Boy's Life (29 page)

     “Huh?” Dad asked. By this time Mom had come up beside us and was holding on to Dad’s arm. Dad had never cared much for the reverend, and maybe she was afraid he might blow his top and take a swing.

     Reverend Blessett retreated from my father and surveyed the crowd again. If there’s anything that pulls people in, it’s a loudmouth and the smell of Satan in the air like charred meat on a griddle. “You good folks come to the Freedom Baptist Church at seven o’clock on Wednesday night and you’ll hear for yourselves exactly what I’m talkin’ about!” His gaze skittered from face to face. “If you love the Lord, this town, and your children, you’ll break any radio that plays that Satan-squallin’ garbage!” To my dismay, several people with dazed eyes hollered that they would. “Praise God, brothers and sisters! Praise God!” Reverend Blessett waded through the crowd, slapping backs and shoulders and finding hands to shake.

     “He got sauce on my shirt,” Dad said, looking down at the stain.

     “Come on, fellas.” Mom pulled at him. “Let’s get under some shade.”

     I followed them, but I looked back to watch Reverend Blessett striding away. A knot of people had closed around him, all of them jabbering. Their faces seemed swollen, and a dark sweat stain the shape of a watermelon wedge had grown on the back of the reverend’s coat. I couldn’t figure this out; the same song I’d first heard that day in the Spinnin’ Wheel’s parking lot was
unholy?
I didn’t know very much about big-city evil, but I didn’t itch with immorality. It was just a cool song, and it made me feel… well, cool. Even after all the listenings, I still couldn’t decipher what the chorus was after the
I get around
part, and neither could Ben, Davy Ray, or Johnny, who still had a wrapping of bandages across his beak and couldn’t yet leave his house. I was curious; what had Reverend Blessett heard in the song that I had not?

     I decided I wanted to find out.

     That night fireworks blossomed red, white, and blue over Zephyr.

     And sometime after midnight, a cross was set afire in front of the Lady’s house.

5
Welcome, Lucifer

I AWAKENED WITH THE SMELL OF BURNING IN MY NOSTRILS.

     Birds were singing and the sun was up, but I was reminded of a terrible thing. Three years ago, a house two blocks south of us had caught fire. It had been a hot, dry summer, and the house had gone up quick as pineknot kindling in the middle of an August night. The Bellwood family had lived there: Mr. and Mrs. Bellwood, their ten-year-old daughter Emmie, and their eight-year-old son Carl. The fire, which had started from a bad electrical connection, had consumed Carl in his bed before the Bellwoods could get to him. Carl died a few days later, and was buried on Poulter Hill. His tombstone had Our Loving Son carved on it. The Bellwoods had moved away soon after, leaving their son in Zephyr earth. I remember Carl clearly, because his mother was allergic to animals and wouldn’t allow him to have a dog, so he sometimes came up to my house to play with Rebel. He was a slight boy with curly, sandy-colored hair and he liked the banana Popsicles the Good Humor man sold from his truck. He told me once that he wished he could have a dog more than anything in the world. Then the fire took him away, and Dad sat down with me and said God has a plan but sometimes it’s awfully hard to decipher.

     On this particular morning, the fifth of July, Dad had gone to work and Mom was left to tell me what that burning smell was. She’d been on the phone most of the morning, wired into Zephyr’s amazingly accurate information network: the society of women who circled gossip like hawks for the meat of truth. As I ate my breakfast of scrambled eggs and grits, Mom sat with me at the table. “You know what the Ku Klux Klan is, don’t you?” she asked.

     I nodded. I had seen Klansmen on the TV news, dressed in their white robes and conical hoods and walking around a fiery cross while they cradled shotguns and rifles. Their spokesman, a gent who had pulled his hood back to expose a face like a chunk of suet, had been talking about keeping your heart in Dixie or getting your ass out and “not lettin’ no Washington politician say I gotta kiss a colored boy’s shoes.” The rage in the man’s face had swollen his cheeks and puffed his eyelids, and behind him the fire had gnawed at the cross as the white-robed figures continued their grim parade.

     “The Klan burned a cross in the Lady’s yard last night,” Mom said. “They must be warnin’ her to get out of town.”

     “The Lady?
Why?
”

     “Your father says some people are afraid of her. He says some people think she’s got too much say-so about what goes on in Bruton.”

     “She
lives
in Bruton,” I said.

     “Yes, but some people are scared she wants to have say-so about what goes on in Zephyr, too. Last summer she asked Mayor Swope to open the swimmin’ pool to the Bruton folks. This year she’s been askin’ him about it again.”

     “Dad’s afraid of her, isn’t he?”

     Mom said, “Yes, but that’s different. He’s not afraid of her because of her skin color. He’s afraid because…” She shrugged. “Because of what he doesn’t understand.”

     I swirled my fork around in my grits, thinking this point over. “How come Mayor Swope won’t open up the pool to them?”

     “They’re
black
,” Mom answered. “White people don’t like to be in the water with black people.”

     “We were in the flood water with them,” I said.

     “That was river water,” Morn said. “The swimmin’ pool’s never been open to them. The Lady’s gotten a petition up that says she either wants a pool built in Bruton or the Zephyr pool open for black people. That must be why the Klan wants her gone.”

     “She’s always lived there. Where would she go?”

     “I don’t know. I don’t think the people who set that cross on fire care much, either.” Mom frowned, the little lines surfacing around her eyes. “I didn’t know the Klan was even anywhere around Zephyr. Your father says they’re a bunch of scared men who want to turn time backward. He says things are gonna get a lot worse before they get better.”

     “What’ll happen if the Lady won’t leave?” I asked. “Would those men hurt her?”

     “Maybe. They might try, at least.”

     “She won’t go,” I said, remembering the cool green-eyed beauty I’d seen looking back at me from behind the Lady’s wrinkled face. “Those men can’t make her leave.”

     “You’re right about that.” Mom got up from her chair. “I’d hate to get on her wrong side, that’s for sure. You want another glass of orange juice?”

     I told her no. As Mom was pouring one for herself, I finished off my eggs and then said something that caused her to look at me as if I’d just requested money for a trip to the moon. “I want to go hear what Reverend Blessett has to say.” She remained speechless. “About that song,” I continued. “I want to know why he hates it so much.”

     “Angus Blessett hates
everything
,” Mom said when she had recovered her voice. “He can see the end of the world in a pair of penny loafers.”

     “That’s my favorite song. I want to find out what he can hear in it that I don’t.”

     “That’s easy. He’s got old ears.” She offered a faint smile. “Like me, I guess. I can’t abide that song, either, but I don’t think there’s anythin’ evil about it.”

     “I want to know,” I persisted.

     For me this was a first. I had never been so adamant about attending church before, and it wasn’t even our congregation. When Dad got home, he tried his best to talk me out of it, by saying that Reverend Blessett was so full of hot air he could blow up a blimp, that he wouldn’t even think about crossing the threshold of Reverend Blessett’s church, and so on, but, at last—after a hushed conference with Mom in which I overheard the words “curiosity” and “let him find out for himself”—Dad grudgingly agreed to go with us on Wednesday night.

     And so it was that we found ourselves sitting with about a hundred other people in the sweltering hotbox of the Freedom Baptist Church on Shawson Street near the gargoyle bridge. Neither Dad nor I wore a coat and tie, as this was not a Sunday service, and some of the other men even wore their field-stained overalls. We saw a lot of people we knew, and before the service began the place was standing room only, including a lot of sullen teenagers who looked as if they’d been dragged into the church on nooses by their cheerless parents. I guess the reverend’s urgent hollering had gotten his message across, as had the signs he’d posted all over town that proclaimed he would be “wrestling with the devil on Wednesday night—our children are worth the fight.” A record player and speakers had been set up at the front of the church, and at long last Reverend Blessett—flush-faced and sweating in a white suit and a rose-colored shirt—strode out onto the podium with the offending 45 rpm disc of black vinyl in one hand. In the other he held the leather grip of a wooden box with small holes on its sides, which he placed on the floor out of the way. Then he grinned at his audience and hollered, “Are we ready to fight Satan tonight, brothers and sisters?”

    
Amen!
they shouted back.
Amen!
and
Amen!

     They were ready, all right.

     Reverend Blessett began with an impassioned sermon about how the evils of the big city were creeping into Zephyr, how Satan wanted to drag all the young people into hell and how the citizens had to fight the devil every minute of their lives to keep from being fried in fire. Reverend Blessett’s face sweated and his arms flew this way and that and he paced back and forth before the congregation like a man possessed. I have to say, he put on a great show and I was more than half convinced Satan was hiding under my bed waiting for me to open a
National Geographic
to one of the naked-bosom pictures.

     He stopped pacing and grinned out at us with his glistening face. The doors had been propped open, but the heat was stifling and the sweat was sticking my shirt to my skin. In the hazy golden light, Reverend Blessett was steaming. He held up the record. “You came to hear it,” he said. “And hear it you shall.”

     He switched on the record player, put the disc down on its thick spindle, and held the needle over the first groove. “Listen,” he said, “to the voices of the demons.” Then he lowered the needle, and a static of scratches clicked through the speakers.

     Those voices. Demons or angels? Oh, those voices!
Round round get around I get around. Way out of town. I get around.

     “
Did you hear it?
” He jerked the needle up. “Right there! Tellin’ our children that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence? That they’re not to be satisfied livin’ in their own hometown anymore? It’s devil’s wanderlust they’re singin’ about!” Again the needle went down. When the song reached the part about having a car that’s never been beat and never missing yet with the girls we meet, Reverend Blessett was almost dancing with delirious rage. “Hear it? Doesn’t that tell our young people to race their cars in the streets? Doesn’t it tell them to indulge in free and easy pleasures of the
flesh?
” He said it like a sneer. “Think of it, folks! Your sons and daughters inflamed by this garbage, and Satan just a-laughin’ at us all! Picture our streets runnin’ red with the blood of our children in wrecked hotrods, and your pregnant daughters and sex-mad sons! You think such things happen only in the big city? You think we here in Zephyr are
safe
from the prince of darkness? You listen to some more of this so-called ‘music’ and you’ll find out how wrong you are!” He let the needle play some more. The sound wasn’t very good. I think Reverend Blessett himself had listened to the song a few dozen times, judging from all the scratches. I don’t care what he said; the music was about freedom and happiness, not about crashing cars in the streets. I didn’t hear the song like Reverend Blessett did. To me it was the sound of summer, a slice of heaven on earth; to him it was all stinking brimstone and the devil’s leer. I had to wonder how a man of God like he was could hear Satan’s voice in every word. Wasn’t God in control of everything, like the Bible said? If God was, then why was Reverend Blessett so scared of the devil?

     “Heathen trash!” he roared at the part of the record where the Beach Boys sang about not leaving their best girl home on a Saturday night. “Sex garbage! God help our daughters!”