Jaidon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cridecoeur) wrote2009-07-20 11:56 pm
cridecoeur) wrote2009-07-20 11:56 pm
Entry tags:
please let me suffer like you, fiction
title: please let me suffer like you
author:cridecoeur
pairing: jamie/nathaniel
rating: pg-13? r?
word count: 1875
Jamie buried his Mama in late spring, boxed her in velvet and blue orchids and sent her to God with the priest’s droned scriptures and ten-cent prayers. He stood beside her casket, her closed casket to hide her withered body, and thought just stop already, just stop, he’s not listening anymore, maybe he never was listening, you son of a bitch, just stop and did not cry when they lowered her casket into the ground and did not cry as they filled in the grave with dirt and did not cry as the priest closed his tattered Bible and the crowd dispersed, leaving Jamie there with his mother and her gravestone and Nathaniel Dressed-in-Black.
“Did you know,” Nathaniel said, “I can always tell when you’re making those little Indian jokes to yourself. You get this look on your face, like you think you’re real clever. When I see it, I just want to sock you.”
In the distance stood the remains of the modest chapel to which his mother had brought him on his tenth birthday, nearly fifteen years ago, now, and beside which Jamie had met Nathaniel. Standing beneath the stained glass clerestory windows, color sliding over their skin, red and blue and green, they’d scrapped with childish intent, charged by the hot groans of the chapel organ from within, hands tugging at hair and elbows digging into soft flesh and feet stamping and kicking up dust. When his mother found them, reddened with Oklahoma dirt, bruises purpling on their arms and cheeks, they’d been leaning against the chapel wall and laughing, fast friends with their arms slung over each others shoulders. Maybe, Jamie thought, we haven’t grown up much after all.
“Like to see you try,” he said, turning on his heel to walk towards the chapel and its toppled bell-tower and its melted, color-ugly windows. Fire had reduced the chapel to its component parts, leaving a skeleton of wooden beams and cement foundation, a marble altar and blackened statues of saints – a rock garden of faith, cultivated by pious Father Burakgazi, the Appalachian preacher who’d arrived in Crowder, Oklahoma, the summer of Jamie’s fourteenth birthday, carrying with him a funny new Bible and a glass case of snakes, red and yellow and black, with milky eyes and foul dispositions.
“Do you remember when I broke your nose?” Nathaniel said. He carried his kit over one shoulder, while they walked - he’d wandered back into town for the funeral from an open Oklahoma plain, maybe, or a dirt-dry Texas town or another one of those roaming places to which he disappeared, sometimes, and of which he never spoke. “That was a good day. You’d been fishing. I could tell because your pants were green up to the knees. You looked like you’d been dipped in algae. You do know you can fish without standing in the pond, don’t you?”
“I could,” Jamie said, as he picked his way across fallen rafters and the crumbling remains of pews, “But then what would you bitch about? And if I remember right, you broke three of your fingers, too.”
“Like I said, it was a good day. Even if you wouldn’t hit back.”
A metallic chime accompanied Jamie’s next step: an offering bowl and chalice tumbled out of hiding. He picked up the latter and swiped the ash off of it with his thumb, revealing intricate knot-work engravings, like snakes twisting to swallow their tails.
“Do you know why I remember that you’d been fishing?” Nathaniel said. “Because it was Sunday morning. You shouldn’t have been fishing on a Sunday. You should have been here, with you mother. You made for a lousy Catholic, but your attendance was perfect.”
“I’d walked in on my mother the night before.”
“And Burakgazi.”
“Yeah,” Jamie said, “and Burakgazi.”
His Mama always left her door cracked open; what quality of light puddled there in the hallway told time like a sundial. The weak orange flicker of candlelight: day fading to early night – shadows crouched in the hallway like hungry dogs. All was not quiet. Jamie could see a sliver of his Mama’s bedroom, from his vantage point across the hall: a lace coverlet, a china vase, a spray of blue orchids, and his Mama on the bed, his Mama and Burakgazi. Preacher-man said, do you know the story of Tristan and Isolde? His Mama shuddered like an animal, like a calf left on the mountainside, eyes blown black and wild, waiting for the lightning-touch of god. Do you know, said Burakgazi, the story of Tristan and Isolde? God smiled on them, my child.
God smiled on them.
“She never should have trusted him,” Jamie said, teeth gritting over the words.
“No. But she did. Everybody did.”
Every Sunday, Burakgazi set his case of snakes on the altar. Who among us, he said, will walk with our Lord on this day? Who among us shall trust in his protection and his love for us? Who shall test the strength of their faith?
His Mama always stood and lowered her hands into that glass case, baring the smooth and tender skin of her palms and underarms, letting the snakes wind around her wrists and forearms, letting them slither and hiss and bare their fangs at her. Standing there beside the altar, she looked wraith-thin and frail. She looked as if she could be torn in two.
Jamie looked back at his Mama’s grave and thought of the revolver in her nightstand drawer, the revolver she’d bought for her own protection and never used.
* * *
Jamie planned as he drove Nathaniel back to his house, on the edge of town: I will buy flowers, I will drive to her house, I will fill her empty vases, I will take her revolver from the night-stand, I will cock the hammer, I will, I will, I will. Nathaniel sat beside him in the truck cab, his knees pulled up nearly to his chest and his dinner-plate hands resting on the dashboard. Jamie’s own hands, on the steering wheel, bore scars of puncture wounds beneath the knuckles, white spots, two by two by two.
His Mama had held his hand, as he stood at the altar, watching the snakes writhing in their glass case. Don’t be afraid, she said. You don’t need to be afraid. God will watch over you. Just believe in him. Let him reach into you. Let him touch your heart.
The fever had held him for three weeks and left his body shivering-weak. He called for Nathaniel in his delirium – Nathaniel, Nathaniel, help, oh – and each time a big hand would cradle his head and wipe the sweat from his brow, soothing, soothing – hush now, Jamie, hush, I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere. The next Sunday that Jamie attended Church - the only Sunday that Nathaniel attended Church - his friend had walked to the altar and, under Father Burakgazi’s smiling gaze, pushed the snakes’ case off the altar, laughing as the glass shattered and Burakgazi ran.
The radio murmured obituary-news: Church fire kills three St. Rita’s parishioners. Police investigation reveals ecclesiastic corruption. More after -
Jamie clicked off the radio.
“His lawyers are trying to keep his case in the district,” Nathaniel said. “He won’t be convicted, here. Not with his parishioners on the jury.”
“I know,” Jamie said. His hands clenched and whitened on the steering wheel.
“If it went to the city court - ”
“It won’t go to the city court.”
“But if it did - ”
“It won’t.”
Nathaniel frowned and quieted. As Jamie pulled his truck up to the curb in front of Nathaniel’s colorful brick house – the house he inhabited only rarely, the house he hadn’t even bothered to visit before seeking Jamie out - Nathaniel reached over and enfolded one of Jamie’s hands in his own, dwarfing it. Jamie could see the dust-smudges on Nathaniel’s coat sleeves from when he’d helped Jamie box up his Mama’s house, just that morning.
“Keep yourself well, Jamie,”
“Yeah,” Jamie said – already standing before Burakgazi, in his mind, leveling the gun barrel at his chest. “You, too.”
* * *
Jamie walked into his Mama’s bedroom, the only room he’d left whole, untouched and unpacked. He’d boxed up too much of her already. The chintz vase on her dresser held fresh flowers: the bowed heads of Wolfsbane blossoms, the needled branches of Arbor Vitae, and long stems of Asphodel, their mouths yawning wide and white. His Mama kept a picture-book of flowers, all her life, her cramped handwriting filling the margins and weaving between pictures and passages. She spoke a flower-language, documented and precise. Wolfsbane: Hatred of man. Asphodel: My regret follows you to the grave. Arbor Vitae: Live for me.
Next to the vase sat a picture frame; contained within were Nathaniel and Jamie and his Mama, sitting on the pond-dock, feet brushing the water, sun coloring their faces, all three bright-eyed and smiling. Jamie picked up the picture frame and sat on the bed. He traced his Mama’s face with one finger, then Nathaniel’s. He put the picture face-down on the bed. Picked it up again. Grimaced, put it down, and opened the nightstand’s drawer. He groped inside for his Mama’s gun and found the drawer empty.
“Did you think I didn’t know?”
Jamie turned towards the door. Nathaniel stepped into the bedroom, his face speckled-red, like a bird’s egg; behind him, shadows crouched like hungry dogs, circling closer, closer.
“How could I not know?” He said. “The way you looked at him, like you wanted to tear him apart. Like you wanted him dead so bad, you could taste it. It made me want to tear him apart, too. How could I not?”
Nathaniel set the revolver, empty-chambered, on his Mama’s dresser. Blood speckled his hands red, like a bird’s egg.
“Nathaniel,” Jamie said, stumbling to his feet. “Jesus Christ, Nathaniel.”
“You were going to run.” Nathaniel said. “You were going to shoot him and run. Maybe sneak into his house at night. Maybe shoot him in daylight, when everyone would see, so everyone would know why. And then you were going to run. You’d already packed all your things, without people knowing quite why. It wasn’t a bad plan, except for one thing.”
Jamie’s voice broke over Nathaniel’s name, a scratched-record sound.
“Did you think,” Nathaniel said, framing Jamie’s face with his dinner-plate hands, “that I’d let you run alone? That I’d want you to?”
“I didn’t want - ” Jamie said, “I didn’t want you to - ”
“‘Course not,” Nathaniel said. “But I did. Looks like you’re stuck with me, now.”
* * *
An Oklahoma highway spooled over dirt-dry fields, past drought-twisted trees and straggled grasses, past cities with their wide-eyed lights and ghost-towns with their hollow houses, past morning-empty streets, a grave, a grave, a ruined church. A truck rattled into the distance, radio turned low and murmuring obituary-news: Father Emel Burakgazi found dead in his home. Suspects have eluded police custody so far. The search for their whereabouts is ongoing.
A truck slipped over the horizon and away.
author:
cridecoeurpairing: jamie/nathaniel
rating: pg-13? r?
word count: 1875
Jamie buried his Mama in late spring, boxed her in velvet and blue orchids and sent her to God with the priest’s droned scriptures and ten-cent prayers. He stood beside her casket, her closed casket to hide her withered body, and thought just stop already, just stop, he’s not listening anymore, maybe he never was listening, you son of a bitch, just stop and did not cry when they lowered her casket into the ground and did not cry as they filled in the grave with dirt and did not cry as the priest closed his tattered Bible and the crowd dispersed, leaving Jamie there with his mother and her gravestone and Nathaniel Dressed-in-Black.
“Did you know,” Nathaniel said, “I can always tell when you’re making those little Indian jokes to yourself. You get this look on your face, like you think you’re real clever. When I see it, I just want to sock you.”
In the distance stood the remains of the modest chapel to which his mother had brought him on his tenth birthday, nearly fifteen years ago, now, and beside which Jamie had met Nathaniel. Standing beneath the stained glass clerestory windows, color sliding over their skin, red and blue and green, they’d scrapped with childish intent, charged by the hot groans of the chapel organ from within, hands tugging at hair and elbows digging into soft flesh and feet stamping and kicking up dust. When his mother found them, reddened with Oklahoma dirt, bruises purpling on their arms and cheeks, they’d been leaning against the chapel wall and laughing, fast friends with their arms slung over each others shoulders. Maybe, Jamie thought, we haven’t grown up much after all.
“Like to see you try,” he said, turning on his heel to walk towards the chapel and its toppled bell-tower and its melted, color-ugly windows. Fire had reduced the chapel to its component parts, leaving a skeleton of wooden beams and cement foundation, a marble altar and blackened statues of saints – a rock garden of faith, cultivated by pious Father Burakgazi, the Appalachian preacher who’d arrived in Crowder, Oklahoma, the summer of Jamie’s fourteenth birthday, carrying with him a funny new Bible and a glass case of snakes, red and yellow and black, with milky eyes and foul dispositions.
“Do you remember when I broke your nose?” Nathaniel said. He carried his kit over one shoulder, while they walked - he’d wandered back into town for the funeral from an open Oklahoma plain, maybe, or a dirt-dry Texas town or another one of those roaming places to which he disappeared, sometimes, and of which he never spoke. “That was a good day. You’d been fishing. I could tell because your pants were green up to the knees. You looked like you’d been dipped in algae. You do know you can fish without standing in the pond, don’t you?”
“I could,” Jamie said, as he picked his way across fallen rafters and the crumbling remains of pews, “But then what would you bitch about? And if I remember right, you broke three of your fingers, too.”
“Like I said, it was a good day. Even if you wouldn’t hit back.”
A metallic chime accompanied Jamie’s next step: an offering bowl and chalice tumbled out of hiding. He picked up the latter and swiped the ash off of it with his thumb, revealing intricate knot-work engravings, like snakes twisting to swallow their tails.
“Do you know why I remember that you’d been fishing?” Nathaniel said. “Because it was Sunday morning. You shouldn’t have been fishing on a Sunday. You should have been here, with you mother. You made for a lousy Catholic, but your attendance was perfect.”
“I’d walked in on my mother the night before.”
“And Burakgazi.”
“Yeah,” Jamie said, “and Burakgazi.”
His Mama always left her door cracked open; what quality of light puddled there in the hallway told time like a sundial. The weak orange flicker of candlelight: day fading to early night – shadows crouched in the hallway like hungry dogs. All was not quiet. Jamie could see a sliver of his Mama’s bedroom, from his vantage point across the hall: a lace coverlet, a china vase, a spray of blue orchids, and his Mama on the bed, his Mama and Burakgazi. Preacher-man said, do you know the story of Tristan and Isolde? His Mama shuddered like an animal, like a calf left on the mountainside, eyes blown black and wild, waiting for the lightning-touch of god. Do you know, said Burakgazi, the story of Tristan and Isolde? God smiled on them, my child.
God smiled on them.
“She never should have trusted him,” Jamie said, teeth gritting over the words.
“No. But she did. Everybody did.”
Every Sunday, Burakgazi set his case of snakes on the altar. Who among us, he said, will walk with our Lord on this day? Who among us shall trust in his protection and his love for us? Who shall test the strength of their faith?
His Mama always stood and lowered her hands into that glass case, baring the smooth and tender skin of her palms and underarms, letting the snakes wind around her wrists and forearms, letting them slither and hiss and bare their fangs at her. Standing there beside the altar, she looked wraith-thin and frail. She looked as if she could be torn in two.
Jamie looked back at his Mama’s grave and thought of the revolver in her nightstand drawer, the revolver she’d bought for her own protection and never used.
Jamie planned as he drove Nathaniel back to his house, on the edge of town: I will buy flowers, I will drive to her house, I will fill her empty vases, I will take her revolver from the night-stand, I will cock the hammer, I will, I will, I will. Nathaniel sat beside him in the truck cab, his knees pulled up nearly to his chest and his dinner-plate hands resting on the dashboard. Jamie’s own hands, on the steering wheel, bore scars of puncture wounds beneath the knuckles, white spots, two by two by two.
His Mama had held his hand, as he stood at the altar, watching the snakes writhing in their glass case. Don’t be afraid, she said. You don’t need to be afraid. God will watch over you. Just believe in him. Let him reach into you. Let him touch your heart.
The fever had held him for three weeks and left his body shivering-weak. He called for Nathaniel in his delirium – Nathaniel, Nathaniel, help, oh – and each time a big hand would cradle his head and wipe the sweat from his brow, soothing, soothing – hush now, Jamie, hush, I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere. The next Sunday that Jamie attended Church - the only Sunday that Nathaniel attended Church - his friend had walked to the altar and, under Father Burakgazi’s smiling gaze, pushed the snakes’ case off the altar, laughing as the glass shattered and Burakgazi ran.
The radio murmured obituary-news: Church fire kills three St. Rita’s parishioners. Police investigation reveals ecclesiastic corruption. More after -
Jamie clicked off the radio.
“His lawyers are trying to keep his case in the district,” Nathaniel said. “He won’t be convicted, here. Not with his parishioners on the jury.”
“I know,” Jamie said. His hands clenched and whitened on the steering wheel.
“If it went to the city court - ”
“It won’t go to the city court.”
“But if it did - ”
“It won’t.”
Nathaniel frowned and quieted. As Jamie pulled his truck up to the curb in front of Nathaniel’s colorful brick house – the house he inhabited only rarely, the house he hadn’t even bothered to visit before seeking Jamie out - Nathaniel reached over and enfolded one of Jamie’s hands in his own, dwarfing it. Jamie could see the dust-smudges on Nathaniel’s coat sleeves from when he’d helped Jamie box up his Mama’s house, just that morning.
“Keep yourself well, Jamie,”
“Yeah,” Jamie said – already standing before Burakgazi, in his mind, leveling the gun barrel at his chest. “You, too.”
Jamie walked into his Mama’s bedroom, the only room he’d left whole, untouched and unpacked. He’d boxed up too much of her already. The chintz vase on her dresser held fresh flowers: the bowed heads of Wolfsbane blossoms, the needled branches of Arbor Vitae, and long stems of Asphodel, their mouths yawning wide and white. His Mama kept a picture-book of flowers, all her life, her cramped handwriting filling the margins and weaving between pictures and passages. She spoke a flower-language, documented and precise. Wolfsbane: Hatred of man. Asphodel: My regret follows you to the grave. Arbor Vitae: Live for me.
Next to the vase sat a picture frame; contained within were Nathaniel and Jamie and his Mama, sitting on the pond-dock, feet brushing the water, sun coloring their faces, all three bright-eyed and smiling. Jamie picked up the picture frame and sat on the bed. He traced his Mama’s face with one finger, then Nathaniel’s. He put the picture face-down on the bed. Picked it up again. Grimaced, put it down, and opened the nightstand’s drawer. He groped inside for his Mama’s gun and found the drawer empty.
“Did you think I didn’t know?”
Jamie turned towards the door. Nathaniel stepped into the bedroom, his face speckled-red, like a bird’s egg; behind him, shadows crouched like hungry dogs, circling closer, closer.
“How could I not know?” He said. “The way you looked at him, like you wanted to tear him apart. Like you wanted him dead so bad, you could taste it. It made me want to tear him apart, too. How could I not?”
Nathaniel set the revolver, empty-chambered, on his Mama’s dresser. Blood speckled his hands red, like a bird’s egg.
“Nathaniel,” Jamie said, stumbling to his feet. “Jesus Christ, Nathaniel.”
“You were going to run.” Nathaniel said. “You were going to shoot him and run. Maybe sneak into his house at night. Maybe shoot him in daylight, when everyone would see, so everyone would know why. And then you were going to run. You’d already packed all your things, without people knowing quite why. It wasn’t a bad plan, except for one thing.”
Jamie’s voice broke over Nathaniel’s name, a scratched-record sound.
“Did you think,” Nathaniel said, framing Jamie’s face with his dinner-plate hands, “that I’d let you run alone? That I’d want you to?”
“I didn’t want - ” Jamie said, “I didn’t want you to - ”
“‘Course not,” Nathaniel said. “But I did. Looks like you’re stuck with me, now.”
An Oklahoma highway spooled over dirt-dry fields, past drought-twisted trees and straggled grasses, past cities with their wide-eyed lights and ghost-towns with their hollow houses, past morning-empty streets, a grave, a grave, a ruined church. A truck rattled into the distance, radio turned low and murmuring obituary-news: Father Emel Burakgazi found dead in his home. Suspects have eluded police custody so far. The search for their whereabouts is ongoing.
A truck slipped over the horizon and away.