LITMIR.BIZ

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they don’t like you once they find out what’s missing, and sometimes you just stop wanting to let people get to know you.

      So if Jesus was coming soon I wasn’t complaining, but He was sure to find a whole lot of folks who think a whole lot different than Him. The world’s just not the same as it was back then from what I hear in church. But I wasn’t worried about Him. In the meantime I kept tending Rose. She was good to me and I knew I’d miss her when she died and somehow I hoped my baby got here before she died so that at least the house wouldn’t be empty. When somebody dies you don’t want the house to be empty because it’s too much at once. Even a cat can help if it’s friendly and not the kind that disappears for days at a time, but a person is much better for this kind of thing.

      And last, I wouldn’t say this to just anyone but I used to think of Jesus as a white man, even though in the churches I went to he was painted as a black man but with hair that was more like a white man’s or else pressed straight with hair softeners. When I think of Jesus coming it’s hard for me to think about him being so white, and just as hard thinking about him using hair softeners. But once I learned to think of him like a donkey in some ways, which I knew was probably not right, it helped since thinking that way I could see him walking around saying, “All right, folks, it’s time to go,” instead of coming with some big flash of light. When I think of Jesus as being sort of like a donkey I’m not so bothered by that sign being crooked or stuck in the sticks and muck or painted with big red letters. A man white or black might mind that. A donkey would just walk by and not care the least. Even if it’s wrong when I think of Jesus like a donkey, I can pray again.

      The Donkey Named Jesus

      But I have to say that it’s not always easy having a real donkey around instead of just a painting or an idea. He mostly stays out back where he does his business. If the little bit of breeze we ever get comes off the tracks it’s fine, but if it comes the other way it smells like a zoo. There’s no latch on the gate in back and Jesus pushes through whenever he’s hungry and eats weeds growing in the field nearby then always comes back. He can’t pull the gate closed so Jimmy fixed up a rope from the gate into Rose’s kitchen window so I could just pull on it and close the gate.

      He’s a little thing and he’s old and has lots of gray in his muzzle. He never seems to mind if the train is passing by or if Ambrosia is screaming and during the summer when the windows are open if he stretches his neck he can just barely get his nose up to the window to sniff. There must’ve been something about the smell in Ambrosia’s room because if he wasn’t wandering around the back side you could just about bet you’d find him sniffing at Ambrosia’s window, just standing there with his body still as a rock.

      Ambrosia pays him almost no mind. Even if he comes near and sticks his nose by her hair she just rocks and turns the pages of her little book. If I was to come near her cheek she’d swat me like a bug without even looking at me. I can understand thinking of wind and rocks and bugs as things you just feel or push or swat. But she seems to think of people that way, like they are just things moving around and she doesn’t want to be bothered. Jesus is more like a part of her body, like her own leg, which she might move if it started to ache or bother her.

      The first time I saw Jesus nuzzling Ambrosia I worried that he was gonna bite her. I would never think that now that I know him. But at first what I thought was that Layla just didn’t pay enough attention to her girl. Now I think she was jealous in a way that Jesus could nuzzle the girl without being pushed away and Layla couldn’t. But I could never say that.

      When the donkey turns away to nibble grass there’s spit in Ambrosia’s hair half the time. If it was my girl I’d wipe it off right away. But Layla just let it sit and dry while she looked out over the tracks sometimes sipping on lemonade. And Jesus clomped around the yard.

      It’s embarrassing to say anything about Jesus’s maleness, which is very noticeable sometimes, even though he is a little donkey. But I couldn’t help but giggle and Jimmy and Rose joined in with Rose sometimes saying, Lord have mercy, which was funny coming from her lips and knowing that she’d seen just about everything. But Layla just stared and sipped her lemonade without any joking to make sense of the thing. Like one rock staring at another rock. It’s one thing to see everything and another thing to see too much.

      This is to say I am just amazed sometimes at how two people can be so different as me and Layla, even though we are about the same age. It’s like the difference between a full moon and no moon. I didn’t say that to Layla. She might’ve taken it as a comment on her womb.

      Trees

      The trees were the first things I saw from a distance when I came up on Rose’s lot. They all looked like Ys. There were leaves on the trees since it was still summer and the row looked like the part in Jimmy’s hair. The power company had been the ones who cut the trees into Ys so they could keep their lines clear, which was probably important. But the trees were sick and gray and truth be told the leaves they made didn’t give much shade. Which made you wonder if trees could ever be more important than power lines and who decides. Or even whether if a tree is gonna be cut into some unnatural shape it might be more respectful just to cut it down and plant some flowers or a shrub.

      But once this baby started growing I started looking at things as being the world a child would live in. And as I thought about why they had to cut the trees into Ys for lines that were so high up I came across one likely reason for such, that maybe it’s the Law, and at the very same time I saw clearly that the Ys would make a good place for a tree house.

      In fact, a plank long enough could run through the Ys we had in the yard, and quite a little fort could be built.

      When you are nineteen you don’t think about forts, if you ever did, which I didn’t except for a couple of times. Once was when I first heard the story of Robinson Crusoe. The other was when I had been sent to stay with an uncle for a while when my mother was sick and I rode with him on his business to pick up valuables that people left on the street for the garbage men. We always started in the rich neighborhoods early in the morning and it was amazing what people will throw out. Mattresses, barbecue grills, humidifiers, stereos, you name it.

      So one day we were driving through the neighborhoods and he said, “There it is,” which is what he said whenever we came to a load that would give us in one stop as much as we usually found in a whole day. It was in front of a pretty brick house, big enough for three or four families easy. There was all kinds of things—toys, boxes of clothes, books, a bed, pictures, and all the pieces for a fort including a plastic roof and a little door. It was like Christmas except that I never had a Christmas like that. So we loaded up the truck but we didn’t have room for the fort and I would have cried except that I knew I was only staying there for a little while and could never take it back to Memphis anyway. But when we had loaded everything up and we were pulling away I saw this white woman staring out the window. And then before I even knew why I cried anyway.

      All which is to say that when you are pregnant and you start thinking about forts again, you can wonder why you ever stopped thinking about them. I mentioned this to Jimmy but he saw too much room for extra work, though one night he took a break from his searches on the computer to find a site about tree houses. Everything was on that computer. Everything. If I had had the nerve I’d have gotten him to show me pictures of childbirth, but some things just need to be gone through and not thought about so much, I think.

      So something catches your eye like three trees lined up and cut into Ys. Then the Y reminds you of the question Why and the trees look half dead like a lot of other stuff. One thought leads to another thought not like train cars, which are connected so that you know why they follow each other, but like ants who, if the first ant walks zigzag, every other ant walks the exact same zigzag, even though they are not connected by anything you can see. Then before you know it somebody who would not be around except you stopped and asked for a glass of water starts to grow inside you and suddenly you’re not thinking about why people like the power company ruin your trees but instead

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