by Joseph Bathanti
I didn’t know why Talese was looking for me. All I knew was that it was a serious thing, that I had somehow insulted him, and the matter required redress. I’d expected him for days and was half-relieved to see him pimp toward me through a corridor of students, ravenous to see what might happen, hurrying to get out of his way. Talese and I had known each other our entire lives and had always treated each other with respect. I’d always thought of us as friends. How had I injured him? With someone like Talese, you’d never know. He’d kill for the sake of what he’d come to think of as honor. It was 1964; honor had trickled into our blood as a vicious thing. He stood in front of me in the schoolyard. Neither of us said a word. I stared into his blue eyes. He was wild-looking: mongrel mouth; unruly black hair; dark, exquisite as Our Lady of Guadalupe. We studied each other. I felt everyone watching – I contemplated hitting him first – and let myself smile, and he smiled in return. The lone, self-unfruitful plum tree on the chapel lawn trembled. Oval, pale pink blossoms lifted from their twigs. The Angelus sounded from the belfry: Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. Talese punched me in the face: on the lower jaw, close to my earlobe. The utter unlikelihood of it all: that I neither flinched nor budged, but continued to gaze without anger or fear into his face; that he continued to gaze back at me; that not only had I survived, but was enlarged; that in the settling of this thing I had never understood, yet in which I had been complicit, Talese had made me happy. Then, as canon law required, we knelt in the schoolyard and prayed.
Joseph Bathanti is former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the 2016 North Carolina Award for Literature. The author of seventeen books, Bathanti is Professor of English, McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor in Interdisciplinary Educatiom, and Writer-in Residence at Appalachian State University’s Watauga Residential College, in Boone, North Carolina.