Meemaw’s Heavenly Feast

I

Simon Eubank was seventeen when he gave his mother back to the earth, the only place she was received without complaint. Standing in the heat of the graveside service were six neighbor ladies, three cousins, a hairdresser, and a double-booked minister who cut off every eulogy. For this last man, Simon was grateful. The ladies knew his mother drank—all Eubanks were addicted to something—and they knew she had fallen, drunk, to her death from the overpass near her favorite bar. In charity, they rolled their words in sugar and invented a woman Simon did not recognize, one worthy of mourning.

Simon’s own written eulogy dampened in his fist; when he had composed it the previous day, he surprised himself by accomplishing everything with one sentence, then kept the paper purely for ceremony. The hairdresser gave the longest tribute, amounting to a single fact about Simon’s mother, that she had always tipped twenty percent. Afterward, the minister turned his weary eyes to Simon. He stared back, but could not make a sound. The minister did not prompt him again and instead roused a verse of “Amazing Grace” that creaked through the crowd in several keys. He spoke about ashes and dust, they buried Simon’s mother in a shower of dust and praise, and the whole affair ended like a summer squall. All the while, a few words bled ink in Simon’s palm: SHE WAS A AWFUL MOTHER AND NOBODY LOVED HER BUT ME.

The minister hurried off, but the others stayed for the reception Simon had put together, which took place around a folding table a respectable distance from the grave. There were bowls of potato salad, a plate of deviled eggs, and a plastic tub of banana pudding still possessed of its discount sticker. Simon had forgotten plates and utensils, so the women spooned their food onto napkins stacked three deep and raised them directly to their mouths. Simon watched over them, his dark curls gelled back for the first time, his forehead bright white above his surveying eyes. Around the cemetery, the Blue Ridge peaks loomed in a crowd of their own, shoulders hunched. 

He, too, was hungry. He had hardly eaten that week. While the ladies buzzed, he pictured himself pushing them aside and whisking away the pudding to eat by himself somewhere. The faces of the neighbor ladies shone, their necks scarlet like the skin of turkey vultures as they piled their napkins full. Simon watched them flock around the folding table the way they had viewed the body before the service. His stomach boiled, and his hunger was suddenly swallowed by a flux of acid. A hidden cicada shrieked bitterly all the time.

The ladies approached him one by one to kiss his cheek with their thick, shiny lips that made him feel as if he had eaten a messy popsicle. The hairdresser, who used the same red dye on herself as she had on Simon’s mother, came over and offered him a deviled egg. 

“Went to this trouble and ain’t gonna eat?” she asked with an encouraging smile.

With one hand, he took and held the egg like a gem, and with the other he tugged the collar of his shirt, the eulogy still twisted between his fingers. He was sweating but had not removed his blazer. He ate the egg in small, dutiful bites as the hairdresser watched approvingly.

But the bright yellow filling coated his mouth, and the egg-flesh dropped at once to the pit of his stomach. The woman was saying something about her business being down. Simon looked into the distance to distract himself but could only picture the heavy hills bearing down on his mother in her grave, devouring her to the bone and spreading her flesh like mayonnaise, picking her clean.

He lurched aside to be sick in the petunias. 

When he stood up again, he found the ladies gathered around him, and he looked at them each in turn as if he had never noticed them. He felt suddenly that he could see through them, to their bones, even to the dust their bones would become; he caught his reflection in one woman’s glasses and saw the same in himself. He recoiled from their touch. If it were possible, he would have recoiled in that moment from all that he could see, or hear, or smell, or touch, or taste—from everything that was or would be. It was an impression which failed to fade that day, or any day for a long time after.

II

“There’s a billboard went up, Route Nineteen,” said the old man Byrd, failing to light his cigarette in the drizzle. “It’s a beaut.”

Simon pulled his feet in. He had let them dangle from the dumpster, where he was sitting alone with the white-haired drifter, but now the rain was picking up. The overhang of the restaurant roof provided little shelter in the alley. It didn’t matter much if he were rained on, Simon realized. When his break was over, he would go back to washing dishes, and his shirt and shoes would be damp again in minutes from the steam and the wet floors.

By the light of the streetlamp, he could see Byrd in profile. The man was shrunken, with a shelf-like forehead that stooped over the rest of his face, just as his shoulders stooped over his chest. His hair had a smoke-like fineness, translucent in the light. He had large, puffy lips which seemed to draw their flesh from the sunken eyes and skully temples; Simon was glad he rarely smiled. But he liked Byrd. The drifter said he had arrived in town a few weeks ago, and though Simon did not doubt he would be gone again soon, he was a good man with whom to sit quietly in the dark. Lately this had been Simon’s favored pastime. 

 He watched the old man try to reignite the butt of a cigarette. “Not much left in that one.”

“We’ll see what we can get,” said Byrd. “Now did you hear me or what, about that billboard?”

“I wasn’t listening.”

“It’s an ad for a diner. Route Nineteen, that’s down Scarleton way, long way from here, little smidge of a town. The place is Meemaw’s Heavenly Feast.” The flame took briefly on the end of his cigarette, framing his chapped lips in light. “Gotcha!” The lips stretched in a smile. But the spark disappeared, and the night settled more deeply than before. Byrd dropped the cigarette to the ground and settled to flicking the lighter out of habit.

“That doesn’t sound like a diner,” said Simon.

“It’s a church lady runs it, on Zion Church Road. There’s a redhead lady with a halo on the billboard—bit too young to be a Meemaw, but there’s her and a big pile of pies and chicken and biscuits.” 

The picture took shape in Simon’s mind. He saw a white space, a pile of pies, and a woman he could only envision as skeletally thin. He tried to imagine her fatter, but failed. She cowered in the shadow of the enticing mountain.

“I said don’t you think?” said Byrd.

“What?” 

“They make a fella hungry, those pictures.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“You know, you don’t listen.”

“My mama died six weeks ago.” The sporadic clicks of Byrd’s lighter punctuated Simon’s words like a mysterious grammar.

The back door of the restaurant opened a few feet to their right, and the manager stood on the threshold. He was a teardrop-shaped man who blocked most of the light from the kitchen. He held a long, new, white cigarette between two fingers.

“Simon, get your hands in this sink. There’s crap everywhere.”

“Yes, sir,” said Simon.

“Yes sir now. And you—I told you get out of my alley.”

“Once the rain lets up,” said Byrd. Simon followed the old man’s eyes to the cigarette. “Say, I’d love a smoke.”

The manager snorted. He had little success in lighting the cigarette and finally dropped it to the gravel in frustration. “Just get in here,” he muttered at Simon, and disappeared inside.

Byrd scrambled down from the dumpster with surprising agility. He rescued his prize from the ground and had it nearly lit before he took his place beside Simon again.

“People’s always trying to waste things,” he lamented. He was missing one of his canines, freeing a perfect slot for a cigarette. “This, I can light.”

Both men huddled beneath the overhang, knees by their chins, and fixed their attention on the ember’s glow. Byrd raised his eyes to Simon as if he had not properly seen him before.

“You look like hell,” he said. “Why don’t you eat something?”

“I’m sick.”

“Bad stomach?”

“Yeah.”

“Want some crackers? I’ve got a couple here somewhere...”

“No, thanks.”

“No crackers, huh?” Byrd blew the smoke from his nostrils and held out the cigarette. “How about some of this?”

“It won’t help.”

“Always settles me.” Byrd turned his body towards him intently. “Listen, you oughta eat, boy.”

“I don’t see why.” Simon angled his knees away. “What do I want to eat for? You spend so much time on it and just get eaten anyway.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I mean three times a day you try to keep this thing running.” He placed a hand on his chest as if forgetting the vital word. “Throw your time, your money into keeping it alive. But it doesn’t matter. One day they’ll stick you in the ground and the world eats you up…”

“The world?”

“Or the earth, you know—the ground. It melts you down and then pushes you up until everything grows up from what’s dead. I didn’t see it before, but my mama makes everything grow up dead.” Simon did not meet Byrd’s stare. “And nobody seems to know it. But I’m tired of putting stuff into this—thing”—he passed an unsteady hand over his head—“that isn’t gonna last. That’s just gonna get eaten up like a—uh—”

“Piece of candy.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You like candy?”

“I like everything.”

“Aren’t you hungry, then?”

“Hell, I’m starving. What you want me to do about it?” 

Byrd let a wide, closed grin spread cheek to cheek like the margin of a horizon, then, just as Simon opened his mouth to say more, the old man unleashed a stream of smoke into his face. It was a strong, hot, sulfuric breath that jumped down Simon’s throat and seemed to last an age. Simon broke out coughing.

Byrd turned his face to the rain and murmured, “Some days out West, I lived on fire. Sometimes it’s all you can get.”

When Simon forced his eyes open, they were obscured by a light film of tears. Byrd, seen through this lens, was only a white shape whose form leapt with each blink, like the heart of a flame. A tear passed from Simon’s right eye, and the old man’s face was clear again.

Simon had not heard the back door open. The manager’s voice took him unawares. “Now, Simon!” 

“Get in there, then,” said Byrd as the door slammed. “Time I got going anyway.”

The old man slipped down from the dumpster lid into the rain, cupping the cigarette with one hand, and disappeared around the corner with a backwards, smiling look. A sourness lingered in Simon’s throat, and as he stared after Byrd, he was struck by a sudden fear that the smoke had settled so far into his lungs that it could never be expelled. 

He considered the outline of the restaurant door in the dark. Then he hopped onto the gravel and ambled away in the opposite direction from the one Byrd had taken. Though he had no cigarette, he felt he too was carrying a small, poisonous fire into the night.

III

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Got room for one more down there?”

Simon was sitting in the evening shadow of the gumball machine outside the gas station, his legs stretched out across the sidewalk as he flicked a lighter. He looked up at the sheriff’s deputy, a heavy, middle-aged man with eyes like gray fish left by the tide. 

“Sit if you can,” said Simon with a doubtful glance at the deputy’s knees. 

“I’m still a young man.” The deputy crouched down and joined him on the sidewalk, avoiding a lump of bubblegum. It was autumn, and he sat on an assortment of brittle leaves. “If I were Sheriff Holt, we’d be having a different talk.”

Simon stared straight ahead.

“So,” said the deputy.

“So.” 

“Some setup you’ve got here.”

“What about it?”

“I just find it interesting is all. Can’t say I’ve seen a boy set gumballs on fire one at a time.”

“It’s not hard.” Simon produced a nickel from his pocket and slipped it into the machine. The deputy watched a lime-colored candy spin down the plastic track, though Simon paid it no notice. It bumbled out of the opening and plopped unceremoniously into the plastic bucket of gasoline stationed below. 

“The only thing’s not burning yourself.” Simon plucked out the gumball with a pair of barbecue tongs, held it at arm’s length, and stared at it for a moment. Using his free hand, he flicked the lighter beneath the gumball, which was swallowed by the flame. He deposited the small comet on the sidewalk and nudged it away from them. Both men’s eyes followed it over the curb. The deputy scooted forward to peer at the sugary Gehenna that had formed in the storm drain, where rising wisps of smoke were immediately swept off by the breeze.

“How many you think are down there?”

Simon squinted up at the depleted stock. “It was full when I started. Still a ways to go.”

“So you’re gonna do ‘em all, then.”

“Seems stupid to stop halfway.”

“Listen, this little arson kick’s stretched on enough, don’t you think?” 

“I never hurt anybody.”

“No, but it scares the hell out of people, you know that, right? That little light show on your cousin’s lawn, what’s-his-name—he was trying to do you a good turn, and you burnt all his food up in the middle of the night with a pile of fireworks. People don’t put up with that kind of crazy too long.”

“I only used the fireworks ‘cause he didn’t have gas. I’m not that crazy.”

“Be honest with me, Simon. Could you stop this if you wanted?”

“I don’t want to.”

“I’ll tell you, Mr. Colter’s pretty unnerved. Got a pretty scared call from him just now.” The deputy rolled his eyes toward the window at Simon’s side, and Simon turned to look at the owner’s salmon-red face shrinking away behind the pane. 

“How’d you pay for all these, anyway?” the deputy pressed. “I happen to know you never got a cent.”

Simon hit the body of the machine, and a handful of nickels crashed onto the concrete. The two men watched a shower of Jefferson heads spin in the sun. Simon could sense Mr. Colter gaping behind them.

“I don’t get him,” said Simon. “It’s just gumballs.”

“There, you’re talking sense now. Just gumballs—hardly worth all the trouble you’re going to.”

“I meant to him it’s just gumballs.”

“I see.” The deputy pointed at the coins on the sidewalk. “Oblige me, huh?”

Simon slipped another nickel in the slot and a gumball traveled the track, a crimson red one this time. He caught it before it landed in the bucket, and handed it to the deputy.

“I like these things, myself,” said the older man. “Don’t you?” Balancing the gumball on the tips of three fingers, he held it up between himself and Simon, where it eclipsed the sinking sun. He seemed to know Simon’s attention was fixed upon it, but he did not turn to see the faint dilation of his eyes. “Like a whole little planet, or something. I used to get one of these every payday when I had my paper route. My pop told me it was a waste, but I never listened. The red ones are the best—leave it in your mouth just long enough, all perfect, then you break it…”

Simon was suddenly mastered by the thought of sweets, not just one, but a mass of them towering above him just as the gumball machine towered. He imagined moving the bucket and letting the candies roll into his waiting mouth. 

The deputy’s voice dipped. “Don’t you ever want one?” he asked. “Just enjoy one for yourself?”

In Simon’s mind, at the base of an imaginary mountain a skeletal woman shivered like prey. Coming to his own, he reached over with the tongs, plucked the gumball from its living pedestal, and dropped it into the gasoline as if to quench a fire rather than to start one.

The deputy rubbed his neck. “Simon,” he said. “I think it’s best you leave this county.”

“Do I have to?”

“You say that like I haven’t tried to be good to you.”

Simon was silent.

“I have tried, you know,” he went on. “I thought, life’s been worse to him than me. I was there when they found his mama. I can let him go a little wild once or twice—hell, what’s that in the scheme of things? But we’d be stupid to let this go on any longer, and I got my orders. We don’t want you in our jail. We’re just telling you kindly to find someplace else.”

“What makes you think I’d stop if I left?”

“I don’t think you would. We just wouldn’t be the ones getting called about you all the time.”

“Smart.”

The deputy sighed. “Listen, I thought of one thing. There’s a place out in Raleigh called Dix—Dorothea Dix. You heard of it?”

“It’s the loony bin.”

“Well, it’s a damn nice loony bin. I have a little nephew lives there. Crazy as they come, but they treat him well. They might have someone there could help you, too.” Simon knew the deputy was trying to look him in the eyes. He let him look, and in doing so looked back at himself in miniature, at the bony body he hardly recognized. “You think about it.”

Simon nodded again, then smiled—the deputy relaxed with the growth of the smile—and stood up. The deputy rose alongside him and took Simon’s offered handshake, his other hand on his hip, where it grazed his holster.

“Done,” said Simon.

“You’ll think about it?”

“Thought about it. Don’t care for it. But I’ll leave, if that helps you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I appreciate it, Simon. I sure do.”

“Guess I better go, then. I left my stuff at the bridge.”

The deputy cast a sidelong glance at the remaining deposit of gumballs.

“Don’t worry about those,” said Simon. 

“Well, you take care of yourself, all right?”

“All right.”

With a nod to Mr. Colter’s sullen face, the deputy made for his car. He looked back from the door of his cruiser just as Simon finished pouring gasoline through the open lid of the gumball machine.

IV

The pickup truck stopped for gas around midnight. Simon sat in the bed, slouched against the back window, fighting sleep. It was late spring, and the night was as hot and still as a closed mouth; the crickets were its pulse; the lump in its throat was the nervous promise of lightning.

Simon shut his eyes as an elderly attendant came to work the pump. He knew the man was staring at him, searching perhaps for some clue as to whether Simon had escaped from prison, the asylum, or the undertaker. Simon heard him mutter in his direction, “Gaw.” Once, when the attendant drew near enough that he must have caught Simon’s scent, he whispered, “Gaw,” with special horror.

The driver who had picked up Simon, a man with a beard like dead yellow grass, leaned out the window and called to his hitchhiker.

“You wanna go on? Smells like rain.”

“I’ll get out at Scarleton.”

“Nothing’s open this time of night.”

“It’s all right.”

The driver gave a slow nod invested with doubt. When the attendant had finished and collected his tip, the Chevy lurched back onto the road. Route Nineteen needed repaving, and Simon pillowed his head with his knapsack. In it, he kept a lighter, half a loaf of Wonder Bread, and a coffee can full of gasoline. He settled down on the Wonder Bread. Through the large hole in the knapsack, he could feel the plastic packaging against his hair.

The grasshoppers’ screams disappeared behind the loud complaints of the truck’s transmission, and the frightened air shot past, but Simon felt the weight of the station attendant’s stare for miles. Like all stares, it morphed into the gaze of Byrd the drifter. Though he had never seen him again after that night in the alley, at times his face coalesced in the darkness as through smoke: his smiling eyes and lips, his wreath of hair, his breath of fire. 

Simon, too, was a wild bramble now. It had been a year since his hair was cut—his mother’s hand had been the last to cut it—and his curls were knots matted against his scalp. He had spent the last week in an abandoned hardware shop outside of Asheville, sick, his stomach aflame with acid. He reentered the world as a tangle of bones. 

Months ago, he had abandoned the idea of living with family or with his mother’s acquaintances. Few such people existed, and fewer still could tolerate him. He could no better tolerate them, either; everywhere he looked, he saw the ends of the things around him, of the people, their possessions, their works, their earth. A shadow stood over them all. He soon found that a dim and empty place chosen correctly—a shed, an abandoned motel—had so little to offer his senses that for a while he could live in near-total relief from the strain. He could lay in the dark somewhere below consciousness, outside of the days of the week, expecting that at any time his wasted body, too, would give itself over to death. 

But it never did, and then his futile desires always returned burning, not born of his surroundings but from within his own body, like a quiet sabotage. It was hunger of a kind he had never known as a child—it lived in every cell, crying out for perpetual satisfaction just as insistently as he reminded himself that every cell would die. Those were the moments he tried the hardest to take the upper hand against himself. One day in the winter, he held his can of gasoline to his lips, but never drank; another time he lit up a shed with himself inside, but his legs carried him out through the smoke. Two nights ago, in the midst of his illness in the empty hardware shop, he had woken up convinced that he could achieve relief from hunger if he removed his own stomach. He had reached for a rusty nail that lay nearby, had even removed his shirt before he dropped the nail, trembling.

After such attempts, he was always consumed with shame. If he could not destroy himself, he reasoned, he could at least hasten the destruction of other things. He would creep from his abandoned place and burn the first things he saw that he hated—fruit stands, darkened and curtained for the night; a parked ice cream truck once; billboards twice, both of them advertisements for a hamburger restaurant. Inevitably, when he ran out of gasoline or his lighter broke, something inside of him weakened. He would no longer be able to resist the urge to eat, and daylight would find him hiding away somewhere with a stolen bag of peanuts, a can of chicken, and he would live. This was the cycle in which he had been locked since he began to wander outside his county. He could sense clearly in his body that he would not be able to repeat the process again, and an awful lightness overtook him knowing that nature would soon finish what he never could.

Above the chaos, there always flickered the idea of the billboard Byrd had described. It was as bright in his mind as he had first imagined it in the alley. The urge to see it for himself—and then to destroy it—was the only desire he was now willing to indulge, the final object he wished to take with him. Owing to his appearance, it had been hours before any driver picked him up, but now, as the night wore on, the pickup truck sped him down Route Nineteen towards Scarleton.

They did not get much farther before Simon saw the billboard, or what he felt had to be the right one. The Chevy shot past it as it rose from the banks of pines. Even in the darkness, it struck him: a piece of geometry in the mass of anonymous growth, its image completely obscured. He pounded on the rear window, and the Chevy jerked, then rumbled to a stop. The driver leaned out.

“It’s still a few miles to town.”

“I’m getting out here.”

“This is the middle of nowhere—no lights or nothing.”

“I’m getting out here.”

The driver only mumbled something to himself.

Simon grabbed his knapsack and boosted himself out on the passenger side. He began to walk down the crumbling road even before the Chevy moved on. The transmission whined behind him and in a few seconds, the truck was gone.

There was a chance, he knew, that it could be the wrong billboard, and if so he was not sure what he would do, since no one else would be along to pick him up and continue the search. The thunder had already spoken its first words through the cedars on the next hill. He trampled these fears with the broken asphalt and carried on. 

He walked on until he stood almost directly beneath the sign, but even there, the night was so black that he could only discern the outline of the image. He strained his neck and stared up.

It was indeed a woman. She reached for the world with slender arms that could only be a woman’s. Her hair was a mushroom-like mass, and her dress was rugged at the edges. Simon realized that this was the mountain of food Byrd had described: it was not looming above her, but overtaking her. Worse than he imagined, it was part of her. The only features that remained smooth and human were the head and neck and the arms that were held straight out as if in a last plea for help. 

Simon sank down in the grass and tried twice to spit out the bitter taste that coated his mouth. It would not be dislodged. He tried again; his knapsack slipped from his shoulder, and the gasoline can rolled out. A distant stroke of lightning reflected across its surface. 

It would be enough, he thought, picking up the can and gauging its weight. It could eat through enough before the rain came.

The only question was whether he could make the climb—up, yes, but also back down. He did not pause to consider. Instead, he went to the thin ladder that ran the length of the pole, grasped a rung at shoulder height, and looked up. In the next flash of lightning, he thought he saw, at the top of the billboard, the white fluid form Byrd had taken through Simon’s tears. He started up. 

There was a fine tremor in his legs and arms. After four rungs he paused to rest, began again, and stopped again. No wind came, and no downpour, only the air huddling closer.

He climbed. Halfway up, during a rest, he wondered if he had yet ascended past the height of the overpass from which his mother fell. It was the standard by which he judged height. That bridge ran over the highway near her usual bar; he could still see her as she had looked after one of her nights there, when he had bailed her out of jail for public indecency. She huddled in the corner of his front seat, against the car door. “Listen to your mama,” she said, eyes shut. “One day you’re gonna look around and see it’s all a bunch of shit, and you can’t make it right, you can just block it out.”

He had not replied. A tense silence settled, broken by a raspy breath. “Do you hate me, Simon?”

He glanced over at her swollen lip. “No,” he said. “You just teach me too much.”

A little more than halfway up the ladder, one of Simon’s knees buckled and he clung to the metal frame. The night leaned close and smothered him in its arms. From the hole in his knapsack, the gasoline can tumbled to the ground, clashing violently once against the ladder as it disappeared below. He hit the frame in frustration and nearly lost his foothold again. He gripped the rungs close, shivering in the heat, something in his stomach boiling so that he wished with all his strength he had had the courage to use that rusty nail.

“I love you, Si.” His mother reached her long, pale arm across the front seat and touched his elbow. He flinched. “Just throw out everything but that.”

Alone on the ladder, Simon screamed into the night. The silence of the abandoned places, the wordless midnight curses spoken in flame, burst out in a cry of anger that emptied him further than any of his starvations. If he could only be rid of being, if he could kill it, he felt he would. He would kill it because he hated that it was dying. 

Simon sensed what was about to happen in the instant before it did; it happened as if he had asked it to. The hair on the back of his neck stood up and tingled like an itch, like something inside of him was working its way out. Then the lightning came—a wind of white flame which overtook everything. Somehow, even when it was in him, it was from him and from everywhere else. The ladder and billboard and shadowed cedars vanished, and he was unmoored, suspended in a plane of light and hollowed out by fire.

The wind and rain had loosened the grasses to make them like wet, combed hair, and the sound of the leaves ran smoothly in Simon’s ears. The muscles of the earth relaxed around the place where he lay. Even before he opened his eyes, he was conscious of the contrast: the rippling pain in his limbs, the fluid easefulness beneath and around them. The two sensations competed for attention at every nerve. For a long time he remained half conscious, moving only his fingers, between which the grasses seemed to respond to his touch. 

He opened his eyes onto the pale stretch of his arm where his head rested. A crooked pink line wove crazily on his skin from bicep to wrist, already fading in some places, tracing the path the lightning had taken through his body. Its endpoint disappeared where his palm touched the ground. A handful of strange memories returned to him—the sound of beastlike lowings in the blue before dawn, cries he now recognized as his own; a brief waking at sunrise, during which he had pressed his thirsty mouth beside a puddle of rain; a hundred pinpoints of pain, thirst, hunger. Now it was daylight. No vestige of the storm remained but its glazing waters in the sun. Simon lay as if rooted to the earth.

He could sense the billboard standing above him and, feeling someone’s eyes looking on him with beneficence, he turned his head to the sky.

The woman that loomed above him was greatly altered. She had red hair, huge black eyes, full cheeks, and a close-lipped, secretive smile. A halo rose behind her like a sun resting on her shoulders. The food of the mountain shouted superabundance in brilliant color: whole roasted chickens, cherry-crowned slices of cake, cream pies, corn muffins, nests of bacon, buttered cobs, triple-tiered burgers, and dripping golden flapjacks. Over it all the woman presided, her arms raised in victory, her face flushed with confidence. She looked as if she might continue rising into the sky without effort, the sky whose blue was as deep as the sound of the thunder had been. 

Simon rested his head on his arm and wept for a long time.

He had not finished yet when he tried to climb to his feet. The effort to rise was tremendous. Once he managed to stand, he stood swaying slightly, waiting for the blood to climb from his feet to his head again. He saw where his knapsack had landed a few feet away and took it up. The Wonder Bread, though flattened, was salvageable. He shouldered the bag and walked stiffly to the base of the billboard, kicking aside the can of gasoline absentmindedly.

The second climb was more difficult than the first, but he undertook it with twice the determination. Every few seconds, he stopped and waited for the worst of the pains to subside. As he reached for one rung and then another, the fading marks on his arm seemed to pull him upward until he emerged at the top. A platform two paces wide ran the length of the billboard, and he pulled himself onto it, then sat on his knees before the image. He breathed shallowly to lessen the pain. 

The breeze here was fuller and the light warmer, the span of his mother’s arms more overwhelming as he looked up at her. He rested his forehead against the enticing mountain and, reaching into the knapsack, brought piece after piece of sweet bread to his mouth. When the bread was gone—when, in fact, the evening came—he remained kneeling, at times asleep, at others whispering eulogies no one could hear.