A Land More Kind Than Home (4 page)

What he did next I can't even picture quite good enough to tell just how it happened, but when I felt it on my skin I knew right then what it was; it felt just like the hand of a dead man, just as cold and clammy as it could be. He grabbed me by the neck just above my shirt collar and forced me to my knees right there in the front of the church, and when he did I heard the toe of his boot kick open the little trap on that crate. He let go of my neck and got ahold of my arm, and before I even knew he was going to do it he'd already stuck my arm down inside that crate, and he used that hand he'd once set on fire to hold it there. I tried to jerk it out, but he was just too strong, and when I tried to stand up he leaned one of his knees down on the back of my shoulders. My feet scraped at the floor, and I kicked at one of the metal folding chairs behind me in the front row. It fell over and the crash echoed along the floor. Chambliss acted like he hadn't heard it. I kept kicking my feet, looking for something that would help me stand, but there wasn't nothing there.

Chambliss stood above me and held on to me tight like I was some kind of hog he was fixing to butcher and he was afraid of me getting away before he'd done it. I tried again to jerk my hand free, but he held it there tight, and I could feel the cold, smooth skin of his fingers where they wrapped around my arm.

“Shhhh,” he whispered. “Don't fight it now. Don't fight it.”

I gave up then and quit struggling with him, and I can tell you that's when I took to praying. I closed my eyes and turned my head away from that crate, and that's when I heard it inside there; it was real quiet at first, like a light wind rustling dry cornstalks, but then that rattle got louder and louder until I just couldn't make myself pretend it was nothing else. I squeezed my eyes shut just as tight as I could, and I imagined feeling the prick of its fangs, something like a bad bee sting, and I imagined that venom coursing itself through my veins on the way to my heart. I pictured myself pulling my arm out of that crate after it struck me, the skin on my hand already turning black around the two puncture holes and the blue veins rising up all cloudy with poison. I pictured Miss Molly Jameson, how her face had swelled up, how she'd struggled to breathe, how they'd found her laying out there in her yard without the least idea of how she'd got there. I tell you that I thought I was going to die, and I did my best to get ready for whatever it was that was going to happen after I did.

“You ain't afraid, are you?” Chambliss whispered. I tried to say something to him, but it was like the words got caught in my throat and I couldn't cough them up good enough to speak. He gave my neck a hard squeeze and shook me good, and when he did I felt that rattler buck against the roof of its crate and I thought I'd been bit for sure. “Are you afraid!” he hollered at me then.

“No,” I finally said so quiet I almost couldn't hear myself. “I ain't afraid.”

“You ain't got to be afraid if you believe,” he whispered. “If you got your faith, there's nothing in this world that can hurt you. Not the law, not no man neither. Ain't nothing you need to fear but the Lord himself.”

Once he said that, I felt that hand let go of my arm, and I pulled it out of the trap on that crate just as fast as I could and tucked it under me with my other hand. I heard him close that trap with his boot, and then I heard him behind me setting that folding chair back upright. I still had my eyes closed because I was too afraid to even open them, and I stayed there on my knees on the floor with my arms pulled up under my chin like I was praying. I heard his footsteps come around in front of me, and he bent over and closed the latch on that crate and picked it up by its handle. I could tell he was standing right there over me because I heard him breathing heavy, but other than that it was quiet again, so quiet it was almost like nothing had happened.

“Hope to see you on Sunday,” he finally said. “If you get a mind to it, come on inside and join us for worship.”

I stayed hunkered down there in the front row of the church and listened to his footsteps as he walked down the center aisle toward the door. I heard him open it up and step outside, and when he did my eyes sensed the explosion of light the door let in even though I had them closed just as tight as I could. He was outside, but I stayed froze just like that until I heard the sound of his car engine revving; I still didn't move when I heard him pull out onto the road and head out toward the highway. Once I was sure he was gone, I opened my eyes and tried to look around to get my bearings, but the light from the door was gone, and I knew my eyes would have to fix themselves against the blackness that had once again taken over the church.

I
FOLLOWED
J
OE
B
ILL FARTHER DOWN THE RIVERBANK THAN
we'd ever gone before. We stopped at the bridge and came up a new path from the river through the bright morning sunlight and crossed the road toward the woods on the other side. We walked along the railroad tracks where you could smell the dusty ties getting baked dry in the heat, and then we went into the trees and crawled through briars and over rotten limbs and didn't say a word to each other until we stood in the shade on the edge of the woods and stared across the field at the back of the church.

It was so hot that my hair and my shirt were soaked through with sweat, and I figured that if I told somebody I'd just been baptized in the river with all my clothes on, they would've believed it. I could feel that sweat running down my legs beneath my blue jeans, and I knew it would start itching me when it dried. I untucked my shirt and wiped my face, and then I tucked it back inside my jeans because Mama had told us over and over that we'd better keep our shirts tucked in while we were at church, especially on Sunday mornings. She always said Joe Bill's mama didn't care one bit about what he looked like at church, and I reckon she was right, because he'd untucked his shirt and unbuttoned some of its buttons too. He reached up and grabbed a tree limb and pulled it down and held on to it. I looked around for a limb that I could pull down and hold on to too, but there wasn't any that I could reach. Joe Bill was eleven and I was nine, and that meant he wasn't just two years older than me, he was two years taller too.

I watched a hot breeze come across the field and move through the high grass on its way to us. I looked over at Joe Bill as the breeze pushed his cowlick off his forehead. His hair was blond, but in the shade it looked almost as brown as mine because it was wet from him sweating so much. He looked over at me, and then he looked back toward the field.

“It's right there,” he said, nodding toward the back of the church.

I looked across the field, but I didn't know what I was supposed to be looking at because I hadn't ever been behind the church before. Up front it had big windows that somebody had covered over from the inside with newspapers so long ago that they'd been turned yellow from the sun. There was only one window around the back of the church, and it had a rusted old air conditioner sitting up inside it.

“Right there,” Joe Bill said. He raised his hand and pointed his finger out across the field to where that air conditioner hung out of the window. There were some rotten-looking boards blocking in the sides of it, but it almost looked like it might be too heavy for them boards to hold it up in there. “You see it?” Joe Bill asked.

“I see it,” I told him. He looked over at me again, and then he took a step closer like somebody might've been watching us and he was afraid they'd hear what he was about to tell me next.

“There's gaps in between them boards and the window frame,” he said. “If you get up close enough, you can see right in there.”

I looked at that air conditioner, and even though I couldn't hear it from where we were standing, I could see it blowing hot air down into the grass right under the window. The church was painted white, but around the bottom it had turned orange from where dirt and mud had splashed up from the grass during rainstorms.

“I bet he's still in there,” Joe Bill said.

“You think?”

“I bet he is,” he said. “It ain't been long since Mr. Thompson came down and got him.” Joe Bill let go of the limb he'd been holding, and it whipped right past my ear and snapped back up into the tree.

“Hey!” I hollered out. “You just about took my dang ear off!”

“Shhhh!” he whispered. “Be quiet.” He closed his eyes and dropped his head and for a minute it looked like he was fixing to pray, but then he opened his eyes real slow like he'd just woke up from a nap. “Listen,” he said.

“To what?”

“You can't hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Listen,” he said again.

I dropped my head and closed my eyes just like I'd seen Joe Bill do, and for a minute I couldn't hear nothing at all except for a few birds fussing in the trees above us and the sound of the breeze coming through the dry grass, and after a minute I couldn't even hear that. But then, real slow, the singing of the crickets raised up out of the woods behind me and their chirping sounded like somebody was scratching a spoon across a clean dinner plate, and past that, across the railroad tracks on the other side of the woods, I could hear the river running slow toward Marshall, and it was so soft that I wondered if I was making it up or remembering the sound of it just because it was supposed to be there. Then I couldn't hear nothing until I turned my ears to listen for what was in front of me out there in the field where the grasshoppers and the katydids hummed in the high grass. That was a noise I'd always heard without even knowing I could hear it, and when I heard it, I could finally hear what Joe Bill was talking about. At first I heard it like a heartbeat, and I felt it in my chest like a heartbeat too, like it was inside my body thumping up against my ribs because it wanted to get out. It made me think about the Madison High marching band at the football games and the marchers with the drums strapped to their chests and the feeling you get inside you when they march out onto the field at halftime with the batons and the horns and the drums and all that noise they make. And now I could hear other noises floating just above the sound of that heartbeat: the electric guitar came out over the field like a crackly old radio that wasn't tuned in good, and the sound of somebody banging away on the piano followed behind it. All of a sudden I knew that what I was hearing was music, and when I opened my eyes I knew it was coming from inside the church. I looked over at Joe Bill.

“It's music,” I said.

“I know,” Joe Bill said. “They must be singing in there.”

We stood in the shade and listened to what we could hear of the music coming across the field. Every now and then I could hear people's voices, and it sounded like they were shouting.

“Are you going to take a look?” Joe Bill asked me.

“I ain't decided yet,” I said, but deep down I wished I could tell him
no
because I was scared to death of going all the way across that field to spy on folks inside the church. Mama had told me and Stump it wasn't right to spy on grown-ups, and one time she caught us hiding up in the barn listening to Daddy and Mr. Gant hang the burley. When she found us, she took us inside the house and whipped us good across the backs of our legs with one of Daddy's old belts.

“I told y'all not to go spying on grown-ups,” she said. “Especially your daddy. You don't need to know the kinds of things a man like him talks about.” But I already knew what kinds of things men like my daddy talked about. They talked about burley tobacco and farming and other men they knew who got new cars or new girlfriends or whose wives had got sick and died without nobody expecting it. I couldn't figure out what was so special about that kind of talk that made it something me and Stump couldn't hear. I wanted to tell her that all Daddy talked about was the kind of stuff folks talk about while they're working or while they're sitting around and visiting. Only thing she ever talked about was God and Jesus and Pastor Chambliss and what all they had going on down at the church. Sometimes I wanted to say, “If it's so great down there, then why can't you get Daddy to go with you?” and “If it's so wonderful, then why can't me and Stump go inside too?” I wanted to tell her that I got tired of hearing about that kind of stuff, but I didn't say nothing about what I thought because I didn't want her getting out that belt and whipping me again.