The Devil's Dream

by Lee Smith

  So me and Johnny and Georgia grew up like stairstep brothers and sisters, Johnny three years older than me, Georgia two years older than Johnny. Then there was my cousin Katie that I loved so, just my age.

  We were a gang, the four of us, a club, me and Johnny and Georgia and Katie. Alice and Freda were supposed to watch us but they didn’t of course, silly Alice too busy reading magazines and painting her toenails, mean old Freda working her fingers to the bone doing the work of ten, as she liked to point out to us frequent. She could of had a hired girl—Daddy told her to hire one—but she’d rather do it all by herself and complain about it, that’s the way she was. Pancake was pretty much running the farm by that time, though Daddy took a big interest too when he was home.

  Now here’s the thing I’ve tried to explain to people ever since—having the Grassy Branch Girls in our family just didn’t mean that much to us at the time. We didn’t hardly notice it, for a fact. It didn’t change our life none. Oh, I’m sure we had more than most had during the Depression—but then there was Mamma putting up beans every summer with Freda, same as always, and saving string, and putting extra money in an old sock. And there was Daddy out in the fields with the boys, working like the devil. Or out in the barn building some new gadget like as not, the way he’d always done.

  In summertime, we all worked the fields every day until four, hoeing corn in ground so rocky that our hoes would ring out like bells, right down there where Clarence is tilling now, riding the new tractor which nobody had then.

  Oh, it was hard, hard! Your back would hurt till you couldn’t hardly stand it, and you’d get blood blisters on your hands. We used to fight to get to be the one to stay back at the house with Mamma and cook for the rest.

  But then, at about four o’clock, just when you thought you really couldn’t stand it any longer, Pancake would clap his hands and let out a whoop, and off we’d run for the creek, shedding our clothes as we went, till we got to the big old swimming hole where Robert Floyd had dynamited the sycamore tree. Oh, that water felt so cool and good! Nothing has ever felt better to me, before or since. And the sunlight flashing greeny-gold down through the trees set spangles in the water.

  It was Johnny that taught me to swim. It was Johnny that taught me everything I knew, and try as I might, I can’t remember a time in my childhood that he wasn’t there. “Rosie” he called me. Cousin, brother, heart of my heart, best friend—“Johnny is my best friend,” I told them all as soon as I learned to talk, and they laughed and laughed. They thought it was cute back then.

  One time Daddy bought Johnny and me little red cowboy suits just alike, with shiny badges and white fringe and white hats and boots, and let us sing together on the show. We were a big hit. We sang “Red River Valley,” holding hands, and everybody said we were the cutest thing. I’ve got a whole bunch of pictures of us in our cowboy suits, right there in the dresser drawer, if Gladys didn’t throw them out too, that is. We’d sing “Home on the Range” and then I’d curtsy and Johnny would shoot off his cap gun. The crowd went wild.

  But when he taught me to swim it was summertime and hot, and the water back then was so clear you could see straight down to the bottom, to your feet all white and wavy and your funny wobbly legs. “Just relax, Rosie,” Johnny said, “don’t be afraid,” but I was afraid, then as now, of so many, many things. “Just relax, Rosie,” Johnny said. “Hold your breath and put your face in the water,” he said. “You’ll never learn to swim if you won’t put your face in the water. Close your eyes and hold your breath,” he said, which I could not do for a long time, as the world went away then and this scared me. Later I would feel that it was happening all the time. Also, I did not know what creatures might be down there in the water, coming up to get me. One time Katie put a crawdad on my shoulder, and I screamed and screamed. I screamed bloody murder. “Trust me,” Johnny said. “Lay on your back now, now you will learn to float. Just relax, Rosie, I’ve got you now.” He had one hand under my shoulder, the other hand under my butt. “Just lay back in the water,” he said. “Look up at the leaves, aren’t they pretty, Rose Annie? Trust me,” he said, and so I learned to float and to swim, but I would never dive down like the rest of them did into the dark scary places under the fallen tree. We used to play tag in the water and duck each other. I remember one time Clarence got me so good that Johnny jumped in to pull me up and he really scared me, coming on me down in the deep water that way, so I lashed out and hit him in fear, but he grabbed me around the waist and pushed up from the bottom kicking like crazy. We burst up into the sunlight like gangbusters and I was thrashing and kicking I was so scared. I can recall that day so good even now, it is more real to me than this day is—the green-gold sunlight, the squishy warm mud between my toes on the bank, Georgia’s red bathing suit, and the water running down Johnny’s chest as he held me out at arm’s length and looked at me. He was getting muscles even then. “You are all right now, Rosie,” he said.

  Oh, they all took care of me to some extent, I suppose, for I was the littlest one and sick a lot as a child, while Georgia and Katie were both tomboys, fearless from the word go, Georgia with her spiky black hair and heart-shaped face like Virgie, Katie with those big blue eyes and straight yellow hair and a big build like a strong boy. I had light, light hair, sort of like it is now, I reckon, and real pale skin; they would not let me out in the sun without a hat for I sunburned so easy.

  Mamma used to run after me, carrying the hat, and make me put it on. I was Mamma’s little flower, so she said, her last child, born to her in old age after so many boys. They all doted on me, Mamma and the boys—Daddy too. They spoiled me something awful—Gladys is right about that! But I was a colicky baby, so they said, born early, and real nervous. “Lucie’s womb just plumb gave out,” is how Tampa described my birth. She said it was a wonder I lived at all, little as I was. But always, from the first day I remember, there was Johnny who stood in his special place between me and the world, protecting me, giving the world to me bit by bit so it wouldn’t scare me.

  For I scared easy, easy—

  I remember one time when Daddy and Mamma took me way over on the other side of Cemetery Mountain, where her people came from, to visit some cousins I didn’t know. There were so many kids around the table I couldn’t look anywhere without looking right straight at one or the other of them.

  But it was their daddy, my Uncle Anse, that scared me so. “Let us bless this food,” he said in a loud voice, and we all bowed our heads and he started to pray. But right in the middle of the prayer, there comes this real loud knocking. I looked up quick, to see if somebody was at the door, but the door stood wide open and it was a nice sunny day outside. My uncle went on praying just like nothing was happening, and everybody else kept their heads down too, although some of the kids were fidgeting and Daddy seemed to be trying not to smile.

  “Amen!” Uncle Anse said finally, and all the kids started eating. But I couldn’t stand it. I leaned forward and said, “Uncle Anse! Uncle Anse! Didn’t you hear all that knocking? What was that?”

  “Oh, that knocking!” my uncle said. “You see, Rose Annie, we’re so used to that knocking up here that we don’t hardly notice it. But I can tell you what it is, of course. You see that pie safe over in the corner?” With a jerk of his thumb, he indicated the big cupboard in the corner, with its tin door.

  “Yes,” I said. I still hadn’t started my chicken and dumplings.

  “Well, about a hundred years ago,” Uncle Anse said, “there was a little girl from the other side of the mountain who came over here to visit. Just like you, come to think of it. I believe I have heard tell that she was a little blond girl, just like you. How old are you, Rose Annie?” he asked.

  “Nine,” I said.

  “Why, bless my bones if she wasn’t nine too!” Uncle Anse leaned forward and looked at me good. He had hard, piercing eyes like bits of flint. “Well, this little girl got to playing in the old pie safe there, and didn’t nobody know she was in it
, and when it come time to go, they couldn’t find her noplace. Oh, they looked high and low and couldn’t find her, and it was not till a week or so later that her pore little body was found right in there, where she had smothered to death.”

  I looked at the pie safe.

  Then I looked all around the table and they were every one looking at me real solemn, round eyes like marbles. At that quiet moment, the dreadful knocking started again, real loud. I jumped up.

  Uncle Anse continued speaking over the noise. “And now,” he said, “every now and then if we have a visitor, especially if it is a nice little blond girl just her age, why, she sets in knocking to get out and play. She’s been so lonely in that pie safe without a playmate,” he said. He stood up. “Should I let her out to play with you?” he asked.

  “No!” I screamed, and jumped up from the table and ran out the open door into the yard sobbing. Behind me I could hear all the kids just about to die from laughing.

  I wouldn’t go back in my cousins’ house then for love nor money, but set out there in that hot Studebaker crying my eyes out until they took me home, where I was sick in bed for two days.

  And even though I knew it was a joke, somehow I could not get her out of my mind, that other little girl who looked so much like me, who had been smothered to death for a hundred years. I kept expecting to see her behind every big tree, in every cave on the mountain, down at the springhouse—I thought she’d be waiting for me up in the hayloft. Sometimes I did catch a glimpse of her, just ahead of me on the road to Holly Springs, for instance, going around the bend, I’d see her blond hair or her blue dress so plain for just a minute. Or she’d be out in the schoolyard playing with the other children, as I walked over the hill—then I’d look again, and she’d be gone. One time when I went down in the root cellar to grabble some turnips for Freda, there she was, my little girl, standing real still in the dim light.

  “Play with me,” she said. Her voice was my voice.

  “I can’t right now,” I said. Then I ran lickety-split back up the stairs, and told nobody.

  Over time, I came to love that little girl as much as I feared her, and she has been with me ever since, just out of sight. “Play with me,” she says.

  The only person who ever knew about her was Johnny, and she didn’t scare him at all. He used to laugh about her, and one day he stood right out in the middle of the road and hollered at her to show herself, but she did not. Johnny could make me laugh about her too. But he did not laugh at me, you understand, he never laughed at me, but at her, and this kept me safe, I believe.

  Johnny saved me from the hogs too, which was another scary time. We all used to go sanging along about October, when the sang turned yellow and got easier to find. Now this is something Johnny was real good at, for he never was much on school and laid out of it half the time, traipsing the mountains by himself. There was big money in gathering sang then—still is, though there’s few now that’ll go as far back in the hills as that. Anyhow, this was a wet October, and Johnny took me with him.

  We went way up on Cemetery Mountain and then over toward Craggy Knob, where I hadn’t ever been, and when we got up there the sun came out and started burning off the mist, so we could see a whole beautiful valley spread out like a quilt before us. I do not know the name of that valley, never have, nor have I ever been back there. I was thirteen that October.

  “Over here, Rosie,” Johnny said, and I went around back of some big old rocks where he was already digging out those weird little roots that are shaped like a man. He had brought along a spoon for me to dig with, and I did, and we dug in silence awhile, putting the roots in a gunny sack, while the sun shone hot and everything took on a spanky-clean shiny look.

  My back started hurting finally and I stood up and looked around and was surprised to find Johnny not digging at all right then, but staring at me real serious. Johnny looked like an Indian, with his big dark eyes and that floppy black hair which he wore too long. Johnny had brown skin and high cheekbones and a sticky-out Adam’s apple. That fall he was real skinny. But Lord! I bet he grew up to make a handsome man. Johnny was wild, though, and everybody at school was a little bit afraid of him, but I wasn’t.

  “What are you staring at so hard?” I said, and he said, “You.”

  I was wearing some of Bill’s old jeans. “I guess I look awful,” I said. I believe it was the first time I ever thought about how I looked, one way or the other.

  “You don’t look awful,” he said. “You’re real pretty.” Then he came over and took my hand and drew me to the edge of the craggy knob itself. He stood right behind me, so close I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.

  “I believe I could fly,” I said, and Johnny did not laugh at me.

  “I bet you could too,” he said.

  His breath on my neck went all over my body, and though he did not put his hands on me that day, or kiss me, this is when it began, that part of it.

  I felt like I was on fire all over. I had not felt like this before, ever, nor would I again—not even much later, with Buddy or the few boys I went out with before I married him.

  So you see the problem. I had it all, everything there is, I think, when I was just a little girl, and it has ruinced me for men ever since. Or for life—I might as well say it. Johnny ruined me for life by making me feel so much then. Why, I was more alive at fourteen, at fifteen, than anybody has got a right to be ever, and I haven’t got over it yet. I can’t get over it.

  That necklace—the one Gladys threw out, that I got so upset about—this was the necklace of scarlet haws he made for me once, and I reckon it did look like some kind of dried-up mess to Gladys, but whenever I saw it laying there in the dresser drawer, just for a minute I felt again the way I felt when he put it around my neck. I felt alive, I mean. We were over at Indian Grave Gap when Johnny gave it to me, sitting buck naked on a burying quilt that he had stole out of Virgie’s cedar chest and she gave him hell for it later. The necklace scratched when he placed it around my neck.

  But you know what? I would rather have it now, all brown and crumbly, than the diamond lavaliere Buddy gave me last Christmas, or the graduated pearls he gave me the year before that. I reckon Gladys has got my number all right—I am spoiled! But not like she thinks. It is a hard thing to peak out so young and then have to live out the rest of your life the best way you can. Everybody around here thinks, Oh, she is so lucky, she’s got a push-button door on her garage, and this is true too. I am lucky.

  But I was telling about the day we went sanging over to Craggy Knob, and then how coming back down we slipped and slid down the mountain till we came to lodge muddy and laughing against a big hollow stump that’d been hit by lightning. It was right after that that the hogs came scrambling out of the laurel slick and headed toward us.

  “Run!” Johnny yelled, but I could not even get up; my feet kept slipping on the wet leaves. All of this was happening so fast, but like it was happening to somebody else.

  In a flash Johnny was up and had his knife out, and when one hog ran at him, he stuck his knife right into its eye. Whereupon that hog gave a terrible squeal and started raring up and down pawing at its head, and then the other hog faltered and backed off.

  Johnny grabbed my hand and we ran like crazy back up the hill to the path. The hogs did not follow us, though I did not feel safe until we had crossed the footlog over Grassy Branch at the very bottom of the mountain.

  Of course we lost our ginseng in the process, and arrived back at Grassy Branch so muddy and torn up that Mamma looked at me real funny and said she thought it would be best if I didn’t go off with Johnny Rainette anymore, that I was too big for such adventuring and ought to start acting like more of a lady. Mamma was not fond of Johnny, who got into more and more trouble as time went on, although she said she felt sorry for him as his mother was letting them grow up so wild. You know, Mamma never did get along with Virgie, or approve of her, though they sang together all that time. Mamma also used to
say she feared that Johnny Rainette was born with a criminal nature. But she didn’t mind for us to sing with Johnny as long as we stayed around the house, so many’s the night he’d come over with his guitar and sing with us—around the fire in winter, out on the porch in summer, singing up the moon. This was all right with Mamma, and what Mamma didn’t know didn’t hurt her.

  For we were on fire in those years, and just as determined to let no one know, and we got away with it too, so that to this very day no one knows the extent of it, nor when it started nor how long it went on.

  I’ll tell you, a thing like that will mark your life. For all my days then were spent in thinking, Now where is Johnny today? Where is he right now? What’s he doing? Will he be at school today? or Did he go into town with Daddy? and When will I see him next? Yet when I saw him, I took such pride in not looking at him, nor appearing to notice him special in any way, and he did the same.

  In church every Sunday I used to sit at an angle behind him, and look at the curve of his cheek and the hollow of his neck just below the ear, and it drove me wild—I couldn’t hear one word Preacher Roebuck said, not one! As a child I was pretty religious—well, we all were, or we were supposed to be, Daddy saw to it that we went to church every time they cracked the door, and I was baptized when I was twelve—but after me and Johnny got so thick, I lost my religion, for a fact. I just couldn’t keep my mind on it. In the same way that Johnny stood between me and the world, he stood between me and God. And although I have asked God for forgiveness since, and I have prayed over it, and I take my own children to church, I don’t have any real feeling I’m getting through to Him. I have not had any personal response, I mean.