Eyyyy, said Ignatia. After a hundred years of hard use it would be a miracle. If you only prayed more, she cackled.
Mooshum’s frail shoulders were shaking. Pray for a hard-on! That’s a good one. Maybe I should pray to Saint Joseph. He was a carpenter and worked with wood.
Them nuns never mentioned the patron saint of manaa!
Mooshum said, I will say a prayer to Saint Jude, the one who handles lost cases.
And I will pray to Saint Anthony, the one in charge of lost objects. You’re so old you probably can’t even find your own pecker in those pants Clemence put on you today.
Yes, these pants. They are good material.
One of my other husbands, said Ignatia, the one with the tiny cock, had a pair of pants like yours once. Extremely high quality. He had sex like a rabbit. Quick in-out-in-out but for hours at a time. I would just lay there making things up in my head, thinking my own thoughts. It was restful. I felt nothing. Then one day, something. Howah! I cried. What happened to you? Did it grow?
Yes, I watered it, he said between in-out-in-out. And fertilized it.
Yai! I cried out, even louder. What did you use?
I’m joking, woman. I made it bigger with clay from the river. Oh, no!
All of a sudden I felt nothing again.
It fell off, he said.
The whole wiinag?
No, just the clay part. He was very downhearted. Oh my love, he said, I wanted to make you scream like a bobcat. I’d give my life to make you happy. I said to him, That’s all right, I’ll show you another way.
So I showed him a thing or two and he learned so good that I made sounds his ears had never heard. One time, anyway, we had this lantern swinging from a hook over the foot of the bed. He was going at me like the rabbit and that lantern fell off the hook and hit him in the ass. I heard him tell his friends about it. They were laughing pretty good, then he says, I was lucky though. If I had been doing the deed my old lady taught me, the one that makes her so happy, that lantern would have hit me in the head.
Yai! Mooshum’s tea spluttered from his lips. I gave him a napkin because Clemence had also charged me with keeping food out of his hair, which against her wishes he’d worn the way he liked it, hanging down around his face in greasy strands.
Too bad we never tried each other out when we were young, said Ignatia. You are much too shriveled up to suit me now but as I remember it, you were damn good-looking.
So I was, said Mooshum.
I blotted away the tea that was rolling down his neck, before it reached the starched white collar of his shirt. I drove a few girls out of their minds, Mooshum continued, but when my pretty wife was living, I did my Catholic duty.
No difficulty there, Ignatia snorted. Were you faithful or not? (They both pronounced the word fateful; in fact, every th in this whole conversation was a t.)
I was fateful, said Mooshum. To a point.
What point? said Ignatia sharply. She always supported women’s extramarital excitements, but was completely intolerant of men’s. Oh, wait, my old friend, how could I be forgetting? To a point! Eyyyyy, very funny.
Anishaaindinaa. Yes, of course, she lived out on the point, that Lulu. And you had your son with her.
I started in surprise, but neither one of them noticed. Was it known all over that I had an uncle I never knew about? Who was this son of Mooshum’s? I tried to shut my mouth but as I looked around I saw of course a large number of the guests were Lamartines and Morrisseys and then Ignatia said his name.
That Alvin did good for himself.
Alvin, a friend of Whitey’s! Alvin had always seemed like part of the family. Well. When I tell this story to white people they are surprised, and when I tell it to Indians they always have a story like it. And they usually found out about their relatives by dating the wrong ones, or at any rate, they usually began to figure out family somewhere in their teens. Maybe it was because no one thought to explain the obvious which was always there or maybe as a child I just had not