Future Home of the Living God(4)
She seems relieved to have thought backward, to have figured out directions from my point of view. She even seems awed with herself, a little, like maybe she has never given directions before.
“What river?”
“The big one.”
“That would be, I mean, the name. I need the name.”
“It’s the only big river, with a bridge. Then right after, there’s a road. Not paved. Take a left.”
“All right then, take a left on an unpaved road. No name to the road?”
“Skinaway Road.”
“We’re getting somewhere. Then?”
“We’re at the end.”
“What’s your house number?”
She clears her throat. Somehow I get the sense that she is just about to cry out, that there’s some desperation on her end, danger of a hysterical outburst. And it occurs to me that reservations—I don’t know about them—maybe people just do not give directions on reservations. Maybe everybody just knows where everything is there. Maybe nobody leaves and everyone was there forever.
“Okay, all right, what does your house look like?”
Relief fills her voice.
“It’s yellow, newish, a two-story ranch with white trim and a front porch with a wheelchair accessibility ramp for Grandma. We’ll have her here for you tomorrow. Until then, Avis is borrowing her. But you just drive into the yard. There will be a black van with purple detailing, up on blocks, but that’s the only car . . . um . . . not operational at the moment. There is also a new pickup, that’s mine, and a little brown Maverick might be there, Eddy’s, and a sweat-lodge frame—”
“A sweat what?”
“Grandma and Eddy doctored Little Mary. That was her on the phone. Anyway, it’s right beside the house, a little back, in the yard.”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, and there’s some birdhouses too. And a shrine, you’ll see that first of all. Mary.”
“I don’t go by Mary, naturally. My adoptive name, my real name, is Cedar.”
Long pause. “That’s a pretty name.” Her voice is tender again, pained and wistful. “I just always thought of you as Mary. But I was actually talking about the shrine, you know, it has the Blessed Virgin.”
“Mary? Mary in an inverted bathtub?”
“Well, yeah, I guess you could say inverted, you must be smart, ha! But I would call it stood on end and half buried. How’d you know? We took the tub from the old house. Eddy put that up. I planted the flowers.”
“Wow.”
Something hits me then, really just about floors me. It loosens up some of the anger and makes me quietly say good-bye and express the polite expectation of being glad to see Mary Potts. When I put the phone down I just sit there looking at it, thinking. Here it is—inherited genetic congruence. I became a Catholic before I got in touch with my biological mother; Catholicism drew me, and I was fascinated by it all: the saints, the liturgy, even the little shrines. Now it turns out that the saints and the church are things we have in common. Me and her. Sweetie. Mary Potts Almost Senior.
August 9
The next morning, I travel the highway north to my Potts reservation home. I’m having flashes of poignancy. Everything that I am seeing—the pines, the maples, the roadside malls, insurance companies and tattoo joints, the ditch weeds and the people in the houses—is all physically balanced on this cusp between the now of things and the big, incomprehensible change to come. And yet nothing seems terribly unusual. A bit quiet, perhaps, and some sermons advertised on church billboards are more alarming than usual. Endtime at Last! Are You Ready to Rapture? In one enormous, empty field a sign is planted that reads Future Home of the Living God.
It’s just a bare field, fallow and weedy, stretching to the pale horizon.
I pull over, take a photograph of the sign, and keep driving. A car passes me bearing the bumper sticker Come the Rapture Can I Have Your Car? Oh good, not everybody’s getting ready to ascend. I love driving. Thinking while I shoot along. If it is true that every particle that I can see and not see, and all that is living and perhaps unliving too, is trimming its sails and coming about and heading back to port, what does that mean? Where are we bound? Is it any different, in fact, from where we were going in the first place? Perhaps all of creation from the coddling moth to the elephant was just a grandly detailed thought that God was engrossed in elaborating upon, when suddenly God fell asleep. We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are an idea not worth thinking anymore.
These notions turn over and over until I stop. I go through a typical car entrance at a typical fast-food franchise, and eat an egg-cheese biscuit and drink two cartons of milk. So there is still fast food, and I am grateful. Eating grounds me. My head clears, and a few hours later I am on the reservation. I pass the Potts Superpumper without stopping, though I do slow up a little. Well, there it is, I think as it goes by, my ancestral holding—a lighted canopy of red plastic over a bank of gas pumps, a cinder-block rectangle with red trimmed doors that match the canopy. Big lighted windows, a bony-looking man at the cash-register stand, bent over on his elbows, peering into what looks like a book. Probably the used-car blue book, at best a techno guy-thriller. I hope not porn. Probably the skinny man is the husband of my biological mom. Eddy. He was mentioned in the letter. No mention of my biological father.