Little Sister Death

by William Gay

  Lorene awoke, drowsily listening until the sounds brought her wide awake and apprehensive.

  What on earth?

  It sounds like rats, he said, unnecessarily.

  She didn’t answer. The noise rose in volume as if controlled by some vituperative force. A faint and far-off squeaking of the young so that Swaw saw in his mind great hordes of soft pink rats clutching their mothers, the elder rats gray and malign, tails like rattail files. Lord God, she said.

  It ain’t no rats, Swaw said. You can smell a goddamn gopher rat and there ain’t no smell at all in this house.

  The words were no sooner said than a stench of rats saturated the room, unspeakably fetid and overpowering, instantaneous, foul and malefic, just abruptly there, the house stifling with it. Swaw lent gagging over the side of the bed, struggled up.

  They ran out choking and retching into the night. The six of them silently aligned before the dark house. It set still and impassive as if it were watching them back.

  Swaw cleared his throat and spat. He had the taste of rats in the back of his mouth.

  What we need is us a good housecat, the woman said.

  Swaw just looked at her. He didn’t say a word.

  He was abroad early the next morning. The rubbertired wagon stood before Judge Beale’s house. Swaw sat across from Beale in the oak-paneled study. Beale trimmed his nails with a nail clipper. Swaw talked of rats and watched Beale’s disbelieving face and listened to the nail clippers make little snick-snicks of punctuation.

  Swaw spoke of rats at some length. When he had finished Beale just shook his head. There were no rats, Beale said. The house had been fumigated in the spring for bugs and poison and traps set for rats. Besides, there had never been a problem with rats. The place had always been scrupulously kept. Swaw said there was for goddamn sure a problem with rats now, and if Beale thought he was a liar he could drive out there tonight and see for himself. The judge declined. He gave Swaw an enigmatic smile and a chit for the grocery store good for twenty pounds of rat poison.

  Swaw came out angry and sweating. He balled the chit up and threw it in a hedgerow bordering Beale’s lawn. He knew in his heart there was no need in hauling in a sack of rat poison.

  He was right, too. They never heard them again. The house was bored with rats.

  The summer drew on, warm and mellow. In the soft, moist nights the bottomland alongside Sinking Creek was beset with fireflies, great phosphorescent droves of them drifting like St. Elmo’s fire through the cool blue dusk.

  In the fields the ears of corn lengthened and hardened, the leaves yellowed and withered, then grew brittle. The fields that bordered them turned bright yellow with goldenrod; wild apricots ripened on their dying vines strung on fences, withered globes of dusty gold, and the air was heavy with their musky perfume.

  They were briefly happy.

  Random as the fireflies, his three eldest daughters were coming and going at all hours of the day and night, as if they had all come into heat simultaneously and word of it sent abroad into the land so that in early September Swaw found himself beleaguered every night by swain from all up and down Sinking Creek, old rustyankled country boys with red necks and hardons and old highbacked rolling junkers held together by spit and baling wire and blind luck, weighting the harvest dusks with the smell of oil burning engines, the stench of rubber from smoking tires. Drunken laughter echoed in the still dark, his daughters with it, raucous and meaningless as calling crows or harpies.

  I never seen the goddamn like in my life, he raged to Lorene. Lately he was mostly in a rage. He was sleeping badly.

  Lorene just seemed pleased they had entered into an active social life. Let em have their fun, she told him, adding darkly, I never had any. You seen to that.

  I aim to put a stop to it, he said.

  They just poplar, Lorene said.

  Popular was not quite the concept Swaw was struggling with. He would hear them leaving in the old highbacked sedans, gone awhile, back once more. Then after a while horns blowing, wild mindless laughter, gone again. He wished for sons. At least sons would be at somebody else’s house worrying the hell out of them.

  At first they sat on the stone doorsteps and plied him with splo whiskey, spoke with transparent craft of the weather, crops, the likelihood of an early winter. Biding their time until they could be gone in a cloud of oily blue smoke and a roar of rusted mufflers, gone to the beer joints at Flatwoods, the show, the woods. They grew emboldened. At last they just drove up and honked their horns. They quit bringing him whiskey, too.

  He found a used condom down by the creek. It lay drying in the morning sun, like some arcane form of life beached here by distant seas. He took it up on the end of a stick and threw it in the creek, cursing all the while. They poplar, all right, he said to himself. Pussy was always purty well thought of in these parts.

  He commenced running them off. He’d run out into the yard shouting, waving his double-barreled shotgun, maybe fire off a round or two just to hear the shot rattle in the trees. You’d hear Model Ts cranking all the way to Shipps Bend. But they were getting bolder, like wild dogs held at bay by a circle of light. While he was nailing up the front door they were kicking down the back, and there were nights he ran off the same bunch three or four times.

  One night a soft mewing noise drew him behind the toolshed. Bowered by honeysuckle, he came upon a naked couple stricken by moonlight, laboring away. The sons of bitches were even bringing their own blankets now. They didn’t hear him until he was upon them. He could smell the raw aroused smell of them, could feel his own member thicken. He raised a booted foot and slammed into the boy’s naked nates. The boy went squalling like a ribkicked dog, hauling at his breeches as he went, whirling where the dark opened up and leering back at Swaw.

  Swaw didn’t have his gun, and he couldn’t find a rock.

  He couldn’t keep them in the fields either. He’d harness both teams, take one wagon and head for the lower bottoms after getting them started in the upper, but he’d be no more than out of sight when some old boy would saunter out of the brush with a shit-eating grin on his face and they’d be long gone. He was trying to get a crop in, and he’d come in at midday to eat and they’d be lounging around the porch. You had to kick one aside to find a place to sit down.

  Piss on it, he said to himself. I wash my hands of em. They can root like hogs or die. He felt sure things were becoming unmanageable. He felt how surely the center was not holding, how adroitly things fell apart. He felt like a man trying to stuff a pumped-up inner tube into a shoebox. He’d stomp one side in and the other would pop up. He’d hold both ends and the middle would leap out like a jack-in-the-box until the shoebox was demolished, the innertube still just as round and fat and uncontained as ever.

  Swaw came down the slope with a rolled towsack under his arm. He carried a hoe to part the weeds with. He moved carefully toward the pear tree, studying the ground beneath his feet as he walked. The air was winy with the smell of ripe pears.

  When he was sure there were no snakes about he moved with more confidence. He began to pick pears from the lower branches and stuff them into the sack. He worked hurriedly. The pears were warm to his touch and seemed to have stored all the fugitive warmth of summer beneath their yellowbrown skin. The ground beneath the tree was strewn with fermenting pears, and all around him was a steady drone of insects.

  Sitting on a mosscovered stone he ate a pear, slicing it off a section at a time with his pocket knife, slapping away onehanded the yellow jackets the juice attracted. He was staring off below the homeplace, where the earth curved gently into a hollow, when for no reason at all he thought: something is going to happen.

  The wry air seemed to alter, to thicken. His vision of the world darkened as if the sun reached the glade filtered by an eerie shadow. He could hear a child’s voice singing. A child in a green dress swung from a grapevine, blond hair strung out behind her. It felt to Swaw as if the skin of his body was tightening. He watch
ed the sunburnt hairs on his forearms stand erect, the flesh beneath them crinkle with gooseflesh. There was a popping sound in his eardrum, or a dull far-off roaring like water. His mouth was dry.

  Humming to herself, the girl came out of the brush into what had once been the yard. She seemed not to notice Swaw. She had moved so swiftly that his breath caught in his throat. There was no discernible motion of feet or of legs, but rather a smooth movement as if she were gliding. He could see the tree branches and brush behind her. She ascended to the level of the rubblestrewn foundation, as if unaware that there was no longer a floor there.

  Swaw felt drained of volition, lethargic, frozen to the stone where he sat. The girl was watching him. He saw that she was not a child, but a young woman, the flaxenhaired girl he’d seen before. She watched Swaw with cold cat’s eyes. Her fingers were slowly unbuttoning the top of her long dress. She slipped it down about her hips, stood bare to the waist, her hands cupping her breasts, which were very white in the sun. Her nipples seemed the texture and color of pale pink rosebuds. Her face was innocent and childlike but her eyes seemed to be taunting him. Her hands caught under her sharp breasts, upthrust them, as if she were mocking him with them. He was on his feet and stumbling toward her before he realized it.

  She was gone. He heard soft, derisive laughter behind him. A thrown pear struck the foundation stones at his feet. He stood looking at it. It had split against the rocks, and hornets worked the ripe flesh, buzzing a onenote drone of gluttony.

  For two weeks she had been coming to him while he slept. In the dream, if it was a dream, it seemed to be autumn, the time of year after the first frost. The trees were baring and the grass felt sere beneath his feet and the white road lay dusted with moonlight. Once a falling leaf touched his face, a golden sepia cast like an aged photograph.

  He felt strange to himself, and he had no words to explain it. He felt bigger and curiously older, slowmoving. His mouth hurt. The countryside looked subtly different too. There in the moonlight, the trees seemed lower and closer together. The wind in their branches was foreign to him, whispered of bitter winters he’d never known.

  The toolshed reared starkly against the heavens. The door swung soundlessly on oiled hinges. Inside the air was thick with the smell of new pine boards. He’d come across the floorboards pulling off his clothes.

  She would be on a pallet of quilts against the wall and at his arrival she would rise to her knees on the quilts and shuck the dress off over her head. She wore nothing beneath it. She’d raise her hands to smooth her hair, the moonlight through the cracks rendering her body all black and silver, silver face and throat and sharp, pointed breasts, the darker pubic triangle under her silver belly. Something mysterious and profound, the very negation of her flesh.

  He would fall with her onto the pallet, her hips already arching to meet him.

  From the night Swaw had the first dream the house was quiet. Satisfied, perhaps. There were no rats, no lights bobbing toward the barn, no singing. No one save Swaw saw or heard anything you would not expect to see or hear.

  Except for one occasion Swaw never heard about: Retha was hulling out walnuts in the hollow above the barn, and for some reason she looked up. Below her a man was walking toward the hall of the barn. He was an old man with muttonchop whiskers and he walked with his left leg dragging. He strode into the hall of the barn and out of her line of vision. She kept waiting for him to walk out the other side but he never did. She never mentioned it to anyone. He had looked so like a flesh-and-blood man it was some time before it occurred to her he could have been anything else, and by then it was too late.

  What’s the matter with you? she asked him.

  Nothin in this round world, Swaw said.

  Then why are you in bed ever night before good dark? How come you ain’t never got a word to say to nobody?

  Swaw pulled the covers over his chest. Through the window he watched the grove of cypress across the creek slowly vanish in sweet darkness.

  Hell, I’m tired, he said. I been tryin to gather a corn crop singlehanded. I don’t see nobody offerin to help, neither.

  I do what I can, she said. I been in the field same as you.

  I know it. I meant them worthless girls.

  You too tired to talk awhile? I get lonesome with them out courtin ever night, and Retha ain’t never had nothin much to say for herself. She sat on the edge of the bed.

  I seen you prowlin around that old toolshed. You got a bottle hid in there.

  Swaw had closed his eyes. He didn’t say anything. She sat there for a time in silence and then after a while he heard her sigh and then the corresponding sigh of the bedsprings when she got up. The door closed behind her.

  Swaw opened his eyes. He lay waiting for the girl.

  The rains of early fall began. The sky went slategray, dripped with leaden weeping. Forlorn and lostlooking birds foraged the barren fields.

  He saw the sign first. Whoa, he called. The team ceased, the wagon halted, he began to hear the rain soft in the trees. He spelled out the words on the sign, his lips moving slowly as he did so. A TEMPLE OF THE HOLY JESUS REVIVAL, the first line read. In smaller print, the second: NIGHTLY AT 7:00.

  Git up, he called. He snapped the lines. Around the curve he saw the tent and the old car. He saw them simultaneously, the old olivedrab tent set up in the field, ropes running taut to stakes driven at an angle in the earth, the hearselooking old sedan parked before it in the mud.

  We’ll see about this, Swaw said. He stopped the team again, this time pulling them to the side of the road. He climbed down, checked to see if the groceries were covered with the tarpaulin. He took a halfpint bottle from the back pocket of his overalls and canted to the light. It was almost empty. He drained the bottle and tossed it into the ditch and climbed the embankment to the field, rain sitting on the brim of the old felt hat he wore.

  The field was a sucking quagmire of mud. Gray water shoaled in wide, shallow pools. Swaw picked his way between them toward the wagon. He saw no one about the tent but he could see a man’s profile through the glass. Were it Swaw, he would have been trying to get the car back onto the solid surface of the road, but the man behind the steering wheel was just serenely watching it rain.

  The car had once been black but the weather had faded it to sort of lusterless gray, the exact texture and color of old tar. The glass was cranked down to show a young man with red hair, bright as a rooster’s comb and shiny with Brilliantine. The man had gray eyes and acne-pitted skin.

  How do, brother, he said. He thrust a freckled hand into the rain. Swaw took the hand and gave it a perfunctory pump and then dropped it.

  Do you know where you’re at? he asked.

  Yes, I do, the man said complacently. I’m settin in a fine automobile watchin God’s own rain fall.

  You in the middle of Joseph Beale’s pasture is where you are, Swaw said. And he don’t ’low no trespassin.

  The man nodded. He smiled, keeping his lips compressed, as if he had bad teeth. A fey dimple appeared in each cherubic cheek. Arrangements have been made with Mr. Beale, he said.

  You must of arranged to be here awhile. I was you, I’d a been tryin to get out of here.

  It’s God Almighty’s rain, friend. He’s not worryin about it.

  God Almighty hisself couldn’t drive a T Model Ford through mud half kneedeep.

  God’s love can splinter you to the heart like lightning killin a tree. Don’t blaspheme, brother. Have you been baptized?

  Not in some time, Swaw said.

  If you’re baptized in the blood, once is all it takes.

  I’ve backslid a time or two.

  The preacher was watching him with level eyes.

  You ain’t going to get no meetin here tonight anyway.

  Two is a meetin, friend, if one of em is in need of salvation and the othern is equipped to provide it. Don’t the Bible say wheresoever two or more are meet in my name, there I shall be also?

  I reckon it does. />
  You ever handled the serpents?

  Ever what?

  Handled poisonous serpents when the spirit of God was on ye? Drank strychnine and lived to tell it?

  Lord no. And don’t plan to.

  Ever held your head in the fire and nary a hair was singed?

  No.

  Then you ain’t baptized and never have been. You ain’t never had the gift. The gift of salvation, neighbor. The faith to know that you can handle poison and serpents and God’s love is between your face and the fangs. That you can drink strychnine and know your stomach is coated with a salvation that poison can’t eat through. That’s the gift. Any of you ain’t true baptized, your soul will twist and turn in Hell like a paper burnin in the fireplace.

  Jesus Christ never handled no snake, Swaw said. Never drunk no strychnine, neither.

  Jesus died so the likes of me and you could stand here in the rain and argue about it, friend. That’s the price he paid for salvation. Me and you could get it a little cheaper.

  Where you got these snakes?

  Got em in boxes right inside that tent yonder. Got em in cages.

  I figured bein as they didn’t hurt you you’d just let em run loose like a housedog.

  The preacher looked at him with a pitying contempt. The spirit ain’t always on ye, neighbor. It comes and goes like the season.

  What kind you got?

  Copperheads. Timber rattlers. Got a cottonmouth big as your arm. A little coral snake I got in Texas pretty as a silk handkerchief.

  Let’s see em.

  Why, sure.

  The preacher got out into the rain. He rolled the glass up and closed the car door. He had on shiny lowquarters and he picked his way between the mudholes. They moved toward the tent, drummed down by the rain. The preacher pulled aside a flap door and Swaw followed him in. It was darker inside, and for a moment he could see only the white shirt of the preacher. He was conscious of the smell of new pine lumber, as if he had been in the toolshed of his dream. Then he saw the flat boxes along one wall. They were of pine shelving, and they had holes augured into the sides. For ventilation, Swaw guessed.