by Lee Smith
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,“Must Jesus bear the cross alone,
And all the world go free?
No, there’s a cross for everyone,
And there’s a cross for me.”
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.
Ezekiel’s heart was about to beat right out of his chest as the words of his gift hymn ran through his mind. Over on the riverbank they were singing “Amazing Grace,” and Ezekiel could hear Aunt Dot’s piercing voice above all the rest. Billy Looney held out one arm in a magisterial gesture in the air and put his other hand on the small of Ezekiel’s back. Ezekiel was so much bigger than Billy Looney that the baptizing looked almost comical. Ezekiel stood like a huge tree in the fast-flowing river, the water dividing and eddying away from him on either side in little swirls. Billy Looney said some words, but Ezekiel didn’t take them in. “I once was lost, but now am found,” they sang on the bank, shading their eyes from the sun blazing off the water.
Still keeping his right arm around the small of Ezekiel’s back, Billy Looney smote him suddenly on the chest with his other hand, said something loud, and Ezekiel fell back into the water. He lost his footing and flailed around for a minute, panicked because he couldn’t swim. He swallowed water—half the river, he would claim later. The white shirt pulled free of his pants and billowed toward the surface, up around his head, and the preacher had to struggle mightily to get him back up. “Was blind but now I see,” the crowd sang lustily yet in the old slow mournful cadence, as Ezekiel waded out spewing and dripping, saved.
He was a changed man from that day on—not that he’d been so bad before, you understand. But now Ezekiel gave up liquor and girls and even dancing. Tom soon grew disgusted with him and told him that he acted like he’d got a poker stuck up his ass, but Ezekiel didn’t even care what Tom thought. He set about the business of being saved as if he’d invented it, praying out loud when he walked the Cana road home, or singing hymns.
Some people said it was like there’d been a feud over Ezekiel’s soul, the Malones versus the Baileys, and the Baileys had won out in spite of him living over here all these years among Malones.
Blood will tell, in the end.
Ezekiel went to meeting every time they cracked the door now, and walked long distances to other meetings. He got too good, in the Malones’ opinion. He started doing things free for other people all the time, such as planting and plowing for old Elder Stump. Finally Clovis grew plumb disgusted with Ezekiel, who continued to eat prodigious amounts of his aunt’s good cooking but never brought home any money. Ezekiel just sat around the Malones’ place at Frog Level like a bump on a log, enjoying the silence in his head, for God had taken away the sound when He gave him his gift song.
Eventually, sensing that his long welcome on Frog Level was worn out, Ezekiel answered the prayers of the childless Elder Stump and his sick wife Garnet by moving into their double cabin at the foot of Cemetery Mountain, overlooking a clear little twisty creek called Grassy Branch.
In exchange for a place to live, Zeke would work the Stumps’ land for them, since the arthuritis was fast crippling up Elder Stump too bad for him to do it. Elder Stump didn’t pay him, but Zeke didn’t mind, since money had never been much to him but a worry and a distraction anyway. He liked Elder Stump too, who would
pray out loud whenever the mood hit him, in the field or anyplace. Elder Stump spent long hours agonizing over his Scripture. (“Do ye reckon, Ezekiel, that a suicide can find a place in Heaven?” To which Ezekiel had no opinion, but he liked to be asked.) And Ezekiel liked the place, a long narrow pretty bottom sliced through by Grassy Branch. The cabin was close enough to the creek that you could hear its gurgle as you fell asleep. A bad road, not more than a trace really, ran along the creek, coming from Cana, heading off in the direction of Oak Hill, but Zeke never went down that road, so he didn’t know where it went exactly. He never had any reason to go anywhere except back and forth from Cana sometimes, or to meeting at the Pisgah church, or to other meetings.
He hardly ever went over to Frog Level to visit his cousins. “I declare, I don’t know what ails that boy,” his Aunt Dot would say. “Stone for a heart.” He would have gone to visit her more if he’d known he was hurting her feelings, or if it had occurred to him, but it didn’t. Zeke liked people when he was with them, but if he wasn’t with them, he didn’t think about them. He didn’t think about anything. He liked to sit on the porch and smoke a cigarette and watch the summer rains sweep down the long bottom toward the house. He liked the smoky purple possum grapes that grew in the old man’s arbor, and the tart taste of the little apples that grew on the hill behind the cabin.
He was tickled by the antics of excitable old Elder Stump, who continued to get more and more riled up over Scripture; and when the Old Pisgah Primitive Baptist Church at Cana, the church that had baptized him, busted up over those same issues which so concerned Elder Stump, Ezekiel joined with him and some others to form another church, a church that would hold to the old ways which Preacher Billy Looney seemed bent on getting away from. Ezekiel did not understand the issues that split, finally, the Primitive Baptists from the Missionary Baptists, but he figured that if Elder Stump was against missionary movements and infant baptism and Sunday schools and church choirs and instruments in the church, why then Ezekiel was against these things too.
The new churchhouse they built was just like the old one, which was the point, except that they used lumber this time instead of logs, and it was closer to Grassy Branch—this side of Cana, on a little point of land called Chicken Rise. The actual name of the new church was Hebron Old Primitive Baptist, a name that Preacher Stump got out of the Bible someplace, but over the years it came to be called simply the Chicken Rise church. By 1880 it had sixty-four members, and Ezekiel had become an elder in it. He did not take his turn at reading the Scriptures, since he couldn’t read, or at praying aloud, since he always got too tongue-tied to do this in the presence of other people, but he lined out the hymns and sang lustily, always experiencing a deep secret thrill when they sang his gift hymn, and he took good care of the graveyard and the church itself, often doing something extra like adding pegs at the back where you could hang your coat, or cleaning out the spring in the nearby woods, or putting up a hitching post out back.
When Garnet Stump died, Ezekiel dug her grave, then helped to lower her coffin down in it. She was light as a feather by the time she died. Old Preacher Stump was bent near double from the arthuritis by then. He used two canes to walk.
But one cold December day after her death, when Ezekiel was out in the yard boiling the wash in the old black kettle, Preacher Stump came out of the cabin and made his tortuous way around to where Ezekiel hunkered by the fire, having fallen into the kind of blank blue reverie he was prone to. Ezekiel Bailey was thirty-nine years old at this time, hale and strong. He had a slow, deliberate gait, a permanent squint, and a child’s sweet heart. Preacher Stump came up behind him and said right out what was on his mind, startling Ezekiel so much that he almost pitched forward into the fire. “Boy,” the old man barked abruptly, “hit’s time you got you a wife.” Ezekiel turned to stare at the little bent-over preacher. He remembered some things. Slowly, a big grin spread across his face.
3
Nonnie and the Melungeon
Zinnia Hulett Talking
I never did know what ailed Nonnie. Don’t know to this day! But she had ever chance for happiness, ever chance in the world, mind you, which it is not given to all of us to have, and stomped ever one of them chances down in the dirt like a bug. It seemed that Nonnie was bent on destruction, from the womb.
Why, the very first thing she ever done was kill Mamma!
I will not forget that night as long as ever I live. It was a cold snowy night in the middle of wintertime. Old Granny Horn had been with us going on a week, Daddy had went up her holler to fetch her when it commenced to snowing so bad, so she’d be here when it come Mamma’s time. Now it had snowed to where you could not even see the boxwood bush by the front steps, nor that big huge rock there by the gate, nor yet the gate itself nor the fence neither. The snow had blowed hither and you to where it had covered up what ought to have been, and made new hills and valleys all around.
I stood on the porch looking out, as I recall, while Mamma moaned inside of the house and Daddy chopped wood out back even though it was the middle of the night. Granny Horn had sent him out there finely, she said he was nought but a bother in the house. I stood still on the porch and looked out at the snow.
It was a new world out there! I didn’t know nothing I saw. And white—Lord, it was white! So white it stayed kindly light all night long, and all the shadders was blue. It was scary. It would be days and days before a soul could get in or out through Flat Gap.
And I looked at that snow and felt glad for all them mason jars of applesauce and peas and such as that which me and Mamma had put up last summer, and for the sweet taters down in the grabbling hole under the porch, and for the shucky-bean leather-britches hanging up in the rafters over the loft, and the chest full of cornmeal—“cornmeal enough to last till the baby is toothing,” Mamma had said.
The first time I heerd about this baby was back last summer when Mamma and me was out in the yard putting up butter beans. We had boiled the jars and lined them out in the sun, and the sun looked real pretty shining off of them. Mamma stirred the butter beans with a wooden paddle and wiped at her face with her apron.
“Honey, you don’t have to stay out here and help me,” she said. “You can go over and play with Mickey if you’ve got a mind to.”
“No, Mamma,” I said then. “I like to help you.” And it was true. For I was the best little girl! And I loved nothing more than helping my mamma, her voice was a song in my ears.
“Zinnia,” she said that day, straightening up, “now I have some news for you. Come wintertime, we will have a baby in this house.”
“Where are we going to get it?” I asked, for I did not know. I had heerd that you found them under a cabbage leaf, or that a great owl brung them.
Mamma smiled real nice and stroked my hair. “God will bring it,” she said, and so I didn’t think nothing of it when she growed so fat and got so tired, not until this neighbor girl come up and tole me after meeting that the baby was in Mamma’s fat stomach, and then I hated the baby, for it had made my sweet mamma grow so big and sick she wouldn’t hardly play with me no more, and she cried all the time.
I had heerd her crying at night and saying, “No, Claude,” and “They is something the matter,” and such as that. He said, “It is God’s will, Effie,” which is just like him, he bowed always to the will of God.
And Mamma bowed always to Daddy’s will, which is how the Bible says it should be. In fact the only time I ever recall Mamma acting any way but dutiful was when that baby was in her, and I say it was all due to the nature of the baby.
For Nonnie had a troublesome nature from a child.
Things was never the same after the day we were out front canning, so that as I stood on the porch that winter night six months later and heerd Mamma screaming out in the house behind me, I was not surprised to look out and see the world all different, all changed before my eyes, nor to feel the wind blow offen the snow and chill me to the bone.
Granny Ho
rn would say something, and then Mamma would scream, and then Granny would say something else, and then Mamma would scream again. Out back I heerd Daddy, chop chop chop. I went through the breezeway to see him. “Daddy,” I said. “Daddy.” I couldn’t see nothing out there but his big dark form in the pale blue light. I could see it when he raised the ax, black against the snow. I heerd it when he brung it down. Chop. Chop. Chop.
“Daddy,” I said, but he kept right on. Chop. Chop. Chop. I stood out there wrapped up in a coverlet, hugging myself. Wasn’t nobody else going to hug me, that was for sure! They was all too busy borning the baby to care about me.
And yet I had done all the work, for Granny Horn had said her old self was wore out, and axed me would I be her extry hands, and like a fool I said yes, so she had set me to fetching and carrying for her, what all she needed—the scissors, the string, the borning quilt, water a-boiling in the big black pot. While I done all this, Mamma just laid up in the bed staring out over her great stomach at me with her dark eyes real big in her thin face.
“Now come here, Zinnia,” she said. This was right before the sun went down. And I went over there, and Mamma smoothed back my hair and touched the mark on my face real gentle, the way she always done, and pulled me down to her, and kissed me.
“Now you be a good girl,” Mamma said, and so I was, and did not cry.
But it galled me standing out there in the freezing cold in the middle of the night, why I could of froze to death for all they knowed, or cared! I was just a little girl. Too little to see what happened next, which was awful. For Mamma had a britches baby that wouldn’t come out, Granny Horn had to cut it out of her. But it looked so awful I didn’t have no sense that it was a baby. Granny slapped it until it cried. Then she flung it down in the cradle that they had there, my cradle, mind you, that Daddy had made for me, and left it squalling while she worked on Mamma, and this gone on all night, them packing every cloth they could find in there, and even using snow finely to try and stop the bleeding, but nothing worked.