Coffee and Sugar, C. Sean McGee [highly recommended books txt] 📗

until a shadowy crest swelled up under the falling sun like a tidal wave of gentle familiarity, rushing towards their tiny farm to wash away the stains of isolation.

By the time the sun settled below the horizon; bringing the dawn of struggle to another farm on another distant part of this world, the great shadow that had ascended across the land had melded into a horde of smiling faces, shaking hands, kissing cheeks, warm, longing hugs and simple converse.

Women gathered together and cackled away in their hoarse voices and in the extent of their laughter and shared joy, they sounded more like a collection of antique kettles, whistling away and all coming to boil. They all looked remarkably reverent, dressed sententiously in white; their dresses flat against their either corpulent or skeletal frames and flapping only lightly against the rough skin on their knees as a hot dry breeze slithered its way through the air like a snake through yellowish dry brush.

As they sat in their circles, the old women talked about their sore joints and their strained muscles and they compared scars and snake bites and oohed and aahed whenever one of the old women lifted their Sunday dress above their knobbly knees and gargantuan thighs to reveal a scar thicker and more bulbous than the ones that had come before.

And they cheered and clapped and admired as one old lady told tales of her close encounter with the devil, mistaking a python warming under her covers and sliding over her trunk like legs for the spent affection of her drunken husband, thinking she was reaching to peel away his slimy advancing sexuality, only to pull hard at the snakes tail and receive four bites at the bridge between her thumb and her index finger.

She showed the marks where her husband had cut her hand to suck out the venom and all of the women crowed around her in marvel and wonder.

The men said very little. They gathered in a circle like the cattle they herded; their heads hanging low, their eyes looking out from the edges of their straw hats and their hands each cradling a stained glass of cachaça, listening with silent applause while another man attended to his beaten up old acoustic and strummed away, as in the sky abounding, the last hint of light pledged its allegiance to the retreat of day.

And as the man with the guitar strummed, singing songs about life on the hard land; digging and turning the uncouth soil and making one’s bed in the asperity of life, the farmers all kept their stern faces, clasping and cradling their strong drinks and nodding their heads every now and then as they played out in their minds, the words of the songs that painted with a dry, coarse stroke, the attendance of their difficult and rarely rewarding lives on their farms.

The men never talked about their problems or their worries. They would just sip on their cachaça and tilt their heads about until they caught another’s eye and then tip their heads forward, wink lightly (though with such a leathered face, one would have to use quite an amount of force to feign a slight wink), make an unidentifiable utterance that may or may not be a word and then continue to tilt their head about like a bouncy ball bobbing about in the open sea.

The men didn’t like the uncomfortableness of sitting still with arms flat and in attention. They responded and reasoned better with order and direction and were more common to communicate with primal grunting and pointing, conversing in high esteem only with their horses and stubborn cattle as opposed to their complicating wives and directionless children.

This circular quietude; the gathering of men, what just offsetting, so they relied on one man to strum away on his guitar while another canted openly and profoundly about horses and stubborn cattle, something they all had in common and longed to nod away to in communicable agreement.

Once the night had settled in, The Bishop called everyone into attendance and the stiffened men lifted themselves from their uncomfortable wait and the cackling, worn, old women lowered their girthing dresses and put away their aging scars as the two groups came together; the smiling women being taken in arm by their reserved men, scooping up their children as they shuffled along the dirt path to the back of the farm where; in an old shabby barn, there waited under a single flashing bulb, Joao’s father; The Bishop, standing tall on his podium with his arms reaching out into the distance as if he were their shepherd, calling them into his pasture to feast upon his good word.

Every Sunday they came from far and wide; from all over this sun drenched country to listen to The Bishop give his sermon. The farmers sat quietly and attentively on rows of benches carved out of splintered and diseased wood and balanced on piles of dirt, sticks and rocks with the heaviest people sitting on each end to balance out the seat for all the others.

The women sat with their hands in their laps while the more prosperous of the men, held in their hands; as they had their glass of cachaça, a small, leather bound black book which to them was as a key is to a lock, as violence is to obedience and as love is to servitude.

They sat still like a wayfaring bull, looking straight at The Bishop just as a sailor would the forever line of the horizon; unflinchingly and covetous, while the children sat submissive, edging to gather again in group and race about on the dusted earth in play but having been clipped over their ears and pinioned enough times through the years to restrain the wanton wrecking of the devilish child within them and listen intently to the good word of god.

Joao was not allowed to enter the shed and instead would have to watch the sermon from the gaps in the swinging doors as a thin piece of copper wire struggled; like his mother’s waist band, to keep the heavy doors from swinging back open.

He would crouch in the sand, his left knee pressing against a small carven hole in the splintered wood and his toes curling into the sand where the two heavy doors met.

It was something he had always done; shifting the warm sand between his toes while his father stood magnificent and gallant in front of the many inspired people. At this moment, he was deaf to the echo of his father’s abusive slurs and immune to the tyranny of insult from his entire family, for; while he stared at his father, the image of his veneration and communal splendour alone was enough for him to drizzle sweetness onto his own bitter struggle to belong in his family, in his own body and in the world.

To Joao, The Bishop; when he was preaching of course, was mountainous in his stature. His two arms could stretch out and embrace the world, holding it tight and safe, free from falling away from its passage about the sun just as his word did to strengthen the will of man and stop them from descending into debauchery and societal slavery with alcohol, parties, drugs, sex and other spices of the devil’s condiments.

The reality was that The Bishop was a tiny bulbous man, with short stubby legs and balloon like hands. He had a big fat belly that hanged low over his rusted belt buckle with his tight shirt pulling against his sweaty skin, clinging just below his belly button so the thick and sweaty, black hairs of his chest and crotch would ride up into the air and glisten under the low light like fresh dew on a prickly thorn under the rise of the sun.

His hair was flat and matted. He had a large bald spot that he smoothed over with a mixture of the sweat from his belly and grease from the insides of old truck tires that he would move about daily feigning use and activity while the rest of the family earned their measly supper. He would spend the greater part of his days running his hand through his long fringe and flattening it down over the top of his sunburned head.

The Bishop wore flat footed loafers. He did no work on the farm other than preparing the weekly sermon so he needed not of the leather to bear the daily trenching through the fields like his children. Instead he wore comfortable slip on shoes that were slightly large for his feet so that every time he walked, he would slap the heel of the shoe loud and annoyingly against the ground, thinking to himself that he displayed all the grace of a show pony plodding around the less muddy and dusty parts of the farm.

Joao hated this sound. And while he would sit and watch his siblings toil on the land; imagining their bitter struggle, The Bishop would slap his stupid feet about like a flamboyant donkey in his usual uneducated and arrogant accent and the sound alone would pull Joao from his focus, driving him towards internal disturbance.

He would try to balance himself and ignore the slapping of plastic heels on cold tile; breathing calmly and looking out in the distance without trying to attain any focus whatsoever, just letting the conscious storm pass without dirtying his creativity. It was no use though. The second a breath of silence would return and he would start imaging the troubles of one of his brothers or one of his sisters, from out of nowhere would come that annoying, ignorant slapping sound.

Back and forth it went, all day long; the sound of his father’s feet smacking against the ground, begging for someone to craft a question as to where they might be heading and what they might be doing when they get there.

And everywhere that his feet slapped were those two stubby legs with knees that looked like two squashed turnips, jeans that were too big, even for his lumpish frame, hanging off his arse like a diaper that’s just been filled, that enormous stomach and its protruding sweaty, black hairs, his two tubby arms that looked like someone had just attached his forearms to his shoulders.

And then there was the leather case.

The Bishop had a little black, leather bag with a long, leather strap that he carried with him everywhere he went and nobody quite knew what he kept inside but the way he swung it about let one and sundry know that he was a man in charge. And everywhere that he went, he would have the bag thrown over his shoulder with his wrist bent lightly back, walking with a cretinous swagger as if he thought he were in league with Santa Claus or a vagrant hobo.

That was his weekly parade though, for now and every Sunday, he was dressed as sophistication; his hair combed neatly over his balding spot, the tufts of grey hair that sprouted from his ears gelled back into their waxen housing and all of the other unnecessary hair trimmed and cut away, his face shaven of the thick, black, prickly hairs that under the hot sun pushed their way through warts and puss filled blemishes.

He wore a shining black suit. I say shining because to look into its stellar dark, one could see a glimmer of hope. And his midnight black leather loafers glistened under the dim light. So embossed were they that would glisten under the faintest light of the moon on the darkest art of the earth. He looked entirely like a man of profession and of course a servant of Christ has; in his making, the profession of holiness, of goodliness and of spiritual ascension.

After all, he who is appointed to preside upon god’s word must look as if he could administer a heaven.

Joao looked through the tiny hole in the fence in pleasant wonder as The Bishop raised his hands and sang his words in mighty esteem, banishing the doubt and fear that coagulated in the crevices of his congregation’s collective consciousness.

Whenever he spoke of drought, disease or of stubborn ox, he would shake his fist about as if he were inviting the devil himself to a duel. He cursed the fallen one for everything that wronged the world and as he spoke of travesty and tragedy, the farmers gathered around him; his faithful flock, shedding tears from their stone set eyes and cringing under the vexing weight of his words.

And just as that pressing weight seemed unliveable, he would open his fist, extend his arms into the air with his open palms tilted backwards facing the dim light above him and he would lift his head and look upwards slightly as if he were reading the word of god from the back of his hands and chant out the name of his lord Jesus Christ high and mighty, with love and without