The Devil's Dream (10 page)

The old man slept on one side of the double cabin, she and Ezekiel on the other side. Ezekiel had his bed tick and she had hers, and her own quilt, and her own two feather pillows that she had brought from home.

Every night, Ezekiel waited until she had put on her nightdress and taken down her hair and stretched out on the bed tick and closed her eyes before he came into the cabin. Then he entered as quietly as ever he could, yet the whole cabin would shake with his step. While Nonnie feigned sleep, he went to the foot of her bed and left a present there, something he thought was pretty—a piece of crystal quartz he'd found one time up on Cemetery Mountain, a pearl button, cornflowers from the field, an iridescent snakeskin, finally his beloved steelie marble. Nonnie's presents were lined up on the floor at the foot of her bed. Alone in the cabin, she had to smile in spite of herself, looking at them. She did not know what to make of this big, gentle man. But she was tired of tears, and one day she found herself humming a tune.

Then finally there came the night when a screech owl woke her. It sounded like the screech owl called her name. Nonnie sat up in bed and looked at Ezekiel, who always slept like a child or a dead man, flat on his back, hands clasped on his chest, breathing audibly. It seemed to Nonnie that he never dreamed; at least he never gave the appearance of dreaming. Moonlight streamed in the open door that night and made a silver path across the cabin floor, right across Ezekiel, who looked like an angel sleeping there.

Idly, Nonnie held out her hand, so that the moonlight fell upon it too, silvering her whole arm. Then suddenly Nonnie got that powerful feeling she got sometimes, that feeling she had gotten ever since she was a little girl, when all of a sudden she just
had
to do something—never mind what!—she just had to make something happen.

Nonnie stood up and took off her nightgown and stepped into the moonlight, looking down at her silver body. Her breasts were large now because of the pregnancy, and her navel stuck out on her firm high belly. She felt like she was bursting right out of her skin. She stood in the moonlight admiring herself, breathing hard, waiting to see exactly what she would do next. Then she walked over to Ezekiel and knelt beside his bed tick and leaned over him, brushing his chest with her hair. The screech owl called out to her again, clear as could be, and even if she couldn't quite make out what he said, she knew what he meant all right.

“Wake up,” she said to Ezekiel. She poked him in the side.

Zeke stirred but did not wake. Even the hair on his chest was silver in the light of the moon.

“Zeke,” Nonnie said. “Wake up.” She poked him again, harder.

Zeke opened his eyes and looked at her. “God Almighty,” he said.

For the first time since her arrival on Grassy Branch, Nonnie started to giggle.

“Why, looky here,” she said.

R.C. Bailey, Nonnie's Melungeon baby, was born on February 14, 1881, about a month after Ezekiel and Nonnie were married in Preacher Stump's cabin by Dr. Paul Trott, a traveling evangelist on his way to Knoxville. Dr. Paul Trott had red hair and a little red mustache. “Man and wife,” he said. Ezekiel heard him say it. Ezekiel had a wife now. Then Dr. Paul Trott rode off in the rain, and Nonnie kissed Ezekiel, and Preacher Stump died, just like that. He took a little shallow rattling breath, tried to say something, and died. It was like he had put it off to see them wed.

When folks came to the house for the laying out, they were surprised to find that Ezekiel had such a pretty, pregnant wife. They told it up and down the hollers until they got tired of saying it: “Did you ever feature Ezekiel Bailey wed, now?” and “Whar did she come from?” and “Who do you reckon her people are?” They buried Preacher Stump in the Chicken Rise graveyard not forty feet from the church he had started himself and built with his own hands, and when the first shovelful of red dirt hit the pine coffin, Ezekiel felt as though he too would die; but this feeling passed quickly, as most feelings did with him, and by the time R.C. was born, he had almost forgotten the old man although they named the baby for him, Reese, because the granny woman said they ought to, and so did some people at church. Ezekiel had not known that Preacher Stump had this first name, Reese, or any first name at all.

Then Nonnie cried because she had wanted to name the baby for her father, so the baby's name turned out to be Reese Claude Bailey, too much name for such a little baby, and they took to calling him R.C. He was a colicky baby who had a high, thin cry like a cat mewing. Nonnie had been real curious to see whether he would look like Jake Toney or not. R.C. did have curly hair like Jake Toney, but fair skin like Ezekiel Bailey. He wouldn't sleep at all. One night, sitting up with him by the fire, Nonnie got so tired and so mad that she kicked at the chimbley in disgust, the way she often stamped her little foot, and lo and behold, one of the chimbley rocks fell out as neat as you please, and she saw that there was something stuck in the hole. Nonnie plopped the crying baby down in its cradle and leaned forward to see what she'd found.

It was a burlap bag full of money, saved by Garnet and Preacher Stump for a rainy day. Nonnie, terribly excited, sifted through old silver dollars and paper money while the fire leaped up in the hearth and the March wind wailed outside. Just beyond the circle of firelight, Ezekiel slept on. Nonnie would not wake him; she'd wait until morning to give him this news which would not mean much to him anyway, she knew it wouldn't. He didn't give a damn about money. Meanwhile she would hold her baby in one arm and run the fingers of her other hand through this money, and think what she might do with it.

Later, some people would say that it was this money which spoilt Nonnie Bailey finely and fectually, that she would not have gone and done what she done if she hadn't kicked in the chimbley and found that little burlap bag. But others held that Nonnie Bailey was obviously spoilt long before she came over to Grassy Branch, that what we will do is buried deep inside us all anyway, like a dark seed. Be that as it may, the burlap bag contained just enough money—not much, actually—to give Nonnie Bailey a sense of what she could not have. It contained just enough money for her to order off for some silky rose-colored cloth and some pink mother-of-pearl buttons, some tortoiseshell combs and some magazines. It might be that the magazines were the most damaging of all, for in them Nonnie could see page after page of women dressed to the nines (bustles and mutton sleeves and tiny waists and huge plumed hats, in the fashion of the day, which Nonnie would have given her eyeteeth to model).

“Can't none of em hold a candle to you,” Zeke said, looking at a magazine with her.

Nonnie knew this was true. She had always been beautiful. Now she realized that she was more beautiful than the ladies in the magazines, and since she was the missus here and could do as she pleased, she sewed a dress from her bolt of rosy silk cloth and put the mother-of-pearl buttons up the front of it, lace at the neck. But then she just sat on the porch wearing the dress and rocking R.C., with noplace to go. She wore the dress to the Chicken Rise church once, then never again, because of how the other women looked at her. She was the prettiest woman in the county, but it didn't matter. She would rot here in these mountains and be damned.

When Nonnie knew she was pregnant again, she folded the rose silk dress away carefully, regretfully, and stored it in a special place in the loft even as she stored that image of herself away in a special place in her mind where she would take it out and look at it sometimes as the years passed.

Durwood, her funny baby, was born in 1884, all smiles and giggles and kicking feet from the first, it seemed, as different from whiny R.C. as day from night. Durwood looked exactly like his daddy, but Nonnie got his name out of a magazine.

It tickled Ezekiel to death to have the two little boys around; he was always playing with them, doing “Eeny meeny miney mo, catch a nigger by the toe” over and over until R.C. shrieked with joy. You would think nobody in the whole world had ever been a daddy before, to watch Ezekiel Bailey with his boys, and folks talked it up and down the creek, how he acted, for most men would not have a thing to do with a child, leaving it all up to the womenfolks, as is proper. Zeke's behavior was unmanly. But it allowed Nonnie to primp and preen and pleasure herself, so that she didn't resemble a missus at all, in a way that made the other men cast an envious eye at Zeke and a more lingering look at Nonnie, a look that made the other womenfolks downright uneasy. “They was something quare about them from the start,” they'd say later. “I knowed it was something wrong over thar,” they'd say.

Then in 1885 came the baby that was born dead, and after they buried him, Nonnie dreamed for seven nights running that they had buried her too, down in the cold black ground. Every night she woke up choking, with the taste of dirt in her mouth.

Ezekiel took this to be her sign.

And because Ezekiel knew about such things—signs and portents, how God reveals himself to men—Nonnie believed him.

They had to break the ice in the river in order to baptize her right away. Nonnie stood shivering and terrified on the riverbank in the cutting wind, still weak from loss of blood, clinging to Ezekiel's strong arm beside her, hoping her sign was a true one, hoping she would not die when the preacher plunged her beneath the icy water. She could still taste the dirt of the grave in her mouth. Behind her, the folks from the Chicken Rise church were singing in the old high sad way. Suddenly Nonnie felt completely alone, and it was as if the world and all its bright trappings streamed past her like the wind and were gone forever, and she was left on the bleak brown shore of the Dismal River by herself, with the dirty grayish ice before her, the sluggish dark river moving mysteriously beneath it where they had broken the ice, and for the first time Nonnie was lifted out of the moment of her life and thrust toward something beyond herself. The others seemed far, far away, as they sang,
“Shall we gather at the river, where bright angel feet have trod? With its crystal tide forever flowing by the throne of God
.
”

At that very moment the sun came out from the mass of leaden clouds which covered half the sky, and the ice on the river changed instantly from gray to silver, to diamonds spread out sparkling before their eyes. Ezekiel squeezed her hand. “Hit looks like Heaven, don't it?” he said, and then the preacher took her and then she was under, frozen solid and dead, and then she was up sputtering and resurrected, and as soon as it was done, the choking dream stopped forever.

Now Nonnie could go on about her life, her good life as it came to pass, for she grew accustomed to Ezekiel's limitations and learned to compensate for them, handling all the money, for instance, doing the things Ezekiel was not cut out to do, while he did the things he could. Under his hands, the farm prospered. Hired girls came in to help Nonnie with the work as time went on and more children were born, Pack Bailey in 1886; little Elizabeth, called Lizzie, in 1890; Sally Fern in 1898.

These were the blurred and busy years, the good years, when Nonnie got so caught up in the great tumble and roar of her life that she never even thought of the rose silk dress folded away in the loft, nor of Jake Toney, nor of how she used to dance up on the counter of the store in Cana when she was a little girl and sing,
“The cuckoo she's a pretty bird, she sings as she flies”
—

Oh, Nonnie still sang, while she carded the wool or rocked the baby or shelled the beans, but now she mostly sang the hymns that Ezekiel loved, or the old bloody ballads like “Barbry Allen” and “Brown Girl” and “The Gypsy Laddie.” It gave Nonnie the strangest feeling to sing that one, all about a woman who left her house and baby to run away with a gypsy. For how could a woman do such as that? Men might wander, but women were meant to stay home, and during those years when the house on Grassy Branch was brimming over with babies, Nonnie could not imagine anywhere else she might even
want
to be, whirled round as she was in the great spinning wheel of the seasons, as implacable as the stars.
Plant now pull the fodder now hoe the corn now dig the newground the baby is crying she wants to be fed the cow is lost Mamma my throat hurts Mamma whar is the hairbrush Mamma he hurt me it is time to buy the seed corn Mamma he it is time to Mamma it is time mamma mamma mamma
.

Ezekiel loved the children and played with them by the hour, rolling down the hill behind the house with them, making cat's cradles with string and chains with daisies, singing to them swinging them chucking them under their chins tickling them, “Tickle, tickle, on your knee, if you laugh you don't love me,” which made Lizzie, fat little yellow-haired Lizzie, dissolve in laughter every time.

Once when Ezekiel and the boys were wrestling on the floor at her feet while she mended their clothes, Ezekiel grabbed Nonnie's leg, as shapely as ever, and said, “Tickle, tickle, on your knee, if you laugh you don't love me,” and all the children giggled expectantly, but Nonnie looked at him and did not laugh, as anger, like a bolt of lightning and just as unexpected, cut through her body like a knife.