The Truest Pleasure (2 page)

And the little irritations would not matter either. I would not be concerned with the cold mornings when I had to go out to the cow stall to milk and the cow would kick me with a filthy foot. And I would never have to worry about the blues that made me feel lower than the earthworms. And I did not need to feel guilty for not fixing myself up every day the way Florrie and Lily did. From now on I would practice charity naturally and give to those in need what was in my power to give.

I stepped into the aisle and walked toward the preacher on tiptoe. I did not jerk as Lily had. I kept my eyes on Preacher McKinney and took short quick steps. Lily was setting in the corner wiping her eyes, but I did not look toward her.

“This sister is in the Spirit,” the preacher said. He reached out and placed his hand on my head and I begun to shudder and melt. I quivered throughout my bones and sunk toward the sawdust like jelly. I wanted to sink in the ground to show my humility. I wanted to fall and float right into the earth under the horizon.

And as I hit the ground I felt myself spun over. The only way to show humility was to wallow like a mare. I had to stretch out and shed my vanity. I spun and rolled as if carried by a flood across the room. Turning, I felt pulled underground, deeper and deeper into humility. Only by turning could I reach the center.

I touched the edge of the brush arbor and as I begun rolling back I felt the fire around me. The flames bathed and caressed me. The fire scorched away all pride and dirt of willfulness and the pain of vanity. I was lower than anybody in the room, and it was only by lowering myself that I could be cleansed. The fire burned and cooled me at once. Flames stretched through my thoughts and across the sky millions of miles like endless sunsets one after the other. The fire reached the edge of dark space and brushed up against stars.

“You've got to fight fire with fire,” the preacher shouted.

I whirled and whirled and saw that everything was spinning. Days was spinning and the earth was spinning and the sun itself was turning. Everything was curves and circles.
Everything turned and returned. Each speck of me had been cleansed by turning.

This is the sweet geometry of light, I thought. This is the algebra of spirit and time. This is where flesh becomes clear as a lens and dust shines like Christmas candles. Carrion is radiant and new potatoes glow like babies. Lightning bugs pepper the dark. The coldest rock is on fire and icicles too. The sky is a blue fire and time runs its flame through everything.

When I stopped rolling I was too weak to do anything but lay in the shadows at the edge of the brush arbor. Sawdust and shavings stuck to my sweaty face and neck and my hair was tangled around my forehead. Sawdust was stuck to my legs behind my knees, but I didn't care. I felt emptied out and full at once.

“It is a privilege to be here tonight,” Preacher McKinney was saying. “In all my years of preaching I have never seen such an outpouring of the Spirit. We are blessed with a rare gift.”

There was shouting all around and a man, I think it was one of the MacBanes, hopped down the aisle and around the altar like he was crippled and hadn't walked for years but couldn't help hisself. “Thank you, Jesus,” he shouted, “thank you, Jesus.”

“What a taste of Glory tonight,” the preacher said. “What a great big tin tub of honey has been dumped over us.”

I heard somebody else speak in tongues, but couldn't tell who it was. The voice was so stretched it didn't sound like anybody I knowed. There was a stream of syllables like bubbles gargled and blowed from a pipe. Then there was more, and still more.

“Bless you, sister,” the preacher said and looked at me, and I saw it was me that had been speaking. I didn't even recognize
my own voice. The syllables stopped as fast as they had started. The last one fell off my tongue like a big final bead.

“Everybody come forward,” the preacher said. “Everybody come get down on their knees in front of the altar.”

I tried to pull myself up on my knees.

“The Spirit and the bride say come; let whosoever will take the water of life freely,” the preacher said, quoting Revelation.

I fell back on my butt I was so weak.

“Help the sister up,” the preacher said. One of the Jenkins men reached out and helped me raise to a kneeling position.

“Everybody on their knees,” Preacher McKinney said. “It's the only way to face eternity, right here on your knees in the dirt and sawdust.” Everybody come down and dropped to their knees, all close together. I was between Tildy Tankersley and the Jenkins boy. We crowded shoulder to shoulder.

“Now everybody put their arms around each other,” the preacher said. I put my left arm around Tildy's neck and my right on the Jenkins boy's shoulder. We got so close together it felt like everybody had their arms around everybody else.

“‘By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another,'” the preacher said. He got down on his knees and put his hands on the necks of two people right in front of him. I think it was Joe and Lily.

“Lord, we will get right down here in the dirt in our humbleness to you,” he said. “We ain't got no pride, and our strength comes from you. Without you we're no more than dirty rags. We that was once lost are now found. We that was filthy are now cleansed and saved with fire. Thank you, Jesus.”

“Thank you, Jesus,” we all said.

“Now hug each other closer,” the preacher said.

It was the most wonderful feeling as we all drawed each other to us.

“Hell itself cannot stand against love,” Preacher McKinney said.

I was aware somebody had put a hand on my breast and squeezed it. But in the packed-together crowd I couldn't see who it was and I didn't much care. We was so close everybody was touching somebody. We swayed as one body when the preacher prayed.

“This is what people was made for,” Preacher McKinney said. “We was put here to share in the joy of Christ's love, and to know Him through love.”

I don't know when I first noticed the smell of smoke. The scent of coal oil burning in the lanterns had been there from the beginning. And there was the scent of pine needles heated by the lanterns. But suddenly I caught the odor of smoke. At first I thought it was just a lantern, or the smell of pipe smoke on one of the men. But it was a dusty papery smoke. Everybody looked around at the same time and saw the hair of smoke pouring through the arbor, and heard the crackling.

It was such a shock it took us a few seconds to respond. People unlocked their arms and begun twisting and struggling to get up. Some helped each other and some crowded toward the door. “It's a fire!” Tildy screamed.

In a daze we all begun pushing toward the door. It was purely dark outside, but I could see the fire glow on the trees.

“Where is the spring?” Joe said.

“It's way up on the hill,” Emmett MacBane said.

“Closest water is the branch,” his brother Tilden said.

“Anybody got a bucket?” Pa said.

“It's the baptism of fire,” a voice shouted out in the woods, and there was laughter.

“Where's the bucket of drinking water?” Emmett said. It appeared somebody had stole the bucket and dipper from the stump in front of the brush arbor. But it was too late anyway. The pine brush on the walls and roof of the arbor had caught like tinder. The fire soaked right through the walls almost as soon as we got out. There wasn't much we could do but stand there watching the arbor drown in flames. Within a minute fire had reached into the frame and opened the walls. We could see the benches burning, and the pulpit and altar. There wasn't a thing we could do except gasp as the roof started falling a piece at a time.

“We will build it back,” Emmett said.

“We will build it back even bigger,” Tilden said.

“The Lord's work will not be stopped,” the preacher shouted to the darkness. The fire lit the trees far into the woods, but blinded by the flames I couldn't see a thing.

I don't remember much about the ride back down the river road. After the heat of the service, and the rage of the fire, the cool air felt good at first. But I soon begun to shiver in the dark and wish I had a coat. Joe lit the lantern but it didn't help much against the night chill. We creaked and rattled along the rough road under the stars. I brushed pieces of sawdust and shavings off my dress and out of my hair.

“You had a true baptism, Ginny,” Lily said to me. “I could tell it. I could tell you was in the Spirit.”

But now that we was out in the dark I didn't want to talk about the service. It felt wrong to talk about it.

When we got to the house it must have been past midnight. We had left Lily at her place up near the ford. Florrie and Locke had gone to bed and there wasn't even a lamp on in the living room. The katydids was so loud in the trees around the place it was hard to believe the house was there at all.

While Joe unhitched the horse and led him to the stable, Pa gathered kindling and cobs to start a fire. Because it was so clear, the night had got cold. I shivered and suddenly felt awful hungry. “Make the fire in the stove,” I said. “Build a fire in the stove and I will fix some biscuits and coffee.”

“I'm mighty hungry for cornbread and butter,” Pa said.

“Then I'll make some cornbread,” I said. I got meal and buttermilk and salt and soda and mixed them up in a batter by the time Joe come in. Pa had the cob fire roaring in the stove and the kitchen started to warm up. I poured the batter into a pan and put it in the oven. The water for the coffee begun to boil.

“He's the best I've ever seen since Elmira,” Pa said. “He's as good as his daddy was.”

“He's as good as Lilburn is,” Joe said, “and I always said L-L-Lilburn could outpreach and outshout anybody in Dark Corner.”

I wondered what they was going to say about my part in the service. Now that we was back home I felt even less like talking about it. It didn't seem right to discuss what had happened, not because what went on in the brush arbor was shameful, but because it was too sacred to talk about.

I put a cake of butter on the table and we had hot cornbread and butter and cool molasses and coffee with cream in it. The butter tasted better than ice cream on the hot bread. And the strong coffee matched the buttery sweetness of the molasses.

“The MacB-B-Banes will build another brush arbor,” Joe said.

“They should build a rock church,” Pa said. “Except then it would get just like all the other churches.”

“They could meet in somebody's house,” I said.

“It's not the s-s-s-same if you gather in somebody's parlor,” Joe said. “You need a sp-sp-special dedicated place.”

I saw what he meant, for I didn't even want to talk about the service, and what happened to me, now that we was among ordinary things. I wasn't ashamed. But it wouldn't be the same to have a service right in the living room. It would be hard to give yourself to such a meeting. Maybe I was a little embarrassed. I flicked another crumb of sawdust off my dress.

“Why it's two o'clock in the morning,” somebody said. It was Florrie standing in the doorway in her nightgown, frowning.

“Do you want some cornbread and molasses?” I said.

“I just got up to see who was making all the fuss,” Florrie said.

Everybody always said I was the most high-strung of the Peace children, but the hardest working. Sometimes I work because I can't stand not to be doing something, because I don't know where to look or where to put my hands. Other times I'll get so interested in a job I can't think of anything else. It will be like I forget I am me, and just think of the job, of what my hands is doing. That's when I feel the best, when I don't even think about myself, but about what needs to be done. I guess that's when I'm most at myself, when I don't even worry about it.

People say I got the “Italian” look from the Peaces and the Richardses. It's true I have Pa's black eyes and hair. But I got Mama's fair skin and height. People talk that way all the time, like they know why people look the way they do. But I don't think we know much about why people are what they are. Some children don't take after their parents at all. And I sure can't see traits going back several generations, to Italian, a trace of Italian, blood, or Indian blood, all the way to South Carolina, and Pennsylvania, and back to New Jersey and Wales even before that. I think we are just like God made us and we don't ever know much about our ancestors or what they did.

They always said I had a way of my own, and that much I'll agree to. I never did want to be anybody else. Some said it was
because Mama died when I was young, and I never had anyone to bring me up but my sister Florrie. There was nobody else to show how a girl ought to be. Some said it was because I fought with Florrie from the time I was a youngun and didn't have a chance to learn manners. Others said it was after Pa took me to the meetings that I got mixed up and nervous. And still others said it was because I read too many books that I acted quair.

But from the time I was just a little girl I always did pitch in if there was somebody sick. I visited the shut-ins and took plates of chicken to the bereaved. Even as a girl I went to poundings for somebody that had their house burnt and took a pound of coffee or of sugar, or a piece of ham meat. I wasn't more than fifteen when I helped wash and lay out a corpse. It was old Miss MacDowell up on Rock Creek that dropped dead while she was rendering lard. I helped put her on the cooling board and clean her up and even washed her hair.

People liked to say I was a worse bookworm than Pa and I reckon that was true too. Even as a girl I subscribed to the
Moody Monthly
and
American Magazine
. Pa took the Toledo paper and I read that too. And we got this magazine from Ohio called
The Telescope
that I went through every page of. I liked to read early in the morning before daylight. I'd get up and make coffee and read in the kitchen when the house was still quiet. That was the time I liked best, for it was cool in summer and too early to milk the cows. And in winter I'd get the fire going in the stove and have coffee and read before daylight, before Joe and Locke, my brothers, got up. Florrie never did wake up till she had to.