“Bertie?” It’s Mama’s voice. I picture her standing by the chicken coup,
her hands balled into fists and driven into her thin waist as if she’s
squeezing my name out from her body like how I squeeze toothpaste from the
tube. I think about ignoring her. She only calls me ‘Bertie’ when she wants
something from me and right now I don’t figure I’ve much to give.
I pick up
my magazine and thumb through until I find the story I’d been about to read when
I fell asleep. It’s by Lovecraft, so I
know it’s going to be dark, but it’s called “The Cat’s of Ulthar.” There’s nothing all that objectionable about
cats, is there? Maybe Mama wouldn’t mind
if I let Sissy read this one, but then again, Mama didn’t even like Daddy
reading Weird Tales. I reckon it’s the
covers she finds so distasteful. The last
issue that came to the house before Daddy’s subscription ran out two years ago
had a very provocative cover. It’s one of
my favorites. There’s a girl, or a woman
I ought to say, naked as the day she was born, kneeling all shameful-like
before a man in a hooded robe. Her
wrists and ankles are bound, her breasts firm, and her hair like golden wheat,
a memory to me now.
When that
particular magazine came in the mail, Mama said to me, ‘You’ll go blind looking
at those things,’ and I thought long and hard over what ‘things’ she could have
meant. Breasts? Is that what would blind me? Why now?
If I didn’t go blind after the September issue from 1933 what chance did
this new issue have in rending me sightless?
Maybe she meant real breasts. I
considered this and decided there must be some sort of talisman to protect
married men from losing their eyesight during the dangerous task of love
making. But what about babies who breast
fed? Surely everyone should be blind. No, it couldn’t be that. Perhaps my blindness would come from the
stories contained within. But Daddy was a
voracious reader of pulp and fantasy, yet he was always the first to see a
duster coming, sometimes when it was still just a haze on the horizon. And why should the words in Weird Tales have any such power over a
man’s sight when the words in the bible do not?
So perhaps, and this is what I finally settled on after a good deal of
rumination, Mama doesn’t know a damn thing about the real world. Her mouth would move and the Preacher’s words would come
out, mixed and remade to sound like her own, but I knew better. Had it always been like that? Had she ever had a thought that was her own?
I cried
myself to sleep that night. Mama
overheard me and lectured me thinking I was crying because the subscription had
come to an end, but that wasn’t it at all.
I sobbed because it suddenly seemed that my mother had never really
belonged to me. Even when she used to
sing me to sleep, it was always for
Him; I was just an excuse for the song.
Whenever anything good happened it was God rewarding us, and whenever
anything bad happened it was God testing us.
It wouldn’t have bothered me so much if I wasn’t so sure there was no
one up there listening to her. Thinking
on it now, I guess she was right. I did
‘go blind looking as those things’ and now I’m lost in the dark, no God to save
me, no Preacher’s assurances to make it better, no
life-everlasting-world-without-end, amen.
I’m fine with it, though. Life
everlasting would be pretty boring, anyway.
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