Jude crossed his arms.
In his lap, Waylon kneaded his reedy fingers. “I didn’t know how to be a daddy, truth is. You don’t know this but your momma had a baby before you was born. Jezebel. She came out perfect, but she had something twisted and hard in her belly. We couldn’t afford no doctor, so we tried to take care of her at home. When we took her to the emergency room, it was too late. They wheeled her away in one of those little gurneys for babies, with them clear plastic sides. She was paining, but she stretched out her hand to us, to your momma really, all her fingers reaching for her. She weren’t never baptized in church. They let us see her one last time, and your momma sprinkled water from the tap on her even though she’d already died by then. I didn’t tell her it wouldn’t do no good. I thought, if anyone could bless a child’s soul to heaven, it was your momma.”
Jude swallowed hard, his jaw clenched.
“We buried Jezebel in the poor cemetery, and nobody came to the funeral but your momma and me. There were lots of people who said we were deserving of it for letting her go without baptism, for not being married.” He shook his head. “It weren’t about the Bible, what they were saying. It weren’t about God neither.”
Waylon wiped his sleeve over his face, sniffed hard twice. He stood from his chair and opened the back door. A chilly gust blew into the room as he left.
“Off drinking,” Jude said to my unasked question. “He’ll never quit. He needs that stuff to keep from coming unglued. Trust me, he’s better with it than he is without.”
“What are you gonna do?” I asked, and he knew I was really asking him if he was going to stay here forever.
Jude shrugged. “Someone has to stay with him. He’d die if there weren’t no one here to take care of him.”
“What if you were free to do whatever you wanted?” I asked. “What if you could leave the mountain? What if you could start over in the city? Live in a real house?”
“Ain’t never gonna happen,” he said in a voice colder than I’d ever heard.
“Why?”
“My momma and daddy wouldn’t have moved out here if it was such a good life in town. It’s poison down there. I know that’s why momma got sick. The dirty sprawl, the factories blacking out the sky, the people stealing your own breath because they can. Here’s the only place you can be safe from that. I figgered it all out.”
“What?”
“Why people move to the wilderness. Remember we used to wonder about that, why they leave everythin’ behind? It’s not to run away, like I thought. And it ain’t got nothing to do with God,” he said. His eyes were stretched open like large windows. “It’s hope.”
“Hope?”
“Hope for somethin’ better. A better future. My momma used to talk about it. People have been expanding into the west”—he spread his fingers wide—“longer than memory. They were called pioneers. Pioneers. Ain’t that a good word?”
“I guess,” I shrugged. “So?”
“So, what if we did it, too? Made a life for ourselves out here? What if we made a new civilization, just us two?”
“What’s wrong with the civilization down there?” I gestured toward the direction of the town.
“It ain’t ours. We lived our whole lives in these woods. You think it would be easy to start over there? You think they’d let us? They’d take us to homes, orphanages. They got laws about that. They’ll lock us up because we don’t make no sense to them.”
“What do you wanna do, Jude? Run and hide?”
“I’m only talking about you and me, living.” He smiled, and for a moment he looked like the boy I met in the night all those years ago. But there was something sharp underneath, too, something that never used to be there.
“This isn’t the first time, Jude,” I said, realizing it even as I said the words.
“The first time what?”
“That you’ve made me feel like you’d bottle me up in one of your father’s moonshine jars if you could.”
“What’s wrong with that?” he asked. “I cain’t see you getting hurt again. I cain’t see it.”
“This just sounds too much like . . . like the Prophet.”
“Don’t say that! I ain’t nothing like him. I don’t even think God’s real anymore.”
Jude’s face was still.
“Don’t you?” I asked.
“No. I haven’t for a long time.”
“How do you know?”