The Devil's Dream

by Lee Smith

  “No I ain’t,” she lied to Daddy, flashing her eyes, but we sent for Granny Horn, who found out the truth of it soon enough.

  And then here comes Preacher Cisco Estep, hat in hand, a-knocking on the door.

  “I’ll tell you what’s the truth,” he said to Daddy, when the two of them had set down. “I would send her off someplace if hit was me.”

  “But whar’d she go? She belongs here,” Daddy said real pitiful. His eyes was all red from crying and staying up late.

  “Well now, Claude, think about it,” Preacher Estep said. “If she tried to come to meeting in her condition and unwed, I’d be forced to church her, as ye know. And around here, everybody knows who she is and what she done, and won’t nobody take a Melungeon’s leavings around here neither, not to mention the child. This is the long and short of it,” Preacher Estep said. “But if she was to go somewheres else, say, she might have a chance for a new life. In fact,” Preacher Estep said real forceful, “in fact, Claude, I have got a proposition for you.” Preacher Estep took out a handkerchief and wiped at his big red fleshy nose, that looks like a sweet tater.

  “Well, what is it?” Daddy said without no hope.

  “Well, they is a man I heerd about at the past Association meeting that needs a wife the worst in the world,” Preacher Estep said. “He is in a fair way to come into quite a parcel of land over at Grassy Branch, what is now Preacher Stump’s place, but he don’t have no wife, nor no children to work it. He is a elder in the Chicken Rise church too. So Preacher Stump has let it out to all and evry that he hisself ain’t long fer this world, and he would like to see this feller settled down regular on his land. Hit’s a nice piece of land,” Preacher Estep said, “and I don’t believe this feller is too particular neither.”

  Daddy looked at him. You could tell he was considering it.

  “I wouldn’t see no reason to mention the Melungeon,” Preacher Estep said.

  “Done,” Daddy said.

  And so this is how Nonnie come out smelling like a rose one more time, and got a great prize for being bad. For that land over at Grassy Branch turned out to be among the prettiest I have ever seed, and hit turned out to be a fine big double cabin over there—finer and biggern our own, I might add—and I was further surprised to find that Ezekiel Bailey hisself was not so bad to look at neither. He come out to the wagon grinning when we drove up, and he was just as nice to me as ever he was to that silly Nonnie who done nothing but cry and cry, and he did not even appear to notice my face none. I remarked upon how tight he helt my arm when he helped me down off the wagon, and how much he appeared to like the fried apple pies we had brung them—which I had made!—and I knowed in my heart of hearts that Ezekiel Bailey preferred me over Nonnie. Yet I resolved not to act on this, nor to tell no one, for I would not disappoint Daddy by leaving him, he needs me so.

  Daddy said as much too when me and him was driving back through Flat Gap late that night after leaving Nonnie over on Grassy Branch with old bent-over Preacher Stump and Ezekiel Bailey her husband-to-be.

  It was too dark for me to see good even though the stars was out, because of how the mountains rise up there directly in the gap. It was black as tar in the gap, but I could tell that Daddy was crying, and when he spoke, his voice was irregular. “If I ever lay eyes on him again, I’ll kill him,” Daddy said after a while, meaning the Melungeon. Then after another while, he said, “Well, hit’s just you and me now, ain’t it, Zinnia girl?” and so I took his old work-hard hand and helt it in mine, and so it has been ever since, just me and him, the way it ought to be, ever since that very night when we was riding home through Flat Gap in the pitch-black night, the night so dark I didn’t have no birthmark, and I was just as pretty as Nonnie.

  4

  Nonnie and the Big Talker

  When Nonnie Hulett climbed down off her daddy’s wagon to stand before him at Grassy Branch, Ezekiel Bailey thought she was just about the prettiest thing he had ever seen in his whole life. It made him happy to look at her, and he stood there looking at her for the longest time. Nonnie had tied her dark hair back as severely as possible, but the jolting wagon had loosened it, so that black curls framed her face, red and swollen from crying. When she finally looked up at Ezekiel, her brown eyes had yellow sun-bursts in them, like cat eyes. Nonnie’s eyes reassured Ezekiel somehow. He liked cats, such as Garnet Stump’s old tomcat Henry Boy, laying over there in the sunshine right now. And Zeke knew how to take good care of things—the animals, the house, the church, the land and what grew there. He took good care of everything. Nonnie would be his wife. He would take good care of her too. Slowly, he smiled at her. Nonnie did not smile back. She balled up her handkerchief in her little fist and ground it into her face, crying even harder.

  Zeke did not know what to do then. He turned around to look at old Preacher Stump, up on the porch, for guidance, but Preacher Stump just shrugged and puffed on one of his asthma cigarettes, peering down at them all through the smoke. It looked like trouble to him. Meantime Nonnie’s grim-faced daddy was unloading her things from the wagon without a word, box after box, leaving them piled in the yard. She sure had a lot of things. Her ugly sister had presented Ezekiel with a little bag of fried pies which he ate automatically, one after the other, watching Nonnie. Ezekiel did not look at the sister, who was poking around the yard and exclaiming over this and that and acting the fool in general. Nonnie sobbed louder and stamped her little foot.

  Preacher Stump sighed. This will be a hard row to hoe, he thought. May be he had made a mistake. May be he should of knowed enough not to meddle with nature, should of knowed to leave well enough alone. If God had wanted Ezekiel to have a wife, may be He would of got him one His Ownself.

  Nonnie’s daddy took off his hat and kissed her and then put his hat on again and got back in the wagon. The ugly sister got back in the wagon too. Nonnie’s daddy slapped the reins and said, “Giddap,” and before you knew it, they were gone around the bend of Grassy Branch and out of sight, stirring up dust which hung for a long long time in the still hot air.

  Nonnie and Ezekiel just stood there. Joe-pye weed and black-eyed Susans bloomed all along the road, bleeding hearts by the gate. Little yellow butterflies flew everywhere.

  Preacher Stump felt old and foolish, surveying this scene from his porch. It was not a thing like the time when Garnet had come to him, a young girl not yet sixteen, full-figured and trembling, with a look on her face that he knew. Bent double, barely breathing, Preacher Stump could see her still, his bride of sixty years before, could feel a stirring of the heavy passion he felt then. He had to go lay down. Without a word he turned and disappeared through the open door, leaving Ezekiel Bailey and Nonnie Hulett standing out in the sun in the heat of the day like their feet had growed roots and planted them there at Grassy Branch. It was August 10, 1880.

  For about a week, Nonnie Hulett continued to cry. She tried to cook, and do the chores, for she was a good girl and knew she had done wrong and knew that this was to be her lot; but to her surprise, Ezekiel would not let her do much, coming up behind her to take the skillet out of her hand, to carry the pail of water, to feed the chickens that fluttered around the yard. Nonnie couldn’t get over it. She had never seen a man do such things. Once when Zeke grabbed the broom and was sweeping the porch off himself, Nonnie raised her eyebrows and looked questioningly at old Preacher Stump, who sat wreathed in smoke in his rocking chair, and for the first time, Preacher Stump smiled back at her, his mouth full of black teeth, but then he fell to coughing, and failed to answer the question which she hadn’t really asked.

  Preacher Stump was smoking as many of his asthma cigarettes as he could manage, trying hard to stay alive. Several times lately in a dream he had seen a great golden angel flying down from Heaven like a chicken hawk, swooping down low to get him, but so far Preacher Stump had managed to hold off this angel, for he intended to stay alive long enough to see how things would turn out.

  One time when Zeke had taken the b
ucket from her and set off for the springhouse, Nonnie faced the old man and said, “He don’t talk much, I reckon,” and Preacher Stump said, “No, he don’t.” This was the only question Nonnie ever asked about him, as blue cloudless day after day came and went, and she got used to life on Grassy Branch. Truth to tell, it was a relief to be shut of that bossy Zinnia! Gradually it dawned on Nonnie that she would be the mistress here, and since Ezekiel seemed disposed to spoil her just as much as her father had ever done, she could have her way without working her fingers to the bone like all the other women she’d ever known. Nonnie had time to wash her long hair and sit out in the sun to let it dry, she had time to dream in the slow afternoons while Ezekiel hoed corn and the old man dozed on the porch. Nonnie had time for herself, golden and slow and sweet as the thick honey that came from Ezekiel’s hives up on the mountain behind the house. She kept crying, dedicated to grief, but it grew harder and harder to remember exactly what she was crying about.

  The old man slept on one side of the double cabin, she and Ezekiel on the other side. Ezekiel had his bed tick and she had hers, and her own quilt, and her own two feather pillows that she had brought from home.

  Every night, Ezekiel waited until she had put on her nightdress and taken down her hair and stretched out on the bed tick and closed her eyes before he came into the cabin. Then he entered as quietly as ever he could, yet the whole cabin would shake with his step. While Nonnie feigned sleep, he went to the foot of her bed and left a present there, something he thought was pretty—a piece of crystal quartz he’d found one time up on Cemetery Mountain, a pearl button, cornflowers from the field, an iridescent snakeskin, finally his beloved steelie marble. Nonnie’s presents were lined up on the floor at the foot of her bed. Alone in the cabin, she had to smile in spite of herself, looking at them. She did not know what to make of this big, gentle man. But she was tired of tears, and one day she found herself humming a tune.

  Then finally there came the night when a screech owl woke her. It sounded like the screech owl called her name. Nonnie sat up in bed and looked at Ezekiel, who always slept like a child or a dead man, flat on his back, hands clasped on his chest, breathing audibly. It seemed to Nonnie that he never dreamed; at least he never gave the appearance of dreaming. Moonlight streamed in the open door that night and made a silver path across the cabin floor, right across Ezekiel, who looked like an angel sleeping there.

  Idly, Nonnie held out her hand, so that the moonlight fell upon it too, silvering her whole arm. Then suddenly Nonnie got that powerful feeling she got sometimes, that feeling she had gotten ever since she was a little girl, when all of a sudden she just had to do something—never mind what!—she just had to make something happen.

  Nonnie stood up and took off her nightgown and stepped into the moonlight, looking down at her silver body. Her breasts were large now because of the pregnancy, and her navel stuck out on her firm high belly. She felt like she was bursting right out of her skin. She stood in the moonlight admiring herself, breathing hard, waiting to see exactly what she would do next. Then she walked over to Ezekiel and knelt beside his bed tick and leaned over him, brushing his chest with her hair. The screech owl called out to her again, clear as could be, and even if she couldn’t quite make out what he said, she knew what he meant all right.

  “Wake up,” she said to Ezekiel. She poked him in the side.

  Zeke stirred but did not wake. Even the hair on his chest was silver in the light of the moon.

  “Zeke,” Nonnie said. “Wake up.” She poked him again, harder.

  Zeke opened his eyes and looked at her. “God Almighty,” he said.

  For the first time since her arrival on Grassy Branch, Nonnie started to giggle.

  “Why, looky here,” she said.

  R.C. Bailey, Nonnie’s Melungeon baby, was born on February 14, 1881, about a month after Ezekiel and Nonnie were married in Preacher Stump’s cabin by Dr. Paul Trott, a traveling evangelist on his way to Knoxville. Dr. Paul Trott had red hair and a little red mustache. “Man and wife,” he said. Ezekiel heard him say it. Ezekiel had a wife now. Then Dr. Paul Trott rode off in the rain, and Nonnie kissed Ezekiel, and Preacher Stump died, just like that. He took a little shallow rattling breath, tried to say something, and died. It was like he had put it off to see them wed.

  When folks came to the house for the laying out, they were surprised to find that Ezekiel had such a pretty, pregnant wife. They told it up and down the hollers until they got tired of saying it: “Did you ever feature Ezekiel Bailey wed, now?” and “Whar did she come from?” and “Who do you reckon her people are?” They buried Preacher Stump in the Chicken Rise graveyard not forty feet from the church he had started himself and built with his own hands, and when the first shovelful of red dirt hit the pine coffin, Ezekiel felt as though he too would die; but this feeling passed quickly, as most feelings did with him, and by the time R.C. was born, he had almost forgotten the old man although they named the baby for him, Reese, because the granny woman said they ought to, and so did some people at church. Ezekiel had not known that Preacher Stump had this first name, Reese, or any first name at all.

  Then Nonnie cried because she had wanted to name the baby for her father, so the baby’s name turned out to be Reese Claude Bailey, too much name for such a little baby, and they took to calling him R.C. He was a colicky baby who had a high, thin cry like a cat mewing. Nonnie had been real curious to see whether he would look like Jake Toney or not. R.C. did have curly hair like Jake Toney, but fair skin like Ezekiel Bailey. He wouldn’t sleep at all. One night, sitting up with him by the fire, Nonnie got so tired and so mad that she kicked at the chimbley in disgust, the way she often stamped her little foot, and lo and behold, one of the chimbley rocks fell out as neat as you please, and she saw that there was something stuck in the hole. Nonnie plopped the crying baby down in its cradle and leaned forward to see what she’d found.

  It was a burlap bag full of money, saved by Garnet and Preacher Stump for a rainy day. Nonnie, terribly excited, sifted through old silver dollars and paper money while the fire leaped up in the hearth and the March wind wailed outside. Just beyond the circle of firelight, Ezekiel slept on. Nonnie would not wake him; she’d wait until morning to give him this news which would not mean much to him anyway, she knew it wouldn’t. He didn’t give a damn about money. Meanwhile she would hold her baby in one arm and run the fingers of her other hand through this money, and think what she might do with it.

  Later, some people would say that it was this money which spoilt Nonnie Bailey finely and fectually, that she would not have gone and done what she done if she hadn’t kicked in the chimbley and found that little burlap bag. But others held that Nonnie Bailey was obviously spoilt long before she came over to Grassy Branch, that what we will do is buried deep inside us all anyway, like a dark seed. Be that as it may, the burlap bag contained just enough money—not much, actually—to give Nonnie Bailey a sense of what she could not have. It contained just enough money for her to order off for some silky rose-colored cloth and some pink mother-of-pearl buttons, some tortoiseshell combs and some magazines. It might be that the magazines were the most damaging of all, for in them Nonnie could see page after page of women dressed to the nines (bustles and mutton sleeves and tiny waists and huge plumed hats, in the fashion of the day, which Nonnie would have given her eyeteeth to model).

  “Can’t none of em hold a candle to you,” Zeke said, looking at a magazine with her.

  Nonnie knew this was true. She had always been beautiful. Now she realized that she was more beautiful than the ladies in the magazines, and since she was the missus here and could do as she pleased, she sewed a dress from her bolt of rosy silk cloth and put the mother-of-pearl buttons up the front of it, lace at the neck. But then she just sat on the porch wearing the dress and rocking R.C., with noplace to go. She wore the dress to the Chicken Rise church once, then never again, because of how the other women looked at her. She was the prettiest woman in the county,
but it didn’t matter. She would rot here in these mountains and be damned.

  When Nonnie knew she was pregnant again, she folded the rose silk dress away carefully, regretfully, and stored it in a special place in the loft even as she stored that image of herself away in a special place in her mind where she would take it out and look at it sometimes as the years passed.

  Durwood, her funny baby, was born in 1884, all smiles and giggles and kicking feet from the first, it seemed, as different from whiny R.C. as day from night. Durwood looked exactly like his daddy, but Nonnie got his name out of a magazine.

  It tickled Ezekiel to death to have the two little boys around; he was always playing with them, doing “Eeny meeny miney mo, catch a nigger by the toe” over and over until R.C. shrieked with joy. You would think nobody in the whole world had ever been a daddy before, to watch Ezekiel Bailey with his boys, and folks talked it up and down the creek, how he acted, for most men would not have a thing to do with a child, leaving it all up to the womenfolks, as is proper. Zeke’s behavior was unmanly. But it allowed Nonnie to primp and preen and pleasure herself, so that she didn’t resemble a missus at all, in a way that made the other men cast an envious eye at Zeke and a more lingering look at Nonnie, a look that made the other womenfolks downright uneasy. “They was something quare about them from the start,” they’d say later. “I knowed it was something wrong over thar,” they’d say.

  Then in 1885 came the baby that was born dead, and after they buried him, Nonnie dreamed for seven nights running that they had buried her too, down in the cold black ground. Every night she woke up choking, with the taste of dirt in her mouth.

  Ezekiel took this to be her sign.

  And because Ezekiel knew about such things—signs and portents, how God reveals himself to men—Nonnie believed him.