Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  Her Aunt Letty said, “Kate was the prettiest girl I ever laid my eyes on.”

  “And couldn’t she play the organ. Lord have mercy,” said Old Man Agnew, from down the road.

  “I thought she only played the piano,” Laurel said.

  “Honey, she played the organ at both our churches for funerals. When Kate pumped that organ and struck into ‘The World is Waiting for the Sunrise,’ there was not a dry eye.”

  “Girl.” Her Uncle Tate broke in eventually. “You keep listening to this talk, and that cream’s been ready. Come on, you dawgs, and get yours.” He set down two bowls full. His dog and Buff came up out of the shade of a crepe myrtle.

  “Don’t let none of the dogs roaming around get into them peach pits you got out back,” A. T. Murray said. “Ain’t no sight worse in this world than seeing a dog trying to pass a peach pit.”

  “Hush your mouth,” Allie said, laughing.

  “All this mud.” Tate continued to talk about farming. “My cotton picker and my combine both are laid up from mud. Their transmissions are strained. Man called and wanted to know if I was coming to grange meeting tomorrow. Said they were going to talk about cotton. I said, Shoot, I don’t want to talk about cotton.”

  “The cost of insurance and the cost of fixing equipment, they’re going to eat you up,” Sam Upchurch said. He was a black friend who happened along in time for ice cream. “Fields about dried out. I hoped and prayed and watched. And nothing to do but talk about the weather. A man might try not to think about it, but that crop is out there.”

  “Sometimes,” said Tate, “I get in my truck and I start riding. Riding like I could do something about it all, or change things.” He laughed. “Only thing that changes is, I end up in a turnrow and having a bill for my truck’s transmission too. Always there is next year.” He looked off to the road, and Laurel watched all the others look the same direction. “But last year my beans lay in that field so long,” he said.

  “You and me is just outdated, Mister Tate,” Sam said.

  “Look over there,” said Allie. “Loma’s out on her store porch trying to see what we’re doing. She knows if we’re turning cream you won’t be buying Smoky his popsicle today. That dog’s going to end up with worms and bad teeth both.”

  “Smoky wants his popsicle, don’t you, boy.” Tate rubbed the dog’s ears.

  “Loma going to be giving her produce away if that price war don’t end,” Agnew’s wife said.

  “Small storekeepers are just as obsolete as the small farmer,” Sam said. A boy in shorts emerged through hedges holding a small melon. “Boy, what you got?” Sam said to his grandchild.

  “Found a wallermelon.”

  “You ain’t found nothing. That’s Mister Tate’s. Carry it on back where you got it.”

  “We don’t need that melon,” Tate said. “Tony, carry it on home.”

  “Sam, I’ve got cream dished up for Fanny, too,” Allie said. “Get home before it melts.”

  Soon the party broke up. People went away in pickups or cars, and a few ambled off down the roadside.

  Mister Zack accepted a ride from Laurel and asked to be let out at his garden. “Going to have a beer?” she said.

  “You want one?” He winked.

  “No, thanks.” She had not thought about a drink since the night they arrived.

  “You and the boy always looking around. Come on out the New Africa Road to my tent revival.”

  Tent, New Africa; the words held magic. She and Rick looked at one another. “We’ll be there,” Laurel said.

  At night, the open-sided tent appeared to be a carousel from a distance; the interior was aglow from a butane light and people swarmed about. A little of that day’s broad blue light was still in the sky, and, using it, she parked along the road’s shoulder, among a conglomeration of vehicles. Already a wailing kind of singing was going on, and music from strummed instruments. In the short time it took her to park, the early night sky became less silver. In the silence following the cessation of harsh sounds within the tent, they heard the mellifluous lowing of cows watching from behind nearby barbed wire, their nighttime peacefulness shattered. She and Rick laughed. As they approached the tent, Mister Zack lounged outside, talking to another man, and turned, grinning in delight, almost as if he was waiting, waiting there each night to see if she was coming. Laurel resented this; he seemed to feel some claim to her. But maybe this feeling was only obstinacy in her personality: if wanted, she declined; if not wanted, she sought. Something of that in most people, she thought. He introduced them to the preacher, Brother Roundtree, whose diamond stickpin caught the last silvery light and glittered in the early dark. When Mister Zack introduced them as his visitors from up the country—from New York—she decided maybe his attitude was pride, not ownership. She squinted to read a penciled sign tacked to a slit of board outside the tent: FAITH HEALING. ALL INVIDED.

  “What kind of religion is this?” she said.

  “It’s a know-so religion.” Brother Roundtree spoke as loudly as if he were already preaching. “Everything about it, the people know is so.”

  “Pray till you are saved.” Mister Zack grinned.

  They went on into the stifling heat inside the tent. She and Rick found two folding chairs together in one row. People put out hands kindly to help them crawl past their knees. “Thanks,” they each kept saying. They were recognized as strangers.

  A simple wooden platform stood at one end of the tent. There musicians sat playing heartily, their shirts already dampened in dark soaked places. Brother Roundtree came inside and leaped to the platform, long-legged and stiff. He rattled a tambourine above his head. In front of Laurel a little girl was asleep with fingers curled into her mouth. She wore a quaint long dress down to her ankles, too young to speak up and complain, I’m made to look strange. Laurel felt for her. She tried to imagine herself in childhood that way, able to sleep amid so much noise. She tried to remember Rick that young.

  A blond woman sat next to her, who might not be so old. But her face was deeply lined. Her stomach was pouched, though not from pregnancy, Laurel could tell that. Something amiss about the shape bothered her. Maybe just a country woman old before her time, not knowledgeable about keeping in shape, the way Laurel herself jogged and worked out. The woman handed her her own songbook, though Laurel tried to protest. She had another one to use, the woman indicated, leaning to the man beside her, his book on his knees. Her husband. He was a tall blond giant. She could see his curly hair, his handsome profile. “Last week we got rained out,” the woman said. Laurel looked up at the tent top as the woman did; it was full of holes. “One night some niggers come and stood out there.” The woman nodded toward the dark. “Brother Roundtree prayed and they didn’t come no more.” Laurel stared down at the songbook titled Heavenly High Hymns. She opened it and saw old-fashioned shaped notes. The musicians ceased when the people began to sing, a dry cacophonous nasal wailing; soon she realized these were people she had always heard referred to as Holy Rollers.

  Mister Zack seemed different not wearing his usual khaki work clothes. His attempt to be a town man did not fit him. He was all wrong in a loose shirt with red flowers—hibiscus, maybe—and pants of a shiny material. He had come into the tent and looked sharply about for her. She hid her face, looking at her shoes in the grass and the dust. Yet she knew the look of disappointment on his face when he realized there was no place for him beside her. He stood staring slack-mouthed toward her. “What’s with Mister Zack?” Rick said.

  “Nothing,” she said. She had the sense suddenly of how little Rick knew. He’s only a boy, she thought. What had Mister Zack thought could take place with Rick here?

  Brother Roundtree spoke closely into a microphone, like a carnival barker. “I’m no high-educated man. I’m a little self.”

  “So are we all, Brother, so are we all,” a man shouted.

  Brother Roundtree rattled his tambourine. “Once I was full of denial,” he cried. “But, people, I
run aground in sin. I stood there then and said, I’m just a little ole widow’s boy and I’m lost, God. I’m lost.”

  “Go, preacher,” “Tell us about it.” “Praise the Lord!” People cried out from here and there. Now they began to shove themselves forward in their seats. Their feet tapped silently the ground. Brother Roundtree when he shouted rang the tambourine above his head. It seemed it would shed its tinny pieces. “A lot of you are trying to satisfy lust of the flesh,” he cried. “You need to be borned again. You need to be submerged in that water. And if one of your hands don’t go under, I’ll push you down. I believe in submersion, folks. But baptism don’t wash away sins. What Amurricuh needs today is more old-fashioned praying Mommas and Daddies. If you don’t feel nothing tonight you ain’t got nothing. The main thing is Jesus.” The tambourine beat the air and the musicians twanged and strummed. In a moment of silence before Roundtree could speak, the cows across the way mooed out loudly. She felt Rick’s elbow, smaller than her own, nudge hers and knew a moment of compatibility and sharing.

  “Hallelujah!” people cried.

  Brother Roundtree said, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and tomorrow. It’s all based on personal revelation. God knows where you live and who you are. He don’t get me mixed up with you. Jesus is not to destroy life but to give it. Oh, don’t you love him.” He leaped into the air three times and then turned around in a circle and stood with one leg extended stiffly before him so that the flat of his foot faced the congregation. “I know I got something in my shoes besides my feet, people. I feel it all over.” He wiggled his knees together, as in an old dance. Like the Charleston. They shimmied and shook. She almost wanted to laugh. “I felt that,” he said. “If you don’t feel that, you’re dead. I don’t believe in a half-baked cake. Oh, don’t you love Jesus. Things I once hated I now love. I know it’s great to be here. Come up and confess to Jesus.”

  The blond woman stood up. Laurel moved her knees for her to pass. She had the blond giant in tow, like a big shaggy dog. Laurel looked again at the grim old-woman face, though her arms were smooth; she had seen that as the woman passed. Her husband looked so much younger, a man who could appeal to women anywhere. She felt again fear of the future, as a woman growing older while William would have the appeal of an older man to a young woman. A successful man, an executive.

  The man stood on the platform beside his wife with his same air of obedience. She continued to have her grim look of satisfaction, nodding to him to begin. He held up a bandaged arm. “Last night I was burned so bad the doctor said I wouldn’t get out of bed for a week. But my wife sent for Brother Roundtree, and he and my wife and me prayed. In a while I got up and eat supper. Thirty-six years I lived for the devil and four for God. Pray for us while we sing a song.”

  “Ever’ time I do a deed I shouldn’t do, I just steal away and I pray,” they sang, in their twanging, nasal way.

  “Y’all pray for me, and I’ll do a lot better than I been doing.”

  His wife came away ahead of him, her smile fixed, her hands resting on the protrusion of stomach. He wouldn’t leave her because she looked like that, Laurel thought. An old man ran forward and knelt on the piece of rug below the platform. “I tithed,” he testified. “And I bought some property. I stopped tithing and I lost it. I sold a lot of cows and didn’t tithe and I come out owing the gover’ment.”

  Another old man took his place. “Back yonder when I got married I didn’t really mean it. But that was fifty years ago. When I got the Holy Ghost they didn’t think it would last. But if I can make fifteen more days, it’ll be forty years since I took a dose of medicine or had a habit. You got to take a stand.”

  People cried and shouted. “Praise the Lord. Hallelujah.”

  Brother Roundtree sent the tambourine down into the congregation for collection. “Amurricuh has turned into a slipping place,” he called. “People are slipping around into cafes and beer joints and into the arms of other people’s husbands and wives. Niggers are following anti-Christ. They hate the whites. We got to pray.”

  “Remember me in this prayer.” A fat boy ran forward and knelt on the rug. “I been sick in body.” He began to shake and sob. Brother Roundtree started speaking in an unintelligible tongue that sounded like gibberish. People rose in a quiet manner and went forward to lay their hands on the boy’s shaking back. “God touched my body,” he said, raising his head. “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, God.”

  “Oh, if you are with me,” Brother Roundtree said, “reach up your hand and wave. Wave to Jesus, people. I love things of this world. I’m a servant of sin, I told him. Don’t leave me the way I am, I cried. Oh, don’t you love him. Your heart has only one doorknob and it’s on the inside. Jesus said, I stand and I knock. Open. And you’re borned again. I said, Will you ta-ake me as a potter takes clay?”

  People waved their hands in the congregation. She felt the fluttering, a small breeze. It was better than the inadequate cardboard fans that had been going all evening. Sweat ran everywhere all over her. Oh, won’t he take me too? Laurel thought. It would be so much easier to be molded, shaped, and formed by someone else, to have decisions taken from her hands. Not to make her own. I surrender, she wanted to say. I believe. She wanted to run forward, too, before the people, and restrained herself. You had to behave properly. You had to go by rules and behave politely according to the society to which you belonged. Yet here she sat with her hand waving high toward the tent top, waving to Jesus. Signaling with all her might, as if to be known one out of so many people. She felt Rick stiffen beside her. She caught from the side of her eye a glimpse of him as he had turned first to laugh, thinking she jested, and realized his mother sat waving to Jesus in some seriousness of her own. She saw his face staring ahead; she saw a white line appear at his mouth.

  “Let the Holy Ghost take holt of the reins,” Brother Roundtree cried. The tambourine rang. The musicians bent forward to their instruments, between their knees, their heads low. Brother Roundtree flew around again in his spinning circle, ending with one leg stretched out with the flat of his foot toward them. “God don’t have any problems. But he’s got the solution to yours.”

  “I’m satis-fied with my Master. But is he satis-fied with me?” people sang.

  He cried above them, “If nobody loves you, God does.”

  “Yes, glory to come,” said a cracked voice behind Laurel, which she thought only she heard.

  She went out between the crowd, and people put out their hands to greet her. “Come again,” they said. “Welcome.” She was out by the road then, where the cows had hushed into silence, or slept because it was that late hour of the night. Suddenly she realized Rick was not with her. When she turned to a hand gripping her hard by the elbow, it was not him. She saw the red flowers. “Where your boy gone?” Mister Zack said.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You been gone from your husband a long time. You must be about ready.” Laurel thought of the summers before when Mister Zack had spoken of William as “the husband you’re trying to lose.” She had wanted to laugh at that too, thinking herself and William as superior to country people who did not take separate vacations. “You ever do anything out of the family way?” he said.

  Laurel felt quite alone on the shoulder of the road, abandoned to the night and the strange setting. She had a premonition about being a woman alone in the world, a woman without a man protectorate. A husband; it gave you identity, attachment, safety. It was something she needed. It was not Mister Zack’s audacity that surprised her as much as his acceptance of the fact she’d go to bed with him, that there was no reason for her to object to him personally. She was not able to speak before he said, “I could give you ten dollars.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Twenty-five?”

  She shook her head.

  “Fifty? Well, I can’t go no higher than that,” he said sadly when she again shook her head. He went off into the darkness. Fifty dollars? she
had considered for a moment. There were actually things she could use that much money for. She was startled that such a thought crossed her mind. You got to take a stand, Laurel told herself abruptly. She turned in the darkness, feeling deserted on the road. Cars and trucks drove away. Only the stars seemed settled.

  “Rick, where were you?” She felt dependent on this boy coming along the road toward her.

  “I went to see who was out there on a bank toward the end, watching.”

  “Who?”

  “Some black guys.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “Laughing.”

  “It’s their turn,” Laurel said.

  They drove back toward the cabin, pine trees whispering in the nightside. She said, “Well, people have a right to their own ideas about religion. Last Easter at our church in Soundport we had a trumpet solo and some of the older people objected. They weren’t used to that instrument in church.” She thought back to that sound and began to sing, “Christ is risen. Is ri-sen toda-a-ay.”

  “Mom,” Rick said.

  “Sorry about that. Shucks, I been borned again and I still can’t carry a tune.”

  “Why did you act like that?” he said.

  “What,” she said, “waving to Jesus? I felt it. I believed.”

  She turned off the main road, toward their road home. Only it was not home. Home was more than a thousand miles away. She wondered if she had been right to bring him here these summers, to let him see a way people lived that had nothing to do with his life at all. What right had she to change his existence? At what moment could she possibly shatter his world and tell him of her decision? She went up to the cabin with a sense of foreboding about its emptiness. She opened the door without a key, because it had no lock. Out in the country there was not yet fear of strangers, coming to rob you in the night and take away what you possessed.