Twelve midnight, and one last car comes slowly south on the highway. It is the only traffic. The mill whistle blows. In a minute, the intersection will choke with cars, but the long black car coming south is, for the moment, alone. Presley waves it into the turn.
It is, he sees with dull surprise, a truly old car: a prewar Lincoln — what did they call them? — a Zephyr, long-nosed and jet black. But it fails to turn. It draws even with him, and Presley is aware of a cadaverous face behind the wheel, a face turned his way and grinning.
He whoops, lets out a startled squeak; then he is looking at the departing taillights of the black car as it heads on south toward Gaither.
Presley, standing in the intersection, trembles. The sweet taste of spearmint in his mouth suddenly seems to send waves of heat through him. He spits out the wad of gum.
Red-faced, Presley limps back to the patrol car. He slides inside, turns on the engine, and the tires kick gravel as he wrenches the Ford out onto the highway, heads it south. What the hell? Something about that guy’s face. But why did he scream like that, like a damn girl? It was just some thin-faced old man grinning at him. But the way he read that grin — there was death in it.
In fact, at first he thought it was the face of a dead man, a man long dead, his head gone to skull and leathery dried skin.
Presley grunts. He will go on through town, then will turn off the highway and onto Willis Road. He and Eula live in a five-room bungalow there. He will rummage through the dirty laundry and find his other uniform trousers, and he’ll leave this pair in its place. But he won’t wake up Eula.
Meanwhile he drives with anger and humiliation, feeling the cold, clammy touch of piss all down his left leg.
2
Tuxedo Williams is returning home from an evening of adventure and amour.
He has a hangdog look about him as he trots gingerly across the wooden trestle over Cherokee Creek — gingerly because you never know when a train will come clanking across, on its way to drop off cotton wrapped in burlap and cinched with steel bands, or to pick up bolts of woven cloth from the loading docks behind the mill. He knows he will face the wrath of Mrs. Williams when he gets back to the house on Tailor Street. But — he can’t help grinning to himself, despite the sickening stench of creosote rising from the trestle timbers — it was worth it. Anyway, it seems to him, as he turns west, breasting through stands of weed chest-high, it wasn’t really his fault.
Tuxedo blames it on the long-legged bitch.
Oh, he knew her for what she was the moment he caught sight of her, nearly five hours ago, just after seven o’clock. He had been lazing on the porch of the house, idly looking out on the street, every once in a while hearing the rush of traffic on the highway beyond, and under it all hearing the faint hum of the mill, out of sight at the far end of the street off to his left. He hadn’t been bothering anybody. And then she came strutting by on those long legs. She was interested in him, he knew, for one thing only: his simple maleness.
She was aware of him. Oh, she wanted him, she was ready for him. Hell, he could smell her need from the porch. He rose, stretched elaborately and guiltily, and sauntered down the steps as if he wanted to go out for a breath of air before supper. Mrs. Williams, cooking in the kitchen way back in the house, didn’t even notice his departure.
But the bitch did. She looked back only once, over her right shoulder, and then she walked on. Tuxedo followed her. As she cut through the Sylvesters’ yard, he was close on her heels. She crossed the highway and went down the hill behind Harmony Baptist Church. Still heading east, she crossed Walnut Street — it dead-ended, nearly a mile to the north, into Mill Street — and climbed up the rise toward the railroad tracks. That was perfect. Copses of trees, mainly live oaks, grew there, on the other side of the railroad, all the way up to the crest of the ridge. Beyond the ridge lay a couple of miles of woods. No one would be up there on an August evening.
They found a private place, all right. She stopped in the center of a circle of five oak trees, dropped all pretense, and waited for him. There on the ridge, where they could rise up above the high grass if they cared and see the mill village spread like a toy landscape to the west and north, he mounted her repeatedly, to their mutual satisfaction, over a period of several hours. When at last she started to snap at him, he, also sated, simply walked away.
By then it was ten o’clock. Tuxedo was a guard. He worked nights, and he was proud of his record. But tonight — well, if he went home, he was in for it. So he fooled around on the hillside, enjoying the evening sounds and smells. He startled a young rabbit once, and just for the hell of it he chased it a little way. Finally, toward midnight, he judged that Mrs. Williams would likely be asleep. Maybe it was safe to come home.
It is 11:58 when he breaks out of the weeds. Off to the north, Walnut Street becomes a mill-village street, edged by identical white frame houses (saltbox in style because the architect who designed them in 1904 was from Massachusetts, though Tuxedo does not know that), but here the street is almost empty. This is the stretch between the poor white mill village and a section of feed mills, freight yards, and coal yards. This is, almost, no-man’s-land. On the east side, the hill rolls up to the tracks. On the west side lie a few scattered houses, and off to Tuxedo’s left, the intersection with Harmony Street. Tuxedo crosses and heads back up the hill, through people’s backyards, behind Harmony Church.
If the proximity of the house of God strikes him with guilt, nothing about him shows it. In fact, his thoughts are on his partner of the evening, and, if anything, his grin becomes a bit more lickerish as he moves through the night.
The midnight whistle blows down at the mill, a thin sound this far away.
Tuxedo approaches Highway 199. He pauses on its verge, carefully looks both ways. You never can tell with cars. He reflects again on the bitch, wishes she were here right now, and steps onto the pavement.
The black car comes out of nowhere.
Tuxedo’s muscles seem to freeze on him. He has just started to leap back when the left front tire hits him.
It crunches into his chest, forcing one startled yelp from his lungs. His heart is compressed. For one microsecond blood at astonishing pressure floods his skull, and the world flares out in a flash of white-hot internal lightning.
The second wheel hits him, and he explodes. There are no marks on the highway to show that the driver of the car tried to swerve; indeed, the twenty-foot-long smear of blood seems rather to indicate that the Lincoln Zephyr crossed the center line purposely to strike Tuxedo Williams. The body, torn and spurting blood, rolls off the shoulder of the highway and lies there cooling.
It remains there all night. In the morning Mrs. Williams will miss Tuxedo, will send her son Johnny out to find him. Johnny, after an hour of searching, will fail. He will be playing in the yard when Lamar Woodruff, a kid from the mill village, comes by to tell him what is down on the highway.
Other kids join them: Billy Touhy, Clipper Nix, Cindy Fellows. They are all under thirteen, with Lamar the oldest at twelve years and eleven months, and Cindy — also the toughest, and also the one who broke them all in to smoking — the youngest at eleven years and five days. They scavenge a cardboard box with a lid from Mr. Pike, who has a little one-room general store at the head of Paxton Street in the mill village. Then they take the body down into the bottom land of Cherokee Creek — not far, in fact, from the trestle — to bury it.
They make the coffin as neat as they can, lining it with soft grass. They wrap Tuxedo in a towel and put him in the box, which once contained twelve cans of Snowdrift Shortening. The five of them dig the grave, grunting as they turn over heavy brick-sized clods of wet red clay. When they have finished, after they have tamped down the mound over the grave, Johnny breaks down and cries, and then they all do, even tough Cindy.
Tuxedo Williams was just a black-and-white little mutt, but he was a good dog.
3
At midnight, Brother Odum Tate, itinerant nondeno
minational evangelist, kneels in the dry sedge just east of the highway. He has come there to exhort Satan and to pray to God.
His knees ache, and the earth, its dampness belying the arid grass growing on it, moistens them. He ignores discomfort.
Brother Tate has become a fixture of Gaither in the last eighteen months or so. No one really knows him. He simply showed up one day, a scarecrow of a man in a rusty black suit, carrying a ten-pound family Bible under his arm, set up his post on the south side of the Square, and started to preach. He has been on the Square almost every day since. No one bothers him or bothers about him.
If you had lived in Gaither, you would have seen him. Maybe, let’s say, you worked for an insurance company, and you had a lot of claims to do paperwork on, so you failed to finish up at the office. It’s early summer, still daylight at seven o’clock. You decide to go down to the Busy Bee for supper, take the forms with you, and catch up there.
You see him as you park your DeSoto on the Square. You climb out into the warm evening, and the hoarse handsaw of his voice comes through to you: “Oh, be-WARE, brethering — hah! For Satan walks a-MONG you — hah! He walks as a MAN walks — hah! But he’s the old SER-pent — hah!”
White globules of spittle fly as Brother Tate preaches, and his right arm pumps up and down in time to his pronouncements. His left hand holds the heavy Bible, open, balanced steadily.
He glares right at you. “I’ve SEEN old Satan — hah! Oh, I’ve WREST-led the serpent — hah! I KNOW him when I see him — hah!”
With a cold feeling in your spine you realize that he means you. He must. You, he, and Private Parks are the only people in the Square; and Private Parks, the Confederate statue atop its plinth, surely couldn’t be Satan. Walking away from the crazy man, you flush hot with anger. How dare he call you Satan! You, who are one of the newest members of the Gaither Jaycees! You, who only this year passed five hundred thousand dollars in policies sold!
But as you pass under the marquee of the deserted State Theatre, a chilling thought strikes: What if he’s right?
For you can remember a sin in your life, one that no one else has ever suspected. Yes, that one. And to compound it, you told lies about what actually happened, and yes, you got away with it, in the eyes of the world.
But what about the eyes of God?
Maybe Satan did get into you just a tad to make you do that. Okay, admit that much. But surely it didn’t hurt anybody. Well — not many people, anyhow.
The crazy old man on the Square has done a job on you, all right. The taste of your supper at the Busy Bee is sour, and you linger over cup after cup of coffee as you finish your paperwork. It’s dark by the time you leave the restaurant and head back to the Square. The streetlights are already on.
The Square is mostly deserted now. There’s not much to do in downtown Gaither after dark, not since old man Hesketh went crazy two years back and closed down the State. Your DeSoto is the only car parked on the south side of the Square.
The preacher is gone, too.
Too bad. You feel sort of — well, you make a mental note to give the old man a couple of dollars if you see him again.
But you’ll try not to see him, of course.
When Odum Tate came to town, he found first a job, then a place to live. He works for the Benton Brothers Lumberyard, near the train tracks east of town. He runs an eighteen-inch circular saw for eight hours a day, six days a week, cutting boards to specified lengths and widths. He does a good job, and he never comes in drunk.
For this, Bobby and Benny Benton pay him forty-four dollars a week. Tate comes in at eight o’clock in the morning (Bobby doesn’t even open until ten, but as long as Tate’s work is satisfactory, the arrangement is fine with him) and starts right in on the job. All day he stands in the scream of the saw, feeling its vibration as he feeds it wood. His black hair, greased and combed back from his forehead in harrowed rows, collects sawdust. More sawdust speckles his forehead, crusts yellow and dry in his nostrils. All day he stands in the sharp turpentine reek of pine or the clean, sour scent of oak. He stoops slightly, but looking at his thin build and black hair, an observer would be hard pressed to say whether Brother Tate is forty or closer to seventy.
At four o’clock he always stops work, walks the mile back to the boardinghouse where he stays — it is owned by Mrs. Hudson, and she likes him because he is neat, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and indicates that he thinks the late Mr. Hudson might have made it to heaven, by the infinite mercy of God.
There in his room Tate takes off the overalls, bathes himself, and dresses in his black suit, white shirt, and black tie. He picks up the big Bible, walks the additional three quarters of a mile to the Square, takes up his station, and preaches.
He doesn’t always preach to people. Sometimes he does, to be sure; sometimes he will attract a crowd of as many as a dozen, and when he is preaching the Word truly, they will chorus in with “Amen!” or “Preach it, brother!” At the end, they generally take up a collection for him, ten dollars or fifteen.
More often Brother Tate preaches to cars. That is all right, too. A congregation of Fords, Pontiacs, Plymouths, Chevys, assorted pickups, jeeps, even a Nash Rambler or two will not yield him a soul; but their eyes will never drowse or glaze over from the length of his sermon. Often enough, they sit quietly, staring at him with their headlights as he preaches to them about sin, conviction, and the mystery of Jesus crucified.
A few people in town think Brother Tate is a little bit crazy.
He has had a good day so far. He finished work, got to the Square at about the regular time, and preached to a crowd of seven. A young boy across the street had yelled a couple of taunts at him, but Brother Tate ignored him. He saw the Lord working on at least two faces in the crowd, and he hoped they would find their way to Calvary and redemption before it was too late for their immortal souls.
He had come back to the boardinghouse at eight o’clock. He had eaten simple fare with Mrs. Hudson and the other three boarders, then had gone up to his room to read his Bible. So far in his life, he had read the Bible through, cover to cover, thirteen times. This was the fourteenth tour, and he was just getting into the Acts of the Apostles.
At ten he had turned off the one hanging light bulb and had gone to bed.
He was out of bed again by eleven-thirty, disturbed by a sense of impending evil. He could not shake it. He pulled on his overalls and went out into the night.
Tate crossed the highway just before midnight. He was in an empty lot. Down the hill from him was Walnut Street, and beyond that the empty ridge. He knelt in the sedge. He was far enough from the nearest house to exhort Satan, he thought, without disturbing anyone.
He cries out, “Old serpent, God will crush your head beneath His heel!”
The echo from the ridge startles Brother Tate. His own distorted voice makes him shiver. He can smell the grass on either side of him, a bleachy scent like fresh semen, can smell the water and sour mud of Cherokee Creek, which curves west not far from here, passing under the highway through a man-high culvert.
12:03. Brother Tate is praying. He does not hear the last yelp of Tuxedo Williams, from half a mile to the north.
The black car passes behind him. In the warm gust of air from its passing, Brother Tate shudders but does not look around. “Oh, God!” he cries aloud, in a voice drawn out as if in agony. “What trial hast Thou sent us? What evil has come to Thy people?”
The night utterly swallows up these words. Not even an echo returns. In a quieter, wearier voice, Brother Tate earnestly begins to pray for himself, a sinner.
4
Three minutes to midnight. At the corner of Prior and Livingston streets, Andy McCory creeps into a doorway. Andy is drunk again. Right now he reeks of stale beer. His red hair is ruffled, his freckled red face vacant. When he spits, which he does constantly, you can see that his two top front teeth are stained with a black, spreading cavity. Andy, by common consent of the town, is no damn good.
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He is twenty-two years old.
Frye County, like most of north Georgia in 1957, is a dry county. It supports forty-one places of worship and thirty-seven bootleggers. The bootlegging business is growing faster than the church business.
Frye’s bootleggers, unlike the colorful characters from the Roaring Twenties that you see on the TV, are retailers, not manufacturers. They range from a man who can bring in enough popskull whiskey to anesthetize the whole VFW to smaller operators who bring in cases of beer from Atlanta or from Arcade, down toward Athens, for resale. Nobody bothers about the bootleggers, who are seen as necessary parts of society. They are even respected to some degree, for they are entrepreneurs, and men like them built this country on a firm basis of free enterprise.
Andy McCory does what he can to keep four bootleggers in business. He has visited one tonight, and he knows he is too damn drunk to go home. So he will rest for the night in this doorway — it is in the Grizzle Insurance Building, but it leads up a narrow flight of steps to old Mr. Barrow’s photography studio — then go home in the morning.
Andy is a family man. He has a wife, a daughter, and a son, all of whom he sometimes beats.
But he’s always been a little wild. Back in 1950, when the Korean War broke out, Andy was fifteen, the summer was ending, and it looked as if he were going to have to sit through the fifth grade again. He made up his mind one afternoon and walked barefoot (he got one pair of brogans a year, just at the beginning of school) to the Selective Service Board in the Federal Building just off the Square, and went inside. He saw Jeff Saunders, the janitor, mopping the floor. “Hey, nigger,” Andy said, “whereabouts do I go to get to fight in Ko-rea?”
Jeff showed him. But Miz Merrilees, the Selective Service clerk, knew that he was only fifteen, for all his five feet eleven inches and hundred and fifty pounds, and she sent him back to his mill-village house on Porter Street with a pair of burning ears. Andy’s father beat the shit out of him with a leather belt.
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