I don’t prepare elaborate meals for myself. Many is the night that I have eaten from a can. On the nights that I have no church business, no deacon board meetings, no prayer meetings, no auxiliary meetings or trustee board meetings, I try to read. I still enjoy Augustine and Erasmus. Maybe Freud, or Jung, or Foucault. Black history: Franklin, Quarles, Fanon. Occasionally fiction. But invariably I wind up asleep after about ninety minutes, only to awaken without fail around eleven o’clock to watch the late news. Then it’s back to bed, which in many ways seems the object of leaving bed in the first place.

December 8, 1985 9:30 am

December 8, 1985

9:30 am

Above them a winter sky, white-grey and desolate, stretched like the hand of God, high and wide, while inside the mechanical hum and rush of the car heater blew out the smell of new cars, plastic, metal, rubber. Ezekiel Cross sat in the car peering out at the landscape rushing by. His hands were cold, and he rubbed them and placed them before the vents and blew on them, but they were still cold. Lord, won’t these hands ever warm up? Look like every cold day come is like a plague on this body, joints don’t act right, back hurt like the devil and just can’t seem to warm up to save my life.

The road to Fayetteville was pretty simple. You take Highway 50, north, all the way into Warsaw, and then you switch to Highway 24, which will take you into Clinton, which will take you straight into Fayetteville. Once you get into Fayetteville, he remembered, you take one left (onto a street whose name he couldn’t remember, if he ever knew), and that would take you straight to the Veterans Hospital where Asa Cross, his cousin, lay on his bed of affliction. Seems cancer come to take us all. I remember the day won’t no such word—least to my knowledge­—­of no cancer. Folk just died. He recollected that within the last year six people had died in the small community of Tims Creek. And five of them went with cancer. All of them his age or younger. There was Emma Frazier—she was seventy-eight. I believe she was—let me see, I believe she was born in 1906, yeah, that would be right, cause she was six years younger than me. And there was Carl Jones, and he won’t but fifty-nine, and there was—

“1guess I’d better stop for gas, now. Cause Sam Pickett says it’s cheaper here than anywhere else between here and Fayetteville.”

Jimmy turned the car off the highway into the filling station to the right with a high Sunoco sign that should have turned round and round, but did not. Come to think of it, I ain’t seen none of them gas signs turn in a long time. Wonder if it’s to conserve energy or what?