How the Body Prays

by Peter Weltner

• ISBN13: 9781555972882
• ISBN10: 1555972888
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 1999-04-01
• Publisher: Graywolf Press

Summary

"Lay Aside Fear" has been the Odom ruling motto for generations. In this exquisitely written novel, Peter Weltner explores how various members of the family have lived up to-- or fallen short of-- this fierce command. The indomitable grandmother who cannot forgive her son for surviving World War II, her son who wants to do "nothing" with his life, his daughters who refuse to cry, their brother who resists the Vietnam draft-- all are put to the test, and the stakes are high. Who will have the courage to fight, the courage to risk, the courage to die? And most importantly, who will have the courage to love, whatever love asks of them? For when pride is finally unmasked, it is only through the redemption of love that there is any chance for the family's survival. In How the Body Prays, Weltner weaves his luminous tale from generation to generation, circling back constantly while the narrative gains the momentum of music. A love story of passion and grace, a family saga of unusual complexity, How the Body Prays is a triumphant novel.

Author Biography

Peter Weltner is the author of several books of fiction, including The Risk of His Music and In a Time of Combat for the Angel. He has received two O. Henry Awards and his work was featured in Best American Gay Fiction Volume 3. Weltner grew up in North Carolina; he now teaches at San Francisco State University.

Table of Contents

Andrew Stafford Odom	3	(6)
Louisa Marie Odom	9	(30)
Aaron Rose Odom	39	(14)
Anna Ruth Odom	53	(26)
Andrew Willingham Odom	79	(54)
Andrew Lane Odom	133	(34)
Michael Anthony Benedetti	167	(66)
Joshua Aaron Rose	233	(8)
Max Appleman	241

Excerpts

Chapter One

Andrew Stafford Odom

Elisabeth always knows what to play. When I hear a Bach prelude, I feel I might want to live forever. In everything she touches, the soul of her mother inhabits her. The dead must live on somewhere. As Elisabeth plays, Christa plays with her. I want to hold her again, but as I stretch my arms out to embrace her, Christa stops playing. I can hear only her daughter Elisabeth playing alone.

    I am an ancient, nothing but walking bones. Hope molders in me like a brave man in his grave. Body is hobbled horse, toothless dog, clawless crawfish. Heart is cow with milkless bag. Soul is blind, hungry owl, beak and talons no longer red with shrew or rat. My father would say, "The bitch Sphinx lies waylaid on her rock, but pay her no mind. Whatever her riddle, man was never the answer."

    Father would say, "The world is a prison. Its iron bars are fear. Its iron locks, cowardice. Only pride sets you free." He preached, "In the beginning, God sent down an angel with a flaming sword to guard the Tree of Life. At the end, the same fiery blades will protrude from between His teeth. Jesus came not to bring peace but to unsheathe another sword. God is Law. The Law is strife."

    The breeze this afternoon is fragrant with blossom. I watch the petals dance and glide to earth. Butterflies whirl in the sunlight.

    I was born, my father boasted, on the day Scott marched his troops into Veracruz. My days total more than 34,000. Throughout them, war has followed war. Yesterday, the Japanese began a new offensive in the Philippines. Bataan. Corregidor.

    All things flow. Only river, moon, winds abide. Life is sere leaf. Life is melting snow.

    When I was nine, I rode with Father on horseback to Charleston, farther from home than I had ever been before. The ride was long, hard, hot, and dusty. We were often hungry and sore. Whenever early in the journey I cried out in discomfort or fear, Father struck me with his crop. I quickly learned to cry out no more.

    In Charleston, Father sold fur and hide or bartered them for seed. While he traded, I watched the other trade in slaves. No Odom owned slaves. No Odom ever would enslave another man or let himself be enslaved. I had been born sworn to woods and game, to track and to hunt squirrel, possum, fox, deer, boar, bear. At home, Father had told me local tales of black men bloodily lashed, of a mother whipped from her child, of a sister ravaged from her brothers, of weeping babes. The Law commands, give me your son, brother, father. Give me your daughter, your wife. "The Law must be disobeyed," Father said. "Pride is freedom from all laws," Father said, "except for the law you yourself have made."

    In Charleston, I saw my first caged bird. The abasement of pigeons, Father declared, was as metaphysical as slavery. The pigeon was also a slave to man.

    Across from our boarding house was a stable, part of which was used as a residence by the family who owned the horses. The youngest son had built a small coop beneath a wisteria thicket next to a shed. He loved his pigeon with an openhearted sentiment I had witnessed previously only in neighbor girls who played with dolls. He held it, petted it, cooed to it, fed it with his fingers, and let it peck his neck and nestle in his lap.

    One morning, he and I were watching an old slave exercise two colts in a ring. The day was clear and almost windless. Yet an old tree suddenly, unaccountably toppled over onto the shed that dropped several planks onto the small coop. It fell over, freeing the pigeon that did not hesitate, but immediately soared away.

    The boy and I hunted for it all the rest of that day, finding it at last only a few blocks from the stable. It lay near a tall iron fence that guarded a house larger than any I had ever seen. Its distinctive green markings were vivid, almost garish in the sun. Its feathers were puffy and bloodied. It held its useless wings outstretched.

    A cat arched its back and hissed, a few feathers scattered at its paws. The boy said nothing. He uttered no cry, but began a search. When he found the rock he wanted, the cat seemed unsurprised. He hurled it at its head, but missed. The cat pounced on the pigeon. Its teeth pierced the bird's neck. Sickened by the sight of his tormented pet, the boy fled.

    Back on the street, we separated. I chose never to see the boy again. I had already shot dozens and dozens of living creatures. But when I returned to put it out of its misery the pigeon was already dead.

    "Your little friend," Father said to me that night after I had told him the story, "has a lot to learn about pity."

    "He's not my friend," I said.

    I was fourteen when I saw Father killed. One ball, then another, then a third struck him in the back. He'd been leaning against an elm and holding an open map, surveying the terrain. The Yankee attack was swift and thorough, the quickest I had yet witnessed. He wavered for a few seconds between life and death before he fell. I heard him gurgle and sputter. Blood bubbled out of his mouth and foamed. I tore my shirtsleeve and soaked up what I could.

    When the skirmish was over, I and two others were all who survived. From Father's tent, I removed his copy of Tacitus, which he loved, and of Ivanhoe , which he loathed yet nevertheless also always carried with him to read and reread. After the war, I studied them both and much else Father had owned.

    Father's life was too short. Mine has been too long. His father's was long. My son's was short. For over six generations, no Odom has propagated more than one son or fathered a daughter. "That is the Law," Father would say.

    My apportioned son Andrew was born in my fiftieth year. I did not love his mother, but she was young. I taught him to hunt and to fight with his fists. I taught him to love work and honor. I taught him to play the violin to my cello and his mother's piano as together we learned the trios of Haydn, Spohr, and Brahms. I taught him Odom arrogance. I taught him Odom pride.

    During the last war, my son fought the Germans with Major Whittlesey and the Lost Battalion. His war was as chaotic as mine and perhaps still more ruthless. But life without war is also pitiless. "Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For Heaven's sake, stop it!" was the message Whittlesey wrote and entrusted to the pigeon Cher Ami, whose battle-ravaged body is currently encased like a relic in the Smithsonian for everyone to see. Andrew escaped unwounded, returned to the line, and, when there was no more line to defend or penetrate, came home. The Germans had not been his enemy. The French and English were not his friends. He fought as an Odom in spite of folly out of pride.

    Three years after the Great War ended, Major Charles Whittlesey, equally honored and disgraced by his battles, drowned himself. He had embarked from New York to Havana on the liner Toloa . Late at night, immaculately dressed in evening clothes, he leapt into the sea. What is the attraction of those waters? Did he, like that besotted poet Hart Crane, also wave as he fell? Shall I?

    A year later, my son stuffed his pockets with rocks and stones and walked into our river. Elisabeth discovered his body the next morning where it had been caught in the branches of a hickory that had fallen during an ice storm the previous winter.

    Before her husband's funeral, she played me Bach's Sarabande from the A minor Partita. Then, hand in hand, we strolled to the oak grove and through the gate to the cemetery. With her other hand, she guided little Drew who was still learning to walk right. She guided him, too, when wide-eyed, he dropped a clod of clay on his father's coffin, where it lay dark in the dark earth.

    I regret it is our law that the boy must bare Elisabeth's father's name as the middle part of his. "Willingham," coward and rogue, impotent scoundrel, is unworthy of my grandson. Elisabeth cannot be her father's child. No man could have sired her. She is Christa reborn. Christa in whose womb my seed was secretly sown and always died, burned alive. Christa my pride.

    Less than a month after Pearl Harbor, my grandson enlisted, quitting the house one morning so early it might as well have been still night. He caught the train for New York, the same train he had taken initially at my insistence, then entirely on his own, to see and to hear what he could neither see nor adequately hear at home: Wagner, Wagner, yet again Wagner, the greatest artist the world has ever known.

    Before the war, on Saturday afternoons, he and I used to tune our fine radio to the Metropolitan and listen to our master. Sometimes, if Drew was away, Elisabeth sat across the room, as attentive as her son. Once, during a performance of Tannhäuser (with Flagstad and Melchior, Tibbett and List!), she sang along with the Pilgrims' Chorus, the words as familiar to her as a vaudeville song to a more common sort. Before she'd emigrated, her mother had sung in the chorus in Munich and Bayreuth. But after she arrived here and married the vulgar Willingham, she would sing only to her daughter. "And to me," I yearned to confess.

    Although several rooms and a thick floor separate us, I can see Elisabeth as she plays as if she were sitting in front of me, her head immobile, leonine, and proud. Only her arms and fingers move. Her face betrays no emotion.

    In a few minutes, she will be living here alone. She is not the only one who welcomes solitude like a friend. No one knows better than she how to manage this farm.

    Life is an untilled land full of dark caves and rushing streams and rivers. But no bird is to blame for the song in my brain, no locust for the whir in my heart.

    "God is strife," Father said. Yes, and God is cat. God is pigeon. God is man. God is beetle and worm. God is iron. God is rust. God is music. God is thunder, whirlwind, storm. God is tree. God is the son caught in the tree's arms. "If you look for God," my Father warned, "if you try to find Him, you will be like the dog sniffing in the tunnel from which the fox has already escaped."

    The music stops. It is exactly five o'clock. Elisabeth has always been punctual.

    I hear her footfalls and the stairs' creak. She pauses on the landing, finishes her climb, crosses the hall, and hesitates by my door. Elisabeth knows how to wait.

    I dip my pen in ink for the last time. When she knocks, I turn in my chair without taking my eyes off this page. My body strains, fighting against my will.

    She raps gently. "Der Alte?"

Copyright © 1999 Peter Weltner. All rights reserved.