx on her wall, and on the last episode she took it down and put it in the fire. Well, that was a bit dramatic for Frey’s taste. He had simply taken his off the wall and discreetly put it away in a drawer.
The thing was, you never knew when something, especially a religious something, would be useful again. The summer he had made the decision to keep church in his own heart was the summer so many thngs had happened. He’d lost his job teaching at the college. Even though he’d stopped caring much cared about his ex, Jason, for some reason the lack of his love and his inability to grow up plunged Isaiah into a despair. Both of his parents had gotten very ill and nearly died, and he had gone to mass for some sort of comfort, and ended up having a panic attack. Later he realized that much of his panic was caused by trying to adhere to the religion he’d sought comfort in. He hadn’t been one of those superficially angry gay Catholics. He had read the Bible and knew theology and reality well enough to not be troubled about what the Church said about any kind of sexuality. But it was a whole collection of unhealthy ideas about martyrdom and suffering that hung in his head and nearly drove him to madness. He had sat on his sofa that whole day feeing anxious and mad and drained by his inner terror. terror it would take a long time to unpack, and then the next morning he had, with calm, begun to put away his Bible, his rosary, the holy pictures, and he had set up things he had liked over the years. His Vishnu, his Saraswati, his Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching. He would find his own way. No. That was not quite accurate. He would do whatever this way was, sit in front of it, become himself again, simplify, look at the world, breathe again.
God was not in a church. He wasn’t in a book. He wasn’t even in the word or the pronoun. It didn’t do to get rid of the word or the pronoun because people needed something to hold onto. But God was in the appearing, in the present moment, in the silence of things. So, in the same way that once he had gone to church on Sunday or Saturday night, those times became his time to come back ot the silence of things. His Bible reading became his Dhammpada reading or even his poetry reading or no reading at all. The time spent walking to church was the time walking by the river listening to the spirit in the trees. And slowly all of life was becoming holy and all of life was a temple.
Anytime you followed a religion made up by someone else, especially by someone elses that did not have you in mind there was always the danger of hypcorisy. A child molesting priest was a hypocrite, but what about the music director who looked like butter wouldn’t met in his mouth, but kept a bondage chamber in his basement and like to have sex with the church treasurer? And in the end, how long could openly liberal Frey not be hypocritical unless he followed his own way? You could be hypocritically walk any path, but you could never betray your own
And it wasn’t that such high thoughts weren’t on his mind this Sunday afternoon. They always were, it’s just that they were on the back of his mind while he put the chicken in the oven.
He’d prepared it the night before, not like that bland chicken his mother always made, that came out of the oven with its wrinkled white skin salted and peppered, dried out like a bad Thanksgiving turkey. A chicken should never be that way. Saturday he cleaned it and put it in the stock pot with the brine, salt and sage and garlic, paprika and rosemary too, oil and one gallon of water. He set it down on the floor and then after a few hours, lifted it to the refrigerator where it remained ten hours before drying on a rack. These were the details a man never cared about unless a man had to learn to take care of himself, unless he was well to forty and had helped raise two children by the time love finally came. The details of rubbing the bird with the butter and laying out a bed of onions for the roasting, making the salads and the little dessert had to be done in the night before going to bed.
Sunday morning Rob still went to Mass. He drove back to Becket to take his father, and he had implied that it would be nice if Frey came too, and Frey had said, quite simply. No. he had his own church, in the house, in his kitchen, and when it was done, he put the chicken in the oven and prepared the rice and when it was twelve thirty Rob was home, sometimes with his borther. If Javon and DJ were coming, he needed to know because he needed two chickens, If Josh was coming he needed to know. Isaiah Frey didn’t like surprises. It meant less food. It meant a worse time. Sometimes Rob stayed back in Becket and didn’t come back until the evening or till three or four. This was fine. Frey was self entertaining. The chieken was out by twelve, the sauce and the rice were done before twelve thirty, a leg, some side meat, the rice, a glass of wine, a little more chicken, another glass of wine, tea and a cigarette.. A nap. Start all over again. This was Sunday.
This Sunday, Donovan arrived at twelve. He brought Cade, but most important he brought a steaming stock pot of gumbo and two bottles of red wine.
“We have to do this right, goddamnit.”
“”Yes we do.” Frey said, “What was wrong with us that we haven’t been spending time together?”
“Fucked in the head I suppose, but we can do better.”
“Cade, bring your fine, tall ass in here.
“Damn, he’s nice,” Frey rejoiced as if Cade weren’t even in the room.
“Rob ain’t bad either.”
“No,” Frey agreed, “but this one is so tall!”
“He plays the guitar too,” Donovan said, while Cade looked from one to the other.
“Really?” Frey said to Donovan, and then he remembered himself, looked at Cade and repeated, “Really?”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t have brought it, would you? I mean, you probably left it at home.”
“Donovan actually makes me take it everywhere we might be going just in case.”
“And then?’
“Usually people don’t need a troubadour.”
“I love a troubadour,” Frey said.
“I knew you did,” his cousin said.
“Go get the guitar, please,” Frey said, “And I’ll open the wine. I’ll open the chilled one first. They always talk about how French people say wine should be room temperature, but everyone forgets, French cottages didn’t have heat in them.”

MORE TOMORROW....

 

[CharmedFan28]

That was a great portion! It was nice to read some more Frey centric stuff. I don't have much else to say but that this was some great writing and I look forward to more!

 

[ChrisGibson]

Frey lovely! Freylicious!

 

[ChrisGibson]

CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER FOUR

They were half drunk and half asleep on various sofas in the living room when Cade’s phone buzzed in his pocket.
“Uh, hello!”
“Cade!” his brother’s voice was incongruent, hasty. Cade snapped out of his drunkenness a little. What was happening?
“Dad?’ he began.
“He’s awake. Cade. He’s awake.”

Donovan ignored Cade’s haste.
“Not again,” he said, “None of that. The last time we rushed somewhere, we ended up here.”
“You might end up staying a few days,” Frey said while he was rousing himself. “You should probably stop at home and pick some things up.”
“But we’re closer to Ely here than if we went back home.
“You should probably stop at home and some things up,” Frey repeated as if he hadn’t heard.
“Yes,” Yes,” Cade said. “That’s a good idea.”
And then he turned to Donovan and said, “Do you want to stay home this time?”
Donovan was thinking about it, and Frey said, “Don can stay with me. Drop him off here. Or you all can stay back in Willmington. But what’s Don gon do while you’re at a hospital or with your family all day?”
“That’s right,” Cade said, though he was still looking at his fingers. “That is right.”
“I could come,” Don said, but Frey said, “No. That doesn’t make much sense. Stay with us. You’ll prefer it.”

Isaiah Frey was a person of sense and not of sentiment. When he’d met Rob he knew that he was forty, how could he not know, and that roib was barely twenty five. Years of life and learning and coming to deal with things separated them. He came together with him quickly, but Frey had bonded to others just as easily, and they had not lasted, so his whole relationship with Rob he took in stride. They’d met in a small house in what was supposed to be casual, or more than casual, and kept sleeping together and then began living together which, no matter what some peple said, Frey considered to be as good a way of starting a relationship as anything else. He’d had the grand love story that went conventionally, or as conventionally as two men in Midwestern America sleeping together could be considered to be. In the long run it had gone to shit, but then, if any two people stayed together long enough, Frey imagined everything could eventually go to shit.
He and Rob had stayed together during the summer. He had wanted to go down south a little and visit a monastery, andh e took Rob with him. Somewhere along that stay they decided they were really and truly a couple, but Freyt wans’t sure what that meant to Rob. He wans’t sure what it meant to him either. He was too old to think that one true love of one true man would ocme in and take him form all his unhapinessand change his life. He was too old to believe that any mad would show up, remove his residula loneliness and become the center of his world, and quite frnakl,y Rob Dwyer was too young to be that man. He liked living with Rob. More than the sex, which he loved, he treasured the simplicity of Rob being with him, in his home, in his life, He loved waking up and Rob being there, and he loved being in Rob’s arms and certainly hoped that Rob would remain there.
Isaiah was not worried about Rob’s sex life. He wasn’t concerned about Rob cheating on him. Why would he be? He knew that Rob had been in a few relationships, and he knew that Rob had loved a friend of his who lived back in their home town, Pat. Isaiah himself still had more than a lingering affection for two men, the red headed Adam who was recently married, and Jason Henley, the father of his son DJ. Adam was gone. Jason came around rarely. He wondered what would happen if Jason stayed. Would he sleep with him? His body was still stirred by him. Isaiah imagined Rob was the same with his old loves, but he had never asked Rob to not pursue his desires. He just knew Rob’s desires were, like his own, limited.
Frey was not sentimental about people, that is, he no longer expected people to be what they were not, or to be more than people could be. He did not expect a man to be a shelter or a temple or a giant. He did not expect love to do more than it could. But he was sentimental about places. At least, he named all the places that meant something to him. There was a house of an old friend that Frey used to run off to every spring and lock himself up in for about a month. He’d called that Wild Wycott, and now, since Deborah had begun to lend him her family’s little place outside of Becket, the one where he had first met Rob, he called it, the Delight. The Delight wasn’t like Wild Wycott. That cottage was set off in the high old trees and made of stones with a stone porch. The Delight was just a litte house with orangey limestone brick, set in a square yard sunken at a level lower than the road that passed it, and surrounded by a hedge, with a defile and train tracks running behind it. It was a simple place to come for a day, or come when he was waiting for Rob.
You could take the Sunday train to it, and he did, for this was in their first days together. Rob had gone back home on Friday, and Frey thought he would meet up with Rob at the Delight, and together they could go home.
When he had arrived he saw Rob’s Jeep parked at the house, but this was not Rob’s house. It was his if it was either of theirs, and so Frey went in. He heard the sex upon entering. He was too old he was too old he was too old. So much of what he thoughr or did was predicated by the thought of how he was too old, and he was too old to care about this the way some people thought he should. There had been much sex in this house he was sure. Much of it had happened between him and Rob. But now, in the bed where he had been with Rob he saw his lover, his white face flushed, and pressed on it side to the mattress. He was clutching the the pillows, and above him, golden body sweating, muscles pumping, Patrick Thomas, Rob’s first love. Pat,the man who had once forcibly had sex with him one night,and then turned his back and not spoken to him for years. Pat who had eventually begun having sex with Rob’s brother. Pat who, he noted as he watched Pat’s body, olive colored, touched by sweat, his buttocks flexing clenching and unclenching, sweat dripping from his tangles of black curls onto Rob’s back, had managed to be with his nephew Javon and possibly DJ as well. Pat who… got around.
Rob looked like he was crying as Pat was fucking him. His eyes were red, and he kept begging, but his words ended in moans as he was pounded. There was a look of anguish and suffering on Pat’s face and old feelings passed over Isaiah Frey, unable to settle down. Jealousy, but no. humor, but this was not humorous. Disgust? But why? Lust Yes, Lust. And awe. He slipped off his shoes like it was holy ground, and he found himself entering the room. It was his house if it was anyone’s.
In the middle of it, Rob turned to look at Frey, and there was fear and anguish in his eyes. He made a sound, but Patrick had not seen Frey yet. It was only now that he saw Frey in the room and began to stop, But as he did, Frey’s hand touched Pat’s shoulder.
“Don’t,” he said, “stop.”
Pat began to slow his pumping, but Isaiah said, in the slow rhythm, “Do not stop. Don’t stop, Pat.”
And he began to run his hand over the boys smooth body. What violation was this, if Pat was going to be in his house, fucking his man?
“Don’t stop,” he said again, stroking Pat’s damp, hot back, urging him, “Don’t stop.”
Pat didn’t stop, and Frey bent down to kiss Rob. Rob’s hand reached out for Frey and he made a strangled pained noise as Pat fucked him. He clenched Isaiah’s hand as as Pat pounded him harder and harder.
Isaiah said, “Whatever you are in, I am in. Whatever we’re in, we’re in this together.”
He sat there, stroking Rob while Pat fucked him, and reached up to kiss Pat on his mouth because he wanted to. Pat kissed him back and Frey stood up and undressed and lay on the bed beside them, stroking them both, kissing them both until Pat came.

This was not the first time he did what he wanted to because he did not know what was appropriate. There were rules for only so many things, and the world was full of frightened and timid queer men who didn’t need a preacher to tell them they were shameful or their mother to tell them sex was bad because they had internalized both a long time ago. But for certain places and certain things there were no written rules, and because there had been no written rule here, that day Frey had simply followed the rule of desire. That afternoon Pat stayed with them. Frey felt himself expanding like a lotus as he made love to Pat and Rob and all three of them did what they pleased and pleased each other, more than pleased each other, shocked each other, went to the edge that most people were terrified to journey toward. He understood why Rob was crying when he’d come. Toward the evening, in the embrace of Pat and Rob, taken to the limit, Isaiah Frey was shaken out of himself spilled all of himself out of his body and gnashed his teeth while those two lovers took him to limits he had never known.

So that Sunday they drove back to North Fall while the sun was darkening. They traveled in silence, but not in anger, and everything was touched with orange gold. Sunlight glinted on pylons and on the top of the South Shore train glinting now and again to the south.
They had come together in early summer, and in the Eden of their romance no other man had even been an idea. But now, living toether in early fall this had happened and finally, Rob Dwyer said, “When I saw you, when you saw me… I was ready to tell you that this would never happen again. That I was over it. And then things happened. What happened happened.”
Isaiah had not spoken, and he was often this way, not a person to give you words just because you wanted words. Rob understood this now. He wasn’t angry or anything. He was just waiting for words worth saying.
“I pictured myself, on my way home, coming home and thinking to myself, this is over now. This business with Pat is done.”
“But now?”
“How can it e done?” Rob said. “What are we?”
“Does it worry you?”
“It doesn’t worry me,” Rob said, after a while, “but it… I don’t know what it is, so it does. I never pictured that I would love someone, and be someone’s partner, but that the two of us would have sex with another man together. I always thought that was what people with dead relaitonships or desperate people did. And I never pictured myself with Pat. It didn’t seem wrong when it happened, and I told myself it wasn’t wrong, or it wasn’t cheating or whatever, but I also told myself we weren’t any set thing. But when I come home, when I come home to you, it doesn’t feel right. The Pat business.”
“How do you feel about him?” Frey asked, rolling down his window and lighting a cigarette.
The proper question would have been, do you love him? That was what the woman always said sadly to the man before letting him go, or challenging him to stay. But Frey must have already known the answer as much as he knew that two grown men in the twenty first century had no business taking on the roll of a man and a woman in the 1950’s.
“He’s like unfinished business,” Rob said. “He has a hold on me. Had a hold on me. We were talking, talking about everything between us, how things were fucked up. We were best friends and all that died, and everytime I go back home it drums up things, and I guess all those feelings were why we did what we did.”
“But you didn’t do it just the once.”
When Rob didn’t answer, Frey said, “Look, No one’s condemning you. Jason Henley is a great mistake, and I will never live with him, and he will never be the love of my life again, but after we’d split up and he roved and he couldn’t raise a child or be in a household, I still slept with him. I would still sleep with him. At least once or twice. And it’s not that it doesn’t mean anything, but it doesn’t mean enough for me to leave you, or for me and Jason to be something. I’ve never had a marriage or anything like that, and I’ve stopped expecting it. You did, I think. So I’m asking you, is what Jason is for me what Pat is for you?”
“I think so,” Rob said. And then he said, “And I can’t promise that if I go back to Becket and he’s there… that things won’t happen again.”
“That’s all I wanted to know.”
Rob kept his eyes on the road. This was the road where, once upon a time they had stopped the truck and made love while the stars bloomed overhead.
“Are you saying that you won’t leave me?”
“Because of that? No.”
Rob drove on as the sky closed like a lid, and the light began to turn purple.
“Are we in an open relationship now?’
“No. We’re in the same relationship we were in when we woke up this morning only now, at least, we’re open about it. So I guess in that aspect it is open.
“Pat is unfinished business. Jason is too. But aside from them, if you always want something else. if we cease to be enough for each other, then we can’t keep this up, I don’t want an actual open relationship. That’s like a three season room or a car with no engine. If we cant be a four walled home to each other, then we need to end it, but if we can, then let’s be a home.”
Very often Rob did not know Frey’s thoughts, and he imagined Frey kept solitude and wrote so many poems because he himself did not understand all of his thoughts. Rob imagined that if Frey had not discovered him and Pat, or if Frey had not undressed and made love with them, then it would have gone on. Half secrets would become full secrets. As they drove home and the evening turned into night, everything was laid out plainly. Frey never asked how many times Rob and Pat had slept together. He never asked what happened ever, and Rob never had the time or energy to go to Pat again. After the moment when the limits of the relationship were set down by Frey, in Rob’s mind, at least, the relationship was sealed.


UM.... COLOSSUS OF RHODES WILL PROBABLY BE POSTED NEXT..... BUT NOT TOMORROW NIGHT... THAT'S FOR SOME DIFFERENT STUFF

 

[CharmedFan28]

This Pat character seems like an interesting complication for Rob and Frey. I am glad Cade gets to see his Dad again. Great writing and I look forward to whatever surprises you post tomorrow!

 

[ChrisGibson]

Pat Thomas is a complication for everyone, but mostly for himself.

 

[ChrisGibson]

F I V E

SACRIFICE




​

“Maybe you need to learn resurrection.”

- Donovan Shorter





He blinked and drank, and there were staples in his head. Cade’s mother went back to work as soon as her ex husband was conscious, as if she were keeping death watch and now she didn’t have to. This struck Cade as off because he thought that it was when his father was actually awake that he would want someone there with him. When he began to talk, he spoke of people who were not there. He said Steve had come to visit him this afternoon even though Steve had been dead five years.
Stan Richards seemed to have lost thirty pounds and been merged with the body of a skinned chicken, thin neck, peanut head, flapping pale skin. There had been something hhearty there once. Cade didn’t need to stay the entire day. His father slept on again off again, and this time Cade had had the sense to bring his truck.
He sat beside Freddy who had not taken off work, but had the kind of job where he could pretty much come and go, and Cade had forgotten to ask what that job was because, if he was honest, he wasn’t really interested.
“I have to get back to the garden,” his father kept saying,. “I have to get back to the garden. The garden should just be starting to get flowers now.”
Cade looked out of the hospital window, five floors down onto what passed for downtown Ely. The cold snap of last week had given way to something that promised spring, but flowers didn’t seam that near coming, and Cade couldn’t remember a garden.
“We could ask Mom,” Freddy suggested.
“When you all were little we had a garden in the front yard,” their mother said. “You don’t remember it, and I didn’t think your father did either. He used to love to keep it, and to just sit out there and talk to the neighbors as they passed.
“No,” Cade shook his head, “I don’t remember it.”
“And I don’t remember Dad talking to neighbors,” Freddy added.
But on the day that the Orthodox nurse with the wide dark eyes and the wrap about her head said that their father would start therapy the next morning, he kept saying in his newly faint voice, “It’ll be good to get to the garden, and we’ll talk with Henry and Mary. Henry and Mary always like the tomatoes.”

Two things, the first one actually less practical than the other hit Cade.
How would they make a garden for their father, and how would they make his home beautiful for him? It became urgent for Cade, and urgent for Freddy once he’d caught his brother’s gist, to make the house as beautiful as possible, and Freddy said, “We could plant a garden in the spring. Or I could plant one. Maybe you could come and help.”
“Of course I will,” Cade said.
But in therapy, Dad could barely move without a walker, and he kept talking about things that had not happened or were not happening anytime soon. Almost as soon as they were past the idea of making the house nice for him, Cade said out loud, “Who will live for him?”
“I would,” Freddy said. “Like I do now.”
“It wouldn’t be like it is now. He’d take a lot of care.”
When the nurse said that their rehabilitation was at an end and they were recommending that Mr. Richards go to a facility in the next town, it became apparent that he might not be fit to ever go home at all.


The winter snap that had nearly broken the back of southern Michigan and frozen the air till it was ready to shatter gave way to the thirty and forty degree days that set the ice on the beach to dancing rivulets in the light. Under this air of late February crawling toward March, the lake shore shimmered silver as its melting water ran into the great blue of the water. All the ice balls and all the ice volcanoes returned to their natural element and slowly, from the beneath the snow, the earth returned.
When Cade was not with his father or Freddy, he was here on the beach, but he was not the only one. There were runners from up north where happening people who wanted small town life and drove into Holland lived, but there were the true beach people, the people who came here for non running reasons who stood here and walked in slow contemplation, coming as close to the water as they could in this holy time where one could hardly say where water ended and land began.
There was a woman in a red anarak who waved cheerfully at him, and said good morning, and Cade felt himself cheerful and smiling and wished her good morning too. He wished Don was here so they could have the morning together. He went drove back to Wallington every two days, and on the weekend he brought him here. Don was the one who brought lamps and curtains and candles and made the house they hoped their father would return to look like a home. He seemed to know just what to do, and Cade believed much of it had to do with the tall shiny stock pot that soups and gumbos came from, the oven Don tended where roasts came out along with the smell of baking bread.
There was the kindly man walking along the shore. He was not young, but Cade did not want to call him old. He was blond or blondish, his hair was going to grey, and he seemed boylike, but there was age in his face when you came up close. There was a glow about him, and he waved to Cade most mornings, or said hello but left him alone. And it was a leaving him alone, not like so many people who either took up your space or avoided you. Cade actively felt as if this man was leaving him alone.
One day the man was leaving, heading back to his black car when he came up to Cade across the flat damp beach, packed by the snow of the passing winter.
“It clears you, doesn’t it? Clears all the crap away.”
“Yeah,” Cade said, feeling strangely elated that the older man had finally spoken.
“I would say that this is God displaying all of his wonder, if that word hadn’t been ruined by inappropriate misuse.”
“The word wonder?” Cade said.
“The word God,” the man said, and began walking to his car.

It was nearly Ash Wednesday, a thing Cade remembered usually because Don remembered it and not until. But back here, with his mother, he could not help but remember it. She kept saying Lent was on its way. She had a way about her where she did not shove religion down your throat, but if you were in her presence, you were definitely going to hear about it, and this year, traveling from work to here and work to here bringing Don, leaving Don, remembering things past, he felt a desire for an Ash Wednesday. He felt an oldness, an exhaustion of spirit, and the desire to, in his own way, be new.


This is an act of faith, Donovan thinks as he sits down to write. He can write anywhere. It’s all equally hard. The year his first book came out, he was sleeping with Logan and all the while Logan talked non stop in that semi studio apartment where you could stand in the middle of the room and touch all the wals, Donovan sat on the floor, typing. And so, this morning, on Ash Wednesday, in this house, he typed too.
Wind rattled the windows like someone beating the house. Cade was at the facility with his father who was going through therapy.
“We were all there last Sunday,” Cade said. “And Dad told me about when he was back in Hawaii and he used to fly this helicopter he loved so much.”
Donovan was at a loss for what Cade wanted him to say, and finally he said, feeling stupid as he did, “Maybe you can get him on a helicopter again.”
“He never flew in in a helicopter,” Cade said. “And he certainly never piloted one. Do you know he says a squadron of big breasted women guards him every night to keep him safe from the president?”
Here, Don laughed out loud, and Cade said, “It’s not funny, Don.”
“It is funny.” Donovan chided him. “When my father stroked, he swore his next door neighbor was peeking in his windows and worked for the governmnet. He called the police one night and they came and he told them that a giant snake was surrounding the house. Like Ouroboros.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” Cade said.
“The world is full of awful things,” Donovan said. “So we laugh and make them less powerful.”
Cade grinned from the side of his face and opened his mouth, then shut it.
“What?”
“I was about to say I’m not very funny.”
“Not on purpose,” Don agreed.
“White people aren’t very funny,” Cade said.
“Again,” Don said, “not on purpose. You think everything’s the end of the world because your world has never ended. Only your world has ended, my love. Several times.”
“So I need to learn humor.”
“Maybe you need to learn resurrection.”
Donovan went back to his writing. When you did this, you called yourself, either out loud or in your head, a writer, and if you were actually doing it, then you changed your life. Socialization ended. Consumption of much entertainment ended. Assumption ended. Companionship ended. Normal work and normal money ended. Much went away so you could give this imperfect offering, and you loved it. And then the moment you were coming to it was a moment of great terror, a moment sometimes of almost weariness and irritation or despair, a dread that you couldn’t do this, and why the fuck must you do this thing which took so much time, which took so much time even to prepare for? Two cigarettes to prepare for, cleaning the stopped up sink with Drano to prepare for, a flip through the Internet to look at pictures under the heading of “human sacrifice” because—why not?—to prepare for. Even Cade to prepare for.
In his twenties broken men were his distraction from his broken like, from doing what needed to be done. Now he could see Cade was only wounded, not broken, and he could work and tend a wound just fine. Outside, the icicle which had been opaque with cold now glistened as it melted, then fell to the ground with a shatter and shimmer of water.
Everything changes.

Cade drives past Holy Angels. Mass at 12. Maybe he’ll go. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he gets there. Last time he went to Mass he nearly broke out in hives. He couldn’t get all the way through it. He had thought for some time, the damage done to him was from Pastor Skip and Cornerstone Church, that maybe in another church, another face of God could fix it. It was only that day when he came back into that mass with Simon, and why was Simon going to church? that he realized he wasn’t fit for any kind of house of worship.The opening hymn made him itch, and by the time they had gotten to Gospel reading, he had to get outside for fresh air.That was the last time he had attempted church of a kind and now, with the first buds peering from melting ice, he thought there was a chance he might go.
When he asked his mother about it, she said, “I’m going tonight.”
Cade remembered, very specifically what the sign had said.
“Mom, there is no Mass tonight. Not at Holy Angels.”
“Oh,” his mother said looking a little … caught? Found out? “I’m not going to Holy Angels.”
“Where?”
His mother, who seemed so often upfront about her faith, seemed very shy now, and at last, she said, “Come and see.”
She sounded like Jesus, but ruined it by adding, “If you want.”


MORE TOMORROW

 

[CharmedFan28]

I am very interested to see where Cade's mother is taking him. That is sad about Cade's father but thats life I guess. It was nice to return to this story of Cade and Donovan and co and I look forward to more tomorrow!