Fat Lightning by Howard Owen

no more until after I had come home from the war in 1919, and even then she stayed away from me. Me and her didn’t never talk about Egypt no more.
    Just like Holly must of told about Egypt, the preacher must of told somebody, because they didn’t nobody speak to me at church no more, and after a while, Momma called me into her and Daddy’s bedroom one Sunday and said that the folks at the church was gossipers and liars, and that she didn’t want me to have no more to do with ’em, that I was too good for the damn Baptists. She called them that, too. So I didn’t go to church no more, but Aileen and Grace and Momma and Daddy did. That’s when I quit hanging around when we had company, too. I’d go out to Egypt all by myself, or drive the car somewhere.
    The Army come and got me then. I know it was some of them gossipers and hypocrites in the community that told ’em where I was. Momma told ’em I’d gone down south, to North Carolina, to find work, but they come one morning and found me, in Egypt. Didn’t think the fire would give me away, with all that smoke from the sawdust pile, but somebody must of told them right where to find me. Momma and Aileen and Grace and even Carter was crying when they took me off. Daddy had gone off. Some big old sergeant told me, “We got you now, boy. We goin’ to feed you to the Huns. Show you what we do with chicken-shit like you.” Right there where everybody could hear. And I didn’t see nobody I knowed for near-bout two years.
    But I didn’t never forget none of it. After I come home, folks would act like I was their long-lost friend. They didn’t know they kept me goin’ through the war. In bayonet practice, I’d just play like it was Reverend Boyle instead of some dummy. In them trenches over in France and Germany, when sometimes we’d have to shoot ’em from 10 feet away, I’d just pretend it was some deacon or Sunday school teacher instead. Made it easy to kill people.

NOW

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    The park behind the main branch of the Richmond Public Library was meant to be a place where patrons would read “Jane Eyre” and downtown office workers would eat bag lunches and watch the seasons change. It is surrounded by grass-covered bunkers that make it look like one of the Civil War fortifications that ring the city’s east side. It is shaded by Bradford pears.
    On any day when the sun shines and the temperature rises above 50, though, Nancy knows she has no better than an even chance of having a bench to herself at noon. The wind-blocking bunkers and the shade the hardy trees provide were seen immediately by the city’s dispossessed as a gift, and they have used it often and well.
    Many of Nancy’s co-workers at the library choose to eat at their desks, but she feels that if she can’t have lunch outside her own building, then she’s lost the whole city. The surliest wino gets a firm “no” when he asks for a handout; she only gives to those who appear to be older than herself, and she notices that they are becoming more and more scarce.
    She first becomes aware of the old black woman because she is old, and because she is a woman. Most of the dispossessed are neither. While the young men hang together, she keeps mostly to herself, constantly going through a Thalhimer’s shopping bag that seems almost as old as she is, rearranging what appears to be old rags and pieces of painted wood. She seems to favor red.
    Sometimes, without being asked, Nancy will give a crumpled dollar to one of the few older people in the park, trying to foster the idea that she won’t be forced into generosity. She tries it with the old woman one day at the end of her lunch, casually extending the gift toward the figure sitting stiffly on the bench. The old woman pushes her away, almost violently. Nancy sees for the first time that she’s clutching a Bible to her chest with