2
Odum Tate spent his days in the roar and howl of the lumberyard sawhouse and his nights in wrestling with God.
The Benton Brothers didn’t notice any change in him, but then they never spoke to him. He showed up, accepted the work orders for the lumber to be cut that day, did the work, and left; or if it was payday, he picked up his envelope first, never bothering to count it. Mrs. Hudson, the owner of the boardinghouse, fretted a little about him. His appetite was off, for one thing, and in the mornings he hardly touched his grits, ham, and eggs and in the evenings he merely pushed around on his plate the chicken, pot roast, or pork she had prepared. He had a sharp look about him, a nose growing pointed as a pen nib. Old Mr. Hudson had looked the same toward the end, as the cancer ate his insides. Mrs. Hudson worried about him.
Tate did a world of praying. Like Job, he longed for release, for destruction if that was what it took: like Job, he knew that God wanted him to be patient, to accept the evil with the good, to do what he could to be a righteous man. But here was no whirlwind, no voice to challenge him: and here was no suggestion of what he should do to relieve the burden he sensed everywhere around him in town.
Except for the boy.
Tate did not really know anyone in town, but he had seen a boy, and something inside him had told the preacher that this boy was his charge and his chance, that the building thunderstorm he felt over the town might yet be averted if only the boy could be brought into it, if the two of them could understand what it was they must fight and how to fight it.
But — a boy.
Odum Tate one night read a page in the huge ten-pound Bible that he never read anymore, a page not inspired by God as he believed every other page in the book assuredly to be. It was a page of blanks, meant to be filled in with the records of a family: births, marriages, deaths.
In the births column was one entry: Charles Benjamin Tate, 6/15/33.
In the deaths column was one entry: Charles Benjamin Tate, 11/13/42.
Tate saw more than nine years in between those two groupings of pen marks on paper. He saw his own profound iniquity, and the sufferings of a good woman and a boy (a boy, a little, little boy) brought on by his own works of evil. He saw the onset of a crippling fever, he saw himself too preoccupied with drink to carry the boy to the doctor, he saw the hopeless slide into coma and death and the look of cold, bitter hate in the eyes of the woman he had loved.
Well, God had given him nearly fifteen years of penitence now. He had not brought back his son, and he did not know where his wife was, if she still lived, but he had raised his voice against the sweet poison of sin the best he could for nearly every day of those fifteen years. And now there was another boy.
He knew he would have to seek the boy out, though he did not know where the knowledge came from. And as surely as he knew the past, Odum Tate knew he would bring into the boy’s life dark evil, desperate sin, the danger of death.
3
“Did he get her?” Jack Harwell asked. He and Alan had spent half of Friday morning tossing a football around with Reese Donalds and nine or ten other kids, but now the others had gone to Moccasin Creek to swim and the two of them rested under the trees at the far side of the school playground while Alan relived the depredations of the teenage werewolf.
“It was great,” Alan said. “See, he’s in the gym, and this girl is on the bars, and he turns. And she sees him — ”
“How’d he turn?” Jack demanded.
“It sort of looked like he was behind a pane of glass and somebody ran water over it, and he turned all hairy while the water was running. He slobbered, too. Drooled all over himself.”
“I wish my old man would let me go,” Jack muttered.
“I got five tickets left,” Alan said. “We could go. I just want to save two of them for — somethin’ else.” He had almost said, for Diane and me; but Jack would not understand his wish to take Diane to the movies, as soon as something less scary than werewolves was showing.
Jack plucked a grass stem, held it in his cupped hands, and blew a trumpetlike high note. “I reckon not. I don’t think the old man wants me to go to the show, period. It’s not the money.” He heaved a great, forlorn sigh. “So did he get this girl, or what?”
“He came up to her, and she was hanging upside down. This part was really great, I mean she has on this real tight gym suit and she’s hanging so you can see just about everything, right? Anyway, you see him coming closer, only he’s upside down — ”
“What? How come he’s upside down?”
“You’re supposed to see him the way the girl hanging does, see, and she’s hanging upside down, so he looks upside down to her, get it? Okay, he comes right up to her and she — ”
“She says, ‘Get outa here, boy, ya bother me.’” Jack Harwell’s outstanding talent was mimicry, and he did the slow nasal drawl of W. C. Fields perfectly. Or, if not perfectly, at least as well as whoever did the voice for the Warner Brothers cartoons. Jack had the peculiarity of being able to imitate any voice he heard imitated. He wasn’t quite as good when he tried to come up with an original impression. “Ah, yes,” he continued, still Fieldsian, “you’re far too hairy for me, m’dear, too hairy by far, yes, yes.”
“Shut up.” Alan grinned. “You goof.”
Jack blew his grass trumpet again, pushed his specs up, and looked across the playground at the red-brick school, dappled with the shadows of afternoon clouds. “All over the world teachers are getting ready to open school up,” he said.
Alan thumped a black ant off a stem of grass. He thought of Miss Lewis and the others inside the school. “All over Frye County, anyhow. You hear Mickey’s going to Calloway this year?” Calloway, an outlying town, was one of six in the county that housed its own school. “His daddy got tired of driving him in.”
“Durn it. He was the fastest one we had. Gonna miss him when we play football.”
“Yeah.” Alan plucked a spear of grass. He didn’t know what it was called — some kind of weed. It grew a long, tough stem, with a pale green head at the tip of it shaped something like a miniature carrot. Alan folded and twisted the stem to make a gun and popped the seed head off hard, shooting Jack in the neck with an audible thap! The other boy clapped his hand over his pimpled nape.
“Durn it, Kirby.” Jack snatched up another weed, made his own gun, and in an Edward G. Robinson voice said, “Now you’re gonna get it, see? Nyah. Little Caesar don’t take stuff like that, see? Nyah. Eat lead, copper. Nyah. Nyah.”
Alan submitted to being shot, somewhat painfully, on the neck. In the lull that followed, he said, “Wonder what old Ulrich’s class is gonna be like.”
Jack, who had been sitting holding his knees, pushed his legs out and relaxed onto his back. He wore no shirt, and a few real hairs grew on his chest, dark and wiry against the background of silvery down. “I sure will be glad when I get out of the eighth grade and get to go to high school,” he said.
“Me, too,” Alan said, knowing that he was not telling the full truth. High school would be a change, and with the conservatism of all boys, he was apprehensive of change. “I hear old Ulrich shakes you if you talk back to her.”
“Shakes your teeth outa your head,” Jack agreed, rolling onto his stomach. “Who is that?”
Alan turned to follow his gaze. Away across the playground, at the head of the ramp, stood a figure clothed in black, a man in a funereal suit, a stick figure, an Ichabod Crane of a man. Alan shivered all at once. “Don’t know,” he said.
“Is it that crazy old preacher?”
“I don’t know.”
Jack dropped his head and the subject. He rested his forehead on his crossed arms. “Wanna go swim?” he asked the ground in front of his face.
“Huh?”
“Pay attention — I say, pay attention, boy!” Jack said in the voice of Mel Blanc doing Kenny Delmar. “I keep tossin’ ’em over the plate, you keep cuttin’ the air, I say air! I say, are you willin’ to make like a dog
and paddle? Dog paddle, that is. That’s a joke, son!”
Alan stood up, not replying. The tall man in black turned slowly and walked away, past the school, toward town. “Jack,” Alan said, “I gotta go.”
“So go,” Jack said to the earth.
Alan ran down to the playground, righted his bike, and rode it to the ramp. He walked it up to the top and rode toward town, looking for the black-clad figure, seeking to find the man but somehow not wanting to find him. He spotted the figure waiting on the corner ahead, just in front of the Pure station. Alan braked, put his foot out, stood balancing his bike.
The man looked back. It was the preacher, the one whom Alan had heard now and again, usually in the evening, down on the Square. He had never really listened to the man, but no one in the downtown area could avoid hearing him.
Alan shivered again. The long-faced man frightened him, the intensity of the dark look frightened him. The hoarse ranting sermons frightened him perhaps most of all — Dr. Alman certainly didn’t sound that way when he stood in the pulpit of the First Methodist.
Alan pedaled his bike toward the man, who waited for him — impelled by curiosity, perhaps, or perhaps something different. He could not himself have said. Archie somebody-or-other looked up from under the hood of a black ‘52 Ford as he passed the station, but no one else seemed to notice. No one except the waiting man.
Alan stopped a few feet from him. The traffic light at the corner changed, and the aluminum box that controlled it clacked its relays. “Boy,” the preacher said.
“Sir.”
The thin chest heaved, and the man looked away. When he turned back, Alan could see tears shining in the dark eyes. “The gospel is a burden, son,” he said.
Alan didn’t know how to respond. “Yes, sir.”
“We don’t know why God’s finger touches one and not another.” The preacher reached into his back pocket and brought out a handkerchief. He mopped his thin face. “You’ve felt it, too, haven’t you?”
Alan frowned. He seemed to be on the edge of recalling something — a feeling, an idea, a dream. “I don’t know.”
The handkerchief went back in the pocket. “You’ve felt it. I know.” Eyes steady and piercing on Alan, deep and dark. “I am a weak vessel, son. Like Jonah, I nearly fled the call of the Lord. We can only put our fate in His hands now.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The time is not yet. I don’t understand either, boy. And I can’t see the end of it. All I can see is black night and fire, a time of great lamentation and an angel with a sword. We have a long way to go. What’s your name, boy?”
“Alan Kirby.”
“Mine is Odum Tate.” The man extended a long, fine-boned hand, and Alan shook it and felt thick callus. “I had a boy like you once,” Tate said. “The Lord punished my iniquity by taking him away. The sins of the fathers are visited on the sons.”
Alan, desperately unhappy, murmured, “Yes, sir.”
“When the time is right, you’ll find me on the Square, in the evening before sunset. You’ll remember that.” Alan could only nod.
“May the Lord hold us in the palm of His hand,” Tate said. “May he grant us His love and His help, for without them we cannot hope to stand in the night of our travail.”
“I have to go.”
The preacher nodded. Alan got on the bike and crossed the street. He looked over his shoulder once as he entered the outlying commercial district, and away behind him he saw the preacher still standing on the corner. He feared the man, and he did not trust him.
But somehow he feared the night even more. The night and the flame and the angel with the sword.
The night of his travail.
4
They had taken Billy Resaca out of the cagelike fighting tank. He was in a cell now, one of a dozen on the third and top story of the county jail. He was the only one on the floor, an important prisoner: they had doubled up some of the other inmates just to make room for him.
Billy could not understand the white men’s talk about lawyers and rights, and he could not make them understand that she came by night, came to show him her wounds and to speak strange things in his ear. He was still terrified by the visits, but he no longer screamed. Billy had gone far away, deep down into his own head, and when he screamed there, the shrieks never got as far as his mouth.
She wanted him to be like her, that was what he understood. She was with him all through the night, every night, and in the morning he was worn out, in a fog, uncaring. She wanted him to be like her, to be with her, to be her.
He thought of her coming home last Saturday night, dark of the moon that had been, and Mollie always ascared of the dark. Why hadn’t he heard, why hadn’t anybody heard? She explained that to him on one of her nocturnal visits: “I didn’t want you to hear me, Billy. It felt good. It felt real good. You’ll see, Billy. You won’t want anybody to hear you, either.” And though the voice was Mollie’s, the words were like a white man’s. The sounds of the words cut through his haze, were the only thing that cut through it. He had appeared in a courtroom, where white men had said things at him, but he ignored them. He spent his time in the cell sitting on the edge of his bunk, except for when his body told him he had to change position, to answer a call of nature, to eat, to sleep.
He slept mostly in the daytime now, despite the sun coming into the cell through the high barred windows, their glass out of reach beyond quarter-inch tight-mesh wire. He had thought at first that she was a dream, that she had come in his sleep, and so now he avoided sleep — and still she came, every night. And now he couldn’t even scream anymore.
The clank of the stairwell door being opened came to him, penetrating his lassitude, and then the muffled clack of the lock going back in place again. Next came the sound of the corridor door being unlocked and opened, closed and relocked. Finally the double sound of two men walking toward the cell. It was suppertime.
“Billy,” a man said, “come on. Get somethin’ t’eat.”
Billy pushed himself off the bunk (or did something else push him, was she here now, invisible?) and slouched to the door. The older guard, Billy forgot his name, had the food tray. The younger one, whose name Billy did not even know, had the shotgun. “Stand back,” the older one said, and Billy backed away.
The older guard unlocked and opened the cell door and set the tray down on the floor. He did not turn as he left the cell and locked the door again. He knew his business. At no time had he blocked the shotgun guard’s line of fire. “Eat now,” he said.
Billy picked up the tray, sat on the bunk again with the tray on his knees, and began to put food in his mouth. It was a hunk of boiled pork, boiled cabbage, black-eyed peas, a piece of cornbread, and a hard donut. He washed it down with the cup of water they had brought. The food was difficult to eat with the utensils they gave him — wooden fork and spoon, like the kind the ice cream places gave kids to eat soupy ice cream out of a paper cup — and it was tasteless, but Billy did not notice. He made his jaws chew and his throat swallow. He ate methodically, first the pork, torn into bits he could thrust into his mouth, then the cabbage, then the peas, then the bread, then the donut. And a last swallow of lukewarm water. He took the tray to the door, put it down (the wooden fork and knife lined up on the plate side by side, the way they had told him to do it), and then he went back to sit on the edge of his bunk.
The older guard unlocked the door, retrieved the tray, and locked Billy in again. “That ol' ghost been around again, boy?” he asked.
Billy did not turn his head.
“This man says a woman’s ghost comes up here. You ever seen her, Eb?” the old guard asked Shotgun.
“Ain’t never seen her,” Shotgun said. “How the hell she get in? Sure don’t come up the stairs.”
“Ghosts have their own ways in.” In a lower, insinuating, confidential tone: “She been comin’ to see you, Billy? Showin’ how bad you cut her up?”
Tell him, Billy screamed to himse
lf. Lord God, tell him what happen ever night when I left all alone here and it black dark outdoors and she come and talk them crazy words. Tell him again, tell them all, find somebody who’ll listen. He heard himself make noises, whimpering sounds like a hurt dog, but no words. He felt the tears, hot, then warm, then cold, sliding from his eyelids to his cheek to his chin. He could not make his mouth work to talk.
“Let’s go,” Shotgun said from the corridor.
“Holler if she comes back, Billy,” Tray said. “I’d give a pretty to see somethin’ like that. You just give us a holler, hear?”
The two of them retreated down the hall. Billy heard the doors open and close behind them, and he was alone. But outside the sun was going down, and in four hours the cell lights would dim — they never went entirely out — and except for the hourly check-in by the guards, Billy would be in the cell alone.
The dark was coming.
She was coming with it.
It felt good, she had told him in her own voice and somebody else’s words. It felt real good. Billy heard a tack-tack-tack sound at the window. It raised the hair on his neck.
But when he brought himself to look up, he saw just a moth, a big, fat, furry gray moth, tapping against the window glass. It wasn’t yet time for the creatures, for the dirty glass still showed the red streaks of sunset, but this one was outside, and it wanted in.
“Go away,” Billy whispered to it. “You ain’t Mollie. I don’t believe you Mollie. You get outa here and leave me alone.”
The moth continued, maddeningly. It ticked like a clock counting off the seconds, an idiot sound, a bug hitting its head on glass with more persistence than any creature with a brain could possibly have.
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