"Light and Life" is maybe thirty years old, and, I think, unpublished. Why not? I think it was one of those stories that might have been too "Christian" for the small magazines and literary journals, and too, well, "obvious," if it were to appear in the kind of church magazine that it could have reached. Plus, too close to the real thing.

There were prototypes for the characters and the action of the story, prototypes--real people--that I wouldn't really want reading this story or living with the fact that maybe some of their neighbors were.

I may be wrong, but after writing it, I think I stuck it in a drawer. My only copy of "Light and Life" is boldly outfitted in dot matrix print.

So this could well be its first public appearance. The people I wouldn't want to shame have long departed this world of sorrows. Whether or not they made their peace is something I don't know. I'd most certainly like to believe they did.

*  ~  *  ~  *  ~  *

Shari takes the boys on the tramway down at Santa Cruz' Boardwalk on the oceanfront. She's up there floating over the whole amusement park, and Sally and I are sitting down beneath them, sharing a gyro. Mark and Bryant poke their hands out when they're right over top of us, and all I can see is their pink flattened palms against the pale blue skies.

Sally is almost ten years older than I am, and Kenny's not the first man she's lived with. She works for the county social services, investigating abuse cases. She takes referrals from people she calls "mandatory reporters"--doctors and teachers and other school officials--and tries to check them out. It puts her in places you wouldn't believe. The old man should be proud of her. She works hard and she gets tired because sometimes she says the pain won't go away. To me, what she does is a kingdom calling. The stories are enough to make you weep, seriously.

Anyway, we're sitting down there on a bench along the edge of the beach, Bryant and Mark right above us in the tram car with Shari, and Sally's got a mouth full of gyro.

"Why don't you get married?" I say, just getting it right out there in front of both of us, the same tone had I asked her for shampoo. "I don't get it. What's the big deal?"

"You got Dad in you," she says right off. 

"So do you," I tell her.

She nods at me as if truer words have never been spoken. She's got that gyro in both hands so it doesn't leak all over, but she pushes it at me. I take the sandwich, but I don't want to take a bite just then.

"Tell me," I say.

She waits, looks around, jabs at her lips. "Listen, little brother, whyn't you mind your own business?" she says, wiping the juice from the corner of her mouth with a napkin, still trying to laugh it off.

"It is my business," I tell her. "You're my sister." 

"Shuttup and eat," she says.

It's a Saturday, but Kenny's off working somewhere, making a delivery.

"You go to church ever?" I said, this big glob of sandwich right between us.

Now she waits for a long time, looking right at me. I'm thinking she's mad--didn't want me asking. Finally, she looks off into the sky and says, "What's left in me for faith is between me and God--not you or Dad or Mom or anybody else."

Lines are drawn in around her eyes. I sometimes wonder if she didn't lie out in the sun too long because her skin seems almost calloused, hard and edgy, spotted, but not with freckles. Her hair falls off her face and is pulled back behind her ears, tied there in a style popular years ago. She's getting older.

"I'm going to have to tell Mom something," I said to her. "When I get back, she'll want to know about you."

"Easy enough," Sally says. "Tell her we're all fine, we're all doing just fine."

"Are you?" I said.

"I don't need your righteousness, little man," she tells me. "You lived all your life in that burg. Only thing you know is hardware."

Like I say, she's my big sister, and I didn't grow up with her; but I saw her slay my father's spirit. "Dad's had more pain about you, Sally, more than I'd ever hope to see anyone have," I tell her.

Shrugs her shoulders. "I'm sorry about that, but the old man screwed up my life," she says.

There the both of us are, this messy sandwich between us, little kids running all over, spending money, a big log-ride concession splashing down into the water, not fifty feet from where we sit.

"How'd he ever hurt you?" I said.

"You're a tail-ender. You don't know shit about what it was like to be breaking the freaking ground."

I took another bite of the gyro. I didn't want her to know how serious I was. "You still believe in God?" I asked her.

She stood up, walked over to the railing, and looked out over the quarter-mile of beach toward the ocean. The wind pulled at her skirt. Her legs were whiter than I'd ever seen them.

I threw the sandwich in a barrel and looked up at the tramway. Shari and the boys had to be on their way back. I felt like I had to get something down in my mind. "Tell me," I said. "I don't care about Mom or Dad. I got to know myself what's going on with you--tell me."

She pulled her arms back from the railing and stood there as if she were chilled. "Mom knows," Sally said. "Mom knows well and good. She knows everything. I write her."

I'd been gone to college for three years. Maybe Mom had never had the opportunity to tell me what Sally told her in her letters. I wasn't even aware of Sally's writing anyone. As far as I knew, it had been years since Sally's name was even spoken. That's what the old man ruled.

"What do you tell her?" I said.

"Ask her," she said. "She knows." 

"I didn't know you wrote her." 

"She does."

"I'm sorry," I said.

Both of us watched a gull float by and beg for popcorn.

"I wrote her already last spring to tell her I enrolled Bryant in a Christian school," Sally says. "I wrote that. It wasn't easy. Well, she knows it. This little Christian school a couple blocks away. 'Light and Life,' it's called."

I didn't know what to say.

"What do they want from me?--blood? She told me how wonderful it was. I got a letter back that wasn't like anything I'd ever received before--almost as if I were back in the fold." Then she laughed, the same as when she told Kenny they hung blacks in Denton--same mocking laugh. "But she can't even tell him," she said. "She can't even tell the old man because he won't hear about the damned black sheep. I'm just lost." She twisted her purse back behind her shoulder. "You ever think of what that man does to her? You ever think of that?"

The beach was full of people, but we couldn't have been more alone.

"You are so much like Dad," she said. She pulled her shoulder up to her face, as if to wipe away something that might have slipped from her eyes. "You're such a kid," she said, pulling the back of her wrist through her eyes, and looked down as if gyro sauce were running down her fingers. Then she looked at her watch, turned it around on her arm so she could read it clearly.

"Lately I think He won't let me go--I mean the big guy," she said, pointing up. "It's like something sticky is between us--super glue. The other day I was thinking that's what it was--super glue. Isn't that nuts?--just super glue. Or rubber cement--that too, stretchy stuff that won't let go."

"Hey, Mom," the boys yelled from above. "Look up here."

She raises a hand to her eyes to see the kids, smiles. 

I tell myself that's enough.

*