Jack stepped in. “Them cats talking again, Mrs. Albright?”
“Oh yes, they get to mumbling now and then. I always wished Yancy had liked them more.”
“Let’s head on up the road, buddy,” Jack said to Henry. “Well, there’s some people just don’t take to cats, Mrs. Albright,” he said, as Mrs. Albright stood.
“I don’t think you and Yancy felt much different on that, Jack,” she said.
“Well, no ma’am. I don’t guess we did. I like a animal that’ll come when you call it. You let us know, now, if we can do anything.”
As they walked up the road, Jack said, “I’m glad your Aunt Dorie has taught you to be good to old people, buddy. Way down the line, if you’re lucky, it’ll come back around.”
“She said it was wrong to steal, even from rich people.”
“Oh, she did. Well, she’s probably right. I just need to even things up sometimes.”
When Aunt Dorie took him down front at the church to see Yancy dead, Mrs. Albright was sitting in a chair at the head of the coffin, and she was crying. Flowers were on stands, and in the air was that sweet, perfumelike funeral flower smell. The coffin was a shiny wood one, one of the ones made by Mr. Fitzhugh at the furniture store, and Yancy wore a light gray coat and a white shirt with a red tie. Old Mrs. House, with her black cane, walked up, looked at Yancy a minute, then said to Mrs. Albright, “I like that red tie. It gives him a little color in his complexion.” She turned back and looked at Yancy. “They do get pale at a time like this.”
Henry looked in at pale Yancy. He wondered if the ball was going to be a different color than it had been. But there was no sign of the ball.
Mrs. Albright reached over, pulled Henry to her. She smelled the same way still. “Oh Henry,” she said, “he loved you so much, and you should get his train. That’s just what he would have wanted.”
“Where’s his ball?” Henry asked.
“Henry,” said Aunt Dorie.
“That’s okay, Dorie.” She turned to Henry. “Dr. Block told me that he’d cut it out if Yancy died, so he did.”
Yancy’s sister was at the funeral too, but she didn’t sit down beside the coffin with Mrs. Albright. She came in with the family, though, when they came in to sit in the first few pews at the beginning of the service. Her head was held up so high it was like it was leaning back. Uncle Jack had been talking about her again, said she was mad because she never got the attention Yancy got. He said if she’d been able to work herself up a goiter she would have fit in better.
The scripture for the sermon was Isaiah 25:8 — “He will swallow up death in victory.” Preacher Gibson preached that it was not a time for sadness, but for happiness, that Yancy was in heaven, rejoicing with the saints, and that it was never too late for anybody in the congregation to surrender to Jesus so as to join Yancy in the company of God and Jesus for eternity, and that only through Jesus Christ could anybody ever get to heaven.
At Mrs. Albright’s house after the funeral, all the cats were home, but not too many people were around. Plates of food rested on the kitchen table. Aunt Dorie fixed Henry a plate with two chicken wings, some black-eyed peas, turnip greens, and some thin fried corn bread. She gave him the dish of banana pudding before he finished eating his main food, and he didn’t remember that ever happening before.
After he ate, Henry walked into Yancy’s room and looked at the closed closet door, the yellow curtains, the chest of drawers with a few hats and a trophy of some kind on top, and the floor lamp and straight-back chair.
Mrs. Albright led Aunt Dorie into the room. Aunt Dorie looked a little worried about something. Mrs. Albright said, “I just had to . . .” and she pointed to Yancy’s Red Rider wagon. His electric train was in it. “I need to set this back up. I can’t let it go yet. I know Yancy would want you to have it, Henry, but I need to set it back up. And I found out I can’t bring myself to get rid of any of his clothes for a while either. I just — it feels like, like he’s still in here.”
“I can understand that,” said Aunt Dorie. “I can understand that.” She looked around.
“It was his body, Dorie,” said Mrs. Albright. “His body was so tender and white, and his skin was so soft. He was like an angel. Didn’t you think so?” She was rubbing her arm.
“I sure do. Yancy was a good boy . . . man.”
“I just forgot about his skin. You know, his body. I hadn’t looked at it in such a long time. I hadn’t touched it and felt it and all that. His face was always kind of red, you know, but his skin underneath his clothes was different. He’d got so he took care of hisself and gave hisself a bath.” She looked around the room. “I ain’t been able to stop thinking about his body since we dressed him out.”
Henry remembered that Jesus had raised one of his friends, Lazarus, from the dead, and a little girl too. Those were lucky people. That would be magic, though, wouldn’t it? But Jesus could do magic. “Are any of the cats named Lazarus?” he asked Mrs. Albright.
“No, son. I don’t have a Lazarus. But that’s a good idea, when another’n comes round. Or maybe I can rename Judas. He’s so unlucky. You know, he learned his lesson too late, way too late. But sometimes I think: Where would we be without him?”
1942
Henry knew that it was going to happen, that Jesus would call him down to the front of the church after a service to accept him. Nobody could be exactly sure when it would happen. And if Jesus didn’t call him, then he’d just wait some more. But most everybody in his family was pretty young when they were called, except Uncle Jack had come from Strickland County, and his family didn’t know Jesus for some reason that had to do with being common.
So on the first Sunday morning in April, when the dogwoods — with the flower that was the cross — and the wisteria were just coming into bloom, and Aunt Dorie was all the time talking about the runted dogwood, because that was the wood of Jesus’ cross — after the regular service, and during the invitational hymn, Henry, after Aunt Dorie had talked to him one more time, and after he had thanked God for Jesus the night before while he prayed for a long time on his knees by the bed with his knee against the bed pot while Uncle Jack was out at the canning shed smoking a cigar, and after Caroline talked to Henry about her giving her life to Jesus — after all this, on that next Sunday morning, Henry stepped out into the aisle and in spite of Uncle Jack’s talk about no magic and all that in Trixie’s Bible, in spite of having played with his woody and been chastised by Aunt Dorie while being given the go-ahead by Uncle Jack in some way or another, in spite of being caught stealing a stick of licorice from Mr. Jackson’s store, in spite of getting caught saying “damn” at school twice, Henry, on that Sunday morning, experienced Jesus walking before him, leading the way in a white robe, on the rug that was red — the color of Jesus’ blood — and he followed Jesus on down to the outstretched arms of Preacher Gibson, who welcomed him into the community of Christians, into the community of people in the world who would be spared the fires of hell and instead be swept up into heaven, where there would be no mean people, to live in the presence of God and Jesus and all the saints, walking streets of gold for eternity.
The next day in school Henry drew a sketch of Jesus crying, big tears coming down his face. When Aunt Dorie saw it and asked him why Jesus was crying, he said because of all the sin in the world, and that Jesus had been singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” probably. Aunt Dorie said she wanted that song sung at her funeral.
Then he drew pictures of crosses on hills, and then on flat land, and just after he’d drawn a cross in class Mrs. Peebles showed him how he could draw a line from left to right about halfway up the cross, behind it, and there was a whole different and grown-up look to it. It was a horizon line, she said.
Mrs. Peebles was the one who said in class that she didn’t know why preachers had to shout, and Henry couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t shout. He wondered if she might be going to hell.
Then one day Mrs. Peebles showed Henry how to
draw a box, and he asked her if she’d show him how to draw Jesus on a cross, and she said she’d like to show him how to draw an airplane and a car, and so he started drawing them a lot. Later she showed him how to draw a ship so that it looked like it was on real water.
The electricity had been out for two days on account of a bad summer storm. Henry smelled the kerosene lantern in his sleep, it seemed like, and was then awake, seeing Uncle Jack pull up a chair beside his bed, sit down, set the lantern on the floor. It cast shadows upward. Where was Aunt Dorie? Henry sensed a lateness in the night — or maybe it was early, still dark, morning.
“I need to tell you something, shortstop.” Uncle Jack wore a shirt with flaps on the pockets. In the lantern light, Henry couldn’t tell if the shirt was blue or brown. Besides alcohol, Uncle Jack smelled like cigars and the inside of the truck. Henry watched, wondering, as Uncle Jack coughed gently with his hand over his mouth, then said, “Old Uncle Jack is going to have to move on down the road. I’m going to have to look for work down in Pinehurst, maybe. I done got my bus ticket. I’m leaving the truck, and as soon as you’re a little older you can drive it. Caroline can drive it all she wants right now.”
“But why —”
“No, no, stop, I ain’t going to be able to answer no questions, because I’ve kinda got in over my head, and if I stick around it’ll be sure enough trouble coming, and it’s all my fault. Don’t you start in now. You’re too big for that. Everything’s going to be all right. Hush up, son, don’t be doing that. Hush, now. I got to go. I’ll be back in touch soon. Uncle Jack’s going to stay in touch.”
He bent over, kissed Henry on the forehead. He’d never done that before. He’d taken the matchstick out of his mouth. He stood and blew out the lantern, and left, not looking back as he closed the door quietly. Henry could see candles lit in the kitchen. After the door closed, white spots remained in his vision, then faded.
The next day, Saturday, Aunt Dorie kept Henry inside all day. She recited the Twenty-third Psalm several times, then the Lord’s Prayer, and asked Henry to join her in more praying. Sometimes they both prayed in silence and sometimes she prayed aloud that God would be with her and Henry. Henry followed her from room to room as she cleaned and cleaned, again and again. At one point she said, “Come in here and sit down with me on the couch.” He sat beside her, and she looked straight ahead out the window by the fireplace for a minute and then turned to him and said, “I want you to know what our vows said. They said ‘for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health; to love and to cherish, till death us do part.’ That’s what they said.”
“What are vows?”
“They are things that are stronger than a promise.”
“Is that like a covenant?”
“Yes, it is.”
1944
A few months after Pa D’s funeral, Uncle Samuel moved from his orange groves in Florida to the homeplace — to raise tobacco — and brought Carson, fifteen, his youngest, the only child left at home. Aunt Linda had died two years earlier after getting and losing cancer several times.
Soon after Linda got sick the first time, years earlier, Samuel began to think of Dorie in sensual ways, and prayed for forgiveness. At the family reunions each year he flirted with her, and she did not dissuade him. She’d always wished Jack were as devout as Samuel. Samuel was so steady and predictable, and though he didn’t smile much, he always had a smile for her. She could afford to like him in a slightly flirtatious way, because he visited the homeplace only a few days each year and was then gone. She felt so sorry for Linda, who had never seemed fully well. And there in the last year she felt sorry for Samuel having to watch Linda get weaker and weaker.
Each year, back in Florida after the family reunion, Samuel seemed to think about Dorie a little longer than he had the year before. Once Linda died and he’d come back to Simmons and moved into the homeplace with Carson, the courtship was direct and simple. He visited her twice, then asked her to marry him, and she said yes.
She needed a man, and in her view he was exactly the moral guide that Henry needed — had needed all along.
Disadvantages for Henry — the lectures, scolding, sermons — were balanced by the fact that he and Carson lived under the same roof.
Uncle Samuel increased the tobacco acreage to include most of the farm and paid Caroline and Henry thirty-five cents an hour to help out during that first summer after he married Aunt Dorie.
Ma D, getting more feeble by the month, moved in with Caroline and Aunt Ruth when Pa D died. Caroline began working at the Simmons drugstore, in addition to the tobacco fields, saving money for Woman’s College in Greensboro. She wanted to be a schoolteacher.
Jimmy Tilletson — a distant cousin just moved back from Tennessee and now a hired hand on the homeplace — had bad teeth and a GI haircut that he said he would keep as long as his brothers were overseas. He and his wife, Jeanette, had a little girl who had polio. Aunt Dorie said the little girl’s dresses were dirty. They brought her to church, and the men who were ushers each Sunday lifted her in her wheelchair up the steps. Jeanette worked at the cotton mill, and Mrs. Albright kept the daughter on workdays. Although two of Jimmy’s brothers were soldiers in the war, the army had not taken Jimmy. No one seemed to know why. Jimmy said it was because he was flat-footed, but when he climbed barefoot into the tobacco barn rafters to hang tobacco, anybody could see he had arches.
While they were frog gigging one night, just the three of them, Jimmy told Henry and Carson about handling snakes in his church in Tennessee. Mark 16:18 promised that believers wouldn’t get bit when they picked up snakes. Jimmy had seen plenty of snakes held up over believers’ heads while they shouted to God in the unknown tongues that Mark 16:17 talked about. He said his church had to keep it all secret because of the newspaper.
“Why couldn’t he tell about it?” Henry asked after he and Carson were in bed. They had twin beds in their own bedroom now. “I didn’t understand that part.”
“Because all the churches have these things they don’t want other churches to know about. Like the Catholics sprinkle people instead of baptize. There’s a Catholic church up in Raleigh and a Jewish church. And I think there’s some Jewish churches in McNeill too.”
“Are they the same as the Jews in the Bible?”
“I don’t know. These might be new Jews. I think they are.”
“Do they sprinkle?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why do they want to keep it a secret?”
“Because it’s connected to some kind of code that only preachers can know. Like the Morse code. Like in the army they have these codes that the Germans and Japs don’t have. The Jews had a code and then the Christians had a code. I think.”
“If we went in the army and got killed, would that make Aunt Dorie a gold star mother?”
“No, because you have to be the real mother.”
Henry thought about his real mother somewhere in Raleigh, a blue flag with a gold star hanging in her window. He pictured the flag in a window of a building he’d once passed in Raleigh on a school trip. It was a nice house that had tourists written on a sign out front, and he thought she might live there. He thought about the letter and present he got from Uncle Jack. “I got something in the mail today. You want to see?”
“Sure. What is it?”
Henry opened his drawer, got out his billfold, and pulled three gold packs from the hidden cash pocket. “Three preventatives. Well, I got this billfold too. It’s all from Uncle Jack. He wrote me a letter, told me how to hide them in the secret cash place and move them around so they wouldn’t make circles in the leather, and he told me I needed to learn to use them so I could avoid misery.”
“They keep you from getting a girl pregnant,” said Carson.
“I know it.”
“And they’re rubbers, not preventatives. You ever seen a water bomb made out of one?”
“Yeah, I guess I did. I don’t know. You want
these?”
“You don’t want them?” asked Carson.
“No.”
“Why?”
“I’m not going to do it before I get married.”
“Why not?”
“I promised Aunt Dorie. You’re not supposed to. The Bible says not to — somewhere in there. But Uncle Jack said you could practice on a banana.”
“Screw a banana?”
“No, dummy. Put a rubber on one.”
“I’ll be right back,” said Carson. He came back with a banana.
“Should we peel it?” asked Henry.
“Peel it? I don’t think so. Do you know how to unhook a bra strap?”
“No. Why?”
“It ain’t easy. You need to practice.”
“But I won’t be doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“Sex. All the way.”
“Aw, come on. Then you can play with their titties. Ain’t you ever read Song of Solomon, this king in the Bible? David’s daddy?”
“No.”
“Everybody knew about that in Florida. Hand me your Bible.”
Henry got his Bible off his dresser.
Carson read and Henry listened.
“That’s really there? Let me see it.” Henry looked over the passage.
“Okay,” said Carson. “I’m going to get a bra out of the dirty clothes basket.”
“It’s Aunt Dorie’s.”
“I know that . . . aw, come on.”
Carson left and returned. “Here it is.” He held it from one end so that it hung lengthwise toward the floor. “You want to go first?”
“Go first?”
“Try to unhook it. You’re supposed to practice with it on somebody.”
“I don’t need to practice.”
“Aw, come on.”
Henry looked at the door. Then the window. “Okay. You can practice.”
“Take off your pajama top.”
“Why?”
“Because you wouldn’t wear a bra over a shirt, stupid.”
“Something ain’t right about this.” Henry took off his pajama top.
The Bible Salesman Page 13
