More time passed, though I don’t know exactly how long. I lost count of the days. When in church, I gradually noted that the number of people in the pews got smaller. It pretty much come down to Reverend Joy preaching to a smattering of hanger-ons and us, and we had heard it all before at the kitchen table and had even helped him fine-tune it. But we stuck out of loyalty, same as you would if a little kid wanted to read a poem to you they’d wrote and there wasn’t any real good excuse to go somewhere, though next to offering my hand to a water moccasin to bite, listening to someone read a poem is high on my list of things I can’t stand.
The women who had been bringing Reverend Joy food during the week, as it was customary to do for the preacher, stopped delivering it; that little perk we had been taking advantage of dried up like an old persimmon. Too Much Salt in the Fried Chicken Lady-or, as I sometimes thought of her, the Anteater-was the first to go.
After that, it was all downhill.
Her chatter, and that of her nest of hens, turned the flock so against the reverend, including that man we had seen him baptize, that some joined the Methodists, which was a low blow as far as Reverend Joy was concerned.
“They might as well be Catholics,” he said.
The reverend’s sadness began to rub off on us. Terry, who hadn’t been in any hurry to go, had taken more frequent to carrying May Lynn’s can of ashes and her diary to the raft. He’d sit there with the can by his side and the diary in his hands, reading. Jinx would sit on the raft with him, and do some fishing. Whatever she caught, she’d throw back. I had been wearing my good dress a lot even when I didn’t need to, but now I put it away and went back to my overalls. It got so I dreaded Sunday church and Wednesday prayer meeting. Before, all I had to do was sit through it, but now, watching the reverend preach was painful. He seemed smaller in his clothes, like a dwarf that had put on a fat man’s pants and jacket by mistake.
One Sunday evening there was only us and about five other people in the church. Four of them five was old folks who wouldn’t have changed churches if it caught on fire, and one was the local drunk, who liked to come there to sleep sitting up in the back pew next to where Jinx liked to sleep, though now and again he wasn’t above yelling out “Amen” or “Praise the Lord,” which was more than Jinx was willing to do. But unlike Jinx, the drunk did some of his sleeping lying down in the pew, where our girl would kind of hood her eyes and nod sitting up.
Anyway, this Sunday I’m talking about, after the sermon, Reverend Joy was quick to get out from behind the pulpit and over to the door. He stopped and let Mama walk with him down the hill toward the house. Before, he always went to stand in the doorway to shake hands, and we’d go ahead and meet him later. But now, like a dog bored of a trick, he was done, partly because the five listeners was as eager to leave as he was, including the drunk.
Me and Terry and Jinx watched Reverend Joy and Mama walking down the hill toward the house. It was still bright out, it being sometime in early July now, and we stood in the lot, picking up gravel and tossing it at a sweet gum that grew near the church. It wasn’t that we had anything against the sweet gum. It was just something to do.
“We ought to get on with it,” Jinx said. “May Lynn ain’t gonna go to Hollywood and scatter herself.”
“I have been thinking the same thing,” Terry said. “At first I found this comfortable, but less so now. I feel like we have been kidnapped by ourselves. That we are among the lotus-eaters.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Something I read in a book once,” he said. “Suffice to say that once you are in the clutches of the lotus-eaters, it isn’t easy to depart from them. You eat of the lotus and are led to believe everything is pleasant even when it isn’t. We had a plan, and we’ve laid it down. I suppose we should pick it up again. For me, the spell here is broken.”
“I don’t remember eating no lotus,” Jinx said. “Whatever that is.”
“It’s a way of speaking,” Terry said. “It represents a mood. A thought.”
“Why don’t you just say that?” Jinx said. “Why you got to represent it, or some such thing?”
“I’ll work to improve,” Terry said.
That night I lay on my pallet on the floor, dozing off and on, and then at some point I came wide awake. I felt like a hand had been laid on me and was shaking me, and when I woke, May Lynn was walking to the back of the cabin pointing in the direction of the river. She was wearing that same old dress she always wore. Her hair was wet and dripping and there was a sewing machine tied around her feet. She was dragging it behind her like a ball and chain, making no noise whatsoever. She was all swollen up like when we found her. When she got to the rear of the cabin, she turned and looked at me and frowned and jabbed one of her fat fingers at the back cabin wall, really hard. It was all so genuine I could smell the river on her.
Then I really woke up. I looked and there wasn’t no ghost, but I sure felt like May Lynn had been in the room, urging me to get back on that raft and get on down to Gladewater and then Hollywood.
The whole thing made my stomach feel suddenly empty. I was also hot and sticky. I thought I might creep over and get myself some cool buttermilk from the icebox, but when I sat up, now that my eyes had become used to the dark, I noticed the door to the bedroom, where Mama slept, was open.
I got up and tippy-toed so as not to wake Terry, who was sleeping at the rear of the cabin, or Jinx, who slept near the front door. I went and looked in the bedroom. The bed was empty. I went back to the main room and over to the window by the front door. I hesitated a moment, listened to Jinx snore. She sounded like someone had stuffed one of her nostrils with a sock. I moved back the curtain. There was nothing out there to see but heat lightning dancing above the trees and a few fireflies fluttering about, bobbing back and forth like they were being bounced off an invisible wall.
I went back to my pallet and got my shoes I had set by it, put them on, then crept quietly out the front door and closed it gently. I stood there on the porch trying to decide if I should go through with what I was thinking. Finally I decided I was going to do just that, even if in the end it harelipped the pope.
I sidled over to the reverend’s car and looked in the window. The reverend’s blankets and pillow was in the front seat, but he wasn’t with them, and Mama wasn’t there, which was a relief, but it wasn’t a deep kind of relief, because I still didn’t know where neither one of them was. I don’t exactly know why I was concerned about it, but I was. I didn’t like to imagine Mama would be with Reverend Joy, at least in the way I was thinking. I guess she had the right to some kind of happiness, but it still bothered me, and I suppose it was because I was wanting her and my real father, Brian, to rekindle things, so we’d be some kind of family.
I decided it was best not to know what they was doing. I started back for the house. Then I heard talking. It was coming from the rear of the cabin, so I went carefully along the side of it. When I got to the edge of the back wall, I realized the sound was not as near as I thought, but because of the slope of the hill, and the way it had a horseshoe sort of bend in it, voices were coming up from down there. The words wasn’t entirely clear, but I could tell the voices belonged to Mama and Reverend Joy.
I skulked down the hill, feeling like a thief with a baby under my arm and a hot pot of water and some salt and pepper waiting, and made my way through the cover of trees scattered here and there. I came to where the hill had a bit of a lift, and then another drop-off. I could really hear them good now. I sat down there on the edge of that drop-off because I could see them from there, too. It was just shapes I could see, but it was easy to recognize the shapes and voices. They was down by the water, sitting on the raft, talking. It was a rotten thing to do, but I sat down and listened.
It was just talk at first, and I don’t remember much of the early stuff. Mostly it was the Reverend Joy doing the talking, about this and that, but there was something about his tone that made me feel like he had something wild caught inside his head and was trying to sneak up on it and let it loose without getting bit.
He said, “I don’t know that I have actually been called to preach.”
“God called you?” Mama said.
“I thought so. I really did. But now I’m less certain. I am beginning to think I called myself.”
“You know why your church members are leaving, don’t you?” Mama said.
“I do.”
“And so do I. But instead of us leaving, instead of making it easy for you, we’ve stayed. We’re at fault here. If we leave, things will go back the way they were.”
“It’s all right.”
“No,” Mama said. “No, it’s not. Tomorrow we are going to load up and go on down the river.”
“It’s too late for that, Helen,” he said. “What’s done is done.”
“Maybe not,” she said.
I could see the reverend’s arm move now and again, and then there would be a little plop in the water. I came to know he had a little pile of rocks with him, picked up on the way down, I figured, and he was chunking them into the water. He finished off the last of them and quit chunking. They both sat looking out at the dark river.
“You never told me why you were going down the river in the first place,” he said.
Mama thought for a long time before she spoke. “I’m on the run from my husband, and the children are trying to get out to Hollywood.”
“California?”
“Yes,” she said, and then she told him the whole dang thing, except about the money and May Lynn being with us. She left that part out. I’m not sure why, but she did, and I was glad. But she told him near everything else. Even told him about Brian and her pregnancy, and how me and Don didn’t get along, and how he hit her and me. She said some bad things about Gene, and so on. It surprised me she told him about the pregnancy part, marrying Don on the downslide, because she hadn’t told me any of that until recent, and here she was sharing it with some fellow she had only known for a little while.
When she finished, she said, “And now you know what kind of woman I am.”
“Before you start feeling bad about your existence, you should know something about mine,” he said. “I am a murderer.”
I was so startled I stood up, and then sat back down.
“Surely not,” Mama said.
“Not by my own hand,” he said. “But a murderer just the same. When I was a teenager I stole a man’s rifle. It wasn’t much of a rifle, but it was a theft. I was seen in the area where the rifle was stolen, and was questioned. I blamed it on a colored boy I knew. We had grown up fishing the river together, playing together. We had a big tree where we played, a great oak that overhung the river. We would go there to jump from limbs into the water and swim.”
It was exactly the same thing me and Jinx and Terry and May Lynn used to do. It was odd to think he had been a kid, just like us, doing the same thing we did for fun.
“One time,” he continued, “the water was running swift from a big rain, and I jumped in and it was too strong for me. Jaren, that was his name, leaped in there after me, grabbed me, and fought that current. We both near drowned, but he stayed with it long after I had tuckered out. He pulled me out of the river. This very river. The Sabine. Saved my life. I told him then and there that I owed him my life, and that I would stand by him forever. And then this thing with the rifle came up.
“I had seen the old man prop it against his porch when I was walking by on my way to the fishing hole, where I was going to meet Jaren. Well, I can’t explain it other than the devil was talking directly at me, but it came to me that I could just walk up on that empty porch, take hold of that rifle before he knew it was missing, and run off. And that’s what I did. I took it home and hid it in our barn.
“Thing was, though, the old man noticed it missing immediately, and next thing I know the sheriff was at my door. The old man had seen me coming up the road, and he told the sheriff, and the sheriff asked me if I had stolen the rifle. I told him no. I told him I wouldn’t steal, but I had seen Jaren going up that road ahead of me, and said he was known to be a thief, which wasn’t true. But I told him that because the hot breath of the law was on my neck. They went and got Jaren, and even though they couldn’t find the rifle, their blood was up. If it had been me they had, even if they had the rifle I stole, I’d have gone to court and maybe to jail. But Jaren, being colored, well, it was like a coon hunt.
“They got him and took him out in the woods, and they castrated him and chained him to a stump and poured pitch all over him and set him on fire. I heard them bragging about it down by the general store. They was bragging on how long he screamed and how loud, and how it all smelled. They was proud of themselves.
“I went out to where they said they had burned him. I could smell that cooked meat before I could see him. All that was left of him was a dark shape with bones sticking out of it. Animals had been at him. I was going to bury him, and had even brought a shovel with me, but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t stand it. I went over and lay down in the woods and just passed out asleep. Then I heard a noise and woke up. I looked out from the trees and saw a wagon pulled by a couple of mules. There was a man and a woman in the wagon, and I knew who they were right off. I had eaten dinner at their table more than once. It was Jaren’s parents. And all the time they were there, his mother was moaning and crying and yelling to the sky. The man got out of the wagon with a blanket and laid it on the ground, and he got that body free and stretched it out on the blanket, and rolled the sides of the blanket over what was left of Jaren, and carried and put him in the back of the wagon. When Jaren’s father finished, he and his clothes were covered in char from Jaren’s body.
“Jaren’s mama climbed back there with the body, and his daddy clucked the mules up, and they started off. I could hear his mama yelling and carrying on long after they were out of my sight. I got sick and threw up, and could hardly walk, but finally I went and got the rifle, determined I was going to tell the law I had taken it, but then I thought, what does it matter now? They’ve killed Jaren. And I’d be incarcerated. I was a coward. I took the rifle down to the river, by the oak tree where Jaren had saved me from drowning, and threw it in the water. I stayed quiet about what happened, and now and again I would hear those men laugh about the time they burned a nigger, and how they had shown that thief a thing or two. Jaren wasn’t even a person to them. He was a thing. Castrating him wasn’t any different to them than castrating a hog, and burning him wasn’t any different than setting fire to a stump. I never told anyone until now what really happened. One day, that memory was haunting me like a ghost, and I came to the conclusion that God, to help me repent, had called upon me to spread his word. Now I think my own guilt might have been talking to me.”
“Oh, Jack.”
“Yes. Oh, Jack.”
“How old were you when this happened?”
“I was thirteen, but age doesn’t matter. I knew better. I sold him out for something he didn’t do to keep from being tagged with the deed myself. They didn’t question him. They didn’t find the rifle on him. They just killed him. I always wondered if the last thing they told him was that they knew he had taken that rifle because I told them so.”
“You poor man,” Mama said.
“Me? Goodness, no. Me? Why, I’m the scum of the earth. I have murder on my hands, and I tried to absolve it by preaching. And now I know I wasn’t even called. I called myself. And I’m not really any different, not at the core. That little colored girl, Jinx. She’s just as smart and good as she can be, and I guess I thought I could make up for one evil deed by saving her soul so she wouldn’t go to hell. But it’s me that’s going to hell, not her. It’s me that belongs with the devil.”
I understood then that what I thought was discomfort about Jinx being colored wasn’t Reverend Joy’s problem at all. He was toting around a sack of guilt, and in some way, she reminded him of it.
Frogs bleated. Something splashed out on the water.
“I told you my sins,” Mama said. “I’m not clean, either.”
“You haven’t done anything of consequence but leave an abusive husband and strike out down the river with your child. My sin is heavy as the world and dark as the deepest shadow in hell.”
It was a big statement from the reverend and sounded like a line out of a book, but it hit me like a fist between the eyes. Compared to him, Mama and me and my friends was all doing pretty good when it came to any kind of measurement of sin. What scared me then was what I figure makes some people religious. The sudden understanding that maybe there isn’t any measurement, and that it’s all up to us to decide. And no matter what you do, it only matters if you get caught, or you can live with yourself and the choices you make. It was a kind of revelation.
Thinking on that made me feel cold and empty and alone.
“You were a boy,” Mama said to Reverend Joy. “You did something wrong. You stole and you told a horrible lie, but you were young and frightened. It’s not an excuse, but it is a reason.”
“Sounds like an excuse to me,” he said. “I was evil.”
“If that’s true, you’ve shown the evil has been cleansed. You have been saved, Jack. You have saved others. You’ve been baptized, of course, and therefore you have been redeemed. You’re a good preacher.”
“Good or bad, I’m done now. There’s nothing left for me here. I don’t deserve to ask it, but I’m asking you. Can I go with you downriver? Away from here? I don’t know where I’ll go in the end, but away from here. Will you have me with you?”
“I suppose it’s up to the children, at least to some extent,” Mama said. “They will have to be asked. Frankly, I’m uncertain what it is I want to do next. But I suppose whatever it is I’ll first have to go downriver.”
“What about your first love-the man in Gladewater?”
“I don’t know,” Mama said. “That was a long time ago. The idea of him and what we had got me out of bed and on the raft, but I don’t know it’s such a good idea to dig up the past like an old grave. What’s in it might stink.”
I hadn’t thought about that. Hadn’t considered that Mama and Brian would meet and things wouldn’t go back to where they were some seventeen years ago, that we wouldn’t be just one big happy family. It was another one of those revelations, and I didn’t like it. Basking in ignorance has much to be said for it.
“Will you have to tell the children what I have done?” he said. “Should I?”
“I suppose not,” Mama said. “Another time, maybe, if you want to get it off your chest. But there isn’t any going back in time, for me or for you. We got to wear our crowns of thorns. We can talk all we want, but we can’t take them off.”
“My thorns are sharper,” he said, “but I suppose that is as it should be. I’m sick to death with the memory, and I wanted you to know. Somehow, telling you makes me feel better. Not about what I done, but it helps me bear it. I hope I haven’t handed you a burden.”
“Nothing I can’t carry,” Mama said.
“I appreciate that, Helen. I really do. Shall we leave tomorrow? I have to resign my church, which I might as well anyway. It doesn’t mean I have to actually write out a resignation letter. I just need to go. It does no good to preach to the wind. I have to leave the cabin. It’s given to the preacher to use, and I won’t be the preacher anymore.”
“All right, then,” she said. “We can load the raft tomorrow morning. Then we can leave.”
I saw Mama take the reverend’s head in her hands, and their shadows mixed. I knew she was kissing him. More and more I realized I didn’t know Mama at all.
They talked awhile, and held hands, and the Reverend Jack Joy even cried. She put her arms around him, and they leaned together and kissed again, and it was real kissing, what Jinx calls smackie-mouth.
I didn’t want to see no more of it, so I got up and sneaked back into the house and onto my pallet, lay there with my mind full now of Jaren and his last moments, burning up, chained to a stump, all for a lie. And then I had to think about Mama, and how she was more than I knew as a person, and that she and the reverend was down there on the raft, kissing, and maybe more. I couldn’t find any way to lose the thoughts, or to get hold of them.
Wasn’t long after I laid down that the door opened, and I seen Mama’s shape in the frame, and behind and above her, I seen more heat lightning dancing across the sky. Also behind her, I saw Reverend Joy heading toward his car. Then Mama eased the door closed and moved noiselessly to the bedroom.
In spite of all that was bothering me, I eventually nodded off.
My sleep was soon spoiled by the sound of lumber splitting. I sat bolt upright, and so did everyone else in the house, cause the door had been kicked back and broken apart; there was two hat-wearing shapes in the doorway. They brought with them the smell of liquor and sweat. One of them was holding a flashlight. It was shining across the room, right on my face, and it was blinding me. Jinx moved on the floor, said something in surprise, and one of the shapes kicked her hard enough she let out her air and was knocked tumbling. She twitched just enough that I knew she wasn’t knocked out.
Mama came into the room instantly, and when she did, one of the shapes quick-stepped toward her. A hand struck out, and she went down with a scream.
“Stop it, damn it,” I said, coming off my pallet and to my feet.
“Unladylike as always,” said a familiar voice. “You best sit back down before I hit you, Sue Ellen.”
The flashlight beam that was resting on me hopped around the room. I couldn’t help but look where it went. It came to rest on Terry’s pallet, where he was sitting up.
The voice said, “There’s the sissy.”
“Where’s the damn preacher?” said the other man. I recognized that voice, too.
After a moment, both shapes moved deeper into the room. Then one of them spotted a lantern with the flashlight, and the lantern got lit. The lamp lighter was that one-eyed Constable Sy, and the other one, the kicker and hitter, was the man I had always known as Uncle Gene.