Edge of Dark Water

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “What I was really thinking is we don’t need no roof,” Jinx said. “What we need is to get back on the river. We haven’t gone that far, and here we sit.”

  “Mama’s doing better,” I said. “She even seems a little happy. Maybe she just needs some time.”

  “I had an uncle was a drunk, and that cure-all is the same kind of thing,” Jinx said. “What happens is they quit a day or so, then they get to craving, and they get sick, then they get better if they don’t go back to it. But the real bad time is coming yet, and you got to be ready for it.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said.

  “I know it well enough,” she said. “Same as I know that fried chicken tonight was too salty.”

  “You ain’t against looking a gift horse in the mouth, are you?”

  “Even if the horse is free, you ought to check its teeth now and again to make sure ain’t none of them falling out,” Jinx said. “Besides, I ain’t the reason he wants us here. It ain’t arguing religion he likes so much. He likes your mama.”

  “I see that,” I said.

  “He looks at her, it’s like he’s licking his lips over a pork chop.”

  “You think he’s got bad intentions?” I asked.

  “He’s got regular man intentions, that’s for sure.”

  That night rolled into a series of nights, and then I lost count. We got the river off our mind. The food was good and it was brought to the reverend free by his church members, though there was someone who always did overdo the salt.

  It was a good life and easy, and I wasn’t having to carry stove wood to bed with me. There wasn’t any sudden outburst that ended in Mama holding her eye and limping off to the bedroom. The reverend had a good singing voice, and he sang spirituals and old songs, and he sang them well, like his voice was coming from down deep in a well.

  This enjoyment didn’t keep me from allowing the reverend to help us build that rudder he talked about for our raft. Then he built a kind of hut made of lumber and logs in the middle of it. It wasn’t much of a hut, but it could hold all of us at one time if we didn’t breathe heavy or think too hard. He even stocked the hut with a couple bags full of goods so that if we decided to leave, we’d have a few things with us.

  But after it was built, we didn’t leave. We was like flies stuck in sweet molasses. Things was so comfortable there, I was beginning to think we had gotten worked up for nothing, and no one was following us. A few miles down the river had given us a freedom. It had been at our fingertips and we hadn’t even known it. I had hesitated about running away from home, but now realized just how much of a captive I had been. What really struck me was there hadn’t been no walls or guards around me, yet I had stayed in my prison on a kind of honor system. I had been my own guard and prison wall, and hadn’t even known it.

  As I said, the reverend slept in his car, and now and again he would sit at the table in his house with a big pad and pencil, the Bible at his elbow, and would write out sermons. To see how they would go with his flock, he would try them out on us. We told him how it all hit us, and gave him a few tips on how it might sound better to his listeners. He didn’t even mind that a nonbeliever like Jinx had some suggestions. He got so good at delivering them sermons, Jinx was damn near ready to get baptized.

  While we was there, for our keep, we did chores. Mama hoed out the garden and showed Reverend Joy how to better take care of it. She even looked stronger, and the gardening gave her use of her muscles and some sunlight. But, as Jinx said it would, the cure-all came back on her. She had seemed clear of it, but then her need for it showed up. She did have a few days and nights where she got weak, yelled, and had some bad dreams—dreams about that black horse, and the other, winged now, and white as a cloud. We held her while she talked out of her head. The reverend didn’t even ask her what was wrong. Just sat by her and put a damp rag on her head. It was clear to me he knew what was going on, but it was also clear to me he never intended to say a word. During the day Mama tossed and turned and the bed was wet with her sweat, which was thick as hog lard on the sheets.

  After a few days of this, Jinx went off in the woods and got some roots and bark and such, brewed it all up together, put it in a cup, and gave it to Mama to sip. Jinx said it was what they had given her uncle that caused him to quit drinking. Mama tried to fight off drinking that stuff, but she was too weak. Jinx was able to slip it down her throat. From the smell of that mess, I figure Mama got better just to keep from having to drink any more of it. Jinx said it was because she wasn’t a true-to-the-bone drunk, but was a drunk in her head, which meant she just didn’t like her life and wanted to get away from it, and that the cure-all was the door out. Now that she had gotten off it, and things was good, she had lost the desire, and unlike most drunks, the worst of which would drink shoe polish or hair tonic if it had alcohol in it, Mama was most likely done with it. Or so we hoped.

  It got so Mama washed the reverend’s clothes, and ours, and while she did my overalls and shirt, I had to wear my good dress. This led to the reverend telling me how pretty I was, and it led to me believing it to such a point, next thing I knew I was up in church singing with the choir.

  We all started going to church, and even Jinx got to come in, but she had to stay in the back and was told not to be too familiar with white people, and she wasn’t supposed to discuss her views on religion, even if she was asked a direct question. That was okay with her. She mostly slept through the sermons.

  Truth is, we was all pretty content.

  Now, there did get to be some talk. Folks at the church started asking me about us, about where we had come from, how long we had been at the reverend’s house, and exactly what was his and Mama’s arrangement. They also wanted to know why was we staying around with a nigger, meaning Jinx, of course. I told them we was just folks he was helping out with good Christian charity, and that he was sleeping in the car and Mama in the house, and there wasn’t nothing funny going on, and Jinx was a friend, which was a thing that kind of concerned them. They will tell you they got “good nigger friends,” if you ask, but what they mean is they have colored folks who they know and nod at and hire for jobs wouldn’t nobody do if they didn’t need the quarter, which was a kind of standard payment for everything from cutting grass to chopping wood, even if it was done all day in the hot sun.

  To sum it up, his flock started to talk bad about Reverend Joy after church, and fewer men shook hands with him at the door. Even the kids run by him like they was passing a wasp nest, and my guess is they didn’t know sin from a pancake.

  The women would stand out in the church lot and yak and think I wasn’t hearing them, but I have good ears, and I’m nosy, too, so I heard a lot.

  There was one woman about Mama’s age, not bad-looking in a kind of long-nosed anteater way. She was always narrowing her eyes and smiling, but that smile reminded me of how a dog will do when it’s trying to decide if it ought to snarl or not. She seemed to be the main source of the gossip, and reason for that was plain to me. She was the one Jinx identified as the Too Much Salt in the Fried Chicken Lady; the one that came around and smiled and brought food, and tried to peek about to see if Mama had her underwear hanging over the door or some such business. It was clear to me that she saw herself not so much as a protector against sin but as someone disappointed the sin she suspected wasn’t hers, and that she wasn’t going to be what she most wanted to be—the preacher’s wife.

  Anyway, she and them other women was talkers, standing around in their good-enough dresses and spit-shined shoes, their big church hats propped on their heads. It was the kind of talk that made me want to break off a limb and take to whacking her and that bunch of hypocrites across the back of the head.

  I started to tell Mama and Reverend Joy about it, but figured if I did, then we’d have to leave, and we’d be on the river again in the Kingdom of the Snake. I thought about what it was we had planned to do, thought about May Lynn from time to time, about her being in a bag, and th
at she was still a long way from Hollywood. But the truth was, it wasn’t at the front of my mind.

  Terry, the one who most wanted to take her out there, had even settled down, though now and again he would take the bag with May Lynn in it and go out and set with it on the edge of the raft like they was spooning. I even heard him talking to her once when I come up behind them. I was on my way to sit on the edge of the raft and dunk my feet in the river, but when I heard him talking, I decided to turn around and go back up the hill and leave them to it. In time, he found a lard can to keep her in, like the money. I guess he figured that was safer, and it had a nifty handle for carrying.

  Only Jinx wanted to move on, though I don’t know how much May Lynn’s ashes had to do with it. For all his kindness, the reverend still treated Jinx a bit like a stain. He had stopped trying to convert her, however, and said something about there being some souls that was bound on the Judgment Day train for hell and there was no way to stop it. He would bring this up now and again, and when he said it, he would look at Jinx, and she would go, “Choo-choo.”

  Anyway, we stuck, cause sometimes when you’re happy, or at least reasonably content, you don’t look up to see what’s falling on you.

  14

  More time passed, though I don’t know exactly how long. I lost count of the days. When in church, I gradually noted that the number of people in the pews got smaller. It pretty much come down to Reverend Joy preaching to a smattering of hanger-ons and us, and we had heard it all before at the kitchen table and had even helped him fine-tune it. But we stuck out of loyalty, same as you would if a little kid wanted to read a poem to you they’d wrote and there wasn’t any real good excuse to go somewhere, though next to offering my hand to a water moccasin to bite, listening to someone read a poem is high on my list of things I can’t stand.

  The women who had been bringing Reverend Joy food during the week, as it was customary to do for the preacher, stopped delivering it; that little perk we had been taking advantage of dried up like an old persimmon. Too Much Salt in the Fried Chicken Lady—or, as I sometimes thought of her, the Anteater—was the first to go.

  After that, it was all downhill.

  Her chatter, and that of her nest of hens, turned the flock so against the reverend, including that man we had seen him baptize, that some joined the Methodists, which was a low blow as far as Reverend Joy was concerned.

  “They might as well be Catholics,” he said.

  The reverend’s sadness began to rub off on us. Terry, who hadn’t been in any hurry to go, had taken more frequent to carrying May Lynn’s can of ashes and her diary to the raft. He’d sit there with the can by his side and the diary in his hands, reading. Jinx would sit on the raft with him, and do some fishing. Whatever she caught, she’d throw back. I had been wearing my good dress a lot even when I didn’t need to, but now I put it away and went back to my overalls. It got so I dreaded Sunday church and Wednesday prayer meeting. Before, all I had to do was sit through it, but now, watching the reverend preach was painful. He seemed smaller in his clothes, like a dwarf that had put on a fat man’s pants and jacket by mistake.

  One Sunday evening there was only us and about five other people in the church. Four of them five was old folks who wouldn’t have changed churches if it caught on fire, and one was the local drunk, who liked to come there to sleep sitting up in the back pew next to where Jinx liked to sleep, though now and again he wasn’t above yelling out “Amen” or “Praise the Lord,” which was more than Jinx was willing to do. But unlike Jinx, the drunk did some of his sleeping lying down in the pew, where our girl would kind of hood her eyes and nod sitting up.

  Anyway, this Sunday I’m talking about, after the sermon, Reverend Joy was quick to get out from behind the pulpit and over to the door. He stopped and let Mama walk with him down the hill toward the house. Before, he always went to stand in the doorway to shake hands, and we’d go ahead and meet him later. But now, like a dog bored of a trick, he was done, partly because the five listeners was as eager to leave as he was, including the drunk.

  Me and Terry and Jinx watched Reverend Joy and Mama walking down the hill toward the house. It was still bright out, it being sometime in early July now, and we stood in the lot, picking up gravel and tossing it at a sweet gum that grew near the church. It wasn’t that we had anything against the sweet gum. It was just something to do.

  “We ought to get on with it,” Jinx said. “May Lynn ain’t gonna go to Hollywood and scatter herself.”

  “I have been thinking the same thing,” Terry said. “At first I found this comfortable, but less so now. I feel like we have been kidnapped by ourselves. That we are among the lotus-eaters.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Something I read in a book once,” he said. “Suffice to say that once you are in the clutches of the lotus-eaters, it isn’t easy to depart from them. You eat of the lotus and are led to believe everything is pleasant even when it isn’t. We had a plan, and we’ve laid it down. I suppose we should pick it up again. For me, the spell here is broken.”

  “I don’t remember eating no lotus,” Jinx said. “Whatever that is.”

  “It’s a way of speaking,” Terry said. “It represents a mood. A thought.”

  “Why don’t you just say that?” Jinx said. “Why you got to represent it, or some such thing?”

  “I’ll work to improve,” Terry said.

  That night I lay on my pallet on the floor, dozing off and on, and then at some point I came wide awake. I felt like a hand had been laid on me and was shaking me, and when I woke, May Lynn was walking to the back of the cabin pointing in the direction of the river. She was wearing that same old dress she always wore. Her hair was wet and dripping and there was a sewing machine tied around her feet. She was dragging it behind her like a ball and chain, making no noise whatsoever. She was all swollen up like when we found her. When she got to the rear of the cabin, she turned and looked at me and frowned and jabbed one of her fat fingers at the back cabin wall, really hard. It was all so genuine I could smell the river on her.

  Then I really woke up. I looked and there wasn’t no ghost, but I sure felt like May Lynn had been in the room, urging me to get back on that raft and get on down to Gladewater and then Hollywood.

  The whole thing made my stomach feel suddenly empty. I was also hot and sticky. I thought I might creep over and get myself some cool buttermilk from the icebox, but when I sat up, now that my eyes had become used to the dark, I noticed the door to the bedroom, where Mama slept, was open.

  I got up and tippy-toed so as not to wake Terry, who was sleeping at the rear of the cabin, or Jinx, who slept near the front door. I went and looked in the bedroom. The bed was empty. I went back to the main room and over to the window by the front door. I hesitated a moment, listened to Jinx snore. She sounded like someone had stuffed one of her nostrils with a sock. I moved back the curtain. There was nothing out there to see but heat lightning dancing above the trees and a few fireflies fluttering about, bobbing back and forth like they were being bounced off an invisible wall.

  I went back to my pallet and got my shoes I had set by it, put them on, then crept quietly out the front door and closed it gently. I stood there on the porch trying to decide if I should go through with what I was thinking. Finally I decided I was going to do just that, even if in the end it harelipped the pope.

  I sidled over to the reverend’s car and looked in the window. The reverend’s blankets and pillow was in the front seat, but he wasn’t with them, and Mama wasn’t there, which was a relief, but it wasn’t a deep kind of relief, because I still didn’t know where neither one of them was. I don’t exactly know why I was concerned about it, but I was. I didn’t like to imagine Mama would be with Reverend Joy, at least in the way I was thinking. I guess she had the right to some kind of happiness, but it still bothered me, and I suppose it was because I was wanting her and my real father, Brian, to rekindle things, so we’d be some kind of family.


  I decided it was best not to know what they was doing. I started back for the house. Then I heard talking. It was coming from the rear of the cabin, so I went carefully along the side of it. When I got to the edge of the back wall, I realized the sound was not as near as I thought, but because of the slope of the hill, and the way it had a horseshoe sort of bend in it, voices were coming up from down there. The words wasn’t entirely clear, but I could tell the voices belonged to Mama and Reverend Joy.

  I skulked down the hill, feeling like a thief with a baby under my arm and a hot pot of water and some salt and pepper waiting, and made my way through the cover of trees scattered here and there. I came to where the hill had a bit of a lift, and then another drop-off. I could really hear them good now. I sat down there on the edge of that drop-off because I could see them from there, too. It was just shapes I could see, but it was easy to recognize the shapes and voices. They was down by the water, sitting on the raft, talking. It was a rotten thing to do, but I sat down and listened.

  It was just talk at first, and I don’t remember much of the early stuff. Mostly it was the Reverend Joy doing the talking, about this and that, but there was something about his tone that made me feel like he had something wild caught inside his head and was trying to sneak up on it and let it loose without getting bit.

  He said, “I don’t know that I have actually been called to preach.”

  “God called you?” Mama said.

  “I thought so. I really did. But now I’m less certain. I am beginning to think I called myself.”

  “You know why your church members are leaving, don’t you?” Mama said.

  “I do.”

  “And so do I. But instead of us leaving, instead of making it easy for you, we’ve stayed. We’re at fault here. If we leave, things will go back the way they were.”