He got anything to eat?
He smiled like a tired uncle and dug a handful of jerked beef from his pocket and tossed it over.
Chew it good, he said. Else it’ll repeat on ye.
I hope it do. I ain’t had no grub in I couldn’t say when.
Can ye listen while ye chew?
She nodded.
Then let me get my dollar’s worth.
Meanwhile, William R. McKissick Junior was slipping through the alleys of Old Texas and peeking in its windows. His plan: rescue the whore and get his handjob. She hadn’t come back like she said she would, which meant the widow-witches must’ve nabbed her. He hoped, as he searched, that he might see a nekkid lady. But so far he’d seen little more than ladies sleeping in chairs by dead men on tables or sideboards. In one of the houses he saw the six children he was supposed to have been watching. Asleep on pallets on the floor. They looked cleaned up, at least. He hoped the widows had given them something to eat and wouldn’t have minded a cob of corn himself.
He went along the back of the house and stood breathing in the shadows. Something pulled at his britches-leg and gave him a hard bite. Rat. He kicked it against a wall and it fell and got up and lurched at him again, hissing, its ears back. There was a pitchfork against the nearest wall and the boy seized it and skewered the rat and left it to wiggle itself to death and went on, scratching at the bite.
I remember last October, Mrs. Tate said. When you first came to our town. I knew what you were.
What was I?
She stared at her dead husband but spoke nothing.
Smonk chuckled and stubbed out his cigar in Elmer Tate’s hair and collected a dip of snuff between his fingers. I remember too, he said. That day ye mean.
A year before.
With Ike watching from the east hills, Smonk had ridden into town on a blind mule named Fargo, now deceased, past the well and up the hill and off the mule into the store. The man behind the counter had paled at Smonk’s countenance and demeanor and his impatient claws clacking the countertop. He’d pointed him down the street to the town clerk who could help him with the parcel of land and the deserted sugarcane plantation he wanted to purchase. On his way, already limping with the gout, he’d stopped in the street before this very house. He’d stood staring for so long that Tate finally came out onto the porch with a rifle, making tiny, careful steps. Casting wary eyes. Said, Could I help ye, stranger? Naw, Smonk had answered, looking past Tate to the woman’s face through the window-glass.
I wondered why ye didn’t invite me in for a gourd of licker, he said now. Dusty as these Octobers can get.
She said nothing.
He offered a pinch of snuff and she shook her head. Go on have a dip.
It’s vulgar, she said. A man’s nasty habit.
You want to tell me ye don’t take a dip ever twilight I’m gone call ye a liar. I can smell it thew ye skin. Besides, we been watching ye, my partner and me. Out there in the sugarcane watching ye town a whole goddamn year. So don’t believe that it’s a thing about all you old heifers I don’t know or ain’t seen. Yer pansy menfolk went down easier ’n a goddamn orphan-house full a blind babies. We know who ye bailiff is, too. My former employee. Followed me here. Did he tell ye that? Born killer, that one. Did ye know what was walking among ye?
She said nothing.
We know ye killed the judge, too, though I can’t blame ye there. We know ye burn ever animal ye can catch. Know the ones of ye that still suffers her monthlies is suffering em now. And we know, he said, about yer church.
She glared for a moment, but then her wrinkles relaxed in her forehead and her bottom lip furled down. She lowered her head. I think I’ve changed my mind, she said.
There ye go. He came and with two of his sharp yellow nails deposited the pinch of snuff-powder against her gums.
You want ye teeth in?
They were in a jar of water on the table. He fished them out and held her jaw—Don’t bite now, he said, grinning—and fitted them in and she contorted her face until they worked into place.
Smonk returned to his chair behind the old woman and they sat quietly. He drank and replaced the gourd on the detonator. You got a bowl for spitting?
No, I do not.
He leaned and spat on her rug.
Animal, she said.
Smonk cranked the broom handle and she peeped. Animal, he said. Is that what I am.
I reckon evil happen ever now and again, Ike said to Evavangeline. Here and there in the world. Can’t keep it at bay. Start this way or that way. People dabbling where they ought not. Witches and they conjures. Tarot cards, crystal balls. Doctors with they potions and scalpels. Men in congress with dogs and eating live monkey brains and the like. All of em, meddling up in God business. Reaching too far back in the drawer. Evil happen. Here, there. Started in Old Texas a long time ago, after the War commenced, when the North started they work and ever white man and boy in town and them farmers beyond, ever one who could get on a horse and go got on one and went. Volunteered like fools to die fighting the Yankees.
Evavangeline chewed jerky and listened as Ike’s story began. He told how when the War started only a few men and boys—too old, young or sickly—had remained in Old Texas with the ladies and farms. But one was a tall preacher named Snowden Wright. He’d been born with one arm—where the other should have been, up at his shoulder, was a nub with six tiny fingernails. As desperate as the army was for soldiery, they still sent him back home (all four times) he tried to sign up.
Once he’d resolved to stay, however, he took charge of the town, swearing to help all the wives while their men were gone fighting. He did their farmwork and preached Sunday sermons and counseled the ladies at their daily lives. He solved their disputes. Advised them. Whipped their unmindful boys and girls and comforted the wives in their darkest hours.
Then one morning, as he collected eggs in his henhouse, a possum dropped from the rafters onto his neck and bit him. He suspected the animal had the ray bees as daylight appearances were unusual for its kind, as was the savagery this specimen displayed. He caught it and put it in a cage and watched it refuse water and bat itself against the wire and slobber and try to bite him.
A thoughtful, self-educated man, the Reverend Wright had squatted before the cage for hours, clutching his Bible and staring as the creature snapped at him and ground its face through the wire mesh with no thought to pain or self-preservation, as if all the world’s rapture lay in the union of tooth and flesh. Day, night, Wright watched the creature thrash itself to death, the preacher thinking, What will I learn O God upon my journey.
He burned the possum when it finally succumbed, and on waking several mornings later with sweats and shivers, ill at the sight of water, he had the ladies of his church lock him in a makeshift cell he’d built in the livery barn and assign a guard. Day and night he fought the disease, alternately praying and cursing God, ripping his clothes off, tearing his skin with his own fingernails. Bruises flowered on his chest and shoulders from his battering the bars. He endured fits where he couldn’t remember his own name but also relished spells of clarity, his eyes pooling at the beauty of sunlight patterned on wood and a chain’s oiled grace. In these calm moments he knew the position of every insect in the barn and could tell one sparrow’s voice from another and see in the dark.
He called for his daughter, a girl abnormally tiny and sixteen years of age. She had good handwriting and as he lectured and preached she copied down what she heard. How his condition had revealed truth he otherwise wouldn’t have known. The ray bees, he said, were the living key to God and God had told Snowden Wright that He, God, was making him, Wright, a prophet, that they should alter their church to the ways of his telling.