It was a good life and easy, and I wasn’t having to carry stove wood to bed with me. There wasn’t any sudden outburst that ended in Mama holding her eye and limping off to the bedroom. The reverend had a good singing voice, and he sang spirituals and old songs, and he sang them well, like his voice was coming from down deep in a well.
This enjoyment didn’t keep me from allowing the reverend to help us build that rudder he talked about for our raft. Then he built a kind of hut made of lumber and logs in the middle of it. It wasn’t much of a hut, but it could hold all of us at one time if we didn’t breathe heavy or think too hard. He even stocked the hut with a couple bags full of goods so that if we decided to leave, we’d have a few things with us.
But after it was built, we didn’t leave. We was like flies stuck in sweet molasses. Things was so comfortable there, I was beginning to think we had gotten worked up for nothing, and no one was following us. A few miles down the river had given us a freedom. It had been at our fingertips and we hadn’t even known it. I had hesitated about running away from home, but now realized just how much of a captive I had been. What really struck me was there hadn’t been no walls or guards around me, yet I had stayed in my prison on a kind of honor system. I had been my own guard and prison wall, and hadn’t even known it.
As I said, the reverend slept in his car, and now and again he would sit at the table in his house with a big pad and pencil, the Bible at his elbow, and would write out sermons. To see how they would go with his flock, he would try them out on us. We told him how it all hit us, and gave him a few tips on how it might sound better to his listeners. He didn’t even mind that a nonbeliever like Jinx had some suggestions. He got so good at delivering them sermons, Jinx was damn near ready to get baptized.
While we was there, for our keep, we did chores. Mama hoed out the garden and showed Reverend Joy how to better take care of it. She even looked stronger, and the gardening gave her use of her muscles and some sunlight. But, as Jinx said it would, the cure-all came back on her. She had seemed clear of it, but then her need for it showed up. She did have a few days and nights where she got weak, yelled, and had some bad dreams-dreams about that black horse, and the other, winged now, and white as a cloud. We held her while she talked out of her head. The reverend didn’t even ask her what was wrong. Just sat by her and put a damp rag on her head. It was clear to me he knew what was going on, but it was also clear to me he never intended to say a word. During the day Mama tossed and turned and the bed was wet with her sweat, which was thick as hog lard on the sheets.
After a few days of this, Jinx went off in the woods and got some roots and bark and such, brewed it all up together, put it in a cup, and gave it to Mama to sip. Jinx said it was what they had given her uncle that caused him to quit drinking. Mama tried to fight off drinking that stuff, but she was too weak. Jinx was able to slip it down her throat. From the smell of that mess, I figure Mama got better just to keep from having to drink any more of it. Jinx said it was because she wasn’t a true-to-the-bone drunk, but was a drunk in her head, which meant she just didn’t like her life and wanted to get away from it, and that the cure-all was the door out. Now that she had gotten off it, and things was good, she had lost the desire, and unlike most drunks, the worst of which would drink shoe polish or hair tonic if it had alcohol in it, Mama was most likely done with it. Or so we hoped.
It got so Mama washed the reverend’s clothes, and ours, and while she did my overalls and shirt, I had to wear my good dress. This led to the reverend telling me how pretty I was, and it led to me believing it to such a point, next thing I knew I was up in church singing with the choir.
We all started going to church, and even Jinx got to come in, but she had to stay in the back and was told not to be too familiar with white people, and she wasn’t supposed to discuss her views on religion, even if she was asked a direct question. That was okay with her. She mostly slept through the sermons.
Truth is, we was all pretty content.
Now, there did get to be some talk. Folks at the church started asking me about us, about where we had come from, how long we had been at the reverend’s house, and exactly what was his and Mama’s arrangement. They also wanted to know why was we staying around with a nigger, meaning Jinx, of course. I told them we was just folks he was helping out with good Christian charity, and that he was sleeping in the car and Mama in the house, and there wasn’t nothing funny going on, and Jinx was a friend, which was a thing that kind of concerned them. They will tell you they got “good nigger friends,” if you ask, but what they mean is they have colored folks who they know and nod at and hire for jobs wouldn’t nobody do if they didn’t need the quarter, which was a kind of standard payment for everything from cutting grass to chopping wood, even if it was done all day in the hot sun.
To sum it up, his flock started to talk bad about Reverend Joy after church, and fewer men shook hands with him at the door. Even the kids run by him like they was passing a wasp nest, and my guess is they didn’t know sin from a pancake.
The women would stand out in the church lot and yak and think I wasn’t hearing them, but I have good ears, and I’m nosy, too, so I heard a lot.
There was one woman about Mama’s age, not bad-looking in a kind of long-nosed anteater way. She was always narrowing her eyes and smiling, but that smile reminded me of how a dog will do when it’s trying to decide if it ought to snarl or not. She seemed to be the main source of the gossip, and reason for that was plain to me. She was the one Jinx identified as the Too Much Salt in the Fried Chicken Lady; the one that came around and smiled and brought food, and tried to peek about to see if Mama had her underwear hanging over the door or some such business. It was clear to me that she saw herself not so much as a protector against sin but as someone disappointed the sin she suspected wasn’t hers, and that she wasn’t going to be what she most wanted to be-the preacher’s wife.
Anyway, she and them other women was talkers, standing around in their good-enough dresses and spit-shined shoes, their big church hats propped on their heads. It was the kind of talk that made me want to break off a limb and take to whacking her and that bunch of hypocrites across the back of the head.
I started to tell Mama and Reverend Joy about it, but figured if I did, then we’d have to leave, and we’d be on the river again in the Kingdom of the Snake. I thought about what it was we had planned to do, thought about May Lynn from time to time, about her being in a bag, and that she was still a long way from Hollywood. But the truth was, it wasn’t at the front of my mind.
Terry, the one who most wanted to take her out there, had even settled down, though now and again he would take the bag with May Lynn in it and go out and set with it on the edge of the raft like they was spooning. I even heard him talking to her once when I come up behind them. I was on my way to sit on the edge of the raft and dunk my feet in the river, but when I heard him talking, I decided to turn around and go back up the hill and leave them to it. In time, he found a lard can to keep her in, like the money. I guess he figured that was safer, and it had a nifty handle for carrying.
Only Jinx wanted to move on, though I don’t know how much May Lynn’s ashes had to do with it. For all his kindness, the reverend still treated Jinx a bit like a stain. He had stopped trying to convert her, however, and said something about there being some souls that was bound on the Judgment Day train for hell and there was no way to stop it. He would bring this up now and again, and when he said it, he would look at Jinx, and she would go, “Choo-choo.”