High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (33 page)

“My daddy says Kentucky did God’s dirty work for him and made whiskey on the seventh day.”

The man throws back his head, mouth full of whiskey and silent with laughter so as not to lose a drop. He wipes at his silk cloth, checking for a spill.

Orr comes out from behind the pot fire. “He let me taste it once.” Just thinking about it makes his stomach wrinkle. “Most negroes around here ain’t like you.” Orr looks at the floor, and then back to Cotten. “You ever killed anything before?”

Cotten shakes his head. “What for?”

Orr shrugs his shoulders. “What’s a circus?”

Cotton considers the question. “A place for making people happy.”

There’s a sound of quick breathing at the doorway, the red dog, half inside. Orr pulls a piece of ham from the hock, and throws it to the floor.

Cotten goes on, “We got horse shows and tricks.” He takes another swig from the bottle.

Orr takes a piece of ham for himself. “You gonna work for a circus in Lexington?”

“No, sir.” The bottle dangles from his fingers. He looks upward; Orr follows his gaze to the rafters, but sees nothing. “Can you read some?”

Orr nods. “My daddy teaches me from the Bible.”

“That’s a good book.” Cotten clears his throat. “I guess you-all Christian, then?”

“My daddy says God ain’t particular, and no one gets to tell you what’s what.”

“I like your daddy.” Cotten takes another piece of ham. “I don’t subscribe to nothing neither. Where’d your daddy go to?”

“North.”

“What for?”

“Merchants. And for salt. He’s selling luck jars and soap. Should be good with all them wagons going up.”

“I seen all them. Got stuck in the middle of some taking up the road.” He waves away all of what bothers him. He puts the cork in the bottle and sets it behind the curtain on the ledge. “Your father heading for a camp meeting?”

“What exactly is a camp meeting?”

“Like a big church meeting.”

“You going to a camp meeting?”

“Never took.” Cotten coughs. “Where’s your ma at?”

Orr hesitates, not used to the question. “She’s dead.”

Cotten coughs again. “Well, I’m real sorry.”

Orr fans the pot fire. Puts his hand by the heat until he can’t take it no more. “Where you think a dead person goes to?”

Cotten shakes his head, and stands. “Can’t say.”

“That’s what my daddy says.” He barely touches the stove and pulls away his finger. “I saw my mother. On a wagon. Yesterday.”

“Well, you never do know.” Cotten sighs. “How far north your daddy go to?”

“Maybe two hours.” Orr looks back through the doorway. “You know about Heaven?”

Cotten looks at the bottle on the window, then back to the boy. “How old are you?”

“Twelve and a half.”

Cotten looks like he’s either itching for another pull of whiskey, or maybe wishing he hadn’t gotten started. Orr turns away from the doorway and looks back at Cotten, at his eyes paying close attention. Cotten says, “If people knew what free is, they’d live it. Not all slaves are slaves. And not all free are free.”

The sky in the doorway is darker. Orr feels the blade in his back pocket. “I can show you how to get to Lexington.”

Cotten tightens his neck cloth. “I’d appreciate it.”

“Only one road. And I bet we pass my daddy on the way.”

“Oh, I don’t know about you coming. People see you alone with a strange nigger, we’re bound to find trouble.”

Orr pours water on the pot fire until it dies to embers.

“You’re looking tired.” Cotten touches his forehead. “And you warm.”

“I’m fine.”

Cotton laughs. “Betting you don’t take no for an answer.”

Orr waits for him to leave so he can follow behind, but Cotten excuses himself, nods, and extends his arm through the doorway, after you.

They gather the horses and lead them to the wagon. Cotten hitches the team.

Orr climbs into the seat, and feels again for the blade in his pocket. He watches the hogs and pigs sleeping in the yard as the wagon rolls on through the grass. The black sow’s rump swings as she walks to the trough. Maybe that one. Seems right to pick out the oldest. Maybe not so afraid after all of the kill, of picking one, and having to kill.

*   *   *

An hour north along the river, Orr says he’ll walk on no matter how far, and Cotten should just go east because he’s bound to find his father on the road. But Cotten won’t hear it. So they ride on along the path, over the limestone worn smooth by the herds of long-gone buffalo. They climb the crest of a tall wooded knob as a dumb white moon watches over them. They ride roughly over the grassy rise, the river going dark alongside them, until a field opens out below them surrounded by a wood. Fire lights smearing yellow trails in the distance. They ride closer to a wash of noise.

They ride through the field, as the night gets less dark in the lamplight out by the tree line. They ride past large rocks along the hill, where curious locals watch and bear witness to what appears to be a vast gathering filling up the field. Wagons in the field, littering the hill and the woods. There are voices, a rising din of shouts from the crowd lit up by a bonfire. The wash of noise grows, as they get closer, soon filling up the evening like the sound of a rushing waterfall. They see hundreds of horses standing there by the trees. On a short wooden stage, a tall thin man stalks back and forth before the crowd, hands flailing. The sound of the crowd is even louder in the corner of the field, where they make a strange wheat waving in the night breeze. Pink hands waving, and white hands, and the negroes in the back make a dark place, their forearms moving along in waves. They all move in the shadowed field, a spreading swath of smoke movement in the lamplight, the candlelight, and the bonfire beside the forest. Whiteheads fly to the tallest trees now dark in silhouette. The Appalachians hold sway in the east.

“That’s my daddy’s wagon!”

Cotten pulls on the reins. “You sure?”

Orr jumps down from his seat. “That right there. And that’s our bag.” He jogs over to a wagon and grabs at a bag, pulls out a bar of soap, and shows it like a prize.

They tie the team to a stump.

Cotten says, “Better stay close,” as they venture into the crowd.

They walk by lean-tos and shelters made of bundled sticks, and by cloth tents pitched at woodside, by children sleeping in straw beds and infants feeding at breasts, napping in their woolen blankets. They walk in among the army of readying people, who press themselves ever closer.

Some sit still, consumed by a sober worship, but most move about, declaring aloud a commitment to the High Holy Spirit. They watch a youngster make exhortations from his father’s shoulders, filled with the Spirit of the Lord, never too young for salvation. A magic maker performing tricks, dancing on eggs unbroken and telling futures. The leather-dressed men with rifles on their backs speak to all who might listen. An older woman, about his daddy’s age, waves at Orr and Cotten, singing out “Glory, glory, Hallelujah! Glory, glory, Hallelujah! Sing with me, boy. I sing with God, and He says He likes my voice!” Orr can’t help but smile. And other women sing prayers and poems, and listeners are bewitched by these women—by women! She swears she speaks to God direct! Orr sees the white preacher on the clapboard stage—the young man insisting on a truth, a new truth that you know in your heart was placed there by Christ, and your sinful nature needs his election, swearing, “You
will
hear my voice, because this mouth is God’s mouth, and none other’s. Never will you need the mouth of another to claim your stake in the Lord! God’s eyes and ears hear
you,
see
you,
He knows
you
and your soiled soul.” And the listeners cannot keep still. This blood is boiling over as they quiver and fill up with the Spirit, and they rock against Orr and Cotten. Cotten takes hold of Orr’s hand.

“The Holy Fire is too hot for any standing still!” says the preacher onstage.

Orr watches the people shake and wave in the clearing. It frightens him.

There is a passing of the Spirit, unbounded by bodies. There is a heaving, a hurling from inside their souls in the torchlight. Retch any spirit that keeps you calm. Grab others by their collars, and fill yourself with overpour. Get drunk on the Spirit in this place, dance with the Spirit in this place, each one a name and a face before the one true God who grants salvation, the God who knows your every sin, your failings, and who forgives them, who grants mercy, and will be made glorified and will come down to this place soon enough—
to this place
—and set His feet on American soil. He will walk these hills, returning giant of Jesus Christ, oh Great Man of Original Liberty.

*   *   *

Orr and Cotten start away from the center of the crowd, toward the outer fringes of the great gathering, Cotten’s big hand on the boy’s slender shoulder. But the forest is no less spirited and filled with persons. The horses in half-light are tethered to the trees and their heads are lowered in shadow, drinking from water troughs and bowls. Orr and Cotten make for the back of the woods toward the river and away from the field. Still they are accosted, and handled, beseeched by other exhorters. “Won’t you please show your love for the Lord?” The black folk among them see Orr walking with his negro.

Cotten says, “Stay close.”

“Why they crying?”

“They don’t wanna be here no more.”

Orr sees mostly legs and bellies, so Cotten sets the small boy on his shoulders. “Look for your daddy, go on now!”

Orr taps Cotten’s head. “I don’t see him nowhere.”

“What? Too loud. Keep looking.”

They shoulder on toward the river, where the trees are darker and the chanting is lower behind them. Thinner trees shake in the wind and look alive. Orr swats at a low branch grabbing at him.

There is a loud cry, and Orr points that way. “Look!”

Waist deep in the river water and sloshing about is a wiry and bare-chested man with a wild white beard, his black hat sliding off the side of his head, almost falling; he’s constantly pulling and setting it straight. The man forces a struggling piglet partly under the water. He laughs and belches. I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Roast! He wrestles with the piglet and pushes the head fully under. The man’s hat falls away and rushes downriver. Some of the watchers cheer, raised whiskey bottles in their hands. But most point, and cry out Blasphemer! as the man grapples with the kicking and pink suckling pig. It slides some from his hands, front hoofs clacking.

Cotten says, “Let’s get on now!”

Orr rests his chin on the man’s soft hair, feeling unsure and sick in his stomach.

Cotten shouts, “We shouldn’t have come so far!”

“What?”

“From the crowd. We’re too far from the crowd! No telling what kind of people! See your daddy anywhere?”

Orr watches the woods unfold in the torch glow, as listeners burst with exhortations right in front of his eyes, making speeches like they’d done so all their lives, garbling words he’s never heard before. Cotten carries him past a small campfire. Clay jugs pass among the fire watchers. An old man, his face red with cackling, hot breath, reaches up to Orr, offers the boy a drink. The old man says, Have a sip! Cotten just waves him aside. They move on further away from the crowd, to what looks like a white blur wavering back in the trees. It’s too high, almost floating, it’s a woman with bright flowing hair. Her golden hair of sunlight hangs long and ribboned with a white rope draped over her shoulders. She’s a ghost in a white gown looking like an angel. A crown of thistles rests upon her head. In one hand she holds what looks like a wand, a crooked stick like a witch’s wand. She holds it high. And the watchers yell out Harlot! whenever the stick falls to her side. The other arm is tied with rope to a tree, her wrist going red.

Closer now, Orr sees a small stage and chair legs wobbling from under her gown.

Her hem has all gone muddy, and the watchers yell Harlot! Witch! while she cries out for help. Adulterous whore!

The white woman goes blurry in the trees, and goes smaller as they move away.

They head toward the crowd in the field. Orr looks for his father and sees that, now, inside the crowd, there isn’t a crowd, but persons, faces, hands, and eyes. Each one a person, is a piece of the view from way back, high up on the knob. The poor folk and gentlemen, and the young ladies in silken wraps and gold finger rings muddy their finery as they move about and dance in the dirt. A snare drum pounds out a gallop. They raise their legs, dancing, walking and running in place, losing their bonnets and capes, fine hair loosening from pins and snapping back like whips, in enthusiasm for the Lord.

Orr doesn’t know what to make of it all, and suddenly shouts: “There!”

They push through the crowd toward the stage behind a long wooden table, where sit baskets of bread and tin cups for communion, and the Christ blood in a fat leaden tumbler. The preacher onstage finishes with a flourish. The crowd responds with shouts of approval, as a new preacher takes to the stage.

“Right there! It’s my daddy! Right there.” Orr points to a man in the crowd. The man is shouldering a sack and can’t seem to stop himself from laughing.

*   *   *

It is Gillon Dowse’s first time onstage, this preacher of proud Ulster blood. He looks to the crowd, and the spirit in this crowd is fierce. So many exhorters in the field compete for listeners, speakers standing precariously on chairs. But there is a roar in these woods, and it comes booming from the lion mouth of Christ—This be all the spectacle we need. A bright torch blooms behind him. With hair long like a woman’s, Dowse prays for the Holy Spirit, that this mouth speak only Truth, and that for Truth they will listen.

He spreads his arms out wide, black Bible in one hand, and the gesture fills him with boldness. “There is a heavenly scent in the air today. Who else among you can smell it? Can you smell the sweet Holy Spirit?” The listeners up front are swaying, their backs against the faithful sharing at the sacramental table. “This bounty is here and all for your taking, but only the pure in heart can sit. Dear God, I bless this table!”