man you can at least write on his grave someday “He Lived, He Sweated”—No halfway house is Cody’s house—Tho now as I say sorta sweetly chastised and a little bored at last with the world after the crummy injustice of his arrest and sentence he’s sorta quieted down and where he’d launch into a tremendous explanation of every one of his thoughts for the benefit of everybody in the room as he’s putting on his socks and arranging his papers to leave, now he just flips it aside and may make a stale shrug—A Jesuit at work—Tho I remember one crazy moment in the shack that was typically Cody-like: complicated and simultaneous with a million nuances as though the whole of creation suddenly exploded and imploded together in one moment: at the moment that Pat’s pretty little angel daughter is coming in to hand me an extremely tiny flower (“It’s for you,” she says direct to me) (for some reason the poor little thing thinks I need a flower, or else her mother instructed her for charming reasons, like adornment) Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim “Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing” and at that moment I’m trying to close my palm around the incredibly small flower and its so small I cant even do that, cant feel it, cant hardly see it, in fact such a small flower only that little girl could have found it, but I look up to Cody as he says that to Tim, and also to impress Evelyn who’s watching me, I announced “Never let the left hand know what the right hand is doing but this right hand cant even hold this flower” and Cody only looks up “Yass yass.”
So what started as a big holy reunion and surprise party in Heaven deteriorates to a lot of showoff talk, actually, at least on my part, but when I get to drink the wine I feel lighter and we all go down to the beach—I walk in front with Evelyn but when we get to the narrow path I walk in front like an Indian to show her what a big Indian I’ve been all summer—I’m bursting to tell her everything—“See that grove
