Days of Little Texas

To Deborah Jean Nelson

There is this girl in my dream.

She has blond hair washing down her back, and eyes so blue it makes me want to pray. Only this isn’t a praying dream.

I’m with the blond-headed girl in this big, empty farmhouse. The rooms are large, and they go on and on.

“In my Father’s house are many mansions.”

The girl is covered with a bedsheet that billows and ripples. We walk around awhile till we come to a room painted all in white with a mattress on the floor. It puts me in mind of that story in the New Testament where Jesus tells the lame
man, “Take up thy bed and walk.” We sit on the mattress together, and my heart puffs up like a maypop ready to pitch out all its seeds.

The blond-headed girl smiles the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen. Then she drops the bedsheet, and she doesn’t have any clothes on. Not one stitch. But—
oh Lord
—I’m buck naked, too.

I lay down alongside the naked girl, and we stretch out skin to skin. We look at each other a little while, not saying a word. Finally I have to reach over and
touch
her, and she feels so good and warm and soft, and I can’t stop. Can’t stop touching her. Then she touches
me
. Touches me in places nobody
ever
touched me before. Nobody. And the touching gets better and better till—

I wake up, and the devil is standing over me.

I nearly scream. But there is no devil; it’s only one of Sugar Tom’s suit coats hanging on the door. The real world floods back in—I’m in the motor home with him and Miss Wanda Joy. I look out my small window and see lights winking in the Alabama gloom.

I sneak to the other end of the motor home, heart near bursting from shame.

Do they know? Did they see? Hear anything?

But nobody else is awake. Thank the Lord it’s still dark.

When I close my eyes again, all I can see is the lake of fire, big lumps of brimstone burning on its banks. And I feel like I’m dying.

Verbena, Alabama.

On the other side of the curtain, the crowd is rustling, murmuring in anticipation. I can hear them saying my name. But I’m not watching them. Through the saddle flap in the tent I can see fields of sorghum, heavy green in the June twilight. The air smells like something growing.

Sugar Tom grunts in his sleep. “Lord Jesus.”

“Praise Him,” I say.

Sugar Tom is eighty-seven years old today. When he’s not preaching, he’s liable to fall asleep anytime, anywhere. Tonight it’s a rusty folding chair round back of the curtain,
where the congregation can’t see. His eyes are wriggling like mice under a bedsheet. His long legs are spraddled out in front of him, twitching like he’s fixing to run right straight to glory.

I bet he’s dreaming about South Dakota again.

See, Sugar Tom was a child evangelist just like me. He once shook hands with the great Billy Sunday. When he was my age, going on sixteen, he worked the revival circuit with Mordecai Ham all the way north to Sioux Falls and Rapid City. That’s where he got his revival name, Sugar Tom Walker.

“’Cause all the gals thought my sermons were so sweet,” he likes to say.

His hair looks like cuttings left on the barbershop floor. He has cornbread crumbs on his pants. That’s what he asked for instead of a birthday cake. Sugar Tom believes South Dakota is heaven.

“Skies that reach right up to Canaan, Ronald Earl,” he likes to tell me. “Grass like a woman’s hair. Ponds blue as cornflowers. South Dakota is the place where the hand of the Almighty reached down to touch the world. It’s where I’m going to die. Amen.”

I inhale the outdoors one more time and feel for the knife in my pocket. I take it out and flick it open; the blade is cold on my fingers. I sit down next to Sugar Tom and whittle the chess piece I’ve been working on—a rook tall as my pinkie finger, carved out of white aspen. Whittling takes a lot of
concentration. It generally helps me calm down before a service, but tonight my hands are shaking.

Because I’m a fraud
.

I put the rook away but hang on to the knife, thinking how easy it would be to make a long cut in the canvas, slip off into the woods, and disappear. Forever.

But where would I go? How would I live? What would I do? Besides, Certain Certain is watching me. I can see him in the shadows over by the prayer box. His hair is speckled with dabs of white and shaped just like a halo. I put the knife away and watch him cross the pinewood stage.

“You need be thinking about the sermon,” Certain Certain says, voice full of creek gravel.

“I know,” I say.

But really I’m not. Witnessing for the Lord has always come natural to me. It has nothing to do with thinking.

“What’s eatin’ at you, boy?” he says.

“Nothing,” I say.

This is the second time I’ve had that dream this week. Sooner or later somebody’s going to find out how strange I am. Then it will all be over.

Certain Certain comes into the light of the drop cord and sinks down into a chair next to me.

Even after all this time, his mouth can still make me flinch. Part of his top lip was once blown off by a bullet, and it never healed up quite right. Underneath you can see the stumps of broken black teeth and gums red as death in the
sunshine. Years ago Certain Certain was shot climbing out a woman’s bedroom window in Corinth, Mississippi.

“I turned back to look at her,” Certain Certain says, “like Lot’s wife turned back to look at the destruction of Sodom. I didn’t turn into no pillar of salt, but that gal’s husband rained the fire of hell on me. And that’s when I gave my life over to the Lord.”

Certain Certain is the only name I’ve ever known him by. He’s descended from South Carolina slaves and wears a brass slave tag round his neck to prove it. The tag is engraved
PEMBROKE PLANTATION, SERVANT
653, 1851. Certain Certain says his great-great-great-granddaddy had to wear it whenever he went to town so he wouldn’t get whipped or sold as a runaway.

Certain Certain is somewhere around sixty. Nearly twice the age our Lord and Savior was when they nailed Him to the cross. But he’s still powerful strong. He grabs hold of my arm. His big hand is warm and moist, and his breath smells like the Crown Prince Kipper Snacks he always eats for lunch.

“I reckon I know what’s bothering you,” he says. “Every rooster ever lived thinks the whole world turns on them pretty little gals. Always have, always will. You think you the first boy ever discovered his ping-a-ling?” His laugh sounds like a bark.

I look away, face burning. “Turn me loose,” I say.

He lets me go, still grinning.

“Let me tell you something, Lightning.” Certain Certain
calls me Lightning on account of how I got the name Little Texas. “I know what you goin’ through. Nothing to be ashamed of. Most natural thing in the world. That’s your problem. Don’t know nothing ’bout the real world even though you gettin’ to be a man. And a man who don’t know anything about women is useless as tits on a boar hog.”

Sugar Tom snorts, but his eyes are still closed.

“‘Abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul,’” he mumbles.

I stand and brush wood shavings off my leg, feeling the blood come up in my face.

“You got to learn to
control
it,” Certain Certain says. “That’s all. When I was your age, I didn’t have nothing like no control. Shoot. Every spare chance I got, there we’d go, back behind the woodshed—”

“Hey, I … I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well. If you ever
do
want to talk about it, I’m right here.”

I walk away from him and take a peek around the curtain at the congregation.

Lord
.

They kill me. The shape of their legs in the white dresses. The way the material pushes away from their skin in places. The softness of their faces, eyes big as barn owls’, hungry, wet. Bare toes in sandals. I notice how their bodies shift in their seats, how they whisper to the girl next to them. I feel it all like a burning cord running straight from their chests to my stomach.

Miss Wanda Joy’s standing in the back of the tent ushering in stragglers and handing out scripture. Miss Wanda Joy is a tall woman, big-boned and straight as a loblolly pine. Her hair is pulled way up and over the top of her head, then it waterfalls down her back, all the way to the green bow in her white dress.

Was she ever pretty? I don’t imagine so. Still, you can’t help but stare. Her eyes are like buckeyes, hard and black and shiny. Sugar Tom calls them “arresting.”

Miss Wanda Joy is my “mother by deed, not by seed.” That’s how she puts it. She’s really my great-aunt, and only by
marriage, but she’s real proud when folks mistake her for the mother of Little Texas.

I reckon I love her. I know that sounds funny, but Miss Wanda Joy is a hard person to love. She only lets you go so far and no farther. But she took me in when nobody else would. I know she cares about me, but she always expects things to go her way, and when they don’t, she can flare up hot as melted plastic.

Miss Wanda Joy’s got me wearing Sugar Tom’s pin-striped suit tonight. If I straighten my arms at my sides, my hands almost disappear up the sleeves. My pant legs are bunched on top of my shoes.

“People expect to see
Little
Texas,” she says. “The preaching prodigy. You’re growing too fast. If they stop coming, we stop eating. It’s as simple as that.”

Miss Wanda Joy always ties my tie too tight. I put a finger inside my collar and give it a tug, trying to give myself a little room to breathe.

Sugar Tom bolts upright in his chair.

“Where’s the Book?”

He always wakes up raring to go. Certain Certain takes the Bible from the prayer box and hands it to me—a big old King James that Sugar Tom has had for fifty years. It hangs open across my hand like a bird with broken wings.

Sugar Tom coughs to wake up his big voice and says “Glory” into his hand a couple of times. He winks at me and slips out from behind the curtain. The people clap and holler;
they know what’s coming. Sugar Tom pulls himself up to his full height in front of the pulpit. He never needs a microphone.

“Good evening, brothers and sisters, on this day the Lord hath made.”

Sugar Tom starts his witnessing slow, quoting scripture, but pretty soon he does what the best of us evangelists do, lets it rip. Faster and faster, louder and louder. Before you know it, he’s worked the congregation into a frenzy, roaring like a righteous hurricane.

“When the spirit of the Lord,
ah!
comes down to you,
ah!
I say, my brothers and sisters,
ah!
It’s not a thing you can control,
ah!
It’s like the ocean,
ah!
It’s like the Bay of Fun-dy,
ah!
But you never can tell,
ah!
I say, you never can tell,
ah!
when or where the wave,
ah!
is going to hit,
ah!
You must ride it,
ah!
you must ride it,
ah!
when it comes,
ah!
”

You would think he was forty years younger. That’s what happens when the Holy Spirit comes into me. Lifts me up till I’m strong as ten thousand Philistines.

Some are standing now, swaying next to their seats, arms in the air, shouting, “Yes, yes!” and “Amen!”

Sugar Tom finishes up.

“And now,
ah!
I want to bring one out to you,
ah!
One whom you all know,
ah!
One who has seen the glory of the judgment seat,
ah!
One who has witnessed the rebuilding of the Tabernacle,
ah!
One who has been sanctified by the blood of the Lamb,
ah!
”

Here we go
.

“Little Texaaaaaasss!
”

My knees feel like they are locking up, and my throat is closing off.

Too late to run. I gobble one last, shuddery breath, then step out from the curtain. Even after all this time, I am never quite ready for the screams.

“LITTLE TEXAS! LITTLE TEXAS! LITTLE TEXAS!
”

A wind from the sorghum fields hits me, and the pages of Sugar Tom’s Bible flap all the way from Leviticus to First Corinthians. And I begin.