The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier Page A

anger and confusion, when those we love are taken before their time. The air is piping through the trees, and his voice keeps rising and dropping away. Christopher is thinking about all the fathers he has read about, the ones who have lost their daughters to unknown circumstances, unknown powers, like the Arkansas millionaire who built a high stone wall around his house and then, when his daughter was returned to him, sank all his money into the world’s largest display of Christmas lights, which he donated to Walt Disney World after his neighbors complained about the crowd of sightseers. The Reverend is talking about the difficulty of knowing the mind of God. Why does He allow so many of us to come to grief? Whose world are we living in, after all? Christopher can feel his eyes stinging in the wind, but the eyedrops he bought are still at home in the medicine cabinet. It is only a few minutes later, when the Reverend says his daughter’s name again, Celia Elizabeth Brooks, and then something about how as long as we remember her she is inside all of us, that United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson begins to shout.
    The congressman slashes his arms through the air in a wild X, the bottle in his hand whipping this way and that so that arcs of brass-colored liquor keep spattering onto the floor of the pavilion. She’s already dead, he cries, you can’t do this again, my wife is already dead. He can hear the distant chop of the reservoir, see the people in their folding chairs paused in a far-away stillness, but everything around him seems to be wrapped in a layer of wool. All his attention is gathered around the man in the black robe, a bat, who has been mocking his Elizabeth. He thinks of her burial plot, so many miles away, already scattered with the first few leaves of autumn. In October, when he travels north, he sees entire flocks of swallows and robins migrating south for the winter, thousands of them flying in clots and waves, and he imagines that he is a counterweight connected to them by an invisible steel rod, balancing their motion with his own. For a while, during the final months of his wife’s illness, the wasting smell of her body made him sick to his stomach, and he had to wear a surgical mask over his face as he washed and fed her. He has never forgiven himself. He watches the Reverend Gautreaux walking slowly toward him, palms extended, asking him to calm down, calm down, saying that everything will be all right. How dare he! The congressman hurls his liquor bottle at the man, but it rolls past his shoulder and hits one of the columns, shattering inside its paper bag with a heavy concussive sound. Sara Cadwallader and Sheila and Tim Lanzetta, who are sitting across the aisle from Celia’s parents in the front row, leap at the noise and skip back from their chairs.
    Sara Cadwallader watches the Reverend back carefully away from the crazy man in gray clothing, moving with such an awkwardly wooden gait that he reminds her of her cats, Mudpie and Thisbe, treading over the floor vent in her living room, shaking their feet after each step as though their pads were sticking to the metal. The Reverend moves slowly down the stairs, stopping finally in the aisle beside her, and the crazy man looks away from him for a moment, right into Sara’s eyes. He has a crusted shaving cut above his lip, and his corneas are stained a pale yellow, and she has a curious desire to wave to him. Then he seems to notice the rest of the people in the crowd. He says something she does not understand and climbs onto his bench and from there into the rafters of the pavilion, shouting, Stay away from me, keep away, and glass liquor bottles begin raining down from him in twos and threes, breaking against the railing or bouncing and sailing into the chairs. There are so many of them that she thinks he must have hundreds up there. She takes cover behind the Reverend, who himself takes cover behind a wastebasket. Sara lives two houses down