Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He looked around. In his eyes a look of despair.

“So fall,” he said. “Fall to your knees.”

As he said this he fell, like a man shot. His knees hit the planed boards with a cracking sound. He winced and almost keeled over but was able to right himself. His face was drawn, famished, gaunt even. Others had followed him to their knees in a symphony of groans and creaks. The preacher raised his scarred hands and held them before his face as if he was holding in a blessing or curse or the split words of a raveling faith. Slowly he lowered his hands until he could look out over the closed fingers. Then his eyes closed.

In a choking voice he said, “Fall on your knees, yes. Offer what you have to the Lord, yes. Offer the misery and the scarediness and the hate and the rage, yes. Lord!” he cried, his voice reedy and broken. “We here are scared to death. We are miserable. We are filled with hatred. Take these putrid products and like the water you changed into wine, like the loaves and the fishes you enhanced to feed a multitude, change, enhance them, until they are transfigured in the fire and love of your being into a faith that will sustain us. Help us, Lord! We cannot help ourselves.” He leaned so far forward it seemed he might pitch off the platform onto the ground.

With a struggle he righted himself. His body slumped. He forced air through nearly closed lips. Drew a rattling breath.

“Ay, Jesus,” he whispered. Silence. People looked from under lowered brows. The silence extended like a dark and steady wing over the congregation. Delvin could hear the wind rustling in the trees. At last the young preacher spoke. “Be kind,” he croaked, “Be kind.”

He staggered to his feet. He slumped before them, held up by what they could not tell. His exhausted face looked as if he was no longer behind it, as if he had been taken by an imbecility, a loose dumbness.

Cries began to pass through the assembled.

The minister Rev Munch rose and grasped the younger man’s arms from behind. He drew Rev Wayne to him and slid his arm around him and they stood together, eyes closed. Both prayed outloud and no one in the congregation was sure of what either said. Their prayers mingled and coiled about each other in the sun-filled air aswim with motes and drifting bugs. As the prayers ended the choir started in on another song. Good news, they sang, chariot comin — good news.

Soon they were all out in the cemetery grouped around the big green canvas awning above the yellow hole in the ground. The air smelled of the dusty cotton plants. A warm breeze as if idly looking for something lifted the leaves of the gum trees and set them back. All around them at other graves bouquets of phlox and jacob’s ladder and yarrow and wild carrot and even the yellow blossoms of the humble dusty miller plant gave the scumbly ground a festive and mournful air.

A tall gaunt man stepped forward and began to sing the jubilee song “Before I’d Be A Slave.” “O freedom. .,” he began.

From the corner of his eye Delvin saw a bright shawl of fire shoot incredibly high over the roof from in back of the church. Before the fire became a thought, he heard the thunderous explosion and was pushed against Mr. Oliver’s broad belly.

People screamed.

A siren somewhere off in the woods behind the church began to wail.

Another explosion, black and lithely red, hit the retired church across the yard, seeming to lift and set it momentarily back on the ground before it split apart and collapsed into burning boards and shingles.

The people, until this moment weighed down and nearly immobile, were suddenly roused. They cried out. Many ran crying and screaming into the fields and toward the road that was empty now of the police cars that had trailed them to this site.

A green glass bottle flew through the air, landed beside the side wall of the main church and exploded in fire.

Delvin, shaky but still upright, crouched under the open awning. The coffin perched on narrow boards above the grave. The older preacher, Rev Munch, lay in collapse across a couple of wooden folding chairs. Some people back in the crowd thought he’d been shot and this was how that story started. The younger preacher, partially recovered from his struggle, knelt beside the coffin. At the explosions he had winced and leaned away as if blown by their wind and looked up with an anguishing face and gone back to his praying. The singer held tightly to one of the brass tent poles.

The siren that had provided a back noise to the occurrence keened higher and faster, rushing until its noise became a wheezing sound like a giant trying to scream through a madness.

More fireballs, sputtering like sparklers, rained down.

Delvin and Oliver and Willie Burt helped the clerics and the singer and those knocked to the ground by the suddenness and noise to get up and get away from the grave.

Some people were crawling on their hands and knees. Others ran full out. Others, dazed or in shock, stood doing nothing.

A man with a smoking back ran by. A woman stumbled along fanning herself with a punctured derby. Little girls screamed.

There was nothing to do but leave the coffin where it was.

Fire caught in both church buildings, rose thickly from the remains of the old church and licked around the corners of the new structure

Delvin’s group joined the crowd fleeing. The dozen automobiles and trucks had created a traffic jam. Those in wagons attempted to get their mules and horses into action, but these animals were generally so frightened they couldn’t be controlled. Several broke loose and at least three rigs were hauled off across the cotton field bouncing and knocking through the thick knee-high bushes. Others rigs were trapped, tangled, forced back on themselves, animals driven to their knees under whipped reins, shying, kicking, knocking people to the ground, dragging them. Two horses, riderless, made it to the road and were pulled up by quick-acting mourners who grabbed their flaring reins. A little boy was grazed in the forehead by a mule kick and knocked out, but was otherwise unhurt. Many were thrown off their feet and Sunday clothes were ruined and bruises and scrapes were applied everywhere. Some lost their shoes. The hearse was deeply dented on the passenger side by the kick of a mule.

Many people ran away down the eastward slanting road. Others headed through the fields back toward the settlement.

Oliver had gotten in the hearse and had been trying to start it when the mule kicked the door. “Get in,” he cried, not realizing what it was.

Just then Delvin tried the passenger door, but he couldn’t open it. Oliver turned his head and looked at him. The boy was far away, speaking without sound. Then he was close and Oliver could hear him shouting. Reach this way! The boy grinned crazily at him. Oliver grinned back.

Delvin tried the back door and this one worked. He climbed in and then crawled through the interior window space into the front seat. He hugged Oliver and in the hug Oliver could feel his life — that had been leaving him, leaving without his even knowing it — reviving in his body; it was as if the boy’s life poured into him. They grasped each other and held on for dear life and then as if a cue was taken by both they let go and looked each other in the eye. Both knew inexpressibly a great thing.

Oliver began to feel his life moving again at its natural speed. He started to cry — small, singular tears, each carrying a little bouquet of humility and gratitude. Delvin kept patting him as, mouth open, he stared out the window.

They sat side by side watching the clash and bang in the world around them. A young man trailing a long blue scarf ran by. A hugely fat woman in a large funnel hat stumped past waving one white glove. A man swung a wooden crutch at a woman who was shouting at him. A small boy climbed onto the hood of the hearse and stood waving a checkerboard bandana as if signaling and then jumped off and disappeared into the crowd, no one, as far as Delvin could tell, having responded to the signal. A skinny man clapped his hands, threw back his head and hollered. Everybody hollered. Curls of smoke licked at the web-footed sweet gum leaves. Somebody was singing, some woman, at the top of her lungs. What firepower, Delvin thought, and it was about the woman not the fire he thought this. But the fire — able to take care of itself — was a circus of color all around. It raged and kicked with great blossoming fusillades like a flotilla of gunships firing cannons. Splashes and rents and gouts of flame. All handy combustibles in terrible trouble. A singing, whizzing noise. Up above everything, Delvin could see patches of blue sky, unshakeable, mute. Something in him pulsed and seemed to surge toward the sky. He felt a hugeness inside him as if he had broken open. An agitation came with this, a sense of things lopped off and falling, the old fearfulness careening through. He shuddered and drew his chest in. Then, as if a wave had passed through and gone on, a quiet filled him. He felt a rocking motion, a calm and a rectitude in himself, a shyness. Sunshine picked among the flames, distilling light. A sense of ease came on him, and it seemed natural and right that this was so. He would recall this feeling later in his life, but not for a while. He leaned back, or seemed to, as a swirl of smoke, black and tinged green, rolled past the grit-speckled windshield. He was back suddenly in the car.