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Raining Red RibbonsBy Chad MacDonald QuailBellMagazine.com “You think we could run away?” Matt asked me while skimming a rock over the glass flattened river. It shivered like flesh as the rock danced across its murky surface. “I suppose so. It wouldn’t be too hard to try in here. Everybody’d get lost lookin’ for us.” I dangled on a bent boxelder branch that leaned out across the river. It leaned with its weight. Its roots stretched leafy green fingertips across the water. The trees opened up on the river bank, leaving the boxelder by itself. I wondered if that’s why it reached out so much. “I betcha we could make our own world.” he said. I stared at the Batman figure we left in the hollow of the tree. He slumped in it, relaxed as a fat squirrel.
“I thought that’s what we’s already doin’?” I asked. Matt wasn’t a loner. He wasn’t a drifter. Matt was a wave. He crashed up against my shores, and ebbed back to where he came from. I haven’t heard from him in over a decade. I wonder if he dreamed of that tree also. If he wished he ran, just to say he tried. We grew up in Clarksville, Tennessee over the remnants of Confederate farmland, swallowed up and ingested neither by republic or confederate parties, but by a deciduous one. We danced in their death. Hopped over the rusted barbed wire fences and played house on the chipped concrete foundations. We were eight then, and everything in the forest was of the forest. Abandoned overturned wheelbarrows housed raccoons and possums. Ribcage wood cabin walls whistled lost songs in the southern wind. We could belong to it. We often wondered about how the people lived in these houses, did they love the woods as much as we did? Did the woods love them back? Me and Matt were always together. If you couldn’t find one, just look for the other. The other homeschooled kids aren’t bad, but the other kids aren’t me and Matt. Our friendship grew tenfold when 9/11 happened. When we watched people fly like Superman out of flaming windows, never caught a loving hand, never gaining lift in their flights. Ma said this was Revelations, this was Holy Wars. End is nigh. Thy Kingdom Come. Everyone began dancin’ their ways back into church aisles after that. Only kinda dancin’ me and Matt wanted to do was vine shufflin’ through the treetops. We did the Tarzan swing, hung upside down in a Batman jitterbug. After skippin’ stones, we went back to the house. Not our homes, but the house. An ol’ log cabin with vines bristling like veins on it’s sides, diggin’ in between the logs and bleeding green through the other side. The Western wall musta fell in years ago, leaving the other three to fend for themselves. Me and Matt found this place out when we strayed lost off a dirt path. We thought ‘bout tellin’ folks ‘bout it, but we also wanted at least one secret between us. Matt had all sortsa theories ‘bout what happened to the fellas. “UFOs coulda beamed anyone up out in these woods. Ain’t nobody here to hear them holler for help…” “Musta died in the Civil War. Stray cannonball done knocked down the wall an’ killed them. Musta hit so hard that it blown the bodies away…” “You think there was a rapture? Those things done happen every couple hundred years, right?” The house would always take us in when we were too cold from a fall chill. Whenever we had to share secrets to the world, it was a place that was too old n’ dead to judge. Some of the other kids was Jesus babblin’. They’d only talk about doin’ the God Walk. It was just somethin’ me and Matt weren’t that into. I guess that’s the one thing that tied us together. Flamin’ Armageddon wasn’t on our minds. Personally, I woulda been Justice League member anyday over a Boy Scout. Same with Matt, he didn’t even try Boy Scouts. Me and Matt also had gone daddys. Mine went to Afghan, he had to stomp through rocks and sand to find who knocked the towers over. Someone had to do it, I guess. Matt had a lot of theories ‘bout why his daddy was gone too. “Top secret mission.” “That so?” I replied “Yeh, he dipped right before the towers fell, not even sayin’ ‘goodbye’. I think he knew somethin’ was goin’ down. He was military, you know.” You could find old rusted hammers in the shed by the house. A butcher knife was left hatcheted into a still standing sawhorse. We’d always wait outside the door before entering the house. Listen to see if the wind would say anything as it blew through cracks, creases and window slits. Wooden boards housing families in the course of over a century, evolved into a forest’s larynx. Gave it a voice, which in turn, gave us one. Matt and I shared a lot of secrets in that abandoned home. I could doubt there, for whenever I had moments of doubt. We could safely wonder if our dad’s were ever making it home. If they wanted to make it home. If we made them proud in everything we learned, everything that we were. Whenever we climbed anything in the woods, a rocky riverbed face, uplifted oak branches raised in self worship, I always tried to outclimb Matt. Prove that I worked harder, that I exerted more. I tried to prove to myself, and my absent father that I was a man. No climbing brought him back, and I could never see where he was at from the highest tree on the highest cliff in Clarksville. Flares and flashlight morse would shoot through the night sky, with the shimmer of stars being the only response. Tried even talking to God, but he never talks back. The only thing that fit into a sensible place back then was that house. Whenever we entered into that house, held palaver, and left, we exited into a world that was different. Either more alien, or familiarized, it was hard to say. Matt wanted to talk inside the house again. He said it was about the church, about the program we went through. I didn’t want to talk about it. Not even the other kids wanted to talk about it. It was a sex ed program held in coop by homeschool parents in some church. We learned the basics of Christianity and sex. Your body is not yours, it belongs to the Lord, you have no say in that. If you try to break away, remove the divine branding, there’s Hell to pay. Matt wanted to run away. He wanted to tell me why. “You ‘member those photos they showed us?” Matt asked while tromping over the rubble of the fallen wall. He clambered palms down feet flat, like a spider. He always shambled over the rubble like a scavenger, face down, seeing if anything shiny and worth botherin’ was drowin’ in the debris. “We swore not to talk ‘bout them things.” I was already inside the house, sitting on a tilted three legged wooden chair. I had to shoo the cobwebs off it every time I sat down. Matt plunged his hand into the wooden pile, crunching wood and dirt between thick fallen logs as he wormed his hands down there to snatch at something. “Then walk damn it. You ain’t gotta listen.” Matt pulled out a round rusted sliver of metal pocked with enough holes to be a hose nozzle. What use to be letter engravings were now streams carved like canyons by water over time. It was hard to tell if it was sleeping or dead. I leaned forward in the chair, causing it to fall forward and tumble me onto the ground. I coughed on impact, shooting out a spiral of dust and dirt. “Then talk Matt. House is yours.” I didn’t want him to talk. I didn’t wanna listen. But the look on his face showed that he didn’t wanna talk either. He was actin’ cold in the summer. Not reaching out as much to hit up the pond or the creek. Staying in his house with me havin’ to drag him out. Matt acted that way since we had these classes. I was taught how to do it right by never doin’ it. At least, not until God done anointed a partner for me. His picking, not mine. I was taught about Indian parents settin’ up their kid’s marriages. I guess it was only bad ‘cause their parents weren’t God. It’s not their job to do that. We also learned about all the wrong ways to do it. Syphilis, AIDS, herpes, HPV; it was God’s way to make sure we stayed in line, followed his plan. Punishment for those that didn’t. It explained why most gays had AIDS. We also learned a lot about gay people. Satan’s final vengeance against God. Make an Adam and Steve monster that pridefully struts hand in hand on his earth. I’m guessing Satan didn’t see AIDS comin’, drifting down from heaven in red ribbons, like Autumn leaves. Branding the cattle that strayed from the path. The gays also had a ferocious appetite, they’d sodomize you roped, raw, and dry while tied to a post. Like a farm animal. Anyone could fall victim to them. The class sessions were only an hour long, and mostly just dealing with following God’s orders. Don’t flirt, don’t look, don’t touch, at least, not till God says so. It was easy enough to tone out for an hour. Then the laptops would switch to the pictures. We were shown penises brown rotted and red boiled from syphilis, shown testicles flesh bridled with genital warts, bloated and red as if it was a heated tomato about to explode. Me and Matt stopped talking, the playing had stopped entirely. No one else in the classroom was talking. I wanted to look at Matt, see if he was as sweat beaded and wide eyed as myself. To see if somewhere between the puss and the freshly shaved folds, we could find a joke, something to make our hearts go a bit slower. We were both eight back then, and never talked about sex. Not with anyone really. God’d get pissed otherwise. But Ms. Scruggs wanted us to take a good look. She said that it’s God’s plan. His doing. Thy kingdom come. And if it was this bad just looking at it, imagine having them. All the gays have this. It’s incurable. Ms. Scruggs wants us to know that if you follow God’s plan, then we’re spared, we’re free. Don’t stray from the pack. It was worse when a syphilitic vagina popped up on the screen. Fluffed up and stained with a gloss that flashed too bright from the camera shot. It’s lips were chapped but it looked dry and drooly at the same time. It was the first time in my life I saw one. After class, me and Matt hid behind the church, not playing with the kids, and leaned our shoulders against the wooden panels of the corners, puking like a water pump left on overnight. I felt like I was coughing up fists. Matt reached a hand down and picked me up by my collar. I leaned down to dust my knees off, and Matt caught my hand on one of the swipes. He held it tight, and I could feel the sweat gathering in his palm, like blood seeping through skin. He didn’t speak. He clutched the rusted belt buckle in his hand, and turned westward to stare at the setting sun cutting red and spitting pink into the horizon. It sliced through tree branches, honing it, making the light more piercing, highlighting the both of us. The wind blew, filling the house like a lung, like a throat, and groaned in a stretching relief as it passed. It blew leaves into Matt’s black curly hair, and my blonde overgrown bangs. He dropped my arm. “I...I can’t say.” He stuttered while taking a step back into the wind, towards the fallen wall. “Yeh you can!” I stepped toward him. I lurched over him. We were the same height, but I slammed my foot down when I stepped. I didn’t mean to be mean. I was mad he couldn’t share somethin’, couldn’t trust me. It’s hard to explain, I didn’t wanna hear it, but if anyone had a right to hear it, it was me, it was us, and this house. It’s selfish, but it’s what I felt. “Why can’t you share? What? You wanna ‘nother secret of mine?” Bargaining was useless, Matt had his own, locked up, I couldn’t pry none. “Maybe we should talk another time.” “So you don’t trust me?” “That ain’t what I said.” Matt and I were a society of our own. Economics, music, art, and culture all encapsulated by a roofless rocking house. No presidents to send fathers to wars we couldn’t comprehend, we lead ourselves. No strangers in sandy lands trying kill us for reasons we couldn’t comprehend. There was no God that demanded everything that was ours; we submitted and yielded to ourselves . Current affairs were the latest Spider-Man issue. We always tuned in to the wind rustle leaves and twigs, a toddler in its babbling stage grasping at langauge. We never knew what we were supposed to get out of it, the wind, but we knew we had to listen. The Ojibwe have a word for when the wind rustles the trees, si-sig-wad. Listening to the trees, we never fully learned what we were supposed to learn, we just knew we had to be quiet. We walked on grounds that families walked on for centuries, we took shelter in their proverbial corpses and bones. We knew to be quiet when we had to be quiet. Listening to the wind rustling the leaves, an organic buzz that bordered on a mantra chant, we only got the moment out of it. Could only comprehend the silence. But growing up in a world where an angry God screamed for war, and buildings hollered in metal grinding agony as they crashed down, and your bodies are not yours but are shouted commands by an entity beyond your comprehension, sometimes the things we craved most were silence. Sometimes the thing that made the most sense was emptiness, a void. Peace. We silently walked home, whippin’ our heads to listen to leaves whisper, but we never looked at each other. We stretched the foot between us into light years, eons apart. The loudest thing to pass between us was a mumbled ‘goodbye’, and I turned onto my lawn, and Matt walked uphill to his. Matt didn’t call until I was half asleep in my bed, staring at the popcorn ceiling, seeing past them and staring at stars. The phone rang out in the night, and I knew it was Matt. We called each other at night to sneak out and try to catch stars in our palms. His voice was shaky. “I’m movin’, movin’ back to Kentucky. Ma needs a job again.” I opened my mouth, but I wasn’t sure if I was begging, protesting, or wording something beyond words. I felt like there was everything to say to him, and no way to say it. Weeks after our last visit to the house, Matt wanted to stop by ‘n say goodbye. The living room door knocked to a rhythm and he stepped in. Ma was in the kitchen, giving us the livingroom’s dust specs and windowed light to ourselves. We hugged, and he said goodye, blowing through the door like wind through winding branches. I didn’t even hear the door close. I just heard the breeze that sighed through it. The slide show still slipped through my closed eyes, projected on my brain while I slept. I’d wake up randomly in the middle of the night to the sound of dripping puss. Thick plops that slopped themselves around on tile floor. Something was wrong, something was wrong with me. I’d pick up the phone at night before Ma could wake up. Matt would ask me if I was okay, if everything was still normal. I told him yeah. But he said ‘no…I mean, is everything normal’. It was our first time ever talkin’ ‘bout it. I told him yeah, said that we’re safe. We should be normal. Checked out clean and fine. But Matt wanted to know when we do it, how does it go down when we do it? Be fruitful and multiply. What if you do it with the wrong person? But you think she’s the right one? Does God get mad? Does he bloat you? Make you bleed from places you’re not ‘spose to bleed from? Does it happen over time or all at once? I told him to stop, damn it Matt, just stop. I wondered if God would be mad at me for cussing. In the end, I was as scared as he was. I told him we got ten years to worry ‘bout that. ‘Til then, we’re safe. Matt asked me what if we turned gay? How do you turn gay? What if it’s a cold, a disease, you turn without choice. There’s no pill, no fixin’ it. I asked Matt if he was gay. He hung up the phone. I was ‘bout to go to bed, head swimmin’ and drownin’ in thought when Matt called back. ‘No’, it’s all he said over the line, and hung up. It was the last time I ever heard from Matt. Later that day, I tried walking through the woods, tried breathing in the wind and light jagging through the leaves. Wind moves, light is in constant motion, but neither can move, right? Neither can up and leave. I spent the day pacing circles in the groaning house, hoping to find the metal Matt had just found weeks ago. It was impossible to find beneath the jumbling wooden folds on the floor, branches and logs stacked on each other like sleeping puppies. I sat on one, and listened to the leaves whisping in the summer breeze. Then and there, listening to that wind, I imagined Matt finding a woods of his own, sitting on a mossed log speckled with mushrooms, listening to it alongside me. Comments
Rainier Lee
6/4/2017 02:37:30 pm
That was beautiful. This was the realist reflection of anything I have read, when compared to my childhood. Thanks, 'TheChad'. Comments are closed.
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