Three Days Before the Shooting ... (206 page)

I am the resurrection…

… And the life …

And the life …

That’s good, but not too fast now. I am the lily of the valley…

I’m the lily of the valley…

Uh huh, that’s pretty good—I am the bright and morning star….

… The bright and morning star.

Thy rod…

Thy rod and thy staff.

Good, Bliss. I couldn’t trap you. That’s enough. You must remember that all of those
I’s
have got to be in it. Don’t leave out any of those
I’s
, Bliss; because it takes a heap of
I’s
before they can see the true vision or even hear the true word.

Yes, sir. But can I take Teddy too?

Teddy? Just
why you got to have that confounded bear with you all the time, Bliss? Ain’t the Easter bunny enough? And your little white leather Bible, your kid-bound Word of God? Ain’t that enough for you, Bliss?

But it’s dark in there and I feel braver with Teddy. Because you see, Teddy’s a bear and bears aren’t afraid of the dark.

Never mind all that, Bliss. And don’t you start preaching me no sermon; specially none of those you make up yourself. You preach what I been teaching you and there’ll be folks enough out there tonight who’ll be willing to listen to you. I tell you, Bliss, you’re going to make a fine preacher and you’re starting at just the right age. You’re just a little over six and Jesus Christ himself didn’t start until he was twelve.
But you have to go leave that bear alone
. The other day I even heard you preaching to that bear. Bliss, bears don’t give a continental about the
Word. Did you ever hear tell of a bear of God? Of course not. There’s the Lamb of God, and the Holy Dove, and one of the saints, Jerome, had him a lion. And another had him a bull of some kind—probably an old-fashioned airplane, since he had wings—he said under his breath, and Peter had the keys to the Rock. But no bear, Bliss. So you think about that, you hear?

He looked at me with that gentle, joking look, smiling in his eyes and I felt better.

You think you could eat some ice cream?

Oh, yes, sir.

You do? Well, here; take this four-bits and go get us each a pint. You look today like you could eat just about a pint. What I mean is, you look kind of hot.

He leaned back and squinted down.

I can even see the steam rising out of your collar, Bliss. In fact, I suspect you’re on fire, so you better hurry. Make mine strawberry. Without a doubt, ice cream is good for a man’s belly, and when he has to sing and preach a lot like I do, it’s good for his throat too. Wait a second—where’d I put that money? Here it is. I thought I’d lost it. Ice cream is good if you don’t overdo it—but I don’t guess I have to recommend it to you though, do I, Bliss? ‘Cause you’re already sunk chin deep in the ice cream habit. Fact, Bliss, if eating ice cream was a sin you’d sail to hell in a freezer. Ha, ha! I’m sorry, now don’t look at me like that. I was only kidding, little boy. Here, take this dime and bring us some of those chocolate marshmallow cookies you love so well. Hurry on now, and watch out for those wagons and autos….

Yes, that was how it began, and that was Hickman.

When he laughed his belly shook like a Santa Claus. A great kettledrum of deep laughter. Huge, tall, slow-moving. Like a carriage of state in ceremonial parade until on the platform, then a man of words evoking action. Black Garrick, Alonzo Zuber, Daddy Hickman.

God’s Golden-voiced Hickman
Better known as
GOD’S TROMBONE,

they billed him. Brother A.Z. to Deacon Wilhite, when they were alone. They drank elderberry wine beneath the trees together, discussing the Word; me with a mug of milk and a buttered slice of homemade bread…. That was the beginning and we made every church in the circuit. I learned to rise up slow, the white Bible between my palms, my head thrusting sharp into the frenzied shouting and up, up, into the certainty of his mellow voice soaring isolated and calm like a note of spring water burbling in a glade haunted by the counterrhythms of tumbling, nectar-drunk bumblebees.

I used to lie within, trembling. Breathing through the tube, the hot air and hearing the hypnotic music, the steady moaning beneath the rhythmic clapping of hands, trembling as the boys marched me down a thousand aisles on a thousand nights and days. In the dark, trembling in the dark. Lying in the dark while his words seemed to fall like drops of rain upon the resonant lid. Until each time just as the shapes seemed to close in upon me, Deacon Wilhite would raise the lid and I’d rise up slowly, as he taught me, with the white Bible between my palms, careful not to disturb my hair on the tufted pink lining. Trembling now, with the true hysteria in my cry:

LORD, LORD, WHY HAST THOU …?

Then came the night that changed it all. Yes, Bliss is here, for I can see myself, Bliss, again, dropping down from the back of the platform with the seven black-suited preachers in their high-backed chairs onto the soft earth covered with sawdust, hearing the surge of fevered song rising above me as Daddy Hickman’s voice sustained a note without apparent need for breath, rising high above the tent as I moved carefully out into the dark to avoid the ropes and tent stakes, walking softly over the sawdust and heading then across the clearing for the trees where Deacon Wilhite and the big boys were waiting. I moved reluctantly as always, yet hurrying; thinking, he still hasn’t breathed. He’s still up there, hearing Daddy Hickman soaring above the rest like a great dark bird of light, a sweet yet anguished mellowing cry. Still hearing it hovering there as I began to run to where I can see the shadowy figures standing around where it lies white and threatening upon a table set beneath the pines. Leaning huge against a tree off to the side is the specially built theatrical trunk they carried it in. Then I am approaching the table with dragging feet, hearing one of the boys giggling and saying, What you saying there, Deadman? And I look at it with horror—pink, frog-mouthed, with opened lid. Then looking back without answering, I see with longing the bright warmth of the light beneath the tent and catch the surging movements of the worshippers as they rock in time to the song which now seems to rise up to the still, sustained line of Daddy Hickman’s transcendent cry. Then Deacon Wilhite said, Come on little preacher, in you go! Lifting me, his hands firm around my ribs, then my feet beginning to kick as I hear the boys giggling, then going inside and the rest of me slipping past Teddy and Easter bunny, prone now and taking my Bible in my hands and the shivery beginning as the tufted top brings the blackness down.

At Deacon Wilhite’s signal they raise me and it is as though the earth has fallen away, leaving me suspended in air. I seem to float in the blackness, the jolting of their measured footsteps guided by Deacon Wilhite’s precise instructions, across the contoured ground, all coming to me muted through the pink insulation of the padding which lined the bottom, top, and sides, reaching me at blunt
points along my shoulders, buttocks, thighs, heels. A beast with twelve disjointed legs coursing along, and I its inner ear, anxiety; its anxious heart; straining to hear if the voice that sustained its line and me still soared. Because I believed that if he breathed while I was trapped inside, I’d never emerge. And hearing the creaking of a handle near my ear, the thump of Cylee’s knuckle against the side to let me know he was out there, giggling squint-eyed at my fear. Through the thick satin-choke of the lining the remote singing seeming miles away and the rhythmical clapping of hands coming to me like sharp, bright flashes of lightning, promising rain. Moving along on the tips of their measured strides like a boat in a slow current as I breathe through the tube in the lid of the hot ejaculatory air, hushed now by the entry and passage among them of that ritual coat of silk and satin, my stiff dark costume made necessary to their absurd and eternal play of death and resurrection….

No, not me but another. Bliss. Resting on his lids, black inside, yet he knew that it was pink, a soft, silky pink blackness around his face, covering even his nostrils. Always the blackness. Inside everything became blackness, even the white Bible and Teddy, even his white suit. It was black even around his ears, deadening the sound except for Reverend Hickman’s soaring song; which now, noodling up there high above, had taken on the softness of the piece of black velvet cloth from which Grandma Wilhite had made a nice full-dress overcoat—only better, because it had a wide cape for a collar.
Ayee
, but blackness.

He listened intently, one hand gripping the white Bible, the other frozen to Teddy’s paw. Teddy was down there where the top didn’t open at all, unafraid, a bold bad bear. He listened to the voice sustaining itself of its lyrics, the words rising out of the Word like Ezekiel’s wheels; without breath, straining desperately to keep its throbbing waves coming to him, thinking, If he stops to breathe I’ll die. My breath will stop too. Just like Adam’s if God had coughed or sneezed.

And yet he knew that he was breathing noisily through the tube set in the lid. Hurry, Daddy Hickman, he thought. Hurry and say the word. Please, let me rise up. Let me come up and out into the light and air….

Bliss?

So they were walking me slowly over the smooth ground and I could feel the slight rocking movement as the box shifted on their shoulders. And I thought, That means we’re out in the clearing. Trees back there, voices that-a-way, life and light up there. Hurry! They’re moving slow, like an old boat drifting down the big river in the night and me inside looking up into the black sky, no moon or stars and all the folks gone far beyond the levees. And I could feel the shivering creeping up my legs now and squeezed Teddy’s paw to force it down. Then the rising rhythm of the clapping hands were coming to me like storming waves heard from a distance; like waves that struck the boat and flew off into the black sky like silver sparks from the shaking of the shimmering tambourines, showering at the zenith like the tails of skyrockets. If I could only open my eyes. It hangs
heavy-heavy over my lids. Please hurry! Restore my sight. The night is black and I am far … far … I thought of Easter bunny, he came from the dark inside of a red-and-white striped egg….

And at last they were letting me down, down, down; and I could feel the jar as someone went too fast, as now a woman’s shout came to me, seeming to strike the side near my right ear like a flash of lightning streaking jaggedly across a dark night sky.

Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-sus! Have mercy, Jeeeeeee-sus!
and the cold quivering flashed up my legs.

Everybody’s got to die, sisters and brothers, Daddy Hickman was saying, his voice remote through the dark. That is why each and every one must be redeemed. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE REDEEMED! Yes, even He who was the Son of God and the voice of God to man—even
He
had to die. And what I mean is die as a
man
. So what do you, the lowest of the low, what do you expect you’re going to have to do? He had to die in all of man’s loneliness and pain because that’s the price He had to pay for coming down here and putting on the pitiful, unstable form of man. Have mercy! Even with his godly splendor which could transform the built-in wickedness of man’s animal form into an organism that could stretch and strain toward sublime righteousness—Amen! That could show man the highway to progress and toward a more noble way of living—even with all that, even He had to die! Listen to me tell it to you: Even
He
who said, Suffer the little ones to come unto
Me
had to die as a man. And like a man crying from His cross in all of man’s pitiful puzzlement at the will of Almighty God! …

It was not yet time. I could hear the waves of Daddy Hickman’s voice rolling against the sides, then down and back, now to boom suddenly in my ears as I felt the weight of darkness leave my eyes, my face bursting with sweat as I felt the rush of bright air bringing the odor of flowers. I lay there, blinking up at the lights, the satin corrugations of the slanting lid and the vague outlines of Deacon Wilhite, who now was moving aside, so that it seemed as though he had himself been the darkness. I lay there breathing through my nose, deeply inhaling the flowers as I released Teddy’s paw and grasped my white Bible with both hands, feeling the chattering and the real terror beginning and an ache in my bladder. For always it was as though it waited for the moment when I was prepared to answer Daddy Hickman’s signal to rise up that it seemed to slide like heavy mud from my face to my thighs and there to hold me like quicksand. Always at the sound of Daddy Hickman’s voice I came floating up like a corpse shaken loose from the bottom of a river and the terror rising with me.

We are the children of Him who said, “Suffer …” I heard, and in my mind I could see Deacon Wilhite, moving up to stand beside Daddy Hickman at one of the two lecterns, holding on to the big Bible and looking intently at the page as he repeated, “Suffer …”

And the two men standing side by side, the one large and dark, the other slim
and light brown; the other reverends rowed behind them, their faces staring grim with engrossed attention to the reading of the Word; like judges in their carved, high-backed chairs. And the two voices beginning their call and countercall as Daddy Hickman began spelling out the text which Deacon Wilhite read, playing variations on the verses just as he did with his trombone when he really felt like signifying on a tune the choir was singing:

Suffer
, meaning in this workaday instance to
surrender
, Daddy Hickman said.

Amen, Deacon Wilhite said, repeating Surrender.

Yes, meaning to surrender with tears and to feel the anguished sense of human loss. Ho, our hearts bowed down!

Suffer the little ones, Deacon Wilhite said.

The little ones—ah yes!
Our
little ones. He was talking to us too, Daddy Hickman said. Our little loved ones. Flesh of our flesh, soul of
our
soul. Our hope for heaven and our charges in this world. Yes! The little lambs. The promise of our fulfillment, the guarantee of our mortal continuance. The little wases-to-bes-Ha!—Amen! The little used-to-bes that we all were to our mammys and pappys, and with whom we are but one with God….