The Devil's Dream (6 page)

“Zekey?” she says. “Zekey?”

The fiddles saw away, the air is close in there, and Zeke wipes sweat off his face and looks at her. There is something about her.

“Zekey, is it you?” she says.

Zeke keeps looking at her, but he can't think what to say. While he watches, her big eyes fill with tears. Then she puts her hand up to her mouth and pushes past him roughly, through the throng of people, out the door. Zeke follows after her. He makes it to the door just in time to see her start off into the night hanging on the arm of the big feller who is waiting for her there.

“Mary!” Zeke calls out, his voice rusty and odd, so that everybody out there stops drinking and smoking and talking, and turns to look at the enormous boy silhouetted by the light pouring out of the dance-hall door. His hair glows fiery pale, like bright angel hair, in that light.

But Mary Magdaleen and the man she is with have already disappeared into the darkness beyond the dance; all you can see of them is the glow of the man's cigarette in the dark, and it is his voice that calls back to Zeke from wherever they are going to, “Sorry, buddy,” as if there has been some mistake.

Ezekiel will not see Mary again. A restless, wild girl, she will move eventually from Sistersville to Knoxville, where she will get in trouble.

And Zeke, standing in the doorway, has already forgotten her, her very name
Mary
drowned out by the sound in his head. He goes down the steps and buys some liquor from a man. After the dance is over, he goes with his cousins Willie and Tom to a whorehouse in Sistersville, where a girl takes off her clothes slow for him, stopping at the black garter belt and stockings. Zeke has never seen such a contraption. When he shoots off inside her, the noise in his head goes away, and then he sleeps. The next day, Willie keeps vomiting as they ride back over to Cana under the blazing noon sky, and Tom keeps laughing. “How's yer hammer hanging, Zeke?” Tom asks him, and Zeke says fine.

The other thing that Zeke likes is meeting; it helps him the way a woman and a fiddle tune help him. It quiets his head. Even though the Malones are widely known as backsliders, they all attend the Old Pisgah Primitive Baptist Church set back on the ridge toward Cana. This church, raised by its congregation in 1831, is nothing but a square cabin made of notched and chinked logs, with a puncheon floor, a single small window on each side, and a plain pine door. It stands in a high clearing on the hill, with a good view of the road to Cana and the Frog Level bottom and a glimpse of the Dismal River beyond. There's always a breeze up on that hill. Having the graveyard right next to the church keeps things in the proper perspective. There's no steeple, no sign, no bell to indicate that this small, plain cabin is in fact a church, but the stern lonesome air of holiness hangs everywhere about it, like fog on the ridge of a morning.

Ezekiel walks up here every third Sunday with the rest. Other Sundays, some of them go to other meetings, often traveling miles. For many of them, especially the women, this is the only time they ever go anywhere. They approach the churchhouse soberly and quietly, eyes cast down. Horses and mules and wagon teams are hitched in the woods. Some of the wagons have little children sleeping on pallets inside, or sucking quietly on a sugar tit. Newborns are carried into meeting. Older children are left at home; meeting is not the place for children.

The women go on in. Most of the men stand around outside the churchhouse, smoking or chewing tobacco, until the singing starts. Then they throw their cigarettes down on the ground and spit out their chaws and file in too, men to the right, women to the left. They sit on hard plank benches. Meeting is not supposed to be comfortable.

Inside, the Pisgah churchhouse is as plain as it is outside, nothing but a potbellied stove in the back and a homemade table to lay your coats on in the wintertime, nothing up front but the rough-hewn pulpit in the center and the Amen corner over to the side, a wood platform with chairs on it for visiting elders to sit on. No cross, no pictures, no ornamentation of any kind. “Christ don't need no fancy cross,” as old Elder Stump has been heard to say. No choir, no hymnbooks, no organ, no piano—no instruments of any kind.
Christ don't have no truck with the things of this world
. Cornelius Malone leads the singing by just flat starting out with it all of a sudden, his high nasal voice almost like an assault on the rustling hush in the meetinghouse.

“Hit's the old ship of Zion as she comes
.
”
Cornelius lines out the hymn and the others follow.
“Hit's the old ship of Zion as she comes
.
”
The first line is repeated for the rest of the verse, and each hymn has many verses.
“She'll be loaded with bright angels as she comes
.
”
Cornelius remains seated while he sings, leaning forward a little from the waist with his rough hands placed on his knees, no emotion at all on his face.

When that hymn is finally over, Aunt Dot starts another,
“O Lord, remember me, now in the bowels of Thy love
.
”
It is straight-out tuneless singing, yet Ezekiel finds it beautiful, as his Aunt Dot does.

One time years back, when she was sitting on the porch hooking a rug and singing one of these mournful old hymns, as she frequently did, little Ezekiel asked her, “Aunt Dot, how come you to sing that old song? How come you don't sing something pretty?” For he knew full well how pretty his Aunt Dot could sing if she took a mind to, and how many songs she knew. She turned to look at him, pursing her mouth, and said, “Honey, they is pretty singing, and then they is true singing,” and although Ezekiel didn't know what she meant by that then, he does now. He loves the high hard plaintive singing too and joins in energetically, face blank and eyes closed, sometimes lining out a hymn himself.

Ezekiel likes singing as much as he likes fiddle music and black garter belts and dancing, and he makes no distinction among these things, which all comfort him. He does not care so much for the rest of the service.

The singing goes on for about an hour, and then one of the elders lifts up a prayer, and it goes on awhile too. People pride themselves on how long and how loud they can pray. Then there's some more singing, then another scripture read out by another elder, then Billy Looney giving the sermon in his unemotional singsong voice that comes to be punctuated halfway through his sermon by the “ah!” at the end of each sentence. “Jesus will come in the night, ah! And He will find you where you're hid, ah!” Billy Looney didn't even start preaching until he was an old man. You can't prepare to preach. If God wants you, He will let you know. It will come upon you unawares. Billy Looney was called in the spring of his forty-sixth year one rainy day when he was hauling a wagonload of lumber over to a man in Sistersville. He's been preaching ever since. He preaches frequently that man is a lonesome traveler on a long road, and whenever he takes this text, a thrill shoots through Ezekiel.

Once Billy Looney gets to really horating, he will go on an hour or more, and then a visiting elder might preach some too, and if things get going good, if Billy Looney or one of them others gets to what Aunt Dot calls his weaving way, why then some folks might start to holler out “Amen” and Missus Clara Bellow might suffer palpitations of the heart and have to lay down on the bench while they sing the invitation hymn. By the end of meeting, the singers still appear detached, yet tears run down their cheeks as they continue to sing. Even some of the men are crying, but none of them wipe off their tears or appear to notice. Then the closing hymn, with parting handshakes all around.

And once again, as always, hearts are somehow strengthened and lifted as all leave meeting and go outside, where the women spread dinner on the ground, everything good you can think of to eat—chicken and dumplings, shucky beans and fatback, pork roast, sweet potatoes baked in their jackets, corn pudding, applesauce, cornbread, watermelon pickle, vinegar pie, apple stack cake. The women wait on the men and children first, then they eat too. Then there's more singing out on the hill, and the sun is low on the mountain when it's time to go. And if a horse or two gets sold behind the churchhouse, or a boy steals a kiss from a girl back in the trees there, or one woman tells another what to do when her baby won't take no titty, what is that? God has been served today.

And there will be other days too, for foot-washings and protracted meetings and brush-arbor meetings on the ground, where emotions will run so high that you have to get out of the way sometimes and let the Spirit work, or you might get trampled by them that is crying out and rushing forward in the hope of glory and flailing around on the floor and jerking ever whichaway with their eyes rolled back in their heads. A girl named Lois Ellen Buie died of religion over at Bee, right in the meetinghouse. But nobody tries to stop it, for if you die shouting happy you go to Heaven for sure, and everybody knows it.

Those remaining don't know no such thing, however. You might go to Heaven or you might not, and don't nobody know but Jesus. He likes to keep you in the dark about it too, your only light being that transitory glorious shot of rapture He grants you sometimes, as He must have done to Lois Ellen Buie down on the churchhouse floor at Bee, or in that moment at the end of meeting when all press hands, or when God appears to you wherever you are, out plowing or laid up sick in the bed or at the springhouse or just anyplace, and vouchsafes you a sign.

But who ever thought Ezekiel Bailey would get one? Or that he would have enough sense to know a sign when it came?

It all goes to show you how mysterious are the ways of God Almighty in all His doings, God who would not give Moses Bailey a sign for all his searching and heartbreak and wandering those woods around Cold Spring Holler in prayer unceasing, God who then decided to give Ezekiel one when he wasn't even expecting it or looking for it, one night when he was walking the road home from Cana drunk.

It was a wild, stormy summer night, a night full of black puffy blowing clouds and rushing winds and flashes of lightning that lit up the whole sky. Little squalls of rain would race down the Cana road and then pass over, each one leaving Zeke a more sober man.

He had been over at a house party in Cana where the liquor was pretty good, and after it he had gone down the road with Horse Hicks's fat daughter Ada. Ezekiel was singing, as he often did when he walked back drunk,
“Muskrat, oh muskrat, what makes your head so red?”
when suddenly there came a long, low rumble of thunder that was somehow different from the rest, an ominous slow roll a lot like the sound Ezekiel had heard in his head since childhood.

But now he heard it
outside
him, and it was suddenly as if his head had split and parted and poured Ezekiel himself out in the world like a pail of water, like there was nothing left of him at all.

Ezekiel dropped his bottle and shrieked and clapped his hands over his ears to hold his head together, staggering on the Cana road. The thunder boomed. A huge fork of lightning split the sky, striking so close that Ezekiel felt it race all through his body, electrifying him, knocking him down on the side of the road, where he lay jerking and crying while the thunder rolled on and on, each long rumble greater than the last, shaking the whole earth. Ezekiel peed his pants from terror as he lay trembling in the mud, and then, all of a sudden, things quieted down. The thunder ceased. The rain stopped. The wind stopped. The moon grew visible behind the fast-moving clouds. Ezekiel took his hands down from his face. Nothing happened. He sat up. Then he stood up, wobbly. What a storm, a bodacious storm! Gingerly, Ezekiel retrieved his hat from the mud. He looked around. The whole world was still. It seemed that he had been spared something. Ezekiel slapped his muddy hat against his muddy knee and prepared to walk on home, dead sober now; but as he started out, the words of that song he'd been singing earlier came back unbidden to his mind.
Muskrat, oh muskrat, what makes your head so red?

And then a clap of thunder sounded that was louder than all the previous thunder piled together, a clap of Judgment Day thunder, and though the moon remained mostly obscured by clouds, a wild pale greeny light spread over the earth all around, so that everything,
everything
along the Cana road began to glow softly, and a kind of sparkling light danced along the edges of things. All the familiar sights and objects of the world were transformed utterly—the shining split-rail fence along the side of the road, a glowing stump in the field, three tall pine trees burning with green fire against the dark mountain, the Cana road itself, each pebble on it lit up, so that Zeke stood among stars looking down a starry road that shone on forever, over the gleaming ridge.

And God said, “Don't be a-singing that song, boy.” Then He said, “This un's yer song.” Then God sang,

The minute God had done singing, the light faded off the earth all around, the wind picked back up, and a small steady rain started that would last the rest of the night. Ezekiel walked on home with his face turned up to the misty rain and let it wash down over him like a benediction, singing his song.

Ezekiel Bailey was baptized in the Dismal River the following Sunday by Billy Looney, who took off only his black shoes, wading in fully clothed in his dark suit and starched white shirt. Ezekiel wore dark pants and a white shirt that his Aunt Dot had ironed the night before.

Prior to Ezekiel's baptism, nobody had ever seen him without his overalls. The way he looked on that June morning of his baptism made all the girls suck in their breath, and made some of the women feel a way they had not felt in years. With all that bright hair, Ezekiel looked pretty as an angel, solemn as a judge. He waded out into the river, brogans sticking in the sucky mud, blinded by the morning sun off the water. Billy Looney stood hip-deep in the swirling current and waited for him.