by Silas House
“I like it better right here,” he said. He wanted to say, This is where God lives, but he knew Easter would probably say that was blasphemy. She was always worried about people blaspheming since this was the only sin that God would not forgive. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he told her, “I believe in God.”
“Well, I sure hope so,” she said. She clutched her purse in front of her and didn’t move. “But you have to congregate with other Christians, honey. You’ve got to let your light shine.”
“Why can’t I shine it right here?”
Easter fretted her eyebrows together. “You going to be just like your mommy.”
He kept going to church with Easter. He felt the fire of the Holy Ghost run up and down the back of his neck, he clapped and sang along to songs like “The Good Old Gospel Ship” and “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down,” but it wasn’t the same feeling that came to him when he was on the mountain, alone. That was where he prayed. On the mountain, he was able to recognize the Lord hanging in the trees, blowing against his face.
Clay heard the first strains of one of his favorite songs, and he was brought back to the present. When he turned to look past the pews crowded with everyone he knew, he saw a girl he had never seen, stepping up on the altar. She brought a fiddle up to her face and began playing “Midnight on the Water.”
He had barely gotten to size up the fiddler before Darry nudged him and said it was time they walked on up to the altar. Even after they were situated in front of the congregation, he couldn’t help looking to his side, where she was playing.
The girl’s eyes were closed tightly, as if she felt every note of the music flow through her. He liked the straight way she stood, the careful placement of her feet. He watched the way she moved, her body bending forward slightly with each changing note, her hair swaying softly behind her, the curve of her cheek against the cool wood of the fiddle. She concentrated on the cries of her fiddle, making sure each one came out correct and full of pain. When she finished, she stepped to the side of the altar pews without even looking out over the audience.
Anita Whitaker went to the altar and began singing “Love Can Build a Bridge,” and the bridesmaids began their walk up the aisle. When Dreama appeared in the foyer on Gabe’s arm, the fiddler stood and broke into a rousing version of the “Wedding March,” and then everyone jumped up and looked toward the back of the church.
Clay looked at the fiddler, though. Still she did not open her eyes but sawed away at the instrument like a man determined to cut down an oak. She let her hair fall into her face, her knuckles white. The music seemed to flow right out of her skin. He felt dizzy from the beauty of her fiddling and swallowed hard. Even after she had stopped playing and the ceremony began, he watched her. He didn’t even notice when one of the candles in the tall, brass candelabra fizzled out with a hiss, foretelling infidelities, and a little murmur rose up from the crowd.
Dreama and Darry tangled around each other for a long, sensuous kiss, and the preacher introduced them as man and wife.
Darry and Dreama walked quickly back down the aisle as the fiddler launched into a fast, celebratory song that Clay had never heard before.
The reception was held across the road in the fellowship hall. Everyone settled into their seats while Dreama and Darry went about shoving wedding cake into each other’s mouths and twisting their arms awkwardly together to drink their punch. Clay sat down beside Easter, who had taken her seat at the very back of the room. She was gray-faced and looked as if she had walked wearily into the building and fallen into the first chair she had seen.
“We’re supposed to be up front,” he said. “Dreama will kill us.”
“I know it,” Easter answered. She did not meet his eyes and seemed to be looking at nothing at all. Suddenly, she seemed very old.
“What’s wrong?” Clay asked.
“It’s just come to me,” she said, as if she was out of breath. “Dreama’s carrying a baby.”
When he turned in his seat, he saw the fiddler, standing straight-backed in a coat that was too heavy for the season.
“Are you Dreama’s brother?” she asked.
“No, I’m her first cousin, but I might as well be. We was raised up together.” He could smell the strong, fresh scent of Coast soap easing out of her skin.
“Well, can you tell her that I need to go on and leave? She said I didn’t need to play at the reception. I hate to run off, but I’ve got to go.”
“Why yeah, I’ll tell her,” Clay said. “Did she already pay you?”
“You all don’t owe me nothing,” she said. “It was such a pretty wedding that they ain’t no way I could charge for playing. It was my pleasure.”
Clay patted his back pocket for his billfold, then realized it was in his tuxedo jacket. “Here,” he said, and shoved a twenty-dollar bill into her slender hand. “At least take this, for gas up here.”
“No,” she said, pushing the money away with a half-smile. “I don’t want it. Swear I don’t.”
“Are you a friend of hers?”
“Naw, I had a little paper on the bulletin board at the community college, saying ‘Fiddler for Hire,’ and she called me,” she said, and laughed as if she was embarrassed. “This is the first time I ever played for strangers.”
“Well, you’ll never make no money this way.”
“That’s all right. We’ll see you all later. Tell Dreama I said congratulations.”
He watched her skipping across the puddles of the parking lot, her fiddle case clutched tightly in her hand. She got into her car and plowed off through the rain as if she was running away from something.
4
CLAY AND CAKE were headed to the Hilltop Club. The night was warm and well lit by a bright rind of a moon, but there was a scent to the air that signaled autumn approaching. Clay had rolled down all of the windows, and the wind came into the cab of his truck to swirl about roughly. Steve Miller was singing on the radio.
Cake patted the dashboard to the beat of the music and took long hits on a joint. Clay didn’t hunger for pot, and he definitely didn’t feel like it tonight. The aroma of marijuana was sickeningly sweet and tangy as it met the damp, warm air.
“You want to cruise through town before we head up to the club?” Clay asked.
“Why yeah,” Cake answered, after singing the entirety of a verse. “We do every Saturday night. Why would we change it now?”
Clay drove on, leaning this way and that with each curve of the road. They drove into town, where the stores were all closed and lit up like many-windowed boxes stacked along Main Street. The town itself was closed, as nothing stayed open past dark, but the streets were filled with slow, rumbling cars crowded with people who waved and hollered to Clay and Cake. They knew by the cars who they were passing, without even glancing at their faces. They went on up to the shopping center, where people sat on their car hoods beneath signs that ordered NO LOITERING. People were dancing beside their open car doors or sitting on the tailgates of trucks, swinging their legs and yelling to everyone that passed. Cake burst out of the truck window, half his body extended into the air, and screamed for everybody to go up to the Hilltop with them.
The Hilltop Club sat nestled halfway up Town Mountain, a wide-shouldered wall above Black Banks. As they climbed the steep grade, they could see the whole town spread out below them. There were so many lights and zooming cars that it almost looked like a big city. Across the bowl that held the town, another mountain rose up to support the hospital, which you could pick out by the marble statue of Jesus with his arms stretched out in front: the white figure was so lit up that it could be seen for miles.
In the parking lot, Clay turned off the truck and sat breathing in the good air for a minute while Cake primped. It was such a beautiful night that Clay considered asking Cake if it would be all right with him if they just went driving around, but he knew this would have been foolish talk to Cake. Cake had waited all week, thinking of nothing bu
t Saturday night while he worked at the gas station, and there was nothing he would rather do than party. Besides, Clay liked being dressed up and having somewhere to go, liked knowing that he could walk into the club and know everyone there, that he could hold up a dollar bill and have a cold beer delivered to him. They could hear the beat of the music rolling across the blacktop, and already he felt like dancing.
“How I look?” Cake asked. He had on a black bowling shirt, tight black Levi’s, and shiny black boots. He brushed his hair again and studied himself in the visor mirror.
“You look all right,” Clay said.
“Just all right? You mean I don’t look damn good?”
“You look good, Cake,” Clay said. Cake knew exactly how good-looking he was, and his vanity annoyed Clay. They went through this every time they went somewhere.
“Well, hell, why didn’t you say that instead of just ‘all right’? Now I feel like I look awful.” Cake fished down into Clay’s glove box and pulled out a small bottle of cologne. He sprayed it all over his shirt and, with a maniacal grin, squirted two sprays onto his crotch.
“Shit-fire, Cake. Now we gonna smell just alike.”
Cake laughed and climbed out of the truck. Cake didn’t give a damn about anything on a party night. As long as he was having a good time, nothing mattered. Some Saturday nights, when they fought and the bouncers had to pull Cake away with his boot heels dragging, he would laugh like a lunatic while blood poured from his lip.
“All right, let’s see who goes home with the best-looking woman tonight,” Cake said, strutting across the lot.
“Who are you, John Travolta? I can’t remember many nights you took somebody home with you.”
“I’m picky, I guess.”
As soon as they opened the door to the honky-tonk, cigarette smoke burst out onto the crisp night air like a translucent fist being unclenched. They paid their way and walked into the spell Evangeline was casting over the audience with her husky voice. The music churned about them. Evangeline was singing “Don’t Ask Me No Questions” while she danced across the stage. She smoked a cigarette and took sips from her bourbon and Pepsi as she sang.
The honky-tonk was full. They had to push their way through to get to their table. Every small wooden table was crowded with more chairs than it could accommodate, and people stood against the walls like a line of police guards. People threw their heads back in laughter, women sat on men’s laps, people downed shots of liquor and blew the fire off their jellybeans before throwing the drinks down their throats. The dance floor was filled with people, hunched and swaying beneath the huge stage, where Evangeline strutted back and forth.
Everyone spoke to Clay and Cake as they made their way through the club, so that it took them five minutes to cross the short distance to their table. The table was marked by a piece of notebook paper that read RESERVED. Cake wadded up the piece of paper and threw it onto the floor.
As soon as they sat down, their waitress arrived to put napkins and a bowl of pretzels on their table. She also sat two long-neck beers and two shots of whiskey before them.
“I seen you all coming in,” Roe explained, “so I went ahead and set you all up. I know what my boys order.”
Cake paid her and added a hefty tip. “Go ahead and bring us a fifth of Jim Beam,” he said.
“I’ll do it.” Roe nodded and parted the crowd.
Cake danced in his seat and squalled out loudly to let everyone know they had arrived. He swallowed the shot of whiskey without chasing it. Clay downed his own shot and felt the fire of bourbon scorch his throat. He looked out over the crowd and watched Evangeline as she finished the song and took a long swallow from her cup. Cool air rolled off the dance floor, and the place was filled with the scent of liquor and beer and a hundred different perfumes. Clay felt a strange sense of dissatisfaction that he couldn’t actually name, and looking around, he suddenly felt that most of the people around him looked pathetic.
“Man, I love this song,” Cake said, jumping up. “I’ve got to dance.”
Cake faded off to the strains of “Night Moves,” hunting for somebody to dance with.
When Roe came back, she sat right down at the table with Clay. She shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit it. “What’re you up to, Clay?”
“Nary thing, Roe. Gonna try and get drunk.”
“What’s wrong? You don’t seem like yourself tonight.”
“Ah, I don’t know. I feel kind of lonesome tonight.”
“Well, you in the wrong place, then,” she said with a wheezing laugh. “People don’t come to honky-tonks to be lonesome.”
“People don’t go nowhere to be lonesome, do they?” he asked, and smiled.
Roe laughed loudly as she got up. “Naw, I don’t reckon they do. I don’t see what a good-looking boy like you is doing lonely, though. I don’t understand it.”
“Well, I don’t neither,” Clay said.
Roe ran her finger through the air. “Look around, then. They’s plenty of women here, and most of em would give their eyeteeth to have you.”
“There ain’t nobody here I’d have,” he said. “Don’t want nothing you can find at a honky-tonk.”
“When you get ready to settle down, where you need to go and find you a woman is the church house, buddy,” Roe said.
Clay felt like saying, “You’re one to talk,” but he didn’t. Roe had worked at the Hilltop for the past twenty years and wound up just as drunk as everybody else by the time the club closed, since she took a sip out of everybody’s glass—just like she bummed a smoke out of everybody’s pack. She was a good old girl, though.
BEFORE LONG, CLAY and Cake’s table was crowded with drunks. Geneva and her husband, Goody, were there, along with several other people that they always partied with. They were all intent on getting wild drunk tonight, and they were well on their way. They talked loudly, yelling back and forth over the music. They drank from the same bottles and lit one another’s cigarettes. They had been drunk together so many times that if they were not related, they felt like it.
Cake poured Clay another shot and slid it across the table. “Drink up, brother!” he hollered. “Let’s get knee-walking drunk tonight.”
Clay threw his head back and swallowed the liquor. Half the bottle was gone, and he was already feeling the dull electricity coursing through him. Liquor did not make him stumble or stutter, did not make him meaner or louder, but seemed to prod his jumpy spirit. When he got drunk he wanted to jump up and down, hollering to tell everybody that they ought to enjoy life more.
Geneva was obviously drunk, as her consumption of beer had been pepped up by several Xanax. When Evangeline and her band began to play “Cherry Bomb,” Geneva bolted out of her seat and grabbed hold of Clay’s arm, pulling him up. She danced through the crowd toward the dance floor, turning round and round, snapping her fingers and twisting her hips until Clay caught up with her and they began to swim around the floor.
Geneva was a good dancer not only because of how well she moved but because of the cool, serious look on her face. She seemed completely absorbed in the music, unaware of her dancing partner or her surroundings. She shut her eyes or looked at the floor, holding her mouth in a firm, straight line with her top lip stuck out hard above the bottom one. Clay followed her in perfect stride, moving his body in all different directions and managing to keep in sync with the music.
When the song ended, Geneva and Clay hugged and she said, “Thanks, baby,” loudly into his ear. Clay put his hand into the small of her back and began to stroll across the dance floor, but she stopped.
“Wait,” Geneva said. “Let’s see what they gonna play next.”
Evangeline took her time between songs. She drifted across the stage to grab her cup of whiskey from a wooden stool and emptied it of all contents. She held the cup up in the air until Roe scrambled up to the stage and took it to be refilled. Evangeline lit a cigarette and breathed smoke out through her nose as she conferred with the lead guit
arists. Finally, she made her way back to the microphone. The band strummed softly behind her, tuning their guitars.
“We going to do one of your-all’s favorites, now. How bout a little ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’?” The crowd roared with applause and high squalls. “Wait a minute, now. Wait. Tonight it’ll be the real thing. My little baby sister is going to come up here and play the fiddle for us.” The applause intensified with more clapping and whistling. Roe brought Evangeline another cup of whiskey. She breathed loudly into the microphone and winked at Roe.
She looked offstage and yelled, “Alma, get up here, now.”
Evangeline’s sister, Alma, walked slowly up the steps and onto the stage. She carried her fiddle and its bow in one hand. She waved as she made her way across the big stage while everyone whistled and clapped, but she didn’t look up, as if she was afraid she might misstep and fall right in front of everybody.
“If you don’t know her, this is my little sis, Alma,” Evangeline said. “And she can play that sumbitch like nothing you ever seen.”
Even with all the bourbon coursing through him, Clay knew that she was the same fiddler from Dreama’s wedding. He could tell by the way she moved.
He thought she was beautiful but didn’t know exactly why. She was dressed modestly—unlike most of the women there—in a long, black skirt with a slit and a white, ruffle-collared shirt that was open by only one button. She wore black flats and black hose, and her hair fell in a wild auburn blur down to her waist. There was something about her face that struck him as out of place. She looked like somebody from another time. Her face was smooth and made up of soft, rounded curves, but it was interesting in the same way older people’s faces are: there seemed to be a story in her eyes that was waiting to be told. She pulled her sleeves up, threw her hair to the side, and positioned the fiddle on her shoulder. When she put her chin onto the cool wood, Clay felt a start run all through him.
The band was silent behind her, and the crowd was paying reverence, too. Fiddlers were not common fixtures at the Hilltop, and everybody was quietly excited. Either that or Clay was simply unaware of any sound other than that of the bow first touching the strings of the old fiddle. She began the song slowly, the strains high and mourning. She was a part of the music, her face a peaceful hillside. Her eyes were clenched tightly shut, and she swayed softly, so slowly that it was barely noticeable. She reminded Clay of tall grass in a slight breeze. The sad voice of the fiddle filled the building. Evangeline began to sing the slow first verse of the song, and it seemed that her voice and that of the fiddler were in perfect harmony, like two sisters ought to be.
