Jeffery Allen - Rails Under My Back

Beulah continued, deaf to the question. Nap was dead.

Ain’t nobody killed nobody, Sheila said. Beulah, you know Nap had those seizures and he get to drinkin and wouldn take his medicine.

And Sam get on the phone, Beulah said, and tell one version bout stealin out of some white woman’s house and Dave git back on the phone talkin bout stealin her love. Whatever they did, they did it together. They both gets on the phone, cryin somephun bout crackas lynchin a boy in Fulton. Strung em under a railroad bridge and burned him up wit a blowtorch. Burned him so bad that his family didn’t get no remains. First wind come along and blow his ashes from that rope. So I wired em some money.

QUEEN OF THE MOUNTAIN, she bounced off the dresser in the old barn. Bounced, above and beyond. Went sailing over the side. Spread her wings only to discover they didn’t work. Her stomach hit the edge of an open drawer, her flesh curving around it.

Sheila’s lips moved silently.

At first Gracie felt no pain. Hers was the sudden feeling of falling down a well into the deepest solitude. Then she saw the pain, red spiders crawling down her thighs.

Gracie, Sheila said, You awright?

The words rolled heavy in Gracie’s head.

Gracie? …

She’ll be dry as an empty riverbed, the doctor said.

She was thirteen.

NOW, YOU AND GRACIE take this applesauce to Brother James.

I don’t wanna be round no dead folks, R.L. said.

I don’t either, Gracie said. She was thinking about the doctor’s words. She’ll be dry as an empty riverbed.

Ain’t nobody dead. Do like I told you.

Sister James’s house lay in the bend of the road, set far back from the trees to catch the best chances of light. Why anybody want light in this Sippi heat? The fever had gotten so bad that Sister James’s naked black body glowed with heat. Not one sister of the congregation could get within ten feet of her without blistering.

Take the water from the well, Gracie said.

Why, girl, that water poison. Kill her for sure.

Listen. Take the water from the well. Gracie knew exactly what to do. Knowledge breaking like rushing waves inside her.

Lord!

Holy!

Heaven!

Fetch Miss Ivory Beach! Tell her come see bout this child.

That girl — the sister pointed at Gracie — one of them McShans.

You know Larry over there wit that three-legged cat. Triflin wife ran off—

And that one — the sister pointed at Sheila — touched. Born with a caul. So they both might be touched too.

Listen, Gracie said. Take the water from the well.

Sister, an older sister instructed, do as she asks. The lesser evil won’t kill her no quicker than the more.

Sister took a bucket of water from the well. Gracie stuck her face in the rusty cool, bobbing for apples. She filled up the balloons of her jaws. She walked over to the bed and stood directly above Sister James. Arched back her head and sprayed a loop of water from her mouth, a thick stream that thinned and sputtered, then sizzled against the sick woman’s naked skin.

Christ!

Moses!

Praise the Lord!

She makin the Good Book live!

It’s the devil’s work!

The sick woman’s sweat knotted, a silver train that moved inward from the four corners of her body and congealed into a single large bead between her breasts. Gracie lifted the bead with two fingers. She snapped it in her mouth gumdrop fast.

That night, Sheila and Gracie discussed the day’s events. Gracie realized that Sheila also possessed the slow fire of power, had always had it. The Lord lends us his body to do good work. Sheila explained the properties of roots, the democracy of ghosts, the committees of dead souls. But who had told her? How did she learn?

Look, Sheila said. Other folks live inside us. Yo body like a used road.

Gracie saw this, footprints up and down her body’s inner roads. Well, I thought dead folks sposed to be light.

What you mean?

Like ghosts. Ain’t they like sheets? Can’t you put yo hands through them? Ain’t they fulla air?

I think so.

They sho don’t feel light.

Sheila said nothing.

If they gon walk inside somebody, least they could take off they shoes.

From then on, Gracie lived a life of iron prohibition, laying the gleaming metal bricks of her soul — smoke, drink, dance, frivolity, gossip, fornication, and profanity being the sins to be avoided, sins that would take an edge off her powers. She sealed up her belongings from this world and rode off to the next. Practices and prohibitions she brought North in her black steamer trunk. Keep an eye on yourself, for fear you also may be tempted. She would never forget that train ride. The long cold tube of the coach. She was fleeing Lula Mae’s house for the station, and in the same image she was on a train looking down on flooded tracks, seeing a dead horse floating — its mane spread like a lily pad about its head — bobbing with the slow current. Two men at Union Station offered to carry her trunk; Beulah and Sheila arrived and chased them off with threatening eyes and purses— Be careful of these city niggas —this trunk heavy with the memories of every person back home she had helped, all the lights and shapes she had broken her soul into and shared with the less fortunate, all crammed into those brief years of power.

It was the most natural thing when Reverend Tower asked her to put in work for the church. Unlike the greedy-hearted brothers and sisters who only showed their face on Sundays, she went to Mount Zion every night of the week— stay the course —Reverend Tower’s voice lifting the waters of her spirit—

I won’t tell my sins, for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like heavy snow.

Preach.

I can see it all from a lonely mountaintop, the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it, the story of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow.

— in those days when Cotton Rivers was a poor deacon, those days before Reverend Tower died and John, Lucifer, Dallas, and Rivers lowered him into the red soil of Woodlawn Cemetery (where Sam would later be buried), where he could watch over the souls of those he’d guarded in life and the congregation light-lifted Cotton into the podium of leadership and power on the tips of their praying hands, Rivers weighing the souls of the congregation to find the heaviest ones, Rivers forming a partnership with the Reverend Cleveland Sparrow, pastor of the Holy Victory Outreach Church, the two men trading pulpits Sunday to Sunday, church to church, then sharing the same pulpit, and eventually setting up a pulpit at either end of the stage (at both Rivers’s Mount Zion and Sparrow’s Holy Victory); on the right side of the podium, with his right hand raised high in the air, Cleveland Sparrow always released the high ship of sermon—

Abundance is belief in the Lord Christ.

What you say, Cleveland?

Cotton, I say abundance is belief in the Lord Christ.

Cause, our Gawd is the wealthiest being in the universe.

He is the owner of the trees.

He is the owner of the dirt rooting the trees.

He is the owner of every golden fruit born from the trees.

The stained glass flashed with the rhythm of moving shadows, the shadows of moving tongues.

He is the owner of the worm that spies in the fruit.

Yes, Gawd is the owner of the hollow beak that drinks the worm.

Gawd is the owner of the animals that eat the bird and the fruit.

He is the owner of four-walking animals that eat the fruit.