Welcome to Braggsville (36 page)

No man, he says, can carry another man's cross. You may think
you can, but you only delay their journey. If God has deemed that you must walk three days and three nights to reach your destination, but you try to hitchhike, the car will break down. Try he pronounces as trah. Will he pronounces as wheel. You'll find your goal is farther than you thought.

Listen to the deacon. You all hear him now? croons the reverend. Let him do his piece.

The deacon turns his back to the crowd, wraps the chain around his wrist, and begins heaving like a longshoreman, breathing in, leaning on the right foot as he pulls, exhaling on the left as he bends forward and feeds more chain through his palms. The womenfolk tap their menfolk big and little. The deacon waves them back each time, stopping only when a four-year-old boy pulls on his jacket.

Son, I know your momma raised you right, and she might not have even been the one to send you out here. You maybe came on your own, but for once and all—he scanned the room, giving each an eyeful—leave me to my work. Mrs. Patterson, I don't come downtown and make your pies, good thing, I know. Brother Hal, I don't till your field. He looked back at the kid, And, Ricky Foldercap, young man, I don't draw in your coloring book. Okay?

You can, says Ricky, and everyone laughs.

You'll know when it's time. Lord, bless this boy. The deacon scans the room. He already has, has he not? He is merciful, is he not?

D'aron feels the Amen! in his chest, it could shake the barnacles loose.

Run on back to your momma. The deacon winks at little Ricky and says, Thank you for the break.

The congregation laughs again, so loud, rushing out the sound of the chain against the steps. Woodbridge is barely ten feet into the hall, and has another ten to reach the pulpit when the anchor comes buckling through the doorway. It is rusty and flaking, encrusted with a colony of oddities collected during its obviously long sojourn, and
packs a sneaky reek, too, bearing in tow the briny odor of Port Savannah and a smidge of the rotten smell, that sickly sweet tang of decay haunting Tollenridge marsh, and lastly, a sniff of haint not unlike the Oconee eddies, those brown swirls downriver from the mill, where the refuse and metal filings caught in the whorl stain the sides of algae-slick rocks. It smells like all those places D'aron hates, and the deacon's shortened strides—out of exhaustion, or wary of knocking over the pulpit, he doesn't know—make it appear an unseemly act, one to be performed under cover of night.

The anchor an offering before the pulpit, deacon and preacher both lay hands on it and murmur, eyes closed, one even making the gestures reserved for rebuking demons, fingers spread, palm thrust forward. After a few moments they appear satisfied. The preacher returns to the dais and fans himself.

Deacon Woodbridge clears his throat. Is it a coincidence that the anchor figures a cross? Take a look. Look through the dirt and the grime, the barnacles and rust. See what it was and what it can do. He motions with his hand as if cleaning a window—small—Look through the aging and see it as God sees you. Can you see it now? Can you see how the anchor figures a cross? He points to the cross on the wall and everyone nods.

Is that a coincidence? I see some of you nodding. Do you believe in coincidence? He is whispering now. Then you are in the wrong place. Louder, he is now. I believe in God, and God don't make coincidences. Coincidence! Louder yet. That's what we say when we don't want to give Him on High credit, or we need to deny the truths that face us, when the writing is on the wall and we do not want to read it. It is a coincidence, we say. But no. This is no coincidence that the anchor figures the cross. Too many of you think that God is like that energy drink everyone is drinking in the cities. He points around the room with an index knotted by arthritis. Gives you wings, you think. You see these angels and want to fly. But you're not for that in this
life. In this life, Jesus is like this anchor, he grounds you. See, you've been thinking, I'll fly over and do this and that, and fly back over to church on Sunday for a refill. It's not like that.

He pulls a bag from behind the pulpit and dumps it on the floor. Cigarettes, a fifth of dark liquor, and what appears to be a men's magazine, judging from the cover, fall at his feet. Gulps and gasps from menfolk as the little ones' eyes are covered and the big ones' slack jaws are smacked. He snaps his fingers, and little Ricky places one of the items in each far corner of the church, out of the deacon's reach. The deacon walks first in one direction, then the other, stopped each time by the chain.

Your battle is with yourself. That's why you need Him. There was no Cain and Abel.

A ripple of confusion passes across the congregation, flurries and snatches of protest take flight like startled pheasants.

Listen! Not, listen, but Listen! Once only. The voice cannot, will not, be denied. Even the preacher touches his heart and crosses himself. The deacon speaks, but is no longer the speaker, is no more a speaker than a speaker is a record, than that record is a musician, than that musician is any more than a speaker for Him than whom none greater can be imagined.

They were one man, Cain and Abel. One man. That's called symbol, allegory, metaphor. Metaphor means to carry. Like we each carry in us Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau. Abel speaks for Jesus. He is this anchor, keeps us on track and out of harm's way, keeps us sane and safe. And what do we want to do with that anchor? What do we want to do come Sunday night, or Monday night, or Tuesday night, or for you all with long memories, last Saturday night at Bobby Ray Johnston's? That is right, we cut it loose. That's right! We cut it loose, the way Cain laid out Abel. But it is Cain who has to die. Hear that. Cain must die for us to live forever. Problem is Cain is just too much
fun. Never yet heard of some fellas running out Friday night to raise some Abel.

Laughter.

Oh yes, laugh. When you do, I know you heard. This week, head out there and raise some Abel.

Following the sermon, a procession to the river, the preacher in the lead, trailed by flowing white robes, a pageant of bellflowers to be submerged one by one and anointed, as John did for Jesus, as someone certainly did for John. Gentle, so gentle they are, cradling Nana's head like two clumsy children entrusted with a precious egg. She stands, her eyes sparkle, and D'aron is possessed by a rush, a true possession it feels—Alleluia!—as he scurries toward her, halting as she clears the water. The eyes aglow, yes, but her body is the same, and as she struggles to pilot it ashore, he wants to look away—but cannot—from the new sheer skin she wears, from the low orbs at midrib—staring at the wild tangle beneath. In her grasp, in her clutches, she smells still sickly, only now wet on top of it, and her hands frisk him, playing along his spine as if in search of the songs of youth. And after the baptism a ritual he was not allowed to witness but imagined all the more, knowing as he did the sounds of slaughter and recognizing, even at that pitch, Nana's voice.

He didn't sleep well for three days afterward. When he complained of it, Nana blessed him with juniper oil and warned him to never go back there alone.

Toward the end his nana suffered olfactory illusions, the doctors had a word for that, but it made her sound mentally deranged. (Maybe Candice wasn't so wrong to challenge Hirschfield for referring to Louis as the deceased.) Nana was always smelling things that weren't there—fire, and charred wood, and burning grass, and blood. Clouds, she once claimed. For years, D'aron admitted it to no one, but he thought that if kids and old people truly were closer
to the Lord, maybe she did smell something. He mentioned it to no one except Charlie early the morning of the Incident, expecting him to understand, but he only shrugged. Why are you telling me now? Daron shrugged back. He'd been smelling something burning since dawn, but didn't say it. Later there was smoke on the horizon and he figured that was it, someone burning trash.

As one professor would have said, It's just the mind playing tricks on us to rationalize what it can't explain. It's how religion started.

It was all a trick of the mind. Of course. He couldn't be remembering it right.

Couldn't be.

Couldn't be.

All that chatter rattling about the Holler was hearsay, not a lick true, but as he climbed Mosby Ridge and descended south into the shallow vale, he would have preferred anything to what he was facing, setting off in the opposite direction of the meadow he'd run as a child and over the rise that separated Smiths from Houstons, town to the west clear as day, the scattered trailers to the east obscured as always by the obstinate thicket that brooked not even wind, then bearing due north to descend into the Holler.

Nope, none of the chatter was true, but he plumbed his memory nonetheless, sounding the words out until the rhythm rang right, and he knew for certain it was two steps back and one to the right before entering the Holler at night.

T
hrough a photo-encrusted hall, through a large industrial kitchen, shiny and serrated, through silver double doors smudged with fingerprints, and at last into a smaller kitchen, like the kitchen in someone's home, a kitchen appointed with a car key hook fashioned from burned wood, those clay trivets every fifth grader made for Mother's Day, and needlepoint samplers on the wall:
GOD BLESS THIS HOME
over the mantel and sink,
A WAIST IS A TERRIBLE THING TO MIND
over the window,
HAPPINESS IS HOMEMADE
over the swinging doors, and on the refrigerator a mosaic of magnets advertising local businesses, as well as Lou's Luscious News & Animal Calendar, featuring game in various stages of dress. It was as if Daron had sat in this kitchen all his life, and in a way he had, had he not? Daron, D'aron, Donut Hole, dat Wigga D, Turd Nerd: every few minutes a familiar face passed through, rifled the fridge or the cabinets, grabbed a cookie or a glass of milk, gave him a wave, and called him by a not-so-long-forgotten nickname. Oh, the cookies! How had he forgotten the cookies? He probably could have smelled them from the Holler. If he had, he would have imagined, precisely as it appeared, this kitchen.

O
N HIS TREK INTO THE
H
OLLER
, he had worried he was walking in circles until one faint trail, a line of broken shadow, ended at an unpaved safety-pin turn in a rough road, a hard-cocked elbow of packed and rutted dirt, no normal road because in one direction it stopped short of the last rise before the highway as if it didn't connect to any other roads, and in the other direction it ended at a gate marked
PRIVATE DRIVE
. He could see both from where he stood in the crook of that elbow. At the end of Private Drive, no church. No squat, wooden single-pen building with a simple cross carved into the door. No deacon at anchor. A congregation, though? Yes.

A windmill and a few sheds, a pump house and a short silo, a grain closet and an old dairy, and a soaring barn, majestic even in decay, all facing a broad low hunting lodge with a porch wrapping three-quarters around, and between them a courtyard with a single pole in the center. He vaguely recognized the man who answered the door, but couldn't recall his name. Was it Rob? Whoever it was knew him because he sighed, Finally. Postmaster's got an earache all over for you. Come on in, D'aron.

He was led to a room immediately inside the front door, a room with a desk and a few rows of government-issue metal chairs, and a TV/VCR combo on a wheeled cart like the ones they had in the elementary school media center. In fact, the blackboards on three walls, desk chairs, and flag in the corner made it feel very much like a classroom. Along the walls above the blackboards hung photos of the U.S. presidents, ending with G.W. Bush.

Behind him, a voice said, Why no 'Bama? I know you're thinking it, and I'll tell you it ain't got nothing to do with his race. It's his nationality. He wasn't born here. That's why the Terminator had to get out of politics. There was nowhere left for him to go.

Daron went knock-kneed. Postmaster? What kind of code name was Postmaster? Or so he'd wondered until hearing the man speak.
Harry Jones was indeed the local postmaster. Should he turn around? Pretend he didn't recognize the voice? Make a run for it?

The postmaster placed a kind hand on Daron's shoulder and gently spun him around. Let's talk, Little D.

He motioned for Daron to follow him down the hall, past photos of locals shaking hands and sharing beers with David Duke, Railton Loy, Hal Turner, Tony Perkins, John Tanton, Senator Russell Pearce, Terry Jones, and others. On the hall bookshelf,
The Bell Curve, Who Are We?, Freakonomics, Darwin on Trial, Illegal Is Not a Race—It's a Crime,
Jon Entine's
Taboo,
tracts by James Watson and Charles Murray and a few others. Below that, rows and rows of photo albums. They passed through an industrial kitchen into this smaller one, and now sat at an old oak table under needlepoint samplers and Lou's calendar, a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies between them.

Sure you won't have one? Eatin' one ain't gone doom you to stay here forever. Sure, they all say, Don't eat in the Holler or Gully after dark, but this here's different. These Reebah's.

Daron selected a cookie from the side of the plate closest to Harry and took a small bite. They were as good as he remembered from grade school when Little Harry brought them to class every Valentine's Day. The cinnamon warmed his cheeks and the raisins tickled his tongue.

Harry smiled. The world is changing, D'aron. All we want to do is be prepared. As he explained it, voice quiet and unassuming as when explaining the particulars of certified mail, the majority of crimes were still committed by blacks, with Mexicans a close second, interracial marriage was on the rise, and, as they have already figured out in Arizona, the white race would be a minority by 2020. Michael Hethmon said it best. We're fixing to be a minority-majority country, and there ain't a single example in history of that kind of shit storm ending well. Mind you now, the South was ten-to-one black back in
the day, but we didn't have half the problems. Don't mean that we want to bring back slavery, but we shouldn't be ashamed to say that things are what they are.