Yonder Stands Your Orphan Read Online Free PDF Page A

something heavy and odorous in the trunk, but he was not paid to smell or reason. He was sent to get the thing below water in a twenty-foot pool of bayouat the rear of his uncle’s land. A busted route of saplings and clipped post oaks was all there was for a path. He let it, a 1948 Chevrolet, below the chilly water, Missouri tag sinking, purple, at last. “Show me.” Then he strolled back, sopping wet, to his chain-smoking uncle’s house, careful to shout hello because the man kept a .22 Magnum rifle at his lodge. God knows what for, except for those who would poach or harm his many dogs and cats.
    Egan’s uncle was a decrepit Irish ex-priest, sent to minister to Mississippi, which the diocese described as a third-world country, forty years ago. The poverty of blacks, whites, the paucity of Catholics. But slowly he had turned landowner. His name was Carolus Robert Feeney, but he had long since gone by Carl Bob. He bought a lodge near Eagle Lake and made his peace with the lord of the coons, lynx, bobcat, armadillo and the rolling vinery of the lower Delta jungle. Now he was a pantheist and fairly profane in this faith.
    His nephew Egan still loved him and appeared at odd times to make repairs to the lodge. In these chores he had found scriptures in the house and converted to Protestant ecumenism although railed at by his uncle, who now despised all churches.
    Feeney loved Egan too. He nursed him through the jitters of several whiskey and methedrine collapses. The old man knew nothing of the underwater Chevrolet, as Egan knew nothing of its story. Neither Large Lloyd nor Edie, Mortimer’s right hands, had any idea where it rested.
    Scores of corpses rested below the lakes, oxbows, river ways and bayous of these parts, not counting the skeletons of Grant’s infantry. The country was built to hide those dead by foul deed, it sucked at them. Back to the flood of1927, lynchings, gun and knife duels were common stories here. Muddy water made a fine lost tomb.
    It was just seven years ago Egan had been the driver who felt silent forms in the car seats beside him wanting to scream and party. When the car went under, he loved even the sweat on his brow. Done. The Christian antiapotheosis.
Now
, he said,
let’s really get wasted, brother monkeys. Mister Me, I be dead
.
    Two days later a deputation arrived at the body shop in Redwood. Dr. Harvard and Melanie Wooten in the front seat of her station wagon. The culprit Ulrich in the back, hangdog. Behind them they towed the ATV, dinged up and muddy. It was not Ulrich’s only misadventure with a local machine. Two years ago he had bought a used Jet Ski and had gone airborne with it on the other side of the cove. Went out of the lake and pile-drove into blackberry bushes and wild vicious yucca plants. The steering column had driven his scrotum upwards into some unprepared cavity, and the yucca spears had entered his thighs and stomach very deeply before he rolled off into the lesser crucifixion of blackberry thorns. He could not recall what he was trying to prove. Perhaps atonement for the maimed pilot in Huntsville. Or all of his life after the war.
    Melanie came out to the body man, Ronny, who was waiting with the same rubber hammer, and with Percy and Marcine too. They had squabbled but returned because there was nowhere else in Redwood to gather. Marcine was much taken with Melanie, who was elegant and lovely, but in a natural way that would have suited any outfit. Marcine was not aware there were any women in this county, young or older, like Melanie. And the older woman did work hercharm, as the dignified Harvard leaned on the car hood smoking a pipe, her ally.
    Melanie explained that Ulrich was very sorry, he was a sick old fellow with rare convictions. He had brought money to take care of the broken vehicle and the rifle. He had little money left. She felt he had been punished. Now he needed his woody and his walker back. The body man stood aside