Delivering Virtue Read online

  When I was finished, I felt greatly improved, although somewhat sheepish. I stood and wiped my mouth on my sleeve.

  The waiter had appeared, and was assessing the disaster with sadness.

  Dallon stood beside Thurman, not speaking, but revealing what was on his mind by the hopeless slump in his posture.

  “Pardon me,” I said.

  Thurman spoke. “Regrettably,” he said to Dallon, “the final decision is not mine to make.”

  He gestured for me and Dallon to follow him.

  I handed my last dollar to the waiter. “For your troubles,” I said. But I could tell he did not think it compensation enough for the task that I had left him.

  OUTSIDE, THE SWOLLEN BLISTER of the sun washed everything with jaundiced light. It pained my eyes. People were coming and going on foot and in wagons, dodging and zagging, as if they were all savvy to some sort of design in the confusion. Thurman, too, seemed to know right where he was heading. He led Dallon and me through the melee until we came to a big catalpa tree off the main street. The tree was in late bloom, hanging heavy with tired white blossoms and filling the air with its musky perfume. There was a bench in the shade, and upon it sat two women and a man. The man looked to be Thurman’s twin – same wrap-around muttonchops, and dressed like a crow – only born about twenty years after his brother. One of the women appeared to be the mother who had endured the arduous and protracted labor of their birth. She was old and wrung like a rag. But the second woman, although she wore the startled expression of a doe about to take a bullet, was young and inordinately pretty. They all stood when we approached. The pretty one hugged a bundle to her chest.

  Thurman gestured for Dallon and me to wait just outside the perimeter of the shade. The sun pounded down upon us. Then he went to talk to the trio at the bench.

  I could not make out what they were saying. They seemed to be discussing business in a private glossolalia. They kept glancing over at us. Dallon muttered out of the corner of his mouth. “Just keep smiling, Rain. I’m not sure how we managed, after your little show, but I don’t think we’ve lost this hand just yet.”

  I peered into the sky, hot and pale blue. A few swallows were darting about, snatching little moths on the wing. I wondered what it might be like to fly.

  “Mister Rain,” called Thurman.

  I stepped into the shade with Dallon right behind me. The haggard woman and the other man came forward to meet us, but the pretty girl stayed back.

  “This is Brother Benjamin,” said Thurman. “He deals with our contracts and legalities.”

  Dallon and I shook the man’s hand and uttered the obligatory niceties.

  “And this is Sister Sarah.”

  The woman had a parched smile, like a bend in a desert river. “Bless thee,” she hissed, and squeezed my hand.

  “You will follow all parameters of the prophecy,” said Thurman, “of which Brother Benjamin will now read, so as both parties might be in undisputed accord.”

  Benjamin stepped forward and read from an official looking paper.

  “Thou shalt bear no arms,” he said, “neither for protection, nor for hunting. Trust in the Lord, for He shall afford you food and safe passage.

  “Thou shalt eat no meat.

  “Neither inebriants nor stimulators are to be consumed.” He looked at me, and clarified. “No liquor, coffee, or tobacco, or any variety of other Indian potions you might find on your travels.”

  I nodded like a good boy, but I still was not clear as to what I was agreeing.

  “Thou shalt partake in none of the carnal pleasures.” Benjamin blushed through his beard when he said that part. He kept his eyes on the paper. “Such misdeeds shall be punishable by God, and ye shall surely suffer for your transgressions. For he who fraternizes with evil shall surely be subject to it in the end himself.”

  That was when it occurred to me that maybe I was being asked to transport the pretty girl to the City of Rocks. To say the least, I became intrigued.

  “As the instrument for the prophecy, you shall convey the bride, with her virtue intact, to one Prophet Nehi, who will then pay to you, in earthly currency, the balance of thirty thousand dollars.”

  That, too, caught my attention. An unreasonably large sum. I was used to far less.

  Brother Benjamin then put away the paper, and Thurman stepped forward and asked, “Are you clear on the guidelines for the prophecy?”

  Dallon nodded eagerly, wiggling like a retriever who is about to be thrown a stick. “We are.” He glanced at me. “Rain is.”

  I might have nodded too. I do not remember. I was looking past Thurman at the pretty girl. I was thinking that my share of that thirty thousand dollars would allow me to get back to the project that had been haunting me for so long.

  “There is just one more point,” said Thurman.

  Behind him, the girl was handing her bundle to the old woman.

  “Our young sister has had a vision,” said Thurman. “In it, she was vouchsafed an immaculate experience by the Spirit of God. She will now determine if you are the True Deliverer, Mister Rain, or merely an interloper.”

  He summoned the girl, who then walked forward with her hands held demurely at her sides. She stood before Thurman, listening to his direction. “You must be absolutely positive,” he told her.

  Something in the way he said that caused me to squirm.

  Thurman turned and leveled an accusing finger straight at me. Then, in that holy booming voice, he asked the girl, “Is it he?”

  She just stood there for a time, looking me over, while I looked back at her. I will not lie. Even under scrutiny, with all eyes trained upon me, I was unable to help myself. Some animal part raised up inside of me and took me over. In my mind I was imagining what the girl looked like beneath that dowdy Mormon dress. I was already wandering the feminine wilderness of her body, roaming along the slope of her shoulders, through the peaceful valley of her bosom, and down and down the milk white plain of her beautiful belly. And although it may only have been my own narcissistic conjecture, I am almost certain that she was performing a similar appraisal of my own secret person.

  Then she stepped close to me. She was somewhat diminutive, and when she tipped back her head, it was as if she were offering me her throat. I looked into her eyes – two cool blue pools into which I suddenly longed to plunge. The girl raised her hand and laid it against my cheek. Her touch was eerily familiar, as if from some half-remembered dream, or some other life I had lived in a sweeter time. Her lips were red and full and damp, even in the heat of that arid midday. Lovely little beads of sweat glistened like dewdrops on her brow.

  Finally, she unbuttoned my shirt, opening it so my chest was bare to her breath. It was all I could do to stand. She placed a single finger over my heart, lightly tracing a shape on my skin.

  I closed my eyes.

  I could not have said accurately which way was up.

  I was ready, right there in plain view of everyone, to offer that girl every ounce of my world-weary self. I was most assuredly prepared to sink away to her most ardent and oblivious depths.

  “Rain.” She whispered my name. “Rain.”

  WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, the girl was walking away, leaving me in an embarrassing state of undress and near rapture.

  The thunder of Thurman’s voice shook me from my reverie.

  “You have a large raindrop, Mister Rain, tattooed upon your chest.”

  I peered down awkwardly at my tattoo, trying to focus. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  “What does it mean?”

  I tried to remember. It was not something I thought about most of the time. “Oh,” I said. “My mother had it put there when I was a child, as a mark of birthright, so that I might someday receive my legacy without question of who I am.”

  Thurman nodded. Then he turned to the girl who stood beside him. I heard him say, “Are you certain?”

  The girl gazed back at me over her shoulder. Those translucent blue eyes. Then
she nodded.

  “The raindrop,” said Thurman, “is the final proof of the prophecy. It seems your birthright, Mister Rain, is more miracle than you might have expected.”

  I bobbed my head. “Well,” I said, “some people would not recognize a miracle if she were to step right up and kiss them.” It was, of course, an imprudent thing to say, and I regretted it directly.

  After shooting me through with one last disapproving look, Thurman led Dallon and Benjamin to the side to fill out paperwork. I buttoned up my shirt and put my disheveled and shaken self back together. I stole a glance at the girl, but even after our intimate interaction, she did not return my attention. She seemed done with me. I know it sounds puerile, but I felt slighted somehow, jilted, as if I had been used up and cast-off all in one swoop.

  No matter, I told myself, we will get to know each other over the long course of our journey.

  Old Sarah and the girl (I still had no name by which to call her) were fussing over the bundle, and that is when it occurred to me that their actions were somewhat peculiar. The old lady gently bounced the package a couple of times, rocking it back and forth. And then, weirdly, the girl bent into the bundle with her face, kissing whatever was inside. She had tears on her cheeks. I had seen religious rites where a believer laid her lips upon a relic, or talisman. Such devotions often move the devout to a passion. And so I assumed perhaps that that was what I was witnessing now. Then Sarah came to me with the bundle.

  “You two need to get acquainted,” she said. And then she carefully placed the bundle in my arms. “This,” she told me, “is our little Virtue.”

  Of course, it had been a baby all along. I should have known by the way they cooed and worried over it, but I had spent no time with infants, and so I beg excuse for my stupidity.

  I gazed down into my arms, bedazzled. I had never held a babe. The child, one could clearly see, was a girl, small and light. She seemed made of feathers. She sucked her tiny fist and stared up at me with a pair of freshet blue eyes. I already knew those eyes. They were the young woman’s eyes in miniature. They seemed to peer directly into my deepest regions. They seemed to know me better than I knew myself. From nowhere, a fathomless sadness washed inside of me, a wave of inexplicable nostalgia and loss. Followed by a flood of joy. I do not know how to explain it entirely. It was such a push and pull. I have since tried to understand, have gazed into the moon and struggled to write it down, but have yet to find the appropriate string of words to express that ineffable moment. No poetry, it seems, will serve.

  “Have you ever changed a soiled diaper?” asked Sarah.

  I stared at her, not quite sure I was hearing her right. “No,” I mumbled dumbly.

  “Well.” She smiled, and patted my hand with her wrinkled fingers. “It is high time you learned how.”

  NOW IN ORDER TO convey a sense of my impression of what happened next, it is necessary for me to erect a conceit as baroque, confused, and absurd as the situation in which I found myself. Let us say, in keeping with my earlier dream, that I was now partly a goat, endeavoring to piece together a nonsensical puzzle – one made up of baby parts and whiskered faces – while somnambulating through the fog of a goat’s worried hallucination.

  While the other men discussed logistics, Old Sarah gave me instruction in the finer points of a baby’s toilet. This alone was a small and disquieting nightmare, and I surmised more from the crone’s hominid gestures and tone than from actually comprehending a single word she was telling me. The old lady tutored me at length about the various powders and ointments and degrees of freshness required for a baby’s sanitary contentment. But while working within the parameters of my horny, ruminant brain, I must have come across as somewhat dimwitted. At one point, I understood I was to fold over a corner on the diaper so that I might learn to fashion a special style of flattened knot that would be more comfortable against the child’s sensitive abdomen. But as I was all hooves, I royally botched this simple undertaking.

  “Never you mind,” Sarah assured me. “You will learn.”

  And while I vaguely grasped her words, I greatly doubted their truth.

  Virtue remained patient through it all. And I must say, I was impressed with her from the git-go, both with her ability to produce such a robustly pungent mess, and with her placidity throughout my bumbling efforts of dealing with it. She already seemed separate from the ignoble world into which she had been born – a tolerant tiny demi-goddess suffering the ineptitudes of we mere mortals. Her blue eyes remained fixed upon me as I took instruction on the proper approach to swabbing and powdering her nether regions.

  I glanced about for the nameless doe of a girl who had earlier been nuzzling the bundle of Virtue, the one who had so deeply touched me, but she seemed to have vanished into the sultry air.

  “Would it not be more prudent,” I asked Sarah, “to have the child’s mother do the changing?”

  She gave me a long-suffering smile. “Indeed it would, Mister Rain. But the Lord asks us to endure the most unlikely trials as proof of our faith. We must remember the examples of Noah and the Flood, or of Abraham and Isaac.”

  I recalled that Biblical tale in which God asked Abraham, as confirmation of his devotion, to take a knife to the throat of his only legitimate son. And although, to my knowledge, I have never been a father, it did not take much to imagine the tortured anguish Abraham must have suffered as he prepared to lay open his son’s jugular.

  But then – Ha-ha!

  At the last second, God stopped Abraham’s arm just prior to plunging the blade. A sort of holy joke, not dissimilar, it always seemed to me, from the variety contrived by Yahweh’s more Olympian counterpart, Zeus. I tried to think now which role I was playing in such a reenactment of that scenario, and felt a chill when I then remembered the fatted ram God had provided as a sacrifice in Isaac’s stead.

  “And now for the feeding,” said Sarah. She showed me a bottle full of milk upon which was attached a vulcanized rubber teat. “Above all,” she inculcated, “you must be striving for cleanliness.”

  I nodded, as if I knew what she meant.

  She instructed me in exacting detail on how best to boil the glassware and nipples for sterilization, and how then to warm the milk and test its heat so that it might mimic the very stuff tapped from a mother’s breast. “Not too hot,” she warned, and dribbled a drop of the milk onto her under wrist. “Like so.”

  The day was so warm, she told me, that the milk was nearly already at the correct temperature. “But be careful you don’t go and let it spoil.”

  I nodded again, but I could not have been more lost had she been explaining an algorithm in some lost dialect of Mesopotamian.

  She then had me hold Virtue in the crook of my arm, while she got the child started at the nipple. I took over, holding the bottle gently tipped so that a steady supply would drain into the child’s puckered mouth. It was an odd sensation when it all came together. A tad tense, but not at all unpleasant. And for the first time in my life I felt I knew just a little bit of what it might be like to be a mother.

  Virtue continued watching me, approvingly, I imagined.

  “Well, Mister Rain,” I heard Thurman say. “You seem to have a natural talent.”

  I felt myself blush as the others came close to where I was administering to the babe. “Yes,” I said in my best manly tenor. “But it is not something I would want to do every day.”

  Thurman nodded sympathetically. “And yet,” he said, “it is established. For the foreseeable future, at least, that is exactly what you will be doing.”

  I laughed, and then looked to Dallon, my intermediary, to translate from Affiliate Mormon to Goat. My partner grinned surreptitiously, and looked away, inciting in me a slight anxiety.

  “But the child’s mother will surely be tending to all her needs,” I said. “I am only to protect and lead them through the perils of the journey.”

  No one responded verbally, and I saw a troubled expression play out on Thurma
n’s whiskered façade.

  “Correct?” I said.

  Thurman cleared his throat, and then recited from some invisible text he had etched in his mind. “And the mother shall part ways with her child. And The Blessed Deliverer shall then accompany the bride through the wilderness, conveying her into the waiting arms of the Prophet.”

  I was scrambling in my skull, adding up all the information I had so far gleaned, putting together as many pieces of this abstract mystery as I could. I drew the most obvious conclusion and voiced it to the dark-suited man before me. “So why am I learning so much about infant care,” I asked, “if the mother is to leave the child behind?”

  Thurman looked at Dallon, who chewed his mustache and hunched his shoulders. Then Thurman turned back to me. “I thought it was clear, Mister Rain.”

  I shook my head and smiled feebly, feeling the rhythmic throb in my wrist as little Virtue continued to pump on the bottle.

  “Well, Mister Rain. It is not the mother who is to leave the child behind…” He parted his hairy hands before him, as if drawing a curtain to let in some light. “…it is the child who will leave behind the mother.”

  I gazed down at Virtue, sucking away, and watching me.

  I was deeply confused.

  Then, like a chump punch to the gut, it struck me.

  “Virtue is the bride to whom you refer?”

  “Yes, Mister Rain. As the prophecy so decrees.”

  I involuntarily stamped a hoof. “Baaah!” I replied, or something equally as inane.

  “Ours, Mister Rain, is not to reason why.”

  Admittedly, I did not know piddledy-poo about baby humans, but I deduced that this one I held in my arms was relatively new. She could not have been more than a few weeks old. She seemed ages away from ever donning a white dress and strolling down the matrimonial aisle into the arms of anyone – prophet, or otherwise. She was too perfect and pure and small. A protective instinct stirred inexplicably in my solar plexus. But then I told myself, Rain, it is not your place to meddle.