Pay the Piper (10 page)

She did not chastise William for the time back in that same Village apartment when he almost made her electrocute herself. She told him by phone the light in her closet was out and she did not know whether the current was on or off. “Well, stand in a bucket of water,” he had said. Later, she told him it had been too much trouble to borrow a bucket and fill it, so she just changed the bulb. “Jesus Christ,” William had said.

Before knowing William, she had begun sitting in her Village apartment occasionally cradling an imaginary infant in her arms, completely taken by surprise by her longing for a baby. Married to William, at her first dinner party at his mother's when Laurel was passed a dish, she had asked, “What's this?” A startled look crossed Mrs. Perry's face before she answered, “Chutney.” It did not matter much that Mrs. Perry showed obvious surprise at her daughter-in-law's ignorance. When she needed Mrs. Perry, her mother-in-law had proved herself a champion. She wrote to apologize about the embarrassment of the baby coming too soon, and Mrs. Perry replied by special delivery she'd personally punch in the snout anyone who mentioned the date of that child's birth. Her own mother wrote that Laurel always had been selfish and had taken away any joy in her being a grandmother for the first time.

Laurel watched Rick come along with a snake draped over the barrel of his gun. She was grateful for his different past. As a toddler he knew already the fork and spoon at the top of his plate were for dessert, a practice she had learned in Boston. But when she realized her mother had brought herself up out of this countryside, Laurel had more compassion.

She recalled a formal dinner party in Delton when she was of college age, when a white-coated black man presented the entrée on a silver platter. She had served herself and felt him stand behind her rearranging the serving utensils she had replaced incorrectly. But she had felt everyone else at that table was watching. The party had been held at the home of someone kin to Hal MacDonald, one of those wide-ranging tangled Southern relationships, because she remembered the host's first name was MacDonald.

As they drove along the Mississippi roads to Allie's ice cream party, Laurel considered that most of her life she had felt herself heading upstream, alone. Often, she wondered that people she dealt with in publishing did not see down to her true, ignorant, inner depth. So long had she lived, when she was young, in an environment without culture that there was no way she could catch up. She remembered, though, when she and William married and he started his job at Events-Empire, he'd stood with his briefcase, saying, “I'm going somewhere in this world, and you can come along or not.” She had looked at him in silence, thinking she'd arrived somewhere already and did not see why he might think she'd lag behind. However, it did not seem a wifely comment.

She and Rick stopped on the way for Miss Mamie's famous mousetrap cheese, but also because a van was parked near the store saying county dogs could be vaccinated there. An elderly gray-haired black man came out, holding a big dog on a rope with a collar saying
King
. “We gone to the dawgs today,” he called out. Inside, Miss Mamie was disappointed about cutting her cheese; it kept crumbling. “It hasn't been out of the box long enough. And honey, I wanted it to look so nice for you.” Laurel and Rick enjoyed her handmade signs: for sale she had Hair Gromer and Congeled Salad. “A long way from Soundport,” he said, coming outside. They drove on eating crumbly cheese Miss Mamie wouldn't take money for, enjoying it, as Buff did. Rabbits made crazy running patterns all down the roads, between ditches laden with kudzu. When they went up to Allie's, widows of Laurel's uncles were sitting under oak trees; they had never seemed anything but blood kin. Sitting on the ground, Laurel suddenly asked what her mother had been like as a girl here.

Her Aunt Letty said, “Kate was the prettiest girl I ever laid my eyes on.”

“And couldn't she play the organ. Lord have mercy,” said Old Man Agnew, from down the road.

“I thought she only played the piano,” Laurel said.

“Honey, she played the organ at both our churches for funerals. When Kate pumped that organ and struck into ‘The World is Waiting for the Sunrise,' there was not a dry eye.”

“Girl.” Her Uncle Tate broke in eventually. “You keep listening to this talk, and that cream's been ready. Come on, you dawgs, and get yours.” He set down two bowls full. His dog and Buff came up out of the shade of a crepe myrtle.

“Don't let none of the dogs roaming around get into them peach pits you got out back,” A. T. Murray said. “Ain't no sight worse in this world than seeing a dog trying to pass a peach pit.”

“Hush your mouth,” Allie said, laughing.

“All this mud.” Tate continued to talk about farming. “My cotton picker and my combine both are laid up from mud. Their transmissions are strained. Man called and wanted to know if I was coming to grange meeting tomorrow. Said they were going to talk about cotton. I said, Shoot, I don't want to talk about cotton.”

“The cost of insurance and the cost of fixing equipment, they're going to eat you up,” Sam Upchurch said. He was a black friend who happened along in time for ice cream. “Fields about dried out. I hoped and prayed and watched. And nothing to do but talk about the weather. A man might try not to think about it, but that crop is out there.”

“Sometimes,” said Tate, “I get in my truck and I start riding. Riding like I could do something about it all, or change things.” He laughed. “Only thing that changes is, I end up in a turnrow and having a bill for my truck's transmission too. Always there is next year.” He looked off to the road, and Laurel watched all the others look the same direction. “But last year my beans lay in that field
so
long,” he said.

“You and me is just outdated, Mister Tate,” Sam said.

“Look over there,” said Allie. “Loma's out on her store porch trying to see what we're doing. She knows if we're turning cream you won't be buying Smoky his popsicle today. That dog's going to end up with worms and bad teeth both.”

“Smoky wants his popsicle, don't you, boy.” Tate rubbed the dog's ears.

“Loma going to be giving her produce away if that price war don't end,” Agnew's wife said.

“Small storekeepers are just as obsolete as the small farmer,” Sam said. A boy in shorts emerged through hedges holding a small melon. “Boy, what you got?” Sam said to his grandchild.

“Found a wallermelon.”

“You ain't found nothing. That's Mister Tate's. Carry it on back where you got it.”

“We don't need that melon,” Tate said. “Tony, carry it on home.”

“Sam, I've got cream dished up for Fanny, too,” Allie said. “Get home before it melts.”

Soon the party broke up. People went away in pickups or cars, and a few ambled off down the roadside.

Mister Zack accepted a ride from Laurel and asked to be let out at his garden. “Going to have a beer?” she said.

“You want one?” He winked.

“No, thanks.” She had not thought about a drink since the night they arrived.

“You and the boy always looking around. Come on out the New Africa Road to my tent revival.”

Tent, New Africa
; the words held magic. She and Rick looked at one another. “We'll be there,” Laurel said.

At night, the open-sided tent appeared to be a carousel from a distance; the interior was aglow from a butane light and people swarmed about. A little of that day's broad blue light was still in the sky, and, using it, she parked along the road's shoulder, among a conglomeration of vehicles. Already a wailing kind of singing was going on, and music from strummed instruments. In the short time it took her to park, the early night sky became less silver. In the silence following the cessation of harsh sounds within the tent, they heard the mellifluous lowing of cows watching from behind nearby barbed wire, their nighttime peacefulness shattered. She and Rick laughed. As they approached the tent, Mister Zack lounged outside, talking to another man, and turned, grinning in delight, almost as if he was waiting, waiting there each night to see if she was coming. Laurel resented this; he seemed to feel some claim to her. But maybe this feeling was only obstinacy in her personality: if wanted, she declined; if not wanted, she sought. Something of that in most people, she thought. He introduced them to the preacher, Brother Roundtree, whose diamond stickpin caught the last silvery light and glittered in the early dark. When Mister Zack introduced them as his visitors from up the country—from New York—she decided maybe his attitude was pride, not ownership. She squinted to read a penciled sign tacked to a slit of board outside the tent: F
AITH
H
EALING
. A
LL
I
NVIDED
.

“What kind of religion is this?” she said.

“It's a know-so religion.” Brother Roundtree spoke as loudly as if he were already preaching. “Everything about it, the people know is so.”

“Pray till you are saved.” Mister Zack grinned.

They went on into the stifling heat inside the tent. She and Rick found two folding chairs together in one row. People put out hands kindly to help them crawl past their knees. “Thanks,” they each kept saying. They were recognized as strangers.

A simple wooden platform stood at one end of the tent. There musicians sat playing heartily, their shirts already dampened in dark soaked places. Brother Roundtree came inside and leaped to the platform, long-legged and stiff. He rattled a tambourine above his head. In front of Laurel a little girl was asleep with fingers curled into her mouth. She wore a quaint long dress down to her ankles, too young to speak up and complain, I'm made to look strange. Laurel felt for her. She tried to imagine herself in childhood that way, able to sleep amid so much noise. She tried to remember Rick that young.

A blond woman sat next to her, who might not be so old. But her face was deeply lined. Her stomach was pouched, though not from pregnancy, Laurel could tell that. Something amiss about the shape bothered her. Maybe just a country woman old before her time, not knowledgeable about keeping in shape, the way Laurel herself jogged and worked out. The woman handed her her own songbook, though Laurel tried to protest. She had another one to use, the woman indicated, leaning to the man beside her, his book on his knees. Her husband. He was a tall blond giant. She could see his curly hair, his handsome profile. “Last week we got rained out,” the woman said. Laurel looked up at the tent top as the woman did; it was full of holes. “One night some niggers come and stood out there.” The woman nodded toward the dark. “Brother Roundtree prayed and they didn't come no more.” Laurel stared down at the songbook titled
Heavenly High Hymns
. She opened it and saw old-fashioned shaped notes. The musicians ceased when the people began to sing, a dry cacophonous nasal wailing; soon she realized these were people she had always heard referred to as Holy Rollers.

Mister Zack seemed different not wearing his usual khaki work clothes. His attempt to be a town man did not fit him. He was all wrong in a loose shirt with red flowers—hibiscus, maybe—and pants of a shiny material. He had come into the tent and looked sharply about for her. She hid her face, looking at her shoes in the grass and the dust. Yet she knew the look of disappointment on his face when he realized there was no place for him beside her. He stood staring slack-mouthed toward her. “What's with Mister Zack?” Rick said.

“Nothing,” she said. She had the sense suddenly of how little Rick knew. He's only a boy, she thought. What had Mister Zack thought could take place with Rick here?

Brother Roundtree spoke closely into a microphone, like a carnival barker. “I'm no high-educated man. I'm a little self.”

“So are we all, Brother, so are we all,” a man shouted.

Brother Roundtree rattled his tambourine. “Once I was full of denial,” he cried. “But, people, I run aground in sin. I stood there then and said, I'm just a little ole widow's boy and I'm lost, God. I'm lost.”

“Go, preacher,” “Tell us about it.” “Praise the Lord!” People cried out from here and there. Now they began to shove themselves forward in their seats. Their feet tapped silently the ground. Brother Roundtree when he shouted rang the tambourine above his head. It seemed it would shed its tinny pieces. “A lot of you are trying to satisfy lust of the flesh,” he cried. “You need to be borned again. You need to be submerged in that water. And if one of your hands don't go under, I'll push you down. I believe in submersion, folks. But baptism don't wash away sins. What Amurricuh needs today is more old-fashioned praying Mommas and Daddies. If you don't feel nothing tonight you ain't got nothing. The main thing is Jesus.” The tambourine beat the air and the musicians twanged and strummed. In a moment of silence before Roundtree could speak, the cows across the way mooed out loudly. She felt Rick's elbow, smaller than her own, nudge hers and knew a moment of compatibility and sharing.

“Hallelujah!” people cried.

Brother Roundtree said, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and tomorrow. It's all based on personal revelation. God knows where you live and who you are. He don't get me mixed up with you. Jesus is not to destroy life but to give it. Oh, don't you love him.” He leaped into the air three times and then turned around in a circle and stood with one leg extended stiffly before him so that the flat of his foot faced the congregation. “I know I got something in my shoes besides my feet, people. I feel it all over.” He wiggled his knees together, as in an old dance. Like the Charleston. They shimmied and shook. She almost wanted to laugh. “I felt that,” he said. “If you don't feel that, you're dead. I don't believe in a half-baked cake. Oh, don't you love Jesus. Things I once hated I now love. I know it's great to be here. Come up and confess to Jesus.”