Yonder Stands Your Orphan Read Online Free PDF Page B

bucket in the shade of the willows and cypresses.
    This man was a veteran of Korea and Vietnam. Melanie had seen him in Redwood one Veterans’ Day. His name was John Roman, and he was proud of the Indian in his blood and adored his wife, Bernice, who looked even more Indian than he did. On his last tour he was shot three times, twice through the shoulder and once through the mouth, in a cane field at twilight. He was heavy even then and bore it well. He listened to Chet Baker on the tape deck over and over when he was in the hospital. He belonged to the world of smoky old jazz clubs and wanted fervently to return to it. He loved how this white man held his tones with an old sincerity, even when he was lacking teeth. He felt allied to Baker because now he too had missing teeth from the gunshot through his jaw. “My Funny Valentine.” Neverenough of that. He was planning to sing like that himself when he got back to Bernice in Mississippi. He would struggle for the tone as the injured Chet Baker did. He sang with a whistle from the side of his mouth. He went to San Diego, Houston, New Orleans, then Jackson, Mississippi, where she waited in the airport.
    She put her finger in the dimple where his cheek had sunk to the gap. “What you gonna do now, old soldier?”
    â€œWear out my ass. Wear sandals.” White was on top of his hair.
    He wasn’t just coming home. He was making a home, and his ass was going to be nailed to it. They bought a Walter home on stilts near a pleasant green bayou a hundred yards from the reservoir road. The home was made to collapse about the time he and Bernice died together. Passersby could barely imagine the exquisite joy inside this meek home. John Roman himself could hardly believe his pleasure when he touched the front doorknob of this, his own settlement.
    Melanie watched him and wondered why he had fought. For this home?
    Last week a rain had come on suddenly and so white that her mind reflected to another rain in Caw, Texas, in the thirties, when she was a child. She was on the esplanade in front of the hardware store waiting for her father, a cattleman and well digger, inside. She was abruptly frightened by a white rain out of earthquake thunder, a rain of such density she could not discern buildings across the street. She looked five minutes into a writhing blanket of it and believed she saw forms go over, arms of darker frantic air. She had not seen a rain like this since, until last week on the cove when she was watching the heavy black man fishing from his bucket. She could not make him out in the downpour and thought it was because he was not there, was someplace dry. Yet when therain dispersed, the man still sat holding his cane pole in the mist. He was drenched and he was singing. His motorbike lay in a puddle, knocked over by the storm.
    It was a feat how he balanced his buckets and pole on the skinny machine. Big sandaled feet banked on either peg like underwings. The fish were in wire baskets saddled across the fender behind him.
    She wanted to be his friend but was not sure how to go about it.
    When you take someone for a friend, you feel you owe him something, she decided. You have owed him far back into unconscious time and will spend the rest of your days giving to him. The man brought tears to her eyes. White hair and wearing overalls, unconscious of her. She watched him pour Stanback powder into a Pepsi one afternoon. Then he drank it down in one draft. She wondered if he was a saint. If he had served a larger power without whimpering these years while she had served almost nothing but civility. Her parties among the chattering phlegmatists of the campus. Driven from fecklessness to symbols.
And yourself
, she thought in her nainsook,
you want him to be Uncle Remus goes to war, then the old happy fishing patriot. Who am I, old as he is and more? I might be an advanced case of local poet. A trivial and obvious woman, alone
. She wrote nothing.
    Melanie