by Cynthia Bond
So this is the life of woman, he thought, and kneeling beside the bed, head on the mattress he fell asleep.
Book Three
Revelations
Chapter 14
Under the blackberry sky, the impartial moon shone on night phlox, evening primrose and lone houses with slanted steps. It also cast upon wolf cubs caught in traps, hidden bones long buried and burning crosses—with the same indifferent grace.
That night, the Dyboù stretched along a ridge of pines moving towards a glowing light in the distance. Dead pine needles shifted under his belly; above him the branches and needles shivered. He liked the way the old trees bowed and groaned, pushed by a stolid might.
When he reached the pit fire, he saw the men in the distance. Eyes on something they had just cast into the fire. It yowled. He smelled the thing being burned alive.
As he slid forward, he could taste the screams of the cat. See her black fur catching and her fangs, screeching, green eyes covered over, then eaten by the hungry flames. It took a while for her to stop fighting, then he gulped in the shaking spirit of the creature, still locked in its scorched body—barely alive. It disappeared inside of him forever. They could have burned something larger. But he had been hungry. It was enough.
One man stood before the others, the leader, soot and blood in the crease of his palms. The others were waiting in the waving heat. The Dyboù lifted high above them, higher, then blasted down like a grenade upon the circle. They all stumbled and fell back. He lifted again and chose the horse he would ride. They all wanted him, their mouths open, teeth bared and wet, saying the old words until their lips grew white in the corners. He chose the strongest man among them and fell like an anchor upon him.
The Dyboù looked out of the eyes of the man. His man. His horse. He felt the strength of his muscles, the heat of his crotch. He had chosen well. The man was shaking violently on the earth, nose bleeding, drool down his neck, trying to fit the Dyboù into the acorn hull of his human body. The man’s spirit folded smaller and smaller to make way.
The Dyboù waited. Like fucking a virgin, the Dyboù took his time until the man became accustomed to his size. Then he plunged in deeper. He felt the man’s likes, his dislikes, his penchant for menthol tobacco, his favorite tie and suit. He did not smother the man’s soul—he welded to it.
Soon he lifted the man to his feet. He looked at all of the living men, their dumb faces glowing yellow. He smelled the pines. Then he drew back and bit into the skin of the man he was wearing. The man bucked, so the Dyboù sunk his teeth through the muscled arm until he had the faint taste of blood, until it ran down his forearm and his hand. He had been branded.
The circle of men gave him the red bag and a black bottle. It was the reason they had called him. They thought. But it had been his idea all along, planted like brackle in their minds while they slept between white cotton sheets.
Now he felt the soles of his feet on the forest floor. The hush of owls, the quiet of the crickets. The living thicket watched.
The red bag in his palm was heavy with magic, made more powerful by the wet blood that had streamed into it.
Before the powder had found its way into his hand, it had been a mandrake root, baking and drying in the West Texas sun. It had then been gathered when the moon was void, by a left-handed man, and had never since seen the light of day. Then made its trek across Texas earth to its new home in the east, where it had been soaked in gator urine and cooked over a fire. It had been shaved into an open pot then boiled with things such as graveyard dust, red pepper, stagnant water, RIT red dye and things so secret they had only been thrown in during the pitch of night and not looked upon by the thrower. But the strongest ingredient was intention. The ill-will of man whittled to a sharp point, then stirred for forty days in a mash, laid out for one week to dry, and then pulverized to a fine powder. The Dyboù was pleased.
Soon he saw the girl’s land. When he reached it he stepped back. The honey of the earth filled him. So sweet, the land shifted under him. The grass flattened before each footfall, and a dog somewhere began to moan. It smelled like persimmon and apricots stirred with cane syrup. Hundreds of little beings beating, throbbing. The Dyboù bent down and clutched a lump of soil and stuffed it into the man’s mouth. It was like a sugar teat, cotton soaked in the white granules and milk, then given to a baby to suckle. He calmed himself. He knew patience. Whatever small shield the girl had mustered would be washed away come morning.
The house was cracked, soul splinters where it had been blasted apart by sorrow. The Dyboù looked through the window, through the torn curtains, and saw to his surprise that the girl was not alone. The man was asleep, his body draped like a rag against the side of the bed, knees on the floor, his acorn head resting on the pillow. The girl was spread like a starfish on the mattress, hair like frothing black water all around them. He scooted to get a better view and saw it was the fool he had been following for years, who had dropped the gris-gris and his manhood like a harlot drops her drawers.
He fingered the veined glass and zigzag lines spread beneath his hand. He felt his member swelling, his hand on the weave of the pants rubbing. Fast. Faster. His hand inside of his boxers now, until he grew thick and hard against the thigh. Pleasure rising … saliva pouring down his chin. Almost bursting. The house began to shake. The table bounced and the girl shifted and almost lifted her head.
The Dyboù stopped moments before release. Eyes bulging. The chinaberry shook in the distance. The girl curled onto her side. An old crow cawed.
He walked to the door, creaked it open, then dropped to the floor, knees cutting into a splinter, the Dyboù grinding it deeper. Bleeding. The left hand, spilling the contents of the black bottle upon the threshold of the house, molasses and ox blood. The length of him straining against his zipper. He heard something whispering, calling to stop. To stop what he was doing. To stop. Stop. STOP—and he looked, it was only the old crow—good for nothing, not even boiling. The Dyboù rumbled low. Then he spilled the contents of the red bag over the sticky dark. He bent to smell the mix and a thick surge of power shot through the body. Yes. It was good and strong. It would weaken the soul of anyone who stepped upon it. Cause their courage to drain from their feet. Cramp their guts and twist their resolve.
The Dyboù pushed open the door and walked into the house. He stood in the doorway. He stepped onto her bedroom floor and grinned. This boy, this mule, was meant to protect the whore? Like two pill bugs facing a praying mantis, there was no chance they would survive.
He walked away, out the door, down the steps and towards the pines. The man’s nose started bleeding again, his heart pounding too fast. He would not last long, so the Dyboù walked him back to his home, slipped him into his bed, and oozed out of his body. The man would remember only a little, but he would awaken stronger, with a bit more spite and fire in his veins. The Dyboù liked the size and cut of the man. He would ride him again soon.
Chapter 15
Ephram woke to tapping. The sun was only peeking over the horizon when he saw Gubber Samuels standing outside Ruby’s door, shifting one foot to the next, and when he caught Ephram’s eye he motioned for him to join him. Ephram slipped his head from the bed and tipped outside.
“Why you clean that whore’s house?” was what he said when Ephram greeted him.
“Gubber go home,” Ephram managed. The day was soft blue and coral pink, too pretty and new for the likes of Gubber. So he repeated, “Go home.”
“Man I know she got good pussy.” Off Ephram’s look he added, “Least that’s what I hear.”
Ephram grabbed Gubber by the shirt sleeve and pulled him away from Ruby’s door. But before Ephram could open his mouth Gubber cut in, “Look Ephram, we been friends too long for me to keep quiet. Folks ’bout to run y’all out of town after what Celia say at church yesterday. Ain’t no joke.”
Ephram looked at Gubber Samuels, his boyhood friend and ally. He was tipped to one side to balance his considerable weigh
t. His creamed corn skin wet with the strain of walking so early. His right hazel eye steady, his left floating, traveling right then left on its own volition. Walled.
“I don’t want to hear you say nothing like that again.”
“What?” Ephram looked at him sideways so Gubber said simply, “All right man.”
Ephram knew Gubber Samuels had never talked around things. He’d always spoken like rocks falling. When Ephram thought about it, Gubber hadn’t been up before 10:00 A.M. on a weekday since he could remember. So Ephram pointed to a stump across the road and the two men walked over and sat down.
“So what did Celia say?”
“You know how Celia be when she testify. Talk a fly off a fresh pile a’ shit.”
“I know.” Ephram looked back at the house to make sure Ruby was still sleeping. He rubbed his fingers. Their soreness made him smile.
“It ain’t funny. She come in church all tore up right before elections, look like she been ravished. When she commence to talking, you couldn’t knock folks over with a dick.”
A cock crowed somewhere off in the distance as if to emphasize Gubber’s point.
“First she say how she can’t sleep all that night what with hearing demons scurrying across her floor. Then she wake up and find you ain’t sleep in your bed. Then how before she make her Folger’s, one a’ them demons slither around her living room floor on her nice shag carpet with the plastic covers. That demon just keep saying, We done got him. We done got him. When she ast who was they and who they got, that demon start laughing and points to that picture of you when you was little, the one with your daddy up on the wall. Then she say she look at that picture and damn if it don’t bust into flames.”
“Well that’s easy to prove a lie.”
“Oh, she one step ahead, boy. She say when she look back them flames disappear. That’s when she say it’s a warning. Say it means they’s still time.”
“Jesus.”
“Yes nigger, why you think I move my fat ass up here this early in the morning?”
Daylight spit yellow across the heavens while Gubber told the rest of it. “Then she starts out to see you, and see the Devil three times before she got there. Each time he take a different form. First time he a crow, second, a jackal and third, he a toad. And you know how she tell it with that flourish and rhyme and all her Sanctified Saids. Each, every time the Devil say, ‘Don’t mess with that girl, she be my special pearl.’ But she say she keep on walkin’ ’til she get out to Bell land, where she see a snake slithering backwards crost the road. ’Til up she come to the door and touch the knob and it’s cold as ice.
“Then she tell how she begs you leave cuz she seen the Devil’s mark appear, spreading across your left cheek. She paint it so good them niggers was ready to run out the goddamn church and get you. If she’d told ’em, some of them fools would have burned that girl house down to the ground. But then she calm them, tell them it best to trick the Devil with kindness. Try to baptize them under his snare. Try to bring her boy back to Jesus. That the mark faded as quick as it came. There was still time.”
Ephram shook his head against stupidity. “They believe that mess?”
“The best part I ain’t told you. Some folk not saying Amen like she want. So she say the Devil told her he was gone sneak into the minds of the weak in the congregation before she got there and tell them not to believe her. So then, you know ever body was up and stomping and clapping and yelling Amen by the time she talks about the fight she had with the Devil.”
Ephram looked back at the house again. A light purple cloud was arranging itself just above its roof. Gubber let out a belch, cracked his knuckles and said, “If I was you I’d put my johnson back in my pants and get my ass home.”
“I ain’t going back. Don’t know if it’s safe for her with me here, but—I’m not going back.”
“Damn, you always been a hard-up ignorant nigger. You can still fuck her, if the pussy that good. Hell, ever’body else do.”
Ephram gave Gubber a look that let him know it was past time to stop. The look that said his fist could and would connect hard with Gubber’s slack jaw.
Gubber backed down, “Man, do what you want.” He stood to leave. “Only you better be at Junie Rankin funeral this afternoon. You already done missed the wake yester-evening. Supra and them expecting you to stand pallbearer and they gone be hell to pay you don’t cover your corner.”
“Junie were a good man.”
“Only one used to keep them rude-ass Rankin boys in check.”
“I can’t say I’ll be there Gubber. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“I ain’t say no more. Only, you best think long and hard else your next step might lead you off a goddamn cliff.”
Ephram watched Gubber struggle up from the stump then sit back down with a thud. “Damn. Need me a minute, all that walkin’ only to turn round and walk right back. I gots to catch my breath.” And he pulled a pack of Newports out of his pocket, lit one and sucked it into his lungs.
A school of swallows took flight from a tall pine, their complaints little pinpricks in the stretch of dawn. Both men looked up and watched them freckle the sky. Ephram thought about a wide-toothed comb inside the house, furry with black hair. Gubber thought to spit. But he did it in such a lazy, will-less way that it clung in streaks to his cheek. It seemed an effort even to wipe. He waited until he brought the cigarette back to his lips to give a halfhearted try. Ephram fought the urge to take out his handkerchief and hand it to him. It was hard for him to remember sometimes the boy Gubber had been, but sitting close to him on the stump, Ephram could yet see him peeking through.
Gubber Samuels’s snaggle-toothed grin, stretching full, pride bursting. Gubber, the skinny, yellow boy that he’d learned to pee standing up with. Ephram had been five, Gubber six. Ephram’s mama and Gubber’s grandmama had taught both boys to pee-pee like girls to avoid sprinkles on their new indoor toilets. So one day Ephram and Gubber had ventured into the woods near the lake, aimed away from their fallen trousers and peed and peed and peed until they could not muster another drop. Then they’d run to the well and filled the dipper so many times their bellies sloshed when they moved, and they’d waited eagerly to try their aim again.
Ephram remembered it clearly because later that same year, in June of 1934, the two boys had watched as water and mud swoll up and swallowed the Reverend Jennings’s new church. It was meant to be the star of Liberty, with twenty new pews, red velvet carpet in the aisles, brass handles on the front door and a stained glass window gotten half price because the White First Baptist in Jasper thought Jesus had mistakenly been crafted with a harelip. Reverend Jennings had gotten him for a song. After the storm Ephram and Gubber sat perched on the fallen steeple and watched the Reverend kick at the mud, cursing the hurricane until he slipped and fell face down right on top of the harelip Jesus. Split it clean in two. The boys held in their laughter until he’d started crying, big, ugly sobs. Then Ephram started crying too, at the sight of his daddy weeping, which is when the Reverend leapt up and slapped him off the steeple.
Easter of ’37 when Ephram’s mama had walked over the hill as God had made her, Gubber was the only person at the picnic who had the wherewithal to pay Ephram any mind, walking up to him, while all the women were running to put a tablecloth over Otha’s sin, and patting his friend Ephram on the back.
The next day Ephram’s daddy beat his mama for one whole hour before dragging her screaming and begging to Dearing State Mental Hospital. Wouldn’t even let her say good-bye to her son. Beat Ephram with a hair brush when he tried to defy him and come out anyway. His mama clawing at her own face until the Reverend stopped and punched her. Gubber was waiting in the tall grass through it all. He crept up to Ephram’s window to find his friend’s face under the pillow, fat from crying, his body sore, his spirit broken. He climbed into Ephram’s locked room and offered him a piece of sugarcane. The two boys sucked and gnawed in silence while the Reverend drove an unconscious Otha a
ll the way to Dearing.
After that Gubber tended to the splinter that had lodged itself in Ephram’s heart. Not by any direct thing, but by just knowing it was there and acting like it wasn’t, both boys could pretend that life had unfurled itself in a different way. Together they found that they could ignore the pelting looks and questions directed at Ephram. Gubber Samuels knew something about hard looks too, because of his walled eye and the shenanigans with his own mama, who’d had four children by four different papas and hadn’t stayed around long enough to raise a one of them. Over the next few years the boys knitted their unique brands of forgetfulness into a shield against the folks of Liberty.
They decided that Gubber’s dancing free eye was a good thing. It meant that he could see not only what was right in front of him, but the whole of the sky and stars at a glance. They whispered into freshly dug wells to stay cool and not grab any small children. They reminded crooked saplings to straighten up their act.
That shield gave them a new boldness so they ran wild up and down Liberty Township, adding unflattering letters to lovers’ names carved into tree trunks, swimming and splashing in Marion Lake, snatching Sarah Geoffrey’s drawers from the line and taking turns smelling them. They stole so many of Clem Rankin’s peaches that the man was forced to shoot buckshot at them or go broke at harvest. They hid brilliantly from the seven rowdy Rankin boys, standing up to them only when a church elder was present.
In 1939, the boys watched with the rest of their neighbors as thousands of White soldiers pitched tents in the woods and on the embankments of Liberty Township and Shankleville—the only Colored towns in the vicinity. Watched as they tromped through the woods in full battle regalia, with what they later learned were M1 Garand rifles high on their backs. Ephram and Gubber secretly and courageously moved the red or yellow cotton ties marking the boundaries for the battalion’s army maneuvers. They hid as soldiers, wearing faded yellow or red armbands, crept closer, and held in their terrified giggles as the soldiers stopped, checked, then double-checked their maps. Kicked a tuft of grass, whispered, then turned back cussing. Two years before Pearl Harbor and the one year after, over ten thousand men came to occupy that little corner of the piney woods, camped in tents, some not twenty yards from Black folks’ back doors. Like any occupied town in the world, mothers and fathers kept their daughters locked indoors and their fighting-age boys out of sight. More than one girl had run home in tears, clothes torn; more than one boy had become the butt of regimented, orchestrated cruelty. K.O.’s older brother Taylor had been found shot to death. His daddy went to the Funeral Home in Jasper to dig the army-issue bullet out of his boy himself when no one else would do it. Taylor’s mama walked all the way into Newton to show the Sheriff, who’d taken the bullet, looked her in the eye, said he’d investigate. He had then promptly thrown it in the trash receptacle.
