Coffee and Sugar - C. Sean McGee (mystery books to read .TXT) 📗

the bottle’s lid trying to twist it open without success.

“Surely this excaliburian bottle has been packaged for the king of kings, to set free the spirit of Christ to fight the evil in the world and lead mankind to the judgment.”

This was what the old man thought as his sweaty palm slipped and slid over the metal lid and twisted and turned until the skin on his palm it burned and it burned and he cursed a ton of vile obscenities into the air, throwing all of his insult at his dim witted son who was now picking himself up off the floor, looking disgraceful in his Sunday’s best with a trickle of blood running from his chin down onto his white shirt and a stupid wash cloth wrapped around his right hand.

“You’re nothing like your kin; always on the nearside of an accident. Your brothers, now they were smart. Don’t know how in god’s grace I ended up with you but for the eternal grace of Jesus I will endure your hellish deviancy. For the love of god, would you look at your shirt, it is a disgrace, you are a disgrace. Hurry back there and make yourself presentable for Jesus. There’ll be no service with you looking like that” yelled The Bishop, steadying himself on the podium and trying to catch his swaying vision by steering his head in all directions, over correcting each time and aquaplaning his conscious mind, taking with it, the bottom of his belly as with every spin of his mind he felt his stomach swinging about wildly and willing itself to evacuate onto the floor below.

“What’s the time donkey?” he yelled out at the top of his lungs.

From behind a curtain in a small room behind the bar, Joao was busily removing his shirt and quickly soaking it in water and bleach before the blood stained permanently. His chin was stinging as the warm humid air flowed against the small, loose flap of skin from where he had hit himself against the ash white tiles; ash white because no matter how hard he scrubbed or how much bleach he used, he just couldn’t wash away the filth that had collected over the years that, so instead of returning to an off white like when they first moved in, they had a thick greasy and greyish residue from all the years of dirty shoes, cigarettes, beer, cachaça, semen, urine and rain washing all over it and so, no matter how hard he scrubbed, the best he could get was an ash white colour.

“It’s eight thirty five” yelled Joao from behind the curtain; racing to dress himself in a clean white shirt to match his Sunday suit; the pride of any man’s possessions if his heart was true to the lord that is.

“Why did you let me sleep this long? You know the service is forty five minutes and I’ve only got twenty five minutes before the soap operas start. You’ve upset Jesus” said the old man.

“Can we miss the soap opera tonight?” asked Joao.

“What?” screamed The Bishop belligerently.

“Every Sunday we give a service from eight until eight forty five. Not a second earlier and not a second later. At nine o´clock every night, we sit with Jesus and watch the ‘The Carriage of my Heart’. That’s the way it always is, it’s the way it’s always been” he continued in a lecturing tone.

“Sorry daddy, I didn’t forget I just thought that…”

“You didn’t think little donkey, that’s your forte, speaking on an empty mind. Now what are you doing in there?” yelled The Bishop, ushering the boy along so that they could start their service.

“I’m coming daddy” he said, tucking his shirt into his pants, all the while staring at picture of his mother who sat upon an old wooden bench on their farm wearing a long floral dress that covered her big bulbous knees and holding a small pocket sized leather bound bible; being long from where they were, surrounded by barren land and lots of stinging insects. A joyous warmth washed over him as he thought of the work he and his father were doing for the sake of their family and more so for the kind and brutish woman sitting painfully still in the photo.

Joao came rushing out from behind the curtain and sat on one of the crates in front of his father who was now standing behind the podium with his chest high into the air like a proud preacher, waiting to deliver the word of Christ, our lord and saviour.

“Fix your tie son, you look like a Catholic” he said acrimoniously.

CHAPTER ONE

Joao was by no means any more special than any of his eleven brothers or eight sisters, in fact; working on the farm, from where he was born and subsequently much later expulsed, he had always proven to be the appendix of his family’s working organs.

His hands were too small to grasp and his legs were like two elastic bands balancing on ice cubes. He had the coordination of a dizzy drunkard and all the force of a polite request. As a young boy he could barely even carry his own reflection in a mirror.

As for the labour of attending to the land, his sight was poor and his bulimic learning had him knowledgably bankrupt, being able to only hold onto an idea for as long as it would take him to forget it. So useless was he in fact that he couldn’t even pick a seed from a grain of sand. His worth on the farm and more so to the family, could be summed up in the inspirations of his father;

“Little useless donkey,” he’d say, “you’re only talent is in breathing. God gave you lungs so you could stay alive long enough to trouble him a little less.”

Joao never took it to heart inasmuch as he never argued himself out of accepting the truth that; on the farm, his presence alone was akin to that of a drought. Whenever he neared the toils of his siblings, they would curse and moan and band together to shoe him off like a diseased cattle; with he, wandering off to graze by himself in the dry dusted earth of the unwanted and unmanageable land they had always called home.

His mother; bless her heart, was no kinder than bull ant in her maternal affection; a giant hulking mass of a woman with elephantine like calloused hands that were more leathered than a cattle’s skin and tougher than a crocodiles arse.

She always wore the same floral dress that struggled to adapt and stretch around her huge knobbly knees. It was a white cotton dress but over the years it had worn itself into a reddish, orange hue from the time she spent with her knees buried firmly into the dusted earth, breaking and then turning the ground with her bare hands, doing the lord’s work to unshackle the dry dusted earth from the devil’s unquenchable thirst.

His mother was no stranger to hard work and had run the family farm since she too was a child, having dealt with her own parents’ untimely death in the fashion of digging her fingers into the dirt and burying the mounting stress and sadness of her burden, with every seed.

And so, she passed on to her own children what had helped her to survive for many a torrential season under the harsh sun and parched earth, feeding them from an emotional well that was as dry as the Sahara and as deep as a lizard’s print in the sand. Instead they learned and drank from the goodness of Lord Jesus Christ and quenched their thirst on his divine words and bared themselves through the agonizing sores on the tips of their fingers with the promise of daily prayer.

Hard work was the ink on which their lives were scribed and Joao had always struggled to find himself; as a part of the family and as use to the land. He had not the strength of his brothers, nor the homeliness of his sisters, making a burden of himself wherever he stood.

From the moment he learned how to crawl, he had almost instantly; as some self-preserving nature, started to distance himself from the accident of his nature which; as one and one is as to two, would be the inexorable disappointment in everything that he was to do.

His brothers and sisters teased him daily, calling him cruel names and pushing him into fox holes, burying him up to his neck and leaving him to roast under the scorching sun and swell up like an oddly shaped balloon as the stinging ants crawled over his face, taking out their own pent frustration towards this godforsaken arid land by biting into his milky white skin that would quickly turn pinkish red as the sun preyed upon his fair complexion.

Their father; the old drunk preacher, egged them along and made residence of the boy’s sentence; to be the butt of their humour and the foot stool unto which the insurmountable weight of their spiritual abandon rested so heavily, making light of how they spent their days; one after the other, turning the soil and suffocating their hope in an impotent dry dusted earth.

There wasn’t much for the children to like about Joao; in fact his father used to deny having ever being involved in his conception, saying instead that his wife had once swallowed a poisoned seed; one passed through the hands of the devil who had come dressed as a cunning trader and from that seed was then spawned the flower of Satan that then blossomed into the gangly little donkey called Joao.

Although nobody actually believed his story, the other children loved to listen to their father’s fevered sermon. Nobody believed it, nobody except for Joao that is and for this reason alone; he accepted the cruelty of the family of which he so longed to one day belong.

Every night before he lay his oddly shaped head down on the bumpy ground to set himself to sleep, he would pray silently; whispering inside his own mind, for Lord Jesus to take him away and find him somewhere where he could belong; not so he could be happy, but so his brothers and sisters would no longer have to feel so spited that they needed to curse and refer to cruelty to irk the foul form that nested within his skin and tricked its way into their salvation and also that his mother may live a single day without having to see the shadow of her disgrace walking in her footsteps and begging for her embrace and for his father, well, his father was a preacher and on terms with Christ so he needn’t pray for someone who as a servant of the Lord can obviously bargain their own redemption.

Every night though, he thought of his family and how much he loved them and it grieved him thinking how something as simple as his being was enough to cause them so much hurt and for god; because of his existence, to have to go so far as condemning this land to bear no life to any seed which made its bed under where his cursed feet had left their impression.

But it wasn’t all so terrible for Joao. Not always anyway. Their farm had become; over the years, popular amongst travellers; Europeans mainly, looking to absorb themselves in the rustic and arduous countryside and enrich their identity by assembling some closeness to their primitive tidings like an eagle on a spiritual quest, deciding upon his ascent to shut its eyes and flap with one wing.

There was one visitor who made an impression on Joao. He was unusual in that he unlike the other travellers who yearned and likened to quieten their educated tongues, speaking only to the dry dusted earth with the sound of their knuckles scraping against the sharpened edges of reddened stones.

In fact this stranger had the knuckles of a new born baby; rounded, smooth and unblemished like a ripe tomato; not a single line of bother or burden across his pasty white skin and he had an annoying happiness