Anyway, we stuck, cause sometimes when you’re happy, or at least reasonably content, you don’t look up to see what’s falling on you.
14
More time passed, though I don’t know exactly how long. I lost count of the days. When in church, I gradually noted that the number of people in the pews got smaller. It pretty much come down to Reverend Joy preaching to a smattering of hanger-ons and us, and we had heard it all before at the kitchen table and had even helped him fine-tune it. But we stuck out of loyalty, same as you would if a little kid wanted to read a poem to you they’d wrote and there wasn’t any real good excuse to go somewhere, though next to offering my hand to a water moccasin to bite, listening to someone read a poem is high on my list of things I can’t stand.
The women who had been bringing Reverend Joy food during the week, as it was customary to do for the preacher, stopped delivering it; that little perk we had been taking advantage of dried up like an old persimmon. Too Much Salt in the Fried Chicken Lady-or, as I sometimes thought of her, the Anteater-was the first to go.
After that, it was all downhill.
Her chatter, and that of her nest of hens, turned the flock so against the reverend, including that man we had seen him baptize, that some joined the Methodists, which was a low blow as far as Reverend Joy was concerned.
“They might as well be Catholics,” he said.
The reverend’s sadness began to rub off on us. Terry, who hadn’t been in any hurry to go, had taken more frequent to carrying May Lynn’s can of ashes and her diary to the raft. He’d sit there with the can by his side and the diary in his hands, reading. Jinx would sit on the raft with him, and do some fishing. Whatever she caught, she’d throw back. I had been wearing my good dress a lot even when I didn’t need to, but now I put it away and went back to my overalls. It got so I dreaded Sunday church and Wednesday prayer meeting. Before, all I had to do was sit through it, but now, watching the reverend preach was painful. He seemed smaller in his clothes, like a dwarf that had put on a fat man’s pants and jacket by mistake.
One Sunday evening there was only us and about five other people in the church. Four of them five was old folks who wouldn’t have changed churches if it caught on fire, and one was the local drunk, who liked to come there to sleep sitting up in the back pew next to where Jinx liked to sleep, though now and again he wasn’t above yelling out “Amen” or “Praise the Lord,” which was more than Jinx was willing to do. But unlike Jinx, the drunk did some of his sleeping lying down in the pew, where our girl would kind of hood her eyes and nod sitting up.
Anyway, this Sunday I’m talking about, after the sermon, Reverend Joy was quick to get out from behind the pulpit and over to the door. He stopped and let Mama walk with him down the hill toward the house. Before, he always went to stand in the doorway to shake hands, and we’d go ahead and meet him later. But now, like a dog bored of a trick, he was done, partly because the five listeners was as eager to leave as he was, including the drunk.
Me and Terry and Jinx watched Reverend Joy and Mama walking down the hill toward the house. It was still bright out, it being sometime in early July now, and we stood in the lot, picking up gravel and tossing it at a sweet gum that grew near the church. It wasn’t that we had anything against the sweet gum. It was just something to do.
“We ought to get on with it,” Jinx said. “May Lynn ain’t gonna go to Hollywood and scatter herself.”
“I have been thinking the same thing,” Terry said. “At first I found this comfortable, but less so now. I feel like we have been kidnapped by ourselves. That we are among the lotus-eaters.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Something I read in a book once,” he said. “Suffice to say that once you are in the clutches of the lotus-eaters, it isn’t easy to depart from them. You eat of the lotus and are led to believe everything is pleasant even when it isn’t. We had a plan, and we’ve laid it down. I suppose we should pick it up again. For me, the spell here is broken.”
“I don’t remember eating no lotus,” Jinx said. “Whatever that is.”
“It’s a way of speaking,” Terry said. “It represents a mood. A thought.”
“Why don’t you just say that?” Jinx said. “Why you got to represent it, or some such thing?”
“I’ll work to improve,” Terry said.
That night I lay on my pallet on the floor, dozing off and on, and then at some point I came wide awake. I felt like a hand had been laid on me and was shaking me, and when I woke, May Lynn was walking to the back of the cabin pointing in the direction of the river. She was wearing that same old dress she always wore. Her hair was wet and dripping and there was a sewing machine tied around her feet. She was dragging it behind her like a ball and chain, making no noise whatsoever. She was all swollen up like when we found her. When she got to the rear of the cabin, she turned and looked at me and frowned and jabbed one of her fat fingers at the back cabin wall, really hard. It was all so genuine I could smell the river on her.
Then I really woke up. I looked and there wasn’t no ghost, but I sure felt like May Lynn had been in the room, urging me to get back on that raft and get on down to Gladewater and then Hollywood.
The whole thing made my stomach feel suddenly empty. I was also hot and sticky. I thought I might creep over and get myself some cool buttermilk from the icebox, but when I sat up, now that my eyes had become used to the dark, I noticed the door to the bedroom, where Mama slept, was open.
I got up and tippy-toed so as not to wake Terry, who was sleeping at the rear of the cabin, or Jinx, who slept near the front door. I went and looked in the bedroom. The bed was empty. I went back to the main room and over to the window by the front door. I hesitated a moment, listened to Jinx snore. She sounded like someone had stuffed one of her nostrils with a sock. I moved back the curtain. There was nothing out there to see but heat lightning dancing above the trees and a few fireflies fluttering about, bobbing back and forth like they were being bounced off an invisible wall.
I went back to my pallet and got my shoes I had set by it, put them on, then crept quietly out the front door and closed it gently. I stood there on the porch trying to decide if I should go through with what I was thinking. Finally I decided I was going to do just that, even if in the end it harelipped the pope.
I sidled over to the reverend’s car and looked in the window. The reverend’s blankets and pillow was in the front seat, but he wasn’t with them, and Mama wasn’t there, which was a relief, but it wasn’t a deep kind of relief, because I still didn’t know where neither one of them was. I don’t exactly know why I was concerned about it, but I was. I didn’t like to imagine Mama would be with Reverend Joy, at least in the way I was thinking. I guess she had the right to some kind of happiness, but it still bothered me, and I suppose it was because I was wanting her and my real father, Brian, to rekindle things, so we’d be some kind of family.
I decided it was best not to know what they was doing. I started back for the house. Then I heard talking. It was coming from the rear of the cabin, so I went carefully along the side of it. When I got to the edge of the back wall, I realized the sound was not as near as I thought, but because of the slope of the hill, and the way it had a horseshoe sort of bend in it, voices were coming up from down there. The words wasn’t entirely clear, but I could tell the voices belonged to Mama and Reverend Joy.
I skulked down the hill, feeling like a thief with a baby under my arm and a hot pot of water and some salt and pepper waiting, and made my way through the cover of trees scattered here and there. I came to where the hill had a bit of a lift, and then another drop-off. I could really hear them good now. I sat down there on the edge of that drop-off because I could see them from there, too. It was just shapes I could see, but it was easy to recognize the shapes and voices. They was down by the water, sitting on the raft, talking. It was a rotten thing to do, but I sat down and listened.