Yonder Stands Your Orphan by Barry Hannah Page A

here. Across the lake was a deserted barracks and barn and fifty acres contained by a broken fence of storm wire, a former quarters for a football and majorette summer camp, and this maimed and devoted couple began to convert the camp into a resort for orphans. They kept four horses and a pleasure barge, with fields for softball, archery, volleyball and badminton, horseshoes. They built a hall for movie nights. Catastrophe had brought their earnestness together. Sworn to give something back, they fell more deeply in love. A few weeks back the first orphans had come.
    The ex-doctor Max Raymond practiced his saxophone, tuned to this house of chaos and horror. It was spring, or starting to be, and he felt the ghosts passing and then struggling down the green alleys of the deeps in the swamp behind them. His wife sometimes sang, perhaps for the animals and birds, alone on the back stoop. Her voice was pure, lush and sweet, unconscious of ugly history.

    Raymond was fishing from the other side of the pier from the old men at work on their own barge when another came over from the orphans’ camp across the lake, twin Evinrudes putting behind, children at the rails. White, black, Vietnamese, Mexican. But they were all speaking like immigrants who knew only a few phrases of obscenity in English. The wife was at the stern trying to lead these children in song. They ignored her. Nevertheless, Penny kept smiling radiantly. Gene was at the wheel, also smiling with a sort of witless beatitude. The couple were still sallow and drawn from their calamity, no longer handsome but invested by their great pity. The children around them made rutting motions and blew noises on their arms. A small one urinated on the deck. All the while, many others were yelling filth. Reviling the dignity of this geriatric gallery on the pier. But the husband steered as if all was in hand and each child adorable. The wife kept leading the song. A vision beyond comment until they left and trolled southward to the dam.
    Raymond thought of Malcolm, the rival he had destroyed. Did he look like the couple did now? Lunatic, pale, slumped. The idiotic hope in their faces. “I’m happy there’s a lake between us and that,” said Wren.
    It looked like something, well, unlicensed. “My first look at them since they were hauled off in the ambulance,” said Dr. Harvard. “Poor people. Crippled. Thinking they’re doing good.”
    â€œYou seen everything that’s wrong with this fucking U.S.A. aboard that scow,” said Sidney. He had a deep chest cold and had been enjoying heaving up phlegm and spitting the gouts into the water, going for distance.
    Two of the orphans were well-figured girls, maybe fourteen, both smoking cigarettes, their faces already set hard, their eyes already gone whoring, leers ready. Each ofthe old recalled them in his own way. Glittering eyes of a lizard. Troubled homes, troubled streets. A foreign perfume in these dreams. Old men eaten alive. A mindless revival of unspoken sins. Death by arousal.
    Raymond watched their faces. Then he looked up the yard at Melanie coming down the hill, bringing cold beers to them. Sweetness and light, he thought. She was amazing. A face and body kept lineless by virtue, self-sacrifice.
    Ulrich had been quiet, painting on deck varnish. Now he spoke. “We don’t love each other as much as we used to. You can see the uncertain looks, the calculations, the dismissals. People are not even in the present moment. Everybody’s been futurized. You look in those eyes and see they’re not home, they’re some hours ahead at least. I hate to go into Vicksburg anymore. Anywhere, really. It’s all like meeting people who have just departed. Old men and women don’t look wise anymore. They are just aged children. And who gets the highest pay? Actors. Paid to mimic life because there is no life. You look at everybody and maybe they’re a little sad, some of