Read Online Sign Languages by James Hannah - Free Book Online

highway. She’d let it go with a long, soft noise.
    Before it had said Bridgett Creek. But the road crew didn’t seem to mind. I watched all morning. They kept me from the grate I’d just found on up the hill on the other side. Now I walk carefully down the bank and step over the lingering puddle from two days before Sunday, a brief spring shower. I stand at this newer post and slowly find a barb and gently prick my thumb with it. If I squint I can see the nearest cows. Red and white faced. I smell them again and also the flowers on this vine that’s creeping up the newer post. “Elegants,” Mothermae said they were. I said “elephants,” and she laughed and shook her head and wrote it on a piece of scrap we’d gleaned.
    Today is the second day after Sunday; two days since the priests had their hands all over me. On the fifth day I’ll go to the grate and see. Again I feel the trickle of piss before I smell it.
    â€œVoiture,” I shout, and a calf near my hand bucks off out of my vision. I let the wire draw a prick of blood. Two cars close together. I hear it over Bridgett, the tires striking the metal plates. The boy on the crew falling the year after the water rose almost to this very post. But actually to the sign across from my house back up the closed dirt road through the evergreens, the pines. “Loblolly,” the young priest says. But I don’t say a word back at him, just nod because he crosses the prairie from Delios and lets me out a mile away though there’re no houses there either.
    â€œLives up a side road,” I heard him say in town at the mission, the front wall all glass looking out onto the street. The tables buckling under lamps and cracked leaf-green plates for sale. A white woman brings in an armload of folded brown bags. The two little girls with her all eyes and wrinkling noses, the tips turning red.
    â€œGod bless you,” fat Father Stephen says.
    â€œAnd you, too,” she smiles to the old priest. The nun behind her silently shooing the girls away from the nearest table. The day’s light caught up in a single blue bowl, its lip unevenly sheared off. Bringing the light up from its base, it burns along the jagged rim.
    â€œHey, you old fucker,” they shout from the car. I tense my back, the piss smell stronger, a cow at my bloody thumb, in focus, her eyes unmoving, sightless; she chews her cud.
    Once they never said anything. Then they said nigger, coon, blackass, words spit out windows. A can once struck me on the neck. Like the worst lick I’d ever got from Mothermae. Why, I don’t remember. I remember always minding. We’d “scour the neighborhood,” as she called it. “Oh, look at what this is,” she’d shout at me. “Oh Milton, they’ve lost this for sure. Fell out of the trunk. Child tossed it out the window.”
    Once there were two shoes, the same set. They fit her until I had to rip the toe out. Her feet beginning to fill up with gas. The hay I scattered on the floor—the hay Rudy, his friend, no one ever came back for—to ease the shock of her steps. “Nope, I’ll just stay put here. You go out.” The year I went out alone; the year she was sick but got better for a while.
    Before the creek sign business. And long before that boy on the road crew painting the railings fell off the bridge. Head turning to me as he sprawled past the mulberry bushes I sat behind. He opened his mouth and I felt my own open wide. But we didn’t know to speak or scream, and his feet hit the top of the steep bank and pitched him perfect onto the rock that’s always above-water unless it’s way out of banks. “It only has two speeds. Low and flooding,” she’d say. “Dry or wide open.”
    Later I waded out to the rock carefully. Already an old man. And looked up. Then I lay down on it and looked up. There was the railing like a thick fence and the