There was no “us” after the floods. We had promised to stick together, humble to our cause, like bees to a honeycomb.
I reckoned it was time for the bedtime stories to end.
Evil stopped hiding in the shadows.
We were only true to each other at night. The halcyon days when the moon was still white.
Nightly murmurs were silenced by barreling winds. Hope, in those days, was as good as a straw hat in hail. To us, life was like death was supposed to be. Surely, we were better off six feet under.
Four boys were brought together by the salaciousness of our minds. Ripped, pushed, burned out of our families.
I kept the fire from my mama’s screams. The ember rested around the pupils of my eyes. Then I met them. Red-hot turned cool, served with lemonade and a seaside breeze.
The Lord bound us together. Skin to thorn.
We were scooped up by folks in charge of protecting children. They gave my ass two options: gamble my marbles in the looney bin or cleanse my soul living at the bottom of a mountain with other “troubled” ones.
The curious caught pain all too well.
Every day we were reminded of our unnatural ways. Marla, our corrector, would strip us naked, take bits of leather, and bind us to loose floorboards. She would pour water with ice chips on us, light a long cigarette, and let us flounder about.
The bitch had short, round, mousy blonde hair that fell to the middle of her ears. Her lips were always the same color as her skin, floury white, and her grimace was like that of a retired mule. Billy said she punished us because men wouldn’t look at her twice. The handsome devils we were brought out the worst in those types of dames.
That was what I thought about when the water chilled my bones. I would laugh and she would get madder than a wet hen.
One time, the bitch got ballsy, threw me into a black hawthorn bush, and poured rubbing alcohol all over my body. If I could’ve only counted the clock’s ticks. It felt like I had bled for hours. The wounds healed, and I looked like I had a permanent case of chicken pox.
Marla said no one would yearn for me like they used to. That may have been true — just about everybody was dead.
Billy, the youngest of us, tended to my skin on nights Marla had too much of that barrel whiskey. Billy was a caring boy. His cheeks were as sweet as his mama’s peach cobbler. At least that was what he went on claiming. Billy applied concoctions of oils, creams, and pastes he stole from Josephine’s market. In return, I read to him, and when I finished he always told me the same thing.
“My mama will turn around. We’ll all move to Georgia, and Mama will make us some cobbler. She has to, we’re brothers,” Billy would say.
Then the storms came in like a charging bull. They hit hard one Sunday when Billy was out gathering firewood. One week later he passed from pneumonia. Marla didn’t try much to save him.
“Let God have His way,” she said.
Caleb took the news the hardest. He didn’t talk to us for weeks. That was when he disappeared.
The town’s woodsmen found a starved Caleb in the fetal position in a cave at the top of the mountain. Marla said that in penance he probably wanted to be swallowed up whole by a grizzly bear.
Can’t never could with how ignorant that bitch was. Caleb had run away in the dead of summer. Bears ’round our parts didn’t make their way up to the caves until winter.
At night it felt like my lungs collapsed thinking ’bout Caleb having to die alone. His eyes were an incantation of sapphire, prettier than any girl’s I’d ever seen.
Marla was like a shiny pearl when Caleb’s body was dropped onto our doorstep.
I wept and the good Lord made me despondent.
The last time I cried like that, a group of mallards flew high in the sky. Benjamin shot them cold and the tall grass bled. A small patch was permanently stained with their death, only to die when the wildfires thrived.
Benjamin’s fortitude was an answered prayer. He always reminded me of a tin of butter cookies on Christmas Day.
Rain lasted for weeks. The newspapers stopped coming. The clouds were fatigued and dark like a miner’s clothes.
The hurricanes were so frequent that they stopped naming them.
The town was soon leveled and a mass exodus was ordered.
Benjamin and I ran away just before the river overflowed. From the mountain’s base we witnessed the place we called home being dismantled. We came around the mountain, the St. Thomas at our feet, when the river’s banks crumbled in. With an unparalleled appetite, waves almost as tall as houses swallowed the earth below, splitting the two of us apart.
Benjamin was forced further north. Alone, I went south.
For a moment there was calm and sunlight.
My tears rivaled the hurricane. I walked on, looking for ways up hills. I came upon a house. Everything but the wooden porch had been consumed by the mighty.
My skin turned gray. My pulse softened. This was the end of the line.
“Why are you doing this?” I said, searching for answers in the sky.
The sun glimmered and there was only a howl from the winds. The storm’s violence drowned the answers away.