Me to listen.
He brought the cob to his lips and the leaves in the bowl simmered and a line of smoke rose from the corner of his mouth and traced up his cheek and curled around the brim of his hat.
She looked at him and looked away and looked again. A dollar, she repeated. I don"t care yer a n.i.g.g.e.r. She lowered to her haunches across the fire from him and hooked her arms around her knees.
Well now, he said. Since you don"t care I"m a n.i.g.g.e.r. He extended his legs, longer than they"d seemed, his shoes store-bought and new, which she"d never seen on a n.i.g.g.e.r"s feet. He removed a leather purse from his pocket and unclasped it and over the fire flipped her a heavy silver coin which she caught and bit and raised to him as if in toast and then popped into her mouth and swallowed for safekeeping. It got lodged halfway down and she plucked at her throat and hacked.
Can I get a taste of yer-She pointed to the whiskey gourd by his log and he tossed it across the flames and she caught it and unstoppered it and smelled it then sipped politely.
Go on finish it.
She grinned and turned it up and he caught it back empty when she was done.
Thank ye, she said. s.h.i.t. She pounded her chest. Whoo. That"s some bust-head licker for a n.i.g.g.e.r to have.
n.i.g.g.e.r"s got a lot more than that.
He got anything to eat?
He smiled like a tired uncle and dug a handful of jerked beef from his pocket and tossed it over.
Chew it good, he said. Else it"ll repeat on ye.
I hope it do. I ain"t had no grub in I couldn"t say when.
Can ye listen while ye chew?
She nodded.
Then let me get my dollar"s worth.
Meanwhile, William R. McKissick Junior was slipping through the alleys of Old Texas and peeking in its windows. His plan: rescue the wh.o.r.e and get his handjob. She hadn"t come back like she said she would, which meant the widow-witches must"ve nabbed her. He hoped, as he searched, that he might see a nekkid lady. But so far he"d seen little more than ladies sleeping in chairs by dead men on tables or sideboards. In one of the houses he saw the six children he was supposed to have been watching. Asleep on pallets on the floor. They looked cleaned up, at least. He hoped the widows had given them something to eat and wouldn"t have minded a cob of corn himself.
He went along the back of the house and stood breathing in the shadows. Something pulled at his britches-leg and gave him a hard bite. Rat. He kicked it against a wall and it fell and got up and lurched at him again, hissing, its ears back. There was a pitchfork against the nearest wall and the boy seized it and skewered the rat and left it to wiggle itself to death and went on, scratching at the bite.
I remember last October, Mrs. Tate said. When you first came to our town. I knew what you were.
What was I?
She stared at her dead husband but spoke nothing.
Smonk chuckled and stubbed out his cigar in Elmer Tate"s hair and collected a dip of snuff between his fingers. I remember too, he said. That day ye mean.
A year before.
With Ike watching from the east hills, Smonk had ridden into town on a blind mule named Fargo, now deceased, past the well and up the hill and off the mule into the store. The man behind the counter had paled at Smonk"s countenance and demeanor and his impatient claws clacking the countertop. He"d pointed him down the street to the town clerk who could help him with the parcel of land and the deserted sugarcane plantation he wanted to purchase. On his way, already limping with the gout, he"d stopped in the street before this very house. He"d stood staring for so long that Tate finally came out onto the porch with a rifle, making tiny, careful steps. Casting wary eyes. Said, Could I help ye, stranger? Naw, Smonk had answered, looking past Tate to the woman"s face through the window-gla.s.s.
I wondered why ye didn"t invite me in for a gourd of licker, he said now. Dusty as these Octobers can get.
She said nothing.
He offered a pinch of snuff and she shook her head. Go on have a dip.
It"s vulgar, she said. A man"s nasty habit.
You want to tell me ye don"t take a dip ever twilight I"m gone call ye a liar. I can smell it thew ye skin. Besides, we been watching ye, my partner and me. Out there in the sugarcane watching ye town a whole G.o.dd.a.m.n year. So don"t believe that it"s a thing about all you old heifers I don"t know or ain"t seen. Yer pansy menfolk went down easier "n a G.o.dd.a.m.n orphan-house full a blind babies. We know who ye bailiff is, too. My former employee. Followed me here. Did he tell ye that? Born killer, that one. Did ye know what was walking among ye?
She said nothing.
We know ye killed the judge, too, though I can"t blame ye there. We know ye burn ever animal ye can catch. Know the ones of ye that still suffers her monthlies is suffering em now. And we know, he said, about yer church.
She glared for a moment, but then her wrinkles relaxed in her forehead and her bottom lip furled down. She lowered her head. I think I"ve changed my mind, she said.
There ye go. He came and with two of his sharp yellow nails deposited the pinch of snuff-powder against her gums.
You want ye teeth in?
They were in a jar of water on the table. He fished them out and held her jaw-Don"t bite now, he said, grinning-and fitted them in and she contorted her face until they worked into place.
Smonk returned to his chair behind the old woman and they sat quietly. He drank and replaced the gourd on the detonator. You got a bowl for spitting?
No, I do not.
He leaned and spat on her rug.
Animal, she said.
Smonk cranked the broom handle and she peeped. Animal, he said. Is that what I am.
I reckon evil happen ever now and again, Ike said to Evavangeline. Here and there in the world. Can"t keep it at bay. Start this way or that way. People dabbling where they ought not. Witches and they conjures. Tarot cards, crystal b.a.l.l.s. Doctors with they potions and scalpels. Men in congress with dogs and eating live monkey brains and the like. All of em, meddling up in G.o.d business. Reaching too far back in the drawer. Evil happen. Here, there. Started in Old Texas a long time ago, after the War commenced, when the North started they work and ever white man and boy in town and them farmers beyond, ever one who could get on a horse and go got on one and went. Volunteered like fools to die fighting the Yankees.
Evavangeline chewed jerky and listened as Ike"s story began. He told how when the War started only a few men and boys-too old, young or sickly-had remained in Old Texas with the ladies and farms. But one was a tall preacher named Snowden Wright. He"d been born with one arm-where the other should have been, up at his shoulder, was a nub with six tiny fingernails. As desperate as the army was for soldiery, they still sent him back home (all four times) he tried to sign up.
Once he"d resolved to stay, however, he took charge of the town, swearing to help all the wives while their men were gone fighting. He did their farmwork and preached Sunday sermons and counseled the ladies at their daily lives. He solved their disputes. Advised them. Whipped their unmindful boys and girls and comforted the wives in their darkest hours.
Then one morning, as he collected eggs in his henhouse, a possum dropped from the rafters onto his neck and bit him. He suspected the animal had the ray bees as daylight appearances were unusual for its kind, as was the savagery this specimen displayed. He caught it and put it in a cage and watched it refuse water and bat itself against the wire and s...o...b..r and try to bite him.
A thoughtful, self-educated man, the Reverend Wright had squatted before the cage for hours, clutching his Bible and staring as the creature snapped at him and ground its face through the wire mesh with no thought to pain or self-preservation, as if all the world"s rapture lay in the union of tooth and flesh. Day, night, Wright watched the creature thrash itself to death, the preacher thinking, What will I learn O G.o.d upon my journey.
He burned the possum when it finally succ.u.mbed, and on waking several mornings later with sweats and shivers, ill at the sight of water, he had the ladies of his church lock him in a makeshift cell he"d built in the livery barn and a.s.sign a guard. Day and night he fought the disease, alternately praying and cursing G.o.d, ripping his clothes off, tearing his skin with his own fingernails. Bruises flowered on his chest and shoulders from his battering the bars. He endured fits where he couldn"t remember his own name but also relished spells of clarity, his eyes pooling at the beauty of sunlight patterned on wood and a chain"s oiled grace. In these calm moments he knew the position of every insect in the barn and could tell one sparrow"s voice from another and see in the dark.
He called for his daughter, a girl abnormally tiny and sixteen years of age. She had good handwriting and as he lectured and preached she copied down what she heard. How his condition had revealed truth he otherwise wouldn"t have known. The ray bees, he said, were the living key to G.o.d and G.o.d had told Snowden Wright that He, G.o.d, was making him, Wright, a prophet, that they should alter their church to the ways of his telling.
Write! he would shriek at his daughter when she fell asleep at the school desk they"d set outside the cage. He spoke rapidly, babbling at times, contradicting himself at others, his eyes opaquing as he squatted in the hay, naked as Adam in the bliss before the serpent, saying his strange, brilliant things.
And when Wright called to her from his cell, his daughter put down her tablet and pencils and slipped out of the school desk, straightened her skirts.
Get the key off the wall, her daddy said.
Because he was her father, she obeyed, she let herself into his cell where he rose naked from the hay. Because he was her father, she submitted to his will. Then he called for her younger sister, and for the other daughters of the town, and they were brought to his cell and he had his way with them.
In two days, when he started trying to bite the girls, they became afraid to go in, and he died within a week after being bitten, snapping his teeth to the last and incoherent in his babbling, his daughter still trying to write it all down. When they were sure he"d pa.s.sed away, the girl disappeared upstairs in the large house where the family lived. She missed her father"s funeral, so consumed was she to compare the views he"d dictated and create her definitive version. The doc.u.ment she presented to her sister and the other ladies of the church two days later was what came to be known as the Scripture.
What did it say, Evavangeline asked.
Ike paused. It laid out they new beliefs. And they mission. The ladies was to keep em a mad-dog, ye see. They call it a struck dog, I call it a mad-dog. Keep it in a cage, and that Scripture say the ladies supposed to infect ever boy child with the ray bees. The little boys they had already, six or seven of em too young to go die in the War, was the first to be blessed-that"s they word-blessed by that mad-dog. They call him Lazarus the Redeemer. Them first boys to get bit, well, they all died of the ray bees. Ever one. But it was more little boys on the way, cause most of them girls who"d laid with Snowden Wright was now in a family way, including both his daughters.
All them girls, Ike went on, they knowed what was in store for they babies when they come. The girls had seen the ladies of the church let the mad-dog bite they brothers and they"d seen the boys in they cages. Going mad. Trying to bite they mothers when they come visit em. Ulrica and her little sister Elrica and all the other girls knocked up by Snowden Wright knew they "d have to let that mad-dog bite they boys when they was old enough. They mothers would make em.
Why? asked Evavangeline.
Cause they believed that when that chosen child got born, all they faith would be rewarded. All them other boys the ray bees had killed would rise up from the dead like Judgement Day.
Stop! hissed Mrs. Tate, hearing the same tale from Smonk. How do you know these impossible lies?
Who was that turnip, Smonk asked, up the steps yonder?
Her eyes followed his finger. My Chester, she said. My boy. She blinked at him. You killed him.
I did. Chester"s bit his last.
For a long moment Mrs. Tate stared at him through the candlelight. A tear wending down the wrinkles in her face.
Those were impossible days, she said. You won"t understand. You weren"t there. We ladies and children cut off from the rest of the county while the North destroyed us a boy, a man, at a time. We were all alone out here, fourteen ladies and twenty children. No letters, no news. Four long years. One one-armed preacher and one d.a.m.ned possum.
Tell me about ye daddy, Smonk said.
Mrs. Tate sighed her foul breath into the air. Daddy, she said. Well. He was fair enough to look at, I guess. Except for his absent arm. I used to be afraid of the little nubbins up on his shoulder. He could wiggle them. Used to make the boys giggle and scare us girls upstairs.
Her face changed.
But he had lovely black hair, Daddy did. He wore it long. Wore his beard long too. Gray at the edges. His back muscles were so pretty and shiny when he"d cut wood in that onehanded way of his with his shirt off.
The old woman inhaled and closed her eyes. He was a good speaker, too, she said. Of sermons, I mean. Every Sunday, a new one. He"d read from the Song of Songs. We ladies and girls fanning ourselves and squirming in our pews. She lowered her voice. If he got you off alone he could sweet-talk you, too, make you feel special, and so, by the time the War ended, we were all in love with him-even my sister Elrica and me, his own daughters. Our mother had died ten years before. Daddy would visit this lady or that each night and lend council. That"s what he called it. But it was good council because he was in constant demand. Fix this fence. It"s a fox after our chickens! My Jimmy"s got the measles and high fevers. Come sit the night with him, come comfort my soul.
Smonk tilted his gourd. He offered it to Mrs. Tate but she ignored him.
When that possum bit Daddy we were all terrified. In danger of losing our only man. But he calmed us down. Daddy. He told us what would happen. Said it was G.o.d"s plan. G.o.d was watching us, couldn"t we feel His eye? And we could, somehow, Daddy, we could. You felt bathed in His light. It felt as if He had noticed us. G.o.d. As if His eye had fixed on Old Texas.
Smonk belched.
Ike told how Ulrica, always a child who"d lived in fantasies, who"d played with sprites and danced with fairies, believed in the Scripture she"d written, and as her belly swelled with her daddy"s child she prayed for the strength to trust the Lord as Abraham had on that unthinkable walk up the mountain when he was about to sacrifice his only son. But Ulrica"s sister Elrica, who was fourteen, didn"t believe the Scripture. The younger sister hated her daddy for doing what he"d done to her and hated herself for letting him do it.
But her love for the baby inside her got bigger as he did. She would not let the church ladies have him, she decided, she would not let them feed her child to a mad-dog. She left the house one midnight and walked out to the place called n.i.g.g.e.rtown and had the baby there but died having it, he was so big and she so tiny. Before she died, though, she made the midwife promise never to let Old Texas get her son. She told what horrors transpired in that fallen town. Even as her baby suckled its first and last from its mother.
What you want the baby called? the midwife asked.
But Elrica Wright was already dead.
Now that midwife, Ike said, she had always been barren. And always wanted a youngun. And now here was a baby. Like a gift from G.o.d. Saved from death. Her and her husband decided they "d take that child and move to the next county and get a house and raise him. He had dark enough skin, and cutting cane the way they did for a living, well, they knew he"d grow darker still from the sun. Soon he"d pa.s.s for colored and they would have they child.
All this time Evavangeline had been watching the old man"s face. The orange pulse from his pipe gleaming twins of itself across his cheekbones. His eyes such bowls of black it seemed as if he could see past tonight and into her life before.
What happened? she asked.
Wasn"t to be, he said. Those eyes of his looking down. Wasn"t long fore the midwife figured out she had the ray bees. Cause he"d bit her. That baby had. Teeth already in. When the shivers come on her some days later her husband snuck to town. He seen with his own two eyes what was going on. Seen a boy mad in a cage and the ladies praying round him. Which was how his wife was fixing to die, too, he knew. Mad. Drooling like a dog. But she was a good, good woman. Name Inetta. And she knew what them ladies didn"t know. Knew the redeemed boy they was looking for was already here, born with ray bees.
What happened to the midwife?
Her husband. He shot her in the head when she starting getting mean. He shot her in the head and burned her in a fire along with they house, and he knew he ought to thow in that squalling baby too. Baby born out of a sinful union and carrying the ray bees that killed his wife. Be better for ever body he was to jest go on thow it in the fire. Jest thow it on in. But he didn"t. He couldn"t. It warn"t that baby"s fault things were how things were. He didn"t evil his self into the world. He was jest a baby. And then that poor heart-broke man smelled the baby"s head and got drunk on it. He didn"t thow him in. That night he left, rode a mule and led a goat on a rope and fed the baby on goatmilk from a bottle and raised him up his own self and loved him even though he was a evil little- Wait, said Evavangeline. It was you.
Meanwhile, William R. McKissick Junior crept toward the south end of town, approaching the single-room church building which also served as the schoolhouse, and crept up the wide plank steps and stood on the porch looking in the window. The ladies had tried to get him inside this place before. Saying he needed G.o.d and learning. That was two things could never be took from ye, they told him. G.o.d and learning. William R. McKissick Junior didn"t give a good dern for neither G.o.d ner learning. Heck. If air one of them ladies had jest flashed him a t.i.tty he would of gone.
Behind him somebody was coming so he jumped off the porch and ran east alongside the building and paused in the shadow of a cord of stacked firewood, looking behind him, waiting, listening. The rat-bite on his leg stinging. He crept to the church window and took the sill in his fingers and scrabbled up the clapboards and peered in. In the pews in the shadows he saw them. Dozens of them, very still. Praying maybe. Or maybe being punished. Grown folk did that sometimes if you misbehaved. Back in Oklahoma William R. McKissick Junior had gone to school for two days while his daddy stalked and killed a ranch hand. That teacher-lady had made him stay late and bang chalk erasers both days because he"d beat up several other boys. He learned to crawl under the school during play time and peep through the cracks in the floorboards and see up her dress. Then his daddy said it was time to move on and they"d moved on.
William R. McKissick Junior looked through the gla.s.s, smeared with his own breath, and imagined his head among theirs, bowing, praying, learning to write and read and add numbers. He pushed the top of the window but it was locked. He dropped to the ground and crept alongside the building. Back door locked too. The other windows. Then-heck-it was somebody coming. He slipped under the church and rolled through spiderwebs to the dark center and watched the guard-widow"s black skirt-tails trundling the dust.
Smonk could feel the morphine working. To test himself he hovered his heavy, flat hand over the detonator handle.
How do you know these lies? Mrs. Tate asked.
Smonk moved his hand. Tell ye what else I know, too, he said. War "d been done almost a year when four, five of ye men begun to trickle home. Didn"t they? Fellows with they eyes empty and they beliefs all sacked. They was skeletons, warn"t they? Had arms off, legs gone.
How do you know this?
They wanted to know where the younguns was, didn"t they. And how come all the unmarried daughters was knocked up?
She lowered her chin. Yes, she said. Some came back. Yes, they wanted answers. We told them what happened in a simple version. Told them about Daddy"s vision and even as we told it, it began to sound false. But the simple men believed it. If they hadn"t been so eaten up by the War they might have done something else. Might have called it all madness. Might have said that Daddy "d gone crazy with the ray bees and made us all crazy, too. How had we listened to him? How many little boys had we given to our struck dog?
But them men, they didn"t say none of that, did they?
No. Because of what they"d seen in that War. That G.o.dd.a.m.ned War. Because of what they"d done there. One man-boy!-who I"d known from girlhood and once had held hands with-in this very parlor-he returned home with that selfsame hand blown off. The other women sent him to visit me and he saw in my eyes I had a secret. He took hold of my hand with the hand he had left and twisted until I told him that Elrica had gone to the darkies to have her baby.
So the men collected they guns and rode out to n.i.g.g.e.rtown, Smonk said, and the n.i.g.g.e.rs said the girl never had been there and said the midwife died of natural causes.
I suppose.
But when they dug the midwife up out the ground, it was a bullet hole in her head and it warn"t nothing natural about that, was it.
I suppose not.
They found another fresh grave, too, didn"t they?
I suppose they did. Without a marker I suppose. And when they dug it up they found Elrica wrapped in b.l.o.o.d.y sheets. But no baby. The Old Texas men tortured the darkies and burned their houses and barns until they found out that the midwife"s husband had stolen the child and run off.
Out west.
We didn"t know where. But before our men entered pursuit, they came here first. All covered in blood. They had Elrica in a wagon. My baby sister. Under a sheet. Said it was my job to clean her up. Put her best dress on. Bury her like white people. The worms had already been at her but I didn"t care. Here was my "Rica returned to me, and men with arms and legs off were already departing on their horses to find our stolen child.