‘The Lord does work in mysterious ways, that’s certain sure,’ the old man found his text – ‘for example, the pitiful critter atop the county property happen to be my son.’
‘Here come the part I come for,’ somebody dug his naked toes in the earth with anticipated pleasure – ‘Here’s where thet busthead starts really taken holt.’
‘—a critter not long for this world,’ Fitz gave hope to all creation – ‘the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away – and the sooner he taketh away that particular civet, the air hereabouts will be considerable fitter for humans. His lungs is gone, his mind is weak, his heart is dry as an autumn leaf. The brickle thread of his life is ready to snap. I envy him his trials is about to cease!’
The man on the cannon tried to reply, but was trapped by a cough so racking that every face turned to his own. He was good as dead, those cold looks told, yet not one cared a tear.
Pressing a bandanna to his lips, Byron dismounted cautiously. His father’s cracked voice, with a dozen others as cracked, joined in a hymn familiar to all. That rose, contented in all its discords, in a chorus above all argument.
and pursued him down every step of the street hawking bloodily all the way.
They had come to see someone lose. That it should be the same doomed fool week after week gave a flip to their satisfaction. Saturday night after Saturday night, it was always Byron to be singled out. Between his cough, the crowd and his father, he always lost. What was it in him they had to disprove? What was it that mere repetition added?
Byron was one whose beginnings had been more brave than most – that was what needed disproving.
For how Fitz leaped then – literally leaped – clapping his hands above his head and barking triumphantly—
—in the name of Jesus, now come as you are!’ – and would skip down the steps, his sermon done, to take anyone’s bottle and everyone’s praise, mocking or sincere.
‘Keep your boots on, Preacher! Come just as you are!’
Fitz would be weaving a bit. Yet behind his shrouded glance a gleeful victory glinted. The Lord would forgive one who had defended His ark so well.
‘Preacher,’ one told him, ‘you just done my heart good tonight. You plumb restored me. Next week I’m bringen the younguns, they need restorin’ too. The old woman is beyond restoren. She aint been the same since the time she got throwed by the Power.’
‘You never should have picked her up,’ Fitz recalled an occasion when one of his listeners had passed out – ‘You should have left her right there where Jesus flang her. How’s she feeling?’
‘Better, thank you kindly. We got a bit of a job for you any time you’re of a mind to run out our way.’
That was all right with Fitz. If Protestant privies lined both sides of the road to the City of Pure Gold, by God he’d shovel his way to Salvation. But before he’d take money from papists rapists he’d go the other route. He was playing the whore to no man.
He was a Witness for Jehovah and saw the Holy See engaged in an international conspiracy against the Anglo-Saxon race in general and the Linkhorns in particular.
Papists Rapists! – that’s who it was who kept cheating!
Dove Linkhorn could not remember a time, a place nor a single person, house cat or hound dog that had sought his affection. But sometimes in the depths of a troubled sleep he had a fleeting feeling that a woman with red-gold hair had just touched his hand and fled beyond a curtained door.
A doorway that had not been curtained for years. The little cavern of a room was so sloping that the post of his high-ended bed touched its ceiling.
The old-fashioned bedstead they called a ‘stid’ – ‘It were Ma’s stid ’n all the makin’s was Ma’s too’ – ‘makin’s’ being the shuck-mattress, quilt coverlet, and two square pillows of the kind still called ‘shams.’ The sham on his left bore the embroidered legend, I slept and dreamt that life was Beauty. The one on the right, I woke and found that life was Duty. As often as not Dove’s head, in sleep, fell squarely in between.
That was just as well. Although he was sixteen he could read neither his pillow nor the sooty legend behind the stove:
Fitz had kept him out of school by way of protesting the hiring of a Catholic principal. But no one had protested his protest. No one had come to claim the boy for the board of education. There was no board of education.
If you wanted your young to learn, you sent them. If they wanted to, they went. If you didn’t and neither did they, they went to work.
There was no work. So they went to the movies. Dove had not yet seen one, but he planned to go pretty soon now. When John Barrymore and Marian Marsh came to Arroyo as Svengali and Trilby, he asked Byron to pay his way inside.
‘What if Eternity should come when you were on the Devil’s territory? What chance would you have?’ Byron asked for an answer, thus mocking both father and brother at once; and avoiding an admission that he didn’t have a nickel.
Dove hadn’t yet gone to a dance either. But he’d stood in the doorway of a hall and watched and kept time like the others—
Long after he had gone to bed that night the light from the bitch lamp kept him awake. The lamp had been made by fixing a rag wick to a stone and setting it in a vessel half-filled with whatever was left in the frying pan after the morning bacon was finished. Byron called it a ‘slut lamp.’ But Fitz always said ‘light the grease,’ and let it go at that.
By its ceaseless flicker Dove would see the pair of fools going at it again and both three sheets over. He would lay there moving his lips with the longest words he could pick up. ‘Corruption.’ ‘Generations.’ ‘Burnt-offering.’ ‘Peace-offering.’ ‘Sin-offering.’ Sometimes whole phrases: ‘What meaneth the heat of this great anger?’ ‘Would it were morning! For the fear of thy heart which thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.’
‘I can’t argue with you no more,’ Byron would surrender as the wick burned low, ‘I’m feeling the sickness too bad.’
‘Another name for the soul’s corruption,’ Fitz assured him.
‘How do you feel these days yourself, Pappy?’ Byron asked.
‘Well and contented,’ the old man replied.
Even Dove knew the old man lied.
Mexican and American alike, the townsfolk knew that the preacher was off his rocker and that Byron smoked too much potiguaya bush for a lunger. ‘I was born to smoke bush,’ he boasted, ‘I may die poor but I won’t die tied.’ But what to make of Dove with his hair neither red nor yellow? And brows so light he looked browless? ‘You right sure that boy got everything he’s suppose to have?’ one doubter asked another.