Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

While we was there, for our keep, we did chores. Mama hoed out the garden and showed Reverend Joy how to better take care of it. She even looked stronger, and the gardening gave her use of her muscles and some sunlight. But, as Jinx said it would, the cure-all came back on her. She had seemed clear of it, but then her need for it showed up. She did have a few days and nights where she got weak, yelled, and had some bad dreams-dreams about that black horse, and the other, winged now, and white as a cloud. We held her while she talked out of her head. The reverend didn’t even ask her what was wrong. Just sat by her and put a damp rag on her head. It was clear to me he knew what was going on, but it was also clear to me he never intended to say a word. During the day Mama tossed and turned and the bed was wet with her sweat, which was thick as hog lard on the sheets.

After a few days of this, Jinx went off in the woods and got some roots and bark and such, brewed it all up together, put it in a cup, and gave it to Mama to sip. Jinx said it was what they had given her uncle that caused him to quit drinking. Mama tried to fight off drinking that stuff, but she was too weak. Jinx was able to slip it down her throat. From the smell of that mess, I figure Mama got better just to keep from having to drink any more of it. Jinx said it was because she wasn’t a true-to-the-bone drunk, but was a drunk in her head, which meant she just didn’t like her life and wanted to get away from it, and that the cure-all was the door out. Now that she had gotten off it, and things was good, she had lost the desire, and unlike most drunks, the worst of which would drink shoe polish or hair tonic if it had alcohol in it, Mama was most likely done with it. Or so we hoped.

It got so Mama washed the reverend’s clothes, and ours, and while she did my overalls and shirt, I had to wear my good dress. This led to the reverend telling me how pretty I was, and it led to me believing it to such a point, next thing I knew I was up in church singing with the choir.

We all started going to church, and even Jinx got to come in, but she had to stay in the back and was told not to be too familiar with white people, and she wasn’t supposed to discuss her views on religion, even if she was asked a direct question. That was okay with her. She mostly slept through the sermons.

Truth is, we was all pretty content.

Now, there did get to be some talk. Folks at the church started asking me about us, about where we had come from, how long we had been at the reverend’s house, and exactly what was his and Mama’s arrangement. They also wanted to know why was we staying around with a nigger, meaning Jinx, of course. I told them we was just folks he was helping out with good Christian charity, and that he was sleeping in the car and Mama in the house, and there wasn’t nothing funny going on, and Jinx was a friend, which was a thing that kind of concerned them. They will tell you they got “good nigger friends,” if you ask, but what they mean is they have colored folks who they know and nod at and hire for jobs wouldn’t nobody do if they didn’t need the quarter, which was a kind of standard payment for everything from cutting grass to chopping wood, even if it was done all day in the hot sun.

To sum it up, his flock started to talk bad about Reverend Joy after church, and fewer men shook hands with him at the door. Even the kids run by him like they was passing a wasp nest, and my guess is they didn’t know sin from a pancake.

The women would stand out in the church lot and yak and think I wasn’t hearing them, but I have good ears, and I’m nosy, too, so I heard a lot.

There was one woman about Mama’s age, not bad-looking in a kind of long-nosed anteater way. She was always narrowing her eyes and smiling, but that smile reminded me of how a dog will do when it’s trying to decide if it ought to snarl or not. She seemed to be the main source of the gossip, and reason for that was plain to me. She was the one Jinx identified as the Too Much Salt in the Fried Chicken Lady; the one that came around and smiled and brought food, and tried to peek about to see if Mama had her underwear hanging over the door or some such business. It was clear to me that she saw herself not so much as a protector against sin but as someone disappointed the sin she suspected wasn’t hers, and that she wasn’t going to be what she most wanted to be-the preacher’s wife.

Anyway, she and them other women was talkers, standing around in their good-enough dresses and spit-shined shoes, their big church hats propped on their heads. It was the kind of talk that made me want to break off a limb and take to whacking her and that bunch of hypocrites across the back of the head.

I started to tell Mama and Reverend Joy about it, but figured if I did, then we’d have to leave, and we’d be on the river again in the Kingdom of the Snake. I thought about what it was we had planned to do, thought about May Lynn from time to time, about her being in a bag, and that she was still a long way from Hollywood. But the truth was, it wasn’t at the front of my mind.

Terry, the one who most wanted to take her out there, had even settled down, though now and again he would take the bag with May Lynn in it and go out and set with it on the edge of the raft like they was spooning. I even heard him talking to her once when I come up behind them. I was on my way to sit on the edge of the raft and dunk my feet in the river, but when I heard him talking, I decided to turn around and go back up the hill and leave them to it. In time, he found a lard can to keep her in, like the money. I guess he figured that was safer, and it had a nifty handle for carrying.

Only Jinx wanted to move on, though I don’t know how much May Lynn’s ashes had to do with it. For all his kindness, the reverend still treated Jinx a bit like a stain. He had stopped trying to convert her, however, and said something about there being some souls that was bound on the Judgment Day train for hell and there was no way to stop it. He would bring this up now and again, and when he said it, he would look at Jinx, and she would go, “Choo-choo.”

Anyway, we stuck, cause sometimes when you’re happy, or at least reasonably content, you don’t look up to see what’s falling on you.

More time passed, though I don’t know exactly how long. I lost count of the days. When in church, I gradually noted that the number of people in the pews got smaller. It pretty much come down to Reverend Joy preaching to a smattering of hanger-ons and us, and we had heard it all before at the kitchen table and had even helped him fine-tune it. But we stuck out of loyalty, same as you would if a little kid wanted to read a poem to you they’d wrote and there wasn’t any real good excuse to go somewhere, though next to offering my hand to a water moccasin to bite, listening to someone read a poem is high on my list of things I can’t stand.

The women who had been bringing Reverend Joy food during the week, as it was customary to do for the preacher, stopped delivering it; that little perk we had been taking advantage of dried up like an old persimmon. Too Much Salt in the Fried Chicken Lady-or, as I sometimes thought of her, the Anteater-was the first to go.

After that, it was all downhill.

Her chatter, and that of her nest of hens, turned the flock so against the reverend, including that man we had seen him baptize, that some joined the Methodists, which was a low blow as far as Reverend Joy was concerned.

“They might as well be Catholics,” he said.

The reverend’s sadness began to rub off on us. Terry, who hadn’t been in any hurry to go, had taken more frequent to carrying May Lynn’s can of ashes and her diary to the raft. He’d sit there with the can by his side and the diary in his hands, reading. Jinx would sit on the raft with him, and do some fishing. Whatever she caught, she’d throw back. I had been wearing my good dress a lot even when I didn’t need to, but now I put it away and went back to my overalls. It got so I dreaded Sunday church and Wednesday prayer meeting. Before, all I had to do was sit through it, but now, watching the reverend preach was painful. He seemed smaller in his clothes, like a dwarf that had put on a fat man’s pants and jacket by mistake.