The Devil's Dream (13 page)

“I will,” I said, and I done so, fer I was bound to get the straight of it oncet and fer all. I got up there about dark the next day.

I found old man Willie Malone a-setting out on his porch all wrapped up in a quilt, and hit August. But old folks gets cold real easy. He was so little and dried up he put me in mind of a grasshopper a-setting there.

“Howdy,” I said, and said who I was, fer I knowed he couldn't see nothing there in the dark.

“Zeke's boy?” he said, and I said, well, that's what I had come up that to ax him about, and I allowed as how Tom had sent me up that. I knowed him and Tom used to be running mates, and my daddy with em afore he got religion so bad, for many's the story Tom had told me about them and what all they used to get into. I had knowed
Daddy
weren't no saint, but I had never knowed no such of a thing about Mamma.

So then Uncle Willie Malone told me what folks said about Mamma and the Melungeon, and by then it had growed so dark that it was like I wasn't talking to a man atall, jest a old voice coming from noplace, from the night and the mountain itself. “And now, if I was you, I'd fergit the whole thing,” Uncle Willie said when he had got done telling it. “Fer yer daddy raised you as hisn, and used to trot you on his knee and walk you of a night and play with you by the hour,” Uncle Willie said. “They is not many men that had a daddy to set so much store by a baby as yourn done you,” he said.

But I was young and hotheaded then, and three or four days drunk on top of it. I had heerd what I'd come to hear, all right, and I splunged off down that mountain hollering in the middle of the night, I didn't give a damn. I went over to the camp and got my stuff and then I went over to Grassy Branch and gathered up what I had left there, and told em I was leaving for a while.

They said that that strawberry-face ugly old sister of Mamma's had come around wanting to stay and help out, and Daddy had run her off. I reckon I was still drunk, for when Durwood told me this, I says to Daddy, “Daddy, if I was you, I would of let her stay on here, I would of just put a bag over her head,” I says, “for hit's all the same in the dark. I bet she wouldn't of felt no different from Mamma,” I said.

Well, Daddy whupped me good then, and after he whupped me, he gone to praying over me, and I raised up long enough to say, “Quit that praying over me, for there ain't nothing to it. Hit ain't nothing to Heaven, nor nothing to Hell. Hit ain't nothing, period,” I tole Daddy, for it seemed to me like that was the bare-bone facts of it all. Then I passed out finely and slept all that next day through, and woked up to see Lizzie thar by the bed crying. “What are you looking at?” I said.

Then I left. I didn't never mean to darken that door again. I went over around Bluefield, then up in West Virginia, doing first one thing and then another, fiddling here and there and drinking steady. Best I can recall, my thinking run kindly along these lines.
Mamma is a whore, and I am a bastard
, and so by God I set out to prove it. It seemed like a great storm was raging in me. I figgered I might as well get out there and fuck my brains out or do whatever the hell else I could think of, for it wasn't no pleasure in this life nor nothing beyond it, nothing, nothing, nothing.

I didn't want nothing but pussy. I'd tell a girl anything just to get in her pants, and you'd be surprised how easy that is, iffen you go projecting around with nothing but that on your mind.
They're all whores
, I says to myself, and I proved it pretty good too.

I stayed gone for some several years, drunk moren not, beat up frequent, in jail a couple of times too. Then come a pretty spring morning when I woke up in a woman's bed in Huntington, West Virginia, and didn't have no memory atall of who she was, or how I had got there, or where we was. Hit looked to be a room in a cheap hotel, or may be a boardinghouse. I could hear somebody walking overhead, and then I couldn't hardly hear nothing, fer the sound of this little old baby that started up crying to beat the band. It was in a dresser drawer over there in the corner, I reckon it didn't have no crib. And Lord, it could holler! It just cried and cried.

I rolled over and looked at the woman that was laying there in the bed with me. She didn't look too good. Matter of fact, I couldn't tell if she was breathing or not. She had dried vomit all over her face and was laying on her back with her mouth open. She was a curly-headed blond woman, vomit in her hair too. She looked awful. I felt of her arm, which was warm, but I swear I couldn't see her breathing. I don't know to this day if she was dead or not. I don't know if she was a whore or not. I don't know how I got there. I couldn't remember nothing about the baby. I couldn't remember nothing about the whole week prior, in fact. I got up and pulled on my pants, I was shaking so bad all over I couldn't hardly buckle my belt. The baby had set into a hard thin wail, like it was hopeless or something. The room was a wreck, liquor bottles and drinking glasses and cigarette butts and clothes throwed all over the place. They was a gun on the floor by the bed that was not mine, it did not look much like a lady's gun neither. The woman on the bed was not moving. She was a big woman. I reached down and got something to cover her with, or part of her anyway. Then I got out of there. I remember standing on the street in the blazing sunshine and looking back up at that window. I could still hear the baby wailing, but it sounded real far away, like a baby in another world.

Then I heerd my mamma speaking to me, plain as that blazing sun.

“Go on home now, son,” she told me, and so I did.

I got back to find that Daddy had had a stroke and couldn't say a thing, nor move his left leg. He would walk after while, he got some better, but he dragged his left foot the rest of his life. Durwood and Lizzie and me figgered out later that Daddy had had the stroke just right about the time that I had heerd Mamma speaking to me up in West Virginia. Somehow it didn't surprise me none to learn this.

“I am home for good,” I told them, and even though Daddy couldn't talk none, he could understand me. Tears came up in his old blue eyes. I hugged him as hard as I could. “You took good care of usuns,” I told him, “and now I aim to take good care of you.”

We depart for Europe within a fortnight, as soon as the
Red Cross
is completely stocked and outfitted. Caroline and I have been down to the harbor to see it more than once, of course, and I must say it is a fine sight, the great white ship brilliant in the sunlight, the broad band of red and the fluttering flag proclaiming to the world our mission of mercy. In fact, the newspapers are calling it the “Mercy Ship,” and there is a write-up daily concerning these preparations. I have to pinch myself to assure myself that this is actually happening. Events have moved with such swiftness! First the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination at Sarajevo in June. Then in eight astonishing days, comprising July 28 through August 4, Austria, Germany, Serbia, Belgium, France, Russia, and Great Britain threw themselves into the war. Of course there is a lot of sentiment in this country for us to do likewise, with feelings against Germany running high at this time. Yet
our mission is mercy
, and a hospital unit of surgeons and nurses will go to each country involved in the war, myself to France, for I have a smattering of that language. “Neutrality” and “Humanity” are engraved upon the great seal of our ship, but I foresee that maintaining this position will become increasingly difficult if the war continues. Here at the Nurses Settlement, I busy myself with the routine that has occupied me for several years, yet my mind skips about in such an alarming fashion that I fear I will dispense the wrong medication to some unlucky patient!

Caroline and I have several books about France. We read them nightly, and practice the language . . . and yet, and yet—oh! Here is a riddle worthy of any of our new practitioners of this so-called science of the mind: How can it be, I wonder, that the closer our date of departure draws, the less I am able to even
imagine
France, and the more I find myself travelling back through time and circumstance, back to my Virginia childhood? In my current heightened state of mind, I remember everything—the painful and the pleasant alike, and I feel, oddly, such a need to set these reminiscences down on paper. Indeed, I feel a sense of urgency to do so. Perhaps it is always thus, for those departing—as I am—upon a great journey.

As if it were yesterday, I see our house set on the gentle hill, a large double cabin, two cabins really, connected by the breezeway in between, the wide porch overlooking the yard and the little road, hardly more than a path, which winds around that bend following Grassy Branch itself. Impossible to say how many hours I spent just sitting on that porch, looking down the road, wondering who might come along.

I can still see the wildflowers that grow in profusion all along the road, the burning bush that grows by the gate; I can smell the sweet wild perfume of the honeysuckle whenever I close my eyes; I taste the tart little apples that grow on the gnarled trees behind the barn; and I still hear Grassy Branch itself, running and gurgling along over the big rocks where I sit in the sun and dangle my feet in the clear, cold water. Even in the house, we can hear Grassy Branch—it sings us to sleep each night. And over all, of course, behind and above everything, stands Cemetery Mountain, gentle and sloping at its lower elevations, where we farm, austere and forbidding as it rises sharply to its mysterious craggy peak (which my brother Durwood nicknamed “Witch's Tit”!). How well I remember the taste of the cressy greens that grow wild in the creek, the coffee smell of early morning, Daddy's crooked black hat, Durwood's old dog Ruth that lay up under the house, Daddy saying “Now I lay me down to sleep, pray the Lord my soul to keep” with me and little Sally every night, and how the rain swept up our valley—you could see it coming from a long way off.

In my mind's eye I see so clearly that little girl I was then—miserable and motherless, to be sure, yet full of life and longing, full of belief that sometime, somewhere, there would come a better day. Lord knows whence it derives, the foolish, innate optimism of youth. . . . I was nearly ten when Mother left us, twelve when we learned of her death, and fourteen when Daddy had the stroke and R.C. returned to us from whatever dark and mysterious realms of the spirit he'd travelled through in those lost years. (Try as I might, I was never able to persuade him to tell me anything at all about that time in his tortured life.)

I say “tortured”—for I am persuaded that R.C.'s anguish is habitual with him and has always been so, that it was not simply the result of our mother's abrupt departure. R.C. has been a person of extremes for as long as I can remember. Even as a boy, nobody laughed harder, or ran faster, or yelled louder—or sulked longer, or acted meaner, or was sweeter . . . or more tenderhearted! Yet he was quick to anger, and many was the fistfight to the death which he and Durwood waged in the yard, with me crying and imploring them to stop it, stop it! Other times, he and Durwood would act the fool until they had me rolling on the floor breathless from laughter. And no boy could sing nicer or play a sweeter fiddle than R.C., either, though he had to hide his talent from Daddy in the early days. I remember he kept his fiddle out in the barn, in a special dry space he'd built up under the corncrib, and many were the afternoons I saw him sneak and grab it, wrap it up in a gunny sack, and set off for town or wherever it was that he went, grinning and sitting tall on his big black horse. How I missed R.C. when he went off to work at Beady Nolan's! For there was an intensity about him which is difficult to describe.

Let me put it this way—everyone felt more alive when R.C. came in the room. There was something about R.C. that put an edge on things.

It was not so much the way he looked, although Lord knows he was good-looking—at least, the girls thought so! He had the curliest, prettiest fair hair, which never turned dark as so often happens, yet his once fair skin was now nearly swarthy. He had a big nose, high cheekbones, and a large, mobile mouth. In form he was big and hulking, he seemed to loom over you as he spoke, and his dark eyes burned out in his face. Yet his voice was deep and gentle, almost halting. He hardly spoke, or else he spoke too much. R.C. was a young man of extremes. Often he seemed abstracted, brooding, lost in thought.

I believe he was a kind of genius, for he could build anything, make anything he chose to. Once he conceived of it, there was simply
nothing
R.C. couldn't do. I've heard that even as a little boy he made bread trays from buckeye wood and sold them downtown on Court Day—along with biscuit boards, rolling pins, rocking horses, deadfalls for catching animals, you name it. One time Judge Reckless's wife rode all the way out to Grassy Branch to find out if R.C. could fashion a newel post and a gazebo for the fine new house she was building.

After he came back, he used to go up on Cemetery Mountain regularly to trap muskrats, minks, coons, skunks, and possums, and then he'd trade the skins for shoes for us—as well as for sugar, flour, salt, and coffee—whatever we didn't grow. We always had plenty of everything after R.C. came back. He was the best trapper in our mountains by far, because of some secret trapping device he'd invented, which he would show to no one.

I believe, thinking now in retrospect, that R.C. could have gone anywhere and done anything he chose, and been successful at it, too—even if he never would be happy. The only time he was truly happy, I believe, was when he was actually playing music. The rest of the time he was driven by a great restlessness—yet I suppose we were lucky for it, as it led him into scheme after scheme, and we were the beneficiaries.

I will never forget the day, soon after R.C.'s return, when a man came by our house with a banjo. It was certainly the first banjo I had ever seen, and it may have been the first that R.C. ever saw as well. The fellow sat down, at our request, and played a few tunes—I remember his playing “Get Along Home, Cindy” for one, and “John Hardy.” Then he handed the banjo over to R.C., who took it and played it instantly. The fellow was amazed, but Durwood and I were not, well aware of R.C.'s talents.