The Year the Lights Came On (30 page)

Yet, my memories of Annie were baby memories, though my mother visited her often and Annie made an annual pilgrimage to spend an entire day with Mother. On those days (always with an air of holiday), Annie would embrace me with laughter and tell again an old story of the day I became angry and, in temper, ran away from home, only to return at sundown, declaring I would give my family one last chance before seeking a better residence. But I did remember the Snake Spell, first told by my mother and repeated with marvelous dramatics by Annie. And I remembered specks and flashes of Annie’s gleaming face as she spoke in a trembling voice about voodoo, and I had believed Granny Woman was blessed with knowing secrets no one else knew, secrets that reached back, back, back, forever back, back to Africa and a tribe of godlike magicians, fierce and mighty and proud.

In the late thirties, Granny Woman had become a character in harmless stories, a myth. During World War II, she emerged as a symbol of hope, an emissary between the Unknown and the Frightened. There were stories of sorrowful white women applying to Granny Woman for supernatural assistance. Their husbands, or sons, were missing in action. They had prayed, yes, but God, through the U.S. Army, had not answered their petitions and they had surrendered to this last possibility, this mystery of Granny Woman Jordan. For a time, Granny Woman accepted them, offered audience, and read for them messages of terrible truths. But it was not truth the women wanted; they wanted pain-killing fantasies, cool breezes of assurance. And Granny Woman stopped seeing them, refused to hear their squalling hysterics. She was very old, nearing one hundred years, and she became more and more an unseen person. After the war, she disappeared into the back bedroom of Annie’s home, into a room that squeezed over her like a womb, and she curled into the fetal position on a feather mattress. To my knowledge, she was seen by only three white people during those years of solitude: Tommy Holcomb, the debit man, who saw her by accident, and Wesley and me.

On Granny Woman’s one-hundredth birthday in 1946 (her age was estimated; she was, perhaps, even older), Mother had dispatched Wesley and me to Annie’s, bearing a gift of a hand-knitted shawl. The occasion was most memorable.

Annie and her husband, Claude Miles, lived in a small house, a toy house with unpainted clapboards darkened by exposure and years. The roof had overlapping wood shingles, and the shingles had been patched in mole dots of tin cans hammered flat and
covered with tar. A front porch, broken and limp on one corner, extended the length of the house. The damaged front porch made the house suffer, piteously suffer, like a man who has the half-face of a stroke. There were two front windows peering out from the lid of the porch. The windows were small, weak eyes, diseased by the cataracts of old screens turned brown and bubbled inward. The front screen door had lost its bottom hinge and hung like a scab on a healing sore. Wads of dead grass lodged in the porch planking. Islands of broom sage grew tall in the white sand ocean of the unkempt front yard.

Behind the house the skeleton of a large barn leaned awkwardly, tilting forward on one corner like some great stubby-winged bird wanting to fly. Rot-black hay—grass and grain stems not fit to eat—was shoved against the barn door. Corrugated tin flapped on the roof—metal feathers on the great stubby-winged bird. A well shelter, between the barn and house, had a broken back from a fallen limb that had been cut and rolled away. Mulberry bushes and chinaberry trees grew in dwarfed clusters at the back of the house. A fig bush, the only tended tree in the yard, grew alone in the edge of the pasture.

“Don’t nobody keep this place up,” I whispered to Wesley as we entered the yard on Granny Woman’s one-hundredth birthday.

“They’re all too old,” he said simply.

The gift of the hand-knitted shawl deeply affected Annie. She decided to introduce us to Granny Woman.

“Go down yonder and dig me up some red clay out of the gully,” Annie instructed, “while I tell Granny Woman somebody’s comin’.”

We did not know why she wanted the red clay, but we did as
we were told. Annie took the clay and some starch cubes and wrapped them in wax paper.

“Give these to Granny Woman,” she told me.

“Why, Annie?”

“Granny Woman loves them things. Rather eat them things than table food,” explained Annie.

“She eats red dirt?” I inquired, astonished.

“Red dirt’s good for you, child.”

We followed Annie into Granny Woman’s room. It was a half-size room with a half-size window. The window was covered with burlap sacks, sealing the light except for a straight, dusty, arrow-beam crossing over a bed and plunging into a table beside the top of the bed. The table was draped with a delicate lace cloth. A kerosene lamp was in the middle of the table, on a chipped plate, and a rocker was beside the bed. The back of the rocker was also dressed in the delicate lace cloth.

Granny Woman was in the bed. She was older than any living creature I had ever seen. Her skin was drawn and parched and appeared coated with paraffin. Her lips were pale brown and cracked. Her sunken eyes were black caves. Her hair was thin, white, lifeless, a curled thread braided in rows across her skull. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, like the mouth of a lizard licking the air.

Annie slipped a pinch of red dirt into Granny Woman’s opening and closing mouth and Granny Woman nodded childishly.

Annie began to talk to Granny Woman in a shrill shout, waving her arms in exaggerated gestures, arranging her words like ABC blocks, to be somehow seen as well as heard. I wondered if Annie had become addicted to those hand signs through years of caring for her mother.

We were introduced, but Granny Woman did not know we were there. Annie broke a starch cube in half and slipped it into Granny Woman’s mouth and Granny Woman lay back into her pillow, sucking on the starch. She seemed asleep in her mountain of pillows, lapsed into dream space, and I remembered what my mother had said about old people running away in memory, and how their minds lost control, confusing time and people and place. I wondered if Granny Woman had hurled herself, in one tremendous leap, across time, back to the Civil War, back to a day of killing when, in one breath, she had exhaled slavery and inhaled the poison of being sentenced to years of mindless wandering, years when she knew nothing, felt nothing, remembered nothing.

The white, chalky starch drooled from Granny Woman’s lips as she flew aimlessly about in her astral escape, swirling in worlds of half-images.

Annie led us away, outside.

We had not talked of seeing Granny Woman because Annie had pledged us to silence. She did not want curious spectators with carnival expectations spilling into her yard. Granny Woman was not a sideshow. Granny Woman was old and wanted to be alone. Let people think of her as a witch, “a conjurin’ woman,” and let them believe she could hex them and make them vanish from the face of Earth if they violated her privilege of age.

*

It had been that experience Wesley recalled when he saw the three half-skinned snakes. The Granny Woman we had seen was incapable of casting spells, even if she did have The Power.

Someone else had staged the props of the Snake Spell.

It could have been Freeman; Freeman knew what was required,
but he also respected the solemnity of those rites. It could have been Annie, but Annie was also old and Annie vigorously denied inheriting any of Granny Woman’s gifts. It could have been Little Annie, who often behaved in a quietly removed and pensive manner, as though she anticipated experiences before they occurred. And, it could have been Willie Lee, warning Wesley and me to keep our promise—Willie Lee knowing we would, eventually, remember Freeman’s tree.

But it could not have been Baptist. Baptist was more afraid of snakes than of the distinct, and oppressive, possibility of meeting the Soldier Ghost face to face. If the Soldier Ghost had a face.

*

Dover was weakened by our story of the Snake Spell. He had never been so impressed with any news, he said, and he proposed the theory that Granny Woman had called on the spirit world and the spirit world had lifted her, bodily, and transported her to Freeman’s tree, where she performed the Snake Spell on stroke of midnight. Dover was an absolute believer in “things greater than our thinkin’.” He had learned about such things in his palm-reading course, he said.

“It may be Freeman’s doin’,” Dover admitted, “but I doubt it, boys. Older you get, the more you learn how to recognize things for what they are. That old woman’s got The Power, and there’s no doubt about it. I could curl your toenails with some of the stories I know.”

“You think we’ll be all right, keepin’ watch on that tree?” R. J. said.

“Don’t see why not,” Dover answered matter-of-factly. “I just got my doubts about what we’ll see, that’s all. But we’d have to be
up and back early. The search starts again tomorrow. Sheriff said we’ll keep it up until we found somethin’.”

*

We returned to Black Pool Swamp in pre-night, in that wisp of time when the light of day has the look of a thin sheet of ice, hurriedly melting.

Dover cautioned us that we were not camping; we were on a mission, and the tiniest nerves in our bodies would have to be alert.

“No fires, no talking,” Dover said. “We’ll take turns sleepin’ and watchin’. Freeman’s sneaky.”

There were seven of us, including Dover, and the odd number confused the watch order.

“Ought to be two at a time,” insisted Alvin.

“Yeah, but that leaves us one short, or one too many, dependin’ on how you look at it,” observed Dover. He thought for a moment. “Tell you what, I’ll be awake anyhow, so let’s just take the six of y’all and draw straws.”

Otis argued that Dover could not stay awake all night. Dover dismissed Otis with an indignant stare and broke six pine needles into various lengths—two short, two long, and two between short and long. We drew for watch, short to long. Otis and R. J. had the first turn, Alvin and I were second, and Wesley and Paul were last.

We selected a sentinel’s position on a ridge thirty yards away from Freeman’s beech tree. It was an obstructed position because of the undergrowth of dwarfish swamp bushes, but it had two advantages: we were above Freeman’s tree, and we were on a mat of pine needles; pine needles did not crackle when you moved.

“All right,” whispered Dover. “I don’t want nobody sayin’ nothin’ for the rest of the night. If you see anything, shake the rest of us.”

*

Silence. Night. Nerves on ready. I thought: nothing will escape me; I have lived these terrible moments before. I remembered the Germans and the Japanese and how they had tried to slither like worms through our net of death in the Big Gully, and how we had pressed our ears to the ground and plotted their creepy movements with the radar of our hearing.

I pressed my ear to the ground. Nothing. Perhaps the cooling of Earth. Nothing more.

I could hear only the breathing, the minor note of breathing, lungs stroking unevenly, lapsing into an involuntary syncopation of labored rhythm. The breathing. And night. Everywhere night.

Freeman’s tree was shapeless in that early darkness. It was a blob. A shapeless blob shoved into other shapeless blobs, flat and deeper than deep pits that are bottomless in the eye of imagination. It would be the best time of the night for Freeman to slip unnoticed past our blind spying, and return to his rites of supernatural medication—if, indeed, the rites were for Freeman.

And then the light began. At first, barely there. Light like dew from the tilted spoon of the quarter moon; light from the spears of stars, hurled millions of miles and pinging off the waxy shields of leaves; light of foxfire, sprinkled haphazardly in phosphorescent dots over the carpet of Black Pool Swamp, glowing in never-blinking eyes.

The light pulled Freeman’s tree up from the blob, lifted it like a fighter rising from the lap of his ring corner, his body shimmering in the reflection of his might, and behind the rising figure of Freeman’s tree, smaller trees thrust outstretched but untouching fingers, throwing the fighter forward.

Then we could see plainly the tree, bold in its reach and spread. Dover had not seen the Snake Spell and we tried to tell him, by mouthing, the location of the snakes, but Dover did not understand and mouthed back, “Where?” Wesley motioned for him and Dover edged forward on his elbows and stared down the barrel of Wesley’s finger. When he saw the snakes, his eyes widened in astonishment.

“Lordamercy,” Dover exclaimed in a loud whisper.

A chorus arose: “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

Dover slipped back to his position and stared at the tree. He was mesmerized.

*

Otis nudged me out of sleep and dreams and leaned to whisper in my ear.

“I’m sleepy,” he complained. “You and Alvin take it.”

“O.K.,” I replied in my smallest voice. “What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Dover’s got the watch in his pocket.”

“Where’s he?”

“Asleep,” sighed Otis. “Been asleep for a half hour.”

“See anything?”

“Nothin’. Oh, yeah. R. J. thought he saw a scorpion. Better keep lookin’.”

“Yeah.”

I rolled out of the quilt and Otis wiggled into my place. He stretched once, and his body slowly contracted into the curl of a comma. He was asleep in five minutes.