my eyes fell upon my father standing at the stove within a cloud of steam, and I became riveted by the normalcy of the apparition—Ken Harnett, not grappling with graves and the enormity of death, but clanging a metal spoon against a metal pot, stirring broth. He served soup and I drank it. Later there were crackers and water. By now it had to be at least Tuesday, and wretchedly I began to fret about the classes I was missing and what it meant for the future my mother had plotted. Was I in danger of flunking out? Suspension? This was worse than risking the wrath of Woody and Gottschalk. Then my father returned from an absence and set a stack of papers on my cardboard-box desk. “Your assignments,” he said.
Just sifting through the papers strengthened me. Though sweaty, my fingers itched for my textbooks. I would show them. I would continue to ace every exam. I would turn in work so strong they would accuse me of cheating and I would welcome the challenge. I drifted off imagining their thwarted effort. Let them try.
A cool hand against my face rose me from slumber. I blinked my eyes open and saw an elderly man kneeling above me. He had sparse gray hair and a slotted, wizened face of the darkest chestnut. He wore a white clergyman’s collar. My first thought was one of vanity: my smell, the stink of the grave, this man of God would recoil.
“Hello, Joseph,” he said. “I’m Reverend Knox.” The sonorous buzz of his voice was deep and true.
My throat burned. “Hello.”
Knox smiled so widely the hairs in his mustache pulled away from one another. Bones whined audibly as he twisted his neck to look over his shoulder.
“This boy’s got the boneyard blues.”
Behind Knox I could see my father standing with his fists in his pockets, shuffling his feet like a scolded schoolboy. “His first time. What do you expect?”
“That’s no excuse for laying him on this cold floor,” Knox snapped. “Man, you ought to have your head examined.”
“Stop coddling him,” Harnett said. “It’ll work itself out.”
“Work itself out, my missing foot,” muttered Knox. I gazed at the swaying fabric of his black pants and ascertained that, indeed, the lower half of his right leg was gone. I searched for his face and he waved a hand as if erasing the last few moments. “I got just the cure, Joseph. We gonna put your dad to work, amen?” Knox winked, then called over his shoulder. “Shake a leg to your garden, old man, and get me one of all you got. And not just an armload of nasty onions. We’re also going to need whiskey. Don’t even try telling me you got none. And two lemons, and if that means you need to drive into town, well, I don’t know what to tell you besides you’re running the Lord’s errands now. God is good?”
To my surprise, Harnett moved right away. He lifted his jacket from the rocking chair and fished his keys from the pocket. “Don’t be polluting the kid with this Lord’s errand shit, all right?”
Knox took on a philosophical tone. “ ‘It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household?’ ”
My father raised his hands in surrender and exited. Knox placed a hand on his knee and with a pained grunt lifted himself into the air. He wedged a single crutch into his armpit.
“Are you one of the Diggers?” I asked.
“Just one of Jesus’s foot soldiers. God is good? No, child, I don’t approve of hardly a thing your dad’s ever done. It’s wrong. I don’t need to tell you, you know it in your heart. But that’s Jesus’s miracle, Joseph.” Knox smiled. “Two men such as your father and myself, breaking bread? God is good! Ken Harnett’s soul is on fire, yes. But you know what that means? It means my soul is on fire, too. And the two of us, amen, we douse each other’s flames.” He patted his sleeves by means of illustration.
“You know? What he does?”
“ ‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.’ ”
I tried to bring myself to one elbow. Knox winked.