The Truest Pleasure (11 page)

To keep the juice sweet Tom sealed the jugs with wax, and we set more than fifty gallons in the cellar. As I bent over, wiping pulp from the press board, my hair come partly undone and stuck to my neck. I had loosened my dress by a couple of buttons and could feel the sweat running between my breasts and under my armpits. I glanced up and saw Tom looking at my breasts. “Shame on you,” I said, and slapped his arm. His face was red when he was working, but it turned a little redder. I had put on some weight since the wedding and felt bigger and softer and rounder.

Already that fall Tom had established a routine. He had trouble sleeping after four in the morning. He liked to go to bed early and get up early. When he rose he ground coffee on the back porch and had a cup before it got light. It was the only time he could set. Maybe it was his favorite time of day, as it was mine. He made a fire to boil coffee and he set there and thought. I'd have give anything to know what he thought about. Maybe he prayed, and maybe he thought about sacred things. But I think he planned what he would do that day, what had to be done, and what could be done that time of year. He was planning to improve the place, and he thought about roads and fences, terraces to firm up and gullies that had to be choked with
brush. After stepping outside to relieve hisself he would set for half an hour. I believe he thought the fiber of the Peace family had wore out and he needed to get the place right again.

After the cider making was done Tom built a new springhouse. The actual spring was three hundred yards around the hill, and Pa had bored out pumplogs to lead water down to the yard. But the pumplogs was rotting and leaking and we had never had a decent springhouse. Tom ordered pipe from town to replace the logs, and he dug a basin big as the spring itself and lined it with rocks. He cobbled the outlet that run along the pasture fence down to the branch. I had never seen anybody work as long or steady. Tom had not done masonry before, but he planned the wall with such care it looked like the sure work of a journeyman.

Tom split big chestnut logs for the springhouse itself, and set those logs around the basin, under the hemlocks. When he put the cedar shingles on the building it was cool and dark inside. Water splashed out of the pipe and murmured in the overflow. On the hottest day it was cool in there, and Tom made a box to keep the milk and butter, eggs and cider. In winter it was warm under the low eaves, with the heat of the earth and springwater rising up. Nothing set there ever froze in even the coldest weather.

Between the smokehouse and the springhouse Tom fixed a wash place for me. And he built a table for the tub and washboard. He strung up a clothesline along the path from the smokehouse.

If Pa resented Tom taking charge of so much and doing so many new things around the place he didn't let it show. Pa was past sixty, and liked to set on the porch in the sun and talk, or by
the fire after dark. He always did like to talk more than anything, just like Locke and Florrie. He loved to tell about what he had read, and what he had seen in Virginia as a young soldier. He had growed chin whiskers and suddenly his face begun to show age. He read the paper, and he kept up with the war with Spain. He read to Tom and me accounts of Teddy and his Rough Riders. That Roosevelt was a Republican made him seem even more a hero. Pa had always been a Republican, ever since he voted for Lincoln, him and all our family. After the war he hadn't changed to become a Democrat the way so many in the valley had.

I reckon Pa had got less and less practical over the years. It seemed at times he was just drifting, talking about his months in the prison camp up North. I reckon he wasn't interested in building up the place anymore, after his heart trouble started.

That first winter Tom added two stalls and a feed room to the log barn. He snaked logs in from the hill, and with Joe's help rolled them into place. It was a low barn, and the worst work was notching the logs and setting them in place. They bored holes in the logs and pegged them together. Tom built a fence around the barn, encircling the manure pile curing out front. Pa had kept the pile behind the barn, out of sight, but Tom pointed out that sun on the south side would dry the manure faster. And it would be easier to clean the stalls if the pile was closer and easier to reach with the wagon at spreading time. Enclosing the yard enabled him to put the roughage piles closer also. The stacks of corn tops rose above the barn roof. The cut ends stuck out into the weather, but the leafy tops inside stayed dry and sweet-smelling. Pulled a few at a time, the tops would last all winter, with only the butt ends blackened by the elements.

Whenever I mentioned going to the Pentecostal meetings Tom would stiffen up. At first I didn't know how to tell when he was mad, because he didn't say much. Everybody in my family would talk out their anger. But I come to recognize the way he would say even less, and not look you in the eye when he was mad. He would turn his head away, and sometimes his face would go red. And he wouldn't hardly answer when you asked him a question.

“Tom,” I said, “worship is one of the finest things people can do. People have a hunger for worship same as they do for food and loving.” I had heard Preacher Liner say something like that one time at a meeting and never forgot it.

“I go to church,” he said. “I've always gone to church.”

“But I prefer sometimes services where the Spirit moves, where the meeting is not dry and dead,” I said. But I did not know how to explain how I felt at revivals when I danced or spoke in tongues. It was hard to put the feeling into mere words. “Most churches go through the motions of worship, like some duty,” I said. “They have meetings like mournful chores to get through.”

“I'd hate to judge other folks's worship,” Tom said.

“That's what I'm asking, that you not judge my worship,” I said. “Here, let me read what it says in Acts.” I wanted to warm up the
chilly space that opened between us when I mentioned the Holiness meetings. I was still hoping to make Tom understand.

“‘And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place,'” I read. “‘And suddenly there was a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.. . . Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.'”

It was a passage that always thrilled me. I had heard it so many times I knowed it by heart. Just listening to the words made me feel lifted off the ground.

“But you don't need such doings here,” Tom said. “Everybody on the river speaks the same language.”

I saw that he did not understand. He heard things the way he wanted to.

“But language can mean a message,” I said. “It means everybody hears the message they need. That's the miracle.”

“I don't see the use of acting drunk and crazy,” Tom said. “That won't help nobody.”

“Peter answered that very charge,” I said. “Listen to this. ‘And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this? Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine. But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and said unto them, Ye men of Judaea, and all ye that dwell in Jerusalem, be this known to you, and hearken
to my words: For these men are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.'”

“That was a long time ago in a different place,” Tom said.

“But it's a message for today,” I said. “It is especially for today. Listen to this. ‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my spirit: and they shall all prophesy: And I shall show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke.'”

I felt almost light-headed reading those words they was so powerful. It was the promise of prophesying, and signs and wonders, that stirred me most. I could hardly read them without tears coming. That promise was the richest thing we had.

My arguments was just making Tom quieter and stubborner, but I couldn't stop myself.

“People are here to praise the Lord and be joyful,” I said.

“They wasn't put here to act like fools,” Tom said.

“It's dangerous to call other people fools,” I said. “The Bible says it puts you in danger of hellfire.”

“If people act like fools why not call them what they are?”

I had set out to explain to Tom what a joy the Pentecostal services was, and here I had just made him madder. I couldn't let it end there, and yet I couldn't think of what to say.

“Let me read you this piece from
The Moody Monthly
,” I said. I smiled to myself remembering Florrie's sacriligious joke. Every woman gets moody monthly, she liked to say.

But Tom didn't answer. He looked at his hands on the table and he looked at the floor. I could tell from the set of his shoulders he just wanted to be out working by hisself.

“The Lord wants us to be happy,” I said, “not all troubled and angry. Not riled up most of the time.”

I don't know what Tom believed, except that folks should go to church on Sunday. He never liked to talk about what he thought. I guess the way Pa and me and Joe talked and argued all the time made him quieter than he would have been.

“You mean like the Happyland colony?” he said. It was the first time I had ever heard him be sarcastic.

“I don't know much about the Happyland colony,” I said. “It was mostly gone by the time I can remember.”

What I did know was that a group of freed slaves from Mississippi or somewhere had come to the mountains after the Confederate War and built houses on the Lewis place. They was led by a preacher named Robert Montgomery. In the mountains Montgomery called hisself king and his wife Luella queen of the community they named The Kingdom of the Happyland. Some members worked at the Lewis place to pay their rent. But in the Kingdom everybody owned things in common. I had heard the king and queen had a fine carriage and wooden thrones they set on.

“I growed up near the Happyland,” Tom said. “And when they had their meetings at night you could hear them hollering and screaming. They danced so hard they packed the ground.”

“I guess they was happy not to be slaves anymore,” I said.

“They was just ordinary people,” Tom said, “except at their services they went wild. You never would have dreamed of such
goings-on. They was supposed to be Christians but they hollered and leaped around like crazy people. Sometimes the women would take down their dresses and dance naked, shaking theirselves in the lantern light. They used skulls and blood in their services. I think some of it was voodoo. They would keep us awake till the small hours if it was a full moon or warm weather.”

“Everybody worships different,” I said.

“They would go crazy,” Tom said. “They would hurt theirselves jumping over things. One feller broke his leg when he climbed a tree in a fit and jumped out of it.”

“I guess that was just an accident,” I said.

“Mama was ashamed for me and Sister to hear such ravings,” Tom said. “She used to close the windows when their services got going. But once I slipped out and hid in the woods to watch.”

“I bet you wanted to see those women take down their dresses,” I said, and slapped his knee. Tom didn't even smile.

“It was heathen stuff,” he said. “They shook like they was having fits.”

“Don't nobody take off their clothes at our services,” I said. “At least I've never heard of it.”

“Once a woman got so worked up dancing she give birth to a baby,” Tom said. “But the baby was dead. I seen it the next day laying on a table before they buried it.”

“Maybe it was a miscarriage,” I said.

“It was murder,” he said. He looked at his feet and shook his head. “The thing was the Happylanders was ordinary people in the daytime,” Tom said. “I worked with them and they worked good. They was good people, except their king led them wrong and made them worship him. He done it to keep them under his thumb.”

“It might have been their greatest pleasure,” I said.

“Worshipping him?”

“No, having their meetings and dancing and singing.”

“People have no business working theirselves up crazy,” Tom said. He turned away again.

“We can't know what's in other people's hearts,” I said.

But he didn't answer. I saw he thought he'd talked enough. Tom saw words as commitments he did not want to make unless he had to. I think he felt any verbal commitment was over-commitment. I know he thought most talk was a mistake. “People get in trouble talking,” he liked to say. “It's the tongue that destroys you.”

I think he believed human honesty was in the arms and hands, in a strong back. That's why he was such a good lover. He had confidence in anything done with his body. “Nobody can talk for ten minutes without telling a lie,” he would say. I don't know where he had heard that, but he would repeat it from time to time. Since Pa and me and Joe and Florrie and Locke all liked to talk, it was an accusation. But we didn't mind Tom setting there not saying much. He was a good listener when he wanted to be.

“Want me to read the paper?” I said. “There's another story here about Cuba.”

“I don't care,” he said. “It's almost bedtime.”

After we got married I was surprised at who Tom got along with and who he didn't like. He did not often express his opinions about people, but I could tell how much he come to like Florrie. I think it was because Florrie teased him and was
always telling jokes. And when she told a joke she would slap him on the arm or on the belly. If they was standing up she would almost certainly pat him on the tummy. It was a gesture she liked to make. Tom was such a strong feller, solid and compact, and it was like she couldn't hardly keep her hands off him.