by Lee Smith
They had to break the ice in the river in order to baptize her right away. Nonnie stood shivering and terrified on the riverbank in the cutting wind, still weak from loss of blood, clinging to Ezekiel’s strong arm beside her, hoping her sign was a true one, hoping she would not die when the preacher plunged her beneath the icy water. She could still taste the dirt of the grave in her mouth. Behind her, the folks from the Chicken Rise church were singing in the old high sad way. Suddenly Nonnie felt completely alone, and it was as if the world and all its bright trappings streamed past her like the wind and were gone forever, and she was left on the bleak brown shore of the Dismal River by herself, with the dirty grayish ice before her, the sluggish dark river moving mysteriously beneath it where they had broken the ice, and for the first time Nonnie was lifted out of the moment of her life and thrust toward something beyond herself. The others seemed far, far away, as they sang, “Shall we gather at the river, where bright angel feet have trod? With its crystal tide forever flowing by the throne of God.”
At that very moment the sun came out from the mass of leaden clouds which covered half the sky, and the ice on the river changed instantly from gray to silver, to diamonds spread out sparkling before their eyes. Ezekiel squeezed her hand. “Hit looks like Heaven, don’t it?” he said, and then the preacher took her and then she was under, frozen solid and dead, and then she was up sputtering and resurrected, and as soon as it was done, the choking dream stopped forever.
Now Nonnie could go on about her life, her good life as it came to pass, for she grew accustomed to Ezekiel’s limitations and learned to compensate for them, handling all the money, for instance, doing the things Ezekiel was not cut out to do, while he did the things he could. Under his hands, the farm prospered. Hired girls came in to help Nonnie with the work as time went on and more children were born, Pack Bailey in 1886; little Elizabeth, called Lizzie, in 1890; Sally Fern in 1898.
These were the blurred and busy years, the good years, when Nonnie got so caught up in the great tumble and roar of her life that she never even thought of the rose silk dress folded away in the loft, nor of Jake Toney, nor of how she used to dance up on the counter of the store in Cana when she was a little girl and sing, “The cuckoo she’s a pretty bird, she sings as she flies”—
Oh, Nonnie still sang, while she carded the wool or rocked the baby or shelled the beans, but now she mostly sang the hymns that Ezekiel loved, or the old bloody ballads like “Barbry Allen” and “Brown Girl” and “The Gypsy Laddie.” It gave Nonnie the strangest feeling to sing that one, all about a woman who left her house and baby to run away with a gypsy. For how could a woman do such as that? Men might wander, but women were meant to stay home, and during those years when the house on Grassy Branch was brimming over with babies, Nonnie could not imagine anywhere else she might even want to be, whirled round as she was in the great spinning wheel of the seasons, as implacable as the stars. Plant now pull the fodder now hoe the corn now dig the newground the baby is crying she wants to be fed the cow is lost Mamma my throat hurts Mamma whar is the hairbrush Mamma he hurt me it is time to buy the seed corn Mamma he it is time to Mamma it is time mamma mamma mamma.
Ezekiel loved the children and played with them by the hour, rolling down the hill behind the house with them, making cat’s cradles with string and chains with daisies, singing to them swinging them chucking them under their chins tickling them, “Tickle, tickle, on your knee, if you laugh you don’t love me,” which made Lizzie, fat little yellow-haired Lizzie, dissolve in laughter every time.
Once when Ezekiel and the boys were wrestling on the floor at her feet while she mended their clothes, Ezekiel grabbed Nonnie’s leg, as shapely as ever, and said, “Tickle, tickle, on your knee, if you laugh you don’t love me,” and all the children giggled expectantly, but Nonnie looked at him and did not laugh, as anger, like a bolt of lightning and just as unexpected, cut through her body like a knife.
“Ezekiel Bailey,” she said, “you ought to get up from there”; for she wanted a man suddenly, and not another child on the floor. And furthermore, as Nonnie looked down at them all in a roiling heap, it hit her that she did not want to be everybody’s mamma, which she was. All of a sudden Nonnie was in a temper, the way she used to get. She was still pretty, she was still young, she was furious. But when Zeke tickled her knee again she managed to laugh, even though it was not real laughter, not like back when she was a silly girl and everything was funny.
Was this the moment that marked the change, that signaled what the rest of her life with Ezekiel would be like? Or was there ever such a moment, or only a slow slipping away, a long estrangement so gradual that in the later years of the marriage Nonnie could not even remember what it used to be like in those busy, busy years? . . . Had Zeke ever talked more? It seemed so, but maybe it was just that the children made so much noise . . . and how Nonnie loved to chatter along with them! But at seventeen, R.C. left home to work at a lumber camp near Holly Grove, and then Durwood got on at the sawmill. Only Pack, Lizzie, and the baby, Sally, were still at home, but Pack was mostly gone already, and Lizzie lived for school and had already announced her intentions of going on to the Methodist school in Cana, once Missus Black had taught her everything she knew. Dimly, Nonnie remembered being a smart girl herself. But she couldn’t really remember herself as a child, not really, and now her own children were growing up before her very eyes, their childish features sharpening and stretching and changing them into people she scarcely knew.
Only Zeke remained the same, and he remained exactly the same, which infuriated Nonnie. She had given up her girlhood, her beauty, and for what? For children bent on leaving like thieves in the night, stealing her youth and her heart, for an old man with nothing to say.
But Nonnie was not yet an old woman when she went to the medicine show.
Lizzie talked her into it. “Oh, come on, Mamma, everybody is going, everybody from school,” Lizzie said, arms and legs flying everywhere at once as she chased her puppy around the yard. It made Nonnie tired just to watch her.
“What do you think, Zeke?” she asked her husband, who sat in his chair and smoked and stared down the valley.
“Zeke!” Nonnie said sharply, but once she got his attention, he merely asked why in the world she would want to go see something like that, and mentioned that God was against it, for it had been so preached from the pulpit Sunday past.
This made Nonnie see red. It was not like Zeke to lay down the law, it had something to do with that new preacherman that Nonnie didn’t like anyway, and speaking of him, she could tell a thing or two about him just from the way he looked at her after church, not that she would, of course. Nonnie never told Zeke anything that would bother him, or that he wouldn’t understand. But she determined, then and there, to go to the medicine show, and by the end of the week, she had cajoled Zeke into acquiescing. She got a neighbor woman to come over and stay with Sally.
Nonnie and Lizzie set out on horseback for Cana, Lizzie leading. They stopped once to water the horses and once to eat their snack of dried beef and cornbread, and pulled up at the Streets’ boardinghouse just as the sun went down. “You all better hurry up,” old Birdie Street said, fixing her hat. “Hit’s fixing to start. Hit’s starting in a minute.” Then off she went toward the court-house square, followed by Nonnie and Lizzie as soon as they’d washed their faces and beat the road dust out of their clothes.
Even before they turned the corner into the square, Nonnie heard the fiddle, and as they pushed through the crowd toward the makeshift stage that had been set up in front of the statue, Nonnie’s step grew lighter and lighter, until she was almost dancing to the tune. It had been years since she’d heard a fiddle—years, for in keeping with his position as an elder in the Chicken Rise church, Ezekiel didn’t hold with dancing or dance music. Nonnie didn’t know how much she’d missed it until now. She dropped years with each step as they approached the elevated stage, draped in bunting, ringed by coal-oil lamps.
But it was beginning now—Dr. Harry Sharp’s Celebrated Medicine Show, starring a real medicine man, Indian Jack himself, who was privy to the secrets of the ages whispered in his ear by the famous Apache medicine man Flying Black Bear on his deathbed in mountainous Colorado. A blackface-nigger dancer came out wearing a tattered coat, tails, and a top hat. He promptly fell flat, causing a huge puff of dust to blossom from the seat of his pants and a great roar of merriment to burst from the crowd. Then he started dancing to the strains of the string band which promptly joined him, and then here came two exotic gypsy women with gold scarves and tambourines, and then finally the medicine man himself, Indian Jack, a big imposing fellow wearing an Indian headdress and war paint.
As soon as the opening number was done, Indian Jack addressed the dancer. “How do you feel tonight, Sambo?” he asked.
“I feels just like a dishrag,” said the blackface nigger, rolling his eyes.
“What do you mean, you feel just like a dishrag?” asked Indian Jack.
“I needs to be squeezed!” said Sambo, and everybody laughed.
Then one of the gypsy girls flounced across the stage and Sambo followed her, only to be hauled back by Indian Jack. “Don’t you be follering no women offa here, Sambo,” Indian Jack ordered. “Don’t you forget you are supposed to be working for me.”
“Yessuh! Yessuh!” Sambo grinned, nodding his head energetically. “But this redheaded nigger done come around here last night and sprinkled dis here peedee root and love powders all over me, dat’s what is inducing me to commit love.” The gypsy girl walked by again, and this time Sambo ran off after her, chased by Indian Jack. After the string band played two numbers, Sambo came back and stretched out full length on the stage and fell asleep, snoring loudly.
Indian Jack, annoyed at the interruption, went over and kicked him. “Sambo! I say, Sambo!” Indian Jack yelled. “Can’t you be useful as well as ornamental?” This sally was met by appreciative chuckles from the crowd as Sambo droned on, the loudest snoring imaginable. Lizzie, holding tight to Nonnie’s hand, was crying from laughing so hard.
“I tell you,” Indian Jack said to the crowd, “that nigger ain’t scared of work—he’ll lay down beside the biggest kind of job and go to sleep.”
After several more jokes, Sambo jumped up and ran offstage as Indian Jack stepped forward and launched into a talk about Chief Thunder Cloud’s Old-fashioned Indian Vegetable Compound. “Have you ever noticed, ladies and gentlemen, that there are no bald Indians? Now just think about it. The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, that the Indians of long ago, guided always by the Great Spirit, found curative herbs that can be of immense value to the white man’s civilization. When applied directly to the scalp, this powerful compound will stimulate the nerves which produce the growth of new hair roots and invigorate those yet present, instilling not only a luxurious growth of healthy, lustrous hair but also a clarity of thought reflective of those High Plains Indians who gather these precious little herbs. I myself, ladies and gentlemen, was once plagued by a receding hairline and a consequent loss of self-esteem. But after only one year of repeated applications of Chief Thunder Cloud’s Old-fashioned Indian Vegetable Compound, only one year, mind you, I have the perfectly healthy hair of a much younger man.” Here Indian Jack took off his huge feathered headdress and bowed low to the audience, allowing them a closer look at his full head of shiny black hair.
“That feller weren’t never bald, I’ll warrant ye,” somebody said right behind Nonnie, and Nonnie herself knew this was probably true, yet she couldn’t take her eyes off Indian Jack, up there on the lamplit stage. He sure was one good-looking Indian. But mean? He looked like he might be mean. Indian Jack had a jutting nose and thick black brows which nearly met in the middle of his forehead, and dark eyes which flashed in the torchlight.
“Aw-right!” Indian Jack yelled, holding up a jar of the miraculous compound. “Aw-right! Puts hair on your head and hair on your chest, only fifty cents for new vigor and manliness! Boys, you’ll have to beat the girls off with a stick!”
Hands went up, folks surged forward.
“Mamma, I wanna go back to Birdie’s now. I’m tired,” Lizzie said, but Nonnie said, “Just a minute, honey. Just a minute, I want to hear them play one more time.”
“Daddy wouldn’t like it,” Lizzie said. “I didn’t know what hit would be like when I said I wanted to come here,” and she started to cry, for the noise and the crowd and the Indian man had scared her.
But Nonnie tossed her head and stamped her little foot and said, “Oh, who cares what he’d like? Old stick-in-the-mud!”
Lizzie stood looking up at her mamma and opened her mouth in an O.
“Go on, then,” Nonnie told her. “Just run on back to Birdie’s, and I’ll be along directly. You know the way.” And Lizzie ran, not looking back.
The compound sale was followed by the Gypsy Mind Readers, then a buck dancer named Dancing Henry Hayes, then a thin, sickly-looking redheaded boy who sang “Leave the Light On for Me, Mother” in such a high, sad voice that it brought a tear to every eye, and then the string band returned for a couple of rousing dance tunes.
By this time it had grown completely dark and the coal-oil lamps were lit all around the edge of the stage, giving the performers a heightened, dramatic appearance. Even the familiar faces in the audience—storekeepers, townspeople Nonnie had known by sight for years—took on a new aspect in the flickering firelight. They didn’t look like themselves at all. They didn’t look like anybody Nonnie had ever known. She wondered whether she looked that way to them—exotic, foreign.
And it was at this precise moment that Nonnie felt it stealing over her, that feeling from long ago, that quivering mixture of excitement and longing and dread which meant Now: Right now. Something is going to happen. The moment opened up, flared. Then the drums rolled and Dr. Harry Sharp ascended the stage wearing a stovepipe hat and a fake black beard, looking somewhat like Abraham Lincoln and a lot more like Indian Jack. He held up a bottle of Apache Indian Sagwa, the Bowel, Liver, and Stomach Renovator. “Now we don’t have a cure-all, ladies and gentlemen,” Dr. Harry Sharp announced in his deep, beguiling voice. “Far from it.” Nonnie stared hard at Dr. Harry Sharp as he went on with his speech. She had never heard a man talk so much in her whole life. It made her dizzy and weak in the knees to hear him go on and on like that. “Our product is good for three things and three things only: the bowels, the stomach, the liver, and any diseases arising therefrom. . . .”
Nonnie closed her eyes and swayed to the rhythm of Dr. Sharp’s voice as though it were music. The wind came up a little bit. The torches blew wildly, scattering light. The crowd drew back. The thin boy came out to sing “Letter Edged in Black” in his high piteous voice, accompanied by the old fiddler, as the wind rose steadily. People were leaving.
Then Pete the Tramp, who looked suspiciously like both Indian Jack and Dr. Harry Sharp, put a lighted cigar backward into his mouth and did a whistling imitation of a freight train rounding a curve while the band played “Little Red Caboose Behind the Train.” Smoke poured out of Pete’s mouth and wreathed his head while he whistled, and the wind tore the bunting loose.
“Looks like we’re in for a shower, folks,” he said when that act was done. “But it don’t bother me none. I’m used to sleeping out here in the great outdoors. So if you’ll bear with us, we’ll go right on with the show until the great God Almighty pulls the curtain down. And now for a li
ttle audience participation!”
Old man Bart Willifong fiddled, and a boy did imitation birdcalls, and then Nonnie found herself walking forward, right up to the edge of the stage. She said she’d like to sing. She was doing this and watching herself do it, both at once.
“Why, yes ma’am!” Pete the Tramp, even more handsome up close, was beaming at her.
And so Nonnie sang the song she’d sung when her daddy put her up on the counter as a little girl, all those years ago, her high, pretty voice trilling on the last line, “And she never sings cuckoo till the spring of the year,” and for a minute, she was that little girl again, so silly and so good. The audience clapped and cheered as Pete the Tramp led her up onstage to take a bow. Nonnie curtsied deeply, prettily, as if she’d been doing it all her life. It was amazing how natural she felt up there. Then the thunder cracked and the first big drops of rain splattered in the dirt, round as silver dollars. The wind rose. Some of the coal-oil lamps guttered, and others turned over. “Goddamnit, Charley,” somebody said in the sudden dark. Pete the Tramp turned to Nonnie and kissed her. His mouth tasted fiery as the pit of Hell itself. Nonnie stood on tiptoe on the floppy toes of his big, big shoes and kissed him back.
That was Thursday, or Stomach Night, at Dr. Harry Sharp’s Celebrated Medicine Show. Friday morning, Nonnie and Lizzie went home. Friday night was Catarrh Night at the medicine show. Saturday was Rheumatism Night. On Sunday, the medicine show left town, and Nonnie went with it, taking nothing but her rose silk dress.
For the next three years, Nonnie and Harry Sharp traveled all over Tennessee and Alabama in a wire-wheeled buggy, followed by Charley Stamper (Sambo), the singer Dennis O’Grady, and the Barnett Sisters in two wagons with DR. HARRY SHARP’S CELEBRATED MEDICINE SHOW, OR PHYSIC OPERA painted in gilt and red letters on the sides. Various musicians, dancers, and magicians traveled with them for a time along the way. They carried a hammer and a saw to build the platform in each town. Sometimes they were forced to sneak out of these towns before dawn, if business had been bad and they couldn’t pay their bills.
