Otis ((1977) (a Shannon O’Day Story))
Otis Wilder Mather stood still within the deep cornfields on which one time he and Shannon O’Day drank. Flanked by the tall stocks of corn, as if walled in—the early morning sunlight fell lightly in faded thin like flashes, seeping through the gaps of the cornfield onto his exposed flesh, and upon the bamboo walking stick in his hand, and across the aging shape of his black face who paced to and fro, looking down— as if swimming in some unfathomable emotions, brooding and drooping eyes, childless, never married, Cantina’s new born child in Mabel’s house, Shannon’s brother Gus’ house, both long dead. Out of a window, of the neighbor’s house, peered old lady Stanley smothered with curiosity—she hadn’t seen Otis in nearly a year.
“Well, Cantina,” said Otis “too bad the baby isn’t white, you and the boy will be treated as if you belong in the stockyards.” And he chuckled.
She didn’t move any, just remained on the sofa with the newborn. Looking up at Otis, with a flat expression, with a youthful, no expression, a face gloomy, and sphinx-like, still worn, and tired looking, pale from giving birth but a few hours earlier.
Shannon was nearly a god to Otis, it now had been ten-years, ten long enduring years since his death in 1967, he was now himself, getting old, sixty-seven years old, he had been ten-years Shannon’s junior. He said loudly to Mabel, now owning several fish stores, between Minnesota and Alabama, “Sorry it wasn’t you.” He had always liked Mabel, although Gus never liked him.
“What kind of car is that?” asked Cantina.
“A car, just a car. A damned good car…why?” he remarked back to her, in a soft delicate way, his hand still holding the bamboo walking stick. “The car’s a Cadillac I guess,” he mentioned as if not wanting to mention it, or pretending he didn’t want to mention it.
“Oh,” said Cantina in a near un-hearable shallow whisper. “Yes, it looks like a brand-new car, a 1977 I bet?”
“Yes, that’s what it is.”
“Oh.” She said, as she glanced back out the window. No one could have guessed what she was thinking, but she watched him and watched him as he looked at the child, paced with his staff looked out the window into the cornfields—as if longing for those long lost past days, never to be rekindled.
“Here take this check, its $5000-dollars, do whatever you need to do to make your life better and your child’s, whatever his name is,” he said to Cantina, passing the check over to her in a frizzy like way, and walking out the doorway, as if in a trance, stepping down the few wooden steps onto the ground (leaning on his walking stick with more of his weight than he had before) with a crazy like look on his face, moving a lever in the bamboo upper part of the stick, which made a four inch blade extend outward from a hole in the end of the stick—a weapon as sharp as a razor, and took a bottle of whiskey out of the trunk of his car, and stood there holding the stick in one had and the bottle in the other, drinking and pushing the blade back into its little hidden nest by way of the ground, looking into the cornfields: just waiting there, as the neighbor concluded it was who she thought it was, Otis Wilder Mather. The rich black man from Ozark, Alabama, that once was the bosom-buddy of Shannon O’Day, they were like white on rice: and many a nights had they spent in the cornfields half cocked, and unable to walk.
When Corporal Shannon O’Day was shipped over to France to fight the Germans, in those trenches, Otis then was only ten years old. Then when WWII, came along he didn’t go then either he had something they called flat feet “I’m taking care of my family in Ozark looking after the things,” he’d tell folks who asked, and those who didn’t ask, but wanted to ask, and stared at Otis as if they were about to ask, Shannon O’Day would tell all of those “It aint none of your business why Otis is up here drinking with me in my brother’s cornfields and not in that stupid war those Europeans started over across the Atlantic again.” It’s how it was with Shannon O’Day, a thin, pale-ridden Irishman, with quizzical eyes, who looked about fifty when he was thirty, though it was known that he had married by the time he died a number of times, and only one daughter Catharine, born in 1947, two years after that war had ended and was never a grandfather as well, she was twenty-years old the time Shannon died, not thirty. Mrs. O’Day or the Gus’ wife always knew better to stay out of Shannon’s drinking business, and he was just too lazy and idle, although Gus would try to help him out now and then, help him also with his drinking—a hopeless task at best, they said, everyone said knowing that his sole connection with life after the first war, he didn’t give a hoot for much after that, but Gus’ farm that is where Shannon and Otis lay in the cornfields summer after summer, the first summer Otis was in St. Paul, he worked at the Hill Top Stables, and around 1945, Shannon borrowed him five-hundred dollars and Otis bought his first fish store down in Ozark, Alabama, that started him off, he never forgot it, fact that for years now Gus had allowed him to drink like crazy in the cornfields was due to Shannon getting mad if he’d not allow it, which Gus had purchased when Shannon was just ten years old, and raised him from then on, until the war that is. For a while in other years, Otis even lived with Shannon down in his apartment, the one he kept on Wabasha Street, away from Gertrude his wife at the time, who lived on Amenable Street, he had been living folks said—hearsay, in some shack over in Rondo, a district in St. Paul, know for the blacks, a bachelor in decrepitude shed, once used for a barn. So now it looked like he was doing fine in the financial area, aged somewhat, and seemingly a little sick, too much reminiscing, too many hardships, and that terrific ability to drink in the act of dying.
Even the Stanley’s knew boy observation, or heard by hearsay, much of what took place in those far-off days. That Gus and his kind, his crowd laughed at Shannon for taking Otis in as if he was a sparrow with a broken wing—and a nigger lover on top of it. And Otis knew it was not the first time they had laughed at him, calling Shannon: nigger lover, even Gus said that, I mean, he wasn’t called white trash, which would have been truer than nigger lover, I men he just took a liking for Otis. I mean he did work: Shannon did work, once at a foundry and a few other places, just not steadily. They began to ask him themselves, in the local bars Gus and he went to when Otis was back down in Alabama, meeting them in the dim downtown bars where Judge Finley and his group went, Gus’ group,
“Tell that nigger friend of yours to stay down in Alabama where he belongs; you know which one, that war dodger!”
The drunker Shannon would get, the more redder his face got, the more angry he got, he then would look about the bar of white faces and bloodshot eyes and stained yellow teeth from smoking cigar after cigar, or cigarette after cigarette, behind the smoke, you could see where scorn prowled, and it was there from his extending square jaw bones to inside its marrow, and Gus knew Shannon’s blood was read hot, like a flaming sword ready to strike “I got to go on home now fellows, because I got a wife that wakes me up early to tend to those cornfields, I got to mosey on home now see you all later…” he’d say, and bring Shannon with him before he tore up the bar, bring him to his house on Albemarle Street if he could walk, or if not, to his apartment around the corner. Shannon usually got half cocked, but not all that drunk he was a professional drinker, I mean he could drink—seldom got sick like those armature drinkers—so he’d say, boast, pretending he was drunker, walking out of the bars, and if Judge Finley was there, he’d say to the old judge “Git out of my way fag, I like niggers!” And Gus and the old Judge would just brush it off as if he was out of his mind.
“Niggers?” the judge would repeat; “You got a nigger lover for a brother Gus!” laughing now.
“Yes,” Gus would say. “I know, he looks after a big black one, but aint nothing I can do about it, he’s my brother.”
“Send them all back to the South, or to Africa!” the old judge always could be quoted as saying, as if it was his one and only phrase for the black race.
This was all true what Judge Finley said about Shannon O’Day, he did take care, watch over Otis like an older brother would, even when Gus tried to put him in jail for burning his fields, which he never burnt, and Shannon couldn’t say way, because had he told the truth, he would have exposed his brother’s wife to infidelity. So not knowing—even at the cost of belittlement, was better than telling him the truth, it was a matter of sorting out priorities, who got hurt the worse, or the levels of hurt, or where was the point of most damage.
But with Otis, there was this kind of devotion, not pride for prides sake, but devotion, for devotions sake, for Otis’ sake, it lifted him up from a depressing world that Shannon took his side—no matter what the cost was to him, he became much more than he ever expected to become because of Shannon’s out look on him, not his own outlook—he couldn’t beat the white man to death physically, so he beat him to death with success. No one up in the Midwest in those early days would except him, permitted him to advance, it was an attitude among the whites: I aint going to give to no nigger—especially coming from down south, who avoided a war, the chance to settle down here among us good folks, to seed money home to feed those little niggers back in Ozark, that was the way of thinking. “Aint no chance in hell, we’re going to do that,” old Judge Finley would confirm while half drunk in the bars, say it to himself or anyone listening, willing to listen—sober enough to decipher. Judge Finley had told Otis, a few decades back, nearly cussed him out in the courtroom, to head on out of town, and spend more time where he came from, than were he came to, meaning, Alabama and not Minnesota. Perhaps Finley’s mind—being a friend of Gus—knew nothing else would scare Otis away, yet the fact remained, Otis came back after years, and rekindled the friendship he once had with Shannon, oh, it wasn’t exactly as it was before, but between business he spent a whole lot of afternoons with Shannon drinking—of course no longer able to take drink after drink like he used to, and at this time he formed even a bond with Cantina, Shannon’s only daughter, otherwise known as Catherine. He watched her grow up, you could say. Even thought of himself as her uncle, for the time being, until she showed development, and after Shannon died, his heart would be quiet and proud he took such an interest in her, although after Mabel’s husband died, remembering her fling with him, he had never forgot it actually—he had a half lit flame for her, and she had a full lit flame for him. The only problem was, or so it seemed, was that humanity had created a curse for him, a black skinned curse, although times were changing, they were changing slowly in Minnesota.
“Your father was a fine proud man, a war hero,” he told Catherine, as if he was near god himself. And had he aimed to look like anyone white, it would have been Shannon O’Day.
“I know what they all say to one another,” he had told Cantina, a year later, after the child had been born. “I can just visualize it, live it all over for the boy: but I can fix it, not with money but I can fix it. Just like your father fixed things up for me. It has taken me thirty-five years, but I done it at last, I’m richer than a dog with a barn full of bones. Now that I think of it, I never did ask you, what did you named the boy?”
It had been a year since she had seen Otis, it was pert near the same month and day he had left, and now returned, but a year apart, the boy was walking, black as the ace of spades, and Cantina was as white as the empty space around the ace of spades.
While thinking, pacing between the kitchen and the living room, Mabel busy doing the dishes, and Cantina fumbling on the couch involved somehow with putting a new shirt on the boy, said “Otis Jr., his name is Otis Wilde O’Day Mather Jr.” In his head, in Otis’ head came a sound of screeching tires, until there was a sudden stop, “What?” he said.
He broke suddenly free, to think free. Thinking “How on God’s earth can this little boy grow up here, with a white woman, and how can Shannon O’Day’s daughter live with this scorn, a life time of scorn wherever they walk, this just wasn’t good enough for Shannon O’Day, not at all…” thoughts were galloping to and fro in his mind; and then Cantina look his way fumbled with the boy’s shirt, broke free of her attention span, she had on the boy to ask, quite clearly ask, looking at Otis, lonely and droopy-eyed —ask explicable, beyond—and seemingly into his mind’s eye, “Just what is on your mind Otis?”
Suddenly she could see he was contemplating something, and the child knew something, he was looking at him with foresight, as if he realized that his father’s voice had entered a tomb.
“What’s the matter Otis,” she repeated; “The boy” he said, in a depressed, drunken astonishment, as if he had just figured it out. He seemed to watch an imaginary happening taking place—eyes towards the heavens, one he was going to duplicate.
Now it was getting toward twilight. His composure had completely changed, the boy was crying, and his mother was trying to breast feed the boy, but he kept on crying no matter what. As it is often said, a child knows at six months old, knows his parent’s character to the point of controlling his parents, perhaps it is truer than fiction, but could it be controlled this evening was the unspoken question? Cantina’s face still puzzled on Otis’ previous behavior, and lack of candor: especially, his brooding, his sphinx-like face, now it was calm and collected “Do you want something to eat?” asked Mabel.
“I don’t want anything,” he remarked stern and straight, looking at the child, smiling at Catherine.
“You should eat something,” she exclaimed.
This time he did not answer at all, staring down at the child—his walking stick in his hand, He turned the lever on the upper part of the bamboo, and the sun had completely been devoured by night now. “It wouldn’t be much longer, the child will be sleeping,” said Cantina, thinking the crying was driving Otis crazy. He couldn’t hear her, or the child’s cries, he couldn’t hear anything, or feel anything, no longer curious of what people might think now or then, but knowing how vengeful they could be in the future for his child. He could even hear what they were saying about him and his child and Shannon O’Day, his bosom-buddy, years in advance, the suggestion of believing afar into the fury man’s heart, intent: Old Otis Wilde Mather with his hand tumbling at last he come to the conclusion, his child would not pay the same price for life he had paid: he screamed aloud like a madman, glancing at Cantina watching the child
“Who are you thinking, going to do…!” she said.
“Nothing much! Nothing Much!” that’s what he screamed, the four inch blade out of the end of his walking stick that no one seen, and only he knew, could feel the extending weight at the end of his stick.
His eyes were becoming indistinctly blurred, in the new born twilight.
“Don’t worry any,” he said calmly, smoothly as everything became still, as if before a storm. He heard the galloping in his head again—“…horses: those damn horses again…” he complained, in a whisper, but he remained still. His hand firmly on the top of his walking stick, he stood up, faced the girl and child “Otis,” she said, as if thinking he was leaving.
“I’m here, I’m right here, don’t fret…” Otis said with a smile, a storm had started outside, and the lights went off. His left hand touched the child’s throat, “What are you doing?” asked Cantina in the dark.
Now he moved his right had swiftly with the end of the bamboo. He knew exactly in the dark where the child was, every inch of him, just as he knew every turn, every event in his life, every moment he and Shannon O’Day spent together. The room exploded with terror—but to Otis the horses in his head had now stopped galloping, and consequently, there was a wild relief.
“Otis!” the mother shouted; “Stop! Stop! Otis! Otis!”
But the tall thin, fuming figure couldn’t stop, against the frown and roar in the room, and the abrupt storm out side and Mabel frozen stiff in the archway of the kitchen. With the blade lifted, it opened up a wound around the neck of a glaring child’s eyes, without any cry, any sound, the mother passed out.
No: 660 (8-4-2010)
Otis Wilder Mather stood still within the deep cornfields on which one time he and Shannon O’Day drank. Flanked by the tall stocks of corn, as if walled in—the early morning sunlight fell lightly in faded thin like flashes, seeping through the gaps of the cornfield onto his exposed flesh, and upon the bamboo walking stick in his hand, and across the aging shape of his black face who paced to and fro, looking down— as if swimming in some unfathomable emotions, brooding and drooping eyes, childless, never married, Cantina’s new born child in Mabel’s house, Shannon’s brother Gus’ house, both long dead. Out of a window, of the neighbor’s house, peered old lady Stanley smothered with curiosity—she hadn’t seen Otis in nearly a year.
“Well, Cantina,” said Otis “too bad the baby isn’t white, you and the boy will be treated as if you belong in the stockyards.” And he chuckled.
She didn’t move any, just remained on the sofa with the newborn. Looking up at Otis, with a flat expression, with a youthful, no expression, a face gloomy, and sphinx-like, still worn, and tired looking, pale from giving birth but a few hours earlier.
Shannon was nearly a god to Otis, it now had been ten-years, ten long enduring years since his death in 1967, he was now himself, getting old, sixty-seven years old, he had been ten-years Shannon’s junior. He said loudly to Mabel, now owning several fish stores, between Minnesota and Alabama, “Sorry it wasn’t you.” He had always liked Mabel, although Gus never liked him.
“What kind of car is that?” asked Cantina.
“A car, just a car. A damned good car…why?” he remarked back to her, in a soft delicate way, his hand still holding the bamboo walking stick. “The car’s a Cadillac I guess,” he mentioned as if not wanting to mention it, or pretending he didn’t want to mention it.
“Oh,” said Cantina in a near un-hearable shallow whisper. “Yes, it looks like a brand-new car, a 1977 I bet?”
“Yes, that’s what it is.”
“Oh.” She said, as she glanced back out the window. No one could have guessed what she was thinking, but she watched him and watched him as he looked at the child, paced with his staff looked out the window into the cornfields—as if longing for those long lost past days, never to be rekindled.
“Here take this check, its $5000-dollars, do whatever you need to do to make your life better and your child’s, whatever his name is,” he said to Cantina, passing the check over to her in a frizzy like way, and walking out the doorway, as if in a trance, stepping down the few wooden steps onto the ground (leaning on his walking stick with more of his weight than he had before) with a crazy like look on his face, moving a lever in the bamboo upper part of the stick, which made a four inch blade extend outward from a hole in the end of the stick—a weapon as sharp as a razor, and took a bottle of whiskey out of the trunk of his car, and stood there holding the stick in one had and the bottle in the other, drinking and pushing the blade back into its little hidden nest by way of the ground, looking into the cornfields: just waiting there, as the neighbor concluded it was who she thought it was, Otis Wilder Mather. The rich black man from Ozark, Alabama, that once was the bosom-buddy of Shannon O’Day, they were like white on rice: and many a nights had they spent in the cornfields half cocked, and unable to walk.
When Corporal Shannon O’Day was shipped over to France to fight the Germans, in those trenches, Otis then was only ten years old. Then when WWII, came along he didn’t go then either he had something they called flat feet “I’m taking care of my family in Ozark looking after the things,” he’d tell folks who asked, and those who didn’t ask, but wanted to ask, and stared at Otis as if they were about to ask, Shannon O’Day would tell all of those “It aint none of your business why Otis is up here drinking with me in my brother’s cornfields and not in that stupid war those Europeans started over across the Atlantic again.” It’s how it was with Shannon O’Day, a thin, pale-ridden Irishman, with quizzical eyes, who looked about fifty when he was thirty, though it was known that he had married by the time he died a number of times, and only one daughter Catharine, born in 1947, two years after that war had ended and was never a grandfather as well, she was twenty-years old the time Shannon died, not thirty. Mrs. O’Day or the Gus’ wife always knew better to stay out of Shannon’s drinking business, and he was just too lazy and idle, although Gus would try to help him out now and then, help him also with his drinking—a hopeless task at best, they said, everyone said knowing that his sole connection with life after the first war, he didn’t give a hoot for much after that, but Gus’ farm that is where Shannon and Otis lay in the cornfields summer after summer, the first summer Otis was in St. Paul, he worked at the Hill Top Stables, and around 1945, Shannon borrowed him five-hundred dollars and Otis bought his first fish store down in Ozark, Alabama, that started him off, he never forgot it, fact that for years now Gus had allowed him to drink like crazy in the cornfields was due to Shannon getting mad if he’d not allow it, which Gus had purchased when Shannon was just ten years old, and raised him from then on, until the war that is. For a while in other years, Otis even lived with Shannon down in his apartment, the one he kept on Wabasha Street, away from Gertrude his wife at the time, who lived on Amenable Street, he had been living folks said—hearsay, in some shack over in Rondo, a district in St. Paul, know for the blacks, a bachelor in decrepitude shed, once used for a barn. So now it looked like he was doing fine in the financial area, aged somewhat, and seemingly a little sick, too much reminiscing, too many hardships, and that terrific ability to drink in the act of dying.
Even the Stanley’s knew boy observation, or heard by hearsay, much of what took place in those far-off days. That Gus and his kind, his crowd laughed at Shannon for taking Otis in as if he was a sparrow with a broken wing—and a nigger lover on top of it. And Otis knew it was not the first time they had laughed at him, calling Shannon: nigger lover, even Gus said that, I mean, he wasn’t called white trash, which would have been truer than nigger lover, I men he just took a liking for Otis. I mean he did work: Shannon did work, once at a foundry and a few other places, just not steadily. They began to ask him themselves, in the local bars Gus and he went to when Otis was back down in Alabama, meeting them in the dim downtown bars where Judge Finley and his group went, Gus’ group,
“Tell that nigger friend of yours to stay down in Alabama where he belongs; you know which one, that war dodger!”
The drunker Shannon would get, the more redder his face got, the more angry he got, he then would look about the bar of white faces and bloodshot eyes and stained yellow teeth from smoking cigar after cigar, or cigarette after cigarette, behind the smoke, you could see where scorn prowled, and it was there from his extending square jaw bones to inside its marrow, and Gus knew Shannon’s blood was read hot, like a flaming sword ready to strike “I got to go on home now fellows, because I got a wife that wakes me up early to tend to those cornfields, I got to mosey on home now see you all later…” he’d say, and bring Shannon with him before he tore up the bar, bring him to his house on Albemarle Street if he could walk, or if not, to his apartment around the corner. Shannon usually got half cocked, but not all that drunk he was a professional drinker, I mean he could drink—seldom got sick like those armature drinkers—so he’d say, boast, pretending he was drunker, walking out of the bars, and if Judge Finley was there, he’d say to the old judge “Git out of my way fag, I like niggers!” And Gus and the old Judge would just brush it off as if he was out of his mind.
“Niggers?” the judge would repeat; “You got a nigger lover for a brother Gus!” laughing now.
“Yes,” Gus would say. “I know, he looks after a big black one, but aint nothing I can do about it, he’s my brother.”
“Send them all back to the South, or to Africa!” the old judge always could be quoted as saying, as if it was his one and only phrase for the black race.
This was all true what Judge Finley said about Shannon O’Day, he did take care, watch over Otis like an older brother would, even when Gus tried to put him in jail for burning his fields, which he never burnt, and Shannon couldn’t say way, because had he told the truth, he would have exposed his brother’s wife to infidelity. So not knowing—even at the cost of belittlement, was better than telling him the truth, it was a matter of sorting out priorities, who got hurt the worse, or the levels of hurt, or where was the point of most damage.
But with Otis, there was this kind of devotion, not pride for prides sake, but devotion, for devotions sake, for Otis’ sake, it lifted him up from a depressing world that Shannon took his side—no matter what the cost was to him, he became much more than he ever expected to become because of Shannon’s out look on him, not his own outlook—he couldn’t beat the white man to death physically, so he beat him to death with success. No one up in the Midwest in those early days would except him, permitted him to advance, it was an attitude among the whites: I aint going to give to no nigger—especially coming from down south, who avoided a war, the chance to settle down here among us good folks, to seed money home to feed those little niggers back in Ozark, that was the way of thinking. “Aint no chance in hell, we’re going to do that,” old Judge Finley would confirm while half drunk in the bars, say it to himself or anyone listening, willing to listen—sober enough to decipher. Judge Finley had told Otis, a few decades back, nearly cussed him out in the courtroom, to head on out of town, and spend more time where he came from, than were he came to, meaning, Alabama and not Minnesota. Perhaps Finley’s mind—being a friend of Gus—knew nothing else would scare Otis away, yet the fact remained, Otis came back after years, and rekindled the friendship he once had with Shannon, oh, it wasn’t exactly as it was before, but between business he spent a whole lot of afternoons with Shannon drinking—of course no longer able to take drink after drink like he used to, and at this time he formed even a bond with Cantina, Shannon’s only daughter, otherwise known as Catherine. He watched her grow up, you could say. Even thought of himself as her uncle, for the time being, until she showed development, and after Shannon died, his heart would be quiet and proud he took such an interest in her, although after Mabel’s husband died, remembering her fling with him, he had never forgot it actually—he had a half lit flame for her, and she had a full lit flame for him. The only problem was, or so it seemed, was that humanity had created a curse for him, a black skinned curse, although times were changing, they were changing slowly in Minnesota.
“Your father was a fine proud man, a war hero,” he told Catherine, as if he was near god himself. And had he aimed to look like anyone white, it would have been Shannon O’Day.
“I know what they all say to one another,” he had told Cantina, a year later, after the child had been born. “I can just visualize it, live it all over for the boy: but I can fix it, not with money but I can fix it. Just like your father fixed things up for me. It has taken me thirty-five years, but I done it at last, I’m richer than a dog with a barn full of bones. Now that I think of it, I never did ask you, what did you named the boy?”
It had been a year since she had seen Otis, it was pert near the same month and day he had left, and now returned, but a year apart, the boy was walking, black as the ace of spades, and Cantina was as white as the empty space around the ace of spades.
While thinking, pacing between the kitchen and the living room, Mabel busy doing the dishes, and Cantina fumbling on the couch involved somehow with putting a new shirt on the boy, said “Otis Jr., his name is Otis Wilde O’Day Mather Jr.” In his head, in Otis’ head came a sound of screeching tires, until there was a sudden stop, “What?” he said.
He broke suddenly free, to think free. Thinking “How on God’s earth can this little boy grow up here, with a white woman, and how can Shannon O’Day’s daughter live with this scorn, a life time of scorn wherever they walk, this just wasn’t good enough for Shannon O’Day, not at all…” thoughts were galloping to and fro in his mind; and then Cantina look his way fumbled with the boy’s shirt, broke free of her attention span, she had on the boy to ask, quite clearly ask, looking at Otis, lonely and droopy-eyed —ask explicable, beyond—and seemingly into his mind’s eye, “Just what is on your mind Otis?”
Suddenly she could see he was contemplating something, and the child knew something, he was looking at him with foresight, as if he realized that his father’s voice had entered a tomb.
“What’s the matter Otis,” she repeated; “The boy” he said, in a depressed, drunken astonishment, as if he had just figured it out. He seemed to watch an imaginary happening taking place—eyes towards the heavens, one he was going to duplicate.
Now it was getting toward twilight. His composure had completely changed, the boy was crying, and his mother was trying to breast feed the boy, but he kept on crying no matter what. As it is often said, a child knows at six months old, knows his parent’s character to the point of controlling his parents, perhaps it is truer than fiction, but could it be controlled this evening was the unspoken question? Cantina’s face still puzzled on Otis’ previous behavior, and lack of candor: especially, his brooding, his sphinx-like face, now it was calm and collected “Do you want something to eat?” asked Mabel.
“I don’t want anything,” he remarked stern and straight, looking at the child, smiling at Catherine.
“You should eat something,” she exclaimed.
This time he did not answer at all, staring down at the child—his walking stick in his hand, He turned the lever on the upper part of the bamboo, and the sun had completely been devoured by night now. “It wouldn’t be much longer, the child will be sleeping,” said Cantina, thinking the crying was driving Otis crazy. He couldn’t hear her, or the child’s cries, he couldn’t hear anything, or feel anything, no longer curious of what people might think now or then, but knowing how vengeful they could be in the future for his child. He could even hear what they were saying about him and his child and Shannon O’Day, his bosom-buddy, years in advance, the suggestion of believing afar into the fury man’s heart, intent: Old Otis Wilde Mather with his hand tumbling at last he come to the conclusion, his child would not pay the same price for life he had paid: he screamed aloud like a madman, glancing at Cantina watching the child
“Who are you thinking, going to do…!” she said.
“Nothing much! Nothing Much!” that’s what he screamed, the four inch blade out of the end of his walking stick that no one seen, and only he knew, could feel the extending weight at the end of his stick.
His eyes were becoming indistinctly blurred, in the new born twilight.
“Don’t worry any,” he said calmly, smoothly as everything became still, as if before a storm. He heard the galloping in his head again—“…horses: those damn horses again…” he complained, in a whisper, but he remained still. His hand firmly on the top of his walking stick, he stood up, faced the girl and child “Otis,” she said, as if thinking he was leaving.
“I’m here, I’m right here, don’t fret…” Otis said with a smile, a storm had started outside, and the lights went off. His left hand touched the child’s throat, “What are you doing?” asked Cantina in the dark.
Now he moved his right had swiftly with the end of the bamboo. He knew exactly in the dark where the child was, every inch of him, just as he knew every turn, every event in his life, every moment he and Shannon O’Day spent together. The room exploded with terror—but to Otis the horses in his head had now stopped galloping, and consequently, there was a wild relief.
“Otis!” the mother shouted; “Stop! Stop! Otis! Otis!”
But the tall thin, fuming figure couldn’t stop, against the frown and roar in the room, and the abrupt storm out side and Mabel frozen stiff in the archway of the kitchen. With the blade lifted, it opened up a wound around the neck of a glaring child’s eyes, without any cry, any sound, the mother passed out.
No: 660 (8-4-2010)
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