Johnny Peter

By Renee Eshel

i. The boys in the village school are crying. It’s a dusty summer, all heat and sweat, warm perspiration. Long legs plunged in the creek to offer salvation. Word gets pulled around – Johnny Peter, the Vicar set himself on fire last night. I see the boys crying. They are crying because one of them lost a lighter - they are crying because they can’t find stolen tobacco on each other’s tongues anymore, or maybe looking back it was about Johnny. 

My mum sends me to talk to the birth of it all.

ii. His mother fills me in on her retrospective love. He was born, not more than a handful in ‘38 past the girls with long blonde hair, on the right of the old post office, up on the lip of the creek. She remembers him being a boy when she’d hoped for a girl. A nice, quiet girl, good and easy in her Sunday best. From my admission, Johnny’s mum drank too much wine but called it religion. From her admission - He ate stale bread and played with kerosene, but she called it growing pains. 

She was dead not long before his funeral, a singular ribbon wrapped round the neck of her wrist and buried.

iii. A right good turn out on the day, all the football boy’s, I’ve heard. Mud on their knees and girls kisses locked in palms. One of them, the boys that is, Tommy, sits newly 17, in a pew. He reads the bible like a textbook, leaning into every word that Johnny and God will say. He skims the parts about sleeping. Sources a coin for collection, fished from a holey pocket. A single silver coin and a tremor. They lower him into the ground and pray for water. A small box rattling with flames. It’s here, you can hear it - a confessional laid to rest.