Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

“I know. I wear my mistakes like a coat, only it’s heavier,” Mama said.

“You did what you could, I guess.”

“I did what I could do, but it wasn’t much. I want to do better now. Don isn’t just a man without hope anymore. He’s a man without heart. I can stand one, but I can’t stand the other. Between what went on between us, him hitting me, there were moments that were very nice. Then it would start over. I got so I lived for the in-betweens.”

“What you said about Daddy-I mean Don-being a quitter,” I said. “You believe that?”

“I do,” she said. “But I been wrong before. Maybe he has more juice in him than I suspect. I know this, though: Gene isn’t a quitter, and neither is his pal Cletus, and certainly not Constable Sy. Neither will quit when he thinks he can get something for free, or when he thinks he can manage some kind of bargain in his favor. Those two will work themselves to death to get a free thing, and do nothing for something they can have for honest work. They’ll chase this money till they get it, or there’s no way for them to have it. I’m certain of that. I have known them as long as I’ve known your daddy, and I know that much about them. Somewhere inside Don I used to think there was a good man pressed flat. I thought he might blow up to size again at some point, but he didn’t. He wasn’t always bad to me, honey. There were times when he was good.”

“You said that,” I said. “It doesn’t comfort much.”

“It’s just those times got farther and farther apart, and I think he’s been flat so long he’s going to stay that way. What makes me proud of you is that you didn’t let either of us mash you down. You spring right back, and you got hopes. I used to have hopes, and I’m trying to remember what that’s like, and I’m trying to make sure you keep yours.”

“I’m trying,” I said. “But he was always bad to me, and wanted to be as bad as he could.”

“I guess I knew that.”

“Why didn’t you do something?”

“Because I didn’t have the spirit.”

This wasn’t a very satisfying answer, but I knew it was the best I was going to get. I decided I had to start with her this very night, and call it a new beginning. She touched my hand, and then was quiet. I snuggled in close. I felt like a sad old dog that had finally been petted.

During the night, we all awoke to Mama on the edge of the raft. She was lying on her belly with her head hanging over, puking. When she got what was in her out in the river, I got her back to the center of the raft and covered her and hugged her close, but she trembled like she was cold, which didn’t make no sense, as it was a warm night.

“I’m needing the cure-all,” Mama said. “That’s what’s happening. I didn’t bring any of it with me. I should have cut it back, not quit cold turkey. I’m so sick. I thought I heard God calling to me, but it was a whip-poor-will. I dreamed about that black horse again, and I saw the white one, but it was running in front of me, too fast to catch.”

“You’ll catch it in time,” I said.

She trembled for a while, but finally got still, and me and her both slept.

We was all up with the sun. Mama felt considerably better, and with the light I felt happier about our possibilities.

Mama, like Terry, had come well prepared. She had some hot-water cornbread patties in a bucket in her bag, and she gave us all a couple of them, and we drank water from a canteen Terry brought. It seemed the best cornbread I had ever eaten and the sweetest water I had ever drunk. Mama, I noticed, drank a little water but ate nothing.

After untying, we poled back onto the river and started out again. It was good water and the river was straight. We went along right smart-like and didn’t have to do anything much until the raft started to drift to one side or the other, then we’d have to push off hard to get back to where the water was swift and straight again. But with the current like it was, and the raft well built, we stayed mostly in the middle and kept making good time. It was hard sometimes to even feel like we was moving. Might not have known that was the case if I hadn’t looked toward shore and seen trees and such go by.

About the time the cornbread began to wear off and the sun was starting to get high and turn hot, we heard singing. It was sweet and it was loud, and there was a choir full of it.

“It’s as if angels have come down from heaven,” Terry said.

“Yeah,” Jinx said. “Or a bunch of people singing.”

It was pretty, though, like the songs was dancing over the water. As we drifted on, the singing grew louder. We finally came in sight of where it was coming from. A bunch of white people gathered on the edge of the river. Many were near the bank, but the rest went up a little slope of grass that at the peak was yellow with sunlight. A lot of the people were dressed up-at least, they was as well dressed as they got in East Texas-and down by the water was a barefoot man wearing black pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was waving around a big black book. A man dressed about the same way was standing beside him with his head down, the way a dog will do when you’re scolding it.

But it wasn’t a scolding. I realized what it was when I figured it was Sunday. I had sort of lost count of the days, but now I knew what day it was because of what I was seeing. It was a bunch of Baptists and they was attending a baptism. I knew because I had seen it before. It had been done to me, but I was so young I didn’t really remember much about it.

Someone was about to get dunked in the river. Way the Baptists saw it, that dunk in the river made sure you was going to heaven, even if before or later you knew a cow in the biblical sense or set fire to a crib with the baby in it. Once you was dunked and a preacher said words over you, heaven was assured and Saint Peter was already brushing off your seat and stringing your harp. Since most everyone in these parts was a Baptist, the fields and the prisons being full of them, it seemed like a pretty good deal.

As we cruised by, we saw the singers lift their heads to look at us. The children waved. Some of them got smacked by their folks on account of it. The preacher, his light hair shiny as gold in the sun, dragged the man standing next to him out into the water. The tails of their shirts floated up.

Passing them, we looked back and seen the man holding his nose, falling back into the preacher’s arms, being lowered down.

Mama, who had turned around to watch it all, said, “He has been baptized.”

“Like us, he can pretty much commit any crime he likes and he’ll be redeemed,” I said.

“Hush,” she said. “It isn’t exactly like that.”

We sailed on past the church folk.

The water was brisk because of all the recent rain, and the river bent a lot, and sometimes when it bent and became narrow, the raft would turn so that the rear end became the front end, and there was no fighting it with our poles because it was so deep. We switched to paddles, but it was like trying to use ice cream sticks to get the job done.

Eventually, we come around a twist in the river and the raft started going around and around and finally it twirled down a little offshoot. All we could do was just keep our places and hope we didn’t tip. It turned shallow, though, and it got so we could use our poles again. In time we was able to push ourselves up against the shore. I jumped off and tied the raft to an oak.

Finished, I sat down on the ground. After I’d been on the water for that long, the earth felt funny underneath my butt, like I had been on a merry-go-round and had gone too fast and had been thrown off.

Everyone got off the boat and sat down. Mama dug around in her bag and came up with more cold cornbread and water. The cornbread was still good and the water still tasted sweet. Even Mama ate this time.