The Devil's Dream

by Lee Smith

  Finally Zeke ended up living with his Aunt Dot, his mother’s older sister, and her husband, Clovis Kincaid, and their eleven children in that tumbledown place at Frog Level, out from Cana. Zeke had never seen so many kids. All of them all the time laughing and crying and fighting, snot-nosed and gap-toothed, running, running here and there. They all looked alike, fair and tow-headed, just like Zeke. He fit right in, or appeared to. So he liked it there.

  It was loud and rough over at Frog Level, and sometimes the boys ganged up on him, and sometimes there was not enough food to go around at supper, but Zeke liked it fine over there. Nobody paid him any mind. They’d say, “Go down there and get the cow,” or “Watch this littlun, honey,” or “Chop me some wood now.” They did not say, “What air ye a-thinking, honey?” or “What air ye a-listening out fer?” like his Great-aunt Edith used to. They never asked him any questions at all. Which was a good thing.

  For even as a child, Zeke had sense enough not to tell anybody about the voices in his head, or that other sound he always heard, like wind through a cave. The only way Zeke knew to shut off that sound was to sit still. Real still.

  But then they sent him over to Frog Level, where the Kincaids drowned it out. So Zeke could relax a little bit now. He could grow up some. He could shoot marbles with his cousin Tom or get in a wrestling match with Dan or play house with Jane and Pansy or hidey-go-seek in the woods until it got too dark to see, and then he could fall on the bed tick exhausted, and sleep in a smelly pile of boys. Girls in the front room, boys in the back room, Aunt Dot and Uncle Clovis in the middle room with the babies, kitchen just a jerry-built leanto against the side of the house. Sometimes Dot would kiss you and sometimes she’d slap you. She was a good cook, who grew fatter and sassier as the years wore on.

  And Dot was a Malone through and through when it came to singing, with a high nasal voice that sent a chill up and down Zeke’s backbone. After supper she’d rare back and close her eyes and set to singing by the fire or on the porch, depending on the season, and the children that wanted to would join in while Clovis sat with his arms folded and his mouth in a line and did not sing, but didn’t leave either. Clovis seemed to enjoy the singing, but you never could tell about him, famous for silence. Cousin Willie or Uncle Cornelius came by sometimes with their fiddles. Dan was taking up the fiddle too, but Zeke refused to learn it, and when he said no to Cousin Willie’s offer, his other cousins all stopped dead in their tracks and looked at each other, and Willie never asked him again.

  But Zeke liked music and he liked to sing, “Oh get around, Jenny, get around, oh get around I say,” while Cousin Willie bit his lip and perspired and the fiddles went faster and faster, “Oh get around, Jenny, get around, long summer day.” Zeke would spin in the yard like a whirligig, faster and faster and faster until all the world was a green blur that looked like the sound in his head. When he finally fell to ground, his head would be completely clear, like the summer sky with no cloud in sight.

  Sometimes, right then, he could remember his mother. He remembered her gray eyes and her clear voice and how she smoothed the hair back from his forehead when he ran in from the yard and grabbed her skirts. He remembered her saying “Now I lay me down to sleep” at night.

  But most times he could not remember his mother, so that when Great-aunt Edith told him she was dead, that first summer they took him away from her, it meant nothing, nothing to him at all. He just looked up at Great-aunt Edith, whose chins started quivering like jelly when she told him, before she started to cry. Then Edith stood there on the porch staring at the boy for the longest time. Then she flung her apron up over her face and ran back in the cabin crying. Zeke stood right where he was and did not think about her, or about his mother, or about anything. It was hot on the porch. Red roses bloomed, climbing up over the porch rail of Edith’s cabin at Honey Camp.

  Later that day, Edith gave him a special marble, a steelie, which was exactly the kind Zeke had always wanted, and how did she know that? How could she possibly know? “Where did this come from?” he asked, holding it, and Edith said it had belonged to a dead boy. Then she started up crying again. Later she put on her bonnet and walked him down to the store and got him some horehound candy.

  Zeke kept the steelie in his pocket always, and sometimes he’d roll it around and around in his fingers, and no one knew. He never traded it, or shot with it, or even took it out of his pocket. The only person he showed it to was his big cousin Tom, his favorite.

  Ezekiel himself would grow up after all, or if he did not grow up exactly, he would at least change from a too solemn child to a too solemn young man. He would stay on at Frog Level, working the hard rock ground with Clovis, who was a man that did not talk to women and children and never appeared to notice Ezekiel at all, so that Zeke wondered at first if his uncle even knew he was present in the house. Until it came time to clear the field that first year, that is. Then his uncle let on that he knew it, all right. For Zeke was a large, strong lad, and Clovis aimed to make him earn his keep.

  Zeke did not mind working, truth to tell. He was never much for school, where he sat like a bump on a log and refused to recite. Zeke would bite his lip and stare through the open schoolhouse door at the mountains while Mr. Green caned him unmercifully, until Zeke’s face grew fiery red, and Pansy started crying. “Is this yet enough, Ezekiel?” Mr. Green would gasp, the slick yellow strands of his oily hair stuck to his head with perspiration. Mr. Green was a slight young fellow with pale skin, spectacles, and a constant cough. It was harder for him to beat Ezekiel than it was for Ezekiel to take the beating.

  Both Zeke and Mr. Green were relieved when Clovis sent word that he’d need the boys, that it was time to clear the fields for planting. And Zeke loved it out there on the long hillside that rose gradually above Frog Level to the steeper incline of Cherokee Mountain; he loved the feel and smell of the dirt on his hands as they grabbled out the rocks, the ghosty look of the bare trees in the morning fog, the faint pink mist of the first redbud, then the purple sarvis, then the white blur of dogwood as spring came on and the birds showed up and the woods grew green again. One famous day when he was twelve, Zeke put himself in harness with Buck, the mule, when they couldn’t for the life of them pull a particularly recalcitrant stump out of the stony newground they were clearing. Zeke strained forward as hard as ever he could. The other kids pushed on the back of the stump. Tom beat the mule. Finally, with a long, wrenching, sucking sound, the stump pulled free, spewing pebbles everyplace, and lay upended there on the hill for days, looking for all the world like a witchhead with big spiky root-hairs sticking out.

  Then came the day when they burned it, and all the other brush besides, in a great wildfire on the hillside that caused Zeke’s heart to beat so fast. He loved the acrid smell of the woodsmoke and the way it looked disappearing into the cloudy sky; he stayed up there on the hill all night long and watched the fire burn itself out, and then worked all the next day too with the rest of them, and never missed the sleep.

  Later, Zeke was the one that walked behind Buck holding the bull-tongued plow to a furrow as straight as any man’s, so that Clovis, watching him, hit upon the notion of renting Zeke out to whoever needed him in the field. Clovis told Zeke that he would not have to go back to school. Zeke liked this idea fine.

  So Zeke settles into his life. He gets up in the morning and eats his Aunt Dot’s good biscuits and her red-eye gravy, he walks to work, he works, he talks some to the people he’s working for, he walks back to Frog Level, he eats, he sleeps. He gives the money he makes to his Uncle Clovis, who gives him back some. Zeke doesn’t need much. It has not occurred to him to ask for more. It has not occurred to him to do anything else, or to go anyplace else. He wears overalls, brogans, and a plaid shirt, winter and summer. He fucks a widder woman over at Cana that he works for regular, it seems to be part of his job. She cuts his hair for him too. And be loves to dance. He is known for it. On Saturday nights he’ll go anywhere, travel any distance t
o find a dance, and he’ll dance as long as anybody will fiddle. He’ll dance all night if he can.

  At these dances he treats all the girls in the same courtly, old-fashioned manner, even the girls that are known to go back of the barn with you, the girls Tom has told him about. Ezekiel is a serious, dedicated, trancelike dancer. Sometimes a girl will start to look at him in another way, but usually this does not last long, for there is something in his face—or there is a lack of something in his face—that puts them off. They stop flirting. Oh, they like Ezekiel fine, they’ll tease him and dance with him, but it isn’t serious flirting. They wouldn’t walk with him on Sunday if he asked them, which he does not. They don’t treat Ezekiel like a man, somehow.

  Sometimes Ezekiel goes with his uncles if they are running a set someplace away from here, at Sisterville or Little Africa or Ash Holler or even as far away as Holly Grove. One time, at a dance over in Sistersville, a pretty woman comes up to Zeke and grabs him away from his partner, grabs him off the floor. She is slight, with curly flyaway hair. She wears a frilly red dress with puff sleeves. She pulls him away from the dancing.

  “Zekey?” she says. “Zekey?”

  The fiddles saw away, the air is close in there, and Zeke wipes sweat off his face and looks at her. There is something about her.

  “Zekey, is it you?” she says.

  Zeke keeps looking at her, but he can’t think what to say. While he watches, her big eyes fill with tears. Then she puts her hand up to her mouth and pushes past him roughly, through the throng of people, out the door. Zeke follows after her. He makes it to the door just in time to see her start off into the night hanging on the arm of the big feller who is waiting for her there.

  “Mary!” Zeke calls out, his voice rusty and odd, so that everybody out there stops drinking and smoking and talking, and turns to look at the enormous boy silhouetted by the light pouring out of the dance-hall door. His hair glows fiery pale, like bright angel hair, in that light.

  But Mary Magdaleen and the man she is with have already disappeared into the darkness beyond the dance; all you can see of them is the glow of the man’s cigarette in the dark, and it is his voice that calls back to Zeke from wherever they are going to, “Sorry, buddy,” as if there has been some mistake.

  Ezekiel will not see Mary again. A restless, wild girl, she will move eventually from Sistersville to Knoxville, where she will get in trouble.

  And Zeke, standing in the doorway, has already forgotten her, her very name Mary drowned out by the sound in his head. He goes down the steps and buys some liquor from a man. After the dance is over, he goes with his cousins Willie and Tom to a whorehouse in Sistersville, where a girl takes off her clothes slow for him, stopping at the black garter belt and stockings. Zeke has never seen such a contraption. When he shoots off inside her, the noise in his head goes away, and then he sleeps. The next day, Willie keeps vomiting as they ride back over to Cana under the blazing noon sky, and Tom keeps laughing. “How’s yer hammer hanging, Zeke?” Tom asks him, and Zeke says fine.

  The other thing that Zeke likes is meeting; it helps him the way a woman and a fiddle tune help him. It quiets his head. Even though the Malones are widely known as backsliders, they all attend the Old Pisgah Primitive Baptist Church set back on the ridge toward Cana. This church, raised by its congregation in 1831, is nothing but a square cabin made of notched and chinked logs, with a puncheon floor, a single small window on each side, and a plain pine door. It stands in a high clearing on the hill, with a good view of the road to Cana and the Frog Level bottom and a glimpse of the Dismal River beyond. There’s always a breeze up on that hill. Having the graveyard right next to the church keeps things in the proper perspective. There’s no steeple, no sign, no bell to indicate that this small, plain cabin is in fact a church, but the stern lonesome air of holiness hangs everywhere about it, like fog on the ridge of a morning.

  Ezekiel walks up here every third Sunday with the rest. Other Sundays, some of them go to other meetings, often traveling miles. For many of them, especially the women, this is the only time they ever go anywhere. They approach the churchhouse soberly and quietly, eyes cast down. Horses and mules and wagon teams are hitched in the woods. Some of the wagons have little children sleeping on pallets inside, or sucking quietly on a sugar tit. Newborns are carried into meeting. Older children are left at home; meeting is not the place for children.

  The women go on in. Most of the men stand around outside the churchhouse, smoking or chewing tobacco, until the singing starts. Then they throw their cigarettes down on the ground and spit out their chaws and file in too, men to the right, women to the left. They sit on hard plank benches. Meeting is not supposed to be comfortable.

  Inside, the Pisgah churchhouse is as plain as it is outside, nothing but a potbellied stove in the back and a homemade table to lay your coats on in the wintertime, nothing up front but the rough-hewn pulpit in the center and the Amen corner over to the side, a wood platform with chairs on it for visiting elders to sit on. No cross, no pictures, no ornamentation of any kind. “Christ don’t need no fancy cross,” as old Elder Stump has been heard to say. No choir, no hymnbooks, no organ, no piano—no instruments of any kind. Christ don’t have no truck with the things of this world. Cornelius Malone leads the singing by just flat starting out with it all of a sudden, his high nasal voice almost like an assault on the rustling hush in the meetinghouse.

  “Hit’s the old ship of Zion as she comes.” Cornelius lines out the hymn and the others follow. “Hit’s the old ship of Zion as she comes.” The first line is repeated for the rest of the verse, and each hymn has many verses. “She’ll be loaded with bright angels as she comes.” Cornelius remains seated while he sings, leaning forward a little from the waist with his rough hands placed on his knees, no emotion at all on his face.

  When that hymn is finally over, Aunt Dot starts another, “O Lord, remember me, now in the bowels of Thy love.” It is straight-out tuneless singing, yet Ezekiel finds it beautiful, as his Aunt Dot does.

  One time years back, when she was sitting on the porch hooking a rug and singing one of these mournful old hymns, as she frequently did, little Ezekiel asked her, “Aunt Dot, how come you to sing that old song? How come you don’t sing something pretty?” For he knew full well how pretty his Aunt Dot could sing if she took a mind to, and how many songs she knew. She turned to look at him, pursing her mouth, and said, “Honey, they is pretty singing, and then they is true singing,” and although Ezekiel didn’t know what she meant by that then, he does now. He loves the high hard plaintive singing too and joins in energetically, face blank and eyes closed, sometimes lining out a hymn himself.

  Ezekiel likes singing as much as he likes fiddle music and black garter belts and dancing, and he makes no distinction among these things, which all comfort him. He does not care so much for the rest of the service.

  The singing goes on for about an hour, and then one of the elders lifts up a prayer, and it goes on awhile too. People pride themselves on how long and how loud they can pray. Then there’s some more singing, then another scripture read out by another elder, then Billy Looney giving the sermon in his unemotional singsong voice that comes to be punctuated halfway through his sermon by the “ah!” at the end of each sentence. “Jesus will come in the night, ah! And He will find you where you’re hid, ah!” Billy Looney didn’t even start preaching until he was an old man. You can’t prepare to preach. If God wants you, He will let you know. It will come upon you unawares. Billy Looney was called in the spring of his forty-sixth year one rainy day when he was hauling a wagonload of lumber over to a man in Sistersville. He’s been preaching ever since. He preaches frequently that man is a lonesome traveler on a long road, and whenever he takes this text, a thrill shoots through Ezekiel.

  Once Billy Looney gets to really horating, he will go on an hour or more, and then a visiting elder might preach some too, and if things get going good, if Billy Looney or one of them others gets to what Aunt Dot cal
ls his weaving way, why then some folks might start to holler out “Amen” and Missus Clara Bellow might suffer palpitations of the heart and have to lay down on the bench while they sing the invitation hymn. By the end of meeting, the singers still appear detached, yet tears run down their cheeks as they continue to sing. Even some of the men are crying, but none of them wipe off their tears or appear to notice. Then the closing hymn, with parting handshakes all around.

  And once again, as always, hearts are somehow strengthened and lifted as all leave meeting and go outside, where the women spread dinner on the ground, everything good you can think of to eat—chicken and dumplings, shucky beans and fatback, pork roast, sweet potatoes baked in their jackets, corn pudding, applesauce, cornbread, watermelon pickle, vinegar pie, apple stack cake. The women wait on the men and children first, then they eat too. Then there’s more singing out on the hill, and the sun is low on the mountain when it’s time to go. And if a horse or two gets sold behind the churchhouse, or a boy steals a kiss from a girl back in the trees there, or one woman tells another what to do when her baby won’t take no titty, what is that? God has been served today.

  And there will be other days too, for foot-washings and protracted meetings and brush-arbor meetings on the ground, where emotions will run so high that you have to get out of the way sometimes and let the Spirit work, or you might get trampled by them that is crying out and rushing forward in the hope of glory and flailing around on the floor and jerking ever whichaway with their eyes rolled back in their heads. A girl named Lois Ellen Buie died of religion over at Bee, right in the meetinghouse. But nobody tries to stop it, for if you die shouting happy you go to Heaven for sure, and everybody knows it.