The Year the Lights Came On (14 page)

“Good Lord,” Freeman exclaimed. “Look at ol’ Laron, Wesley. You see that? Look at that fool.”

“What’s he gonna do, Freeman?” asked Wesley, slipping back into his seat. Wesley and I had never seen such behavior in the name of God.

“Depends on how took he is,” replied Freeman. “Maybe talk in tongues.”

Laron Crook, nearly forty, six feet, five inches tall, was took. He was seized. Obsessed. Possessed. Surrendered into and commanded by. Laron was converted.

“Preacher—Preacher—Preacher. Uh—Inee. Ddaa—pogg—uh—aeeee. Ahhh. Gunnnnnnn… Ahhhhhhhaaahhh… Aeeeeee…”

Laron was talking in tongues. Preacher Bytheway was talking in tongues. The guitar players were playing in tongues, wild Latin-sounding dance music, and one of them was doing a click-click-click castanets sound with his mouth.

Laron Crook’s conversion made St. Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus seem like a migraine headache in comparison.

Laron whipped up on his toes—I swear, his toes. He jabbed and hooked his arms like Joe Louis shadowboxing. He came crashing in on his heels on a downstroke by the two guitarists, held
a quick freeze, and then broke into a couple of German goose steps.

“Show us the Lord, brother,” Preacher Bytheway urged, stepping out of Laron’s way and waving him front and center.

“Amen, Laron…
”

“We’re with you, Laron…”

“God bless you and your daddy, Laron…”

Laron had circled to one side of the sawdust altar area. He began to jump and bicycle in midair. When he landed, he would skid into a split, claw at the air with his hands, and pull himself up. A couple of German goose steps and Laron would be leaping and bicycling in the air again. On his best jumps, he probably cleared four feet and he could pump three times with his legs before he hit ground.

Then Laron slowed the tempo. He began to stiffen and skip on his left foot. Suddenly, his body snapped and went rigid. He pulled his left arm close to him, cocked his elbow and folded his wrist under his chin. His right arm shot out, straight toward the ground, two inches below his knee. His right hand was hinged and opened, his fingers spread like web feet. His right foot was lifted ankle high and he hopscotched in tiny, frantic steps across the sawdust.

Laron Crook looked like Red Grange stiff-arming a midget.

“God bless you, bro-
THER.”

*

Rev. Bartholomew R. Bytheway anointed Laron Crook a preacher of the gospel of the Speaking-In-Tongues Traveling Tent Tabernacle, instructing him to continue the ministry of humanity that had moved him to the grandest, most spectacular display of being invested by God’s mysterious spirit that anyone had ever demonstrated. It was a touching ceremony. Laron confessed to sins as fast as he could invent them. He told long, funny stories about how he had been taught to mistreat animals by being master over them, but how that had now stopped and how he believed the Lord God Almighty had called him to do something special with “them poor creatures.”

Everyone amened and hallelujahed and hugged Laron and wished him luck. Dover Heller promised he would quit kicking Bark in the head for chewing up rabbits. Laron said he’d work with Bark and try to train him with God’s gentle help.

*

The Speaking-In-Tongues Traveling Tent Tabernacle left at the end of the week. It had been a triumph for Rev. Bartholomew R. Bytheway. He had attracted his largest crowds, had delivered the Thursday noon prayer following the Obituary Column of the Air on the Edenville radio station, and he had ordained his first minister. The fact that Laron was Preacher Bytheway’s convert became the most exciting news event in Emery in years. Laron spoke up, proudly and often. If he wasn’t talking, he was meditating. He put himself on a strict disciplinary program—prayer at morning, prayer at noon, prayer at night, and no more R. C. Colas between meals. If he was in God’s service, Laron wanted to be in shape.

During his first days of spiritual growth and adjustment, Laron’s constant companion was Freeman, when Freeman wasn’t working for A. G. Hixon in the warehouse and cotton gin. To Laron, Freeman was someone who had been misunderstood and poorly treated by life. It was a sympathy fired by the parallel of their childhoods, and oddly confirmed by their opposite personalities. If, in his new Born Again self, Laron could help out a fellow human being, it would be Freeman. Besides, no one in Emery
knew animals as well as Freeman and Laron needed help in that commitment; Laron knew mules, but he had a way of repelling other creatures.

Freeman loved the attention. He amened at appropriate times. He allowed Laron to save his worthless soul at least twice a week. He had visions so fearful and vivid, Laron would hyperventilate with excitement as Freeman, wallowing on the ground, described scenes that made the Book of Revelations read like a Flash Gordon comic book.

On days when his personal evangelism fell on deaf ears, Laron would persuade Freeman to meet him in the late afternoon and they would go into the pastures and woods to communicate with God’s animals. These were special missions for Laron, and his zeal was inspiring. He was kicked by a goat in Horace Wilder’s pasture, chased across a cornfield by Otis Harper’s breed bull, bitten by Bark, pecked in the face by a nesting hen, and Freeman left him one night in the middle of Black Pool Swamp hooting away with a distressed owl. Laron had no idea it was Freeman hooting back.

But Laron considered all these trials a test of his faith and, like Job, he would endure. “God forgive this dumb beast for kickin’ me,” Laron would say. “He knows not what he’s doin’.”

The injury and humiliation suffered by Laron was God’s way of preparing him for a revelation. “When it happens, it’s gonna be mighty,” he claimed. “It’s gonna come like a hold-up man at night, when I ain’t expectin’ nothin’.”

He was right.

Laron was at Hixon’s General Store one Saturday afternoon, sitting under a water oak, recuperating from a severe clawing he had received while trying to separate two cats intent on mating. We had been listening to his wonderful interpretation of Old Testament stories for an hour when Freeman asked his question.

“Laron, tell me something,” Freeman said innocently. “How come there’s a heaven for folks, but there’s not one for animals?”

“Who said there’s not?” Laron replied. “Of course there is. Why, heaven’s not much different’n earth. Except that it’s freed of sin, and maybe a little cloudier. What makes you think God don’t believe in havin’ pets? Why, think about how nice it must be up there with birds tweetin’ and chirpin’ all the time. Must be awful pleasin’ to God and Jesus, and the saints and holy angels, to hear them birds.”

“I thought they only had gold harps in heaven,” Freeman said.

Laron peeled back the bandage and looked at a deep red wound on his hand. “Oh sure, they got harps. Gold harps. But they’s only for special occasions. Like Sundays, or Christmas, or Easter, or the Fourth of July. Rest of the time, heaven’s filled with birds singin’ and dogs barkin’ and things like that.”

Freeman measured his words, folded them around in his mouth and dropped them like diamonds of pure wonderment. “But, gosh, I thought the only way you could get to heaven was by bein’ baptized,” he said.

Laron’s head snapped like a whip. His eyes
dilated. His sunken chest began to heave. You could see his heart pumping in his jugular veins. “That’s it. That’s it, Freeman. Praise God. That’s what the Lord has called me to do. I know it, Freeman. You are an instrument of the Lord God Almighty Jehovah.”

Freeman crossed his arms over his chest, as if hiding from the fearful face of God. “What, Laron?”

“The Lord God Almighty Jehovah, He who said I am that I am,
has done delivered me a message, Freeman. Oh, yes. Not from no burning bush or from no mountain, mind you, but from the mouth of a babe. I can hear it, Freeman. I can hear it.”

“Me, too, Laron. Oh, yes. Go out yonder and baptize my creatures.”

“That’s it, Freeman. Them’s the Lord’s words, right out of His mouth. Praise His holy tongue. Amen. A-a-a-MEN.”

*

For the next few days, Laron was lunatic in his determination to baptize every walking, flying, and crawling animal in Emery.

He carried a Boy Scout canteen filled with water from Sosbee’s Spring and if he couldn’t lay his hands on a cow or a crow, he would flit water in their direction and declare the deed accomplished.

Laron was as crazy as Don Quixote, and, in his way, just as noble, but Wesley was greatly saddened by the spectacle of Laron chasing stray dogs and cats up and down the railroad track, and he blamed Freeman for encouraging such mad behavior.

“It’s not my fault,” Freeman protested.

“Freeman, it is and you know it,” Wesley preached. “Laron’s not got good sense, and all you’re doin’ is havin’ a big laugh. What you don’t understand is that Laron’s all caught up in doin’ what he thinks he ought to be doin’. It don’t matter to him if everybody’s laughing and making fun. He’d do anything anybody tells him, if it’s said in the name of God. That’s sad, and you know it. Laron believes God’s hidin’ in that canteen of water and that He comes out like some magic genie every time he flings some water around. Freeman, that’s not God. That’s people sayin’ God’s a white-bearded old man floating around in the air somewhere, and that He’s goin’ around keepin’ count on who’s baptized and who’s not.”

“Wesley, you know what it says in the Bible,” argued Freeman.

“I don’t need to read the Bible to know that water’s not gettin’ you into heaven, Freeman. It’s not the water.”

“Wesley, I’m tellin’ you, Laron heard a voice.”

“Freeman, what Laron heard was what you wanted him to hear. You think God’s talkin’ out loud, like Sam Spade on the radio? You really think such things?”

“Now, Wesley, that’s what Preacher Bytheway said.”

Wesley was quiet. He wanted to say the right thing and say it in a way that even Freeman could comprehend. “Freeman,” he finally said, “if a man’s got to learn about the Almighty by bein’ scared to death because somebody’s screaming about hell boilin’ over with fire, or bein’ fooled about heaven bein’ paved with California gold, then he’s not learned anything. That’s just a way of trying to pin down something that can’t be pinned down. If you got to say what God is, or what He’s not, you’re just talkin’. That’s all. Just talkin’. Knowing the Almighty don’t need that.”

Freeman did not understand a word Wesley said. Neither did I.

9

DOVER HELLER WAS PROUD of his job
with the REA. He had hired on as a member of the right-of-way crew, but his ambition was considerably greater: Dover wanted to be a lineman, climbing poles while others stood around on the ground and admired his steel nerves.

Dover was our favorite adult. He regarded life as a comic book adventure and he treated us as his equals. If anything happened, Dover wanted to know about it, and we knew we could depend on him to listen attentively to our woes and keep confident our most anxious confusion.

Dover had a happy, expressive nature that was accented by one brown eye, one blue eye, and a quaint habit of stuffing cottonseed in his ears. He explained that working in the cotton gin had prompted his cottonseed habit; the noise level was deafening and Dover had sensitive ears. We thought it was a sensible explanation and, unlike adults, we did not perceive the humor of one brown eye and one blue eye.

We had become especially fond of Dover after he brazenly
defended Our Side following the fight at Emery Junior High School. Dover declared it was time someone had the guts to square off with the “high and mighty” of Emery and, further, he proudly sided with our argument. It was after his declaration of support that Dover applied for his job with the REA.

At the end of his first full week’s work on the right-of-way crew, Dover was overwhelmed by the promise of the future. “It’s like comin’ to a fork in the road,” he told us, “and you don’t know which one to take. Well, you flip a nickel or a dime and go one way or the other, heads or tails, and then you find out it’s where you should’ve been all the time. Yessir, boys, I’m right on it, right on the right road.”

To celebrate his enthusiasm, Dover took a Captain Marvel comic book to a sign painter in Royston and the sign painter painted a likeness of Captain Marvel’s lightning bolt on each door of Dover’s wine-colored Chevrolet pickup. Dover kept those lightning bolts waxed and gleaming. Someday, he told us, that would be his truck when he advanced from right-of-way crew to lineman. He wouldn’t need a company truck, even if they offered it. He just needed enough money to keep his Captain Marvel Chevy rolling.

But Dover was on the right-of-way crew, and in late July the crew arrived in Emery, shouldering axes and slingblades and crosscut saws. They began in Sosbee’s woods, slicing in straight lines out of the lush, dark green of pine and oak and beech and blackgum and poplar, leaving a path—a pale underbelly—of scrub trees and grass.

The men were easy workers. They measured a day’s work by the delicate, surgical neatness of their cut. It was just-so, an artistic tracing of the expedition of the surveyors, with their tripods
and funny little telescopes and hand signals. At the end of a day’s cut, the men would sit on the tailgates and sides of their trucks and inspect their work, and they would laugh happily and make book on how far they would slice the next day. It would take them weeks to run the gash from Sosbee’s woods to the tie-up between Goldmine and Eagle Grove, but they knew they would complete their work before the heat of summer and autumn lost its energy. Dover told us the foreman of the crew had an eye for reading sap in trees and he could tell, almost to the day, when winter would come howling its way along the foothills of the Blue Ridge range. “We’ll be done before then,” Dover explained. “And then them linemen will come in and before you know what’s happened, every house on the line is gonna have electricity.”