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  Wesley turns and looks. The possum. “Sure, that’s okay.”

  Vernon pulls an ottoman to a spot near Wesley. He sits, tucks his elbows between his legs, crosses his arms, and starts his rocking.

  “This is the wall I was telling you about,” says Wesley. “See, you got these strings up so that you keep everything level. You just put the mortar on the brick here, like that, lay this on like that, tap it till it’s level, scoop off the extra, and that’s all there is to it. You got your basic trowel, your basic hawk, and a jointer to smooth the mortar. You mix the mortar outside and bring in a little at a time. And that’s about all there is. You got to practice, that’s the main thing.”

  “What’s a hawk?”

  “This thing right here.”

  “You call it a hawk like a bird?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why do they call it that? Looks like there’d be some kind of reason for calling it something like that, don’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. I guess you can call it whatever you want to but what it is is a hawk.”

  “I mean if they’re going to name it a hawk it ought to have something to do with a hawk.”

  “Maybe so.”

  Wesley works.

  “Can I do one?”

  “Sure. In a minute.”

  Provost Sears—Ned—the tips of his fingers held together in front of his chest, appears in the doorway. He is glowing. “Good morning, Wesley.”

  Wesley looks over his shoulder. “Morning, Dr. Sears.”

  “And you, son, I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  Vernon looks at a button—chest level—on the man’s shirt, and keeps rocking.

  “This is Vernon,” says Wesley. “He’s in that Project Promise thing, with me.”

  “Oh, of course,” says Ned Sears. He bends his head forward a bit to catch Vernon’s eye, reaches out his hand. This one looks like he might bite, thinks Sears. Reminds me of. . . of something, but I can’t place it.

  Vernon hands Sears two of his fingers, and looks down.

  An opossum! That’s it. Sears shakes the boy’s hand, turns to Wesley. “That’s good work, son. You obviously know what you’re doing. It’s always a pleasure to watch you work. But, ah, my wife dropped in for a—”

  “He’s going to let me do one,” says Vernon, looking Sears in the eye for the first time.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I get to lay a brick.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know Project Promise was actually up and running.”

  “It’s not,” says Wesley. “This is just extra.”

  “In any case,” says Sears to Wesley, “my wife was over here with a casserole the other day and she had a very good suggestion. If this wall were moved a little toward—”

  “You mean I don’t get to lay one?” asks Vernon.

  “Son, I’m one of the BOTA building and grounds committee members and this wall is my little project and I’ve got to explain something to Wesley, then I’ll be on my way. So, as I was saying, my wife suggested that if this wall were moved a little toward the middle of the room, that extra couch in the upstairs hall could be placed in the space over here.” Sears walks around the wall. “In this area, and we’d be killing two birds with one stone. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like for you to dismantle it, and start again about three feet over this way, right along here.”

  Wesley looks off—out a window.

  “If we get it right this time,” says Sears, “we won’t have to worry about it again. This will be it—absolutely the last time.”

  Wesley shakes his head back and forth. He’s trying to think of a Bible verse that will keep him calm. Jesus wept.

  “It’s just a matter of patience, son—until we get it done the way it will be most beneficial. Patience is something we all have to learn. And until we learn it, we strive to learn it. Here, I’ll help you get started taking this one down. This cement hasn’t dried, has it?”

  “It’s mortar. No, no sir, it hadn’t.”

  “Let me give you a hand.” Ned Sears is proud that he’s had a hand in turning Wesley Benfield around. On the other hand, as a college dean, and then provost, Ned has seen a seamy side of life he never knew existed. Students, some graduate students even, say g. d. They drink, they lie, they have sex with each other. Homosexuals get through Admissions—even after he and Ted have explained at length about how to detect them, male and female.

  As a man of God, it’s sometimes all he can do to stay on the job. But as a man of God, it’s his duty. He has been called by God from that little church back in Focal, North Carolina, to the college classroom, and then from the classroom to administration—the deanship, then from there on up to provost. His good brother, Ted, with whom he sees eye to eye on most things, and God, with whom he sees eye to eye on everything, have done the calling. And who knows, Sears thinks, where I might be called here on earth before I arrive in heaven to reap my heavenly reward on those long, deep streets of gold.

  “Here, Vernon,” says Wesley. “You sit right over here and scrape the mortar off these bricks I pile up. I’ll go get a bucket of water to wash them in. Sit right over here. No, don’t pull that thing over here. You’ll have to sit on the floor, on the canvas.”

  “That’s an ottoman,” says Sears. Thing, he thinks, is one of those words that usually has a better word to take its place.

  Vernon sits on the floor, gets into his rocking position, and rocks. Wesley piles a few bricks in front of him on the canvas.

  Ned Sears looks at his watch. “You boys keep at it. Nice to have met you, son,” he says to Vernon as he leaves.

  “This is easy,” says Vernon, raking wet mortar off a brick into a little pile.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty easy. That’s why it gets hard sometimes.” Wesley looks at Vernon to see if he got it. He didn’t. This boy may not have what it takes to be a brickmason, Wesley thinks. There’s more to laying bricks than laying bricks.

  Two hours later, Vernon jumps off the porch, opens the door to his Plymouth, steps in, cranks her up and and roars out across the lawn, headed home.

  Wesley sits down on the couch in the TV room, puts his feet up on the coffee table, and starts thumbing through a Newsweek. Carla and Linda are sitting on bean bag chairs watching wrestling on Channel 9. Wesley looks at a picture of a girl in a bathing suit. He thinks about Phoebe. She has this kind of an intelligence, Wesley thinks, but at the same time she seems so soft. Her light skin with those freckles, her blue eyes, her thick, fluffy red hair all combine in a way that speaks of magic and love. He thinks about being married to Phoebe, crawling into a big soft bed with her every night, on up onto her big soft breasts —and then sort of crawling all over her big soft body, finding places to stop and settle in, massaging, kneading, before moving on to another place to settle into for awhile, perhaps getting lost, not realizing which port he’s in this time, all the while bringing her great joy, making her giggle and move all around.

  She’s got to be muscular in some parts, carrying all that weight around. That’ll be good. He thinks about her making love with him, abandoning her senses. Going crazy. He tries to stop thinking about that—he knows it’s not Christian—but he can’t get it all out of his mind, her, these things, these forbidden things.

  Then he wishes he could just make love to her without having to go through all the trouble and paperwork of getting married. But getting married is the Christian thing to do. That’s final. He thinks about how she will look when she loses all that weight. He’s not sure how much difference it will make. He thinks about the Bible, women, wet dreams. Whoops. He sings softly from the song he’s still working on.

  What do I do, Lord Jesus,

  with the women in my dreams?

  Some are—

  “Can you please be quiet?” says Linda. “Can’t you see I’m trying to watch this?”

  Dennis comes in with a ball cap in his hand, rubbing his forehead with his sleeve. White paint is on his sleeves, hands, fac
e, hair. “Let’s watch the football game,” he says.

  “We’re watching this,” says Linda. She looks up at Dennis. “Did you get any paint on the gutters?”

  Dennis stops, stands, looking at the wrestling. “That stuff is fake, man.”

  “I seen blood on there,” says Linda. “Blood ain’t fake.”

  “They don’t even hit each other,” says Dennis. “Look, see that. Stand up, Wesley, come here.”

  Wesley slings Newsweek onto the coffee table, stands, walks around the table to face Dennis. Wesley is taller, thinner than Dennis.

  “Now, when I swing,” says Dennis, “you snap your head back. Watch this.”

  “Blood don’t lie,” says Linda. “I know.”

  “No, watch this. Okay, you ready?” he asks Wesley.

  Wesley spreads his legs. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

  “First I’ll do it kind of slow motion.” Dennis draws back his fist and starts it slowly toward Wesley’s face. When it reaches Wesley’s chin, Wesley snaps back his head, ducks, grabs Dennis around the waist, lifts him and starts staggering around the room, holding him off the floor.

  “Get out of the way,” says Carla. “I’m watching television. Get the hell out of here.”

  “No profanity,” wheezes Dennis.

  Wesley drops and pushes Dennis down onto the couch, and starts out of the room toward the stairs in the foyer.

  “Where you going?” says Dennis.

  “Somewhere else. I got to get somewhere to think.”

  “That’s a joke.”

  “Go cook us something,” calls Linda.

  “Go buy something. I’ll cook it.”

  “I got to see this.”

  Wesley stops at the blackboard on Mrs. White’s door: WE USUALLY FALL THE WAY WE LEAN. Not a very good one, he thinks.

  He starts up the wide wooden stairs, up three steps at a time. He slows down, thinking. Did Jesus dream about women? He stops on the steps, turns slowly, and sits down. Jesus was a human man. He was flesh and blood—so he had food feelings. He got hungry. He must have had to have sex feelings—or he wasn’t a man like the Bible said he was.

  Dennis is coming up the stairs toward him. “This your new room?” he asks Wesley.

  “No,” Wesley says absently, standing. He turns and starts up the steps again, slowly, one step at a time.

  This sex business can be a real problem, Wesley thinks, for somebody who becomes a Christian after screwing Patricia Boles and them other four. It’s hard to forget how good that was. Nobody was getting hurt or anything. Maybe the Christian rules were made when it meant having a baby was automatically liable to follow making love with somebody. That must be what it was in the Bible times, before rubbers. Or maybe they had rubbers back then. Sheep bladders. Or maybe it’s just a plain fact that you’re supposed to stay away from somebody unless you’re married to them.

  He walks into his room, flips on the light. Ben’s not in.

  Wesley bunches his pillow against the dark pine headboard of the bed, sits on the bed and leans back against it, crosses his legs. He thinks about how he can tell Phoebe about his life so far. About how hard it’s been. But good, too. About how Mrs. Rigsbee got him out of the rehabilitation center and then on the road to salvation.

  Now, how should he think about Phoebe and sex—sex with Phoebe—and be a Christian at the same time? Is he supposed to think about sex and her at the same time, he wonders. Maybe tonight after they ride over to the mall they can go somewhere to neck. Lake Blanca. If he could just get his lips on those red lips of hers and then sort of wander over to her cheek and kiss one of those freckles, then another one, and another one, and tell her he wants to kiss every single freckle that’s ever been born on her body. . . . Neck a little. It’ll be all right with her, probably. He stares straight ahead at the two photographs from an old 1986 blues calendar that he’s had since 1987: Son House playing bottleneck on a National Steel Dobro with the Clifton Dowell Blues Band, Bukka White playing a National Steel solo. And then he looks over at the two posters he ordered over a month ago and just got: Taj Mahal playing a National Steel solo, and Skip James standing, eating from an ice cream cone in one hand, and holding a National Steel by the pegboard, the bottom resting on his foot.

  He’ll have to try to describe to Phoebe what makes him feel like he’s going to die if doesn’t get to play bottleneck blues on a National Steel Dobro. That’ll be a good thing to talk about. Feelings. But how can he sort of talk about sex? Maybe he can find something in the Bible that could get him started.

  He picks up his Bible from his bedside table, removes his Sunday school quarterly from inside, turns to the concordance. Mrs. Rigsbee, sitting on her faded green couch that she kept saying needed covering, taught him how to use the concordance. He finds “love.” The first entry is “passing the 1. of women,” II Samuel 1:26. He looks it up.

  I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

  Is this guy a queer? thinks Wesley. He reads back a ways to see who this is, talking. David. It looks like David. The one who killed Goliath and went on to be a king or some kind of head man. He was the shepherd who wrote poetry and played the harp. David is one of the main guys in the whole Bible. Wesley adjusts his pillow behind his back. David likes Jonathan’s love better than women’s love. He’s got to be talking about friendly love, not the other kind.

  He reads the first twenty-five verses of the chapter.

  He reads them again. What David is doing doesn’t seem fair at all. Wesley reads the chapters one more time. David has gotten somebody to kill a man with a funny name who a day or two earlier had been ordered by Saul to help Saul commit suicide. It looked like Saul knew he was fixing to get killed anyway by this army that was on the way, and what happened was Saul asked this young guy to help him kill himself, and so he did, and then he took Saul’s crown and bracelet to David and gave him the bad news. David was so sad he tore all his clothes off, but then instead of thanking this guy, he told somebody to kill him, and somebody did—right on the spot. David wouldn’t even do it himself.

  There are all these names and all this stabbing—people lined up facing each other across a pool and then “they caught every one his fellow by the head, and thrust his sword in his fellow’s side; so they fell down together. . . ” Killing their buddies who are killing them. Committing suicide—a sin. All kinds of wild stuff here. He hadn’t read any of this before—hasn’t even heard about it, even though he’s been sitting in Sunday school and church every Sunday, regular, for over five years.

  Wesley pushes himself up higher against the headboard. There is a war going on. Then something about David having all these sons. But. . . wait a minute. He rereads carefully. His second son, Chileab, was “of Abigail the wife of Nabal the Carmelite.. . .” Now David, Wesley thinks, the one Mrs. Rigsbee had all the time gone on about writing poetry and all that, is here having a son by somebody else’s wife, and whoever was writing all this down didn’t have nothing to say about it, nothing, and whoever was writing it down was getting it straight from God, which seems like it means that God must not have found any big problem with David going to bed with another man’s wife. Else, God would tell the man who was writing it down and there’d be all kinds of excitement washed up.

  Wesley closes the Bible slowly on his hand. He looks up at the poster of Son House, his sunken cheeks, the bottleneck on his ring finger. If God didn’t get upset with all that with another man’s wife, Wesley thinks, then maybe I shouldn’t worry about what I been thinking about doing with Phoebe, especially if we’re going to end up getting married. At least I shouldn’t worry about thinking about it. I’m getting this stuff from the Bible, the very Bible, where every word is true. He reads chapter 3, verse 14:

  And David sent messengers to Ishbosheth, Saul’s son, saying, Deliver me my wife Michal, which I espoused to me for an hundred foreskins of the Philistines.


  Gosh almighty! he thinks. This is amazing. The Indians weren’t all that bad. They at least scalped your head. But these guys. . . . Yow.

  And then this: “And Saul had a concubine.” What was a concubine? Wesley lays the Bible down, open, gets up off his bed, goes over to Ben’s desk, opens a drawer. There’s a pocket dictionary in there somewhere. There. There it is. Concubine. Concubine. . . . Well, this is . . . this is amazing. It didn’t make any difference if you were married or not. Why hadn’t they read all this in the Sunday school class at Listre Baptist, or down the street at Mt. Gilead!?

  He starts back toward the bed, stops, stands in the middle of the room. It’s coming to him. Of course! He looks straight up at the ceiling—at the water stain shaped like Florida. The people at Sunday school were just reading what they wanted to. He gets back on the bed. This part is as much the inspired word of God as any of the other parts. And for sure David and Saul, since they were some of the main people in the Bible, didn’t die and go to hell. If David and Saul did all that with that young man that brought the news, thinks Wesley, and all that with all those other people’s wives and concubines, it don’t seem to matter too much what me and Phoebe might do on a little old date. The people that would get upset would be Dr. Sears and people like that. And what they’ve been doing is skipping all this other stuff in the Bible: not telling what all is in there, just reading what’s in those Sunday school quarterlies, so that none of this other stuff gets read by anybody.

  Wesley decides to check out another reference to “love.” Sol. 2:5— “I am sick of 1.” What is “Sol.”? He remembers going over all those abbreviations with Mrs. Rigsbee. The book of Solomon? Is that it? Has to be. Where would that be? He finds it —it’s only a few pages long. He reads a little. He is astonished—they weren’t even married as far as he can tell, and this girl was black. It’s. . . . He reads the whole thing again, gets a pencil from his bedside table, and reads it once more, underlining.

  Chapter 5

  Phoebe is eating popcorn. She usually gets a red-and-white bag of popcorn from the Popcorn Palace beside the pet shop. It’s not in the Ballard Nutrition Plan, but it’s only a matter of a mere ounce or two. She and Wesley are at the mall, sitting on a bench across from the pet shop, in front of Dean’s Delicious Cookies. Wesley has his foot on a big clay tree pot. A little girl sits on a bench across from them, eating a cone of chocolate ice cream.