Future Home of the Living God(78)

“I found out who my real dad is. He’s my real dad!”

What an absurd thing to blurt out.

Grandma’s thin lips part, a tooth glistens.

“Men are tricky. I should know.”

Then she tells me a story.

The Fat Man’s Race

I was in love with a man named Cuthbert who could really eat. He would sit down to the table with a haunch of venison, a whole chicken, two or three gullet breads or a bucket of bangs, half a dozen ears of corn or a bag of raw carrots. He’d eat the whole lot, then go out and work in the field. He was very big, but he was also stone solid, muscle not fat. He would grab me up and set me on his lap and hug me. He would call me his little bird. I was going to marry Cuthbert and had the date of the wedding all picked out, but then his sisters turned him against me. They told him that I was after his money, I wanted his land, and also that I was having sex with the Devil.

Only that last part was true.

Our priest had warned that each one of us has two angels, a guardian angel and an angel of perversion. An angel of right and an angel of wrong. That second angel will attempt to persuade you it is the first, and I suppose I fell for it. I was visited at night in my dreams by a man in blue—a blue suit, a blue shirt, a blue tie, blue shoes, but no hat. He had black hair and black eyes, skin the color of a pale brown egg, very smooth and markless. He would take off all of his blue clothes and lay them at my feet. His instrument of pleasure, don’t laugh at me, was blue also, as though dipped in beautiful ink, midnight at the tip. I would admire him, then I would lie with him all night—you know what I’m telling you. In the morning I’d wake up sick over what I’d done. But next night it would be the same again. I could not resist him. He said the sweetest things to me, like a good angel, but the things he did were darkly inspired.

Now I ask you, how was it that Cuthbert’s sisters knew the shape of my dreams? When he told me that his sisters were telling this story around, all about me and the Devil, he laughed. They were worried about how I might have my eyes on his eighty acres cleared and planted, or the money that the bank kept locked up. He laughed until he shook about the blue suit his sisters spoke of, and did not notice how, when I heard that, I nearly went faint off my feet. I recovered. I thought about it. It did not take me long to realize that the only way that Cuthbert’s sisters possibly could know about my devil was if he visited them too.

I grew furious and plotted out of jealousy to throw over my devil. I would have my revenge. I decided to kill him, though I wasn’t sure just how to destroy a man who existed only as a phantom, without physical substance. Then it came to me that I must dream his death. I must conceive of a knife honed and sharp.

Each night, I dreamed a knife beneath my pillow. I dreamed about its shape and weight. I dreamed its black wooden handle. I dreamed its sharpness. I dreamed the gleam of white light off its point. I dreamed the way it would feel in my hands. I dreamed how it would fit between the dream ribs of my angel of perversion. I dreamed all of this so well that on the night I reached beneath the pillow and found the perfectly dreamed weapon, it was a memory of a dream I dreamed, a dream within a dream. His death was undreamable, however, and horrible. I woke soaked with terror and tears. The nightmare haunted me all morning as I prepared for the feast day of the Assumption. A celebration was supposed to take place at the church, and at Holy Mass the priest was to read the banns preceding my marriage to Cuthbert.

I was shaky that day and my mother said I was pale. But I made six pies. Three for Cuthbert. He was running in the fat man’s race. Every year only the biggest of the big men lined up. Their race, comical and thunderous, was always the feast day’s high point. At the end of it, the winner would have his choice of pies and a Holy Medal for a ribbon—Saint Jude or Saint Christopher or Theresa of the Little Flower. As we drove our wagon to the church grounds, I was almost giddy with happiness—I’d killed off the Devil and would soon marry Cuthbert. His sisters would wonder at the loss of their own blue demon, but they never would know the one who killed him was me.

Then came shock. As the big men lined up at the far end of the field, as we watched, pointing and making little bets of money on this one or the other, there staggered into the group a man in a blue suit and blue shirt, blue tie, blue shoes and with black hair and pale brown skin. Only he was much, much bigger than in my dream. He lined up with the rest of them. I don’t know if it was me or Cuthbert’s sisters whose eyes went wider, and whose jaws dropped farther, but it was only I who knew that having killed him in a dream, I had brought the Devil to life. And here he was, racing Cuthbert for the fat man’s prize.

He didn’t look well at all. I saw as they began to run. He was bloated and gray as a gorged tick, his skin almost dead green. He ran holding a hand against his ribs and I nearly shrieked as he passed and turned on me the flash of his red, robbed eyes. His mouth was open and I saw that it was filled with black blood. He and Cuthbert were neck and neck, out ahead of the others, and I saw that the Devil was taunting and mocking my husband-to-be, who flew into a rage of running and leaped forward like a stag to surge ahead.

When it was over, two men lay still at the finish line. One was Cuthbert, who died of a burst heart. The other man was dead all along, people said. When they opened the blue jacket they found a knife with a black handle buried to the hilt between his ribs.

So, said Grandma, I married instead a man who hadn’t an ounce of spare flesh, a man who hated the color blue and never wore it, a man whose sisters liked me. I lived with him for fifty-seven years now, didn’t I, and the two of us had eight children. Adopted twenty. Raised every kind of animal that you can think of, didn’t we, and grew our corn and oats and every fall dug our hills of potatoes. We picked wild rice. Now and then we shot a deer from off the back porch, and yes we fed our children good, didn’t we.