The Devil's Dream (22 page)

But that last year, I remember Pancake putting the bottle right up to Durwood's lips for all to see. Durwood was too weak to take much of a drink by then, yet he loved it so. He grinned his big old grin when the liquor hit him, and a great whoop went up from the boys. Durwood said something, and they whooped again. He was everybody's favorite, always. But
where was Johnny?
The fiddles went faster and faster. I started dancing with Hollis Boyd from up the road, a little old freckly boy just my age.
Oh get around, Jenny, get around, long summer day
. All of a sudden I got so hot I couldn't stand it, and had to run to the edge of the circle and try to breathe.

Then—sudden and sly as a cat—there was Johnny behind me.

“Did you miss me?” he said.

My knees went funny. But by the time I turned to talk, he was gone, dancing with Katie, his feet going double time. Oh, nobody could dance like Johnny! He never once looked my way while he was dancing, but later, when Daddy and them was taking a break and the Baldwin girl clapped her hands and yelled, “Hide-and-go-seek!” then hid her eyes and started counting out loud, Johnny grabbed my hand and pulled me halfway out in the dark meadow, catching me once when I stumbled.

“This is too far,” I said.

“Too far to play games,” he said. “But looky here. Oh, come here,” and he pulled me down in a pile of frosty hay that the boys had missed somehow. From where we lay out in the cold dark field, we could look back at the stir-off and see it all as a dream, the black figures moving to and fro in the orange firelight.

We could scarce hear the Baldwin girl counting—“eighty-five, ninety, ninety-five, one hundred, coming, ready or not!” Then Johnny was all over me.
“Oh honey oh baby oh honey,”
he went, real loud, and I did not care. I did not care if they heard us or not. I did not care if they found us or not.
“Bushel of wheat, bushel of rye, all still hid, holler I!”
the Baldwin girl yelled finally, but we kept quiet, and we must have stayed out there another hour, loving each other up, and looking back at the circle of light and fire.

When Durwood died it was early evening. Tampa laid with him all night long and refused to let them take him from her to make him ready. The preacher had to talk her into it, yet then she insisted on sitting up by the open coffin all night long the
next
night, so that by the time they buried him, she was talking plum out of her head. I don't believe she has ever got back in her rightful mind since, to tell the truth. Daddy was just about as torn up as she was. I guess we were all so focused on Durwood's death that we did not remark how Mamma was dragging around; she had worn herself out as always, doing for everybody else.

It was three nights later, after supper, that she dropped a dishtowel on the floor, left the dishes in the sink, and went to sit down in her rocking chair. She sat real still and upright in her chair, like she was listening out for something.

“Why, Aunt Lucie, what's the matter?” asked Little Virginia, who was helping out in the kitchen.

“I believe I am just tired,” Mamma said. “I've been feeling tired all day.”

“Well, you sit right there,” Little Virginia said, “and don't mind a thing. Come on, honey,” Little Virginia said to me, and I went back in the kitchen to help her, so I missed what all happened next.

“Now Royster!” Mamma called out all of a sudden in a faint voice. “Royster, you quit that!”

But Royster Hall, Mamma's favorite little first cousin, had been dead for thirty years.

Everybody in the room stared at Mamma for a second, then leaped to her side, but by then she was dead. She sat bolt upright in her rocking chair with her head drooped over to the side, looking for all the world like a little robin. This was the first thing I thought when they brought me in there to see her, and then I don't remember a thing for a good while after that. I remember the night of Mamma's laying-out in little bits, like the bright splashes of color in a crazy-quilt. I remember how much makeup Virgie had on, and the purple plume in Tampa's big hat. I remember the argument over whether to bury Mamma with her wedding ring on or not. Usually you take a ring off, and give it to the kin. But Daddy insisted that Mamma keep her wedding ring
on
, and he further insisted that her little Gibson guitar be buried with her, so they had to dig an extra-big grave hole up there in the Chicken Rise graveyard where she lies. At the burial, Tampa and Virgie sang “Bright Morning Stars,” standing together under a black umbrella in the gentle cold rain while the boys shoveled on the dirt.

I did not stand with Johnny, of course. He was over on the edge of the group, clenching and unclenching his hands, his face a black study. Whenever other folks got sad, Johnny would get mad. That's the way he always was. Daddy stood all by himself, it was like his grief had caused an invisible space around him. He stood with his hat in his hands and his face tilted up to the rain, and stared out across the valley with a look in his eye that you don't want to see. Rain ran down the wrinkles in his face. I got wet clear through, myself, and caught a fever. Freda bade me go to bed right afterward, which I did. By now they had built that little room onto the house just for me, since I was getting to be such a big girl, Daddy said. Daddy had brought me a fancy little vanity table and mirror, edged in gold, back from one of their trips.

The night after Mamma's funeral, as I was laying in the bed with a fever, I heard a knock on my window. I jumped like I was shot. At first I thought it was Mamma, coming back to lay a cool cloth on my forehead, then I thought it was my own little girl, as I'd been wondering all day where
she
was.

But it was Johnny.

I started crying when I heard his voice. I raised up the window and he pulled off the screen and climbed in, all wet and warm. I was so glad he was there! His hair smelled real funny when it got wet. I don't know how to describe it except to say it is a smell I have never smelled since. I would know it anywhere. Johnny kept his clothes on. He just lay on top of the covers and held me, and every time he said he'd better go, I held on for dear life and wouldn't let him.

Of course we fell asleep that way, to be discovered by Freda when she came in the next morning to wake me up. Freda always tried to take over when anybody died.

As soon as the door opened, I was suddenly, terribly awake. It was cold in the room, for we'd left the window open, and the sun blazed a bright path across my pink coverlet. In the vanity mirror I saw us, me and Johnny, intertwined.

Freda gasped like she was dying. “Well, I
swan
!” she said to herself, and came over to the bed and peered down close at us. Johnny lay on his side in deep sleep, mouth open, breathing regular as a judge. I acted like I was still sleeping too. But I was just about to wet my pants with Freda standing there over us, watching us. What was she going to do? One thing I remember thinking is how crazy it was to be found like this, when we were
doing nothing
, and yet all those other times . . . but Freda was shaking my shoulder real rough. “Wake up, huzzy!” she said.

Johnny woke up in a flash and leaped to his feet by the bed. “Now it ain't like you think,” he said to Freda, with his hair all down in his eyes.

“I don't think nothing,” Freda said in her flat hateful voice. “You get out of here now, John Rainette. Go!” But when Johnny made a move toward the door, she stuck out her bony hand and grabbed his jacket. “You go out the same shameful way you got in here,” she said. “I will not have you upsetting that poor man further,” meaning Daddy. “I don't never want to see your face over here again neither,” she yelled after him. “Whyn't you go on in the army and make a man?”

Then Freda shook me so hard my teeth rattled. “I know what you've been doing all along, and don't you forget it,” she said. “You little whore. Now you get up out of that bed!”

And it was a funny thing. It was like whatever had got loose inside me that night at the stir-off started spinning, then spinning faster and faster, until pieces of me were flying off in every direction, to the ends of the earth. It's the only way I can describe it, I believe. But it would be a while yet before I had my flat-out nervous breakdown. By the time I had it, there wasn't hardly anything in me left to fly away. By then Johnny was scared to death, for he knew something awful was wrong with me, yet he could tell no one.

In the end, I told Freda. I believe she had guessed anyway.

I was four or five months pregnant when I told her. I was real sick, and flunking everything at school. They all thought I was just upset over Mamma dying. “Rose Annie has always been high-strung,” Mrs. Matney, my math teacher, said to Mrs. Peace in the office one day when I was calling Freda to come and take me home. “I reckon she gets it from her daddy,” Mrs. Peace said.

Things speed up in my mind after this. I know—it's like that kaleidoscope Robert Floyd brought me from Germany when he was stationed over there. When you looked in it, the colors whirled faster and faster until the shapes flew fantastic and out of control.

Johnny and me were going to get married, though. That was one thing. We were going to run off and find somebody that would marry us as soon as Johnny got his two-week paycheck from the mill. But instead of that, I told Freda. I still don't know why I did it. I told her on a Wednesday afternoon, two days before we planned to run off. Then before I knew it, Daddy was driving me and Freda to Bristol in the dark of night, smoking cigarette after cigarette and throwing the butts out the window. He took us to the train station and threw my stuff out on the platform.

“Tell Johnny,” I said. “Tell Johnny—”

But Daddy slapped my face, hard. “Forget about Johnny. Johnny is as good as dead,” he said.

The train came and Daddy put us on it. I was so glad to see my little girl among the others. She wore a hat, which hid her long blond curls, but I knew who she was, and though she sat in another car so Freda wouldn't see her, I knew she was with me, and she would stay close by me in the months to come, when she was the only one I could really talk to.

Freda made herself comfortable on the train. She put her hat on the rack and folded up her coat and my coat just so, and then got out a white box she'd brought along, and untied the string and started eating fried chicken and deviled eggs. “Would you like some?” she said to the man across from us, who said he wouldn't mind, and then she gave it out to all and sundry like she was queen of the train. But I couldn't eat a bite.

I guess, thinking back, this trip was a big event for Freda, who never got to travel with the others but had to stay home all the time. If it hadn't been for my nervous breakdown, she never would have gone
anywhere
, so she ought to have been nicer to me, I think. But I know it's mean to speak ill of the dead.

We went to a place in Chattanooga where Freda was not nice, and I was sick, I couldn't eat, and Freda was not nice but I was too sick to stand up for myself and Freda was not nice at all and I don't know, to this day, what I would have done if it had not been for my little girl, who wasn't a bit scared of Freda and talked right back to her, saying the meanest things, things I'd never say, right to Freda's face! But my little girl was right, Freda should not have kept the door locked, she should not! and then there was a tiny little baby, my own tiny baby girl, she came too soon, though, she was in a tent, I never got to hold her, she never had a name. “I want to name her Lucie,” I said to Freda when I could, but, “It is too late,” she said. “The baby is dead,” she said. “Thank God.” I was very sick then and I stayed in the hospital a long time having my nervous breakdown and my little girl stayed with me all the while, and she watched out for me then too, and spoke right up to the mean ones. I had a blue bedspread there and a white iron bed and my window looked out on a fountain. We did arts and crafts. When I left, it was Daddy and Pancake that came to get me, dressed up like lawyers.

“You're a lot better now, Rose Annie,” Daddy said. “We've come to take you home.”

But my little girl stood right behind them, making terrible faces.

“We don't want to go back to Grassy Branch,” I said. “Please no,” I said.

“Oh, Rose Annie,” Daddy said. He was crying. He hugged me and then I remembered how he smelled, cigarettes and something else, a traveling-man smell. “Freda will not be there,” he said, and said he was sorry about Freda, who had gone to live in Johnson City now. She died there, several years later. Of
meanness
, I imagine. I imagine Freda's death like this—that she dried up from inside, more and more, until she was finally an empty, rattling husk.

When I got back to Grassy Branch, Johnny was not there and nobody mentioned him, and Virgie had gone off too, to make her fortune, though later she would come back for the girls. Virgie didn't know or care where Johnny was, though—nobody did. Tampa was gone too, but Little Virginia had taken over housekeeping for Daddy, and she was real nice to me, and so was Katie's mamma Alice, and so was Katie, and Georgia.
Everybody
was real nice to me. Little Virginia took me and Katie to Myrtle Beach, where I got real sunburned and the boys looked at us and we danced at the casino in the salty night air. We dated some boys from Ohio that talked real northern. We ate pizza, which I had never seen before. Then when we came back home, Daddy said that Louise Rickers had a little job for me over at her store The Family Shoppe in Holly Springs, and she did, and I got a discount, I got a lot of new clothes, and then some of the guys in Holly Springs started asking me for dates. At first I wouldn't go. I set aside an hour or so each night just for thinking about Johnny, remembering him, but this got harder and harder to do. It was like it had all happened a million years before, in another country. Finally I had some dates. I have to say I enjoyed flirting, and looking pretty again. I liked to make them want me.