The Devil's Dream (21 page)

That necklace—the one Gladys threw out, that I got so upset about—this was the necklace of scarlet haws he made for me once, and I reckon it
did
look like some kind of dried-up mess to Gladys, but whenever I saw it laying there in the dresser drawer, just for a minute I felt again the way I felt when he put it around my neck. I felt
alive
, I mean. We were over at Indian Grave Gap when Johnny gave it to me, sitting buck naked on a burying quilt that he had stole out of Virgie's cedar chest and she gave him hell for it later. The necklace scratched when he placed it around my neck.

But you know what? I would rather have it now, all brown and crumbly, than the diamond lavaliere Buddy gave me last Christmas, or the graduated pearls he gave me the year before that. I reckon Gladys
has
got my number all right—I
am
spoiled! But not like she thinks. It is a hard thing to peak out so young and then have to live out the rest of your life the best way you can. Everybody around here thinks,
Oh, she is so lucky, she's got a push-button door on her garage
, and this is true too. I
am
lucky.

But I was telling about the day we went sanging over to Craggy Knob, and then how coming back down we slipped and slid down the mountain till we came to lodge muddy and laughing against a big hollow stump that'd been hit by lightning. It was right after that that the hogs came scrambling out of the laurel slick and headed toward us.

“Run!” Johnny yelled, but I could not even get up; my feet kept slipping on the wet leaves. All of this was happening so fast, but like it was happening to somebody else.

In a flash Johnny was up and had his knife out, and when one hog ran at him, he stuck his knife right into its eye. Whereupon that hog gave a terrible squeal and started raring up and down pawing at its head, and then the other hog faltered and backed off.

Johnny grabbed my hand and we ran like crazy back up the hill to the path. The hogs did not follow us, though I did not feel safe until we had crossed the footlog over Grassy Branch at the very bottom of the mountain.

Of course we lost our ginseng in the process, and arrived back at Grassy Branch so muddy and torn up that Mamma looked at me real funny and said she thought it would be best if I didn't go off with Johnny Rainette anymore, that I was too big for such adventuring and ought to start acting like more of a lady. Mamma was not fond of Johnny, who got into more and more trouble as time went on, although she said she felt sorry for him as his mother was letting them grow up so wild. You know, Mamma never did get along with Virgie, or approve of her, though they sang together all that time. Mamma also used to say she feared that Johnny Rainette was born with a criminal nature. But she didn't mind for us to sing with Johnny as long as we stayed around the house, so many's the night he'd come over with his guitar and sing with us—around the fire in winter, out on the porch in summer, singing up the moon. This was all right with Mamma, and what Mamma didn't know didn't hurt her.

For we were on fire in those years, and just as determined to let no one know, and we got away with it too, so that to this very day no one knows the extent of it, nor when it started nor how long it went on.

I'll tell you, a thing like that will mark your life. For all my days then were spent in thinking,
Now where is Johnny today? Where is he right now? What's he doing? Will he be at school today?
or
Did he go into town with Daddy?
and
When will I see him next?
Yet when I saw him, I took such pride in
not
looking at him, nor appearing to notice him special in any way, and he did the same.

In church every Sunday I used to sit at an angle behind him, and look at the curve of his cheek and the hollow of his neck just below the ear, and it drove me wild—I couldn't hear
one word
Preacher Roebuck said, not one! As a child I was pretty religious—well, we
all
were, or we were
supposed
to be, Daddy saw to it that we went to church every time they cracked the door, and I was baptized when I was twelve—but after me and Johnny got so thick, I lost my religion, for a fact. I just couldn't keep my mind on it. In the same way that Johnny stood between me and the world, he stood between me and God. And although I have asked God for forgiveness since, and I have prayed over it, and I take my own children to church, I don't have any real feeling I'm getting through to Him. I have not had any personal response, I mean.

I made a god out of Johnny Rainette, and I've been cut off from the other one ever since.

We formed a little gospel group about this time—it was me, Johnny, Georgia, and Katie. We called ourselves the Grassy Branch Quartet and started out singing at a revival at our own church, where we were such a big hit that we got asked to come around to several other churches too. Mamma and Freda made us girls some blue dresses just alike, with big white collars. Johnny wore a black string tie and a white linen shirt. He looked so handsome. This was before his voice changed, and he sang a tenor rendition of “Wayfaring Stranger” that broke all hearts. There was not a dry eye in the churchhouse when we finished, and all the girls were eyeing Johnny, and I was
not
looking at him on purpose, for I had my secret to keep. We sang at several revivals and talent shows and once at the United Mine Workers' Fourth of July celebration up in Welch.

But soon after that, Johnny dropped out of school and got in trouble for “borrowing” a car, and Georgia got a job taking tickets at the movie theater, so we just stopped singing. The Grassy Branch Quartet was officially over. And I have to say, I was glad when we stopped. For I felt bad standing up there with Johnny and singing in front of everybody else, I felt like we were just
flaunting
ourselves, and asking for trouble.

I remember one of the last times our quartet sang together was in our own church at Chicken Rise, on Easter Sunday. Me and the other girls were wearing white dresses, we had outgrown our blue ones by then. Johnny had wet slicked-back hair but he didn't look so good, he looked like he might of been out someplace drinking the night before, which he was bad to do. Oh, I had tried to talk to him about his behavior, and Daddy had threatened to kick him off the place. But all Johnny said was that he had to do
something
, didn't he, because of course he couldn't be with me, I was not allowed to go out with boys yet. Everybody was real careful about me, since I was the only girl in my family.

Johnny had a wildness in his bones. He used to say to me, “Listen, honey, whatever I do when I ain't with you don't have a thing to do with me. It don't have a thing to do with
this
. This is it, honey. This is the only thing that's real in all the world to me right now, and you are the only one that matters.”

I was afraid this was true. For Johnny never had gotten along too good with his mother, nor with his sister Georgia, who was a real bossy goody-goody. After Johnny dropped out of school, everybody—Daddy and Mamma included—was after him to go in the army like all the other boys done. Nobody could understand why he hadn't enlisted right off, why he stayed around here quitting one job and then another, hanging out with trash, and acting so generally wrought up all the time.

“I just don't understand what's wrong with Johnny,” Mamma would fret more than once.

I didn't say a word.

But singing in the choir that Easter Sunday, I got awful afraid that pretty soon, somebody was going to figure it out, just by looking at us. We were singing “Wondrous Love.” We also sung a lot of the gospel hymns and spirituals, but not at Chicken Rise of course. We had to stick to the old tunes there, and I must say, I do love them. Nothing else sounds quite like
church
to me even though now of course me and Buddy go to the Methodist church over in Holly Springs and sit on velvet cushions and sing to an organ playing.

See how my mind wanders? I can't seem to do a thing about it, I know it drives everybody crazy.

Anyway, it was Easter Sunday. We stood up in front of the congregation in a row and sung,
“What wondrous love is this, that caused the Lord of bliss to bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul.”
There sat Mamma with Freda and Alice and the rest of the women, on their side.
Can't they tell?
I wondered.
Can't they see it all over me, like paint?
But they just sat like always, and Mamma had her eyes closed, swaying to the music.

Then I looked at Daddy, face as stern as God Himself, and at all my brothers, ranged about on the men's side.
Lord!
I thought all of a sudden.
They would kill him
, which was something I had not thought of before. But of course it was true, Robert Floyd in particular, with that hothead temper of his. We sung,
“To God and to the Lamb, who is the great I Am, I will sing.”

I felt awful. After meeting was over, I went straight home and laid down in the bed, and did not stay for dinner on the ground. Mamma insisted on going home with me, and pulling down the shades, and rinsing out a cool cloth to put on my forehead. I felt terrible letting her take care of me like that, and making her miss dinner, which she always enjoyed so. I laid in the dark and cried.

But even this didn't stop me, and as time went on, me and Johnny got crazier and crazier, and the crazier we got, the more we did it. I am not saying it was
right
, mind you. All I am saying is, we did it. It was almost like we were trying to get caught. Rainy days in the hayloft in the sweet-smelling barn, with the horses below, rustling and sighing in their stalls, the rain on the pitched tin roof, and my little-girl ghost peeping in at us between the wide boards. Or out in the woods, we'd make sure nobody was around and then we'd drop in place like we'd been shot.

The last time my family ever had a stir-off up here on the old place, why, right down there, it was—Johnny and me did it outside not a hundred yards from where my daddy stood fiddling in the field. Not a hundred yards! Something broke in me that night, and it has not gone back right ever since.

Daddy had got Uncle Durwood all wrapped up in quilts and blankets and put him in the armchair, and had the boys carry him like that out from the house, and place his chair right close up to the fire and the trough, so he could supervise the whole operation—see, Durwood was the one that loved a stir-off so good. He was the one that planted the cane each year and decided when the stir-off would take place, and went up and down the valley telling folks to come. After he died, nobody planted any cane, and the stir-offs were over and done with. That last year, Daddy had them put him right up in the middle of the action, and bade them fetch another chair from the house to put his feet on, so Durwood was real comfortable when the folks started coming.

To tell you the honest-to-God truth, I remember all of this like it was yesterday. Maybe because it was the last big old time we ever had around the place, for it was soon after that Durwood died, and then Mamma, and Tampa went off her head. So that stir-off has come to stand for a lot in my mind, all the good times we had growing up here, and all the things we done together, all that hard work and fun and music, I mean, the way we lived then. The last time I saw Katie, she said she felt the exact same way about it, she said that stir-off stood out in her mind too.

For I'll tell you, folks are not the same anymore,
families
are not the same anymore. Of course I am grateful that Buddy has done so well and all, but a big family night at our house these days is when Buddy and me and Gladys take the kids and ride over to Bristol and eat at Jack Trayer's Restaurant. Gladys always gets the same thing at Jack Trayer's, spaghetti, and Buddy always gets the twelve-ounce rib-eye steak. Then we go to a movie. These family nights are not a thing like a stir-off, for instance, although of course they are more modern. I don't expect that Sugar and Buddy Junior will remember them in particular either. I wouldn't if I was them. It is nothing like standing out in the meadow in the forty-degree cold, clapping your hands together to keep warm, waiting on it to get dark, watching them press the cane.

When Mamma called us in to supper, I couldn't eat a bite. Mamma looked at me closely. “You can't go back out there if you don't eat something,” she said, but when she turned her back I put my plate on the floor for a minute and let the dogs have it all.

By the time I got back up to the meadow, trailing Bill, who could run like the wind, the other boys had brung Durwood out and placed him to watch the syrup bubbling over the fire.
Where was Johnny?
Folks took turns stirring the syrup and skimming the green foam that rose to the top. The sky got darker and darker and a wind rose up. The hoot owls started hollering.
Where was Johnny?
More and more folks came walking up from the valley, carrying lantern lights and little pans or crocks to take their own molasses home in, and them that played an instrument brought it, so that it wasn't long before music rang out on the chilly air, and set everybody to singing, “
I'll eat when I'm hungry and drink when I'm dry, if a tree don't fall on me, I'll live till I die
.” Some of the younger ones were running a set on the ground.
Where was Johnny?
I looked from face to face. Folks were dancing up a storm. Soon they started skimming the molasses. You were not supposed to eat the green foam, which would make you sick for sure, but all the kids were allowed to dip cane stalks down in the stir-off pan to get some sweetening, as Mamma always called it. You'd have to wave your stalk around in the air to cool it off before you licked the sweetening, or you'd burn your tongue. Every year, some little kids did that. Every year, old man Rupert Lowe got knee-walking drunk, for by the time it got full dark, there was some drinking among the men, though we were not supposed to know it.