Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (27 page)

The Redemption of Garvey Flint

by
Vincent Louis Carrella

There is a moment in the midst of a severe beating in which the world fades, and sound dies out, and a man, finding himself upon the threshold of death, slips into a dream and sees things from another time and place altogether. In Garvey Flint’s case he could see horses. That was the strange thing about the beating. That was his dream. Horses. As the violence rained down upon him, blow after blow, closed fists and boot heels, the dull whap of a pipe, between the flashes of light, between the thunder, he could see the eyes of the stallion they called Bowdun, and he could see that roan colt who drowned in the rains. He could see Snowdancer, the alabaster mare. All the horses his father once owned came back to him. All the horses that burned.

They beat him back to a place he swore he’d never go again. It’s strange what hard violence will do to a man’s thinking. It’ll bring back those long forgotten places. It will run a man out of his refuge. It’ll make him face himself. His daddy always said that a good beating was a good thing for a good man gone bad. And so it was for Garvey Flint, who had left home at the age of sixteen after giving his father the beating he had prophesied for his son. He left him in the corral that morning, bleeding from both his ears, and he set the barn ablaze with the horses all locked inside. He could hear them, kicking at their gates and screaming like the drowning souls of Wormwood. And until this day, that’s all he could remember. That sound. Those screams. The dying pleas of a dozen good horses. 

On this occasion Bill Gurns was the author of his misery. Garvey owed him four-thousand dollars in gambling debts, bar-tabs and whores on credit. But it was more than just money that fueled the wrath of Bill Gurns, and Garvey could see that in his eyes, which were as blue as the topaz cufflinks he was famous for. The eyes of Bill Gurns had a way of peeling a man open, and when he was angry the tiny veins would swell up in the whites of them and he’d take on the fevered look of a man burning with sepsis. He had two of his men hold Garvey back by the arms and he stared into his eyes for a long, hard minute and in that short span of time Garvey could see every wrong, every wound, every violation that had been inflicted upon Gurns—from the day he was born and left to die swaddled in a burlap sack to this very morning when he kicked in Garvey’s door to find him astraddle Patsy Murphy, who they called Fat Pat, and who Gurns could hardly give away except to the drunkest of the ne’er-do-wells who came nightly to the brothels of Nashville, which he purchased, one by one, until he united them all into a kingdom of great profit and infamous reputation.

The two men designated for this duty beat him slowly and they work in shifts, sometimes holding him down, sometimes hitting him and sometimes leaving the room altogether to take a drink or to relieve themselves in one of the tar-paper jakes out behind the brothel where the night’s customers had deposited the spent portions of their revelry. But Gurns himself never leaves the room. He never takes his eyes off Flint, who lies now slumped between the two men, men who normally work the door but who are earning an extra five dollars for this special service. One is named Fred. The other is Mack Stilton, who likes Garvey and who’s played cards with him on many occasions, and who likes him all the better for his infamous losing streaks and rash bluffs. Mack considers such prolonged beatings to be torture pure and simple. Especially the end, for they all end the same: in a ritual that has become known as
the baptism
.

Gurns leans back on his chair and swirls the ice at the bottom of his glass. There’s no whiskey left, but there’s still the flavor of the liquor on the ice and Gurns sucks the cubes to savor the residual taste of oak.

How ’bout that brother of yours? he says. He’s got some money. 

Garvey blinks to clear the blood from his eyes. He slumps forward but the two men keep him on his knees.

Let him go, Gurns says. And the men obey, releasing Garvey’s arms and allowing him to fall to the floor.

You go home to your brother, Gurns says. I hear he’s a man of God, and a man of means. You get what you can and you come back here. I’ll give you seven days. You understand, Garvey? I know he lives in Leatherwood. And I know people in Leatherwood who still owe me.

Garvey nods and tries to look at Gurns but he can’t lift his head. He reaches out with his hand, to prop himself up on his arm but he falls over. He tries again, but fails to raise himself from the floor. The man named Fred pushes him over with the sole of his boot and Garvey rolls onto his back. He stares up at Gurns, his eyes rolling.

Go on home, Garvey, Gurns says. Use that famous charm of yours. Brother to brother. Play that hand. That’s a powerful hole-card. That’s an ace.

Gurns tilts his glass back and lets the ice fall into his mouth. He spits a cube onto Garvey’s belly. 

This here’s your last chance, Garvey, he says. Your last.

Garvey’s head spins. His face is just inches away from the sole of Gurns’ python boot and Gurns takes advantage of its proximity. He inserts the steel tip of the boot into Garvey’s ear and applies gentle pressure. 

I’ll do it, Garvey says. 

I don’t want to kill you, Garvey. It’s bad business to kill one’s best customers.

Gurns places his glass down on the table and stands.

Baptize him, he says. 

Behind the brothel is a narrow pathway of thick black mud where a thousand boot prints are filled with oily water. Garvey Flint can hear the sound of the men breathing. He can hear the sucking sound of their boots in the mud. The spatter of their boots is a hollow, familiar sound that reminds him of the horses and the cold Tennessee mountain mornings of his boyhood when he’d lead Bowdun out for exercise, and then the mares with their colts, none of whom he was permitted to ride. 

The men drag him through the mud and he can smell it, the black earth, the manure. It begins to rain. He can’t feel his legs but he can feel the cool drops on his face as they lay him down before the jakes. They prop open the door and the smell hits him like a blast from the bowels of a gut-shot deer. His eyes water and he can feel himself about to retch. The enclosures are narrow and hard for a man to sit in, let alone two men, yet for this event the chamber must somehow accommodate three. This takes skill, and strength, and practice. They must grab him a certain way in order to make it work. They must find the best holds, and since each man’s body is unique, they must find them by feel. They grasp at his ankles and his wrists. But Garvey is lost in that other time and cannot feel anything. He’s back with the horses. 

He sees a torrent of rushing water. He sees a creek swollen with rain, brown as tobacco juice and roiling like the day of damnation. He can see the water coming down through the dry creek bed, a flash flood snapping trees and sweeping before it huge stones that groan and rumble like thunder. The men find good purchase on the sinewy limbs of Garvey Flint and in one quick motion, he is heaved up and inverted and dropped. The floodwaters swirl. All Garvey can see is the dark water and his body is sucked under and swept over stones and stumps and taken downstream. He thrashes and kicks and finally comes up for air and he sees the mares, lying on their sides, spinning and floating and dead to a horse, and he finds that he is holding onto a thing that he thought was a log but turns out to be a bloated colt. He is breathing, coughing up water, but breathing, and above him now he can see a circle of light. Stilton Mack throws him down a rope.

———

Garvey Flint walks the center of the Dutch turnpike. He is three days out of Nashville and still caked with the dried remnants of his baptism. He walks slowly toward the town of Leatherwood, and he walks with a limp, carefully choosing each step he takes so as to avoid the sharp stones on this road. He has long since abandoned his shoes. On this road he had once walked as a child to the Little Sparrow Schoolhouse. On this road, bareback like a renegade Cherokee boy, away from the Flint farm, up from Solomon creek, bound for the hilltop meadows on stolen horses he did ride. On this road he had run from the fire. On this road, he was the wind.

And as the wind does return, so does Garvey Flint. He comes down the road toward the familiar white farmhouse. He can see its roof through the trees. He sees the tiny cabin in the lee of the hill where the old woman used to live, and might still live for all he knows. It is her he fears the most. For his brother is among the best of Christians, and will receive him without judgment. The old woman is of a different mind altogether. They say she can see straight through to a man’s heart. They say that she can look into your eyes and tell you the exact date of your death. She cannot be lied to, she cannot be deceived. And he knows this to be true.

She stands beside a flowering Dogwood tree in her nightclothes and at first he takes her for a ghost. She is hardly four foot tall and she is barefoot in the wet grass. Around her head is tied a kerchief of faded pink linen. Around her neck there hangs a large brass key on a string. She holds a cob-pipe in the corner of her mouth and puffs on it. Smoke swirls above her. Garvey stops in the road. The smell of her tobacco carries him back in time. She was there with his momma, on the day he was born. She was there to deliver Charles too, when Garvey was just four years old and was sent out for water and for fresh linens to soak up the blood. She had that pipe in her mouth on that day too, and when he came back with the bucket and the torn sheets, feeling proud of himself for being able to help her, she told him he was too late. His momma died while he was gone. She took the bucket and used it to wash the blood from the floor. And now she’s looking at him the same way she did on the day he came in through the door when he was four years old, her eyes with that faraway look she gets when she’s seeing beyond the moment, into a place of certainties and simple truths. She takes the pipe from her mouth and taps the bowl on her thigh.

I always said you’d come back, Garvey Flint, she says. And come back you did, as the child you was. 

I won’t be staying, he says. 

I always said you’d come back.

She watches him walk on up the road and over the small rise to where the house sits among the small willows and the oaks that grow beside the creek. She watches him until he is gone.

Charles Flint is a strong man with long, sinewy arms and hair dark as crow’s feathers. His eyes are equally black and when they fix themselves upon a task they widen and bulge and shine like obsidian stones. The eyes of Charles Flint take full part in all his endeavors. He uses them the same way he uses his hands. He uses them to pry, and lift and move that which he wishes to change or destroy. His eyes, like the axe he holds above his head now, are tools. In the moment just before the axe falls, Charles Flint splits the wood with his eyes. Thus the motion of the axe, the swing itself, the passage of the blade through the dry oak, is mere formality. He is already eyeing the next hunk of wood. He sees it in the pile, calling out to him, showing its weak spot. Charles Flint is so intent upon this task that he does not see his brother coming up the hill behind him. Nor does he hear him, until he calls out his name. 

Charles.

At first he does not turn. He does not lay down the axe. He simply cocks his head and listens, as if the call of some bird, rare to these parts, had caught his ear.

Charles.

He lays the axe beside the woodpile and wipes his face with a rag. And then he turns to acknowledge the call he had long expected. 

It’s me, Garvey says. I got myself into some trouble, brother. Bad trouble.

The eyes of Charles Flint widen again. The eyes of Charles Flint glisten. It has been too long since Garvey has seen those eyes. And they have changed. To a stranger they would look mad, they would look wild. But to Garvey, who remembers how his younger brother would stare this way at a butterfly alight upon a flower, they are simply the eyes of a man who sees the face of God in all that he beholds.

I need help, Charles.

Charles steps closer to his brother and fixes his eyes upon the bone just below his left eye where there is a swollen patch of violet colored flesh. He does not see the dirt and the filth which covers his brother’s face, he does not see his bare feet or his torn clothing. He sees only that patch of bruised flesh just below his eye. Thus the motion of his arm, his swing, the impact of his closed fist upon that tender bone occurs mechanically, as does the backward spiral of Garvey Flint. The second blow does not land under his jaw, as he had planned, but smashes into his throat right at the thyroid. The third manages to clip his ear. And that’s all it takes is three. One for the Father, one for the Son and one for the Holy Ghost. 

Garvey Flint is down again, clutching at his neck like a man poisoned with lye. Charles Flint wipes his hand with the rag. He stands above his brother. This is a moment he had rehearsed as a boy, with a flour sack in the rebuilt barn, with a bag of oats, with a bale of hay. His legs became strong from the mock beatings. His diction became stronger too. And years later, when Charles Flint would one day tell the story of how he became known as the most eloquent Holiness man ever to conduct a backwoods tent revival in the state of Tennessee, he would say that it was the sins of his brother Garvey that fueled his passion for scripture, and his life in pursuit of the Lord. 

Charles watches his brother clutching at himself, he watches him struggle to breathe. There, lying on the ground amidst the splinters of oak, is a man he has never known. And he sees now that his clothing is in tatters. He sees that his feet are bare. He sees the black soles of his brother’s feet and his ankles and he remembers how he’d interlock his fingers, as a boy, and kneel, and provide for him a stirrup with his hands, lifting him onto the back of Bowdun in the night so that he could ride under the moon. He remembers how Garvey’s feet were always so cold.

What has thou done? he says. The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.