by Lynn Pruett
Winter had always come to the Dameron house before it reached the other homes in Maridoches County. Red leaves still clung to the maples when the cold wind sought out the water pipes, freezing the flow in them that it could not wholly staunch in the valley. The house, with a two-story wraparound porch, had been a river captain’s dream turned into siding and lattice and oak shingles. He’d cleared all the trees between the house and the cliff so he could walk as if on the deck of a steamship and look out over the swirling waters of the Ruby River.
As clearly as Hattie saw the home, she saw her father on the upstairs porch, fist raised, a flow of hot words aimed at Heaven for sending droughts and bad market prices and cold weather down on him personally, a sight so familiar she could never think of going off to school without recalling it. She’d imagined her friends’ mothers sending them out the door with a kiss on the forehead, an admonition to be good, a habit she’d created for her own girls. But she and Troy Clyde and her little sister Lucy were used to seeing their father wave his fist in the air, talking at God. Since God never struck Daddy with lightning, they had wondered about His existence. It was the main topic of their conversation on the walk to school. Why didn’t He answer? was always the thought that occurred to Hattie.
One day in early winter, the year she was fifteen, as she trudged home from school up the mountain, Hattie sensed something was happening at the house. There was, all through the woods, the steady unseasonal sound of locusts gnawing through leaves and a soft rushing undercurrent that was neither rain nor the river. A film of smoke rolled down to greet her. She ran over ice-crusted leaves, past a mule train hauling barrels of water up the path. Her house glowed from the inside. The ice on the leaves in the yard had melted into a glassy brown lake that reflected the brilliant shoots of color dancing inside the windows. She watched the first bucket of water tossed onto the fire. It made a pitiful psst.
At once, she felt powerless, and a calm detachment took over. She became absorbed in watching the house and fire work in accord to complete their task of destruction. The house sighed; the fire kept its voice to a throaty whisper. It moved as if stroking the posts and walls, as if the black crust it left were a new coat of paint. The house acquiesced; the muslin curtains in the living room, sibilant couriers of flame, gently stretched to place red-tipped wisps on the windowsills, the pine floors, the lace tablecloth, the woolen slipcovers. The fire swirled with the leisure of a connoisseur, examining everything in its path, touching, peeling back wallpaper, leaving powder-smudged kisses, wrapping the railings in gray blankets. It was a friendly blaze until it reached the slate hall floor, where it was forced to leap like a tiger to the staircase. Then it stripped and blistered the steps, scorching a tunnel up to the second floor. It consumed, its tongue hot, hungry; the banister snapped like a matchstick. The second floor blazed hotter than poppy, shuddering in the instant before the shotgun-blast explosion hurtled glass. Searing red and yellow arrows hissed out in the brown lake, which grew deeper and wider as the men tried to keep the fire from spreading. Acrid smoked jetted out of the blackening window crosses, draping Hattie in a cloud. She ran to the back of the house and threw herself on the slick black ground.
A voice the timbre of fire made her open her eyes to search the flames. Black against the brilliance of orange heat, her father roared, his hair white and wild. His familiar ire reached a pitch stronger than the raging red tongues feeding around him as he yelled, “These pipes will never freeze again!” In the glimpses Hattie had of him through the forest of yellow and orange waves, she saw him shoot blue flames from a blowtorch at a teetering maze of pipes, now free of plaster and lath. His internal rage now consumed him and her home. A chill came up from the icy leaves. She felt the cold fingers of death around her heart and a cold pain in her head and chest, as if they were turning to ice too.
Then all went black and suffocating. She clawed at the blanket dropped over her head, fought against the arms carrying her away; she kicked and struggled, knocking her abductor down so the two of them rolled down the bank through frosty blackberry fingers that slapped against her face. She landed looking up at the underside of a white mule, who moved its delicate white legs off the trail to make room for her.
“Get up, Hattie,” said Troy Clyde.
She stood. Behind her, Jake Hiler was brushing leaves and mud from his coat. He snapped the blanket, tossing sticks and plastered leaves into the air, startling the mule Troy Clyde and Lucy rode. Troy Clyde settled his mule and repeated, “Get up, Hattie.”
She mounted the other white mule. Jake Hiler slid up behind her, wrapping them both in the blanket. As Troy Clyde passed, Hattie saw Lucy’s feverish pink face and remembered that Lucy had stayed home sick from school that morning. Hattie collapsed back against Jake Hiler’s sturdy chest.
“We’re going to the mill to tell Mama,” Troy Clyde said, his grayed eyes on the path ahead, unflinching when the crash of the house rushed through the woods.
In the following years, when, at night, the last horrible image of her father appeared and she’d waken, her mouth open, her throat constricted, her scream unscreamed, she would hate Jake Hiler for not letting her see the end of it. If she knew there was some end to her father’s burning, if she’d seen a beam fall on him or, better, a maple branch heavy with snow—she could imagine the hiss—then she could return to sleep. Instead she lay petrified and became aware of the room, the night sounds, of Oakley’s breathing, so regular and calm. She’d get up and walk the house, check on the girls, look outside at the yard, the large purple sky dotted with stars. These dreams usually came in winter when she could see skulls where the snow had melted, black eyes staring up through white bones, tree branches covered with ice rattling their death rattle. She felt that if death was as peaceful and still as the night, she would not mind dying. She’d lean against a cold window until her head ached. With a start she’d notice the etchings of Jack Frost that appeared, beautiful and mysterious, in the space of two breaths. She found comfort in them and went back to bed.
Tonight there was no comfort, and though she cried until her head ached and then slept shrouded by the pines, she felt not rested but uneasy when she woke. It was quiet under the trees, the stillness unfamiliar. She was not eager to go back to the house. So she took off her shoes and buried her feet in the needles, taking pleasure in rubbing pine gum on her fingers and scenting her arms and neck with it. This perfume would get her down through the smoke to her house.
As she descended, she still felt uneasy. To dismiss the smoke was to dismiss her father—and Oakley too, she thought suddenly. The two men she’d loved were gone but she held on to them as if they could still love her. They are my definition of love, and it is all in my memory. She stopped short.
She thought of Paul Dodd, his half-kiss, the sturdy way he’d helped her out of his truck, and something flipflopped inside her. For that rush, she thought, I will bring Oakley home this time. Her father was a spirit, probably roaming the world, beyond her reach. In the dim light, she watched her footing as the slope took a steep turn. Her feet bumped an outcropping of shale hidden beneath the needles. She lurched from tree to tree until the path smoothed out and the decline became more gentle. The closer she got to home, the stronger the odor of the fire became. Fat and full, the smell could linger in the humid Alabama air until fall, when tornado season would sweep the mountain clean. She could be in for days of fire memory. In the glimpses between the trees she saw a halo of smoke above the truck stop.
THE LADIES OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY RESURRECTION
The news of Hattie Bohannon’s date with Sheriff Dodd rescued the children of Dovie Mae Jarboe from a permanent cloud of infamy, despite the front-page article and dim night photograph of her car ascending to Heaven. The black cable suspending the front bumper blurred, out of focus, into the background trees.
Hattie’s confident stand on Dodd’s running board, poised to move on into the driver’s seat, was a detail the ladies found particularly dis
tressing. They thought of all those career women at the courthouse who had had their eyes and—pause—unmentionables on Dodd for years. Plenty of men came and went at the truck stop. Plenty.
To be charitable to Hattie, who after all had survived some dreadful ordeals, they suggested it was Dodd’s uniform—and not the man himself, adeptly removing it from him—that attracted her, an idea that lead to chattering plausibilities. The unstated: Sheriff Dodd was remarkably fit and square. He had the muscular bulges for khaki. The much considered and revised: Hattie’s husband served in World War II. Her brother ran the Viet Vets branch of the NRA. Her father, they knew, must dictate something of her taste. Yet they discarded this notion, aware that they had somehow failed in the psychological quest. Her father had died heroically, trying to save the ancestral home from burning to the ground. Which led to the speculation that the truck stop would also fail and that Hattie Bohannon was desperate for a man, a thought they all skirted as slightly vulgar to state but one they sincerely believed. That Dovie Mae Jarboe’s psyche may have excited far more possibilities for examination did not occur to them.
What occurred to Jewell Miller became a full-blown memory of Oakley Bohannon, lean and impressive in his uniform, leaning toward her. She felt some pain in her leathery heart. Time to take her daily constitutional, the cure for all forms of heartache. As she marched through the woods behind her apartment, she wondered if all her former power had deserted her or if, indeed, she still had some pull with the Army.
GERT GEURIN
I love getting ready for church. I’m a greeter. I stand at the entrance to the sanctuary and shake hands with everyone. This is how I prepare: I sprinkle Lily of the Valley talcum powder in my brassiere for the huggers. There are not many huggers, mostly the old widowed men, like Gee and Haw, known as Gerald and Harold at church, and a couple of the ladies who are very outgoing, the kind who put people off of hugging. But I hug them anyway and they seem pleased that there are others of their tribe.
The powder rises during a hug and leaves a pleasant dust. Perhaps that is what we huggers know and others don’t. I also scent my gloves on the inside with powder and hope the bare-handed reap the benefits of Lily of the Valley when they pray.
After my greeting duties the Sunday after the fire, I selected a good pew up near the front next to Baker Thomas and his sorely tried wife. I intended to reveal my sacrifice regarding cigarettes and to expound about the great good Lord. But church service was intolerable. The air conditioner gave out so we were reduced to waving Jesus fans in front of our faces while the reverend warmed up to prostitution in our community. Reverend Peterson was nervous from the Call to Worship.
He said, “Today the sermon is on the subject of infidelity, whose root word is infidel, of which there are many in our midst.” He said the word so low it was hard to hear, though he blushed to his roots so we all picked up on it.
He said infidelity separates a body from its spirit, and when you split the spirit off from the body you are in living death. That is why he worried over the souls of men who had relations with women other than their wives, to whom they had promised themselves before God. Because it mattered to your spirit, even if it didn’t to your body, and that is what infidel men were finding out. People should have relations when they cared spiritually, not genitally, for each other.
He said that right. I wished Jessamine had been there to hear those words of wisdom.
Reverend Peterson allowed as how some members of our church had been tempted but were now remorseful and ready to confess. He railed on about women without men, and then about women with too many men, then about women who trafficked in men. It was hard to keep up with his groups, and soon they all swarmed together in my head and I found myself calling silently to the Lord to keep my mind’s eye straight and pure. After the offering plate made its rounds, Reverend Peterson asked us to ponder a situation where many men came and went from an establishment that ministered to their physical cravings and asked us to condemn such places.Naturally I was sweating more than usual and wanted to get baptized just for relief but then I saw where he was talking about the truck stop—or was he? He was very confusing and I was so overheated I could not think straight. I wanted to confess to starting the fire and to witness that I was cigarette-free thanks to the glory of God but I never got my chance.
The first to the altar was Richard Reynolds and did he ever lay it on about laying with a prostitute and the wrong path and breaking his vow to God and his wife and Lord what a humble man he became.
I was shocked that he’d been after prostitutes. He must really be a horny old goat because I realized he and Jessamine had clearly been together for some while. You don’t glow like she did if it’s a one-time mingling. Poor Ann Reynolds was staring at Richard as if he’d just hatched out of an egg. But I knew why his guilt had got him up off his hind end.
Next to me Baker Thomas yawned and yawned. He is a man I believe who is here for appearances, not for sustenance. His wife has a grim look. She is skin and bones and he’s a shoat. But that is not an uncommon sight in Maridoches, especially among people with more than their share of money. When Richard Reynolds came forth and announced he’d been with a prostitute at the truck stop, Baker Thomas leaned forward. What a pervert. Or maybe, I thought, as I faced him and stared, he was feeling guilt himself.
Next came Ann down the aisle, looking like a beatitude in a holy blue dress, and she had a confession to make. She said she’d lost a breast.
As if it was a nickel or something—lost it, as if it disappeared while she was watching a soap opera—and she took the blame for Richard’s errant ways and was ready to forgive him for seeking out a prostitute. It had been a rough time but the two little love lambs were back together, and she hoped we’d all boycott the place of ill repute and not let harlots live easy in our community.
I thanked God with the rest of them. Now Jessamine would be safe from the old goat. Her heart would break, but it had to so she’d be out of that unholy alliance. I offered to God my services along these lines because, though she is contrary, she is a very young woman. I felt as if my own trial of quitting cigarettes would be a good model. It would give me strength and knowledge to help her through her time of need. I felt so chosen that I sang loud and clear and caught up with the tune the last three verses.
REVEREND MARTIN PETERSON
After the sermon, Martin wiped his brow. He was wet under his robe. When he lifted the garment off, he felt shorn of a sheep’s coat. While preaching, he’d been unaware of his rising temperature.
He washed his face and dried his fingers one by one, changed into a pressed white shirt, added a dark-colored tie. A charge still tingled from the words he’d flung from the pulpit: infidelity, licentiousness, multiple partners, wantonness. They’d seemed lightning bolts as he’d shouted them. In a fresh shirt and tie, he was a little bewildered by the fervor that had inhabited him.
As he opened the door to the Men’s Sunday school class, he heard a shout and felt the rumble of movement inside the room. The men, already seated in a circle, eyed him as if he were not one of them but a prairie schoolteacher who carried a big whip.
Martin launched into a long rudimentary prayer about the Power of God, and that seemed to settle the men. They took off their ties and their suit jackets and loosened their belts and bent over blue books that looked tiny in their large hands.
He opened a folding chair. After an inordinate amount of noise, chairs bumping and screeching, Martin’s place was secured within the circle. The men squeezed their knees together to avoid touching their neighbors. Sandwiched between Baker Thomas and John Walker, Martin asked, “Is there a topic we need to talk about this week?”
“We were—uh, just getting ready for the Wheel of Gratitude,” said Baker Thomas, whose heavy side abutted Martin. He raised his right hand. “I’m grateful that my appeal last week for some poured concrete was answered by God and Toller Odom.”
“Praise be to God,” said the g
roup.
Martin smiled. Often the Wheel of Gratitude began and ended with Toller Odom. He was a warden for the state prison and was blessed with an endless supply of free labor.
Toller Odom’s faded blue eyes crinkled. “I’m grateful Baker Thomas allowed some troubled young men an honest day’s work. I am grateful they learned a new skill. Education is a precious thing.”
Martin listened abstractly to the sounds of their voices, exuberant, energetic, too loud, the voices of boys. His practiced voice was stern and patrician. At church, the men relaxed. A Higher Power was on call. They were off the hook of authority, at least for a little while. But Martin had no chance to let the tensions loose. He had to represent—even for these men—God. It was why they came regularly, Martin was convinced.
His thoughts went elsewhere, as they often did, while the men shared thanks. He wondered if the young prostitute, the one with the amazingly lively breasts, was the one Richard Reynolds confessed to knowing. Richard’s sins would be forgotten, but his own desires, if acted out, would be unforgivable. A twinge of jealousy galled him as the others shared a joke.
Without him, a direct descendant in the religious faith from the disciples of Christ and therefore from Christ himself, there is no Father, no church of comfort. He only felt vulnerable in Stelle’s arms, when she held him and stroked his head. Then he could give up God and be a man. Her recent coldness unraveled him.
As the men laughed, he remembered with distaste the hunting trip they’d taken him on to Dollarskin Lodge. The men woke early and went out and shot deer and stayed up late drinking and talking. They were like boys then, too. The wives might say their husbands were children and roll their eyes, but they expected them to be men, and men they could be: earn the money, discipline the children, teach the boys to hunt and the girls to love football. At church they could be repentant boys. Because of him, of the power invested in him by God the Father. Martin laughed out loud and felt silence like a chill all around him. Someone had addressed him directly. He hadn’t been paying attention.
