by R. A. Nelson
“Daddy King always said Pastor Hallmark was such a good man,” she says, eyes far away. “So many lives he touched—he will never be forgotten by those who knew him.
“He—he was my grandfather.”
I stare at her, feeling my mouth clap shut.
“There has never been another service on that plantation,” Tee Barlow says. “Not since that day. People stopped coming. The land was said to be cursed. Satan accomplished just exactly what he set out to accomplish, didn’t he?” He looks at Miss Wanda Joy. “When you called with your proposition—what else could I say but yes? It would have been his dream. Pastor Hallmark’s. To see his final mission fulfilled.”
He turns to me. “Well, Little Texas? What do you think about all this?”
Before I can say anything, Miss Wanda Joy reaches over and touches my arm.
“You are going to preach on Devil Hill.”
“I made a mistake,” Miss Wanda Joy says. “I’ve been holding you back, when clearly you are ready for this.”
She makes a little smile that speaks to nobody else but me: I never make mistakes. And it says something else, too: You asked for this.
My mind is fluttering like swallows in a barn. Tee Barlow’s newspaper clipping about the devil lays there looking up at me. I feel the blood in my face.
“It’s so clear to me now,” Miss Wanda Joy says, dark eyes burning. “The hand of the Lord has led us to this moment. It’s time, Little Texas, for you to grow up.”
I glance at Certain Certain. He closes his eyes and shakes his head. Miss Wanda Joy puts her napkin down and pushes her chair back so she can cross her legs.
“My father told a story,” she says, “about a man who began preaching the gospel on a street corner in Andalusia, Alabama. One day he just opened his Bible and began to speak, letting the Holy Spirit flow through him. And for three long days not one person, not one, stopped to listen. That man stood all day long on that hot street corner witnessing to no one but the birds in the trees. In fact, he preached three whole days before a single soul showed up to receive the gospel. But soon thereafter came two, then three, then four. A handful. Ten. Thirty. Fifty. A hundred. Sheep to the shepherd. And upon the Rock, that man built a mighty ministry.
“Think about the size of his faith, Little Texas. He knew he was preaching to someone on those long, empty days. Someone who was listening. Someone who was working diligently in the background to answer his prayers. And that someone was God.”
“Praise His name,” Tee Barlow says.
“But who was the man?” I say.
The lines come up on Miss Wanda Joy’s forehead. She turns and jabs a long finger at the window in the direction of the island, voice suddenly trembling.
“I’ll tell you who he was. The very same man who was dragged off into those woods. My grandfather. Lost, never to be found again. A man that great, that full of the Holy Spirit. We owe him this, Little Texas. It’s time. I haven’t just been thinking about this since Meridian. I’ve been thinking about this my whole life.”
A fresh draft comes whispering through the room; the newspaper clipping rustles. Everybody is quiet, all looking at me.
I have a question, but I don’t know how to ask it without getting her even more riled up. I put it to her as soft as I can.
“But… if Pastor Hallmark, a man that godly… if he wasn’t able to … you know … what can I do?”
“That was over seventy years ago,” Miss Wanda Joy says. “Who knows what truly happened that night? All we know is that my grandfather’s flock turned on him and ran. Christians, and they ran like frightened dogs. Left him to do battle alone, and he was taken. This time I guarantee the children of the Lord will be victorious!”
“Amen!” Tee Barlow says, raising his fists like he’s fixing to bust Lucifer right in the mouth.
“That’s enough,” Faye Barlow says softly. She comes up behind my chair and puts her small hands on my shoulders. “You two are frightening him.”
Sugar Tom coughs. “‘And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.’ First Corinthians, chapter two, verse three.”
“Amen,” Tee Barlow says again, only quieter this time.
Everybody talks awhile longer, till Sugar Tom is fixing to drop off. Tee Barlow clears the newspaper clipping away.
“Well, it’s getting late, and we have a big day tomorrow,” he says. “Faye, why don’t we show our guests up to their rooms?”
“I’ll take Little Texas,” Miss Faye says, hooking her arm in mine as we get up from the table. “I imagine you’re tired from all that traveling.”
Preach on Devil Hill.
“What? Oh. I’m all right,” I say. “Thank you for the delicious supper.”
We head up the wide staircase to the second floor. This is the biggest house I’ve ever been in and also the darkest. There are things that look like torches fastened to the walls, but which are really little electric bulbs made to look like flickering flames.
The place is overrun with plushy carpets and polished wood, heavy on the varnish. Vases, paintings, rugs on the walls with pictures of Bible scenes: Moses in the bulrushes, the two disciples on the Mount of Olives, Jesus riding His ass to town on Good Friday. Those kinds of things. A hundred percent better than the ones I’ve seen at gas stations, I’ll tell you that.
Miss Faye takes my hand. When we’re far enough away from the others, she tugs me into a side hallway. Puts her face close to mine.
“I don’t know how much I should say,” she says in a low voice. “But I don’t want you to do this. What they’re asking you to do.”
I feel my heart speed up a little. “Why, Miss Faye?”
“Be careful. Not so loud.” She whips her head around, looking back toward the light. The stairs creak, but the creaking goes away. She smiles. “And please don’t call me Miss Faye. It makes me feel so old.”
“Okay,” I say, quieter. My heart is racing now. “But why did you tell me not to believe your husband?”
“It’s Tee’s personality.” She presses closer, till I am breathing nothing but her scent. “It’s so much stronger than mine. Even back at Ole Miss—Tee was my business instructor!—he always knew exactly what he wanted, and he got it. That’s just his way. He’s not a bad man. He’s not. That’s part of the problem, Little Texas—”
“Please call me Ronald Earl.”
“All right, Ronald Earl.” She laughs a little, showing her gap-toothed smile. “I mean—he has so much faith. Tee always believes everything will work out the way he wants it to. So he never considers the consequences of his actions for others. Am I making any sense, honey?”
“Some.” It’s hard to think about anything but the closeness of her body to mine. Her smell, her softness.
“When he wants something, it simply drives him,” Faye says. “Anyone or anything that gets in the way of that, he just ignores or bluffs his way around it.”
“You mean he lies?”
Her face pinches up. “Well. I don’t know if I would out and out call it lying. I don’t think he even knows he is doing it. He just gets so fixated on a thing, you know? And he’ll say almost anything, do just about anything, to make it happen. It’s just that this thing is not right, what they’re asking you to do. It’s dangerous.”
I feel the skin on my own face tighten up. “So you think Satan is sitting over there on that island just waiting to drag me off?”
“Shhh. It’s more a feeling I have. Tee—he thinks I’m a big fat pessimist, always seeing the rain in the rainbow. But that’s not it …”
She makes a little clutched-up sound in her throat and swallows hard before she can go on. “If you only knew,” she says, “how long we have been living with his—his obsession.”
“Which fits right in with Miss Wanda Joy.”
Faye puts a finger to her mouth. “Let’s walk while we talk.”
This hall’s the longest yet, lined with pictures of dead people with bow ties, flouncy dr
esses, slick hair, tall hats, starchy collars.
“Are all of them Vanderloos?” I say, to break up the mood.
“Yes,” Faye says. “I wanted them out of here when we moved in, but Tee, of course, would not have one thing touched. ‘It would detract from the authentic antebellum flavor,’ he likes to say. As if he knows what he’s talking about— he makes his money selling Aqua Glass hot tubs.” She sighs. “I never intended on living here. It was all Tee’s idea. But it’s not this place so much. I love a lot of things about it, I really do. But over there …”
She waves her hand off toward the wall. I look, but there is nothing there but a picture of a man who appears to have been born before the invention of shampoo.
“What?” I say.
“Here they come.” She grabs my hands and holds them together with her hands. “Don’t mention what we talked about.”
It’s not till I look out the deep-set window in my room that I realize where Faye was pointing. Not at the wall, but across the water.
Devil Hill.
My bedroom sits at the end of another long hall. The door is practically twice as tall as my head. If I propped it open, I could run straight down the hall right to my bed.
I drop my suitcase on the floor next to a dresser with a white bowl sitting on it. No TV. Out the window I can see double moons, one on the lake, the other shining through the limbs of a pin oak. Glisteny grass slopes all the way down to the water.
I’m not used to sleeping alone.
There’s a tall cupboard in the corner with a bunch of long dresses inside. I sweep them back, and I’m surprised to find a little drum sitting behind them. I take the drum out and set it on my lap; it’s big around as a dinner plate and has red trim and years of smudges. I thump it with my knuckle; it makes a good strong k’dump sound. Who used to play it?
I put the drum back and stretch out on top of the thick covers. The bed has four posts carved the way a honeysuckle vine will twist a dogwood trunk. It’s piled with little square pillows stitched with Bible verses in thick red thread: ASK, AND IT SHALL BE GIVEN; CAST THY BREAD UPON THE WATERS; and DEATH, WHERE IS THY STING?
I kick my shoes off and watch the moon. I think how I know where we go after we die; the Bible spells it out plain. But where is she? Devil Hill rises across the water.
I get up and try to open the window, but it’s locked. Through the glass I can hear crickets sawing and toadfrogs peeping. I force myself to look out at the blackest parts of the dark. No other lights for miles.
We are alone here.
I settle onto my knees in front of the bed and close my eyes.
“Dear heavenly Father, thank you for bringing us safely here. I ask that you watch over us in this house, and that you shower your anointing on the mission of our ministry. Please protect us as we go about your heavenly tasks, and especially watch over us in the night. Please look after the souls of the departed, especially Lucy, and clove her to your celestial bosom. Please send your heavenly angels to guide and watch over and protect Lucy’s spirit and the loved ones she has left behind, and allow me the strength, the courage, and the understanding to learn what she means in my life. In the name of Jesus Christ I pray. Amen.”
I cut out the light and lay there feeling the half-moon shining down on me. Then I get lost in a sleep so dark I might as well be on the bottom of the ocean.
Long about two in the morning, something gets me up with a start.
K’dump, k’dump, k’dump.
The room is all over cold, like a breeze is cutting across my bed. I glance at the window—it’s still shut tight. I swing my legs around, feeling for the wood floor. The bed is up so high, I can’t reach bottom without sliding over the side. The hardwood is cold to my toes.
I can hear them—footsteps creaking out in the hall, coming closer and closer to my door. A shiver wiggles up my back.
“Hello?” I say.
Nobody calls back, but the footsteps keep coming. Is something coming here just for me?
A big bang shakes the whole house, making my heart rattle. I don’t see how in the world the others haven’t woken up. But everything is quiet again outside my door. I wait, listening.
K’dump, k’dump, k’dump.
I walk from the bed toward the door.
K’dump, k’dump, k’dump.
Jesus Lord—the sound isn’t coming from the hall, it’s coming from the cupboard in my room. It’s the drum. Something inside the cupboard is beating on that drum.
I rush to the bedroom door and wrench at the knob—it’s slippery in my sweaty hands, and I have trouble turning it. The drum sound behind me gets louder and louder—I can’t make myself turn around to see what’s back there—the devil has come for me.
I slap around for the light switch, wanting to scream. Where is it? I scratch and bang on the door, wrenching the knob this way and that, yelling and hollering loud as I can. Why is nobody hearing me? I stop, sucking in air, and in the middle of all the drumming I hear it—a big creaking noise behind me. I turn around….
The door to the cupboard is swinging open.
I yank the knob and give the bedroom door a big pull; it swings open to the hall, and a long slab of weak light slants into the room. The drum stops the moment the light touches the cupboard.
Dead silence. I dare to look behind me. Everything in the room—everything I can see in the light coming from the hall—looks like it did before. The long piece of light reaches clear over to the bed. I can see my shoes, my clothes hanging over the bedstead, the bedcovers jerked back. A pillow on the floor says blood of the lamb in bleeding red letters.
I grab up my pants and T-shirt and hightail it out into the hall, looking for Certain Certain’s door. That’s when I see it; something is at the end of the hall. It’s white and bunchy looking, almost like—it is—it’s a bedsheet hanging in the air.
But it’s not draped over somebody’s head like on Halloween; it’s laying on something, covering up a shape only a couple of feet high. I stop, the clothes drop out of my hands. This is not happening. It can’t be happening. But the shape is too solid. The sheet is draped over something rounded and low.
The white shape starts to move.
Sliding slow and straight up the hall toward me, a foot off the ground.
It’s floating.
I beat the closest door I can find like a wild animal, hollering for Certain Certain. I beat on another one and another as the thing under the sheet gets closer and closer, cutting me off.
I make a sputtering sound and rush back into my room and slam the door shut.
No key and no way to lock the door. But what is a door to it? Nothing. Nothing at all.
I tear at the edges of the door with my fingers, feel the light switch at last, and turn it on.
Everything is just like it was. Not a single sound to be heard. Except my heart going like a piston.
I watch the crystal doorknob.
A scrabbling noise comes, moving down the sides of the door, fumbling and scratching.
The doorknob … it starts to turn. Clicks. The door starts to open.
I back away till I’m against the bed, grab the sheets behind me, and scrunch them up in my fingers.
I clamp my eyes and begin praying, praying harder than I’ve ever prayed before, stringing the words all out in a burst, “OhhelpmesweetblessedJesusGodmyLordprotectmeohsweet-JesusLordprotectmehelpmekeepmesafefromall—”
A new noise … I open my eyes just in time to see the bedroom door swing wide.
Its eyes tear into me. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe—
She’s standing in front of me.
Lucy in the blue dress, Lucy right down to her sneakers. Her hair is not flat like before; it looks all ripply, like wet ribbons.
She stands stock-still in the doorway, like she expects to be invited in.
I jerk up a lamp from the bedside table, accidentally click it on, flooding the room with light. I hold it back of my head, like a pitcher fixin
g to hurl a fastball.
Lucy’s dress is smudged with long, muddy stripes. Her mouth is open, open so wide it makes her look like she’s screaming. Only there is no sound. I can see her jaw shuddering like she’s trying to close her mouth but can’t.
I’m clutching the lamp so fierce, my whole arm is going numb.
Her skin has a wet sheen to it. Her fist is clenched like a walnut. She raises one thin arm and points it direct at me, her fist comes open, and she spreads her fingers wide. A little tump sound as something small and hard hits the floor.
Then the big, heavy door slams shut by itself, bam, so hard it rocks the frame in its casing.
My heart whumps inside my ribs. I sit down on the bed, still clutching the lamp, trying to pour my mind back inside my head.
How can I make it to the next minute … the rest of the night? I can’t. I won’t survive this.
Suddenly I hear feet tromping up the hall, regular sounds flood back in: voices, nighttime noises, the peeping bugs outdoors; the cake bowl has been lifted. I can’t make my legs move, can’t even call out. The knob gives a turn, and the door is wrenched open. Certain Certain’s standing there.
“Hey, boy, what’s going on in here? Heard all the …”
He spies the upraised lamp. Up the hall I see the other bedroom doors banging open. Miss Wanda Joy in a purple bathrobe, Tee Barlow in shorts and a sleeveless shirt, even Sugar Tom, barefoot in his silvery pajamas.
“Hey, Lightning, it’s all right,” Certain Certain says. “Put the lamp down.” He comes into the room, walking slow. “Put it down, son. It’s all right. We’re all right here.”
I let my arm drop, and the lamp falls to the floor with a woody crash.
The others are coming into the room now, stopping just inside the door, looking sleepy and afraid. I wrap the blankets around myself to cover up.
“What happened?” Certain Certain says, touching my arm. “Haints scare you out of your clothes? We found these sitting outside….” He’s holding my pants and shirt. Then his smile freezes when he sees my face up close.
