Yonder Stands Your Orphan by Barry Hannah Page B

’em. They’re all homesick for when they were real.” Ulrich began painting again as the others tried to guess what could have prompted this.
    â€œDid you see them orphans?” asked Sidney.
    â€œOrphans?” asked Ulrich. “Who isn’t an orphan, I ask you?”
    Sidney had a living father who he wished were dead. Pepper Farté hated almost everything that moved. To buy something in his bait house was like pulling goods from the hands of a vicious hermit. When Sidney himself entered the store, the older man became livid, angry at the custom that demanded you acknowledge your son. Sidney was going to correct Ulrich, but then he recalled these matters and merely sneered.

    â€œWhen you’re crazy like me, the brain keeps you warm. I haven’t had a long-sleeve shirt on all year,” Ulrich reflected.
    â€œShortness of air to the head is what explains you,” said Sidney.
    â€œI wonder who is helping that poor couple with the orphans,” said Melanie. She handed a beer to Ulrich. “I don’t think you should be breathing paint in your condition, Mr. Ulrich.” She patted his shoulder. Ulrich painted on. She smiled.
    Harvard watched Melanie in reverence.
    I could love this woman too
, thought Raymond.
Like a Madonna. Maybe she is all the vision I’ll ever get. How can you have a faith without a vision now and then?
    The woman has been graceful so long, kind so long
.
    A vision cannot be indefinite, an apparition. No, you go down the road and you see something there, dense and none other like it. Those of us who want visions can’t have them, maybe. They are given to old fools like Ulrich. I love him too. A better man than I am
. Raymond thought this and then had a bluegill on.
But what of the other night when I became so glad all of a sudden and for no reason that there was an Ireland, and that the natives of its villages were going about their ways, to and fro, from stone cottages and green rocky hills. I had an ecstasy thinking that. What was that?
    Melanie walked with her small ice chest back up the pier and continued around the cove on an unknown journey. Her walking made no sense until she rounded the inlet with its thick lily pads, then went on to the point where the black man John Roman sat on his bucket fishing. It began to rain a little. The figures over there were small, but the man watched as she handed the fisherman a cold beer. He took it. The rain sparkled over the bent willows above the two.

    Fairly soon, as it began to rain thickly, the pier crowd beheld this woman on the back of Roman’s motorbike, clutching his stomach, as he rode them out of the trees and up the long rise to her house. Small figures, they entered her kitchen together.
    â€œLookee. She’s steppin’ out on you, Harvard,” said Sidney with a wide sneer. “She been wantin’ it, but she can’t wait forever, eh, eh.”
    This man of great dignity and honors, the man I should have been
, Raymond thought, watching Harvard again, poleaxed by love and this old guttersnipe Sidney. His eloquent white hair flattened out and dripping, eyes stupid. Like a bum with a ruined wig.
    Down in the south corner of the lake, Mortimer watched the absurd floor and roof on pontoons move toward him. Two adults and crammed with children. He did not like children. But he became suddenly alert when he noticed the two fourteen-year-old girls leaning on the rail his way. They both smoked in the sullen manner of the hopeless. One was already bosomy. The other had fine bare shoulders. Just budding upper frame, but muscled long legs. Then he stared at the adults. They had loony smiles, but there was something depleted about them both. They must be church people, he decided. That stupid hope on their faces. That trust that they were always on the Lord’s stage, pulled by the strings of a larger design. Looking for a cross. Maybe these brats themselves. He heard a few curses