Nathan’s Vision

Photograph by David Nelson

Nathan Paterne shifted in the white iron chair when his youngest son approached him of a sweltering Sunday afternoon on the narrow front porch and declared, “Paw. I am going to marry.” The world waved unsteadily in the heat as the boy spoke. A moment after, Nathan turned his head and saw the radiant girl, trailed by nightdark hair, riding up the smooth incline of the driveway perched sidesaddle on a camel. He blinked. He looked back to his son, who smiled and darted his eyes nervously toward the girl, then back to him.

“Paw, her father has a circus, and he says I can travel and learn the business when we are married aright.” Sanders leaned forward on the balls of his feet, swaying like a thin river birch clinging to ground at the water’s edge. “He says he wants me to come with them. Says he needs some help.”

Nathan blinked again. The girl now sat the camel only ten feet from the porch, a slender Arabian grin visible beneath the sheen of her veil. She was beautiful, the olive skin of her cheeks exotic above the fabric, her brown-black eyes sadly mysterious. This girl is no more than fifteen, he thought. A lavender cord cinched the waist of the black flowing robe concealing her from neck to toe. Her hood was off, tucked under the saddle blanket on the camel’s hump. Father and son sweated in short cotton sleeves even in the shade of the porch, but there was no moisture visible on her. J. Naiveh’s GREAT EVANGEL Circus stood raised in gold letters across the brilliant purple blanket.

Then Nathan felt his son’s hand pat his back two times, and Sanders said, “I’ll write when we hit the next town. I’ve said ’bye to Mama already.” He hopped from the porch and climbed the back of the camel behind the girl’s straight figure. Nathan saw the exclamation of Sanders’s hand shooting up in a wave when the camel turned onto the gravel median of the highway a hundred yards away, his boy and the girl and camel dissolving into one unsteady mirage.

Nathan opened his eyes and squinted, tried to focus on the back of his wife’s black bushy head in the sepia light of the small bedroom. It was early morning. He blinked his right eye and then his left to fight the grayed milkiness from his view. His hand followed the swollen hump of his wife’s hip and patted the covers. He rolled over and away from her side of the bed, swung his feet to the floor and into the size twelve work boots resting where he knew they would be. Nathan slept in a work shirt and faded khaki pants during the planting season so that all he had to put on in the mornings would be boots and a belt. The laces cinched quickly around the brass stays by the memory of his hands. Behind him Pauline inhaled deeply and sloughed the covers away. He patted the rump again and said, “Mornin’, glory.”

The hallway to the bathroom had the dappled dawn across it; a picture on the wall of his three boys pulling a Radio Flyer caught in the half-light. Nathan didn’t look at the picture because he did not look to the sides when he walked—always somewhere to go to do something when it was a day to work. He made straight for the bathroom and puckered his lips to view both his cheeks in the round, gold-framed mirror. The razor thocked across the strop as he sharpened it; then the lather and stubble came off in swaths of dirty blue splashed around the drain.

Hezekiah was already sitting in the kitchen when Nathan came in, and he looked up at his father through sleepy slits of eyes beneath a short forehead and a flattop of blond, stubby hair. His head appeared to sit directly on his thick...