!A fire in Galilee
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by Anna @ 2004
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Chapter I: The women
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On the long plain outside the city gates Sheena was
laid down. Her friends always laid her there, then
went to walk in the city and visit friends.
"You know we'll be back in a little while to turn
you," Crystal said and looked at Sheena real hard,
then turned toward the gates. Sheena knew what the
look was for. Crystal prayed mightily that her
missing son would be seen by Sheena from her mat
outside the gates, and that Sheena would be able to
keep the secret from the whole world save her.
Sheena had never seen the boy, so there was no
secret to keep.
Usually Peggy would quip, "Now don't you go
nowhere," before walking away from Sheena into the
city with Crystal, but she didn't say nothing.
Sheena couldn't go nowhere anyway, so she lay on
her mat, propped against the basalt tower outside
the city gates where her friends left her. She was
the income for all three women because times was
hard and money short. Nobody hired no women, and of
the three women's husbands, Crystal's old man was
the only one didn't stay drunk, and Wal-mart
wouldn't even hire him to stand by the door with
the old people and the retards on account of his
felony record.
Crystal's old man had come home to her every night
after walking a great distance to put in applic-
ations at three more places each day. He'd applied
to every place in Galilee; all the fishing boats,
all the net-mending shops, all the dishwasher jobs,
janitor jobs, and temp agencies.
While Sheena lay in that same position and the sun
got hotter, Crystal's man was a day's walk south,
letting his tired feet carry him through the
mountains in the desert, putting in applications
down in Judea. Crystal, in the city, was probably
telling Peggy again how she didn't want to move.
Wherever any of them was, Sheena wasn't going
nowhere. She lay on her mat, propped against the
basalt tower with the Sea off to her left. Around
her outside the gate the other paralytics and
veterans and mental health consumers competed with
her for the good will of anybody with a little
change. The first few groups of gardeners and truck
farmers walked their mules and carried their
baskets into the city to sell at the markets set up
by Health and Human Services, and Sheena tried to
groan louder than the men. A few copper coins
landed on her mat. She smiled inside.
Sheena could hear Crystal's voice behind her as the
two women approached her. "I don't know what the
hell he down there for anyway," Crystal was saying.
"He should have tried the Bass Pro Shops again.
Leaving me up here by myself, and he know we ain't
moving away from the water." Seemed like Sheena's
friends had a special sense for the slap of copper
on Sheena's mat, because it was never long before
the toss of a coin and their arrival.
"I wisht we could get enough to get my television
fixed," Peggy said. She stooped to pick the copper
portraits of the emperor off the mat and handed
them to Crystal, who let them clink against the few
coins the women had got themselves that morning. "I
hate to miss Signs of the Times." Peggy leaned down
again and repositioned Sheena a little so her
weight rested differently and her sores wouldn't
get bad again. Sheena didn't feel like talking.
"Now don't you go nowhere," Peggy said, and turned
with Crystal back toward the city.
After the gardeners and truck farmers and morning
rush of people heading to and from the little
farmer's market had gone, it was slow and hot
propped against the basalt tower by the gate. Many
of the other paralytics and veterans and mental
health consumers fell asleep or went off somewhere,
or somebody came and got them. The sun beat down
and Sheena wondered about her pressure sores.
Anyone who stopped and took the time to look at
Sheena out there in the heat wished they hadn't.
Her wrinkled skin hung loosely on bones and useless
knobby joints. Water weight, not food, made her
belly and waist look swollen and fat. Her puffy
face disguised her nice cheekbones and the old
scarf on her head covered her hairs. Out of her
bloated face, fierce angry eyes looked past her
grotesque cheeks at the world.
After rush hour, the remaining paralytics,
veterans, and mental health consumers went back to
shelters or under the bridge for the night. Seemed
like the number of amputees kept increasing. They
made good money. Sheena lay where she had been left
until her friends returned, both thoughtfully
silent after the possibilities they'd discovered in
the city that day. They lifted Sheena on her mat
and carried her tiny body back to her house.
Sheena's man Joe wasn't home.
With the door closed, Peggy helped Sheena empty her
bladder in the bowl and took it outside to dump in
the latrine, then turned up the volume on Sheena's
TV. Crystal put together a stew with a few okras to
thicken it up and scraps from restaurant dumpsters
and dumpsters on the wharf. When it was done
cooking down, she turned off the flame to save fuel
and served it over leftover rice in Sheena's two
bowls.
"Look," said Peggy as she fed Sheena, "Signs of the
Times is on."
Sheena's fierce eyes wrinkled slightly into a
smile. "No signs we can't read ourselves," she
said. Even though the other women's eyes were on
the TV show, Sheena knew she had their full attent-
ion. "Today by the gates," she said. "that man come
by with his son behind him on a donkey. Don't y'all
remember the Samaritan man? Nasty thing. Probably
got AIDS and everything else. Don't know what they
doing up here. He stopped by me. That donkey showed
his eye whites and turned a little when the man
took his son down. He was talking to one of the
veterans," Sheena said. "Peggy---you remember
Hiram? He was talking to Hiram."
"Eat your soup," Peggy said, and spooned some stew
into Sheena's mouth. Sheena ate a while.
* * *
The next week when Sheena lay on her mat against
the basalt tower, quilting was on her mind. The way
her fingers on the needle used to weave the thread
through the patches, and the stories and patterns
which went back to slavery days.
Sheena felt herself tied to the city gates, to the
long plain, to her girlfriends, by the stitching of
some invisible fingers. Each, she felt, wasn't
nothing but a scrap, but when tied together, put on
a backing, with cotton batting stuffed in, they
were beautiful and useful. There was no people by
the gate but her in the heat under the cloudless
sky. As Sheena thought, her eyes stitched the
horizon to the distant sky and her heart churned.
Are we beautiful, she asked, are we useful?
Then a goat came through the gate, aimless, follow-
ed by another. Their slit eyes echoed the distant
horizon and their beards moved with their tooth-
grinding chins. Another goat came through. The
three galloped a few steps then stopped and set to
wandering again.
That night Sheena would not talk to Crystal and
Peggy at all. They left her house early. Sheena
felt gross, dirty. Her fierce eyes faced out at the
world but she looked only inward and withdrew into
her shriveled, bloated, unfeeling body. Joe came
home so drunk, the Thunderbird sweating out his
pores, soaking his back and under his arms with
alcoholic stench. He didn't look at her but lay
down clothed, his back to her, and slumped into the
mattress. Sheena's eyes did not see him.
The rhythmic thunder of the train spoke: rumbledumb
clacketetang. Sheena woke suddenly to the shudder-
ing train passing. Light came past the burlap sacks
over the windows and she was alone in bed. The
light and train was crushing her head. Her brain
felt swollen. She couldn't marshal her thoughts.
Crystal and Peggy should have come a while ago. Did
anyone help her pee before bed?
As it rumbled into the distance, the train still
spoke: rumbledumb clacketetang. Sheena couldn't
think. She felt the weight of the train on her. Her
old anger got mixed again with helplessness but not
self-pity. She was nauseous and felt dirty and the
light and train crushed her head and she wished she
could move her hands, drain her own urine.
Sheena rocked her head side to side, willing her
body to come along and roll over. The train was
silenced by the distance and Sheena pissed the bed.
No doubt her bladder was still horribly distended
inside her, but some piss had overflowed, somehow.
She lay there, nauseous and hungry, head throbbing
and wet, pulled back into her unfeeling body.
A great liberator was in town staying at the house
of one of the Free Palestine Judeans from the
South. He was teaching them strategy and ethics,
listening. He believed in the people. Everywhere he
went he was mobbed by people who needed help.
Crystal had went the other day because her welfare
check was cut off. She had put her braids up with a
ribbon around them. The liberator had pointedly
ignored her.
Sheena lay in her bed, nauseous, smelling the urine
she lay in, head pounding relentlessly. She began
to see things another way. Angels walked the earth
and were hard to tell from regular people, who in
Sunday school they said were a little lower than
angels. The angels took up residence in people
sometimes, just took them over when they needed a
certain kind of body.
She thought back to when her body became useless.
Joe had a Chevy Nova then. He'd come by her church
to pick her up, but he was drunk and crazy. He
threw her out of the car in front of all the people
at the church and beat her in her head and face.
She had turned and his fist had cracked her neck.
When she had fell down on the church steps, Joe had
stomped her and stomped her in the Tim boots he
loved until she had stopped remembering. Though
hospital recovery was an indistinct soup of beeps,
faces, confusion, waiting, repeated cycles of bed
baths, dressing changes, and catheterizations,
every event of the beating was distinct enough she
could taste the blood, move her body to try to
escape him, feel the pit of her stomach and her
heart ache.
It was a scrap she picked up most often in the
scrap-basket she kept in her mind, turning it over
and wondering where it fit. When Joe had done that,
was an angel in him, trying desperately to show her
how to be? She had been able to earn money outside
the city gates after that, and Peggy and Crystal
came over every day to help her out, and she had
felt her old loneliness leave as she was filled
with friends and their care. As her hands lay newly
limp and wasting, her quilting mind opened to see
the patterns and stitches in all things. And Joe
had never beat her again.
There was a knock at the door. Sheena felt it as
well as heard it, pulsing through skull and nausea.
"What?" she hollered. Hiram opened the door and
wheeled himself in. The urine smell didn't bother
him, but his wheels couldn't carry him close to her
bed because of the mess on the floor.
"I heard about the goatherd yesterday," he said.
"What goatherd you talking about?" Sheena asked.
"What did you hear?"
"That nasty Samaritan told Simon he fucked a
cripple woman, and it wasn't nobody out there but
you."
"I don't remember," Sheena said, and she didn't.
She remembered a goat come through the gate aim-
less, followed by another. She remembered their
slit eyes echo the horizon and their beards move
with the grinding of their teeth. She remembered a
third goat come through, and the three gallop a few
steps.
Through nausea and confusion she felt the weight of
the locomotive on her, its heavy bulk stitched
together with her tiny unmoving body. Her puffy
forehead wrinkled with tension, and even as Hiram
sat there on his chair talking, she closed her eyes
and slept. If he kept talking she didn't hear it.
In her dreams, invisible fingers threaded a needle.
Sheena's grandmothers had been sisters to the
cattle and daughters of the egret. Those great
women held the family clan together in their power-
ful wings and kept the old ways. Their fingers held
threaded needles and they mended rifts among their
people. Their feet were tied to the land by loops
of thread like thin roots and the sky was tied to
their shoulders. With one hand they watered the
cattle and the egret came to warn them. Those women
were careful. They kept the old ways.
* * *
"I'm a bad muhfucka! I'm a bad muhfucka!"
When Sheena woke, this female was hollering, long
nails pointing in this man's face. He said, "Okay,
okay, I know you bad."
"No, I'm a bad muhfucka!" the female repeated.
Sheena was in the back of a pickup truck, stopped
in traffic. She turned her face, fierce eyes
confused. Nothing looked familiar. People streamed
around the truck, a couple motorcycles cut through
the crowd, a bus was at a standstill behind the
pickup truck. The air stank. There was boarded up
shops on both sides of the street. A donkey with
packs on, but no one riding or holding him, wander-
ed against the flow of traffic, sort of struggling.
The pickup truck inched along. Sheena looked for
the bad muhfucka but she was out of sight.
Sheena could not tell where she was or who was
driving, only that it was afternoon and blindingly
hot. In resignation she let her head fall back to
neutral, puffy face pointed at fiery blue cloudless
sky. Three goats were trying to jump over a fence.
She didn't turn to look at them directly. She
flashed her eyewhites like an animal as the goats
put their hooves up in the fence and jostled each
other off again. The truck was stopped again by the
crowd and the traffic.
As the goats were swallowed by the crowd, Sheena
thought about her grandmothers. Both of them had
died in the '60s. Neither lived to see emancipation
from slavery. They had their feets dug in the soil,
stitched to the land with loops of thread like thin
roots, and many young roots were their daughters.
They knew how to dig the roots with a stick and
make soups or charms from them.
Sheena's grandmothers both wore the root name John
around their necks. John had to do with freedom.
Even if the roots were young, they were lived in by
old ancestors. When you saw smoke from the distant
fires the soldiers kept John told you it was a
signal for getting free. John was your news source
about the freedom already inside you and about the
arm resistance movement.
Then those women died the winter before emanci-
pation. Those women had to be planted in the soil
they was stitched to. Maybe John told them that
after freedom there would be a lot of wandering,
that the family clan they had stitched together
would bust out at the seams and get scattered in
the wind sure as if they'd been sold. Not rooted,
not beautiful, not useful, just scraps. It's like
the people didn't know how to be free, so they
tried to be they own slave master, break they
selves. No, her grandmas could not have wanted to
see that.
Sheena kept thinking about the egret and the cattle
and the roots in that soil down south in Goshen and
the quilt of her childhood family clan. She did not
notice that the pickup had been moving while she
was thinking until Crystal and Peggy cut through
the crowd talking excitedly. The cab doors on the
pickup opened and the driver's side slammed. After
some grunting and clicking the passenger side
slammed and Hiram wheeled himself back by the
women. He had fought in that war, and even though
Sheena could tell he always thought about it, he
never had said a word to anyone she knew about it.
The truck rocked as the driver got back in it.
Crystal and Peggy lifted Sheena and carried her out
on the road, through the dense crowd, into an
alley. They rested, then carried her up steps onto
a roof. Hiram waited downstairs. The whole while,
the two women talked on and on, falling over each
other with interruptions about this man who was a
great doctor was going to bring real freedom to the
people.
Sheena hardly heard them. She was thinking about
what it would take to stitch her family clan back
together. She had heard the egret from her mat by
the gates. Being paralytic had been good because
she had put by savings from the copper coins people
threw to her. She had almost a denarius saved up.
In another year or two as long as her house wasn't
bulldozed by government soldiers or seized by
settlers, and her friends weren't arrested to
indefinite pretrial detention without charges, she
she could maybe travel. Her grandmothers would help
her remember how to stitch her sister and cousins
and brothers and all their children together into a
beautiful, useful, free family.
Crystal pulled tiles off the roof, ruining her
nails as she dug at the roofing. She made a big
hole, and the light came in and the people inside
looked up, certain it was government soldiers. But
Crystal and Peggy picked up Sheena's mat and care-
fully lowered her down to the hands of the people,
who laid her, tiny on her mat, on the floor. It was
so crowded! Crystal and Peggy looked down through
the roof, clearly hoping for something.
The man in the middle of the room caught Sheena's
eye as he pushed through the crowd. He was so
country in his starched blue overalls. The bottoms
were tucked into work boots. He came right up to
Sheena, saw her right into her bones, and said,
"Nobody can hold your mistakes against you anymore.
You are free." Sheena felt the earth cradling her
body. The weight of the locomotive came unstitched
and lifted. Her fierce eyes smiled.
Just then, the law came in with a warrant and a
summons to court. They had written it out on the
street and signed it themselves. "We heard what you
said, 'doctor,'" the law said, "and your time's up.
You can't practice medicine without a license, and
only the law can pardon guilt."
The doctor turned his white eyes on their white
faces and stared them down in his overalls. "I
didn't do nothing," he said. "Look through the roof
at her friends up there. They believed in her and
me. Can you fault them? You can't blame anyone with
friends that good."
"In fact," the doctor said, "If they believed she
could get up and walk, I'd believe and she would
too. In fact all y'all would believe. She'd have no
choice but to get up and walk out of here." Still
looking at the law, he nodded toward Sheena. "Go on
honey," the man said.
Sheena's legs were weak, but they moved for the
first time since Joe had beat her so bad. She held
her hands---how was it possible?---and strangers
helped her up. They handed her the mat and she
leaned on them. Small and stumbling, she walked out
of there.
Hiram met her outside in his wheelchair. Crystal
and Peggy came running down from the roof. The
doctor was still inside teaching. They were outside
not sure what to do. An egret crossed the sky to
warn Sheena, and she heard the warning. Overwhelmed
and confused, she cried as they started home.
