It was Preacher Gibbs and his wife from Gap Creek Church. I hadn’t seen them since Mr. Pendergast’s funeral. “Merry Christmas,” Mrs. Gibbs said.
“Merry Christmas to you,” I said and wiped the sweat off my forehead. “Won’t you come in.”
“We come to see about you,” the preacher said. I led them into the living room and Mrs. Gibbs handed me a little poke with a ribbon on it. Peppermint candy canes stuck out the top.
“Thank you so much,” I said. “Won’t you set down. I don’t think any of the chair seats is wet.”
“Did you get flooded too?” Preacher Gibbs said.
“We got at least a foot of water in the house,” I said. “I’ve spent all morning cleaning up the mud.”
“The Goins house washed away,” the preacher said. “Two of their younguns was drowned.”
“And the mill got washed away,” Mrs. Gibbs said. “One of the Henderson boys was in the mill laying drunk on Christmas Eve and he got drowned.”
“Now, Mother, we don’t know he was drunk,” Preacher Gibbs said.
“Everybody knows he was drunk,” Mrs. Gibbs said.
“We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” Preacher Gibbs said.
“Can I take your coats?” I said.
“We can’t stay but just a minute,” the preacher said. “We wanted to see if you and Hank was all right.”
“We was lucky,” I said.
“You have been blessed by the Lord,” Preacher Gibbs said.
“The cow got killed,” I said. “She got killed in the stall. Hank is digging a hole to bury her out by the barn.”
“The Lord reminds us he’s in charge from time to time,” Preacher Gibbs said.
“It was a terrible flood,” I said.
“We come to wish you all a Merry Christmas and invite you to church,” Mrs. Gibbs said.
“Could I offer you some coffee?” I said. “I just made a fresh pot.”
“We can’t stay,” Preacher Gibbs said. “But we do want to invite you and Hank to service.”
“We’ve been worried about what we was going to do,” I said, “when Mr. Pendergast’s heirs show up.”
“Nobody has heard from them,” the preacher said.
“They never was friendly to Mr. Pendergast,” Mrs. Gibbs said, “not like real children would be.”
“Young folks starting a family need a church connection,” Mrs. Gibbs said. She looked at my belly like she could tell I was expecting. I don’t know how she could tell, but she seemed to know.
“We don’t know where we’ll be living,” I said.
“You should buy this place,” Preacher Gibbs said.
“I wish we could afford to,” I said.
“When the heirs are found, maybe you can make a down payment,” Mrs. Gibbs said.
“We don’t have much money,” I said. I didn’t tell them about Caroline Glascock and her husband. I didn’t think it would do any good to tell them how we had been fooled. And I didn’t tell about the lawyer that took the jar of money either.
“The Lord will protect his own,” Preacher Gibbs said, “if you go to church and trust him.”
It was good to hear somebody who was so confident about how the world worked. And it was a pleasure to see somebody from the community, after the awful night of flood.
A voice hollered outside and I thought at first it was Hank, sounding like he was hurt or in trouble. “What was that?” I said.
“Piieendergaass!” the voice yelled.
“It’s Timmy Gosnell,” Mrs. Gibbs said. A shadow passed through my chest. There was something shameful about having a drunk man raving in front of your house, especially on Christmas Day, when the preacher was visiting.
“He always gets drunk on Christmas,” Mrs. Gibbs said.
“Piieendergass!” the voice hollered. His voice hurt like a saw raked across my skin.
“Maybe he’ll go away,” I said. A rock banged on the porch and rolled against the door.
“Poor Timmy,” Mrs. Gibbs said. “When he gets like this nobody can help him.”
“The Lord can help him,” Preacher Gibbs said. “But I doubt if anybody else can.”
Something hit the porch again, and then I heard another voice. It was Hank, who must have heard Timmy hollering and come running from the barn. I opened the front door and stepped out on the porch.
Timmy Gosnell stood in the yard by the boxwood, but except for his voice I would not have recognized him. He looked like he had been made out of mud, the way a snowman is made out of snow. He looked like he had been rolled in mud and soaked in mud. Every inch of his clothes was caked with clay and silt. There was dirt and silt on his neck and face. And there was filth and river mud in his ears and pasted in his hair. His hands was crusted with mud, and his shoes was caked in layers of sand and clay. He looked like something that had been buried for weeks and rose from the dead. Only his eyes wasn’t covered with filth.
“What do you want?” Hank said. Hank was holding the shovel he had used to dig the grave for the cow.
“You owe me monneeeeyyy,” Timmy groaned.
“I don’t owe you nothing,” Hank said. I seen how scared Hank was by his voice. Under the dirt Timmy could have been a rotten corpse rose from the grave.
“It’s Timmy Gosnell,” I said.
“You get out of here,” Hank said and raised the shovel.
“You ooooowe me,” the drunk man moaned.
The preacher and Mrs. Gibbs had come out on the porch, and the preacher stepped down into the flood-scoured yard. “What happened to you, Timmy?” the preacher said.
Timmy turned and studied the preacher like he wasn’t sure he could see him. “Rained on me,” he said.
“You need to go home and wash up and change your clothes,” the preacher said. “It’s Christmas.”
Timmy pointed toward the house like he was having trouble saying what he wanted to. “Owe me money,” he said.
“Julie and Hank don’t owe you money,” the preacher said. “And Vincent Pendergast is dead.”
“They tooook his money,” Timmy hollered.
Hank stepped closer to the drunk man. “We ain’t took nothing,” he said. I seen how scared and angry Hank was, and how embarrassed. I was so scared I couldn’t hardly get my breath.
“Now you come with us,” Preacher Gibbs said to Timmy. “We’ll take you home.”
The drunk man swung at the preacher like he was trying to drive away a yellowjacket. “I done been saved,” he said. “Didn’t do no good.”
“You need to get cleaned up,” the preacher said. “And have something hot to eat. It’s Christmas.”
“Won’t hold water,” Timmy growled at the preacher. “Your preaching won’t.”
“There’s been a flood,” the preacher said. “Half the valley is washed away. Looks like you got caught in it.”
“All whooores,” Timmy said and pointed first at me and then at Mrs. Gibbs.
“Now we don’t need to talk that way,” Preacher Gibbs said. Hank raised the shovel, but the preacher waved him back.
“Timmy, you just come along with us now,” the preacher said. He tried to take Timmy by the elbow, but the drunk man flung his hand away.
“Owe me monneeeyyy,” he groaned and turned away, staggering toward the road. His clothes was so heavy with mud they dragged to the ground.
“What a pitiful sight,” Mrs. Gibbs said.
“All we can do for Timmy is pray,” the preacher said.
“Somebody ought to teach him a lesson,” Hank said. He drove the shovel into the mud of the yard.
“You can’t teach a drunk man any lesson,” Preacher Gibbs said.
When the preacher and Mrs. Gibbs was gone I thought how quick the world could be turned upside down. Awful things and crazy things was there waiting for a chance to happen. I had to go into the house and stand by the fire to warm myself and calm myself.
Ten
The Christmas flood not only killed the cow and washed away the chicken coop, the water in the cellar made the taters rot. I saved some spuds and sweet taters that hadn’t got moldy by wiping them off and laying them in the sun on the back porch. But most of the taters got soft and turned to filth that had to be shoveled into a bucket and carried to the gully.
After the flood a lot of things got carried to the gully below the spring: rags I’d used to wipe off mud, cloth that had soured and mildewed, shoes that had got soaked and moldy. After Christmas it seemed half the things in the house had to be throwed away. There was dried apples and dried peppers that got wet and rotted in the kitchen. And where the flood rose to the lower shelves in the smokehouse some of the pork middles got the salt soaked out of them and started to rot.
By the time I’d finished cleaning the house, I felt the floodwater had been poison and killed almost everything it touched, except the tools. The foundation of the house itself had been soaked and the mortar crumbled off between rocks. It looked like the flood-waters had acid in them, and everything they touched was burned
and eat away. The yard and road had been swept bare down to rock or hard red clay. The road up Gap Creek had always been rough, with long stretches of mud in wet weather and washboard ripples in dry weather. But there was now places washed out deep enough to bury a horse in. A big rock had been exposed in the roadbed high as a wagon axle. The branch run through the road in places and the creek cut across the routes and back above the Poole place. Some ruts was washed out so deep the dirt in the middle of the road come up to a wagon tongue.
If we had been broke at Christmas, we was worse off by New Year. All the meal we had was ruined, along with the taters and some of the meat. It was when Hank went out to the crib to shuck corn to take to mill that he discovered a lot of the ears had been ruint too. Mud and silt was stuck like paint to the ears in the bottom of the crib, and some of the kernels had begun to swell and sprout. Others had got moldy, or was just starting to rot. It was a mess, and it was beginning to smell.
“This is like the plagues of Egypt,” Hank said when he showed me the rotting corn.
“We’ll have to dry it out,” I said.
“How can you dry out a crib full of corn that’s soaked and molding?” Hank said, like he was accusing me of making light of our problems.
“We’ll have to shuck it,” I said, “and carry it into the house to dry by the fire.”
“There ain’t room by the fire, and there ain’t time,” Hank said. But I figured he was arguing more with hisself than with me. Since the night of the flood he hadn’t said much. I tried to forget him standing on the ladder in the barn firing the shotgun.
“We’ll save what we can,” I said.
“That won’t be enough to brag about,” Hank said. I think he was mad at hisself for being mad, and for talking like Ma Richards. He
meant to act different, but he couldn’t help it. I guess nobody changes completely.
It was the day before New Year when we lit in to shuck the wet corn. We piled the dry corn to the side and pulled out the mudstained, wet ears. The shucks was soggy and dripping muddy water as we stripped them off. My hands got cold quick and I found some old gloves in the barn and kept working with a shucking stick. Some of the kernels had been stained with mud, and they would have to be washed off after they dried out. We shucked several bushels of corn and toted them into the house and spread them on quilts on the living room floor. They nearly covered the whole room.
Hank built a big fire in the fireplace and made it hot with hickory wood. Soon the whole house smelled like moldy corn, a sweet almost fermenty kind of scent. The heaped corn looked like some kind of treasure in the firelight. You could imagine the kernels was bits of gold. I warmed my hands and then went back and shucked some more.
IT WAS AFTER we had got most of the wet corn shucked and piled by the fireplace, and I was ready to wash the mud stains off my hands for the hundredth time that week, that somebody knocked on the door. It was Preacher and Mrs. Gibbs again.
“Howdy,” Hank said. “I’d invite you all in but the living room is full of corn. We’re drying it out.”
The preacher stepped inside and looked at the piles of wet, stained corn. “We was just stopping by to greet you,” he said.
The preacher and his wife come and stood by the fire, and I didn’t know what to say. My hands was dirty and cold and my dress covered with mud. The preacher held out his hands to the fire. “I’ve come by to wish you all a happy New Year and to invite you again to church,” he said.
• • •
I HAD ALWAYS thought of myself as a churchgoing person and not somebody to be exhorted and converted. And I knowed Hank thought of hisself the same way. But in Gap Creek we was new to the community, and new to marriage and to each other, and we had not gone to church. It come to me that we must look like godless people to Preacher Gibbs and the folks of Gap Creek. They didn’t really know us at all.
“We don’t know many people on Gap Creek,” I said.
“Then come to church and get to know your neighbors,” the preacher said.
“If God is everywhere, you can worship wherever you are,” Hank said. “I can pray in the corn crib same as in the church.”
“But the church is where we strengthen each other and support each other. The church is the family of Christ,” Preacher Gibbs said.
“I would be afraid to start the New Year without the Lord,” Mrs. Gibbs said.
I was a little offended by the way they talked, but at the same time I was flattered that they had come back up the valley on New Year’s Eve just to invite us again to church. It irritated me that they looked down on us as some kind of sinners. Preachers always look down on those they are trying to convert. But I appreciated the special attention they had showed us. It had been awful lonely on Gap Creek.
“We have been too busy to go anywhere,” I said.
The preacher looked at the corn heaped on the floor. “It won’t help to heap up your treasures in this world,” he said. It was a little bit like he could read my thoughts.
“We’re just trying to save a little corn to get us through the winter,” I said.
“After New Year’s it’s only two and a half months till spring,” Mrs. Gibbs said.
“It’s the hardest two and a half months of the year,” Hank said.
“We’ve got to get us a new cow somewhere,” I said.
“The Lord will provide what we need when we need it,” Preacher Gibbs said.
“The Lord helps them that helps theirselves,” Mrs. Gibbs said.
“I reckon Christians have to work as hard as anybody else,” Hank said.