Witness Marks

By Basil Rosa

Preacher Everett Micah Zachery narrates this novel of interconnected stories of heartbreak and joy, each one taken from a diverse group of parishioners at Glad Tidings Church in the Southeastern U.S. city of Belinda.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Michael Flynn
• Release date: Nov 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005686383

Basil Rosa

John Flynn (www.basilrosa.com), who also writes as Basil Rosa, has published chapbooks, as well as complete collections of poems, which include Moments Between Cities, and Restless Vanishings. He has also published three collections of short stories: Something Grand, Dreaming Rodin, and Off To The Next Wherever. He’s earned awards from the New England Poetry Club, and the U.S. Peace Corps.

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WITNESS MARKS

Basil Rosa

Flight

Delay

Books

Copyright © 2020 Basil Rosa

All rights reserved.

Cover Image by Tony Duane Sturtevant

Author website: www.basilrosa.com

In loving memory of Katerina and Julie

For those who believe, no proof is necessary.

For those who disbelieve, no amount of proof is sufficient.

Ignatius of Loyola

No one else hears the rain fall.

No one else hears the ghosts at all.

Is it too much to carry in your heart?

Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer

By way of the morning star

it’s here in Belinda I’ve been called Preacher for more years and among more sinners than I can count. My name is Everett Micah Zachery and I’ve believed in occult forces since I was a peckerwood shaver on the Zachery farm. I had Momma’s knack for higher learning and the metaphysical, and Daddy’s inclination toward the Bible, hard work and strong drink. Like both my parents, I’m not one to make promises.

I hardly recognize present-day Belinda. Post-Jim-Crow it’s changed plenty in the decades since Daddy, Granddaddy and his daddy before him blemished the ridge-top that cuts across what used to be Wobbly Creek Farm down the end of Zachery Road, all now a mishmash of suburb, exurb and edge city linked by streams of traffic. Once idyllic pastureland, that piece of heaven was deeded to my great-great granddaddy, Micah Zion Zachery, who I’m proud to say refused to own human beings though he took up arms to protect his holdings for the losing side in that war.

I try to coax a little light out of my parishioners. You know this light. It’s a laser that shoots from your heart, never to leave a damaging scar. Here in Belinda our Glad Tidings Church occupies a pod-mall space with lots of parking out front. Early on, I ruffled the feathers of some grouchy old municipals by hanging a rainbow flag over the entry. After phone calls to benevolent Unitarian and some evangelical pastors like myself, I learned I had adequate support if needed. Those belligerent sticks-in-the-mud had no legal pins to stand on. They’re cousins to the supremacists and porcine geezers who still gather for KKK rallies. Dangerously ignorant and like a virus that won’t go away, nobody really wants ‘em around.

Some criticized me for this, of course, and for lacking missionary zeal when I started at the church. My wife Patsy was alive then and I hadn’t grown young enough to know how much of a cantankerous melon-head I can be. The question remains: Can I attract parishioners?

Seems rightly that I don’t have to. Though I cannot define the appeal exactly, my flock grows on its own. They show up in spurts and batches, maimed and maligned, to our converted space that was once home to a video emporium. We’ve got a branch office of Liberty Insurance to one side of us and the T-Rex Firearms store to the other. It’s a southern-fried tableau and maybe that’s appeal enough.

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

ONE

Willow Sapphire Velda, 32, brunette, sat at her kitchen table with four Tylenols and a can of Cheerwine soda. Unemployed, Willow hadn’t been fired or done anything wrong. The company she’d been working for had been sold, re-structured and reduced its work force. Her boyfriend and sponsor Gunner Mills had remarked, All these new normals. Yet I reckon soon enough we’ll start looking back on these as the good old days.

Gunner wanted Willow to join him on a train to Dysonburg north across the state line. He’d told her he believed the agrarian landscape here in the Southeast was experienced best from a window seat of what were once known as sleeper cars. He revered trains, wanted to cheer Willow up and to share his Dysonburg roots.

Three years Willow had been sober. Gunner had been clean for five. I think she was grateful to have him as her sponsor. I think she loved him too, but I never heard her admit it. She’d met him when she’d first started going to the meetings I ran at our church. She was a girl from Bobolink, more of a railroad junction than a town, a place she’d described as butt-ugly. Like Gunner, she’d been raised by a single mother and had no idea who her Daddy was. She often told me she thought of herself and Gunner as doomed. She wouldn’t say why. At our last meeting, she revealed she’d come to an understanding that one key to happiness was in trusting others. She could be right. I didn’t pretend to know.

For a year, upon my recommendation, Willow had been seeing a psychiatrist, Doctor Sheila Blaine, who charged on a sliding scale. Willow drove to Sheila’s home for their sessions. Sheila had helped me on dire occasions from relapsing into substance abuse. As a widower without any kin left, I was certainly knowledgeable but not an expert when it came to self-immolation. I return to Sheila now and then. I, too, need someone to listen as I exhume my past.

Was Willow having a beneficial experience with our good doctor?

Does your butt itch, Preacher Everett, if you shit in a briar patch?

Nothing had been robbed from her that she hadn’t taken first from herself – the theme of karma I’d sermonized on many times. Once so determined to mutilate her senses, Willow was finding calm, rising into more rarified ethers, bonding to Gunner and a growing dignity. She and Gunner could have been Patsy and me all those years ago. When seeing them together, I found it easier to remember that I, too, was just beginning.

In Bobolink – some call the town Bobby, but not Willow – they boasted of their train museum. One old locomotive on its postage stamp of a town common had been re-painted to look as if new. The Pride of Bobbie they called it, where many an iron horse once rolled through and still do, I reckon, but they’re freight cars now and the pagoda-style passenger depot is used as the town’s primary and rather modest municipal building. Gunner thinks it should have become a museum. Willow has no opinion either way. She’d rather not talk about Bobolink. I visited there once for the Christmas tree lighting on the common they have each year and I saw that local families really enjoy it, though the so-called Douglas fir is made of plastic.

I visited Railroad Pond, too, which was Willow’s sanctuary while growing up. She’d hide there to get away from her mother, Florrie Velma. Out she’d go each morning as if walking to Fox Creek High, which to hear Willow describe it was nothing short of a prison. She had a friend, an older boy, maybe all of 22, who worked at Food Lion. She’d give him oral sex in his car and he’d give Willow favors in return. She’d walk many a mile to that Food Lion, easily ten miles from home and that boy would buy her some PBR, usually a twelve-pack of cans. He’d buy her whiskey from the state liquor stores too. Willow would sit at Railroad Pond and down that alcohol by herself, not caring that she was supposed to be at school. She said she drank whiskey like it was Cheerwine and ate her Momma’s anti-depressants like they were Skittles.

Y’all go on and chuckle some, Preacher Everett. Me and you and Gunner, we were never like them with their A grades and their blue ribbons and Varsity letters. We were outsiders through and through.

At thirteen, she dyed her hair arctic blue and pierced her nose and tongue and got her first tattoo. At sixteen, she had her first of more than one abortion. She took care of the boys who bought her liquor and drugs and she sulked, escaping into the metal angst of System of A Down, Audioslave, and Metallica. She played her music loudly, in any place, since the point of living was to piss off adults.

Her Momma Florrie cared lots, but she was never home, always working as a secretary at Ag-Chem, a fertilizer plant thirty miles down the county highway from the double-wide they lived in, or else Florrie was running with truck drivers, farm boys and shit-kickers, with their chewing tobacco and country music. Willow didn’t see these men as all bad, especially if they drank with her. Some tried to be father figures and, not unlike the PBR she was always craving, they went down easy but she tired of ‘em pretty fast.

She and Florrie never talked about it, but Willow knew Florrie had endured her own painful share of abortions. Florrie was an independent, capable, handsome and God-fearing woman and she deserved better. It wasn’t really cancer, according to Willow, that killed Florrie, but rather the demanding life she’d known. It was so hard that it murdered her.

When Willow got wind of Florrie being sick, she was already in Belinda, sort of going to classes at State. Florrie’s illness gave Willow an excuse to drink half the boys on campus under the table and to sleep with the other half. That’s right, more abortions. She never sounded proud to admit it. She had scholarship money for State, too. She could talk highbrow she told me, if she cared to, and she read fantasy novels and had a knack for mathematics, though she could gab like trailer trash if it suited her.

She was far from stupid. I think part of her problem was boredom, along with no sense of direction and an appetite for ways to improve herself that scared her. My first impression of her was that she showed one deep blue streak of melancholia and with Florrie dying suddenly, and alone, Willow turned to PBR for breakfast, JD for lunch, vodka, meth, weed, you name it, for dinner. Except crack. She never liked it. These days, she can at least say that she blames only herself and admits at each meeting that she’s one no good alcoholic.

Gunner Mills, conversely, went in big for crack and meth and starred in his own version of Breaking Bad, though he admits he never sold the stuff but was right darn good at being a two-fisted drunk and user. He had issues with his Momma, as well, summing her up as a piece of redneck dirt. His parents had divorced when he was ten, and his father had run off, taking with him Gunner’s younger brother, Jason. Gunner’s Momma, Clystine, shoplifted and pinched money from the cash drawer wherever she worked. Sometimes she just emptied the drawer and ran off before the store closed, never to return. Stole from Gunner and her lovers and anyone she called a friend. Gunner never learned to do the same. Momma Clystine, why, she woulda stole the gold off a corpse’s molars to pawn it for cash to get high. After I saw what she did to people and what she did to me, of course, I just never could go that far.

Clystine dragged him along as she bumped around up north of Belinda from Dysonburg into Gladysburg and then Janine, always on the go and running from one larceny to another before finally settling into a rented one-bedroom in one of Belinda’s poorest neighborhoods. By that time, Gunner was smoking crack, sometimes with her, and he knew the whole dang region as well as he knew the crack thing.

Another zip code and Clystine dyed her hair another color and found herself another lover. Changed her look, from lip gloss to mascara to earrings, pendants and clothing styles. Got a new tattoo. Used a different name. She sometimes went by Coralee or Tamsin. Found a lover, a sugar daddy or a young sucker she could cadge money from. Lost weight and cleaned up for a bit. Tried to enroll Gunner in school. Fell off the wagon, gained the weight back, and then got on diet pills and lost it all again. She’d disappear for months at a time and return to Gunner with a completely different look. He kept their apartment rent and bills paid, living alone, dealing crack and meth from there.

Preacher, she’d show up strung out, a zombie. She was a chameleon. Apparently, she had also mastered the talent of finding men to fund her bad habits. She found them everywhere. Online, too, Preacher. She was clever like that. Used the free computers at the Belinda library. That woman had herself some cat-like wiles.

When it came to learning to use deception to get what he wanted, Gunner owed his mother a debt of gratitude. Due to her long absences, he learned, as well, how to take care of himself. While still enrolled in high school, though he never attended, he worked two jobs, mostly in fast food. When he wasn’t working, he was getting high. As he got a little older, he stole only when necessary, either to pay rent or else buy more drugs. He earned plenty by selling crack and meth and he’d been in and out of the county jail for occasional one-night stints on charges of drunk and disorderly. He was certain the county sheriff, married with children, had slept with his mother more than once. He believed this explained why he was never held in custody for long.

He got used to living alone and he was cooking himself scrapple for breakfast one morning when that sheriff phoned to ask solemnly if he’d come to the county morgue to identify a body. Clystine had been found in a ditch on Buzzard Hollow Road out by McReedy’s sawmill.

Willow and me, Preacher, see, we’re turning the page. Together like. And I do respect that. Together like. Yeah. You know how it is.

***

Gunner, in the kitchen, poured himself coffee. Willow, what about that train ride then?

Honeybunch, I talked to Preacher Everett and I told him I was thinking on it and know what he said? He said trains go into tunnels.

Gunner looked dazed. Seated, he slurped his coffee. That ain’t news. He told me God helps us explain this life we can’t make heads nor tails of.

Willow leaned against the kitchen counter. Will you let me go on?

I’m sorry. I thought you wanted to talk.

I do, Honeybunch. But I need to do some ventilating here. It’s about me and Najima. We were at the mall the other day. Remember Najima? She got fired too.

I do, said Gunner. She’s your towelhead friend there from Egypt.

Pakistan. And she’s Muslim. Don’t be so ignorant.

Ain’t that close enough these days? Besides, ain’t her husband some professor at State?

He’s a smart man and good husband, Gunner. An engineer. You know, the Muslims don’t drink. They’re good to their families too.

Still and all, it’s a damn shame.

What is?

Gunner shrugged. God, I reckon. And folks. And these new normals all the time.

Willow blew a sigh and rolled her eyes. We went to Belks first. I bought me a new top. Then we went to Big Lots and I got some treats for her kids. Those two girls love me. Anyway, I asked Najima what on earth does it mean this notion of being Christian or Muslim or Methodist or Jew. Honeybunch, I just couldn’t help myself. Don’t we all just believe in one God? And don’t he love us just as we are?

Reckon it’s a quandary. And He does. God loves you. That’s right.

But you know what Preacher Everett said? He said God begins and ends with people. On one hand, they can be ignorant and mean. But on the other, they can move mountains.

Search me what he means by that, said Gunner. And you best be careful. Don’t read into his preachin’ too much. It’ll put you back to drinking again. Things just happen sometimes for no good reasons at all. I got a better idea. Why not think of a glorious train ride?

Cain’t you even listen to me? You are so darn mis-directional sometimes. What I’m trying to get is why does faith put people together, but at the same time pull them apart?

Sunup to sundown, I reckon. Got that right.

Give me one good reason to go with you.

Gunner nodded sagely. Florrie Velma’s ashes. You can scatter them out a window on to a meadow you never seen before. Trains always go through God’s country.

Them ashes are staying right where they are in the living room.

Gunner put down his coffee. He stood, faced Willow and threw up his hands in surrender. You and that urn of yours. I declare, Willow. I really declare.

"That’s right, Honeybunch. My urn. My Momma Florrie. You leave her be."

Later, after Gunner had left to work at a friend’s welding shop, Willow took the urn from its shelf and brought it outside. She stood in front of her apartment building and she spoke to the urn, not caring that anyone might hear.

Look at ‘em Florrie, they all got guns. Ain’t one single neighbor that feels safe. Where’s God when you need Him? It just don’t make no sense.

Willow’s street curved and sloped toward the industrial park that filled a low-lying area along Flaxen River. A trio of cast-concrete grain silos stood as a landmark for the avenue that edged the river and ran perpendicular to her street. On both sides of this avenue, the roofs of warehouses and functional buildings ran low and flat into the horizon like an ordered collection of corrugated cubes and dented tin boxes. This landscape, so crowded, often made her think of all the people packed into the city buses she relied on to get around.

A train ride. Not a bus. They’d see some farms and countryside.

A breeze stirred to carry a smell of sewage and burnt molasses. Gunner was kind. Not always bright, but he listened. The more she talked and revealed her darker complicated side, the more she felt comfortable with him. Gunner had said the train would be romantic. Why that word? Was he coming around and would he ask her, at last, to marry him? Najima had been right. Better not think that way. It led to expectations. Better to think about how she missed Florrie, hadn’t loved her enough when it mattered. Better to pray. It’s me, Momma. Please understand I know I did wrong. She’d been small-minded, ungrateful. Now both were gone: the old Willow and her mother.

A train ride. So much nicer than a bus or Gunner’s tired sedan.

***

This was really happening – she and Gunner were becoming a couple.

We’ll sleep on a pullout, he told her. You’re gonna like my man, Travis Drake. We call him The Florist, after FTD. It’s that company sticker you always see at flower shops.

I know what it is.

They threw away the mold when they made Travis. He’s bad-ass.

Gunner, don’t cuss.

Knows me a long time so he won’t expect us to go out. He never was all that social and he ain’t big on drinking no more. Not like back in the day when we’d get in the mood together. Now, if you’ll excuse me, just thinking about Travis makes me wanna piss. Don’t ask me why. Afterwards, I’m going for a jolt. Want one?

I thought we were gonna be careful with money.

It’s just coffee. He sounded loose, easy. Come with? Only a few cars down.

She shook her head no. He was being such a gentleman and looked so clean-shaven and handsome in his black shirt with rhinestones and white piping. Western style looked good on him. I forgot how much I loved that shirt.

Why, thank you.

And a train ride.

Ain’t it nice? He smiled. I told you it would be nice.

You go. She wanted the train alone for a while. She felt something like telepathy between them, which meant she didn’t have to say it. They’d come a long way in so short a time.

As Gunner walked off, Willow reveled in watching the way his bottom moved, fitted into snug jeans. She also noticed that the woman seated across the aisle from her had done the same thing. It was an attractive bottom, but Willow felt a twinge of anger. Gunner was the best thing that had happened to her in a long time and she was more than willing to fight for him.

Still, she said nothing to the woman, who was maybe bored. Best let it go, she thought. She couldn’t. It had been an affront, rude and obvious, and it had made her uncomfortable. She felt tension brewing silently between them until the woman had the nerve to break it by introducing herself as Moxine Mason Shelby. She spoke in a way that struck Willow as polished, overly mannered, giving her full name and finishing with, I’m from Belinda, of course.

That ain’t no boast. So am I, said Willow.

I have a fiancé in Belinda. Garland. He’s a pianist. Classically trained.

Willow didn’t care. Or did she?

Willow Velma. Pleased to meet you. It’s my first time.

Not born in Belinda but out of Belinda?

By train, yes, said Willow.

I think rail travel the way to go. Some differ, of course. Not me. I detest freeways. Those cars. That pollution. Belinda’s impossible now with traffic.

Willow smiled politely, though her smile looked forced. This Moxine Mason Shelby, a bit snobbish, wasn’t she? Lean, angular, she reeked of a body wash with apricots in it, of breeding, poise and restraint. No doubt she was from the beveled hillside neighborhoods of Belinda where homes far from industrial flatlands were labeled as estates and often had names rather than numbers. Some featured hillside views of the river.

Willow told herself not to be judgmental. Flaxen River was polluted from any point of view. She should be open-minded, lower her defenses. She sneaked glances at Moxine until confirmed that her initial reaction had been right. Moxine Mason Shelby looked like a younger version of her mother. How strange. Similar manner, as well. Scent was the only difference. Her mother’s favorite had been strawberry.

But