Content Warnings: Racism So, he gets up. He gets up out of his dying chair because everyone who’s assembled to watch him go has launched into The Old Rugged Cross, a maudlin hymn Earl Whitfield despises and will not abide. The preacher’s benediction peters out and Whit’s daughter, Opal, stops hollering yes Jesus long enough to watch him stumble into the middle of the living room, through his faltering choir, out the screen door onto the porch, past curious cousins, appalled deacons, and the McWhorter kids from next door to curl his cancerous fingers around the iron pipe railing leading down the steps. He’d been so proud of it when he was in his forties, eyes glowing with a coralline fire, the fulminate rays of his heart shooting out from between his ribs, consumed by a purposeful heat, a circle of apparent light that followed him everywhere he walked, a bonified halo. Back when he spent whole days with his face an inch off the paper, eyes wide and dry, tracking the point of his pencil as it scrawled the geometric notation of Sacred Harp music, the melody of his life, a circled do, an ovulate re, a diamond me, stabbed into every page with such fury he could barely distinguish one from the other—but hearing them, hearing them vine together, glistening, fecund, raw— “Daddy?” Opal takes his arm. He snatches it back. “Get off,” he snarls. “Set Jesus down for half a second and let me be. I can’t stand it,” he glowered. “Can’t fathom.” This creature he’d created, this aberrate daughter who’d started as a wondrously wild girl-god wrestling her knobby knees around the neck of his prize breeding steer, singing and whooping with pure joy. “You were a holy thing,” he says. Whit looks over her head to the porch filling up with all the people who wanted something from him, even if it was just to help out, just to be the one holding his elbow on the way to the toilet, the one pouring another cup of coffee, the one reading in the lamplight from Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, all of them taking by giving, making him sicker and sicker. His whiskered, liver-spotted face jogged over them. They dressed like they got their clothes on the side of the road. Dull, lifeless faces twisted into sorrowful masks, eyebrows crawling into their hairline cause the old man’s wandering off instead of giving them one last show. I’m going mean, he thought. Mean like my uncle Lamar, yelling nigger in hospice till they kicked him out. Yelling at Opal. She didn’t mean nothing, didn’t know nothing. Homeschooled with all the rigor our old RCA could muster. Cain’t blame her for a lack of understanding, it’s just, they need to let me be. “Where’re you goin’?” Opal asks. Whit meant to say, as far away from that awful song as I can go, but instead, he barked “Lightning’s stuck in the creek.” “Lightning’s been dead for forty-eight years,” Opal whispered sweet Jesus. “Come on, Daddy, come back into the house,” she went for his arm again, calling her husband down. “Jake, come get him back inside.” Whit felt the weight of his pistol in his robe and reached into his pocket and got it and held it up. Half the porch fell down to hide and Opal went white with fear. Whit fired a shot up through the walnut tree. Leaves rained down. “Just let him go.” Her husband pulled her close as they watched Whit carry his conniption into the field. He followed the grass down to the fingerling creek winding through the wild pines below his house, his robe billowing in the heat, wisps of hair turning translucent in the afternoon sun, pink tendons elevened up the back of his neck. Then the trail opened up and here he was, here he was in the old meadow where Lightning used keep the dandelions down, chewing all day, quiet, dignified, a serious old bull who understood the blaze that burned through Whitfield’s bones like a torch in a tree trunk and would raise his chalky old horns at the sound of the piano as Whit worked out a motif, heading wild eyed into the unflowered bramble of theory and devotion to try and steal the fire out of I’m on My Journey Home, or sneak dark harmony out of A Wayfaring Stranger and seed them into the hymns he composed. The pasture’s gone to ruin, a bracken of honeysuckle, potato vines, and every thorny plant God gave Alabama, but Whit walks right out in the middle of it. Weeds sweep over a shallow bank ringed by peaches and a pine hammock and a wicket of Come to Jesus trees, trunks furrowed by Muscadine vines, their hard cracked grapes the same brown as the freckles on Whit’s face as it rises, as he lifts it skyward, lips trembling at the story of how he got here. Sixty years back, he’d carried his trapper kid’s body up out of the mine. The boy draped across his arms as they rose in the buck hoist up into the light. Such a beautiful face. His cheeks just barely fuzzed by a blond haze; dead nickel eyes staring up into nothing. Whit had coached that boy, had talked quietly and seriously to him, had been a friend and a father to him, teaching him to keep himself small inside the frame of the metal door he opened and closed to trap the airflow and chase away black damp. He was so obedient, so dutiful, such a good kid—Whit was crying now, crying up into the sky—such a good boy. But he forgot himself one day after his carbide lamp fell over and the flame blew out and left him in a dark shaft. Dark in a mine’s unlike any other dark. Grown men, hard men, would talk about it late at night in the bunk house felt thick, thick like it was gettin’ closer and closer. The trapper kid must’ve panicked, must’ve reached out to find his way, reached out to grab hold of something he recognized, something safe, but instead he grabbed the bare quarter-inch electrical cable running to the water pumps. Two hundred volts of Vulcan fire blew his heart through his rib cage. He died on the spot. Owen Weathers; died on the spot. Whit remembers cradling Owen closer, burying his coal-black nose in the boy’s platinum hair and thinking He’s only ten years old. Owen said his mother was in the choir over at Mt. Olive Baptist Church, so Whit walked the thirteen miles to tell her her boy’d died. As he got close to the building, eyes white in a coal blackened face, he was pulled like a magnet across a soybean field toward the little church, swept into the flat, galvanic fa so la ti does erupting from the open windows. He glided through the doors, glided up the aisle, his eyes fastened onto the dazzling mystery of Owen’s face under apple blossom ringlets peeking out from Holly Weathers’ teakettle blue scarf as her gaze lifted—like his lifted now—lifted into the roofbeams as she sang The Last Words of Copernicus: And thou refulgent orb of day, In brighter flames arrayed; My soul which springs beyond thy sphere, No more demands thy aid. and in her voice, in that sky of sound, Whitfield received a thunderous blessing, and the roof of the church blew off like a hurricane and the storm of her voice turned into a terrifying, beautiful vision, into a canticle called from under a hundred halos, and from the center of it all, a dark idea turned its grin toward Whit and walked over to take residence in his heart and stayed there 70 years. From his house the choir’s mournful rendition rolls down the hill as if to underscore his memory of all those years, all those decades spent chasing that moment: Mr. Earl Whitfield and Ms. Holly Weathers announce their engagement. He never went back to the mine. He became a music director and a noted arranger, staying up all night for weeks on end, poor Holly and Opal and the dog in the doorway watching him mumble and cuss, sweeping compositions off his desk, his wrist and forearm sore trying from trying so hard to recreate that terrifying moment he’d heard spill from his wife’s liquid throat the voice of God. The choir murmurs into alright nows and I guess we’ll let you goes. Alone in silence Whit remembers that time his buddy Harold, a Coushatta Indian who ran the excavation unit and helped him drink whiskey in his wild days, that time Harold stumbled madly down Double Oak mountain after a Golden Eagle, a majestic raptor with wings as wide as man is tall, to steal a feather. They came to a pool in Yellow Leaf Creek not any bigger than a horse trough and Whit stopped to rest but Harold staggered after that bird, which landed on a flat jut of granite not seven feet in front of Whit and shed a tail feather like it was bestowing a spiritual gift and Harold like to never forgive him; wouldn’t take that feather for all the money in the world. And now here he was, now here he was, and he never found what he was chasing, that thing Holly’d had. Even in the middle of cancer and pneumonia she was lit up from the inside, her glassine voice undiminished; even in her 70s she could sight sing his latest melody like she’d known it her whole life and it would be perfect and it would be overwhelming and it would shine into every corner of his heart and in every one, god was absent and so, here he was, having failed, deaf to the voice of deity from day one and he was ready, now, to go; he was good with it. Whitfield waded out till the broom sedge and bottle brush came to his belly button and he gave up. He found himself then, found himself lost in the meadow song, found himself lost in the wind in the branches, in Opal’s complaints clattering out the kitchen window, in stridulant saplings rubbing together, in a frog throating down under the creek lip, in the chip trucks chanting over the mountain, in the perfect stillness of a white cloud dissolving in the blue. Whitfield, having quit the hunt, shoved his spotted hands into the pockets of his robe, hung his head and spoke, truly, for the first time in ninety-odd years, to God, who’d escaped him. “I guess you won this round.” Whit grinned. Then he chuckled, suddenly his old self, and he felt that for the first time in a long time he was free. Free of ambition. Cut loose from purpose. He slipped his feet out of his slippers and dug his toes into the red dirt of Alabama and did fuck all. The sky rolled over him. The sun reached over to grab the golden tree tops and pulled itself to bed and the world shushed and got quieter and quieter until Whit was suddenly attuned, suddenly attentive, suddenly possessed of a fact as if he’d been handed an ordinary slip of paper on which was written THIS. He dragged his gaze along the tree line and his smile widened and his tears ran into his whiskers and he felt like kneeling, like he might fall down but also like he might just lift up out of the weeds and fly after that departing star and he was ruined and he was rebuilt and he was terrified and he was completely calm and all he could say right there at the end, all he could croak through astounded tears was, “Oh.” –30–
About the Author Bull Garlington is a writer from Chicago by way of Alabama. Much of his work is focused on his life in the south and seeing it through a lens of magical realism, humor, and poetry. His work has appeared in various literary magazines, including Mr. Bull, Thin Skin, and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Garlington is currently pursuing, at an advanced and seemingly impossible age, an Undergraduate Degree in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford.
The Last Words of Copernicus
