Cementville (23 page)

“If he needs finishing off,” Levon starts to say outside, where he is leaning against the hearse. He shuts up when O'D glares at him. Levon squints at Nimrod lying there on the stretcher and smashes out his cigarette on top of Nimrod's mailbox. The hearse is gliding away, and Nimrod cannot stop staring—it is as though Levon Ferguson has, with his dark gaze, snared him in some evil thralldom.

Nimrod closes his eyes and hears his mother praying far off for the Lord to have mercy on her wretched son.

I
F A MAN SUCH AS
Nimrod kept a diary, a little hardback book with fake leather binding, if the sheriff and the coroner and the undertaker had come across such when they found him, it could have told of what led to that day. Show them what they know about happy.

What they found instead was a shoebox full of palm-sized notepads, the kind that always end up with a wire crooked out from the corner ready to gouge a hole in your breast pocket. A person doesn't necessarily think, jotting down Scripture or recording a prayer he hopes might save his sorry soul, that such entries will be gazed upon by others as the writings of a man hopeless enough to commit (and worse, fail at) the final sin of despair.

Mac Duvall had it right: One person can't know the things another person is wishing for, the dull little stones clutched under his rib bone, trusting they will turn to pearls someday. There are people who will borrow your hopes, thinking maybe they can turn your straw into gold. You can never be sure what's guiding such people.

—
In the evil land, please stay Your hand, give us righteousness that we might stand. Your hand shall wave from sky to
sky, when You come to claim the apple of Your eye. When the evil one marches on the land, marches to deceive, who will stand?

Madeer, Nimrod's own mother, mumbled such prayers through the steam rising from her ironing board. Thump, thump, the iron would complain over white shirts, piles of them that never grew smaller. She prayed into a cloud of flour while her big brown arms flung their flesh above a rolling pin. She prayed while she cut round hunks of white dough and threw them into the bacon grease. She squinted and prayed into the sizzle and pop.

The two of them would recite the grace and eat in silence, the lamp flame flickering on the wall. Then she would tell him the Bible stories in the dark. This was when Nimrod was small.

She told him about Nimrod the warrior rebel who came from the seed of Noah. He was a filthy wicked man, she said, a mighty tyrant.

Nimrod the boy lay on his cot straight as a stick and pulled his cover to his chin. “Why you name me after such a wicked man, Madeer?” he asked her.

“So you never forget the sin of Adam you carry, just like old Nimrod. I name you that so God keep His eye on you. I name you that so you wake up every morning and ax Him to rain His grace on your wicked soul. His grace is out there, boy, and He give it to those that ax Him for it.” His mother rocked back and forth on the end of Nimrod's cot and sucked at her bottom lip and looked off beyond him as if considering what ghosts lurked there in the dark. She said, “Your name make the Lord nervous. He don't forget that other Nimrod, who built the Babylon tower. He watch you, and He want you to be good. He don't want to have to divide all the languages into seventy-two pieces again. We can't halfway understand each other now, when we supposed to be speaking the same language.” Her shoulders shook with a laugh that had no sound. She would always end the night goo-goo-gah-gahing at her boy same as she had when he was a baby, hoping to make him snigger after she scared the drawers off him with her Bible stories. She
would tickle his feet under the covers and say, “Don't worry, boy, God got His eye on you. You the apple of God's eye, Nimrod.”

Which was small comfort in the dark with a broken-hearted whippoorwill mourning lost love through the shivery glass of the window by his bed.

Nimrod never did forget what Madeer told him. He asked for grace to rain on him, and when he found himself in flood, he sang His praise. And when he found himself in drought, he examined his conscience for what slight he might have committed.

As a young man Nimrod went off. He wandered the land, worked for his food. He served his country without ever once killing a man that didn't need it. And he was never hungry.

Got to where he was always thirsty though, rain of grace or no. At night alone in whatever four walls made home, Heaven Hill rained down his throat and the closest he came to wickedness was to laugh in the face of God. He swam in John Barleycorn's pond and felt the same rapture the saints felt when they were tied to the whipping post.

Last job he had was hod carrier. His bricks built a bank tower in the center of a big city up north. It might have reached Heaven, for the ones who had the most money piled inside there. Nimrod worked until his spine hunched and ripped and burned, and when he learned his Madeer had passed through the veil, he crawled his way back to the place he was born. Knees all turned to gravel and stretched out rubber bands by then.

Most days found him after that on his porch from midday till the sun slipped behind the knobs looming over him like a pyramid made up of God's minions, and him no more than a decrepit student of the Bible, clucking and acting the old woman, quoting Job and Numbers, Esther and Judges, same as if Madeer haunted his insides. Sundown, he closed the brittle leather cover on her Bible, placed it on his bedside stand, and took up his rock and his friend, his Heaven Hill. Just a smallish tumbler-full, he told himself each night, knowing there was not a soul around to give him Hell when he lost count.

Things went that way till the girl showed up.

T
HERE WAS MAYBE A QUARTER
hour of light left. Fingers of sun glanced off the knobs to the west, the kind that stab at your eyes and make a person think of angry red seraphim lifting the hills and flinging them at their adversaries, the foot soldiers of the Evil One, like in that Heavenly battle, where God told Lucifer,
Go then, my bright and fallen son!

That was when she first came. Nimrod heard her before he saw her, a tinkly voice circling around her like a body of bees. First she was a silhouette far up Crooked Creek Road, her boy hips waltzing with brazen importance. Then he could make out her finely muscled arms twirling a stick around her head, tossing it in the air periodically, her knees kicking above her belly as she high-stepped up his road. He squinched his eyes at her, a warning. She stopped in front of Bett Ferguson's and called out.

“Aunt Bett!”

Out came Bett on her porch in a swarm of children and the two bantered back and forth. Nimrod cocked his head at an angle as if to catch the June breeze, but it did nothing to aid him in making out their words. He fastened on Bett's smoky drawl. She seemed glad to see the girl.

In his head he hollered out to Bett,
Don't!

She was some kind of snake charmer, with that high tinkle voice. Nimrod did not trust that girl. Nor did he appreciate her cutting through Crooked Creek to get from the Chaney Farm, where she did odd jobs and looked after those sickly boys, over to her granddad's trashy trailer. No reason she had to cut through this road when there was a perfectly good path, and shorter. Bett ought to tell her dirty little niece to jump in that creek, that's what Nimrod thought, maybe wash some of the trashiness off her filthy young soul. She came closer and he could hear the song she sang, one of those terrible songs they play on the radio. He scooted his chair back all cattywompus, upsetting the notepad where he recorded highlights of Scripture. The corner of his eye caught the glow of her white ankles clomping up and down in cheap tennis shoes all
smashed down at the heels. She high-stepped straight at him, twirling that stick like it was a sterling silver baton.

She slowed down and called out, “Hey, Mr. Nimrod, how you doing this afternoon?”

He dipped his head close to the Scriptures in his lap and ran his hand over his forehead beaded with salt pearls.
You pretend not to hear
, Spirit told Nimrod. Galatians 4:14:
My temptation, which was in my flesh, ye despised not, nor rejected; but received me as an angel of God
.

Rex, the yellow cur belonging to the Ferguson children, had been sleeping in the middle of the road. He got up and slinked off to the woods. Rex is a superstitious dog, wise to evade her. She stopped square in front of Nimrod's house, and all lazy, brushed the top of his mailbox with her stick till he felt it crawl across his own skin. He couldn't help it, he had to look.

She up-arched one tweezed eyebrow, a crooked twig flicked toward the sky, and she said, “We been given another beautiful spring day, ain't we, Mr. Nimrod?” like God had made it that way just for her.

Then she did it. She let her head fall back between her shoulder blades—that girl could not care less if it fell plumb off—and she opened her mouth and let out a laugh from the bottom of her gut, rumbling all the way up her white neck. No reason, nothing funny, no good reason at all to laugh. Nimrod dipped his face low. When she gathered her head onto her shoulders and got her breath again, he could feel her looking at him. He knew without taking his own two eyes from the Good Book that she was studying the top of his silver head.

“You have a wonderful rest of the day, Mr. Nimrod.” Then she commenced to hum, threw that stick high in the air, end over end. She caught it, perfect.

The laugh-out-loud girl went on, calling out to Jesse Greathouse and the other old people. Nimrod stood from his chair to stretch, and when he leaned out over the railing he was able to
watch her progress down Crooked Creek Road. She would come this way tomorrow. And the next day.

A
ND SHE CAME BACK, AND
was soon passing this way every day except Sundays when her granddaddy, old Angus Ferguson, made her pull three Plymouth Rocks from the coop behind his trailer and wring their skinny necks. She chopped off their heads and let those chickens run in headless circles till they couldn't. After the slaughter she dipped them in a scalding bucket and plucked them and cut them up and rolled them in salted flour and fried them in the same manner her granny had before Angus lamed that poor woman's arm. Their neighbors would smell the chicken shit and the blood and the horrible boiling feathers all week while Angus Ferguson gnawed on the chickens' bodies from one Sunday to the next.

“Mr. Nimrod,” the girl would say, “in my fifteen years I've wrung too many necks.” These are the kinds of things she told him, standing at his mailbox.

She had been coming down Crooked Creek Road for three weeks, stopping and talking to everybody in that tinkly voice. Each time she stopped in Nimrod's yard she came closer to his porch. Finally, up she came on the middle of three steps to where he could smell her girl smell. She took off one of those stomped-down shoes and shook it till the insole fell out all filthy and wadded up and he couldn't help it, Nimrod said, “You need to throw them things away.”

He should not have opened his mouth. Because she drew that stinking wad to her nose and said, “Pee-yooo-weee!” And threw her head back all crazy again, making him think it's going to fall straight off her long chicken-white neck and roll out into the road. Even though he knew by then it wouldn't, having seen her laugh in that fashion twelve, thirteen times already. She took off the other shoe and pulled out the insole and threw both of them over her shoulder and she said, “Mr. Nimrod, I been thinking, I been thinking you might need you a cook.”

Revelation 3:10:
And the Lord said, I will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world
.

“Maybe somebody to clean your place,” she went on. “Sweep, odd jobs, whatnot.” She came right up onto the porch and peeked in through the screen door. “It's a nice place you got here, Mr. Nimrod.”

Then she walked, by God, into his very house. He sat there on the porch, a stone figure. He could hear her moving around inside. She was in there a long time, clanging things around, scraping chair legs across the floor, whistling like a man.

He got up and went to stand at the screen door, looking at her moving about among his things.

“If you looking for money, you barking up the wrong tree,” Nimrod said.

She spun around on him and her smile was so big it hurt.

Nimrod sat heavily in his porch chair and opened his mother's Bible and flipped through the filmy pages looking for the line about suffering the children. The girl came out humming a song he thought he recognized.

“Long as you not expecting anything,” he said. But she skipped down the steps and proceeded up the road. Only that tinkle of laugh as an answer. He went inside and checked to make sure, but nothing was missing.

T
HURSDAY WAS THE DAY SHE
settled on as cleaning day, as if it was a thing upon which they had reached agreement. She would greet him and Nimrod would bury his face deeper in his reading. Before dark she would come out on the porch and say, “Well, she's good as new. The place is clean as a baby's powdered butt.” She would put both arms round his shoulders and squeeze hard enough to stop up all the air in him and then clomp down the steps in those smelly stomped-down shoes. When Nimrod was sure she was far away, he would look around him as if some spell had been lifted, and he would
go inside the clean house where she had left for him a plate of beans and that scent of cinnamon and sweat.