Travis meekly followed his father into the hallway, where they stopped under the light suspended from the second-story ceiling. He mutely turned his back to Rufus and faced the front door. Rufus put his belt into his right hand and struck Travis on his buttocks, up his back, down again to his buttocks, and then down his legs and on his calves, over and over, as hard as he could. Rig, Devon, and Dollie, mouths agape, leaned against the banister on the second floor to watch. Lurlene turned her head from the TV. For the first few minutes, Travis just clenched his fists and stood there silently, tears flowing down his face. Each lash felt as though a furrow of fire were being seared across his back, buttocks, and legs. He suddenly realized that if he did not make a sound, his father would not know that he was being affected and would not stop, so he began to wail, “OW! OW! Daddy, stop! OW! OW! You’re killin’ me!”
Rufus continued to strike him on the back. “You ever gonna defy me again?”
“OW! OH! No, I promise!”
Rufus stopped. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his left hand. Travis rushed up the stairs, sobbing, into his room. The children were stunned mute, as if to say anything would bring Rufus’s rage upon them. Devon and Rig quietly went into the bedroom, and Dollie went into her room. Lurlene turned off the TV.
Rufus threaded his belt through the loops of his pants as he walked back to the kitchen. Uma was standing in the doorway.
“Don’tchou think you was a little hard on ‘im?” Uma asked.
“He’s gotta learn there’s rules to follow in this house. Long as he’s under my roof, he’s gonna follow my rules. Or he can leave.”
“He might do that sooner than later,” Uma stated flatly.
“So you think I was too hard on ‘im?”
“I’m just sayin’ he’s gittin’ to be a man. Maybe there’s better ways o’ punishin’ ‘im.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Rufus agreed.
Devon and Rig sat on the edge of Rig’s bed and quietly looked at Travis, who was lying on his bed staring at the ceiling. He had stopped crying.
“You OK?” Rig asked.
“Yeah, I’m OK. You think that hurt? That wudden nothin’. I could barely feel it,” he lied. “He thinks he can hurt me, but I didden feel nothin’. The only reason I started to yell was to make him stop.” His back and legs were still throbbing.
They watched TV the rest of the night. Lurlene and Dollie continued divining the future with the ring. When they were told to go to bed, the boys took off their pants and jumped into bed in their underwear, tee shirts, and socks, Devon settling in beside Rig on his twin bed. They pulled the sheet up to their chins. It was quiet for a moment, and then, in the darkness, they heard a loud SCRATCH! SCRATCH! coming from Travis’s bed.
“What is that?” Rig queried.
No answer. SCRATCH! SCRATCH! . . . SCRATCH! SCRATCH!
“What are you doin’, Travis?” Devon asked.
SCRATCH! SCRATCH! “Wha’da ya think I’m doin’? Can ya guess?”
Devon giggled. “No, why don’tchou tell us.”
SCRATCH! SCRATCH! “That’s my dick scrapin’ the ceilin’.”
Devon and Rig both laughed. “No, it ain’t,” Rig declared.
“Yeah, it is,” Travis insisted. “You guys ever git horny?”
“What’s that?” Devon asked.
“Ah, I reckon not. I guess you’re too young. It’s when you think about pussy all the time.”
Devon and Rig were both silent about what had just transpired between them and Dollie.
“Nah, didden think so,” Travis added. “You will soon.”
They could hear him turn in his bed and the scratching stopped. Soon he was breathing regularly.
“You promise not to tell anyone?” Rig whispered.
“I promise,” Devon whispered back. They had become blood brothers last summer when they made a cut on their forefingers with Rig’s small pocketknife and then rubbed the blood against each other’s wound, sealing the bond. Neither of them would ever tell another person. Rig turned on his right side and soon he was breathing deeply.
Devon stared straight up into the darkness and thought about what had just happened. He remembered Del’s twelfth birthday party last year. He had been nine and Dollie was ten. Everyone had sung the birthday song to Del, he had opened his presents and blown out the candles, and they had all eaten chocolate cake. Then the children went into the living room to play Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and the adults stayed in the kitchen. After a while, they got bored with pinning the tail on the donkey. The boys began to arm wrestle on the floor, and the girls started to play “Say, Say, Oh Playmate” by clapping their hands against their partner’s as they sang. Devon had sat on the arm of the pink Naugahyde rocking chair and watched the giggling girls, as he did not like arm wrestling. Dollie had suddenly stood up and whispered in his ear, “Go hide in your closet.”
He went into his and Del’s bedroom, hid in the closet, and cracked the door just enough to be able to see into the room. Dollie, Lurlene, Janice, and Carrie Lynn, who was Uncle Caryl and Aunt Evangeline’s daughter, came into the bedroom right after he got into the closet. He held his breath as Dollie quietly closed the bedroom door, wondering what she had in mind.
“I know,” she said. “Why don’t we do like the song says an’ everyone pretend we’re paper dolls an’ try on each other’s clothes.”
“Nah,” Lurlene had said, “I don’t wanta do that.”
“Oh, c’mon, Lurlene. It’ll be fun. I’ll go first.” She bent down and took off her shoes and socks and then pulled her dress over her head. Then she pulled her panties down to her ankles and stepped out of them.
“Panties too?” questioned Carrie Lynn.
“Yeah,” Dollie smiled. “Let’s try on everything of everybody else.”
The girls giggled and laughed as they tried on each other’s clothes. Devon knew Dollie was doing this for him so he could see the blossoms of all four girls. He had watched with excited curiosity, but his bird had not grown as it had this afternoon. He wondered why. He drifted off to sleep.
He and Rig spent the remainder of the week climbing trees, swinging on the grapevine, playing in the haunted house, and buying nickel candy bars and fifteen-cent pop from the filling station next to the house. Devon particularly liked Zero candy bars and Hires root beer. Rig liked Reese’s peanut butter cups and Pepsi. They would take their booty back to the haunted house and eat in the room where Travis had beaten them in brick tossing.
“Wha’djou think about fuckin’ Dollie?” Rig asked one day.
“It was OK,” Devon replied. “But I like this better.” He bit into his Zero.
“Yeah, me too,” Rig agreed, swallowing the remainder of his peanut butter cup.
School began the day after Labor Day, and a new year of misery began for Devon. He was again at a different school, William C. Schenck, than he had attended last year. He was once more the new kid in class, unknown to one and all, the brunt of ridicule and scorn for his now five-foot, eight-inch frame and his inability to play kickball and round all the bases without tripping and falling. “Clumsy” was now a familiar word to Devon, having heard it for several years, but no less laden with shame and embarrassment for its familiarity. The laughter of other children was a white-hot flame searing his soul, the fear of which would haunt him his whole life.
As a consequence of his being rejected by his classmates, he spent his recesses and lunch breaks alone at the edge of the playground, watching the other students slide down the slide, hang from the monkey bars, hit the tetherball, and play hopscotch. He was utterly alone. The one consolation he had was music. Mrs. Dillon, his fifth grade teacher, taught her students how to play the kazoo three times a week in the afternoon, and he looked forward to each lesson. His parents had bought a trombone for Del and allowed him to be in school bands, but Devon had never even been asked if he would like to learn to play an instrument, which he resented. The pleasure he experienced playi
ng the kazoo was a wonderful counterpoint to the hazing he received when playing games. Thus began a lifelong love of music which he would never forsake.
In late October, when brown, russet, red, and orange leaves were being buffeted and shuffled by autumn winds, Adam decided to answer God’s call and took Marie and the children to Snyderville to bring lost sheep into the fold.
In the nineteenth century, Snyderville had been a small community of well-to-do families that had settled along the banks of the Mad River at a shallow place where four-in-hand wagons were able to ford the river on their way to Cincinnati with goods from Springfield. It was called Summerford then. The last remaining vestige of that time was a run-down two-story brick building on the south bank of the river. Now, it had devolved into a cluster of shacks, mobile homes, and a smattering of shabby brick homes, the refuge of expatriates from Kentucky who had abandoned the coal mines for better lives in Ohio, only to discover that their paucity of skills and education hardly placed them in better standing in Ohio.
Consequently, they took whatever jobs they could find in factories, restaurants, and convenience stores. Adam himself had been born and raised in Kentucky and worked in a coal mine (for one day, before deciding that a lifetime of working underground and digging into the black veins of the earth and breathing coal dust was not the life for him). He left Kentucky forthwith and, after working as a house painter and a handyman, had finally secured a position as a forklift operator at Frigidaire, a General Motors factory, in Moraine City, south of Dayton.
Adam had a brother and two sisters who lived in Snyderville along a dirt road which wound up a knoll. His sister, Virgie, lived north of the dirt road in a hovel at the base of the knoll. His other sister, Lee, lived further up the knoll south of the road in a single-wide mobile home, and his brother, Nando, lived at the crest of the knoll north of the road in an unpainted wooden house with a ramshackle porch across the front.
When Adam drove up to Nando’s house in the station wagon, he was lying half off the porch, drunk, his left arm and leg trailing into the dirt which served as the front yard. Adam pulled the car to the right of the house and everyone got out.
Adam knelt down and gently touched Nando’s shoulder. “Brother, time to wake up.” No response. “Brother!” he said loudly as he shook his shoulder more firmly. “You got company.” Still no response. Adam turned to the boys. “Boys, go over yonder to the spring an’ bring me a cup o’ water.”
“OK, Daddy,” Del said.
Marie and Gloryann walked to the front door. “Anybody home?” Marie called through the screen door.
Fannie, a rotund woman with graying hair, ruddy cheeks, and a white apron at her waist over a pink flower-print dress, waddled to the front door. She smiled, revealing a gap-toothed grin. “Why, Marie, you’re early. We wudden specktin’ you till six, an’ it’s barely five.”
“It didden take us long as we thought it would,” Marie stated.
“Well, come on in,” Fannie said, as she wiped her hands on the front of her apron and held open the door. “I was just finishin’ up the supper dishes.” She looked over at Nando and shook her head. “I tried to git ‘im to eat today, but he’s been drankin’ all day, an’ look at him now, drunk as a skunk. I hope ya kin git him in shape ‘fore the folks come, Adam.”
Adam looked at her and smiled. “I’ll do what I can.”
On the other side of the dirt road, Del took a metal cup off a post and squatted down to dip it into the cool, clear water of the spring that flowed at the edge of the road before winding downhill in a rivulet to a corrugated metal culvert beneath Snyderville Road. Nando had built a brick enclosure for the spring so that the water rose to a level of eighteen inches before flowing over the bricks and downhill. Del took the full cup to his father, with Devon trailing behind. “Here, Daddy,” Del said.
Adam took the cup. “Thanks, son.” He dipped his fingers into the cup and sprinkled the water onto Nando’s face.
There was no reaction at first, but as Adam continued to sprinkle the water, Nando slowly opened his bleary eyes and muttered, “Wha’da fuh?”
“Nando, it’s me, Adam. Ya gotta git up now. Company’s comin’.”
“Cumpy? Doe wuh no cumpy.”
“Yeah, well, that may be so, but they’re comin’ anyway. Let’s git you settin’ up.” He grabbed him beneath his armpits and managed to pull him to a sitting position. “Have a drink o’ this water.” He held the cup to Nando’s lips and he drank, dribbling the water down the front of his shirt. He turned his bloodshot eyes up to Adam.
“Why you here?”
“Me and Marie are comin’ to save ya.”
“Save me from wah?”
“From hell. So ya can go to heaven when ya die.”
“Hell? Heaven? Shee-it.”
“No, just heaven. Here, let’s git you standin’.” He grabbed both of Nando’s wrists, leaned back, and managed to pull him to his feet. Nando stood unsteadily. Adam put his arm around his waist and managed to walk him into the house.
At six thirty, people began to arrive at the house. The earliest to arrive sat on the threadbare sofa and armchair in the living room, where Adam would be holding the service. Fannie brought out four wooden chairs from the kitchen and placed them in front of the sofa. Those were quickly taken. Adam and Marie stood at the door, welcoming everyone and thanking him or her for coming. It seemed as though most of Snyderville had come to the first church service ever held in their community. Most had come out of curiosity to see Nando’s brother preach, or out of a vague sense of unease that things were not right between them and the Lord. After the sofa, armchair, and kitchen chairs were filled, Marie encouraged others who arrived to sit on the floor. By seven p.m., the whole living room was filled. People were sitting on the floor, standing along the walls, and peering into the room over each other’s heads and shoulders from the front porch. There was a lively hubbub in the room of chatter and laughter.
Adam and Marie threaded their way among those sitting on the floor to the door of the kitchen, where they turned and faced everyone. Adam’s heart was beating hard and fast in his chest. He had never conducted a church service. The extent of his talking in church had been to stand up and testify from where he was sitting about the blessings he had received since becoming a Christian. He swallowed, adjusted his black tie, and began. “Me an’ Sister Hensley wanta thank you all for comin’ tonight. We feel God has called us here to hep you all come to the Lord, an’ that’s why we’re here. We’re gonna begin the service with Sister Hensley an’ me sangin’ a song for ya.” He looked at Marie, who was smiling at him, her eyes shining. “Sister Hensley, let’s sang ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’” She shook her head yes. They sang together:
On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suff’rin’ an’ shame,
An’ I love that old cross where the dearest an’ best
For a world o’ lost sinners was slain.
So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross,
Till my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
An’ exchange it some day for a crown.
Oh, that old rugged cross, so despised by the world,
Has a wondrous attraction for me,
For the dear Lamb o’ God left his glory above
To bear it to dark Calvary.
They finished the song there, for that was all that they could remember. Marie smiled at Adam, stepped out of the doorway, and found a spot along the wall.
“Brothers an’ sisters,” Adam began, “do you know what that song is about?”
“It’s about Jesus,” a corpulent woman in a black dress on the left side of the sofa proclaimed.
“Thank you, sister. Yes, that song is about Jesus, the son of God. God sent Jesus, his only son, to earth to save you.” He opened his well-worn black Bible to a bookmark and read, “In the book of John, chapter three, verse sixteen, the Bible tells us ‘For God so l
oved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlastin’ life.’ You might ask, ‘What do I need to be saved for? I’m not lost.’ Oh, brothers an’ sisters, but you are. You are lost, for the Bible tells us that because we are born, we are all born into this world as sinners. Ever since that foul snake, Satan, told Eve to take that apple from the tree in the garden o’ Eden an’ take a bite outa it an’ give it to Adam, we are all born into this world as sinners an’ are doomed. DOOMED! If we don’t git saved, we will burn in the lake o’ fahr forever after we die ‘stead o’ goin’ to heaven an’ bein’ with Jesus. An’ if you go to hell, the lake o’ fahr, you’re gonna burn, your whole body’s gonna burn, forever an’ ever. Can you imagine that? Can you?” He paused and looked around the room at each anxious face. “You know how much it hurts if you just burn one little finger on the stove. Can you imagine your whole body bein’ on fahr an’ you hurtin’ an’ hurtin’, wishin’ for it to stop, but it ain’t a gonna stop, EVER! You’re gonna cry out, ‘Oh, Jesus, please gimme jus’ one drop o’ water, one tiny DROP to ease my burnin’ throat! But Jesus ain’t a gonna be listenin’ ‘cause he’s gonna be up in heaven rejoicin’ with me an’ Marie an’ all those who been saved and gave their souls to ‘im. So are you gonna be with me an’ Marie in heaven after you die, or are you gonna burn forever in the lake o’ fahr? Now you thank on that while Sister Hensley comes back up here an’ sangs ‘Amazin’ Grace’ for ya.”
Marie came back to the kitchen doorway and stood beside him and sang “Amazing Grace,” her favorite song. Adam put his arm around her waist.
Outside, sitting on the ground beneath a willow tree to the right of the house, Devon played “This Little Piggy” with Gloryann’s toes, and she squealed in delight each time he wiggled one of her little toes. Del was leaning against the tree, talking to some girls who had come with their parents. He seemed to be particularly interested in a buxom brunette in blue jeans and a checkered shirt.
Fiery Rivers Page 11
