Boys Life

comin’.”
    Dad got into the car with him, and Sheriff Marchette started the engine. “Where to?”
    “Listen to me, Jack. You said it yourself: Dick needs magic or a miracle, right? So who’s the one person around here who might be able to give it to him?”
    “Reverend Blessett’s left town.”
    “No, not him! Her.”
    Sheriff Marchette paused with his hand on the gearshift.
    “Anybody who can turn a bag of shotgun shells into a bag of garden snakes might be able to take care of a bomb, don’t you think?”
    “No, I don’t! I don’t think the Lady had a thing to do with that. I think Biggun Blaylock was so blasted out of his mind on his own rotgut whiskey that he thought he was fillin’ that ammo bag full of cartridges when all the time he was shovelin’ the snakes in!”
    “Oh, come on! You saw those snakes the same as I did! There were hundreds of ’em! How long would it have taken Biggun to find ’em all?”
    “I don’t believe in that voodoo stuff,” Sheriff Marchette said. “Not one bit.”
    Dad said the first thing that came to mind, and saying it left a shocked taste in his mouth: “We can’t be afraid to ask her for help, Jack. She’s all we’ve got.”
    “Damn,” the sheriff muttered. “Damn and double-damn.” He looked at the Moultry house, light rising from its broken roof. “She might be gone by now.”
    “She might be. She might not be. Can’t we at least drive over there and find out?”
    Many houses in Bruton were dark, their owners having obeyed the siren and fled the impending blast. Her rainbow-hued dwelling, however, was all lit up. Tiny sparkling lights blinked in the windows.
    “I’ll wait right here,” Sheriff Marchette said. Dad nodded and got out. He took a deep breath of Christmas Eve air and made his legs move. They carried him to the front door. He took the door’s knocker, a little silver hand, and did something he never dreamed he would’ve done in a million years: he announced to the Lady that he had come to call.
    He waited, hoping she would answer.
    He waited, watching the doorknob.
    He waited.
    Fifteen minutes after my father took the silver hand, there was a noise on the street where Dick Moultry lived. It was a rumble and a clatter, a clanking and a clinking, and it caused the dogs to bark in its wake. The rust-splotched, suspension-sagging pickup truck stopped at the curb in front of the Moultry house, and a long, skinny black man got out of the driver’s door. On that door was stenciled, not very neatly: LIGHTFOOT’S FIX-IT.
    He moved so slowly it seemed that movement might be a painful process. He wore freshly washed overalls and a gray cap that allowed his gray hair to boil out from beneath it. In supreme slow motion, he walked to the truck’s bed and strapped on his tool belt, which held several different kinds of hammers, screwdrivers, and arcane-looking wrenches. In a slow extension of time he picked up his toolbox, an old metal fascination filled with drawers that held every kind of nut and bolt under the workman’s sun. Then, as if moving under the burden of the ages, Mr. Marcus Lightfoot walked to Dick Moultry’s crooked entrance. He knocked at the door, even though it stood wide open: One… two…
    Eternities passed. Civilizations thrived and crumbled. Stars were born in brawny violence and died doddering in the cold vault of the cosmos.
    …three.
    “Thank God!” Mr. Moultry shouted, his voice worn to a frazzle. “I knew you wouldn’t let me die, Jack! Oh, God have mer-” He stopped shouting in mid-praise, because he was looking up through the hole in the living room’s floor, and instead of help from heaven he saw the black face of what he considered a devil of the earth.
    “Lawdy, lawdy,” Mr. Lightfoot said. His eyes had found the bomb, his ear the ticking of its detonation mechanism. “You sure in a big pile’a mess.”
    “Have you come to watch me get blown up, you black savage?” Mr. Moultry snarled.
    “Nossuh. Come ta keep you from gettin’ blowed.”
    “You? Help me? Hah!” He pulled in a breath and roared through his ravaged throat: “ Jack! Somebody help me! Anybody white!”
    “Mr. Moultry, suh?” Mr. Lightfoot waited for the other man’s lungs to give out. “That there bumb might not care for such a’ noise.”
    Mr. Moultry, his face the color of ketchup and the sweat standing up in beads, began fighting his condition. He thrashed and clawed at the pile of debris; he grasped at his own shirt