The Year the Lights Came On (13 page)

“Hello, Freeman,” Mother said. “My, but you’re sure lookin’ smart tonight.”

Freeman tucked his head. “Yes’m. Y’all ready?”

“They’re ready, Freeman. Oh yes, they’re ready. Freeman, it’s real nice of you to invite the boys to go to your church. Some Sunday, you’ll have to go with them to the Methodist preachin’.”

“Yes’m.”

“Now, you sure you don’t want me to drive you over?”

Wesley was quick. “No, Mama. It’s not far. We’ll walk.” Wesley knew that Freeman was too proud to accept a ride, even in a 1938 Ford.

“Yes’m. We’ll walk. It’s not far through the swamp,” Freeman assured her.

“But you might get all messy.”

“No’m. I know the way.”

Mother smiled and resigned herself to Freeman’s determination. “Freeman, I do believe you know more about that old swamp than any man alive. I just can’t believe you get around in it so easy in pitch dark.”

“Yes’m.”

Wesley stepped off the porch. “Well, Mama, we’ll be in later.”

“Be careful,” Mother begged. She had never trusted the swamp.

But Mother was right about Freeman. He did know Black Pool Swamp. He knew Black Pool Swamp the way other people know their homes. Freeman had charted every rabbit path, every squirrel
nest, and every foxhole in the swamp. He could walk through the mud and mire and never make a footprint. In Black Pool Swamp, no man was Freeman’s equal.

We crossed through the swamp, carefully following Freeman’s exact steps. At the top of the hill overlooking Sosbee’s Woods and Sosbee’s Spring, we heard the faint singing of “The Old Rugged Cross.”

“…
till my trophies at last I
lay down…
”

The voices were muffled under the tent, and the wheezing of the tenors and altos pitched and bounced around the drooping canvas in a frenzy of discord wanting to escape.

“…so I’ll cherish the old rugged cro
—
osss…”

Freeman stopped and stood on a pine stump.

“You listen,” he said happily. He smiled and spread his arms to hush us. “Hear ol’ Preacher Bytheway singin’ away?”

Preacher Bytheway’s voice was clearly unusual. It came out of his nose and was compressed into a sound between the scratching of fingernails on a blackboard and the stripping of gears on Mother’s old 1938 Ford.

“…and exchange it some day for a crown…”

Freeman laughed aloud. “You ought to hear that fool doin’ ‘O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing.’ Now that is class.”

We crossed into the pine-tree windbreak separating Sosbee’s cotton field and Ben Looney’s wheat field.

“C’mon, Methodists,” Freeman said. “We are goin’ to a circus.”

There were thirty-five or forty people sitting on wooden chairs that had been borrowed from the Emery Junior High School lunchroom. Fresh sawdust from Wray’s Sawmill covered the ground and had been cooking all day under the heavy canvas. In the tent, it smelled like resin burning. People fanned themselves
with fans that had a picture of Jesus knocking at a door without a handle on it. An advertisement for Higginbottom’s Funeral Parlor was on the back of the fan, containing the message: Give Your Life to Jesus, Trust Your Remains to Us. Babies wiggled at their mothers’ feet, playing in the sawdust. Old men wearing bib overalls over starched, white shirts sat rigidly still and mouthed the closing verse of “The Old Rugged Cross.” Freeman and Wesley and I eased into three chairs in the last row, as the song ended.

“Glory. Oh, I say it again—glory. Glory. Glory. Glory. The Lord God Almighty and His holy house must be smilin’ with pure pleasure sittin’ out somewhere on a front porch of a cloud, rockin’ and listenin’ to such singing. Oh, I say it—help me, Jesus—say it again. Glory.
Glo-o-o-o-ry.
Say it with me, good people. Say it so’s the Lord God Almighty and His holy house can know we all feel the same wonderful way.
Glo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ry
.”

A half-dozen women answered.

Preacher Bytheway cupped his hand to his right ear and leaned forward, straining as though he had been struck deaf.

“What? Now, the Lord God Almighty and His holy house couldn’t hear that. Lordy, Lordy, Lordy. There’s a reunion of angels and saints takin’ place, havin’ supper with the Almighty tonight, and they sure wanta hear that praise. Yessir. A big rush of wind come thunderin’ by just as you let loose, and the Lord God Almighty knows you was drowned out by it, so He wants it again.
Glo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ry
.”

The two guitar players lunged forward together and strummed hard and Preacher Bytheway stepped out toward the congregation.

“Say it, brothers and sisters,” he ordered. “Say it.”

His voice was begging. He closed his eyes and raised his head.

The congregation looked up with him, all the way to the top of the tent where a swarm of gnats and moths were circling an electric light that had been strapped to the tent pole by tape. The electric lines running to the tent had been strung and connected to the school, which fed from Georgia Power Company.

“Say it. Glory. Glory.
Glo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-rrrrr-rry
.”

He lifted his arms and locked his wrists together as if they were handcuffed. He sucked in his lips until they wrinkled in the gaps where he had missing teeth, and he began to nod his head up and down. His eyes and nose and lips drew together until they were a scab on his skinny face. His hair looked as though some maniac with scissors had whacked gaps out of it.

“Gloooo-rrry.”

The congregation was overwhelmed by Preacher Bytheway’s frenzy.

“Glory. Oh, glory, glory, glory.” The women’s voices were shrill screams. The men rumbled in bass counterpoint.

“Wesley,” I whispered, “what’s going on?”

Wesley did not answer. He was staring in disbelief at Preacher Bytheway.

Freeman grinned and jumped up. “Glory,” he shouted. Wesley grabbed him by the shirt and jerked him down.

“Freeman, you doin’ that to make me mad, and I know it. Now you shut up, or I’m leavin’.”

Freeman giggled into his hands and slipped down to the edge of the chair. “Glory, glory, glory,” he said in a snickering, low, mocking voice.

Preacher Bytheway had reached the takeoff in his trip to the outer space of evangelism. The two guitar players from Gaffney
began a soft chording of “What A Friend We Have In Jesus,” and Preacher Bytheway picked up the bass dips with his arms, still locked at the wrists.

“Oh, the Lord does love joyful noises. Help me, Jesus. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord. Yes. Yes. And you can do it. You can. You can do miracles makin’ joyful noises unto the Lord. Help me, Jesus. Give it over. Let it roll out of your souls. Say it to the Lord. And He will hear. He will hear. He will hear.”

Preacher Bytheway’s voice began to singsong. He began to siphon off great gulps of air, nodding up and down, pumping with his locked wrists, twitching in the knees.

“He will hear. Go—go out and preach. Go out. Out, I say. Oh, oh, yes. Preach the gospel. Gospel. To allllll my people. All my people—red or yellow, black or white. Help me, Jesus. All over the world. And tell them—tell them—tell them—of my words.”

In the back of the tent we could see the congregation beginning to sway and rock, leaning into the beat. Someone started clapping in time. And another. And another. A baby crawled out into the aisle and started eating sawdust.

“Tonight. Tonight. I tell you. We are goin’ to talk about—oh yes, talk about—God’s holy word in treatin’ all the creatures of the world with love and kindness. And how—help me, Jesus—oh, how it is that hell’s a-burnin’ a thousand times hotter’n the sun to them that’s mean and hateful and spiteful and—oh, help me, Jesus—and stompin’ on the weak and downtrodden. Oh, yes. Remember the Good Samaritan and how he stopped to help out the stranger. That’s God’s world a-workin’ in God’s word. Oh—oh, yes. It’s there in the Bible. I say—help me, Jesus—the Bible. It tells us about evil and good and how the two go ’round and ’round
fightin’, and how—oh, help me, Jesus—how the Devil is sneakin’ into every life he can find not tended by the good shepherd, Jesus…”

Wesley leaned forward in his chair. He could not believe Preacher Bytheway. He held his right hand over his heart.

“What’s he sayin’, Wesley?” I asked. “Is he all right?”

“He’s got the spirit,” whispered Wesley.

I moved closer to Wesley. “I don’t want it,” I said.

“What?”

“Wesley, let’s go home. That spirit may get down here.”

“It’s not a spook, crazy. He’s took with the Holy Spirit.”

“Oh,” I said. Preacher Bytheway was retching on holy words stuck in his throat. “Wesley, anybody at the Methodist Church ever been took with the spirit?”

“Lots of ’em. Hush.”

“I never seen any.”

“There’s different ways of being took.”

Freeman leaned into Wesley. “That’s preachin’. Now, Wes, ol’ boy, you ever see such preachin’?”

Wesley shot Freeman a look that would have killed a snake. Freeman laughed and sat back in his chair and began clapping his hands out of rhythm.

Preacher Bytheway was again behind his pulpit, pounding on the Bible and declaring that an Atlantic Ocean of ice water wouldn’t last a split second in hell, hell was so hot. He jerked in his shoulders, jabbed the index finger of his right hand in the air, and swatted at mosquitoes with his left. He broke in midsentence to talk about God’s having a special love for animals and birds because He created them first and put them in the Garden of Eden and when it came time to flood the earth, he made Noah
gather up two of every kind and float them around with him in his boat until the rain stopped and the ark landed. The two guitar players broke out of a vamp and slipped into “Amazing Grace,” and Preacher Bytheway started on a fox hunt of Scripture until he treed the passage about Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem, and that became his topic.

It was as though Preacher Bytheway had been jolted by a charge from a car battery. He broad-jumped from behind the pulpit in a convulsion. He landed flat with his back bent at an awkward angle, and he whipped forward bringing his right arm over his head, like Alvin letting fly a knuckleball. He then began to stutter step, dragging his left arm behind him. He snapped the fingers of his right hand and did his singsong about Jesus selecting a lowly animal—“Yes. Yes. A ass. It was a ass.”—and how that meant we all needed to humble ourselves.

A loud voice erupted from somewhere in the middle of the right side of the aisle.
“Amen. Amen. Amen, Preacher!”
Rev. Bartholomew R. Bytheway stopped dead between twitches, startled by such quick response to his sermon.

“Yes, brother, that’s what I say. Amen,” Preacher Bytheway echoed.

Suddenly, Laron Crook jumped straight out of his seat. “Oh, Preacher, I know what you mean. Oh, yes, I surely do.”

“Tell us, brother. Tell us all. Let
it out. Praise God. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord. Is Jesus touchin’ you?”

Laron was wringing his hands. His chin was revolving as if he had a chicken bone caught in his throat and he was trying to cough it up. “Jesus—oh, Preacher, Jesus is touchin’ me. Helpin’ me. Leadin’ me.” Laron’s chin was spinning. If Jesus had him, it was by the throat.

“Praise God. Tell us about it, brother,” shouted Preacher Bytheway.

Laron Crook was nearly forty years old. He was six feet, five inches tall, and he had a sunken chest. He was slightly retarded—retarded in that fog of sad confusion. As long as he had lived in Emery, no one could remember Laron ever saying over a dozen words a day. Next to Alvin, before his conversion by baseball and Delores, Laron was the quietest man in north Georgia. He and his daddy had a farm near the Bio community and they traded mules, and sometimes field-trained them to know gee from haw. Occasionally, Laron’s daddy would get drunk and wander around Emery yelling, “Gee” and “Haw” and he would conduct a mule-training lesson under the tin roof of the cotton gin until Laron would arrive in a wagon and drive his daddy away.

“Tell us what the Lord’s doin’ for you, brother. Tell us all,” begged Preacher Bytheway, motioning for Laron.

Laron began to weave out to the middle of the aisle. There were a few restrained amens and everyone was stretching to see Laron.

“Jesus knew what He was doin’, Preacher. Oh, I feel it. Feel it.”

“It’s tinglin’, ain’t it, brother?” encouraged Preacher Bytheway. “The spirit’s tinglin’, ain’t it?”

The two guitar players from Gaffney upped the tempo and cheated into a mild boogie sound. The applause picked up and matched the rhythm of the guitars.

“If you love this good brother, say amen,” Preacher Bytheway shouted. “Do you hear me, people? A-a-a-a-men.”

“A-a-a-a-MEN. Hallelujah.”

“God bless you, Laron…”

“I’m
prayin’ for you, Laron…”

“Amen, Laron…
”

“I’m filled with you, Laron…”

Laron moved slowly toward the front of the tent. The back of his neck began jerking involuntarily and he held his elbows close to his sides and began to pump his shoulder blades up and down. His head was bobbing to the bass beat of the two guitars and the hand-clapping swelled in stereophonic wildness around him. His feet were tapping out a buckdance step.