Through the right-side window could be seen vague figures of shirt-sleeved men and black-shouldered women swaying back and forth, locked in tight embrace; the locked liquid motions steady and unchanging despite the eccentricity of the music, sometimes keeping on the beats, sometimes in between. The Bear Hug and the Georgia Grind were being performed with a slow steady motion. Black skin gleamed like oily shadows in the dim yellow rays of the single flickering light of the kerosene lamp.
“Missa Pinky,” came a soft small voice from the dark.
Pinky jumped and wheeled about.
Big white circles shone from a small black face almost invisible in the dark. The skinny barefooted figure was clad in a patched mansize overall jumper.
“Boy, what you want at this time of night?” Pinky said roughly.
“Will you please, sir, go up and ask Sister Heavenly for two pods of Heavenly Dust for Uncle Bud?”
“Why don’t you go up and get it yourself?”
“She won’t sell it to me. I is too young.”
“Why don’t Uncle Bud come get it hisself?”
“He’s feeling po’ly. That’s why he sent me. He ain’t got the faith no more.”
“All right, give me the money.”
The boy stuck out a hand holding two crumpled dollar bills.
Pinky went beneath the arbor and knocked on the back door.
“Who dat?” a disembodied voice asked from within.
“Me, Pinky.”
Two white crescents flickered briefly in a glass pane of the upper-door panel. There was the click of a simple mortise lock and the door swung open.
With his eyes accustomed to the dark, Pinky made out the vague figure of a stone-old, gray-haired man clad in a blue cotton nightgown which seemed to float about the pitch-dark kitchen. Faint bluish gleams came from a double-barreled shotgun which the old man held cradled in his right arm.
“How is you, Uncle Saint?” Pinky greeted politely.
“Middling,” the old man replied. His voice seemed to come from another part of the room.
“I’s going up to see Sister Heavenly.”
“You got feet, ain’t you?” Now his voice seemed to come out of the floorboards between Pinky’s feet.
Pinky grinned dutifully and went through the kitchen toward the stairs in the back hall.
He found Sister Heavenly sitting on a high throne chair in the corner of the attic farthest from the light. In the dark shadows she was an indistinguishable shape wrapped in dull black cloth.
A sick man lay on a stretcher on the floor at her feet.
Sister Heavenly was a faith healer. Pinky didn’t dare approach her while she was “ministering”.
“You is going to be happy,” she crooned in an old, cracked voice which still retained remnants of a bygone music. “You is going to be happy — if you got the faith.”
Her body swayed from side to side in time with the slow steady beat of the bass.
The man on the stretcher said in a weak voice, “I is got the faith.”
She crept down from the throne and knelt by his side.
Her thin, clawlike, transparent hand extended a silver spoon containing white powder toward his face.
“Inhale,” she said. “Inhale deeply. Breathe the Heavenly Dust into your heart.”
The man sniffed rapidly four times in succession, each stronger than the previous.
She climbed back into her throne.
“Now you is going to be healed,” she crooned.
Pinky waited patiently until she deigned to see him. She forbade interruptions.
Sister Heavenly prided herself on being an old-fashioned faith healer with old-fashioned tried-and-true methods. That was why she used old-fashioned gin-drinking musicians and directed her clients to dance old-fashioned belly-rubbing dances. It was the first stage of the cure. She called it “de-incarnation”.
She had kept Black Key Shorty on the piano for fifteen years. Washboard Wharton had come later. Both were relics of a bygone time. Washboard sat beside the piano holding a double-sided washboard which he strummed with rabbit-leg bones between his legs. Black Key had learned to play the piano in flats. Both were gin drinkers. They were the only ones she permitted to drink gin in her “Heavenly Clinic.” There was nothing wrong with them. But she had to heal the sick people who came to her with Heavenly Dust.
“What you want, Pinky?” she asked suddenly.
He gave a start; he didn’t think she had seen him.
“You got to help me, Sister Heavenly, I is in trouble,” he blurted out.
She looked at him. “You’ve been beat up.”
“How can you tell that, in all this dark?”
“You don’t have no milk shine like you generally does.” On second thought she added sharply, “If it’s the police who done it, you git away from here. I don’t want no truck with the police.”
“It weren’t the police,” he said evasively.
“Well then you tell me about it later. I ain’t got no time to listen to it now.”
“It ain’t only that,” he said. “There’s a little tadpole down in the backyard wants two pods of Heavenly Dust for Uncle Bud.”
“I ain’t selling no pods to little punks,” she snapped.
“It ain’t for him, it’s for Uncle Bud; and you don’t have to give it to him, I’ll do that,” he said.
“Well, give me the money,” she said impatiently.
He handed her the two crumpled dollar bills.
She examined the money with disgust. “I ain’t selling no pods for a dollar no more. Leastways not at this time of night.” She took one small paper packet from somewhere beneath her layers of garments and handed it to him. “You give him this and tell him the price is two dollars,” she directed, grumbling to herself. “How do them cheapskates expect to get healed for a dollar, with prices of everything as high as they is?”
“Another thing,” he said hesitantly. “I need a fix bad.”
“Go see your friend,” she said shortly. “He’ll stake you to a fix.”
“He ain’t my friend no more. He’s in jail.”
She wheeled about on her throne. “Don’t tell me you were in the rumble with him, ’cause if you’ve come here with yourself all hot, I’ll turn you in myself.”
“I weren’t with Jake when they caught him,” he denied evasively.
She was staring at him sharply as though she could see in the dark.
“Well, go down and open the buck rabbit and take a pill out,” she relented. “And don’t take but one, it’s all you’ll need, it’s a speedball. And be sure to close him up good. The spike’s in my bureau drawer.”
As he started to turn away, she added, “And don’t think you’re putting nothing over on me ’cause I ain’t through with you yet. You just wait until I get time to talk to you.”
“I got to talk to you too,” he said.
The man on the stretcher was twitching in time to the music. “It’s cool, Sister Heavenly,” he said in the voice of a convert giving a testimonial. “I got the real cool faith.”
Black Key Shorty was driving piles on the bass with his steady left hand while his right hand was frolicking over hot dry grass in a nudist’s colony. Washboard Wharton was giving out with grunting sounds like a boar hog in a pen full of sows.
The strong orgiastic smell of sweat and red-hot glands was pouring from the windows into the hot sultry air.
It didn’t mean a thing to Pinky. He felt so much like crying he was thinking only of a fix. He went down the stairs to the hallway and passed through the kitchen.
Uncle Saint floated from the shadows with his double-barreled shotgun.
“I’ll be right back,” Pinky said. “Sister Heavenly sent me to tap the rabbit.”
“Don’t tell me your troubles, I ain’t your pappy,” Uncle Saint said, unlocking the door. His voice sounded as though it had come from the bottom of a well.
The little boy in the overall jumper was waiting for Pinky in the grape arbor. He had discovered the grapes but was scared to take any.
“Did you get ’em, Missa Pinky?” he asked timidly.
Pinky fished the packet from his pocket. “Here, you give this to Uncle Bud and tell ’im the price has gone up. Tell him Sister Heavenly say don’t expect to get healed for nothing.”