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afraid.
    Roy has
frozen with one leg in his pants, the other not.
    “Is
something wrong?”
    “You
just can't say anything about it. That's all.” A bitter whiteness
sheathing his expression. “It's near dark. We better get home.”
    But
even then they linger in the forest. At first Roy holds Nathan's hand but later
is ashamed or shy. Yet he refuses to hurry, walking slowly, never straying far.
He brags that he knows all the land around his father's farm, he could find his
way home in the pitch dark if he had to. Soon Nathan glimpses the cemetery
through the trees, and then the pond, and they are walking along the tangled
shore within sight of the backs of both houses. They slow their walking even
more, and each reaches for ways to manage nearness to the other without seeming
responsible for it. In back of the barn, Roy takes Nathan next to him, again
furiously, as if the act makes him angry. “You can't do this with anybody
but me. Do you hear what I'm telling you?”
    Nathan's
heart suddenly batters at them both. “I don't want to do it with anybody
else.”
    “Just
remember.” Red-faced, Roy is already rushing toward his house.
    Nathan
wanders toward his own kitchen, hearing the sounds that indicate supper heading
to the table. Already he is calculating the turns of the cycle, that tonight he
will not see Roy, that tomorrow Roy will not say much on the bus. None of that
makes him afraid, exactly. Nathan has no words for what does make him afraid.
But he feels the chill of it as he descends into the house, where his mother
has prepared a meal carefully but will hardly look him in the eye, where his
father brings the Bible and a tumbler of whiskey to the dinner table, mumbling
verses under his breath as he takes his seat. In the submersion of home, Nathan
returns again and again to the image of Roy's body on the Indian mound, lost
and bewildered under the power of Nathan's mouth.
     
     

Chapter
Four
     
    Their
guest for supper is Saint Paul, and the text is Romans, chapter one. Dad reads
neither aloud nor silently, he chants softly as if he is alone, the words a
stream of sound that barely rises above the gold edged pages of God's holy
word. Because that, when they knew Cod, they glorified him not as Cod, neither
were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart
was darkened.
    The
whiskey sits at his right hand, the knife and fork at the left. Today it is
real whiskey bought from the local package store, not the clear moonshine of
weekends and holidays.
    Mom,
restless, gives the appearance of hovering slightly above the seat of her
chair. Neither listening nor speaking, she chews her food in a mechanical
motion. As always at mealtime, she wears a frightened expression, glancing from
Dad to Nathan, then fixing her attention on her plate.
    Dad
reads: Professing themselves wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of
the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds,
and to four footed beasts, and creeping things.
    Nathan
eats though he can hardly taste. When he sits at the supper table with Mom and
Dad, the twisting of his gut is unrelenting, and every soft spoken word from
the King James Bible reverberates.
    They
are a family during certain mealtimes and during church. Each night, each
Sunday, they eat together, because they always have. The repetition echoes
darkly through the country of Nathan's memory, through all the dangerous
territories in which his thought may no longer move freely. Through all that he
has forgotten and locked away.
    Once
there was a younger Dad, of firm flesh and clear skin, a Dad who could look
Nathan in the eye when they talked, who could drink his whiskey on the weekends
and stay sober through the week, who could play ball with Nathan in the yard.
Once there was a Dad without a soft belly hanging over his belt, without the
slackness of this one's jaw or the broken veins in his cheeks and nose, a Dad
whose eyes were not yellow