The Truest Pleasure

by Robert Morgan

  “I’d hate to judge other folks’s worship,” Tom said.

  “That’s what I’m asking, that you not judge my worship,” I said. “Here, let me read what it says in Acts.” I wanted to warm up the chilly space that opened between us when I mentioned the Holiness meetings. I was still hoping to make Tom understand.

  “‘And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place,’” I read. “‘And suddenly there was a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.. . . Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.’”

  It was a passage that always thrilled me. I had heard it so many times I knowed it by heart. Just listening to the words made me feel lifted off the ground.

  “But you don’t need such doings here,” Tom said. “Everybody on the river speaks the same language.”

  I saw that he did not understand. He heard things the way he wanted to.

  “But language can mean a message,” I said. “It means everybody hears the message they need. That’s the miracle.”

  “I don’t see the use of acting drunk and crazy,” Tom said. “That won’t help nobody.”

  “Peter answered that very charge,” I said. “Listen to this. ‘And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this? Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine. But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and said unto them, Ye men of Judaea, and all ye that dwell in Jerusalem, be this known to you, and hearken to my words: For these men are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.’”

  “That was a long time ago in a different place,” Tom said.

  “But it’s a message for today,” I said. “It is especially for today. Listen to this. ‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my spirit: and they shall all prophesy: And I shall show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke.’”

  I felt almost light-headed reading those words they was so powerful. It was the promise of prophesying, and signs and wonders, that stirred me most. I could hardly read them without tears coming. That promise was the richest thing we had.

  My arguments was just making Tom quieter and stubborner, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “People are here to praise the Lord and be joyful,” I said.

  “They wasn’t put here to act like fools,” Tom said.

  “It’s dangerous to call other people fools,” I said. “The Bible says it puts you in danger of hellfire.”

  “If people act like fools why not call them what they are?”

  I had set out to explain to Tom what a joy the Pentecostal services was, and here I had just made him madder. I couldn’t let it end there, and yet I couldn’t think of what to say.

  “Let me read you this piece from The Moody Monthly,” I said. I smiled to myself remembering Florrie’s sacriligious joke. Every woman gets moody monthly, she liked to say.

  But Tom didn’t answer. He looked at his hands on the table and he looked at the floor. I could tell from the set of his shoulders he just wanted to be out working by hisself.

  “The Lord wants us to be happy,” I said, “not all troubled and angry. Not riled up most of the time.”

  I don’t know what Tom believed, except that folks should go to church on Sunday. He never liked to talk about what he thought. I guess the way Pa and me and Joe talked and argued all the time made him quieter than he would have been.

  “You mean like the Happyland colony?” he said. It was the first time I had ever heard him be sarcastic.

  “I don’t know much about the Happyland colony,” I said. “It was mostly gone by the time I can remember.”

  What I did know was that a group of freed slaves from Mississippi or somewhere had come to the mountains after the Confederate War and built houses on the Lewis place. They was led by a preacher named Robert Montgomery. In the mountains Montgomery called hisself king and his wife Luella queen of the community they named The Kingdom of the Happyland. Some members worked at the Lewis place to pay their rent. But in the Kingdom everybody owned things in common. I had heard the king and queen had a fine carriage and wooden thrones they set on.

  “I growed up near the Happyland,” Tom said. “And when they had their meetings at night you could hear them hollering and screaming. They danced so hard they packed the ground.”

  “I guess they was happy not to be slaves anymore,” I said.

  “They was just ordinary people,” Tom said, “except at their services they went wild. You never would have dreamed of such goings-on. They was supposed to be Christians but they hollered and leaped around like crazy people. Sometimes the women would take down their dresses and dance naked, shaking theirselves in the lantern light. They used skulls and blood in their services. I think some of it was voodoo. They would keep us awake till the small hours if it was a full moon or warm weather.”

  “Everybody worships different,” I said.

  “They would go crazy,” Tom said. “They would hurt theirselves jumping over things. One feller broke his leg when he climbed a tree in a fit and jumped out of it.”

  “I guess that was just an accident,” I said.

  “Mama was ashamed for me and Sister to hear such ravings,” Tom said. “She used to close the windows when their services got going. But once I slipped out and hid in the woods to watch.”

  “I bet you wanted to see those women take down their dresses,” I said, and slapped his knee. Tom didn’t even smile.

  “It was heathen stuff,” he said. “They shook like they was having fits.”

  “Don’t nobody take off their clothes at our services,” I said. “At least I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Once a woman got so worked up dancing she give birth to a baby,” Tom said. “But the baby was dead. I seen it the next day laying on a table before they buried it.”

  “Maybe it was a miscarriage,” I said.

  “It was murder,” he said. He looked at his feet and shook his head. “The thing was the Happylanders was ordinary people in the daytime,” Tom said. “I worked with them and they worked good. They was good people, except their king led them wrong and made them worship him. He done it to keep them under his thumb.”

  “It might have been their greatest pleasure,” I said.

  “Worshipping him?”

  “No, having their meetings and dancing and singing.”

  “People have no business working theirselves up crazy,” Tom said. He turned away again.

  “We can’t know what’s in other people’s hearts,” I said.

  But he didn’t answer. I saw he thought he’d talked enough. Tom saw words as commitments he did not want to make unless he had to. I think he felt any verbal commitment was over-commitment. I know he thought most talk was a mistake. “People get in trouble talking,” he liked to say. “It’s the tongue that destroys you.”

  I think he believed human honesty was in the arms and hands, in a strong back. That’s why he was such a good lover. He had confidence in anything done with his body. “Nobody can talk for ten minutes without telling a lie,” he would say. I don’t know where he had heard that, but he would repeat it from time to time. Since Pa and me and Joe and Florrie and Locke all liked to talk, it was an accusation. But we didn’t mind Tom setting there not saying much. He was a good listener when he wanted to be.

  “Want me to read the paper?” I said. “There’s anot
her story here about Cuba.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “It’s almost bedtime.”

  After we got married I was surprised at who Tom got along with and who he didn’t like. He did not often express his opinions about people, but I could tell how much he come to like Florrie. I think it was because Florrie teased him and was always telling jokes. And when she told a joke she would slap him on the arm or on the belly. If they was standing up she would almost certainly pat him on the tummy. It was a gesture she liked to make. Tom was such a strong feller, solid and compact, and it was like she couldn’t hardly keep her hands off him.

  Of course Florrie was always a flirt when she talked to men. She was a backslapper and nudger. Her husband David was even then getting sickly. He wanted to be a Baptist preacher and spent a lot of time indoors reading the Bible, and leaving most of the work to her. Tom was the opposite in every way.

  I’d say every woman and every man are attracted to each other. It is the natural thing, and marriage is just a selection and guiding of that attraction. But Tom and Joe’s Lily disliked each other from the beginning, or almost from the beginning. It was like they recognized each other from the first as somebody they couldn’t hardly stand. And I never really understood it. I know it had something to do with religion, since Lily was always talking about a service her and Joe had been to, or some meeting out at Fletcher they was going to. Lily loved to talk about preachers they had heard and how they preached and how many people had been healed or led to the baptism of fire. Once she started she would talk nonstop. She would ask Joe to agree with her and then before he could answer she would go on.

  It wasn’t too long after Tom and me was married that Joe and Lily come down for Sunday dinner. Lily had a new lavender dress and a lavender hat. She liked clothes more than any woman I’ve ever knowed. She spent everything she could on new cloth or a new dress or a shawl. You would have thought she was rich to see the way she dressed, except her clothes was too colorful. She was always wearing yellows and pinks and lavenders, and I don’t know if the rich would have dressed that way. She liked dresses with great flouncy sleeves. And sometimes she even carried an umbrella to match when she went to church or to a revival service. She said she liked to dress up out of respect to Jesus and the Holy Spirit. “It’s a way of showing my faith,” she said.

  Lily knowed how to butter up Pa. She would hug him and kiss him on the cheek and bring him pieces of cake or pie. And he liked all the attention. What man don’t? And by then he was old enough to be a little childish. She once begged him for a piece of land up on the road. She said, “Pa, I don’t have a thing of my very own. If you give me a piece of ground I would have something that was just mine.” And Pa went to town and had a deed drawed up and give her five acres there along the river road.

  But strangely, Lily didn’t bother me much. I’m not sure why, because she got on most people’s nerves one way or another. I guess I just thought she was silly, and didn’t pay much attention to her. Or maybe it was I only saw her Sundays, because she rarely come over to work with me, the way Florrie did.

  That Sunday they come for dinner I fixed chicken and rice and a coconut cake. I had had to hurry to get things ready before church and never had a chance to put on a good blouse. What I wore was plain cotton, perfectly acceptable, but not fancy.

  As we set down at the table Lily twisted herself in her lavender dress and patted her hat and said, “Oh Ginny, you always look so good in your clothes.”

  Now I was used to Lily and knowed she just wanted somebody to compliment her new outfit. I guess no one had thought to since she almost always wore a new dress on Sundays if she could.

  “Thank you, Lily,” I said. “And your dress just takes my breath away. Ain’t it pretty, Tom?”

  But she had made Tom mad. He had not made allowances for Lily, and her manner got to him more than I would have dreamed. His face turned red and he looked down at his plate. I guess he had not growed up with people like Lily around him.

  “Well I had to have something to wear, if we’re going to town to hear Preacher Carver,” Lily said. “I told Joe I didn’t have a rag to wear unless I could finish this dress in time.”

  “You look like a society lady,” I said, pouring coffee for Pa.

  “I think we should dress with respect for the Lord’s work,” Lily said. “Don’t you agree, Pa? We should dress at least as nice as the devil’s people.”

  “We should look the best we can,” Pa said.

  “Preacher Carver healed a goiter on a woman from Greenville,” Lily said. “Before a thousand people he reached under her chin and jerked the goiter away.”

  “I hear he reached for their money to jerk away,” Tom said.

  Lily ignored him. Tom’s face was flushed like he was sunburned, and he wouldn’t take his eyes off his plate.

  “Preacher Carver has healed hundreds of people all over South Carolina,” Lily said. “At his meetings the lame has walked and the blind has been able to see. He is a great man of God. Everywhere he goes the number of saved increases.”

  “I’ve heard everywhere he goes the population increases about nine months later,” Tom said.

  “Tom!” I said. But I had to laugh a little behind my hand too. I had never heard Tom talk so.

  “Preacher Carver has blessings for them that will receive them,” Lily said. She wiped her mouth with her handkerchief.

  As soon as he finished eating Tom got up and went outside. He never liked to set around talking with my folks after dinner, especially if Lily was there.

  She didn’t like him any better than he liked her. She liked men that flirted and complimented her on her new dresses. And she hated men that argued with her. That’s why Joe kept silent when she talked in her trembly voice. She had been raised an orphan after her papa died in the Confederate War, and she tried to act stylish and cultured I think to cover up how poor they had been.

  Once before Jewel was born we went to pick huckleberries at the head of the river, the summer after Tom and me was married. Tom hitched up the wagon and put in three seats. We took buckets and a picnic basket, and left at daylight because it was ten miles. We stopped on the river road for Joe and Lily. David was sick and Florrie couldn’t go. It was just us four with Pa.

  Lily come out wearing a big white hat with a white veil. “I must protect my face from both sun and flies,” she said. “I’ll not come back with my skin all bit and blistered.”

  It was a fine summer morning and we got almost to the head of the river before the sun come over the mountains. I always loved that upper end of the valley where the river gets small as a branch and the ridges plunge to the water. The pines are straight and black and the cliffs jut like statues far above.

  “Did you see the article in the paper about wrinkles?” Lily said, as the wagon rattled on rocks.

  “I don’t think I did,” I said. I was watching the dapples of early light through the trees. The woods was spotted with coins and streaks of sunlight.

  “It said the two ways to prevent wrinkles are to stay out of sun and wind, and to never wash your face with harsh soap.”

  Tom was guiding the horse around rocks and slowing the wagon over washed-out places. We started climbing, winding out of the river valley. We come into the bright sun.

  “Did you read the article, Tom?” Lily said.

  Tom did not answer. He kept looking at his shadow throwed over the horse in front of him.

  “Oh I forgot,” Lily said. “Tom don’t read the paper.”

  “We need to get water,” Pa said. “There’s a spring ahead.”

  “There won’t be any water on the ridge,” I said. Anybody that went up to Long Rock to have a picnic or pick huckleberries had to take their own water.

  Tom stopped the wagon a little further on and took the water bucket out of the wagon. I could tell how mad he was at Lily by how he banged the bucket on the wagon as he lifted it. Tom was usually too careful to bang anything. The spring was above th
e road in the laurel bushes. Tom disappeared into the thicket.

  Pa took his glasses out of his pocket and saw a screw had fell out of a temple hinge. He searched in his pocket for the loose screw. “I can’t pick berries without my glasses,” he said.

  But the screw was not in his pocket. He turned it inside out and found nothing but lint. “I have an extra screw in my purse,” he said. He reached into his pocket and looked startled. “It ain’t here,” he said.

  Pa patted his pockets, and then patted them again. He kept his pension money in his little leather purse, as well as a house key. “I had it this morning,” Pa said.

  “Maybe the man that can’t read took it,” Lily said. I looked at her and she turned away. I felt the blood rush to my face.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said behind her veil. “I didn’t mean a thing.”

  Tom returned with the bucket of water and set it gently in the wagon. Cold water run down the sides of the pail onto the hay.

  “Pa lost his purse,” I said to him.

  “Where?” Tom said.

  “I don’t know,” Pa said. “I had it this morning.”

  “Where was the l-l-l-last place you saw it?” Joe said.

  “When I left the house I put the key in the purse,” Pa said.

  Tom walked around the wagon and looked under the seats. “Here it is,” he said, and picked the purse up from the straw.

  “Glory be,” I said.

  When we reached the top we could look down on the river valley stretching blue and white in the summer haze. It was so wonderful to be out of the kitchen, away from the hot fields, up on the ridge where the breeze whitened the huckleberry bushes. To the north you could see the Pisgah Mountains climbing one on top of the other to the edge of the sky. “What a glorious day,” I said.

  It was that same summer before Jewel was born that Tom went fishing with Joe and David. Joe never invited anybody to go on his trapline, but more than once he had asked Tom if he wanted to go turkey hunting or deer hunting up in the Flat Woods. And every time Tom said he had work to do, had to split rails or clear brush, had to fix a fence. “And I don’t have a gun,” Tom said.