!A fire in Galilee --- by Anna @ 2004 --- Chapter I: The women --- On the long plain outside the city gates Sheena was laid down. Her friends always laid her there, then went to walk in the city and visit friends. "You know we'll be back in a little while to turn you," Crystal said and looked at Sheena real hard, then turned toward the gates. Sheena knew what the look was for. Crystal prayed mightily that her missing son would be seen by Sheena from her mat outside the gates, and that Sheena would be able to keep the secret from the whole world save her. Sheena had never seen the boy, so there was no secret to keep. Usually Peggy would quip, "Now don't you go nowhere," before walking away from Sheena into the city with Crystal, but she didn't say nothing. Sheena couldn't go nowhere anyway, so she lay on her mat, propped against the basalt tower outside the city gates where her friends left her. She was the income for all three women because times was hard and money short. Nobody hired no women, and of the three women's husbands, Crystal's old man was the only one didn't stay drunk, and Wal-mart wouldn't even hire him to stand by the door with the old people and the retards on account of his felony record. Crystal's old man had come home to her every night after walking a great distance to put in applic- ations at three more places each day. He'd applied to every place in Galilee; all the fishing boats, all the net-mending shops, all the dishwasher jobs, janitor jobs, and temp agencies. While Sheena lay in that same position and the sun got hotter, Crystal's man was a day's walk south, letting his tired feet carry him through the mountains in the desert, putting in applications down in Judea. Crystal, in the city, was probably telling Peggy again how she didn't want to move. Wherever any of them was, Sheena wasn't going nowhere. She lay on her mat, propped against the basalt tower with the Sea off to her left. Around her outside the gate the other paralytics and veterans and mental health consumers competed with her for the good will of anybody with a little change. The first few groups of gardeners and truck farmers walked their mules and carried their baskets into the city to sell at the markets set up by Health and Human Services, and Sheena tried to groan louder than the men. A few copper coins landed on her mat. She smiled inside. Sheena could hear Crystal's voice behind her as the two women approached her. "I don't know what the hell he down there for anyway," Crystal was saying. "He should have tried the Bass Pro Shops again. Leaving me up here by myself, and he know we ain't moving away from the water." Seemed like Sheena's friends had a special sense for the slap of copper on Sheena's mat, because it was never long before the toss of a coin and their arrival. "I wisht we could get enough to get my television fixed," Peggy said. She stooped to pick the copper portraits of the emperor off the mat and handed them to Crystal, who let them clink against the few coins the women had got themselves that morning. "I hate to miss Signs of the Times." Peggy leaned down again and repositioned Sheena a little so her weight rested differently and her sores wouldn't get bad again. Sheena didn't feel like talking. "Now don't you go nowhere," Peggy said, and turned with Crystal back toward the city. After the gardeners and truck farmers and morning rush of people heading to and from the little farmer's market had gone, it was slow and hot propped against the basalt tower by the gate. Many of the other paralytics and veterans and mental health consumers fell asleep or went off somewhere, or somebody came and got them. The sun beat down and Sheena wondered about her pressure sores. Anyone who stopped and took the time to look at Sheena out there in the heat wished they hadn't. Her wrinkled skin hung loosely on bones and useless knobby joints. Water weight, not food, made her belly and waist look swollen and fat. Her puffy face disguised her nice cheekbones and the old scarf on her head covered her hairs. Out of her bloated face, fierce angry eyes looked past her grotesque cheeks at the world. After rush hour, the remaining paralytics, veterans, and mental health consumers went back to shelters or under the bridge for the night. Seemed like the number of amputees kept increasing. They made good money. Sheena lay where she had been left until her friends returned, both thoughtfully silent after the possibilities they'd discovered in the city that day. They lifted Sheena on her mat and carried her tiny body back to her house. Sheena's man Joe wasn't home. With the door closed, Peggy helped Sheena empty her bladder in the bowl and took it outside to dump in the latrine, then turned up the volume on Sheena's TV. Crystal put together a stew with a few okras to thicken it up and scraps from restaurant dumpsters and dumpsters on the wharf. When it was done cooking down, she turned off the flame to save fuel and served it over leftover rice in Sheena's two bowls. "Look," said Peggy as she fed Sheena, "Signs of the Times is on." Sheena's fierce eyes wrinkled slightly into a smile. "No signs we can't read ourselves," she said. Even though the other women's eyes were on the TV show, Sheena knew she had their full attent- ion. "Today by the gates," she said. "that man come by with his son behind him on a donkey. Don't y'all remember the Samaritan man? Nasty thing. Probably got AIDS and everything else. Don't know what they doing up here. He stopped by me. That donkey showed his eye whites and turned a little when the man took his son down. He was talking to one of the veterans," Sheena said. "Peggy---you remember Hiram? He was talking to Hiram." "Eat your soup," Peggy said, and spooned some stew into Sheena's mouth. Sheena ate a while. * * * The next week when Sheena lay on her mat against the basalt tower, quilting was on her mind. The way her fingers on the needle used to weave the thread through the patches, and the stories and patterns which went back to slavery days. Sheena felt herself tied to the city gates, to the long plain, to her girlfriends, by the stitching of some invisible fingers. Each, she felt, wasn't nothing but a scrap, but when tied together, put on a backing, with cotton batting stuffed in, they were beautiful and useful. There was no people by the gate but her in the heat under the cloudless sky. As Sheena thought, her eyes stitched the horizon to the distant sky and her heart churned. Are we beautiful, she asked, are we useful? Then a goat came through the gate, aimless, follow- ed by another. Their slit eyes echoed the distant horizon and their beards moved with their tooth- grinding chins. Another goat came through. The three galloped a few steps then stopped and set to wandering again. That night Sheena would not talk to Crystal and Peggy at all. They left her house early. Sheena felt gross, dirty. Her fierce eyes faced out at the world but she looked only inward and withdrew into her shriveled, bloated, unfeeling body. Joe came home so drunk, the Thunderbird sweating out his pores, soaking his back and under his arms with alcoholic stench. He didn't look at her but lay down clothed, his back to her, and slumped into the mattress. Sheena's eyes did not see him. The rhythmic thunder of the train spoke: rumbledumb clacketetang. Sheena woke suddenly to the shudder- ing train passing. Light came past the burlap sacks over the windows and she was alone in bed. The light and train was crushing her head. Her brain felt swollen. She couldn't marshal her thoughts. Crystal and Peggy should have come a while ago. Did anyone help her pee before bed? As it rumbled into the distance, the train still spoke: rumbledumb clacketetang. Sheena couldn't think. She felt the weight of the train on her. Her old anger got mixed again with helplessness but not self-pity. She was nauseous and felt dirty and the light and train crushed her head and she wished she could move her hands, drain her own urine. Sheena rocked her head side to side, willing her body to come along and roll over. The train was silenced by the distance and Sheena pissed the bed. No doubt her bladder was still horribly distended inside her, but some piss had overflowed, somehow. She lay there, nauseous and hungry, head throbbing and wet, pulled back into her unfeeling body. A great liberator was in town staying at the house of one of the Free Palestine Judeans from the South. He was teaching them strategy and ethics, listening. He believed in the people. Everywhere he went he was mobbed by people who needed help. Crystal had went the other day because her welfare check was cut off. She had put her braids up with a ribbon around them. The liberator had pointedly ignored her. Sheena lay in her bed, nauseous, smelling the urine she lay in, head pounding relentlessly. She began to see things another way. Angels walked the earth and were hard to tell from regular people, who in Sunday school they said were a little lower than angels. The angels took up residence in people sometimes, just took them over when they needed a certain kind of body. She thought back to when her body became useless. Joe had a Chevy Nova then. He'd come by her church to pick her up, but he was drunk and crazy. He threw her out of the car in front of all the people at the church and beat her in her head and face. She had turned and his fist had cracked her neck. When she had fell down on the church steps, Joe had stomped her and stomped her in the Tim boots he loved until she had stopped remembering. Though hospital recovery was an indistinct soup of beeps, faces, confusion, waiting, repeated cycles of bed baths, dressing changes, and catheterizations, every event of the beating was distinct enough she could taste the blood, move her body to try to escape him, feel the pit of her stomach and her heart ache. It was a scrap she picked up most often in the scrap-basket she kept in her mind, turning it over and wondering where it fit. When Joe had done that, was an angel in him, trying desperately to show her how to be? She had been able to earn money outside the city gates after that, and Peggy and Crystal came over every day to help her out, and she had felt her old loneliness leave as she was filled with friends and their care. As her hands lay newly limp and wasting, her quilting mind opened to see the patterns and stitches in all things. And Joe had never beat her again. There was a knock at the door. Sheena felt it as well as heard it, pulsing through skull and nausea. "What?" she hollered. Hiram opened the door and wheeled himself in. The urine smell didn't bother him, but his wheels couldn't carry him close to her bed because of the mess on the floor. "I heard about the goatherd yesterday," he said. "What goatherd you talking about?" Sheena asked. "What did you hear?" "That nasty Samaritan told Simon he fucked a cripple woman, and it wasn't nobody out there but you." "I don't remember," Sheena said, and she didn't. She remembered a goat come through the gate aim- less, followed by another. She remembered their slit eyes echo the horizon and their beards move with the grinding of their teeth. She remembered a third goat come through, and the three gallop a few steps. Through nausea and confusion she felt the weight of the locomotive on her, its heavy bulk stitched together with her tiny unmoving body. Her puffy forehead wrinkled with tension, and even as Hiram sat there on his chair talking, she closed her eyes and slept. If he kept talking she didn't hear it. In her dreams, invisible fingers threaded a needle. Sheena's grandmothers had been sisters to the cattle and daughters of the egret. Those great women held the family clan together in their power- ful wings and kept the old ways. Their fingers held threaded needles and they mended rifts among their people. Their feet were tied to the land by loops of thread like thin roots and the sky was tied to their shoulders. With one hand they watered the cattle and the egret came to warn them. Those women were careful. They kept the old ways. * * * "I'm a bad muhfucka! I'm a bad muhfucka!" When Sheena woke, this female was hollering, long nails pointing in this man's face. He said, "Okay, okay, I know you bad." "No, I'm a bad muhfucka!" the female repeated. Sheena was in the back of a pickup truck, stopped in traffic. She turned her face, fierce eyes confused. Nothing looked familiar. People streamed around the truck, a couple motorcycles cut through the crowd, a bus was at a standstill behind the pickup truck. The air stank. There was boarded up shops on both sides of the street. A donkey with packs on, but no one riding or holding him, wander- ed against the flow of traffic, sort of struggling. The pickup truck inched along. Sheena looked for the bad muhfucka but she was out of sight. Sheena could not tell where she was or who was driving, only that it was afternoon and blindingly hot. In resignation she let her head fall back to neutral, puffy face pointed at fiery blue cloudless sky. Three goats were trying to jump over a fence. She didn't turn to look at them directly. She flashed her eyewhites like an animal as the goats put their hooves up in the fence and jostled each other off again. The truck was stopped again by the crowd and the traffic. As the goats were swallowed by the crowd, Sheena thought about her grandmothers. Both of them had died in the '60s. Neither lived to see emancipation from slavery. They had their feets dug in the soil, stitched to the land with loops of thread like thin roots, and many young roots were their daughters. They knew how to dig the roots with a stick and make soups or charms from them. Sheena's grandmothers both wore the root name John around their necks. John had to do with freedom. Even if the roots were young, they were lived in by old ancestors. When you saw smoke from the distant fires the soldiers kept John told you it was a signal for getting free. John was your news source about the freedom already inside you and about the arm resistance movement. Then those women died the winter before emanci- pation. Those women had to be planted in the soil they was stitched to. Maybe John told them that after freedom there would be a lot of wandering, that the family clan they had stitched together would bust out at the seams and get scattered in the wind sure as if they'd been sold. Not rooted, not beautiful, not useful, just scraps. It's like the people didn't know how to be free, so they tried to be they own slave master, break they selves. No, her grandmas could not have wanted to see that. Sheena kept thinking about the egret and the cattle and the roots in that soil down south in Goshen and the quilt of her childhood family clan. She did not notice that the pickup had been moving while she was thinking until Crystal and Peggy cut through the crowd talking excitedly. The cab doors on the pickup opened and the driver's side slammed. After some grunting and clicking the passenger side slammed and Hiram wheeled himself back by the women. He had fought in that war, and even though Sheena could tell he always thought about it, he never had said a word to anyone she knew about it. The truck rocked as the driver got back in it. Crystal and Peggy lifted Sheena and carried her out on the road, through the dense crowd, into an alley. They rested, then carried her up steps onto a roof. Hiram waited downstairs. The whole while, the two women talked on and on, falling over each other with interruptions about this man who was a great doctor was going to bring real freedom to the people. Sheena hardly heard them. She was thinking about what it would take to stitch her family clan back together. She had heard the egret from her mat by the gates. Being paralytic had been good because she had put by savings from the copper coins people threw to her. She had almost a denarius saved up. In another year or two as long as her house wasn't bulldozed by government soldiers or seized by settlers, and her friends weren't arrested to indefinite pretrial detention without charges, she she could maybe travel. Her grandmothers would help her remember how to stitch her sister and cousins and brothers and all their children together into a beautiful, useful, free family. Crystal pulled tiles off the roof, ruining her nails as she dug at the roofing. She made a big hole, and the light came in and the people inside looked up, certain it was government soldiers. But Crystal and Peggy picked up Sheena's mat and care- fully lowered her down to the hands of the people, who laid her, tiny on her mat, on the floor. It was so crowded! Crystal and Peggy looked down through the roof, clearly hoping for something. The man in the middle of the room caught Sheena's eye as he pushed through the crowd. He was so country in his starched blue overalls. The bottoms were tucked into work boots. He came right up to Sheena, saw her right into her bones, and said, "Nobody can hold your mistakes against you anymore. You are free." Sheena felt the earth cradling her body. The weight of the locomotive came unstitched and lifted. Her fierce eyes smiled. Just then, the law came in with a warrant and a summons to court. They had written it out on the street and signed it themselves. "We heard what you said, 'doctor,'" the law said, "and your time's up. You can't practice medicine without a license, and only the law can pardon guilt." The doctor turned his white eyes on their white faces and stared them down in his overalls. "I didn't do nothing," he said. "Look through the roof at her friends up there. They believed in her and me. Can you fault them? You can't blame anyone with friends that good." "In fact," the doctor said, "If they believed she could get up and walk, I'd believe and she would too. In fact all y'all would believe. She'd have no choice but to get up and walk out of here." Still looking at the law, he nodded toward Sheena. "Go on honey," the man said. Sheena's legs were weak, but they moved for the first time since Joe had beat her so bad. She held her hands---how was it possible?---and strangers helped her up. They handed her the mat and she leaned on them. Small and stumbling, she walked out of there. Hiram met her outside in his wheelchair. Crystal and Peggy came running down from the roof. The doctor was still inside teaching. They were outside not sure what to do. An egret crossed the sky to warn Sheena, and she heard the warning. Overwhelmed and confused, she cried as they started home.