Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

One Sunday evening there was only us and about five other people in the church. Four of them five was old folks who wouldn’t have changed churches if it caught on fire, and one was the local drunk, who liked to come there to sleep sitting up in the back pew next to where Jinx liked to sleep, though now and again he wasn’t above yelling out “Amen” or “Praise the Lord,” which was more than Jinx was willing to do. But unlike Jinx, the drunk did some of his sleeping lying down in the pew, where our girl would kind of hood her eyes and nod sitting up.

Anyway, this Sunday I’m talking about, after the sermon, Reverend Joy was quick to get out from behind the pulpit and over to the door. He stopped and let Mama walk with him down the hill toward the house. Before, he always went to stand in the doorway to shake hands, and we’d go ahead and meet him later. But now, like a dog bored of a trick, he was done, partly because the five listeners was as eager to leave as he was, including the drunk.

Me and Terry and Jinx watched Reverend Joy and Mama walking down the hill toward the house. It was still bright out, it being sometime in early July now, and we stood in the lot, picking up gravel and tossing it at a sweet gum that grew near the church. It wasn’t that we had anything against the sweet gum. It was just something to do.

“We ought to get on with it,” Jinx said. “May Lynn ain’t gonna go to Hollywood and scatter herself.”

“I have been thinking the same thing,” Terry said. “At first I found this comfortable, but less so now. I feel like we have been kidnapped by ourselves. That we are among the lotus-eaters.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Something I read in a book once,” he said. “Suffice to say that once you are in the clutches of the lotus-eaters, it isn’t easy to depart from them. You eat of the lotus and are led to believe everything is pleasant even when it isn’t. We had a plan, and we’ve laid it down. I suppose we should pick it up again. For me, the spell here is broken.”

“I don’t remember eating no lotus,” Jinx said. “Whatever that is.”

“It’s a way of speaking,” Terry said. “It represents a mood. A thought.”

“Why don’t you just say that?” Jinx said. “Why you got to represent it, or some such thing?”

“I’ll work to improve,” Terry said.

That night I lay on my pallet on the floor, dozing off and on, and then at some point I came wide awake. I felt like a hand had been laid on me and was shaking me, and when I woke, May Lynn was walking to the back of the cabin pointing in the direction of the river. She was wearing that same old dress she always wore. Her hair was wet and dripping and there was a sewing machine tied around her feet. She was dragging it behind her like a ball and chain, making no noise whatsoever. She was all swollen up like when we found her. When she got to the rear of the cabin, she turned and looked at me and frowned and jabbed one of her fat fingers at the back cabin wall, really hard. It was all so genuine I could smell the river on her.

Then I really woke up. I looked and there wasn’t no ghost, but I sure felt like May Lynn had been in the room, urging me to get back on that raft and get on down to Gladewater and then Hollywood.

The whole thing made my stomach feel suddenly empty. I was also hot and sticky. I thought I might creep over and get myself some cool buttermilk from the icebox, but when I sat up, now that my eyes had become used to the dark, I noticed the door to the bedroom, where Mama slept, was open.

I got up and tippy-toed so as not to wake Terry, who was sleeping at the rear of the cabin, or Jinx, who slept near the front door. I went and looked in the bedroom. The bed was empty. I went back to the main room and over to the window by the front door. I hesitated a moment, listened to Jinx snore. She sounded like someone had stuffed one of her nostrils with a sock. I moved back the curtain. There was nothing out there to see but heat lightning dancing above the trees and a few fireflies fluttering about, bobbing back and forth like they were being bounced off an invisible wall.

I went back to my pallet and got my shoes I had set by it, put them on, then crept quietly out the front door and closed it gently. I stood there on the porch trying to decide if I should go through with what I was thinking. Finally I decided I was going to do just that, even if in the end it harelipped the pope.

I sidled over to the reverend’s car and looked in the window. The reverend’s blankets and pillow was in the front seat, but he wasn’t with them, and Mama wasn’t there, which was a relief, but it wasn’t a deep kind of relief, because I still didn’t know where neither one of them was. I don’t exactly know why I was concerned about it, but I was. I didn’t like to imagine Mama would be with Reverend Joy, at least in the way I was thinking. I guess she had the right to some kind of happiness, but it still bothered me, and I suppose it was because I was wanting her and my real father, Brian, to rekindle things, so we’d be some kind of family.

I decided it was best not to know what they was doing. I started back for the house. Then I heard talking. It was coming from the rear of the cabin, so I went carefully along the side of it. When I got to the edge of the back wall, I realized the sound was not as near as I thought, but because of the slope of the hill, and the way it had a horseshoe sort of bend in it, voices were coming up from down there. The words wasn’t entirely clear, but I could tell the voices belonged to Mama and Reverend Joy.

I skulked down the hill, feeling like a thief with a baby under my arm and a hot pot of water and some salt and pepper waiting, and made my way through the cover of trees scattered here and there. I came to where the hill had a bit of a lift, and then another drop-off. I could really hear them good now. I sat down there on the edge of that drop-off because I could see them from there, too. It was just shapes I could see, but it was easy to recognize the shapes and voices. They was down by the water, sitting on the raft, talking. It was a rotten thing to do, but I sat down and listened.

It was just talk at first, and I don’t remember much of the early stuff. Mostly it was the Reverend Joy doing the talking, about this and that, but there was something about his tone that made me feel like he had something wild caught inside his head and was trying to sneak up on it and let it loose without getting bit.

He said, “I don’t know that I have actually been called to preach.”

“God called you?” Mama said.

“I thought so. I really did. But now I’m less certain. I am beginning to think I called myself.”

“You know why your church members are leaving, don’t you?” Mama said.

“I do.”

“And so do I. But instead of us leaving, instead of making it easy for you, we’ve stayed. We’re at fault here. If we leave, things will go back the way they were.”

“It’s all right.”

“No,” Mama said. “No, it’s not. Tomorrow we are going to load up and go on down the river.”

“It’s too late for that, Helen,” he said. “What’s done is done.”

“Maybe not,” she said.

I could see the reverend’s arm move now and again, and then there would be a little plop in the water. I came to know he had a little pile of rocks with him, picked up on the way down, I figured, and he was chunking them into the water. He finished off the last of them and quit chunking. They both sat looking out at the dark river.

“You never told me why you were going down the river in the first place,” he said.

Mama thought for a long time before she spoke. “I’m on the run from my husband, and the children are trying to get out to Hollywood.”