Jay Nunnery

Jay Nunnery

A Visitation

First, they heard it. Reginald would say he heard it breathing even though it couldn’t. It spoke and that’s how they believed—it could only be their mother—if they hadn’t already known it to be real. Through that haze’s enrapturing devotion, the taste of bitter grains on their numbing tongues. “Mother,” Reginald said, staring at the room’s corner, not in disbelief, at the wall’s red paint visible through her and the waning sunlight shining through the smudged, wood-framed window onto her like he’d seen it shine onto dust particles in the air. Then he said, “Louis, Louis, do you see?”

Louis said that he did. As solacing as their mother, she said, “I been called home at last and done seen what I known to be the good Lord. I walked right through that light. But it all went away.” She looked down at her hands like they were no longer holding the one thing she felt she never could have lost. “Everything got all dark like I’d just woke up from a dream into darkness. But see, the only thing I could think about was finding you. Think ain’t the right word though. It was more as if that was my purpose, and I was well aware of that being my purpose.”

She moved closer. Those root-like veins, diverged all over her face, and the indentation that the rope had left above her sundress’s neckline became visible to them. She moved as if she had never considered movement. Her focus on where she was going. Forward in time. Her arms were out, openhanded, the airspace around her acquiescing; while each time Louis blinked, she seemed to get willed closer. Louis reached out and reached further again, his thoughts drowning, and then he felt her, that familiar touch, how synapses fire for even the artificial, the warmth, as if pleading moved along the blood in his vessels, each blink changing the distance of everything. “Louis, my God, Louis,” he heard Reginald say through gasps like Reginald had been running and had only then stopped. That sort of adrenaline pumped through Reginald and caused him to speak to her. “Mother, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Reginald said.

She knew he would apologize. He’d have to before any of it could begin. What he expected to be revelatory and absolving, this confession that escaped from him, was nothing more than another step. She knew that Louis would say as few words as he could get away with saying because she knew her boys and that none of those words would be apologetic, more time compiling more remorse.

“Sorry’s not important right now. What’s important is us and that I need you.”

“What you mean, Mother?” Reginald said, breathless again, like he’d started running once more. Urgent as perceived matters of survival can make anyone. “What you need us for?”

“I need to get squared away. The good Lord let me know. My soul and my spirit and all them weightless things left my body. But my body—you see the body is significant just as the rest is and it warrants and deserves certain things as well.” She stopped talking and gazed at them in that way she had so many times before, when she told them something experience had taught her, teaching them these things that had become so ingrained that she had forgotten she had ever learned them and supposed everyone had just been born with complete understanding, and then she caught herself as she always did in that gazing, her sons’ confused and trying and to her forever children faces staring back on the cusp of innocence, and she smiled that nonjudgmental smile and as they had initially felt her, they felt her again. “My body ain’t got what my soul and spirit feel they deserve. That’s why I’m here because I can’t go. They won’t go. I’d do it myself. But I can’t. There’s no way in hell.”

“You can’t what, Mother?”

“She can’t never do nothing with herself.” Louis said, blurting it out as though it were a fact of life that upset him.

“Louis. Life ain’t nobody’s fault. I need you. Go find me. Put me in the earth. The Lord hisself said so. I done got to feelin like I was part of the kingdom already. They ain’t want nobody to see me like it is and have that be how I’m remembered. You see the Lord said I was exalted on account of how I forgave.”

Louis remembered she told him, You gotta forgive since forgiveness has to do with your soul and spirit and neither of them need to be carryin all that weight. He heard her voice like it was unfolding. Youth revealing itself to a baby boy. But you not supposed to forget since forgettin has to do with your mind and your mind is made to have as much in it as it can. His thoughts fading from seen to heard, seeing it all as his mother’s hopeful and trusting gaze, her big, tired brown eyes refusing to blink as her voice failed her that night. Not wanting to betray, obscure, or hinder that lesson’s passage through her since she believed everything one said went from one’s heart to one’s mind, gathered habitually, and she had faith in the process that she did not understand all the way.

She said her body was in the forest. Then she was gone, gone like she’d never been there, like the sun had been shining on those dust particles the whole time.