Modern American Memoirs (21 page)

“Wait, Mr. Bates,” I cried. “I'll take it.” My hand trembling, I slid the money, five crumpled dollar bills, onto the counter.

“Take what?” asked Mr. Bates, now genuinely perplexed.

“Why, the rod and reel there, the one for five dollars,” I said, my eyes locked firmly on the little rod, the worn-out reel. Sunlight coming in through the wide doorway flashed off the rod's polished ferrules.

I laid another dollar bill on the counter, and said confidently, “And I'd like four dry flies, sir. Two No. 16 Adams and two No. 18 Quill Gordons.”

Bates looked out the door in Albert's direction and then down at me, then out the door again. He scurried down the aisle to the long glass case where he kept the trout flies, along with the watches, pocketknives, cigarette lighters, and cheap costume jewelry. He put the flies into a brown paper bag, took the money and, leaning down close to my face, said, “Boy, you just spent six dollars on fishing. That's six dollars down the rathole, boy. There ain't a fish in this whole county worth no six dollars,” he sneered.

“Yes, sir,” I replied politely, and reached out reverently for the rod.

I found Albert at the café, nursing a bowl of soup and a glass of iced tea. He sat in the back corner, his pale skin standing out like a slice of moon on a stormy night.

“What'd you buy, son?” he asked, crushing a handful of crackers into his soup, stirring them in until they got soggy and drowned, white pulp floating in a stream of bright red tomatoes, string beans and corn, and a dash of Elias Wonder's stump juice.

“Why, the rod,” I said proudly.

“What rod?” asked Albert, a seemingly genuine pall of ignorance spreading over his face.

“Why, the rod you just left at Bates's store to be sold,” I said, as a tight ball of bewilderment knotted in my stomach.

“Couldn't have been me, son,” Albert said flatly. “I've struggled to encumber my modest life with few canons, but I must admit to warming up to a few principles, one of which is that a man never willingly parts with a fly rod, especially if it has been a loyal rod, steadfast and reliable, any more than he should part with a faithful dog or a truck that always kicks over, even in harsh weather.” He paused for a moment to wipe a glop of cracker from the corner of his mouth. “Let's have a look at this rod of yours.”

I handed him the rod that Mr. Bates had wrapped for me and he unwrapped it with great care, as though the contents were as fragile as porcelain. He fitted the pieces of the slender cane rod together and gave it a shake. “Could have trout in it, son,” he said. And I saw how he held the old rod, how he looked at it, his eyes all but glowing, his mind, I knew, conjuring up every trout the rod had taken. “Sure, it might have trout in it. I guess it really depends as much on the angler as the rod. How much did you give for it, anyway?” he asked as he rolled the rod back up in its cotton cocoon.

“Five dollars,” I said incredulously. “Exactly what you told Mr. Bates to sell it for.”

Albert kept working on the soup and tea, then whispered darkly as he looked about the empty café, “Leave me out of this, son. You want your poor old uncle locked up for contributing to the moral collapse of a child? I didn't give you the rod. Such an act would be worse than a drunk spiking his baby's milk just to give it a taste of its future. No, this is trouble you purchased of your own free will, with no help from me or Emerson or anyone else. And it is trouble you've latched on to. Just ask Donna when she comes around for the dishes. She'll tell you straight that you've gone and hitched a ride on the Devil's tail.”

But Miss Donna said no such thing, although she did tell me in a chiding voice that any man who eats at the table with his hat on is “sure nuff eating' with the Devil.”

“You sure about that?” said Albert with an amused grin.

“Albert, you know I don't kid around when it comes to Satan,” Miss Donna snapped as she gathered up Albert's dirty dishes.

“True,” confessed Albert. “But you know how we mountain people are. We're not choosy about our company, don't care about the condition of their soul or the length of their tail.”

Miss Donna winced. Albert chuckled. I just sat there thinking about that Orvis rod, how it had shone so in Bates's store.

After Miss Donna had strutted away in a huff, Albert asked me again, “What did you give for that rod?”

“Just what I told you. Five dollars.”

“Kinda pricey, don't you think. I mean, for such a beat-up old rod. Thing might not have five dollars' worth of fly fishing left in it. Perhaps you should have talked Bates down to four dollars. Shit, maybe three.” But he was smiling as he put seventy-five cents on the table and got up to leave….

 

I never really knew how long it had been going on. Perhaps thirty years. Maybe more. By the time of my arrival among the old men, the meetings between them and the good Reverend Biddle had long since settled into an uncomplicated ritual. Biddle knew that Albert and Emerson and Elias Wonder were well anchored beyond whatever he might tell them, say to them, either as friend or reverend. That didn't matter, however, because he liked them, perhaps even admired them a little. Likewise, the old men liked the Reverend Biddle and often felt bad that they couldn't bring themselves to believe in the God that he believed in so totally and unconditionally. Sometimes, I thought that perhaps they envied him, as well.

The Reverend Biddle came to the house the last Sunday of every month. These Sundays were always looked forward to, for they involved a good meal, wine, hours of heady conversation. Biddle took it as his personal mission to save the old men from hell. He had determined years before that they should be led, willingly or not, into the magnanimous arms of righteousness.

Biddle had tired, mouselike eyes, a rounded, fleshy chin, sunken cheeks, and a few tufts of silky gray hair on his melon-shaped head. He was given to moping about a great deal, and from his perpetually slumped shoulders one got the impression that he hauled the sins of the world, or at least his part of it, the congregation of the
Mount Hebron First Primitive Methodist Church, 106 threatened souls, on his aching back. His followers worshipped him. They worshipped him because they not only suspected that he was in direct contact with God, they knew it. They knew it because Biddle had performed a miracle. The old ones never forgot the night it happened; the young ones grew up on their haunting stories of God's intervention through the Reverend Biddle's holy hands.

It happened on a Sunday morning in September 1945. While on his way to the church to prepare for the day's services, the Reverend Biddle saw an enormous dark hump in the road, curled up in the morning's fog and lacy shadows. He pulled his car off the road, got out to find Lloyd Haysberry's two-year-old milk cow laid out stiff as a frozen cat across the highway, just across from Haysberry's place. As for what followed, Haysberry saw the whole thing and it left him mute for two days until he finally blurted out the incredible story at the café, yelling at the top of his weak, hacking voice that quivered like a plucked guitar string every time he spoke.

The first time through, no one in the café could make out a syllable of what Haysberry was trying to say. It all came out as coughs or hiccups, incoherent rambling. It wasn't until Big Joe came out of the kitchen and poured a pitcher of iced tea over him that Haysberry settled down, sat on a nearby chair, and while crushing his brown fedora in his nervous hands told how the Reverend Biddle had raised his milk cow from the dead.

“She'd been there on the road nearly all night,” whispered Haysberry, looking cautiously around the room, as if he half expected Satan to be among the gathering crowd. “I thought I'd heard a truck out on the road after midnight, and later thought maybe it had hit her good and kilt her dead. Guess she got through the hole I never fixed along the roadside fence. Anyways, I walked out to the highway and put my hand on her. Stone dead, I tell ya. Colder than January ice. No warmth in her at all. I bent down and put my head to her chest. Nothing. Quieter than a potato cellar. There was frost on her eyes and mouth. I started cursing up a storm, I did, and finally went to get the truck and a length of rope to drag her off the highway. Thought maybe I could still salvage the meat.

“When I came back out the house with the rope, the Reverend Biddle was standing over her. I saw him touch her frozen head,
kinda kick her gentle like. He said some words over her I couldn't make out and, I tell ya, that cow began to move. As cold as it was, I broke out in a bad sweat. That cow moved its legs and I dropped to my knees right there on the porch. My cow got to her feet slow like, like maybe some other force was helping her, some other hand was on her. Then the Reverend Biddle—and this here's the eerie part—he don't think nothin' of it. Just shrugs his shoulders, gets back into his car and drives off. I spent nearly the whole of that day on my knees, tears filling my eyes, and I couldn't speak. There must be some kinda law that goes with divine miracles involving raising the dead that whoever witnesses the miracle loses his speech for two days. But, friends, I tell ya this: it was the hand of our Lord workin' through the reverend.”

And everybody gasped with reverence. This was something, something indeed, that God would show up in Mount Hebron, work a miracle in their midst. No one doubted Haysberry's story. He was a good man, a good Christian, and no one had ever caught him in a lie before. Why not, said the townspeople. Stranger things had happened. God seemed to have a special gift for manifesting himself in the most peculiar ways. Wasn't there the Shroud of Turin, and the healing waters of Lourdes. It seemed like every time you picked up the newspaper, God had shown up in someone's Christmas lights, carved his image in a beanfield, cast his shadow across some adobe hut in Wolfe's Hole, Arizona, or been sighted mowing a lawn in France. So why not Mount Hebron's Holy Cow.

The faster Haysberry's story spread throughout the country, the more credible it became. News of the miracle on Mount Hebron highway swept over the countryside like some unstoppable virus. It touched everyone, refueled their broken faith, offered hope to the hopeless, promised salvation to the damned, health to the sickly, healing to the incurable. If the Reverend Biddle had the divine power to restore life to a lousy milk cow, said everyone, just think what he could do with their ravaged bodies and souls. And all with a painless touch of his hand.

“Touch me,” pleaded Reilly Larson, as he stopped the Reverend Biddle in the street and lifted up his artificial leg to receive Biddle's magic touch. Biddle screamed and ran to his car. The more the good reverend denied his divine powers, the more his congregation
flocked about him, yearning for his healing touch, the miracles in his fingertips.

As Biddle's reputation as a humble saint grew, so did the fame of Haysberry's milk cow. For as long as she lived, people traveled to her stall on the Haysberry farm to ogle her, pray to her, touch her, wonder why God had chosen to raise her from the dead. After all, she wasn't even a decent milk cow. Falling into fits of divine epilepsy, some worshippers cut off pieces of her hide for luck. Others flopped about Haysberry's barnyard speaking to her in tongues and were surprised to find that she responded. Her stall became a shrine, a place where people left flowers, simple gifts, photographs of dead relatives. The old cow took the adulation for as long as she could, then died. Haysberry toyed with the idea of having her stuffed, keeping her on as a paid attraction, twenty-five cents a look. But winter was coming on and so he ate her instead.

Biddle's resurrection of Haysberry's milk cow hounded him for the rest of his life. No one believed for one minute that he had nothing whatsoever to do with either the cow's life or death, and in the end he gave in and touched anyone who asked, just so they would go away and leave him alone. For years, no matter where he went he seemed to stumble on people who would throw themselves in his path, crying hysterically to be touched by his ineffable hand, the hand that had put the life back into Haysberry's milk cow. And Biddle would touch them quickly, wincing all the while. The whole matter reached its apex the Sunday Mrs. Priddy, from across Blackberry Run, showed up in the first pew loosely disguised in a freshly tanned cowhide. “Moo,” she cried mournfully. Biddle stepped down from behind the lectern and touched her gently between her floppy ears, one brown and one white, because Mrs. Priddy had liver cancer and her luck had run out.

It never seemed to matter that no one the Reverend Biddle touched ever got better, recovered, reported a cure. No one really cared. No one seemed the worse for it—no one, that is, except Biddle, who boiled his hands in lye water three times a day and who had stopped sleeping at night. He dreamed of dead cows littering the highway.

One of Biddle's few escapes from his great burden of divine
power was getting into his two-tone green Pontiac once a month and driving as fast as hell out to Trail's End, because Emerson and Albert thought the good reverend was kind and thoughtful rather than aloof and divine. While they thought he was a good man, they didn't believe he had the power to raise dead cows, especially Haysberry's old cow, which they knew for a fact had a habit of napping out on the highway. The asphalt held the heat and she liked that.

Still, walking about with the perceived power of immortality in his fingertips was a grave responsibility, one that the Reverend Biddle learned to shoulder with dignity and humility, even when the religious pilgrims who sought him out were less than satisfied.

“Ouch!” bellowed Garland Nobben. Nobben had sunk to his knees in front of the Reverend Biddle as he ate at the café. Nobben rubbed his forehead and climbed to his feet. “I asked you to save me, Pastor, not kill me, for God's sake!”

“Have you faith, brother Nobben?” mumbled Biddle, biting deeply into a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.