Rails Under My Back (19 page)

Jus like they woulda killed Sam and Dave. If they had caught them.

Yall, hush, Sheila said. Hush. Ain’t nobody killed R.L. Ain’t nobody killed Nap. Accidents.

You younguns better learn some respect. Why, Lula Mae light outa town like she killed somebody. And I seen the devil hound on her trail. Aint no leash in Texas gonna hold it.

She ain’t go to no Texas. New Mexico.

Texas, New Mexico—ain’t no difference. Still the South. And a sin is a sin. She looked at Gracie. See, it’s all in the bloodline. Good breedin shows.

The blue sky burst into yellow, thin, like Ivory Beach’s chicken neck. She always had plenty of chores to give work to R.L.’s idle mind. Cleaning up the horse shit. Sorting the good peas from the bad peas. Plucking hair from the hanging hog on hog-killing day. Shucking corn.

R.L., Sam said, that lady got you doin lady’s work.

Damn her dirty draws.

Double damn them.

Yeah. I feel like I been rode hard then put in wet, R.L. said.

To get to Brazil, he woulda had to come back this way, cause California
—

Porsha, hush.

What business a nigga got playin cowboy?

Don’t know but I ain’t a bit surprised he became a cowboy.

Damn them three rascals, Beulah said. White folks be damned if they didn’t lynch em. Some colored folks love cracka mo than corn bread but not them three rascals. All I know is I get a call from Dave sayin that they gotta spirit outa town. R.L. had run off to California.

I thought he went out there to find his father? Mr. Harris?

Beulah continued, deaf to the question. Nap was dead.

Ain’t nobody killed nobody, Sheila said. Beulah, you know Nap had those seizures and he get to drinkin and wouldn take his medicine.

And Sam get on the phone, Beulah said, and tell one version bout stealin out of some white woman’s house and Dave git back on the phone talkin bout stealin her love. Whatever they did, they did it together. They both gets on the phone, cryin somephun bout crackas lynchin a boy in Fulton. Strung em under a railroad bridge and burned him up wit a blowtorch. Burned him so bad that his family didn’t get no remains. First wind come along and blow his ashes from that rope. So I wired em some money.

QUEEN OF THE MOUNTAIN, she bounced off the dresser in the old barn. Bounced, above and beyond. Went sailing over the side. Spread her wings only to discover they didn’t work. Her stomach hit the edge of an open drawer, her flesh curving around it.

Sheila’s lips moved silently.

At first Gracie felt no pain. Hers was the sudden feeling of falling down a well into the deepest solitude. Then she saw the pain, red spiders crawling down her thighs.

Gracie, Sheila said, You awright?

The words rolled heavy in Gracie’s head.

Gracie? …

She’ll be dry as an empty riverbed, the doctor said.

She was thirteen.

NOW, YOU AND GRACIE take this applesauce to Brother James.

I don’t wanna be round no dead folks, R.L. said.

I don’t either, Gracie said. She was thinking about the doctor’s words.
She’ll be dry as an empty riverbed.

Ain’t nobody dead. Do like I told you.

Sister James’s house lay in the bend of the road, set far back from the trees to catch the best chances of light.
Why anybody want light in this Sippi heat?
The fever had gotten so bad that Sister James’s naked black body glowed with heat. Not one sister of the congregation could get within ten feet of her without blistering.

Take the water from the well, Gracie said.

Why, girl, that water poison. Kill her for sure.

Listen. Take the water from the well. Gracie knew exactly what to do. Knowledge breaking like rushing waves inside her.

Lord!

Holy!

Heaven!

Fetch Miss Ivory Beach! Tell her come see bout this child.

That girl—the sister pointed at Gracie—one of them McShans.

You know Larry over there wit that three-legged cat. Triflin wife ran off—

And that one—the sister pointed at Sheila—touched. Born with a caul. So they both might be touched too.

Listen, Gracie said. Take the water from the well.

Sister, an older sister instructed, do as she asks. The lesser evil won’t kill her no quicker than the more.

Sister took a bucket of water from the well. Gracie stuck her face in the rusty cool, bobbing for apples. She filled up the balloons of her jaws. She walked over to the bed and stood directly above Sister James. Arched back her head and sprayed a loop of water from her mouth, a thick stream that thinned and sputtered, then sizzled against the sick woman’s naked skin.

Christ!

Moses!

Praise the Lord!

She makin the Good Book live!

It’s the devil’s work!

The sick woman’s sweat knotted, a silver train that moved inward from the four corners of her body and congealed into a single large bead between her breasts. Gracie lifted the bead with two fingers. She snapped it in her mouth gumdrop fast.

That night, Sheila and Gracie discussed the day’s events. Gracie realized that Sheila also possessed the slow fire of power, had always had it.
The Lord lends us his body to do good work.
Sheila explained the properties of roots, the democracy of ghosts, the committees of dead souls.
But who had told her? How did she learn?

Look, Sheila said. Other folks live inside us. Yo body like a used road.

Gracie saw this, footprints up and down her body’s inner roads. Well, I thought dead folks sposed to be
light.

What you mean?

Like ghosts. Ain’t they like sheets? Can’t you put yo hands through them? Ain’t they fulla air?

I think so.

They sho don’t feel light.

Sheila said nothing.

If they gon walk inside somebody, least they could take off they shoes.

From then on, Gracie lived a life of iron prohibition, laying the gleaming metal bricks of her soul—smoke, drink, dance, frivolity, gossip, fornication, and profanity being the sins to be avoided, sins that would take an edge off her powers. She sealed up her belongings from this world and rode off to the next. Practices and prohibitions she brought North in her black steamer trunk.
Keep an eye on yourself, for fear you also may be tempted.
She would never forget that train ride. The long cold tube of the coach. She was fleeing Lula Mae’s house for the station, and in the same image she was on a train looking down on flooded tracks, seeing a dead horse floating—its mane spread like a lily pad about its head—bobbing with the slow current. Two men at Union Station offered to carry her trunk; Beulah and Sheila arrived and chased them off with threatening eyes and purses—
Be careful of these city niggas
—this trunk heavy with the memories of every person back home she had helped, all the lights and shapes she had broken her soul into and shared with the less fortunate, all crammed into those brief years of power.

It was the most natural thing when Reverend Tower asked her to put in work for the church. Unlike the greedy-hearted brothers and sisters who only showed their face on Sundays, she went to Mount Zion every night of the week—
stay the course
—Reverend Tower’s voice lifting the waters of her spirit—

I won’t tell my sins, for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like heavy snow.

Preach.

I can see it all from a lonely mountaintop, the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it, the story of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow.

—in those days when Cotton Rivers was a poor deacon, those days before Reverend Tower died
and John, Lucifer, Dallas, and Rivers lowered him into the red soil of Woodlawn Cemetery (where Sam would later be buried), where he could watch over the souls of those he’d guarded in life
and the congregation light-lifted Cotton into the podium of leadership and power on the tips of their praying hands, Rivers weighing the souls of the congregation to find the heaviest ones, Rivers forming a partnership with the Reverend Cleveland Sparrow, pastor of the Holy Victory Outreach Church, the two men trading pulpits Sunday to Sunday, church to church, then sharing the same pulpit, and eventually setting up a pulpit at either end of the stage (at both Rivers’s Mount Zion and Sparrow’s Holy Victory); on the right side of the podium, with his right hand raised high in the air, Cleveland Sparrow always released the high ship of sermon—

Abundance is belief in the Lord Christ.

What you say, Cleveland?

Cotton, I say abundance is belief in the Lord Christ.

Cause, our Gawd is the wealthiest being in the universe.

He is the owner of the trees.

He is the owner of the dirt rooting the trees.

He is the owner of every golden fruit born from the trees.

The stained glass flashed with the rhythm of moving shadows, the shadows of moving tongues.

He is the owner of the worm that spies in the fruit.

Yes, Gawd is the owner of the hollow beak that drinks the worm.

Gawd is the owner of the animals that eat the bird and the fruit.

He is the owner of four-walking animals that eat the fruit.

And Cotton, he is the owner of two-walking beings that eat the animals. You and me.

A blast of organ.

Yes, Sparrow. Man who holds dominion over the earth.

But Gawd is the owner of heaven and earth.

Who collects our rent.

He is the owner of the seas.

He is the owner of the fish in the seas.

—buoyant, floating on the hands and prayers and amens of the congregation, the congregation that Rivers and Sparrow shared, as they shared snatches of sermon and prayer from the cup of fellowship, as they shared tithes and choirs, as they shared watching eyes; the preachers formed the Deacon Twelve, twelve deacons who spent every moment peeping through the bush of righteousness to observe the activities of every brother and sister of the church and to carry reports of sin back to Rivers and Sparrow so they could wash those sins in the waters of sermon; Gracie put in work for the church, visiting the sick, preparing meals for the hungry, adding the thin reed of her voice to the choir, and teaching the Sunday school class.

Christ taught and his teaching was so powerful that it mastered all nature. Birds flew about him and settled into the nest of his hair. Fish left the water and sprang into the cool waters of his lap. Tiger and lion lay down next to sheep. Wind and river flowed upward to his upraised hands. Pebbles followed his steps. Cause Christ made new roads from his winding shawl, white clean roads. If we stay clean, we keep wax out of our ears, and then we can keep our ears to his path. Do you all understand?

No one spoke.

Let me put it like this. Do not be misled. Bad associations spoil useful habits. Do you understand?

Yes, Miss McShan.

Lucifer, explain the passage to the class.

Well, you shouldn’t hang around wit no bad niggers.

The class laughed.

Crude, but good. The Good Book says, A wise person will listen and take in more instruction, and a man of understanding is the one who acquires skillful direction. If any one of you is lacking in wisdom, let him keep on asking God, for he gives generously to all and without reproaching; and it will be given him.

Miss McShan?

Yes, John.

Do God come before my granddaddy?

The devil come befo Pappa Simmons, that no-church heathen.
The Good Book speaks, Gracie said. And the word is living and its flesh never ages like the flesh of anyone’s daddy, or, uh, granddaddy. Do you all understand?

Yes, Miss McShan.

Good. Let us sing.

He’s got the whole world, in his hands …

—in his pants.

John, what did you say?

Just singin, Miss McShan.

He lyin, Lucifer said.

Nigga, shut up.

Both of you quit. Let us sing.

—And my dick don’t get too tight to pee.

John, what did you say?

NEAR THE CLOSE OF A HOT DAY—a lean, white spring—he sat, book in hand (
Man and Mestizo
), before an open window of Uncle John’s Eddyland apartment, killing time. A vapor trail hung in the air, chalk-white. The window commanded a view of a long vista of riverbanks that cut into the horizon. The river like a plate of metal, reflecting the yellows of the day. Hills—he remembered these same hills from a dream when he was a kid (under Gracie’s roof, lying in bed next to Jesus), but he couldn’t remember the dream—that gradually flattened toward the river.
Hills? Well, not exactly. A few ridges rising out of the flat plains. Lumps in the carpet.
And the state line beyond the river. One world outside and one world inside.

From the window, he could see over the wall at the end of Canal Street to the busy avenue that ran two miles to the riverfront. Canal Street ran eastward to the lake. A broad and restful street between two rows of large buildings. Ran past little shops and delicatessens, boutiques and department stores. Tourists moved with tired confusion in the blazing heat. Shoppers walked stiffly and lazily between the thick traffic, like marionettes, clutching their packages and bags against their bodies to guard against swift-fingered and swift-footed thieves. He observed their rich and faultless clothes. Noticed the shape of their hats and the box of their shoes. How they carried their hands. Niggas drove by in streamlined bombs of cars, sound systems flinging music out into the street. The edge of the building cut Fifth Avenue off from his view. Well into the evening, yet the sun still well above the horizon. Earlier, the day felt like rain, but now the air was uncommonly clear. The world glowed. Windows sparkled. Rooftops shimmied and danced. A passing fire engine clogged his ears with alarm, cutting light from the siren’s revolving red eye like laser beams on the ceiling and walls.