“How, Bea?” Carmena said, ignoring Mrs. Garrett. “How does this remind you of back home?” Mrs. Garrett rubbed the elbow of her bad arm, then put the bad hand in the center of her lap.
Beatrice said nothing for several seconds. “It thundered and lightened a lot then, too,” she said. “I guess I was sixteen or seventeen and this fella I was keepin company with was sittin with me and my daddy on my daddy’s porch. There was a storm comin on while we were sittin there. There had already been a lotta rain, but not anough to do that much damage to the crops. I remember it was late in the evenin and so dark I could barely make out what was three feet in front a me. It was already rainin when the thunder and lightnin come up, and we was just sittin and talkin.
“Maybe a half hour or more into that storm, I started seein this figure, this thing, that kinda just stood in that corn patch in my mother’s garden. If I didn’t know the garden, I woulda thought it was a scarecrow or somethin. It was no further than from here to that television there. I looked and looked, tryin to see into all that dark, and then I told myself it was just a big corn stalk leanin out heavy with the rain. It made a move a corn stalk ain’t supposed to make but I tried not to think about it. ‘It’s corn,’ I said to myself. But when this thing moved again — moved different from all the other corn — I said this real quiet ‘Oh.’ I touched the fella I was keepin company with and pointed and we looked together. My daddy looked, too. This corn stalk, this thing, said, ‘Uncle…Uncle…Bea…’ Then it moved a few steps toward us. It was this cousin a mine, John Henry. He came even closer and just dropped heavy to the ground, cryin like a baby.
“I said, ‘John Henry, whas wrong? What is it?’ My daddy was already gettin up. ‘It’s them,’ he said. He was cryin so hard that I could barely make out what he was sayin. ‘It’s them,’ he kept sayin. ‘They just sittin there.’
“My daddy went down the steps to him, and when he touched John Henry, John Henry just jumped right up, real quick, like he was some doll and somethin had pulled him up by the neck. He took off down the path that led from his place to where we lived. The three of us — my daddy, me and this fella I was keepin company with — took off after him. It was rainin way harder than it is right now and we was soaked through fore we even took a few steps. All the way down there, I kept prayin, ‘Lord, don’t let me get struck by lightnin.’
“When we got to the house, John Henry was there lookin in the front door. ‘John Henry,’ my daddy said, ‘John Henry.’ We got there and looked in too. Everybody was just sittin around like he had said. My Uncle Joe, his wife Ebbie, her mother, and my Uncle Ray. There was a pipe stickin in Uncle Ray’s mouth, not lit, just stickin there like he did sometimes. The only light was from a coal-oil lamp on the mantlepiece and from a real small fire in the fireplace. It never crossed my mind why they would have a fire burnin on a summer evenin. But there it was — this one log that they kept there all spring and all summer, and it was steady burnin right in the center. I think I thought to myself how dark they all looked, but I put that to how feeble the light in the room was. They was all kinda gathered around the hearth, which wasn’t too strange cause yall know how some folks use the fireplace for the center of the house all year round. There was a buncha smells in that room. One was the kind you get when wood gets wet, and another was burnt hair. But around all of the smells was this one I hadn’t smelled before and ain’t smelled since. It was everything dead you had ever come across in your whole life piled at one time in that room.
“‘Joe. Ray,’ my daddy said to his bothers. Uncle Joe was sittin in that chair he’d made with his own hands, and he was starin at us. No, not really at us, kinda through us and around us at the same time. ‘Joe.’ My daddy went over to him. ‘Joseph!’ My daddy touched him and my uncle did nothin. Then my daddy pulled on my uncle’s shirt front and my uncle fell into my daddy’s arms, right into his arms, like some dime-store dummy. And that told us right then that he and everybody else was gone. It told me anyway. The fella I was keepin company with just said, ‘Jesus Christ!’ I fixed my eyes on him when he said that. I was feelin all kinds of things standin there, and you know, one a them was this feelin that I couldn’t ever keep company with that boy again.
“I looked around the room. This long black line that had cut a rut in the floor went from the fireplace through that group a people right out the room to the kitchen — like somebody had took a big fireball of barbed wire and run cross the floor with it.
“They was just sittin there and they was all gone. You could see where Aunt Ebbie’s mother had been rockin the crib with Aunt Ebbie’s baby in it. A wind was coming down the chimney and through the door, and it was rockin the crib, rockin Aunt Ebbie’s mother’s hand right along with it. I thought the baby was dead, too, but when I saw a leg twitch, I knowed he was alive. I picked him up and he didn’t look surprised to see me, he didn’t look happy or sad or anything. Just a baby waiting for the next thing in his life to happen. I put Aunt Ebbie’s mother’s hand in her lap. I did it calm-like and I was surprised at myself, the way I was actin. I musta been scared somewhere inside, but it was a long time before I knowed it. And then it stayed and never went away.
“‘Lightnin,’ the fella I was keepin company with said. ‘Lightnin.’ My daddy had put his brother back in the chair and he was standin there lookin down at him and my uncle Ray. The fella I was keepin company with pointed at the way the black line ran along the floor and out of the room. ‘Just came down the chimney, Mista Davenport,’ he said, proud that he knew what he knew. ‘Look at it!’ And we looked again when he said that, not so much cause a what he said, but cause somethin in our heads told us to make a everlastin memory of it.
“John Henry came into the house and went on out into the kitchen, his mud tracks walkin right over that black line. I followed him and I seen where the black line came to the kitchen table and hopped right up on it, threw everything every which way, then jumped back down to the floor and ran out the back door. One a the straightest lines you’d ever wanna see. John Henry’s little sister was sittin at the table. Alma was alive. She was cryin real soft, and I don’t think she’d moved since it happened. John Henry sat down and put his head in his hands. He started cryin again. All of a sudden I got weak as that dishrag there. I held the baby and watched them children. Their whole family. My family too. People who’d never done a moment’s harm to a soul. Not one moment’s harm. Somethin in me was struck by that when I started thinkin of Uncle Ray’s pipe stickin in his mouth and when I saw that one of Alma’s plaits had come loose, like they do on little girls. I didn’t know what else to do so I leaned Alma’s head against my stomach. Then I told em that it would be all right, but it didn’t mean anything and I knew it. If somebody had told me to say that tomorrow would be Easter, I woulda said that instead. But I kept sayin that everything would be all right until my daddy came in and picked Alma up and told us he was takin us home….”
The other women in Carmena Boone’s apartment were all quiet, and they were quiet for a long time. The rain had long since stopped. Finally, Mrs. Garrett said, “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” Her dentures made a soft clicking sound as she spoke. “For good or for bad, the Lord seeks you out and finds you. There ain’t no two ways about that.” She looked about the room as if for confirmation, and when no one said anything, she seemed to fold up into silence.
They were all quiet again, until Mrs. Garrett began to talk about the eleventh of August, 1894, the night she was saved…. The others looked knowingly at one another. The story never changed: a huge tent and an itinerant preacher and a little girl who was overcome that night with something she would years later learn to call the Holy Ghost. She had been frightened at first, with this thing that commanded without talking, she said, but it comforted her and led her down the aisle of the tent to the preacher’s outstretched arms. The story, after a thousand tellings, had ceased being an experience to share but was more like an incantation she had to chant to reaffirm for herself the importance of that night.