William Gay - Little Sister Death

The preacher got out into the rain. He rolled the glass up and closed the car door. He had on shiny lowquarters and he picked his way between the mudholes. They moved toward the tent, drummed down by the rain. The preacher pulled aside a flap door and Swaw followed him in. It was darker inside, and for a moment he could see only the white shirt of the preacher. He was conscious of the smell of new pine lumber, as if he had been in the toolshed of his dream. Then he saw the flat boxes along one wall. They were of pine shelving, and they had holes augured into the sides. For ventilation, Swaw guessed.

My little sister, she tends em, the preacher was saying. He had approached the stacked boxes. She’s got a gift with serpents. Don’t think no more of pickin em up than you would playin with a puppy. They love her, too. They know she takes care of em.

He casually opened the lid of one of the boxes as he spoke. The lid was hinged and it swung open smoothly. Swaw involuntarily stepped back, then saw the snake in the box was restrained by an inner lid of locking and by a layer of wire mesh. It was a copperhead coiled on a bed of straw, motionless, bright head aloft as if it were listening to some far-off sound Swaw had not heard as yet.

That’s my little sister yonder, the preacher said, pointing, and Swaw turned, so caught up in the snake that he was aware of the girl’s presence for the first time. She stood in the corner facing an isinglass window of the tent watching him and slowly turned. Swaw suddenly felt chilled, aware of the cold layers of wet clothing against his skin, and for a dizzy second he thought he was going to faint, for the world darkened and everything looked vague and far away. The preacher was still talking, but sounds had diminished and Swaw couldn’t understand him.

Swaw had known her the instant she began to turn, had in some dark cobwebbed corner of his mind known her surely before that by the long flaxen hair and the shape of her body beneath the dress. She was watching him with eyes luminous and compassionless as a cat’s. It was the girl who had beckoned him from Jacob Beale’s tombstone.

Dark fell early. The rain had ceased. They came up the old roadbed by lanternlight, the bevy of giggling girls leading the way. When they reached the field there was no light in it, no sign of voices.

I don’t see nothin, the woman said. There was accusation in her voice. I never heard nothin about no camp meetin neither.

It was right about here, Swaw said. He seemed to be speaking to himself. He raised the lantern, and by the yellow light his sallow face looked carved from dark burnished wood. He peered into the darkness. A chorus of frogs called from the wet field.

You come in drunkern a bicycle, she taunted. Likely you dreamed it or just made it up for meanness.

He crossed the ditch. Below him he could hear water running in it. He went up the embankment and over the splitrail fence. He could feel morning glory vines and sawbriars tugging at him as he crossed into the field. The water was shoemouth deep and rose about his feet. The water looked opaque and illusory, the depth thrown into question, and for a moment there was something sinister about the barren field.

What are you lookin for?

He swung the lantern in an arc. There was something of desperation in his choppy movements. Dry weeds, the unbroken earth in the bare spots stood out in stark relief. Tire tracks, he said. And again, Tire tracks, goddamn it.

Tire tracks, she said contemptuously.

The girls had fallen into a sullen silence. There was to be no meeting, no gaiety, no singing, no snakes. No salvation.

Boat tracks more likely, the eldest said, a harpy’s echo of her mother.

Swaw didn’t reply. He hunkered to the wet earth. With his hand he parted the tall grass, saw only the rainwashed black loam. Hunkered there in the darkness, he felt before himself a door, madness already raising the hand to knock.

Madness sniffing at his tracks like an unwanted dog. Madness would escort him the rest of the way there, clutching at him and whispering adulterous secrets in his ear.

He could see them through the sundrenched window picking the last of the fieldpeas. Lorene and the three eldest, a gaggle of bonneted women moving through the garden above the creek, picking the dry peas into their aprons transferring them to burlap bags. Hogs in the field, he thought. Beyond them the silver water metallic in the sun.

The house seemed locked in silence so intense he felt he could hear it. A buzzing undercurrent like electricity, the air harsh and surreal. He was waiting, but he didn’t know for what.

Daddy? Retha called. Her voice was muffled through the walls.

His hand released the sheer curtain. What? he said. He could still see them, spectral and distant, through the gauzy cloth.

Come in here a minute.

He went into the hall and to the bedroom door. He opened it. Good God, girl, he said. He could hardly speak. The sight of her made his breath catch in his throat. She was standing naked in a foottub, her body lathered with soapsuds. She had washed her hair and it clung wetly to her head, hung in curly tendrils that halfobstructed her soapy breasts, small and perfectly formed. His eyes fell to the smooth white of her belly, the dark patch of pubic hair white with lather. The long white expanse of her legs hurt his chest.

Will you git me a towel off the clothesline?

He forced himself to back through the door. He slammed it to behind him. He could hear her voice through the door, querulous, a childlike whine crept into it.

What’s the matter, Daddy?

He could hear their voices nearing the house, the girls sniggering about something. The old woman’s coarse monotone cutting through. He could see the harsh sun white through the screen. They ascended the steps into his sunlit vision.

Daddy, she called again.

He returned with the towel and handed it through, extending his arm without fully opening the door.

Later that day Swaw opened the door to the toolshed, had already reached for the bottle he had hid above the door lintel. Half the floor had been wrecked out before Swaw’s time, and he found Retha sitting on the edge of the floor watching him. He turned, startled, then began to search all around as if he had come in for some particular tool.

What are you lookin for?

Never you mind what I’m lookin for, Retha. What are you doin in here?

Just sittin in here where it’s quiet.

Go on and get out of there. You’re liable to get copperhead bit.

She got up reluctantly. I like it in here, she said.

Why? It seems a funny place to come and sit.

I don’t know.

Swaw liked it out here and he didn’t know why either. All he knew was that the door of the toolshed seemed to close off the rest of the world. When you were in the toolshed things you worried about didn’t bother you. Everything was timeless in here. There was a different perspective to things. In fact, there weren’t any things, as if the toolshed and its handhewn cedar door was the sum totality of existence, finite, the only thing there was. Swaw didn’t want to share it.

Go help your mama get in the last of them tomaters, he said, and don’t let me catch you back in here again. You git snakebit you’d die fore I could git you to a doctor, even with that wagon and team.

When she was gone he got down the bottle and drank, then sat on the wooden floorboards, feeling the warm assurance of alcohol feeding all through him. He rolled himself a Country Gentleman smoke and lit it, watched the blue smoke shift hazily in the columns of spilled light.

He heard laughter. A girl’s laughter, children, secretive and faint, and for some reason he suddenly felt like a trespasser or eavesdropper. He knew subconsciously he was listening to something that had not been said for his ears.