The Bible Salesman (6 page)

She would have to sell the goddamned cow. She’d rather be dead than this. She’d rather be in some kind of pain in a hospital where nurses could bring food and water and medicine, and wash her sheets and pajamas. Danny would’ve fixed the screen as soon as that happened, and he’d have whipped the dog for pushing it out.

She got the loaded shotgun and an extra shell. Called the dog. She’d have to get a ways away from the house, because she didn’t have the energy to dig a grave. So she kept walking — the dog following — on by the dried-up cornstalks from the year before and finally stopped atop the bank that led down to the creek, and that’s where she stood, pulling back the stiff hammers, remembering her daddy, standing out in the field of stubble tobacco stalks that time as he raised the shotgun, his shoulder being kicked back, the top of a stray dog’s head lifting off like a little wig in the wind. The dog had killed a chicken.

Libby shot the dog twice, reloaded, and shot him again, walked back to the cabin, put the shotgun back, and picked up the crying baby, laid him on the water shelf on the porch, and took off the diaper — he had a bad rash — and cleaned him up. And then back inside she put a clean diaper on him — well, it was dry anyway — then a small clean flour sack with holes for head and arms, and then wrapped him in a quarter sheet and put a blanket in a cardboard kindling box and put him in that. She went to the sewing machine and got the money in the brown envelope. She stood for a second and looked at the sewing machine. Dorie would want it and would get it. Libby had never got the hang of figuring out a pattern, of the pumping with her foot, the threading and holding and stretching and going slow and going fast. Dorie had tried to teach her. She liked Dorie, because Dorie had given her the time of day.

She got an armful of clothes and stuffed them into a paper sack along with shoes, razor and blades, toothbrush, hairbrush, and mirror. On the way to the truck she got a whiff of breeze from the hog lot.

She put the baby on the truck seat beside her and her things. He’d stopped crying. She wouldn’t look at him.

She drove to Pa D’s and stopped the car and got out. She felt hot around her ears and down her neck. Ma D and Pa D and the rest were in the fields or barns. She was glad somebody hadn’t come to sit on the porch. She took the box from the front seat and, not looking down into it, took it inside and left it on the kitchen table with a note saying that Caroline would be coming home on the school bus. She did not look around.

She would not think the child’s name.

The air around her on the porch seemed cool and a thousand miles away, even though it was right there against her arms. She stood with her head dropped low and watched tears hit the floor planks as her shoulders shook, watched drip from her nose lengthen down in a string. She held her hands, clutched, at her sides. Henry. Caroline. Danny. She went back in and wrote a note to Caroline, saying good-bye, saying that Caroline would be happier now — that everybody would be happier now, and that she was sorry.

Rather than turn left and drive back home, she turned right and headed toward Raleigh. She had more than forty dollars.

At Sunday dinner at the homeplace, Pa D, after reaching for a biscuit, told everybody that somebody ought to go ahead and decide for sure who got the two children and make it official. Pa D wore suspenders and had a watermelon belly that kind of ran out onto his legs as he sat.

Jack and Dorie, sitting for a few minutes on their front porch after driving home, talked.

Dorie said, “It’s hard to think about them separated up. She’s a sweet girl and could help take care of him.”

“I know she’s a sweet girl. But we got to make a decision. Ruth is begging for her, and that’ll work out good. Her war pension will go up, and she can move next door easy enough.”

As usual, some came to Pa and Ma D’s for the family reunion early on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend and spent the night. Others came for Sunday dinner only; some stayed after Sunday dinner for horseshoes and swimming. Most adults who stayed overnight played Rook on Saturday night.

Uncle Delbert’s wife, Sis, after both families gathered in the house for Sunday dinner at one-thirty, clanked a glass with a fork. “Okay, everybody, listen up. Before Pa D says the blessing, Caroline is going to say Grandma Caroline’s name. Caroline, come here, honey.”

Caroline came to the sink and Aunt Sis picked her up and stood her in a chair.

“Speak it out, now, honey,” said Aunt Sis.

Caroline looked at all the faces, then at Aunt Sis, and holding her eyes there, spoke: “Cora Rosa Hunter Novella Caroline Hildred Martha Bird Taylor Copeland.”

Scattered applause.

“Now, what did Grandpa Walker call her?”

“Puss.”

Laughs.

“Pa D will return thanks,” said Aunt Sis. “Pa D?”

“Who let that dog in?” somebody asked.

“He just come in.”

“Well, run him out.”

Pa D made his way forward, thumbed open his Bible, and read the Twenty-third Psalm, what he always read, ending:

. . . and I will dwell in the house of the L
ORD
for ever.

Then, “Let us pray. Dear Lord, make us thankful for these and the many blessings thou hast given us, and be with the soul of departed Danny. In thy blessed name, amen.”

People gathered in the kitchen to serve plates for children and for themselves — fried chicken, beans, peas, beef, ham, creamed potatoes, deviled eggs, pickles, biscuits, corn bread, relish, corn, potato salad — hot and cold and warm foods together, smelling sweet along with the already-there smells of Pa D and Ma D’s house, and the sounds of voices and dogs outside, and the Twenty-third Psalm, all melding into an almost singular sensation that these people would be reminded of once or twice a year in some place they didn’t expect it.

Two women met in a bedroom and nursed their babies. One, feeling uneasy in a way she couldn’t quite understand, told her cousin that Uncle Brother had just said that the only difference between a woman having a baby and a pig having a baby was that the woman squealed louder. That was just like Uncle Brother, always joshing, but the comparison brought an uneasiness that she understood only enough to laugh away.

At a card table on the porch, Jack sat with his brother-in-law Delbert and brother-in-law Samuel, and a new in-law, Manley, freshly married to Dorcus, Delbert and Sis’s daughter. Not being able to remember all the names was a problem for most of the adults, except for Sis. People who needed a name went to Aunt Sis.

Samuel and Linda and their three children — Carson was the youngest — had driven up from Garden Springs, Florida, where they worked for a rich man, running one of his orange groves. But Linda was asleep in the back bedroom. She was Dorie’s sister. She often looked weak and pale, especially after the long auto journey up from Florida. Samuel had said the illness was God’s will. He spoke of Job.

Jack normally did not sit with Samuel for the meal, because of grudges, some forgotten, but today Jack had missed the biscuits somehow, and while he was gone back to the kitchen for a couple of minutes, Samuel sat down at the card table across from Jack’s seat.

When Jack came back, Samuel kept his seat anyway.

“Do you go to church?” Jack, chewing a bite of biscuit, asked Manley, the newlywed.

“I go with Dorcus, yeah. I’ll be going with her.”

“Well, did I ever tell you about my dog’s Bible?”

“No sir.”

Samuel stood. “I’ve heard all this before.” He placed his silverware on his plate, looked around for a seat, picked up his glass of tea.

“Aw, sit down, Sam,” said Jack.

“Samuel,” said Samuel.

“Sit down,” said Delbert.

“Samuel,” said Jack. “Excuse me. Sit down. Get the corncob out your ass.” Then he said to a boy at the next table, “Could you pass me that chicken one more time? I meant to get a wing. And you-all eat some of that rabbit stew in there on the stove. I made it.”

“I just don’t care to hear about Trixie’s Bible again,” said Samuel. “No thank you.” He moved away.

Jack looked at Samuel’s back, then turned to Manley. “Trixie, my dog, has got this Bible. It’s got two verses. One: ‘There ain’t no magic and never was.’ Number two: ‘Nobody can see into the future.’ A dog wrote it over five thousand years ago, and it cuts through a lot of” — he whispered — “shit.” He took a swig of ice tea. “How do you like it so far?” he asked Manley.

“What — married life?”

“No. The family.”

“It’s all right. It’s good. I think it’s good you-all took in the boy. And Aunt Ruth, the girl.”

That afternoon Uncle Jack, Aunt Dorie, Caroline, the baby Henry, and Trixie got to the pond first — for swimming. A pasture lay between the house and the pond. At one end of the pond was the dam with a diving board, and at the other, a grassy bank where people rested on towels and in lawn chairs near the main wading place. Pine trees bordered the back side of the pond.

Caroline sat on the grass on a white towel and watched Uncle Jack stand at the edge of the pond in his swimsuit and unbuttoned shirt and shoes without socks. He chewed a plug of tobacco. He pulled a cigarillo from his shirt pocket — the shirttail out. He looked at it, put it in his mouth, lit it, and then went back to chewing — not like an average man would chew tobacco, but nervously, rapidly. Caroline had seen him stand like this at the pond every year after the reunion dinner, while everybody waited for an hour after eating so they wouldn’t have a stomach cramp and drown. Her daddy would do the same thing back before he got hit by the piece of timber — he would stand there with Uncle Jack. But he didn’t chew. And he wouldn’t go into the water. He’d just talk to Uncle Jack while they stood there, and then Uncle Jack, after the hour was up, would walk slowly into the water. Sometimes Caroline’s mother had been sick and hadn’t been able to come to the family reunion. But her daddy always did.

Aunt Dorie sat on a towel with the baby, Henry.

The cigarillo hung in Uncle Jack’s mouth, with him taking puffs and chewing at the same time, and then he kicked his shoes off, took off his shirt, dropped it, and walked into the water.

On the ground beside Caroline was an inner tube inside sewn-together tow sacks — a raft for floating on.

Trixie ambled over, her tail wagging.

Aunt Dorie put the baby in her lap and rubbed his back, while Uncle Jack waded into deeper and deeper water, until he was in almost up to his shoulders. The cigarillo still dangled, untouched, and he puffed on it while tossing the chew tobacco around in his mouth. He crossed his arms and stood there like that. Way out there. And then Aunt Dorie picked up Henry and pulled the float into the water a little ways and plopped Henry down on it and floated him in a circle. Way down at the end of the pond a boy dove off the diving board. Another boy followed. They were yelling and laughing.

Caroline stood and stepped into the pond, walked out, looking down into the murky water lit by streaks of sun rays, water up to her knees and then up to her waist. It was cool water with cold spots here and there at her ankles and feet. Her daddy had taught her to swim the summer before. He said everybody had to learn when they were six. Now he wasn’t in the world to teach Henry. She wondered if he might come walking up out of the woods and say he’d just had to go away for a while. She wondered where her mother was. But she didn’t mind living with Aunt Ruth. Her mama had scared her a lot sometimes by staring out the window while Caroline talked to her.

She fell onto her back and floated, kicking her feet — the part about swimming she’d learned first. The back of her head was almost cold, after getting hot in the sun.

When she came back onto shore, Aunt Dorie told her to sit with Henry while she swam out to Uncle Jack. Once Aunt Dorie got way out there, and Uncle Jack started horsing around with her, Caroline decided she’d take Henry for a little ride on the inner tube. That new man who’d married Dorcus was rowing Dorcus in a boat.

Caroline managed to get Henry on the inner tube and then float it in very shallow water at the edge of the pond, and then on a little deeper. She watched Henry look at the water, waited for him to start crying, but he didn’t. He seemed pleased, and so she walked him into waist-deep water. Dorcus and her new husband rowed their boat right up to Uncle Jack and Aunt Dorie.

Caroline looked back to the inner tube. It was empty. She looked first on shore, then at the long, wide surface of the pond — as smooth and calm as it could be — and she started to scream but swallowed it and dove beneath the tube with both eyes wide open, a deep orange muddy color in front of her. She grasped forward with her hands. Her right hand was suddenly touching — and then her fingers were around — Henry’s thigh. She found one ankle and then the other and lifted as she stood straight.

She heard Aunt Dorie shout, “Caroline, what are you doing?” She looked out where Aunt Dorie and Uncle Jack stood. “Nothing,” she shouted. “Teaching him to swim.”

“Put him back up on the beach, sweetie.”

“Okay.”

She held him a foot or so above the water like he was lying on his stomach, his nose down, and shook him. He coughed, struggled, and then threw up water, milk, and other stuff, something yellow, as she waded with him toward the shore.

Uncle Jack hollered, “Don’t let that float float off!”

A sob pushed out from her. She sat down on the white towel, holding Henry, looking out to Aunt Dorie and Uncle Jack and then down at her brother. He was more precious than the world. And now she had a big secret, unless Dorcus or her new husband had seen . . . But here came Aunt Linda holding her baby, Carson, in her arms. She was talking to him. She hadn’t noticed. Henry looked okay, except he was a little blue maybe. He held up his hand and looked at it as if he’d never seen it before. Aunt Linda walked up and set baby Carson beside Henry. “Well, what’s been going on?” she said.

“I been teaching him to swim. Pretend. He got some water in his mouth.”

“It’ll be fun when him and Carson get old enough to play together.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Later Caroline begged Aunt Ruth to let her spend that night with Henry. She sort of wanted to keep an eye on him. Drowning might could go ahead and happen anyway — a few hours after somebody got saved. Aunt Ruth said fine, as long as it was all right with Aunt Dorie. And it was.