Blossom (Extract)

Flint worked until midday. He hacked and slashed, ripped and sawed, tore sockets from electric panels and blasted the walls with flame. Workmen came and went, but he did not speak with them. The kitchen of the old antebellum home became a lightning rod for his frustration and impotence; for his inability to stop the disease that had killed his mother from killing his wife. 

When he was done, he lay with his back against the ruined plasterboard, his forehead fringed with sweat and his muscles throbbing. He thought about Myleena, and wondered whether this was the price for surrendering his soul; whether it was better to be alone, loveless and unmoved, than to feel his heart rend every time they were apart. 

Throughout his life, Flint had seen people desert the ones they loved. His mother had made a mistake, in 1962, when she allowed a loanshark named Boyce Callaghan to take her home from a West Texas bar. Flint had been conceived six months later, beneath a sky sketched with stars and smoke, Betty-Jane hoisted atop the bonnet of Boyce’s freshly painted pickup truck. He knew this, and he knew the details, because his father had hollered them while beating him.

            ‘I brought you into this world,’ Boyce had yelled, between swings of the bull rope, ‘and I’ll damn sure take y’ out of it.’

The last time Flint saw his father, Boyce was lying on his back outside an Indian Casino, his stomach spilling from his slacks while a dark-skinned cattle wrangler drove ringed fists into his face, splintering teeth and bone. For the rest of his life, Flint would hear his father’s mangled gasps and cries for help. The sounds came to him in the most intimate moments, in the throes of passion with Myleena, when he closed his eyes at night and when he opened them in the morning. Boyce had abandoned Flint’s mother, and in turn his son had abandoned him, walking away as his father’s head thudded off the sun-scorched tarmac of the casino parking lot.

Perhaps that’s why he was here, working demolition for a man with the integrity of soiled underwear. Not just for love, but to right a generational wrong; to prove that the marital sins inflicted by Boyce Callaghan, and by his father before him, would not define those that came after. Or, perhaps, he just liked to see things explode. 

            ‘Sweet Virgin Mary…’ Miles said, walking into the kitchen. He took off his Stetson and twirled it on his finger, surveying the wreckage. ‘Who needs God, anyway?’ 

********

It was almost dusk when Myleena stepped off the bus, and followed the dirt road to the motorhome she shared with her husband. The cottonwoods were dripping with rain; the soil strewn with branches that had snapped and splintered in the breeze. Beyond the flooded treeline, Myleena could hear wind riffling through canopies of wet leaves, and canetoads croaking in pools of stagnant water.

Their camper was parked on a flat plain, flanked by rolling wheatgrass fields and the banks of the Missouri River. Over two days, Flint had fitted the vehicle with fluorescent lights and demolition derby wheels. Then he painted waves across the bonnet, stencilled their names beneath each mirror, and hung the roof with flowers. In the winter, Myleena could look through the topside window and see lightning leaping between the clouds. And in the summer, the green-gold grassland was bloomed with wild roses and flocks of white egret.

Myleena changed her damp clothes, then sat in a wicker chair facing the riverbank. She opened the illustrated Bible that Labiche had given her, smoothed the spine across her knees, and turned to page three. The paper was blotted with dried blood; the pictures silvered by time and tear.

            ‘Y’all ate from the tree of wisdom,’ Myleena read aloud, tracing the letters with her fingers. ‘And…thou….did take our lord’s word in…’ she paused, squinting at the page ‘…perfect-ooity.’ She continued reading. ‘God cursed you and your children, so now y’all gon’ live among the snakes and demons.’

Down by the waterline, she heard the splash of an alligator rolling its tail. Moments later, a white-blue heron burst from the shadows, wings rippling in the wind. Myleena watched the yellow clouds swirling on the horizon; the cottonwoods and waterlilies and wing-tip weeds turning purple and gold in the sundrop. And then the light disappeared behind the trees; the rain paused; and the only sound was her own ragged breath inside her lungs.

Myleena did not want to die. Of this, she was quite certain. She had watched her own father pass five years earlier, and by the end his only lament was that death had come not sooner. She could still recall his face in the final moments, his hands greyed with disease, his body netted by shards of sunlight. Outside, the hospital courtyard was shaded with ponderosa pine and half-blooming chrysanthemums, the afternoon sky as smooth as silk.     

            ‘Ain’t no heaven,’ he’d said, after sending the priest away, ‘just the dirt we came from. Them Bible boys got milk for brains.’

Now, Myleena began to wonder if, like the children of Adam, she was being punished for her father’s wrongdoing; for his failure to believe. Every day, she woke with the same desire: to experience the world brand-new, to walk the earth as it was when God created it; to climb snow-capped mountains and sail beneath the roaring mist of waterfalls; to wade through fields lush with elephant ears, and know that there was no expiry for these things or for her. But every day, the bloodied froth from her lungs became thicker and more pronounced.

She was still reading when Flint came up the path and dropped his overalls in a heap on the wet grass. He stood in his vest and boxer briefs, peering at Myleena through the gloom, the hanging bulb flickering in the darkness above her head.

            ‘What you reading there, Myleena?’

Myleena closed her Bible. The sky was sprinkled with stars now, the moon bright and full above the riverbank. When Flint walked towards her, she could see the muscles rippling in his arms, the sweat that soaked his thighs, and the dust that patterned his needle-nosed boots. He let her kiss him, twice, and she smelt soot on his skin and beard.