Thy Womb Jesus Part 2 (NARRATIVA) ~ di Joseph Bathanti - TeclaXXI

 

NARRATIVA

Joseph Bathanti

 

Thy Womb Jesus

Part 2*

*la prima parte è stata pubblicata il 30 aprile 2026

 

ravioli e birra 

I ran to the store in the fading light. On Chookie’s corner loafed the hoods, pitching craps for smokes, sweating in their motorcycle jackets and greasy boots, cruel swirling glistening hairdos and sneers that scared me, though they never said a word. Like me, they were in-between, inconsequential, innocent really. Another season and they’d stink of reefer and wouldn’t be able to afford their leather coats – not even in the proper season, having sold them and everything else for smack. By then, there would be prison bars on Chookie’s windows. A revolution was coming.

Inside I paid for the ravioli, then drinking an Orange Crush strolled home slowly, dreaming about the baby, in the last of the light. It was a script I could never have imagined. At the point of disaster and disgrace – my mother never opening her mouth to my father and me again, our family dissolving like salt in water – there had come the reversal, that moment of catharsis: something as unexpected, but absolutely inevitable, as a baby. Nothing, after all, was wrong at my house. My mother and father loved each other. They loved me. Soon I’d be a big brother, no longer the only child. Well-being overflowed the streets. I felt it in the beatific glow of the Collins Avenue streetlights. I had even seen it in the faces of the hoods. We had all felt it. It had been there all along like the Kingdom of God.

Had it been Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best, the episode would have ended right there with the theme song, my scuffed high-top sneakers slapping me home across the glittering concrete, the moral scrolled across my gleaming face like scripture.

But I was compelled by fate to keep walking toward our little half-brick rental where my parents and the new baby awaited me. Night had fallen. The house was dark. I switched on a lamp. On the floor the Monopoly board had been ransacked: the shimmering green houses and bright red hotels toppled, money and deeds scattered, my mother’s pink slip discarded along baby blue Oriental Avenue, a door or so down from the jailhouse. My mother and father were gone. As if blown away by the summer wind. Then I heard them upstairs. I wanted to run up and tell them I had the ravioli, but I knew all about what was going on. I set the cans on an end table, and turned on the TV to smother the noise they made. 

When they came down a few minutes later, they smiled. My mother wore a chartreuse bathrobe knotted loosely at her waist and smoked a cigarette. She had put on red lipstick and brushed her dandelion hair. My dad was still shirtless, but red-faced and mottled across his chest.

“I got the raviolis,” I proclaimed.

“Why don’t we have a little drink here?” my mother said. She swept by me into the kitchen and took a seat at the table. My father and I followed her. “Make us a drink, Travis,” she ordered.

“What do you want, Rita?”

“I don’t know. How about something to make a girl think twice about ...”

“About what?” my father asked.

“I don’t know about what. Just something to make a girl think twice.”

My father bent under the sink, and yanked out fifths of Seagram’s V.O., Old Granddad Bourbon with the seal unbroken, and Jacquin’s Rock and Rye. He set them on the table, opened the fridge, still standing cockeyed from when he shoved it off my mother’s earring, and snagged a brown bottle of Iron City beer.

“There’s the lot of it,” he said, flipping off the beer cap with a church key and taking a long swig. Smoke, then foam, rose out of the bottle head when he set the beer down.

“Bourbon,” she said. “Up.”

My dad busted the seal and poured her a good two inches of rust. Then he emptied the full ashtray of butts into the trash, lit two Chesterfields from the pack lying on the table and handed one to my mother.

“Thank you, Travis. You can be very sweet. But are you going to only drink beer?”

“For now.”

“I got the raviolis,” I said again. “They’re in the living room.”

“Go get them, Fritzy, and I’ll heat them up,” my dad said.

“Go get them, Fritzy, and I’ll heat them up,” my mother mimicked, then laughed and swallowed half her bourbon.

I looked at my dad.

“Go ahead, Fritzy,” he said. “Mom’ll feel better after she eats.”

I fetched the Chef Boyardee cans and my father dumped both into a big sauce pan.

“Chef Boyardee is an impostor,” my mother said. “He’s no more Italian than Paddy’s pig. Some fat Irish bastard who slapped on a chef’s hat and a mustache.”

“I’ll bet you have that on the best authority,” my dad came back.

“You know I’m not going to eat that slop, Travis.”

“I thought that’s what you were craving, Rita?”

“I want Fritzy to sit on my lap. Fritzy, are you too old to sit on your mother’s lap?”

I stayed rooted in the kitchen doorway. My dad stirred the ravioli. I stared at his white blank back, the curly black hair at the back of his head. He was steeling himself with impassivity, thinking perhaps that if he didn’t handle my mother properly, it would be a long hellish night. The prelude, then the thing itself: another season of silence.

“Soon I’ll have a baby sitting on my lap,” my mother said. I didn’t know if she was talking to me or my dad. I kept my eyes on his back as he rolled the wooden spoon around the inside of the pan. “It’s funny. Your baby’s on your lap, then he’s not. You look away, check the time or something, and he’s walking, when one minute ago, he was sitting on your lap.”

My dad turned from the stove and looked at my mother. He looked almost afraid. Of what I couldn’t possibly say. But it was a face he could not have made unless he loved her completely.

“This baby’ll be different,” she said. “We hurried you, Fritzy.”

I don’t know if I had ever looked into my mother’s face without make-up. She had large pores and tiny pockmarks high on her cheeks. And a layer of down. Pretty brown eyes, and lush eyebrows she highlighted with pencil each night before work. The menthol smell of Noxema. I wanted to kiss her on the cheek.

“Fritz, would you mind leaving your mother and me alone for a minute or two?” asked my dad suddenly.

“He doesn’t have to leave, Travis. I’ll behave myself.”

“Are you ready for your dinner, Rita?”

“I thought we were going to have a little drink.”

“We’re having a little drink.” My dad held up his beer bottle.

“I’d like Fritz to have a drink.”

“Fritz is a little young to drink.” He spooned some of the ravioli onto a plate, grabbed a fork, and set them in front of my mother.

“How old are you now, Fritz?” my mother asked. She had gaffed one of the stuffed little squares. The edges were pleated, the sauce yellowish. She set down the fork and took a drag of her cigarette, then killed the bourbon left in her glass.

She was joking; she knew how old I was.

“You have a very stupid look on your face, Fritz. It brings out the Sweeney in you. How old are you?”

“Lay off, Rita,” my father said.

“How would you like to have a little brother or sister?” she inquired.

I looked at my mother’s stomach: a little mound under her robe. I tried to look inside her. Like Superman and his ex-ray vision. I concentrated. I brought to bear all my belief in the life swimming inside my mother. And for a moment, like a distant flash of heat lightning, I saw the baby, outlined in white light, like one of those little unchristened souls, neither boy nor girl, trapped in Limbo. It was listening to us, peering through the womb out into our dark kitchen. Its eyes were large and gleaming.

“Do you know where babies come from, Fritz?” my mother asked.

“Come on, Rita,” my father said.

I shifted my eyes from my mother to my father. He was looking at her, the beer bottle drooping from his hand at mid-thigh, then back to my mother who had picked up her fork again.

She reached toward me with her other hand, grabbed my earlobe and gently tugged it. Then she smiled at me. The sweetest smile – that, for a sliver of a second, left her unguarded.

“How about if I kill myself,” she said.

“Rita,” my dad said. “Please, Rita. Whatever it is, let’s not give in to it. Okay? Please?”

She looked at him. Still with that smile, but her eyes were scrubbed of memory, like Jersey Joe Walcott’s when he came to after Marciano knocked him out for the title. My father had told me about it.

Very deliberately, looking the while into my father’s paper-blue eyes, she slid, inch by inch, the plate to the edge of the table until it crashed to the floor.

“Thank you for the lovely dinner, Travis.”

My father lit another cigarette. 

“Do you really think, Travis, that you could make me pregnant? Do you think this is your baby? Do you think Fritz is yours?”       

“I should rub your face in that, Rita.”

“You’d have to grow some balls for that, gutless wonder.”

The baby, in its chrysalis, cocked its infinitesimal blue head and listened. Then it whispered. Wordlessly. Whispered to me. Blue voice. Soundless. Whispered to me. I whispered back: Thy womb Jesus. I had started saying the Hail Mary to myself; I had started to cry. I bent to clean the mess, but my parents didn’t notice. They stared out at the night, like strangers on a train at opposite windows. The kitchen stilled and began to fade.

My mother had already stopped speaking to us. We were dead to her. She was dead to herself. The baby rose up out of her and disappeared.

 

[Thy Womb Jesus by Joseph Bathanti, was previously published in The Hight Heart, Eastern Washington University Press, 2007. The author extends his grateful acknowledgment.]

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JOSEPH BATHANTI

BIONOTA JOSEPH BATHANTI is the former North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor. 

The author of over twenty books, Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and is the recipient of the Board of Governors Excellence in Teaching Award. 

He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program. 

His volume of poetry, Steady Daylight, from Louisiana State University Press, is forthcoming in 2026. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in October of 2024.