The Book of Colors - Raymond Barfield

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he’d bring scraps from work, but he started thinking less and less about his butchering and more and more about his computer. I didn’t like it. Butchering is blood and meat and you get real money. The computer is pictures and electricity and you can’t eat anything on it. When he thought up a way to use Layla and her gift from God to make money he must have gotten very excited. He hadn’t paid Layla much mind I know of, but after his idea came to him everybody wondered why he was suddenly so interested in Layla.

      Ho-Bo.com. Lord Jesus help us.

       The Rattlesnake

      If I’d been paying more attention I might have noticed that God sent a sign. But it wasn’t me that noticed the thing. Actually it was Layla who noticed, but she didn’t notice the snake. She noticed Ambrosia who noticed the snake.

      We were waiting for the train to pass. Wind from the train passing by eases the heat. It passes so close you can understand the end of the world. Rose always sat like nothing changed. As I said, you can get used to anything. But me—I always feel the train shake my bones.

      That was why after watching Ambrosia rock right through the train passing day after day, even I didn’t take long to notice that she wasn’t rocking while the train passed. We all leaned in to see what she was staring at under the train, and as I said, Layla was the first to see.

      “It’s a goddamned rattlesnake,” she screamed, though the poor thing was all curled up on the track and its rattle was going like crazy and the sound of the train drowned it out like a chorus of angels might drown any leftover grumblings in the Kingdom.

      Then that little thing shot out between the wheels of that train and God witnessed us jump when it sprang but the steel wheel caught it on the tail and it rolled about ten feet then lay there like it was dead trying to figure out what happened.

      A thing wants to live. That much is sure. So once the train passed we all settled back to see what the snake would do. We didn’t talk. Ambrosia was back to rocking the second that snake sprang out. It was like she was only interested in the coiled-up snake but once it straightened out it didn’t exist anymore.

      But just when she lost interest I got interested because the question was is the snake dead and who’s walking over to find out.

      Nobody had to go kick the snake, though, because before we could even start talking like grown-ups about what just happened the snake started to slither. But it didn’t slither off into the woods. It slithered toward the chicken-wire fence and then tried to poke its head through one hole then another like it was deciding. Then it found a torn place in the fence and came on through and I know we all felt our hearts going weak but we wanted to see where it would go after all that.

      Well, it went up under Layla’s porch before anyone could say anything, and the thing was done. Now we had a snake living with us and not just one that might or might not be dangerous but one we had seen the rattle knocked off of. And

      one ready to risk dying if that’s what it took to live.

      “That snake ain’t gonna be warning nobody now,” Rose said.

      I hadn’t thought about that, everything happened so fast.

      And then like she knew we all got suddenly nervous she said in a comforting tone, “I bet if Jesus sees that snake he’ll stomp him inside out.” I haven’t mentioned that the donkey’s name is Jesus.

      In time I learned from Rose that a quiet snake is like a dark mystery inside your body. Some mysteries are okay like the sounds your stomach makes even when you aren’t hungry or why you have periods. That’s just the mystery of having insides instead of being angels, she’d say. But other things are bothersome such as lumps and the way you can sometimes feel like something is wrong even if you don’t have a lump. Then you start thinking about dying even if you are young, and it’s worse if you are young because if you live a long time you end up having a lot of worry to look forward to. I agreed. But then the strange thing is that after all the worrying over false alarms, in some ways it’s better to know you are soon to die and from what than to think about how it might be, she’d say. She didn’t learn that until the day she decided she would die soon. When she said that’s how it feels I hadn’t even been thinking about the snake. But I saw what she meant.

      Think about it enough and every step off the porch and every comfortable crawling into bed turns into a new chance to be scared, like every walk down the tracks past strangers, or when you go to the pharmacy to buy Band-Aids and see old people with swollen legs and feet with their shoes loose and untied, waiting on medicines and you know they are fighting something even if they grin at you when you walk by. It ain’t death. It’s the idea of death.

      Jesus Is Coming Soon

      It hurts sometimes but it’s worth the trouble it causes looking sort of white to some black folks and sort of black to some white. I’ve learned some things being this way but there’ve been days I wished I was all one or the other.

      The one time I don’t feel any color at all is when I go for a walk. Not toward the city but away from it to the north. Memphis drops right off into a few lots of junk then sticks. That’s the direction I walk.

      I started doing this not long after I moved in with Rose and when I walked out there I looked out into the sticks and the mud and thought. On one tree settled back from the road was a crooked white sign with red letters painted on it that said, “Jesus is coming soon.” It looked like it’d been there a while so I wasn’t sure what it meant by “soon.” But the thought worried me some. For one thing, this was my first baby and I wanted to see what it looked like. The only child I’d spent any time around besides memories of myself was Ambrosia, but she was always either rocking looking at her little cardboard book or else she had lost her book again and she was rocking and screaming and pulling her hair. Layla went nuts sometimes looking for that book if Ambrosia was screaming. I could tell already that my baby wasn’t gonna be a screamer. Not that it mattered.

      The other thing that bothered me was the sign being stuck out there in the middle of a bunch of dead sticks with nothing around but a few junkyards and some shacks. Maybe if it wasn’t crooked it would’ve helped. A message or a warning like that should have a better sign. I walked on out to it and then turned around and came back, but I couldn’t decide if all the mess and weeds and stacks of rubber tires ought to have made me feel glad or worried about Him coming.

      Anyway, Rose seemed pretty set on Him coming, though if He didn’t come soon I was afraid she’d miss it all. Jimmy didn’t really care much one way or another I guess but that didn’t stop him from looking up all kinds of religious strangeness on the computer. You’d be amazed what some religions do. And I couldn’t talk to Layla about it, first because she did more staring than talking like she was always thinking about something other than what you were talking about and second because she was busy with one of the bums she was always bringing in off the train track.

      Which was one of the strangest things about her, all the friends she made out of whatever or whoever happened to be wandering along the tracks. Not that she asked them. She could just be walking around the yard or even just leave her door open in the springtime like it was a sign saying come on in. When she had Ambrosia she bled a lot and they took out her womb. That was the other thing. My womb grew into a watermelon-sized thing any passing stranger could see and I sometimes felt funny talking to her knowing she didn’t have her womb anymore. Especially being so young. And the problem was that it was not like missing a leg or being bald where everyone can tell what you’re missing so that you go ahead and get used to it. It was missing something important that nobody sees or knows about unless you tell them, and then you always have to decide, do you tell them or do you not?

      And body parts aren’t the only thing you can be missing. Other things that aren’t body parts can be taken away. But you still have the same problem about whether you tell somebody or not. And then you don’t know if they will still like you. If you are missing a leg a person can decide ahead of time whether they like people who are missing legs. But if you are missing a womb, or if one of those other things has been taken away, then

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