Summer Stories: ‘Arise. Shine’

GABRIEL GENERALLY composed new work at Revival Tea Co., a basement shop downtown that calmed him. Two blocks north, the river was a reminder to him of how water and earth unify. Not unlike dark and day, he thought. He liked this city spread south from the water, and then up and out to Rocks of Sharon, a place where the land looked like England as it met the Palouse in a brown-gold brindle pattern. Unlike what he’d witnessed in Alabama, no one seemed to be too happy here. A few were full-blooded hick like the Montana he knew. People walked with a dim glow on their faces and dullness in their eyes.

He worked out chord progressions with a No. 2 pencil on the guitar charts he’d spread on the table.

“Straight black, no sugar?”

The server’s voice startled him. She was bouncy, high-hipped, and confident. The one he’d come here to see, just as he had yesterday and the day before. She smelled like almonds. Her sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a red-winged blackbird on the edge of vision.

“Sugar,” he said, nodding at the bell of her lower body as she walked away.

AS GABRIEL’S wife Angelica emerged from a Starbucks a few blocks away, a large white man ogled her. She sighed and walked on, but the anger came quick. Men are sinners, she reminded herself, and when evil consumed them whole they found the anguish irreversible.

Tedious, she thought. Someone needs to slap that mammy-wanting look off his face.

Men need moral lives. At the bottom, when morality is stamped out, she reasoned a seeping away of the marrow of the bones resulted in three inevitable compulsions: killing oneself, killing others, or both.

She knew Gabriel was a decent man, and she was by no means enslaved to him.

He’s just empty, she told herself.

Evil was a betrayal of love. Men betrayed with a kiss.

Women betrayed with disdain, she thought, casting men into the outer dark.

WHEN GABRIEL had fallen in love with Angelica he’d found her dark-eyed and luminous.

Originally, she’d made him want to be true.

They met over a piano in Birmingham when they were both 21, and a year later, married. Majestic on the piano, and one who preferred not to be the center, not a vocalist, not even a choir member, her hands built cathedrals of sound through which Gabriel sent his high tenor like an arrow driven from a bow of gold: “Take My Hand Precious Lord,” “I Surrender All,” “It Is Well With My Soul.” At Hopewell A.M.E. Church off 44th Street in the Kingston Community of North Birmingham the first two years of their marriage the people responded to his soaring aerials and rare incantations, but it was the ornate soul of the piano she played that made them weep.

The third year of their marriage they’d moved to Spokane for his Campus Crusade job leading worship and evangelizing at the Eastern Washington University. He served a cornucopia of students with his discipleship, and sang like a songbird every Thursday night for a Crusade event called Hunger. Angelica had a dauntless spirit, formed friends hand over fist with her accent and smile, and played piano or Hammond organ with such force the students filled a well-lit room on the edge of the university, and spilled out into the street.

From as far back as Gabriel could remember he sang a scale like no one else.

His father had bought him records, vinyl being greatly preferred to digital in any age, feeling it was his duty to educate his son in the vocal dynamics of the gospel legends ranging from the Blind Boys of Alabama to Albertina Walker, from Sister Rosetta Tharpe to the Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson, from CeCe Winans to Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul. A natural with lead and harmonies, music rang in Gabriel like the melody of water.

A retired Air Force captain, Gabriel’s father had been stationed in Great Falls most of his life. A man who loved snow, he was one of the few Black airmen who, after retiring, still called Montana home. Gabriel’s mother, on the other hand, was a one-night stand for which Gabriel’s father felt remorse. Her name was Kimberly Withers, a girl raised by bigots from out past Geraldine, a small town east of Great Falls. Gabriel’s father thought Kimberly danced like a wild creature and sang uncommonly well for being a white girl. She was dark ginger and Welsh. They shared both faith and faithlessness, but they never married. Gabriel’s father gained custody at age 3 when Kimberly was arrested in a meth house three blocks south of C.M. Russell High School. In this way Gabriel grew into manhood in the unfiltered world of his father lording it over women, his father’s God-fearing worship of military precision, uncommon affinity for Miles Davis and Ray Charles, and endless mutterings over jet fuel, oxygen, altitude and wind shear.

MOST NIGHTS Angelica couldn’t sleep. Her intuition told her she no longer mattered to Gabriel. She recognized she was depressed, but when he lay beside her again, her mind always opened into greater thoughts. The bonds we share lend themselves to fracture, but we were born of fusion. It wasn’t that she couldn’t sing. She just preferred playing piano and organ, and she was shy when it came to singing. It wasn’t that she was big either, she thought. She just loved food and didn’t fuss. She’d been reading “Atomic Physics” by Max Born. Fission disrupts and alters kinetic stability. Fusion coheres, generating subatomic unity. Her linear mind served her well not just in music, but in studies of rhetoric, logic, philosophy, and the mathematical perfection of complex equations. After Running Start she’d finished the math degree at the UAB as one of the department’s two valedictorians. A plaque commemorating this hung above Gabriel’s desk at the Crusade office out in Cheney. He loved to brag about her. After UAB she thought she might apply to graduate school for a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Here in Spokane, three daughters later, she was thinking of it again.

She’d always loved telescopes.

She loved the vertical expanse of planets and stars.

Normal matter – human beings, planets, stars, and all the visible parts of the universe, was only 1% of the whole. Dark matter about 80%. Dark energy about 19%. Everything imprinted with darkness and light. Black bodies astounding and foreign. Supernovas. The dark inside galaxies and super galaxies. The dark surrounding asteroids. Radio lobes. Energy jets powered by the accretion disk of supermassive black holes and flung free under black hole material consumption: the jets, from end to end, measuring larger than any galaxy. Lyman Alpha blobs, one blob 200 million light years wide inside the Aquarius constellation. The Boötes Void, a span 250 million light years across. The Shapley supercluster, a collection of galaxies 400 million light years long. Quasars, or quasi-stellar radio sources a billion times more massive than the sun, also referred to as extremely luminous active galactic nuclei powered by black holes. The huge large quasar group or the Huge-LQG, with 73 confirmed quasars, an expanse so large it would take 4 billion human years to traverse. These, and the infinite scaffolding of galaxies surrounded by dark matter, a web fathomless in size. Our own Milky Way containing more than 100 thousand million stars., a large barred spiral galaxy almost 2 million human years across. 100,000 light years. Angelica thought of the Milky Way as feminine.

God is all, she thought. We’re nothing.

Or we’re a part of everything.

All of us, when young, have little wisdom, she thought. As we age, the spirit of those who take on legitimate suffering grows, while the spirit of those who avoid legitimate suffering atrophies. The spirit grows smaller or larger. On the walk home just north of the river, she let her mind drift into her own personal theorems and corollaries. In the midst of horror some find beauty. Closing her eyes, she thought of her father and the aftermath of a lynching he’d witnessed as a boy. Horror cannot be un-remembered. But in the wake of trauma he found the true, the beautiful, the good.

Her mother had given herself to other men over and over.

Still her father stayed. He’d been unfaithful too, he said. “I’m no golden boy.” She wasn’t sure if his disloyalty was the same as her mother’s. Both of them were believers. Perhaps only the angels knew, for to believe in God was not just the feeling but the hope that there is a God. Not a dead one but a living one urging us with irresistible force toward more loving.

She loved her father and mother.

She had habits they didn’t know she couldn’t escape.

Her wigs for example. The patchy skin below them. Under stress, from a child she’d torn her hair out by the roots. She disliked her body. She hated how she’d harmed her hair. But she had a comely mind and a strong soul, and that was enough. Still, her hair bothered her. It was the crown God gave her, but it couldn’t be healed.

In America, women religious and nonreligious, found new ways to hate themselves.

Marriage meant to love and serve. To worship the beloved with one’s body and soul and all one’s possessions. A troth, in the ancient form. Faith and fidelity pledged in solemn agreement. A betrothal. Despite the remote feel of Gabriel’s body and her own grave foreboding, each night in bed before sleep Angelica repeated her father’s mantra.

Love endures, love never fails.

Angelica wondered if Gabriel would come home tonight.

She saw men like birds, light of wing or fierce of eye. Predatory or docile. Powerful and impressive or small and light as air. Her husband’s voice adorned her music like a lily in the field. When they united there was such tenderness to him. On a journey taken with his father high into the Beartooth Mountains on the road from Absarokee west of Billings, Montana, she’d seen red-winged blackbirds in significant numbers. Nearly no Black people in that whole big state. A state that could fit the Great Lakes inside it, or New York, Florida, and half of California. She’d felt scared. Still, she’d never seen such wilderness, and those birds were like kisses of God at the roadside. Red and gold at the shoulder over the heart, and black in flight, like the flicker of an eyelash. She imagined the scent of their wings like sunlight and honey.

Her husband did not yet know how to fly.

They’d fly together when he did.

GABRIEL STILL hoped in marriage. Even as abject as he felt now, he could resurrect himself knowing Angelica still loved him. But he was also convinced if she truly considered his real self, her love for him would die. His infidelities were real infidelities. Against her, their daughters, himself. Against her mother and father and her whole Alabama family.

Also against God.

When he pictured Angelica bearing his disgraces, he felt unutterable sorrow.

The server was done with her shift, and when she walked up the stairs, he gathered his things thinking he’d follow her.

Instead, he walked home.

Night fell. The children would be asleep.

When he entered the living room, Angelica called to him.

“Come to me, Gabriel. Sing.” Her face looked tired as she lay on the couch, a floral pillow beneath her head, her body a low impression in the cushions. Her eyes were closed. “Stay with me tonight.” He felt unworthy but her voice was an exhalation of such totality he walked to her and stood beside her, reaching down, placing his hand on her forehead. She kept her eyes closed and let her own hand come to rest on his thigh. He thought perhaps she didn’t want to look at him. She’s just tired, he told himself. He drew closer. Staring into her face he felt enraptured by her closed eyelids, the curve of her cheekbones, and how her jaw met the neckline.

She called him sweet man and he went to his knees and moved his hand from her head to her chest, just below her collarbones where the swell started in earnest. He began to sing, humming at first. You are my home, he thought, my refuge. He sang one of the old, old spirituals, letting the tune enter the air generously to ward off the desolation he knew. The lyrics moved him, taking him back to when people had something uncommon, and he realized he was nothing, but still wanted to be something. He hummed the melody over her, slowing the melody down.

“Oh I love that one,” she said. “Keep on. Bring it to where my soul can feel it.” He loved when she spoke to him this way. He felt released and along with the constant of despair his spirit knew rest. He brought the song up from where it had been, and old standard, a spiritual, and set it down into her body, deep into her Alabama sensibilities. “I got shoes, you got shoes.” He rounded the turn, pressing his hand firmly on her chest and she said quietly, “Yes.”

She didn’t open her eyes. Her body was full of peace.

The barriers between them fell away. What is done in love is well done, he thought. Poetry surrounds us everywhere. His voice went forth as if made by God for God, and when he sang like this, always he verged on tears. He’d trained himself to stay there and let the emotion fill the room. “Yes, my sweet man,” she said, and he touched her and gave the words to her. “I got a harp, you got a harp.” He tilted his head back and opened sent the note high.

“Bring it low now,” she said, and he placed both hands on the ascension below her collarbones. “I got wings, you got wings.” All of God’s children have wings, he thought. He felt her body rise. Something of heaven spoke to him as he witnessed her essential beauty.

When the silence came he lay his head on her chest and they breathed together. Before long, she was asleep. He knew she didn’t sleep well. He didn’t sleep well either. But when he sang to her like this she slept like a child in the arms of God. He kissed the nook of her chest just below the neckline, the skin tasting faintly of salt.

He lifted his head and beheld her face.

“I have no harp and no shoes,” he whispered. “I have no wings.”