Salt Lick post 12 Chapter 1 conclusion

She packed her things into the Plymouth, while Daddy tuned the TV to the news, , and quietly ignored the aberrant behavior of his once servile wife. That took effort, since he’d been drinking, to sit there, and hold himself together without so much as a sarcastic grunt. I knew that. And I knew he wasn’t watching the news program, or digesting it, but zeroing in on the wavy lines of the reception, hoping what happened would suddenly slip into one, and everything would shift back into gear.

After the sound of the wagon faded, and she was gone, Cub appeared at my side. Why do the communists in the forest hide from us, he asked. They’re not hiding, I told him. They’re separating from us. They must think we’re bad, or rotten, or somehow poisonous to their nature. He looked over at Daddy, But, they’re the ones with dirt on their faces, he managed, they’re the ones that sleep in tents, and he ran up the stairs. In a year, or less, he’d become afflicted with the sense of dread that decade brought us all, the cold chill of Imminent Nuclear Destruction, as good a reason as any you’ll find to pack the church halls. Be like Jesus, stock your cellar well. But there at that moment, Cub held zealously to his childish naivete. Cloaked with the notion, once morning came, our family would be restored.

My Mind circled a  different airport. I wondered what kind of God separated children form their mother, though I knew it happened in lesser developed places, where things like slavery existed under different labels, like Apartheid, and illegal immigration. What God separated sent your mother chasing amusement park rides in the name of devotion? No consecrated angel of good will offered this predicament up as divinity. I don’t care a whit about the 40 days and 40 nights Jesus hid out in the forest. He was the son of God. I was the son of Doyle and Mae, and D-I-V-O-R-C-E prowled my future. What kind of magic trick is that?

When I laid down in bed, my mind raced to playback visions of my blonde oasis.  Did she sleep on a cool bed of straw, between the other wheat haired children, in need of bread, and English translators, sharing each other’s bodily warmth in order to make it to another day. I closed my eyes. This night, no lustful ghosts of female comic book characters granted me my slumber, so often the case. What took me, Clement Sixtus Graves, into dreamy benediction, bent me toward sleep like bur reeds in the mountain wash, supplicant, but wanton, was my heart’s first shiver. What I would do for a word out of her mouth. One word, my communist fairy, my nameless freckle-faced delight.