It was just talk at first, and I don’t remember much of the early stuff. Mostly it was the Reverend Joy doing the talking, about this and that, but there was something about his tone that made me feel like he had something wild caught inside his head and was trying to sneak up on it and let it loose without getting bit.
He said, “I don’t know that I have actually been called to preach.”
“God called you?” Mama said.
“I thought so. I really did. But now I’m less certain. I am beginning to think I called myself.”
“You know why your church members are leaving, don’t you?” Mama said.
“I do.”
“And so do I. But instead of us leaving, instead of making it easy for you, we’ve stayed. We’re at fault here. If we leave, things will go back the way they were.”
“It’s all right.”
“No,” Mama said. “No, it’s not. Tomorrow we are going to load up and go on down the river.”
“It’s too late for that, Helen,” he said. “What’s done is done.”
“Maybe not,” she said.
I could see the reverend’s arm move now and again, and then there would be a little plop in the water. I came to know he had a little pile of rocks with him, picked up on the way down, I figured, and he was chunking them into the water. He finished off the last of them and quit chunking. They both sat looking out at the dark river.
“You never told me why you were going down the river in the first place,” he said.
Mama thought for a long time before she spoke. “I’m on the run from my husband, and the children are trying to get out to Hollywood.”
“California?”
“Yes,” she said, and then she told him the whole dang thing, except about the money and May Lynn being with us. She left that part out. I’m not sure why, but she did, and I was glad. But she told him near everything else. Even told him about Brian and her pregnancy, and how me and Don didn’t get along, and how he hit her and me. She said some bad things about Gene, and so on. It surprised me she told him about the pregnancy part, marrying Don on the downslide, because she hadn’t told me any of that until recent, and here she was sharing it with some fellow she had only known for a little while.
When she finished, she said, “And now you know what kind of woman I am.”
“Before you start feeling bad about your existence, you should know something about mine,” he said. “I am a murderer.”
I was so startled I stood up, and then sat back down.
“Surely not,” Mama said.
“Not by my own hand,” he said. “But a murderer just the same. When I was a teenager I stole a man’s rifle. It wasn’t much of a rifle, but it was a theft. I was seen in the area where the rifle was stolen, and was questioned. I blamed it on a colored boy I knew. We had grown up fishing the river together, playing together. We had a big tree where we played, a great oak that overhung the river. We would go there to jump from limbs into the water and swim.”
It was exactly the same thing me and Jinx and Terry and May Lynn used to do. It was odd to think he had been a kid, just like us, doing the same thing we did for fun.
“One time,” he continued, “the water was running swift from a big rain, and I jumped in and it was too strong for me. Jaren, that was his name, leaped in there after me, grabbed me, and fought that current. We both near drowned, but he stayed with it long after I had tuckered out. He pulled me out of the river. This very river. The Sabine. Saved my life. I told him then and there that I owed him my life, and that I would stand by him forever. And then this thing with the rifle came up.
“I had seen the old man prop it against his porch when I was walking by on my way to the fishing hole, where I was going to meet Jaren. Well, I can’t explain it other than the devil was talking directly at me, but it came to me that I could just walk up on that empty porch, take hold of that rifle before he knew it was missing, and run off. And that’s what I did. I took it home and hid it in our barn.
“Thing was, though, the old man noticed it missing immediately, and next thing I know the sheriff was at my door. The old man had seen me coming up the road, and he told the sheriff, and the sheriff asked me if I had stolen the rifle. I told him no. I told him I wouldn’t steal, but I had seen Jaren going up that road ahead of me, and said he was known to be a thief, which wasn’t true. But I told him that because the hot breath of the law was on my neck. They went and got Jaren, and even though they couldn’t find the rifle, their blood was up. If it had been me they had, even if they had the rifle I stole, I’d have gone to court and maybe to jail. But Jaren, being colored, well, it was like a coon hunt.
“They got him and took him out in the woods, and they castrated him and chained him to a stump and poured pitch all over him and set him on fire. I heard them bragging about it down by the general store. They was bragging on how long he screamed and how loud, and how it all smelled. They was proud of themselves.
“I went out to where they said they had burned him. I could smell that cooked meat before I could see him. All that was left of him was a dark shape with bones sticking out of it. Animals had been at him. I was going to bury him, and had even brought a shovel with me, but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t stand it. I went over and lay down in the woods and just passed out asleep. Then I heard a noise and woke up. I looked out from the trees and saw a wagon pulled by a couple of mules. There was a man and a woman in the wagon, and I knew who they were right off. I had eaten dinner at their table more than once. It was Jaren’s parents. And all the time they were there, his mother was moaning and crying and yelling to the sky. The man got out of the wagon with a blanket and laid it on the ground, and he got that body free and stretched it out on the blanket, and rolled the sides of the blanket over what was left of Jaren, and carried and put him in the back of the wagon. When Jaren’s father finished, he and his clothes were covered in char from Jaren’s body.
“Jaren’s mama climbed back there with the body, and his daddy clucked the mules up, and they started off. I could hear his mama yelling and carrying on long after they were out of my sight. I got sick and threw up, and could hardly walk, but finally I went and got the rifle, determined I was going to tell the law I had taken it, but then I thought, what does it matter now? They’ve killed Jaren. And I’d be incarcerated. I was a coward. I took the rifle down to the river, by the oak tree where Jaren had saved me from drowning, and threw it in the water. I stayed quiet about what happened, and now and again I would hear those men laugh about the time they burned a nigger, and how they had shown that thief a thing or two. Jaren wasn’t even a person to them. He was a thing. Castrating him wasn’t any different to them than castrating a hog, and burning him wasn’t any different than setting fire to a stump. I never told anyone until now what really happened. One day, that memory was haunting me like a ghost, and I came to the conclusion that God, to help me repent, had called upon me to spread his word. Now I think my own guilt might have been talking to me.”
“Oh, Jack.”
“Yes. Oh, Jack.”
“How old were you when this happened?”
“I was thirteen, but age doesn’t matter. I knew better. I sold him out for something he didn’t do to keep from being tagged with the deed myself. They didn’t question him. They didn’t find the rifle on him. They just killed him. I always wondered if the last thing they told him was that they knew he had taken that rifle because I told them so.”
“You poor man,” Mama said.
“Me? Goodness, no. Me? Why, I’m the scum of the earth. I have murder on my hands, and I tried to absolve it by preaching. And now I know I wasn’t even called. I called myself. And I’m not really any different, not at the core. That little colored girl, Jinx. She’s just as smart and good as she can be, and I guess I thought I could make up for one evil deed by saving her soul so she wouldn’t go to hell. But it’s me that’s going to hell, not her. It’s me that belongs with the devil.”