The Truest Pleasure (15 page)

That was when I thought of the words from the Bible about the Ascension. “While they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight. And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold two men stood by them in white apparel, which said, Ye men of Gallilee why stand ye gazing up into heaven?”

It was the words “while they beheld, he was taken up, and a cloud received him out of their sight” that struck me so deep. It was like I was looking up at that cloud. The cloud appeared at the top of the ridge, which was at the tip of the tall hemlock, which was rooted right in the river. It was almost like I could reach up and touch the cloud. All the trees pointed toward it. The sky around the cloud was blue, on and on, deeper and deeper.

The air felt haunted around and above me. And it was like there was many dimensions in the air. “He was taken up, and a cloud received him out of their sight,” I said again. The words sparkled like the river. They shined and soared and lifted me past the hemlocks and pine trees, past the rock cliffs and trees on top of the ridge. I felt I was rising above the river, and everything below was just shadows. I felt lighter than a thought, and the mountains was nothing but shade, waves of shade. The cloud floated alone and blinding. It was white-hot and sweet as the light in sugar. The air was so bright it was almost black inside and behind. I felt took up in its shining breadth.

“A cloud received him out of their sight,” I said. As I walked back up the river I repeated the words, and the woods along the bank felt different. The woods was brighter, and the river repeated the words over and over like a poem it couldn't forget.

When I was young I was always falling in love with a word, or phrase, with a particular image or sentence. Pa had a big dictionary he bought down in Augusta one time when he took honey and hams to trade. My favorite thing sometimes
was to read in the fat Webster's, and make lists of words and facts. Sometimes I would read a passage and couldn't get it out of my mind. The color and strangeness of a word would trigger a feeling, and I would go through Pa's books for some mention of it. The name or phrase would have a sweetness that stayed with me. I couldn't stop saying it, and I couldn't get it off my mind. I looked through the catalogue of the American Book Company for more books about the subject. The sweetness stayed with me while I scrubbed and cooked, walked to the mailbox, or laid sleepless at night.

One time I fell in love with the description of the Transfiguration in the book of Mark, “And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow.” The words kept coming back to me with a peculiar air, as if I was hearing them for the first time. Maybe it was the combination of “shining” and the purity of the snow. I repeated the words to myself for weeks, and studied the Gospels, finding other versions of the description. But no other pattern of words had the same effect. Gradually their power wore off, and I said the words less and less. But I still recall that sentence with pleasure, the way you remember something you have been in love with. The words had a soft blue glow. But how “white as snow” become blue in my mind I can't recall.

Another time I got interested in things about Egypt, after seeing a picture of the pyramids in a magazine. I read everything I could find about that place and time. I read about the Sphinx and about mummies, and about hieroglyphs. Egypt seemed a vast and silent kingdom. I read about the river, about birds, and about the pharaoh's body embalmed in oils and spices. I thought
about how they worshipped the sun, and thought the earth was a god that died and new crops and flowers growed out of his chest the next year. They thought the pharaoh and the sun and their country's law was the same thing. That Egypt was different from the one described in the Bible.

But everything quiets down eventually. A month after Billy John Jarvis went back to South Carolina we felt the need of another meeting. Joe called a service in his house. We gathered and sung hymns and prayed. But the spark wasn't there without a preacher. With just family and neighbors it never did take off. We needed a force from outside. Things went back to normal.

One night when we set down to supper I found myself looking at Tom more than I had in a long time. Usually we avoided noticing each other. I didn't say anything to him, but I kept looking at his strong shoulders and neck. And he seemed to be looking at me more than usual. Every time my eyes caught his he turned away, or I glanced away. We hadn't talked, except about things that didn't matter, for months. His face was reddened from the wind, and it seemed to get redder while he set at the table.

Later he set by the fire while Pa read the paper. Tom hardly ever looked at the newspaper hisself. Sometimes he would skim the headlines or study an article on farm prices in one of the papers we took. But after a day of work and a big supper it was hard for him to get concerned with what was happening far away.

“If they is anything important you-all will tell me,” he once said. And I reckon it was true. If there was news about Cuba or
the Philippines, we talked about it. When the president was shot Pa heard it at the store and come back and told us long before we saw it in the Greenville paper which always come a day late.

“Now if they was a paper that would tell what the weather is to be tomorrow . . .” he once said.

I saw Tom lift the shoes he had took off and place them by the hearth. He did that every night because he thought the last heat from the fire helped dry them out. Since the fire died down in the night they would be cold by morning, but I guess it was the natural place for him to put his shoes. They always smelled a little. Some nights I set them away while I rocked Jewel. But before I went to bed I put the shoes back on the hearth.

I took a lamp to the bedroom and started brushing my hair in front of the mirror. Jewel was asleep. I stood before the dresser and made slow strokes through my long hair. The door was partly open, and Tom had to pass the door to reach the ladder to the loft. I unbuttoned the top of my gown two or three buttons.

As Tom passed he paused to look in. He was usually not up that late. I did not turn but looked back at him. He is my husband, I thought. He is
my
husband. We are one flesh. It is our worship to be fruitful and multiply. All the harsh things built up between us begun to melt away. There was nothing to keep me from him. He started through the doorway and I went to him. He closed the door and started unbuttoning my gown. I dropped the brush and blowed out the lamp. It was like that night was our true honeymoon.

As I laid with Tom in the dark I kept thinking of passages from The Song of Solomon. I had been reading them in the
Bible the day before. As I rolled and turned I heard in my mind, “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden,
that
the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.”

And later as we loved I heard a voice say, “I
am
my beloved's, and his desire
is
toward me.” And I felt I was right, and in the right place, even as I did at the revival services. And I thought how the thrill of loving was almost the same as communion with the Spirit and the thrill of solitude by the river, but I didn't understand how it could be. It was a mystery.

Our second child, a boy, was born in 1902. I named him Moody after the great evangelist. I was afraid Tom would protest, but he didn't. He was agreeable to most everything I suggested. It was like we had made a completely new beginning. It was as if we did everything for the first time, doing it right and better. We begun to discover what was really good about each other.

That year I was too busy with the children and with housework to go to revival meetings. And as I said earlier, the spirit of the meetings appeared to have left the community. Joe and Pa liked to talk about the Holiness services when they got together, and about the preachers whose books and pamphlets they was reading. And sometimes I joined in when Tom wasn't around. But as we worked or talked around the fire we sounded like elderly veterans of the spiritual awakening. We got sentimental about gone times and past glories. The last revival had been little more than a year before, but it felt like something in history.

“Preacher De Haan says if you're baptized with fire you can't fall from grace,” Pa said. “At his meeting in Atlanta seven hundred people had the baptism of fire.”

“That's the s-s-s-same as sanctified,” Joe said.

“Them with the baptism are the same as saints, De Haan says.”

“Nobody is a saint,” I said. “At least I never met one.”

Tom and me without saying it decided to let bygones be bygones. I reckon as long as we just talked about meetings it didn't matter. I didn't say anything to him about it. I felt a girl again, falling in love again, but wiser and more alert.

Through the late summer, while I was nursing the baby, and in the harvest months when we had extra dollars from the sale of cider and molasses, firewood and apples, our life together was better than it had ever been. I saw how ignorant I had been before. In our first year everything had been new and awkward. I didn't know how awkward I had been until I looked back on it.

That fall we reached a whole new stage in our loving. Our routines was at once habits and explorations. It was like we took long walks in bed while Jewel and the baby slept. Before, lovemaking had been something our flesh did, only slightly connected to us as people. Now we met, at least at times, as the people we truly was. Tom was strong and steady, his mind always on the goal, on the long work to be done. I was the distracted one, passionate and withdrawn by turns, you might say wild sometimes, too excited to think or remember later.

But more than the fullness of the new way we give ourselves, it was the alertness to moods and intentions of each other that made a difference. It was like we had been give an
extra sense for knowing what the other felt. We knowed how to do the right things, even when we wouldn't have guessed it beforehand. It was as if we was in a new dispensation.

Christmas that year was the best I had ever seen. A week before Christmas we climbed up on the pasture hill, beyond the Sunset Rock, and gathered turkey's paw and holly to place over the mantel. Tom took Pa's gun and shot down mistletoe from a tree by the river. We cut a cedar along the fence above the spring and I trimmed it with chains of colored paper and popcorn. The house was filled with the smell of cedar and pine limbs on the mantel with the holly. Pine makes me think of the spices and perfumes of the Wise Men, of angels in the starry night. At Christmas it's like this troubled world becomes a part of eternity. Candles and carols and smells have a hush and thrill. The house smells of cinnamon and nutmeg. I won't forget that Christmas.

“We never did hardly celebrate Christmas at home,” Tom said. “We didn't have no money and I reckon Ma didn't feel like celebrating after the war when Pa didn't come back.” It was the most he ever talked about his family. If you asked, he would never answer questions.

The day after New Year's there was to be a pounding for the Brights down on the Turnpike. They was a large family that had moved into the community a few years before. They always seemed starved and sickly. They was the kind of people that just can't make a go of it. No matter what they try or who helps them their luck never gets any better. In the fall they had caught typhoid fever, three of the children, and the mother, who had died.

The preacher had told the congregation the straits the Brights was in. And it was agreed that one Sunday afternoon in January the members of the church would gather at their house for a pounding. Everybody was to bring a pound of something: coffee, sugar, tea, butter. Tom was going to bring a gallon of molasses. He was taking it hisself since he didn't want me and the children where they had had typhoid. But I told him if he was going I was going too, and taking three pints of foxgrape jelly also. He went out to hitch up without saying any more, and when he was done I come out with a basket on one arm and a box in the other.

“What's all that?” Tom said.

“These people are in need and I want to help,” I said.

The basket held several jars of preserves and jelly, a cake, a canister of coffee, and two dozen eggs. In the box I had packed
sheets and pillowcases, and some clothes I hadn't wore in a long time for the oldest girl. Tom glanced in the box.

“We can't give them everything,” he said. “They're not kin.”

“They need it more than we do,” I said.

“It will look like we're putting on airs,” he said.

“I'll take it in the back door so nobody will see,” I said.

“I'm not going,” Tom said. “I won't look like a rich fool.”

He stomped into the house and never come out. I waited a few minutes, and went to get Pa to drive me. Tom set by the fire holding Jewel. He was so mad he just looked into the flames.

But that was only the beginning of his fury. Next day Florrie told him I had give fifteen dollars of his money to the Brights. It was like Florrie to tell him that. Though she was my sister she never had anything good to say about me. Sometimes we could be friendly and work together like we did as girls. But mostly she didn't approve of me. She didn't approve of going to revivals, and she didn't approve of Joe and Lily either.

But Florrie was wrong about the money. Ten of the dollars I give was mine, and five of it was Pa's. I had saved the dollars by selling eggs before I was married, and from selling a calf to Jimmy Jenkins. I kept my money in the bottom of my jewelry case and Tom didn't know a thing about it. And I decided I wouldn't tell him. If he wanted to act so stingy and listen to Florrie behind my back he didn't deserve to know the truth of it.

Now the strange thing was that Tom could be as generous as anybody if he was asked in the right way. There is a giving spirit in everybody if they will let it out. People enjoy helping others. There is nothing more thrilling than giving to another
human being, because when we give we conquer our fear. To share makes us feel strong and part of the community.