The Arms of God: A Novel by Hinton Lynne

Author:Hinton, Lynne [Hinton, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781466883413
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

All living things have names. To be without one is to be lost in a world without definition. What else but a name satisfies forgotten memories, softens the indured layers of a broken heart, brings life to still pictures?

Nothing shall speak too much about a man, save the sound of his name.

—THE COLOR MAN

Five

Olivia didn’t know that her brother wanted to fly. She didn’t know that he ached to sleep or that at thirteen years of age Roy had given up on childhood. She didn’t know that the innocence had been stripped in lean watery layers, year after year, because of the things he had learned from their mother’s longing and his grandfather’s unfisted hand, poverty, and perhaps the consequences of suffering too many regrets.

She knew that he had abandoned his friendship with E. Saul and his Sunday afternoons next door at Ruth’s; but she didn’t know it was because of what the white boys said about them living in Smoketown. She didn’t know that he was ashamed of things he couldn’t name and that his heart had closed upon itself.

She didn’t know that her brother dreamed of a night woman who untied the red string from around his neck and danced him across the sky, that in that dark place of rest Roy nestled himself in the wings of goodness, that the folding of a day was the only time and place he felt safe.

What she did know about Roy was that he was violent and cruel and that late on a summer afternoon he was christened with a name that handed him the declaration of the man he was destined to be. That if there had ever been a time when he thought of or spoke to her, gently, because of their kinship, a memory she could keep of when he had been kind to her, it was, on that hot August day, like infested wheat in a field, snatched up and burned. That anything good that she would eventually learn of family would come only from what she would be taught from next door.

Just before the day shifted, in the hottest part of the afternoon, the name fell hard on the boy. Harder than the lessons from school that severed his friendship with E. Saul. Harder than staying away from Ruth’s porch and not bending toward the laughter and the singing that drifted through his window. Harder than knowing that his mother didn’t love him. Harder than stone.

It fell during a game of basketball when the boys had gotten through with chores and farmwork at just about the same time. They gathered at the dirt field behind the old school since they were too young to be over at the blacktop one at the park. The older boys played there and it was a whole different kind of ball game on that court.

Roy and some of the younger kids went sometimes just to watch and dream of the day when they could spit out obscenities and smoke Camels at the same time that they held the ball that fit so snugly in their hands.

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