Go Away Mary

1

“Go away Mary to some other man. Just go away marry to some other man. Go away Mary. You know I'll understand, he said with eyes dulled by wine as had he thought about it his entire life.

Mary's dark hair and very blue eyes were full of tears each one resting on her black eye lashes in the sunlight like rain drops gathering on a knife blade that glowed in the brightness until at last there were too many for her long lashes to hold them all and first one large one though they were all the same size joined with another providing too much weight and ran free down her left cheek and she wiped it dry before others came, too many to wipe away and forming a steady stream as she bowed her head and turned away from the only boy now a man she had ever loved and took two steps before she cared no more that he see her cry the same way he had in the army surgeon's hospital when he became conscious to an alien world not of his making with no legs and only one arm that looked deep into her tears until he could stand it as his eyes close and he raised the wine bottle to his lips not realizing it was empty which was more than Mary could stand as she turned and hurried away as he watched until she turned the corner out of his view sitting on a beer barrel there in the ally and something inside him snapped and a new creature became of him but as the old man died he smashed the wine bottle against the brick wall that was all that kept him from falling over backward and glass flew everywhere, some of it lodging in his long scraggly hair. The new creature never shed a tear the rest of its life.

They were kids. Him seventeen soon to be eighteen and her sixteen and a bouncy fun loving girl who adore him and would do anything he wanted and finally when he could stand it no more did. He was drafted and went to hell, a war on the opposite side of the globe gone less than nine moths. Mary carried the child low and one had to really study her abdomen to realize she was pregnant and he child went from blissful news to bittersweet. He was their love child but he was a constant reminder of the dead vet she saw by chance that day in the alley. Nature had its way.

In the same event for from then on there was no time in either one's mind, just events that when seen never changed time and again ignored when the scene in the alley began to be what they all led to as everything reminded her of that day and that day always culminated with the words, “Go away Mary to some other man. Jest go away marry to some other man,” and then cold and lifelessly, “Go away Mary. You know I'll understand.” But the love these two child sweethearts had was alive, speaks from its grave and is carried in the womb of a different dead child with the utter love of a brand new but dead father.

God cried a single tear that hung up on the lashes of his assure eye on the right side where normally great goodness and divine beauty formed followed by not one other until it dried there like a piece dried sleep that washed away eventually with other tears for the things he created in nature were so many. The face of nature transmogrified the face of God and God died for she would never see his face again and he died in a barroom brawl before the baby was born seeing the same God.

No money. No money for prenatal classes or care. A cardboard box with a baby blanket set before the doors of the only hospital in town lying on something that was obviously resting on something farther down in the box for soft blanket ends pushed up here and there to indicate it. When the custodian removed one end of the top blanket tiny feet greeted his mind. So when he carefully lowered the other end so the full head of the living love child could be see its eyes sparkled in the warm July blue sky like day and it beamed with a smile, probably gas.

A young couple who had lost another of many adopted the love child and he grew up loved and even pampered and Mary never saw him until by DNA testing he found her sitting the shame of her father and the ignored daughter her obedient mother in a rundown house with broken stucco patches, some still hanging where the step had broken and the broken part discarded as he stopped on the broken sidewalk and stared then climbed a step or two and sat down beside the prostitute and stared at her hands covering her face not caring who was next to him.

“Mary,” he said.

She was more aware of not being alone and no one had used a kind word of her name in so long she had forgotten about kindness entirely.

“I had a very difficult search but it was you that left me at the hospital that morning wasn't it?” she heard the words like the beautiful words that begin the worst nightmares, the words and the voice of his father.

He put his right arm across her skin and bone shoulders and it was his his father's arm but she knew he was dead for she knew by then as the bartender went to shoot off his ten gauge shotgun he had grabbed the barrel and had taken the full load of both barrels in the mouth blowing his head to tiny pieces of blood, flesh and bone.

This had to be the love child.

“I ship out for the Gulf War this afternoon,” it said, “I had to at least see you. You saved my life and what a wonderful life it was.”

Mary looked at him. It was the boy she loved and he was going off to war to die. God, how can you be so cruel? Was there to think to say to give life to her bones in an open display of rebellion and hate but the dead don't do, say or think anything. She rose to her feet, climbed the stairs, opened the torn screen door, let it slam and disappeared into the darkness of the rooms inside, lay down on the couch and her will to live a moment longer left her. Her will to live one more moment with no purpose in or reason to being flashed away with her life force.

The love child rose to his feet without emotion, put his cap on, descended the broken stairs to the broken sidewalk and died in the Gulf War like his daddy before him had died in Viet Nam a war they leave out of the history books in high school history books anymore. Love children are a natural thing made by default of the great creation God is still in the process of making, made by default of some phenomenal good he had intended to make and did make though faced with incredibly difficult choices coupled with expenses perhaps only he can comprehend.

No one ever knew what great and mighty good had been made that had cost so that it hurt the good part of God's heart so much he almost didn't survive it himself. But forgotten it is here with us now somewhere somehow and most of them the way nature is they are totally irrelevant for everything God eventually fixed by actually asking for our mercy by the time he was done.

God did one good thing I remember. He made the shoes of the children of Israel that wondered for eighty years in the dessert never wear out there on display on the feet of those poor people who walked out of the wilderness and became a great nation and some are still alive in the new Jerusalem he gave them most unaware of the greatest miracle God ever did in my eyes.

But it was of course just a story John pestered God to make a prophecy and go back in events and create every word he was pretending that the Spirit of God wrote through Moses who is a real person in heaven just not the person he claimed to be at the time in the beginning of making sure a lot more good people made it to the afterlife, a story you can swear happened just as he pretended it did all that time ago in a perhaps unconscious effort to fight nature, that made by default as I was and have done a fledgling beginning of making even that I do by default irrelevant as the finishing of Creation continue after I defeat my altar ego made by God on purpose to get it over with and if I win we continue but should I lose it is barely possible he will rule us all with his evil ways, ways made by default of what God intended to do, make every person that could be made believing they had the right to be and in the future to have once been at least. But we hope to build a tangle of lies and roadblocks to any effort he might make when he becomes of age so that he and his own the irrelevant parts of all reality while we live forever unnoticed by him as just one more totally irrelevant thing, all we are and all we will ever be regardless of how many starts it takes to do it as many ways as it can be done which are an infinite number of times multiplied by infinity; that number of times.