Evangelist Blue.
Kajsa Ohman

I know I promised to tell you about Maynard Macon and Tommy Blue, the two evangelists who came to bring Jesus to me in my weathered driftwood shack-on-stilts overlooking the Brown River. But first, let me light up and get comfortable. I can do that; I'm allowed, since turning seventy-five. Age and Jesus—truthfully, I already had these two magic wands when the evangelists climbed the driftwood ladder and poked their heads over my rickety front porch. 

I knew from the minute I first seen them walking up the path, in the dust, that they were coming to me, and I knew why. You can tell. My mother always warned me that if you didn’t go right ahead and open the door to evangelists, they’d just hang around for hours or even days, waiting for you to give up and come out. Just like a hungry bear. Problem was, I’d just done the laundry, which meant I’d stripped myself down to my birthday suit, and then my son had accidentally drove away with the sack of clean clothes still in the car. So here I was, stark naked, laying on the mat and dreaming about how perfect it would be to have a man to share the moment with, and/but here were these evangelists’ heads appearing at the top of the ladder asking if anyone was home. I was confused, because I’d meant ‘man,’ not ‘evangelist.’ So I just hollered out, “No!”

Course, that meant they knew I was home, and on up they came.

Now, Maynard Macon—they’d introduced themselves even before they introduced Jesus—had the presence of mind to look away. Tommy Blue didn’t. Not that one was right and one was wrong; different types of evangelists, is all. However, Maynard Macon was embarrassed—embarrassed for me. He must have known the last few nights I’d been having a nightmare that I was walking down the street after forgetting to put clothes on, and the street was full of people seeing me with the eyes in the sides of their heads like Maynard Macon was doing.

Tommy Blue, though—something seemed different about him. I suppose it was that he looked at my naked old body like it was one of the Lord’s better creations. However, he was concerned that maybe the reason I wasn’t wearing anything was that I didn’t have anything to wear. He looked right into my eyes, then, telling me he was going to go get me some clothes and that I should just set tight till they came back. Then on down the ladder they went.

While they were gone, I reminisced about the two minutes they’d been here. Turned over every little detail. And the one that kept popping up was Tommy Blue’s eyes. If you can’t guess what color his eyes were, reckon I’ll have to tell you: they were blue. Not ordinary blue, though. The official name of that color is probably ‘Evangelist Blue.’ I’ve seen it before; they spend so much time perseverating about heaven that eventually they invite it right into their eyeballs, where it vibrates and grows on itself. That kind of blue. Which Maynard Macon didn’t have, by the way, though his eyes may have been blue also. While I waited, wrapped in a dishtowel so’s not to be taken by surprise again, I thought about those eyes of Tommy Blue.

After a while, here they came back, and this time Tommy Blue was carrying a brown paper sack with wrinkly bulges in it. “Here you go,” said he, handing it over the rail without looking too hard at my dinky dishtowel. “Pick whatever you want.”

I thanked them and took the sack into the darkness of my one room, where I poured the clothes out onto the mat. The thing I couldn’t tell them was that I am righteously finicky about the color, shape, and era of what goes on my body. It was obvious they hadn’t had very much choice. I wondered where they managed to find any clothes at all in this brief time. But there was a pair of turquoise shorts, the kind that’s supposed to come halfway to your knee. When I put them on, they came way more than halfway to mine, ’cause age has melted my flesh away. And I selected a sleeveless, V-neck knit top that had wide aqua stripes and narrow pink ones on a drab background that was probably white before getting washed wrong many times with a load of colors. The top was too small, the bottom too big. In these two garments I sortied out from my shack to greet my guests, thinking how the last time I wore this color scheme, I was being pushed along in a stroller.

“Very spiffy,” said Maynard with a matching smile.

Tommy didn’t say anything. He looked at me with his blue eyes, and I saw that they were round, very round, round as an innocent babe’s. Now, I wasn’t born yesterday, as I’ve said, and if I don’t know the expression of a man who wants to jump on me and have love-sweet-love, my name isn’t Regalia Sternley—which I neglected to tell you it is. Nothing noteworthy about this look except I haven’t seen it for twenty years. And I guess I must have been missing it, ’cause it sure did sit well.

Then they got down to the business of what they came for—asking me if I was good with the Lord. I appreciated that they had to come a very long way, leaving the beaten track behind, to find just me and only me. It made me feel special, like that one sparrow, or lost lamb, or that one lily of the field—though heaven knows I toil and spin. Imagine being so important they even had to double-team me.

So there we sat in a row on my porch, me hoping all the while it would be strong enough to support the three of us and Jesus, and I listened with great pleasure to everything they had to say. They were quiet and sincere, and they flanked me like guardian angels. The sky was bluer than I was used to seeing it, with white puffball clouds tumbling around in it like kindergarten kids on recess. I don’t know why it was so topsy-turvy—I certainly hadn’t taken any LSD. I don’t know why the sand and scrub grass and stunted trees all seemed to fall into an order, the way kaleidoscope chips do. I don’t know why the air kept brushing against my skin like secret fingers getting fresh. I do know that I turned often to look at Tommy Blue, and whenever I did I saw those wide, round, pure blue eyes looking back into mine till I swear I almost got the summertime shivers.

Now, don’t go thinking this is love I’m talking about. Not till I say it is, and I haven’t said it yet. But if you want to think of a pair of salmon steaming on up the creek with those quicksilver bodies pulsing and twisting in the current, you can. That’s how it felt when Tommy Blue looked at me, even though his lips were talking about the kingdom of heaven being right within my grasp.

Maynard Macon, of course, wasn’t a part of all this spawning. He talked about salvation and such, talked about the tiny mustard seed, but his eyes were straying, and pretty soon I seen why. My granddaughter, Mandy, ‘sweeter than candy,’ was coming to pay me a visit. First she was a dot on the path, then she was a human dot, then she was a fresh and bursting young woman with brown pigtails and sawed-off jeans, carrying a sack. I could see from here it was my laundry. That would be the last straw, Mandy bringing that heavy old sack up onto the porch.

“Let’s go down to the river,” I said, “and pray.”

So down the driftwood ladder we all went, one at a time, me first because I didn’t want those evangelists looking up my shorts, which were wide and bloomer-y. I said to everybody that this was Maynard Macon, and this was Tommy Blue, and this was Mandy; then Maynard smiled and said, ”Just like candy.” Then I said we were all going down to the river to pray.

“The Brown River?” Mandy smiled. “Are you kidding?” 

Well, the river is brown, it’s true, but that’s not necessarily ’cause it’s full of sewer water and industrial waste, though it does look that way. Sometimes it smells that way, too. So I guess I don’t know why it’s called the Brown River. But it is brown.

We walked together—Mandy, too—along the dust path, over one dry rise and then another, past anthills and rattlesnakes, gravel and cairns and clattering reeds, till we come to the river. This is where the miracle started, except it took awhile to get underway because it wasn’t one of your now-it’s-water-now-it’s-wine miracles. It began with my excellent granddaughter telling Maynard that the banks of the Brown River were jam-packed with fossils if a person knew where to look. Maynard certainly did seem like a person who would be interested in fossils, and it turned out he was. As for God, He pointed to a place so far on downriver that it would take anyone but an athlete a couple of hours to walk to. So away they went, Maynard and Mandy, to dig up some prehistory. That left me to pray alone with Tommy Blue.

The river was extra brown today, viscous, fast, deep—and almost warm, as I found out when I dipped my bare foot in it. I knelt on the bank, but pebbles cut into my knees. So I laid on my belly with my chin on my arms and watched that heavy old current passing and passing like the tail of a dinosaur. Then I rolled onto my back and looked up at Tommy Blue. He was standing over me, between me and the sun—shading me, bless him. I could see his eyes and the sky at the same time, and there’s no doubt Tommy Blue’s eyes were more blue than the sky. I expected that. Of course, you get what you expect.

The thing about having age and Jesus both is, you just do whatever the hello-there you want. You know it’s going to be good. You can use those fine words you’ve picked up along the way, like ‘viscous,’ or ‘perseverating,’ but if you want to talk comfortable, you can. If you want your address to be Shack-on-Stilts—if you want to gather driftwood along the Brown River—if you want to see little white clouds going crazy—if you want to breathe without moving for four hours—if you want to let evangelists up your ladder—well, you just go ahead and live it up. And if you want Tommy Blue’s heavy, holy body to come down slow, onto your body and right inside it, and even all the way through it just like a river, looking to find the kingdom of heaven, there’s no one on God’s green earth can say you ‘no.’ 

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