Smonk

12 THE WAKE

EVAVANGELINE SAT UP. SUDDENLY THIS TALL NIGGER SHE’D NEVER seen before had appeared in the livery room and clamped a cloth to the guard’s nose before she could rise from her stool and sound the cowbell. He let her drop to the hay and peered through the bars. He brought up a long finger for silence and knelt and looked her so hard in the eye it made her fidget in her bonds. He rubbed his chin, like a gambler wondering what his discard should be, then lifted the key off its nail and unlocked the cage and cut her loose and handed her a bundle of clothing and underthings. Up close she could see his coiled white hair beneath his hat brim. The gray goatee. The lines of his face that would tell stories if a person could read such maps.

He nodded at the clothes and turned to give her privacy. She stretched and flexed and stripped from the shift they’d dressed her in and stood naked in the hay and held things up to discern them arm or leg then wormed her feet down the stockings and dress and fitted her fists down the sleeves. When she was finished he crooked his finger for her to follow. On her way out she unstuck the Mississippi Gambler from the wall and concealed it in her dress.

Outside, the widow-guards began to shoot at them but hit nowhere near Evavangeline as she followed the mysterious stranger over a rail fence into the crisp sugarcane leaves and after a time into the woods. The dress impeded her walking so she lagged back and used the knife to cut off the bottom half. Under it the stockings came near to her thigh. The skirt material was pretty and, still following the old nigger, she fashioned a headdress from the cloth. It was too hot to wear, so she left it collapsed over a stump like a bride weeping in the woods. Because the top half of the dress was cumbersome yet, she ripped off the sleeves at the shoulders and rolled them down her arms and left them strung along twigs of knuckled black oak like tunnels of spiderweb. When it was still hard to breathe she unfastened the top buttons of the blouse and then the bottom ones, noticing how the wires in the corset made her tits bigger. She pushed through a brake bush and into the nigger-man’s campsite where he sat smoking a pipe. Arms folded, wrapped in his coat despite the heat. He had a small fire with a pail of something bubbling over it, held aloft by a spit and sticks. But if he was surprised by her appearance it never showed on his face.

I miss the sound of a dog at night, Mrs. Tate said, bound by the bedsheet to her chair. He’d hung a shawl over her shoulders to conceal her confinement and they’d sat for half an hour without a word spoken between them. Once in a while Smonk would elicit a squeak of air from her by tightening the broom handle.

From outside came the sound of gunshots, no surprise as the guard-women were prone to accidental discharges even when they weren’t terrified. Still, Smonk signaled for silence as voices clanged in the street and footsteps clumped over the porch. A breathless guard-widow burst in the parlor and reported that a nigger had stole the girl they’d captured. What should they do?

Unseen behind the door, Smonk touched the tip of his sword with his tongue.

Let them go, Mrs. Tate said. We’ll find them tomorrow.

The widow looked doubtful but nodded and took this order outside.

Meanwhile a flock, or a swarm—or whatever their group designation was—of bats had inexplicably attacked Walton and Donny, occasioning the understandably panicked horse to throw its rider. Walton’s boot was entangled in the stirrup which battered him along behind the horse as it fled, shrieking madly. When he’d come loose at last, the flying rodents pursued their equine target and left the human one stunned in the dust. The same had occurred with the late Onan, dragged as he’d been by his departing mount. The stirrups, in opposition to what that sales clerk had said, were obviously inferior.

Yet somehow unscathed he rose, searching his arms for pinprick bites, worried about the dread “hydrophobia,” sorry that his rifle had been scabbarded on his saddle and sorrier still that he’d surrendered his pistol to the horrific man in the wagon. Also, his sword was missing, as were most of the pieces of equipment from his extra pockets, victim to his being floundered over the terrain. He felt a passing anger at the tailor who’d assured him the pocket flaps were guaranteed “tip-top,” and wondered what the rotund Italian craftsman would think knowing the terrain over which his pants walked tonight.

A quick inventory revealed that Walton had retained only his medicinal flask, magnifying glass, fishing kit and whistle, which he brought to his lips but decided against blowing. Perhaps stealth might prove a better tactic out here in such sprawling wilderness. Even his goggles were gone. His compass as well, so he had no idea which direction he should go. Perhaps he ought to remain here, near the site of his fall, hoping to retrieve pieces of the valuable equipment on the morrow.

Wait! The North Star. Nature’s omnipresent Saint of the Lost. He gazed into the heavens and spotted that beacon of hope glimmering and counted it a small personal success. He wished he had his logbook. He rubbed his backside and thought of the bats and shuddered. Perhaps he’d best make haste. The full moon gave ample light for him to traipse through the “cane,” beyond which he could discern a copse of trees. He made this his target and began to run, hoping the shelter would remove the danger of another bat-attack.

In the copse, he soon lost himself in total darkness and became entangled in a crosshatch of spiderweb, ivy, vine, weed and briar, quite a morass. Walton shoved at the morass but it shoved back and he thought he felt spiders in his hair. In a panic, he began to flail his arms and bat his way through, an immediate mistake as a low horizontal limb at throat’s height laid him flat and knocked out his breath.

When he opened his eyes, he thought he heard voices. He rolled onto his belly, his neck sore and skin burning from its various cuts and abrasions, but his head felt clear, in fact very clear, and he knew the thing to do was steal closer to the voices without giving himself away. Remaining prone, he passed beneath the thickest of the thicket and presently the underbrush thinned to a civil level and he crept forward tree to tree, moonlight beaming through in columns.

Soon he’d spotted a campfire and, after discerning the wind’s direction by licking his finger and pointing in the air, he prepared to come in “downwind.” He’d have removed his hat had he had it. Instead, he separated each metal item from the other to avoid clinking and began to scuttle forward, noiselessly, soon raising his eyes over a fallen log to fix them upon the precocious Negro wagon-driver from before and, seeing her from the rear, what looked to be a bride with her clothing rent.

Walton’s heart began to pound; he forced himself to breathe deeply.

Here. Here was his chance. He raised his eyes to the trapezoids of twinkling sky the forest roof allowed him and experienced the sensation of having arrived at his destination after a long journey. He bore no doubt that he was a fool. A coward. A—there was no other word—fop. Yet what other fop was here, what other coward, what other fool? Who else to help this woman? To save her from the uppity Negro who even now seemed to be thumping her a coin. Attempting to buy this decent woman for a “thrill.”

Well, Phail Walton wouldn’t have it. He’d reached for his pistol but it was gone. As were his sword and rifle. His knife. Here he was on a mission of reconnaissance, armed with a fishing kit, whistle, flask and magnifying glass. Think, Phail, think! What would Mother do?

She’d take a drink. He removed the flask and unscrewed its lid and endured the burning scratch of alcohol down his throat. He endured another. What was he to do, Mother?

But it wasn’t his mother who seemed to lend wisdom: It was his own inner voice. Just calm down, Phail, it said. Take another drink and listen to the people talk. What are they saying?

They gazed at one another over the fire, the old nigger-man so openly, with such appraisal, it made Evavangeline fidget.

What’s ye name? she asked him, finally.

Ecsenator Isaac. Call me Ike. What’s yern?

She didn’t say.

He puffed his pipe and blew a smoke ring so perfect she nearly chased off after it.

Where ye from? he asked.

That’s what ever body wants to know.

Not ever body. Jest me.

I’m heading north.

You rather ride a horse or pony?

Not no horse.

He nodded. Why ain’t ye wearing that hat ye made from ye dress bottom back yonder in the woods?

She watched him.

No matter how many fellows ye lay with, he said, ye don’t never get knocked up. Do ye.

She shot him a snake’s gaze. You a damn fortune-teller?

Naw, miss. It’s jest…it’s jest something I need to tell ye. Something important. It’s gone sound crazy.

Be a dollar, she said.

He considered her, pipe raised halfway. A dollar for what?

Me to listen.

He brought the cob to his lips and the leaves in the bowl simmered and a line of smoke rose from the corner of his mouth and traced up his cheek and curled around the brim of his hat.

She looked at him and looked away and looked again. A dollar, she repeated. I don’t care yer a nigger. She lowered to her haunches across the fire from him and hooked her arms around her knees.

Well now, he said. Since you don’t care I’m a nigger. He extended his legs, longer than they’d seemed, his shoes store-bought and new, which she’d never seen on a nigger’s feet. He removed a leather purse from his pocket and unclasped it and over the fire flipped her a heavy silver coin which she caught and bit and raised to him as if in toast and then popped into her mouth and swallowed for safekeeping. It got lodged halfway down and she plucked at her throat and hacked.

Can I get a taste of yer—She pointed to the whiskey gourd by his log and he tossed it across the flames and she caught it and unstoppered it and smelled it then sipped politely.

Go on finish it.

She grinned and turned it up and he caught it back empty when she was done.

Thank ye, she said. Shit. She pounded her chest. Whoo. That’s some bust-head licker for a nigger to have.

Nigger’s got a lot more than that.

He got anything to eat?

He smiled like a tired uncle and dug a handful of jerked beef from his pocket and tossed it over.

Chew it good, he said. Else it’ll repeat on ye.

I hope it do. I ain’t had no grub in I couldn’t say when.

Can ye listen while ye chew?

She nodded.

Then let me get my dollar’s worth.

Meanwhile, William R. McKissick Junior was slipping through the alleys of Old Texas and peeking in its windows. His plan: rescue the whore and get his handjob. She hadn’t come back like she said she would, which meant the widow-witches must’ve nabbed her. He hoped, as he searched, that he might see a nekkid lady. But so far he’d seen little more than ladies sleeping in chairs by dead men on tables or sideboards. In one of the houses he saw the six children he was supposed to have been watching. Asleep on pallets on the floor. They looked cleaned up, at least. He hoped the widows had given them something to eat and wouldn’t have minded a cob of corn himself.

He went along the back of the house and stood breathing in the shadows. Something pulled at his britches-leg and gave him a hard bite. Rat. He kicked it against a wall and it fell and got up and lurched at him again, hissing, its ears back. There was a pitchfork against the nearest wall and the boy seized it and skewered the rat and left it to wiggle itself to death and went on, scratching at the bite.

I remember last October, Mrs. Tate said. When you first came to our town. I knew what you were.

What was I?

She stared at her dead husband but spoke nothing.

Smonk chuckled and stubbed out his cigar in Elmer Tate’s hair and collected a dip of snuff between his fingers. I remember too, he said. That day ye mean.

A year before.

With Ike watching from the east hills, Smonk had ridden into town on a blind mule named Fargo, now deceased, past the well and up the hill and off the mule into the store. The man behind the counter had paled at Smonk’s countenance and demeanor and his impatient claws clacking the countertop. He’d pointed him down the street to the town clerk who could help him with the parcel of land and the deserted sugarcane plantation he wanted to purchase. On his way, already limping with the gout, he’d stopped in the street before this very house. He’d stood staring for so long that Tate finally came out onto the porch with a rifle, making tiny, careful steps. Casting wary eyes. Said, Could I help ye, stranger? Naw, Smonk had answered, looking past Tate to the woman’s face through the window-glass.

I wondered why ye didn’t invite me in for a gourd of licker, he said now. Dusty as these Octobers can get.

She said nothing.

He offered a pinch of snuff and she shook her head. Go on have a dip.

It’s vulgar, she said. A man’s nasty habit.

You want to tell me ye don’t take a dip ever twilight I’m gone call ye a liar. I can smell it thew ye skin. Besides, we been watching ye, my partner and me. Out there in the sugarcane watching ye town a whole goddamn year. So don’t believe that it’s a thing about all you old heifers I don’t know or ain’t seen. Yer pansy menfolk went down easier ’n a goddamn orphan-house full a blind babies. We know who ye bailiff is, too. My former employee. Followed me here. Did he tell ye that? Born killer, that one. Did ye know what was walking among ye?

She said nothing.

We know ye killed the judge, too, though I can’t blame ye there. We know ye burn ever animal ye can catch. Know the ones of ye that still suffers her monthlies is suffering em now. And we know, he said, about yer church.

She glared for a moment, but then her wrinkles relaxed in her forehead and her bottom lip furled down. She lowered her head. I think I’ve changed my mind, she said.

There ye go. He came and with two of his sharp yellow nails deposited the pinch of snuff-powder against her gums.

You want ye teeth in?

They were in a jar of water on the table. He fished them out and held her jaw—Don’t bite now, he said, grinning—and fitted them in and she contorted her face until they worked into place.

Smonk returned to his chair behind the old woman and they sat quietly. He drank and replaced the gourd on the detonator. You got a bowl for spitting?

No, I do not.

He leaned and spat on her rug.

Animal, she said.

Smonk cranked the broom handle and she peeped. Animal, he said. Is that what I am.

I reckon evil happen ever now and again, Ike said to Evavangeline. Here and there in the world. Can’t keep it at bay. Start this way or that way. People dabbling where they ought not. Witches and they conjures. Tarot cards, crystal balls. Doctors with they potions and scalpels. Men in congress with dogs and eating live monkey brains and the like. All of em, meddling up in God business. Reaching too far back in the drawer. Evil happen. Here, there. Started in Old Texas a long time ago, after the War commenced, when the North started they work and ever white man and boy in town and them farmers beyond, ever one who could get on a horse and go got on one and went. Volunteered like fools to die fighting the Yankees.

Evavangeline chewed jerky and listened as Ike’s story began. He told how when the War started only a few men and boys—too old, young or sickly—had remained in Old Texas with the ladies and farms. But one was a tall preacher named Snowden Wright. He’d been born with one arm—where the other should have been, up at his shoulder, was a nub with six tiny fingernails. As desperate as the army was for soldiery, they still sent him back home (all four times) he tried to sign up.

Once he’d resolved to stay, however, he took charge of the town, swearing to help all the wives while their men were gone fighting. He did their farmwork and preached Sunday sermons and counseled the ladies at their daily lives. He solved their disputes. Advised them. Whipped their unmindful boys and girls and comforted the wives in their darkest hours.

Then one morning, as he collected eggs in his henhouse, a possum dropped from the rafters onto his neck and bit him. He suspected the animal had the ray bees as daylight appearances were unusual for its kind, as was the savagery this specimen displayed. He caught it and put it in a cage and watched it refuse water and bat itself against the wire and slobber and try to bite him.

A thoughtful, self-educated man, the Reverend Wright had squatted before the cage for hours, clutching his Bible and staring as the creature snapped at him and ground its face through the wire mesh with no thought to pain or self-preservation, as if all the world’s rapture lay in the union of tooth and flesh. Day, night, Wright watched the creature thrash itself to death, the preacher thinking, What will I learn O God upon my journey.

He burned the possum when it finally succumbed, and on waking several mornings later with sweats and shivers, ill at the sight of water, he had the ladies of his church lock him in a makeshift cell he’d built in the livery barn and assign a guard. Day and night he fought the disease, alternately praying and cursing God, ripping his clothes off, tearing his skin with his own fingernails. Bruises flowered on his chest and shoulders from his battering the bars. He endured fits where he couldn’t remember his own name but also relished spells of clarity, his eyes pooling at the beauty of sunlight patterned on wood and a chain’s oiled grace. In these calm moments he knew the position of every insect in the barn and could tell one sparrow’s voice from another and see in the dark.

He called for his daughter, a girl abnormally tiny and sixteen years of age. She had good handwriting and as he lectured and preached she copied down what she heard. How his condition had revealed truth he otherwise wouldn’t have known. The ray bees, he said, were the living key to God and God had told Snowden Wright that He, God, was making him, Wright, a prophet, that they should alter their church to the ways of his telling.

Write! he would shriek at his daughter when she fell asleep at the school desk they’d set outside the cage. He spoke rapidly, babbling at times, contradicting himself at others, his eyes opaquing as he squatted in the hay, naked as Adam in the bliss before the serpent, saying his strange, brilliant things.

And when Wright called to her from his cell, his daughter put down her tablet and pencils and slipped out of the school desk, straightened her skirts.

Get the key off the wall, her daddy said.

Because he was her father, she obeyed, she let herself into his cell where he rose naked from the hay. Because he was her father, she submitted to his will. Then he called for her younger sister, and for the other daughters of the town, and they were brought to his cell and he had his way with them.

In two days, when he started trying to bite the girls, they became afraid to go in, and he died within a week after being bitten, snapping his teeth to the last and incoherent in his babbling, his daughter still trying to write it all down. When they were sure he’d passed away, the girl disappeared upstairs in the large house where the family lived. She missed her father’s funeral, so consumed was she to compare the views he’d dictated and create her definitive version. The document she presented to her sister and the other ladies of the church two days later was what came to be known as the Scripture.

What did it say, Evavangeline asked.

Ike paused. It laid out they new beliefs. And they mission. The ladies was to keep em a mad-dog, ye see. They call it a struck dog, I call it a mad-dog. Keep it in a cage, and that Scripture say the ladies supposed to infect ever boy child with the ray bees. The little boys they had already, six or seven of em too young to go die in the War, was the first to be blessed—that’s they word—blessed by that mad-dog. They call him Lazarus the Redeemer. Them first boys to get bit, well, they all died of the ray bees. Ever one. But it was more little boys on the way, cause most of them girls who’d laid with Snowden Wright was now in a family way, including both his daughters.

All them girls, Ike went on, they knowed what was in store for they babies when they come. The girls had seen the ladies of the church let the mad-dog bite they brothers and they’d seen the boys in they cages. Going mad. Trying to bite they mothers when they come visit em. Ulrica and her little sister Elrica and all the other girls knocked up by Snowden Wright knew they ’d have to let that mad-dog bite they boys when they was old enough. They mothers would make em.

Why? asked Evavangeline.

Cause they believed that when that chosen child got born, all they faith would be rewarded. All them other boys the ray bees had killed would rise up from the dead like Judgement Day.

Stop! hissed Mrs. Tate, hearing the same tale from Smonk. How do you know these impossible lies?

Who was that turnip, Smonk asked, up the steps yonder?

Her eyes followed his finger. My Chester, she said. My boy. She blinked at him. You killed him.

I did. Chester’s bit his last.

For a long moment Mrs. Tate stared at him through the candlelight. A tear wending down the wrinkles in her face.

Those were impossible days, she said. You won’t understand. You weren’t there. We ladies and children cut off from the rest of the county while the North destroyed us a boy, a man, at a time. We were all alone out here, fourteen ladies and twenty children. No letters, no news. Four long years. One one-armed preacher and one damned possum.

Tell me about ye daddy, Smonk said.

Mrs. Tate sighed her foul breath into the air. Daddy, she said. Well. He was fair enough to look at, I guess. Except for his absent arm. I used to be afraid of the little nubbins up on his shoulder. He could wiggle them. Used to make the boys giggle and scare us girls upstairs.

Her face changed.

But he had lovely black hair, Daddy did. He wore it long. Wore his beard long too. Gray at the edges. His back muscles were so pretty and shiny when he’d cut wood in that onehanded way of his with his shirt off.

The old woman inhaled and closed her eyes. He was a good speaker, too, she said. Of sermons, I mean. Every Sunday, a new one. He’d read from the Song of Songs. We ladies and girls fanning ourselves and squirming in our pews. She lowered her voice. If he got you off alone he could sweet-talk you, too, make you feel special, and so, by the time the War ended, we were all in love with him—even my sister Elrica and me, his own daughters. Our mother had died ten years before. Daddy would visit this lady or that each night and lend council. That’s what he called it. But it was good council because he was in constant demand. Fix this fence. It’s a fox after our chickens! My Jimmy’s got the measles and high fevers. Come sit the night with him, come comfort my soul.

Smonk tilted his gourd. He offered it to Mrs. Tate but she ignored him.

When that possum bit Daddy we were all terrified. In danger of losing our only man. But he calmed us down. Daddy. He told us what would happen. Said it was God’s plan. God was watching us, couldn’t we feel His eye? And we could, somehow, Daddy, we could. You felt bathed in His light. It felt as if He had noticed us. God. As if His eye had fixed on Old Texas.

Smonk belched.

Ike told how Ulrica, always a child who’d lived in fantasies, who’d played with sprites and danced with fairies, believed in the Scripture she’d written, and as her belly swelled with her daddy’s child she prayed for the strength to trust the Lord as Abraham had on that unthinkable walk up the mountain when he was about to sacrifice his only son. But Ulrica’s sister Elrica, who was fourteen, didn’t believe the Scripture. The younger sister hated her daddy for doing what he’d done to her and hated herself for letting him do it.

But her love for the baby inside her got bigger as he did. She would not let the church ladies have him, she decided, she would not let them feed her child to a mad-dog. She left the house one midnight and walked out to the place called Niggertown and had the baby there but died having it, he was so big and she so tiny. Before she died, though, she made the midwife promise never to let Old Texas get her son. She told what horrors transpired in that fallen town. Even as her baby suckled its first and last from its mother.

What you want the baby called? the midwife asked.

But Elrica Wright was already dead.

Now that midwife, Ike said, she had always been barren. And always wanted a youngun. And now here was a baby. Like a gift from God. Saved from death. Her and her husband decided they ’d take that child and move to the next county and get a house and raise him. He had dark enough skin, and cutting cane the way they did for a living, well, they knew he’d grow darker still from the sun. Soon he’d pass for colored and they would have they child.

All this time Evavangeline had been watching the old man’s face. The orange pulse from his pipe gleaming twins of itself across his cheekbones. His eyes such bowls of black it seemed as if he could see past tonight and into her life before.

What happened? she asked.

Wasn’t to be, he said. Those eyes of his looking down. Wasn’t long fore the midwife figured out she had the ray bees. Cause he’d bit her. That baby had. Teeth already in. When the shivers come on her some days later her husband snuck to town. He seen with his own two eyes what was going on. Seen a boy mad in a cage and the ladies praying round him. Which was how his wife was fixing to die, too, he knew. Mad. Drooling like a dog. But she was a good, good woman. Name Inetta. And she knew what them ladies didn’t know. Knew the redeemed boy they was looking for was already here, born with ray bees.

What happened to the midwife?

Her husband. He shot her in the head when she starting getting mean. He shot her in the head and burned her in a fire along with they house, and he knew he ought to thow in that squalling baby too. Baby born out of a sinful union and carrying the ray bees that killed his wife. Be better for ever body he was to jest go on thow it in the fire. Jest thow it on in. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. It warn’t that baby’s fault things were how things were. He didn’t evil his self into the world. He was jest a baby. And then that poor heart-broke man smelled the baby’s head and got drunk on it. He didn’t thow him in. That night he left, rode a mule and led a goat on a rope and fed the baby on goatmilk from a bottle and raised him up his own self and loved him even though he was a evil little—

Wait, said Evavangeline. It was you.

Meanwhile, William R. McKissick Junior crept toward the south end of town, approaching the single-room church building which also served as the schoolhouse, and crept up the wide plank steps and stood on the porch looking in the window. The ladies had tried to get him inside this place before. Saying he needed God and learning. That was two things could never be took from ye, they told him. God and learning. William R. McKissick Junior didn’t give a good dern for neither God ner learning. Heck. If air one of them ladies had jest flashed him a titty he would of gone.

Behind him somebody was coming so he jumped off the porch and ran east alongside the building and paused in the shadow of a cord of stacked firewood, looking behind him, waiting, listening. The rat-bite on his leg stinging. He crept to the church window and took the sill in his fingers and scrabbled up the clapboards and peered in. In the pews in the shadows he saw them. Dozens of them, very still. Praying maybe. Or maybe being punished. Grown folk did that sometimes if you misbehaved. Back in Oklahoma William R. McKissick Junior had gone to school for two days while his daddy stalked and killed a ranch hand. That teacher-lady had made him stay late and bang chalk erasers both days because he’d beat up several other boys. He learned to crawl under the school during play time and peep through the cracks in the floorboards and see up her dress. Then his daddy said it was time to move on and they’d moved on.

William R. McKissick Junior looked through the glass, smeared with his own breath, and imagined his head among theirs, bowing, praying, learning to write and read and add numbers. He pushed the top of the window but it was locked. He dropped to the ground and crept alongside the building. Back door locked too. The other windows. Then—heck—it was somebody coming. He slipped under the church and rolled through spiderwebs to the dark center and watched the guard-widow’s black skirt-tails trundling the dust.

Smonk could feel the morphine working. To test himself he hovered his heavy, flat hand over the detonator handle.

How do you know these lies? Mrs. Tate asked.

Smonk moved his hand. Tell ye what else I know, too, he said. War ’d been done almost a year when four, five of ye men begun to trickle home. Didn’t they? Fellows with they eyes empty and they beliefs all sacked. They was skeletons, warn’t they? Had arms off, legs gone.

How do you know this?

They wanted to know where the younguns was, didn’t they. And how come all the unmarried daughters was knocked up?

She lowered her chin. Yes, she said. Some came back. Yes, they wanted answers. We told them what happened in a simple version. Told them about Daddy’s vision and even as we told it, it began to sound false. But the simple men believed it. If they hadn’t been so eaten up by the War they might have done something else. Might have called it all madness. Might have said that Daddy ’d gone crazy with the ray bees and made us all crazy, too. How had we listened to him? How many little boys had we given to our struck dog?

But them men, they didn’t say none of that, did they?

No. Because of what they’d seen in that War. That Goddamned War. Because of what they’d done there. One man—boy!—who I’d known from girlhood and once had held hands with—in this very parlor—he returned home with that selfsame hand blown off. The other women sent him to visit me and he saw in my eyes I had a secret. He took hold of my hand with the hand he had left and twisted until I told him that Elrica had gone to the darkies to have her baby.

So the men collected they guns and rode out to Niggertown, Smonk said, and the niggers said the girl never had been there and said the midwife died of natural causes.

I suppose.

But when they dug the midwife up out the ground, it was a bullet hole in her head and it warn’t nothing natural about that, was it.

I suppose not.

They found another fresh grave, too, didn’t they?

I suppose they did. Without a marker I suppose. And when they dug it up they found Elrica wrapped in bloody sheets. But no baby. The Old Texas men tortured the darkies and burned their houses and barns until they found out that the midwife’s husband had stolen the child and run off.

Out west.

We didn’t know where. But before our men entered pursuit, they came here first. All covered in blood. They had Elrica in a wagon. My baby sister. Under a sheet. Said it was my job to clean her up. Put her best dress on. Bury her like white people. The worms had already been at her but I didn’t care. Here was my ’Rica returned to me, and men with arms and legs off were already departing on their horses to find our stolen child.

She was weeping.

Them fellows never found the nigger, did they. Or the youngun.

We don’t know, she sobbed. They never came back.

Wait, Smonk said. If them fellers never come back, then who the hell was all those sons-of-bitches got killed yesterday?

Mrs. Tate’s breath hitched. Strays, she said. Men who showed up over the years. Drummers, some. Some thrown off riverboats. Others lost in the woods. Running from the law. We needed them to work the fields. We took them as our husbands and as the husbands of our daughters. We let them have any job they wanted to make them stay. We let them have their way with us when they wanted, with our daughters, hoping for boy children so we might find our promised child.

What if a fellow didn’t want his youngun bit by a mad-dog?

Any man who objected was given to Lazarus the Redeemer.

Boards creaking, Smonk moved around front so she could see him. He lowered his good eye to within a foot of her face and she turned away. Loose strands of her white hair stirring in gusts of his breath.

Please, she said. Go ahead and kill me.

Shhhhh. He raised his swordblade to her cheek and turned her to face him. When she wouldn’t open her eyes, he prized them apart with his fingernails.

Don’t ye recognize ye sister’s son? he said.

Meanwhile, a riveted Walton watched the old Negro and the unidentified white woman—age hard to judge from her back. He’d heard almost everything the colored man had said, a tale worthy of that delightful E. A. Poe, indeed, a tale he’d not have believed except he heard it with his own ears. And as earlier today he himself had witnessed the churlish villain “Smonk” in the flesh, Walton felt no need to doubt the veracity of the Negro’s narration.

Now the young woman in her fetching dress tottered and the “darky” reached over the fire to steady her. When she turned away and Walton saw her face, he clapped his hand over his lips. It was her!

Evavangeline!

He stopped breathing.

He’d found her!

This ain’t from no licker, she was yelling to the old colored man. She raised her shaking hands and snatched her arm away from him and her face seemed like it might cry. I got em ain’t I? The ray bees?

Rabies? Walton thought.

They got me, the girl cried, ain’t they?

Naw, miss. You gone be fine, the colored man said. He coughed. Jest don’t bite nobody ye don’t want dead.

A kind of “Typhoid Mary”? Walton wondered.

My head’s hurting, the girl said.

I speck it is.

Why you telling me this shit?

Cause you got to go back up in there. Back up in Old Texas.

The girl sat down. To a bunch of old witches that done put me in jail once? Sorry to disappoint ye, Mister Ike, but I’m gone pass. I got a itch to get going north and nothing’s gone sway it.

Miss, he said. Old Texas is north. You gone pass right thew it. That itch ye got ain’t nothing more than burning ray bees in the air. It’s piles of dogs and coons and possums burning all around. You done smelled it and followed it here.

I ain’t smelled nothing.

And while ye there, Ike said, in Old Texas, ye might think about collecting that passel of younguns, including that McKissick boy. Help em find they way home.

Walton thought, Children. In peril!

How come you don’t go git em? Evavangeline asked.

The old man looked into the fire. I’m done for, he said. He opened his coat and Walton saw that his shirt was bloody.

The girl was silent. Then she said, When ’d ye catch one?

His eyes shut. For the first time he seemed pained. When I was rescuing you, miss.

She came across the fire and sat down next to him and put her hand on his arm and listened as he talked quietly, so low Walton couldn’t hear. The girl didn’t move for several minutes after he’d had his say. Then she got to her feet and walked away from the Negro, away from Walton, to the edge of the trees.

It’s one more thing, he said, looking directly at Walton where he eavesdropped from hiding.

She paused. You gone be all right?

Yeah, he said. Jest don’t go in that church. Whatever ye do.

Meanwhile, William R. McKissick Junior used his head to bump at a board overhead. Then another. When he found a loose one he lay on his back and kicked it free and stuck his head through the floor. Instantly he snatched it back, the smell awful. Holding his breath, he tried it again and slipped his entire body through and up into the room. It was dark but he could see shoes and the ends of benches and an aisle down the middle.

Hey, he said. He rose into the church.

No answer. The pews, from where he stood, seemed full of boys his age.

Hey! he called, stepping away from the hole. Ye bunch a town sissies.

Behind him was a table. Still eyeing the shadowy audience, he swept his hand over the dust until he felt a box of matches. He turned, his breath held. The box rattled in his fingers. He snapped the first stick in half and dropped the second. The third flared, showing a pair of candles on the table. He lit them and held both candles out before him and faced to the room like a celebrant, and, remembering to breathe, stepped into the aisle. Flickering down the front pews and hazy in the rows behind were the faces of boys. Dozens of boys. All wearing neckties, dark church suits. Some of their heads were cocked to the side and some tilted forward, showing widow’s peaks and cowlicks. Some tilted back. Many of their eyes were closed, others half-mast. They looked sleepy. Their mouths were open. William R. McKissick Junior bent closer to the front row. Some of the boys seemed to be tied with twine to keep them upright. Their cheeks were drawn and gray.

Hey, sissies, he whispered. I can whirp ye all.

As if in answer, a cockroach flickered across the face closest to him and William R. McKissick Junior banged back into the table, its leg chirping on the floor. He clambered underneath dropping the candles and scrabbled out the other side overturning the pulpit and began to claw the floor for the hole he’d used to get in. He couldn’t find it, couldn’t find it, couldn’t find it. Hell Mary! he yelled. Behind him, in the light from the burning rug, the heads were moving.