Cephas, Do You Love Me?

Cephas, Do You Love Me?

By

Matt McGuire

Sharp, bright slivers of steel chipped off miniscule from Cephas Wheeler's chisel as he trimmed down a chunk of gray rock into a manageable size, fireplace worthy. Across the work lot his brother Roosevelt did the same—the morning rays played across the yard, belying the winter chill. The iron clouds foretold snow, and a small bucket containing fire for handwarming clicked and popped into showers of sparks that expired to nothing on the frozen earth. The two men worked silently save the clang of hammer on steel, steel on rock. Beside both trimming tables stacks of masoned stones began to accumulate pyramidal, meticulous, and proud. Snow began to fall around break and the two men retired to spackle buckets surrounding their small flame to sip coffee and warm their mortar cracked hands. When the clouds opened in earnest they covered their tables, struck the tent, and departed in work trucks as battered as the day.

The stones remained silent, pyramidal, and proud.

Cephas drove home alone in the midst of a white out smoking the second of his self-allotted two Chesterfields per day. He remembered times when they cost four cents and when you put a nickel in the machine you got a shiny new penny back in the pack. The AM radio crackled late seventies Americana as the wipers ticked and scrubbed against the glass battling valiantly against the snow. He turned into the drive stopping briefly at the mailbox to collect a Winston Salem Journal wrapped in cellophane and a power bill with his dead wife's name on it.

He parked in the gravel drive that ran in a semi-circle round the gray A-frame house and tossed his butt off into the dead yarrow ringing the road. Once inside he laid the paper and the bill on the bar that was only used for cereal and coffee and turned to look at himself in the reflection of a mirror above the hand washing sink. Yep. He was becoming thinner, almost transparent, his jaw working always on the cud of an invisible plug that he'd given up forty years ago but still nursed like a phantom breast. He removed his blue tagless work cap and smoothed his iron gray hair back with his fingers. His skin looked like the leather of a cavalryman's saddle bag and his eyes were deep, blue pools that he couldn't bear to fathom. He washed without returning his own gaze and dried his hands on a red striped towel before entering the kitchen and removing a carton of large eggs and a half pound of bacon from the fridge.

Since Arabella died last year Cephas ate nothing but bacon and eggs for dinner. Bacon and eggs always made him feel full and since he'd never cooked for himself save in the army for a platoon from a field kitchen he didn't know how to cook anything else. He stood above the popping bacon and turned it with an old serviceman's fork marked U.S. Army across the handle. When the meat turned from hog fat to crisp salty hide he lifted it from the grease and stacked it methodically on a paper towel. The last strip rescued, he cracked two eggs in the grease and watched them turn to brown crusted yellow suns before taking his meal to the end of the whiskeyless bar to eat.

He always sat at the end husbanding the space provided should company come calling or a ghost wish to dine. He read the paper while he ate, turning the pages carefully after blotting his fingers on a napkin to remove any stray grease. When he finished he folded the paper with care, policed the bar of crumbs and washed up in the sink overlooking a snow capped bird feeder where a finch sat shivering in the wind. With the dishes done he retired to his indention at the end of the leather couch in the living room and slumped staring at a blank old Sylvania, the fatigue of seventy years of toil melting through his legs into the floor, the block foundation, the soil, intermingling with the earth where Arabella rested in peace till his head sank upon his chest.

In crisp white linen she came to him, in a field where the daisies never faded and morning Sundays endured without end. She reached out her thin hand young again for his, and they strolled through dew that glistened but never soaked.

“Cephas, tell me you love me.”

The treble suns of heaven radiated in her smiling eyes, and her laughter was milk white and honeyed.

“I love you, Arabella, always and forever.”

As he said this her bosom heaved—she became more substantial and he more ethereal. He still felt her grasp but the downy meadow seemed to retreat beneath him, if only in penumbras of doubt.

“Cephas, tell me you love me.”

They approached the gates of the city he might not pass, and she turned to face him, her ebullient youth overtaking his shade in regress.

“I love you Arabella, always and forever.”

His voice was a tin whisper in a vacuum now, and she a jubilant, empyrean star. She reached out arms of flame to retain his abandonment crying,

“Cephas! Do you love me?!”

He sat up with a start, tears streaming down his weather-beaten cheeks in complete darkness now save the light of a waning crescent through the window. He cupped his face in his knurled hands and begged for her back, but the ticking cuckoo and the hum from the fridge remained his only companions.

He stood with difficulty, the arthritis in his right knee more acute after rest, and hobbled to the window by the porch door. He brushed the sash gently aside and lifted his eyes to the night, a billion stars shepherded by a dying moon an empty reflection of what lay beyond decease. He stood stock still in meagre reverence to the sky until his legs trembled uncontrollably, praying for a sign that she knew the innocence of his heart, but none ever came, because signs never do.