The Devil's Dream (17 page)

First Daddy said he wouldn't let us go up there, but Freda started whining and crying and all, and then Mamma said, “Oh, take them then, for God's sake, Durwood,” as she had a migraine headache.

“If you are going with me,” Daddy said as we started off that evening, “I don't want to hear no whining, nor no muley-mouthing, nor nothing like it, from either one of you girls. I don't want to hear nobody say, ‘Daddy, I'm so tired.' Nor do I want to hear nothing spoke about nobody taking a little sip.”

“Yes sir,” I say, and Daddy says, “All right, then,” and so we set off, walking along by Grassy Branch where it was fast coming on for night already, dark shadders laying out behind everything, lightning bugs rising.

We stopped for Daddy to light the lantern, and then I got to carry it. Daddy was carrying a old quilt and Freda was carrying a sack of cold pork biscuits. We walked along the creek and then we tuck off on this path that went up by old man Isom Daughtry's cane patch, and kept on going up into the trees. It wasn't too hard walking, for Daddy went first, and he'd stop right frequent to take a little drink, so we could catch our breath then and look around. Me and Freda held hands. It was scary up there in them big trees. We never played up on Cemetery Mountain, me nor the others, not even Robert Floyd who is so wild. We never said nothing about it, but we never went up there neither. And then there we were with Daddy, and it dark besides. I swung the lantern side to side, looking around real careful-like, for it seemed to me that I could see faces behind them trees, awful old scary hant-faces, keeping just beyond the light. But I knowed better than to say nothing to Daddy about it.

Daddy put the cap back on the jar and we went on, me still looking real careful to one side and then the other, for I felt those hants was trying to reach out and grab me, I felt like they might of wanted me to come and be their little girl. I said a prayer in my head. I was real glad when we come out of the trees and got on a real road.

I seen first one lantern, then another. Then another, all of them swinging along, just like I was swinging mine. It was like being in a big parade of fairy-lights, moving slow up the mountain. As we went on, I looked back, and I saw more and more lanterns coming. I felt like I was part of something then. I felt big—I've always been real little for my age—and I walked bigger.

Before long we got up there to a grassy bald where it appeared that the road ended, and I could tell this was where we were coming to, for it was a lot of people up there already, and lanterns, and talking and laughing.

It was Uncle R.C. who had the first radio in that part of the county, and he had it rigged up to run off a car battery. He had got this idea, he was telling everybody, because they had like to got trampled in their house by all the folks coming over to hear that new show out of Nashville on it. Everybody on Grassy Branch knew Uncle R.C., who was all the time coming up with crazy ideas. He was not ever mean, and it seemed like he was not hardly working either; he had all the time in the world to set down in the road with you and talk about what makes clouds or tell you about the brownies that live in the woods and come out only at night. Mamma said he made that up, but I don't know.

Uncle R.C. was talking a mile a minute that night, all excited about this contraption he had rigged up. Daddy peered at it for a while and then bade us put the quilt down and get on it, so he would know where we was at, and then he went off with some of his buddies. I ate a biscuit and laid back on the quilt and looked up at the stars, which was real big up there over the mountain, and before long the radio come on sure enough, all the way from Nashville, Tennessee, and you could hear them talking and singing real loud just like they was
here
. I couldn't get over it.

At nine o'clock the Grand Ole Opry come on, and Daddy come back and set down on the quilt real heavy-like, and everybody was listening to the Opry. This was the first time I heard a radio. But we was to go up there some several more times that summer, until R.C. got tired of rigging it up thataway, and by then we had got our own radio anyway. Mamma was not
about
to climb up any mountain to listen to a radio, as she said.

But listening to the radio in our house was
nothing
like listening to it on that grassy bald, laying out on a quit looking up at the stars and eating biscuits. I felt like I was all alone in the world, and also like I was a part of something big, all at the same time. I felt like I was a part of my family too, and a part of that music they loved so. See, they always left us behind when they went off someplace to sing. I didn't hardly know Mamma at all.

Me and Freda got so tickled listening to the radio that night, to Sarie and Sadie, who were funny as could be. I couldn't get over this one Opry member that Judge Hay called the Harmonica Wizard, he could make that harmonica sound ever bit like a train coming around a bend, and then passing right by you, and then going off in the distance again. Some of them up there on the bald said that the Harmonica Wizard was a nigger, but I don't know about that. I ain't never seen a nigger. We listened to Uncle Jimmy Thompson, who was real old and claimed he could fiddle the bugs off a tater vine. He tickled everybody by saying he wanted to have a fiddling contest with some champeen he got to talking about. “Let him come to Tennessee, and I'll lie with him like a bulldog,” Uncle Jimmy said. We heard Sam and Kirk McGee, Obed Pickard and the Pickard Family, and Dr. Humphrey Bate and his Possum Hunters, who were real funny. The Solemn Ole Judge was funny too. And it was just fine to be laying out there under the stars and watch the moon come up, big and beautiful, over the top of the mountain. I reckon everybody's favorite singer was Uncle Dave Macon, who could sing up a storm, every now and then hollering out “Ding dong!” or “Kill yo' self!” which got us all to laughing. But even Daddy allowed, “He can frail that banjo for sure.”

We sat up there on the mountain and listened to WSM until the Grand Ole Opry went off the air after midnight. It ended ever time with the Judge saying:

Daddy was snoring that last half-hour, and I sure did hate to wake him up. But then everbody was gathering up their things, and leaving, and I figgered he would be maddest of all if we walked on back with the others and just left him laying on the ground all night and the dew fell on him.

So finely I roused him. He looked all around real wild-like at first, and said where was he, and then he started off after the rest. Freda and me picked up our stuff and follered. But then I got afraid he was going to fall and hurt himself for sure, he was stumbling so bad, so after a while I caught up to him and said, “Hey, Daddy,” and put my arm around him, carrying the quilt and the lantern in my other hand.

The three of us walked the long way back, and even after all the bad stuff that was to happen later, this is what I remember best about Daddy, walking that mountain road along by Grassy Branch with my head full of music and his arm laid across my shoulders. It was way, way late when we got home.

R.C. Bailey paces back and forth on the Tennessee side of State Street—the street that splits Bristol in two like a knife. Tennessee or Virginia: take your pick. It's ninety-five degrees in the shade, humid and overcast. The sidewalk is hot enough to fry eggs on. Yet R.C. is all dressed up—dark blue suit, boiled white shirt, somber tie, his unruly hair parted in the middle, pulled straight back, and plastered flat down to his head. His ears stick out. He looks like he's going to a funeral. From time to time he consults his pocket watch—3:10, 3:12, 3:15. Their appointment is set for 3:30. From time to time he looks up at 408 State Street.
This is it, all right
. The abandoned building does not look promising. It once held a hat factory, then a furniture store. Now its dirty plate-glass windows look into empty rooms with here and there a pile of trash, a shipping box, a broken chair. There seems to be some activity on the second and third floors, however. While R.C. watches, someone passes in front of a window. Then he notices the door at the side, where several people are coming out. One man carries a banjo. Another man looks real familiar to R.C., like somebody he's seen someplace. It is the harmonica player Henry Whitter. R.C. finally recognizes him from the picture on his record, the one that features “Wreck on the Southern Old 97” on one side and “Lonesome Road Blues” on the other. Holy smoke! Henry Whitter!

R.C. thumps on the dusty top of the Model T so hard the women all jump. “All right!” he says. “This here's the place! Get a move on!”

“Just a minute,
sir
!” Lucie answers with some aggravation in her tone, unusual for her. “You just hold your horses!” for she is still nursing her youngest child, Bill, ten months old. She switches him from one breast to the other while R.C. smokes and paces and Virgie primps, pursing her red-red mouth and pushing at her curly hair, unable to see the full effect in her compact mirror. Finally Bill stops sucking and lapses off into sleep, his milky mouth slack. He is as relaxed and as heavy as a sack of meal. Lucie hands him over to Tampa while she adjusts her bodice and buttons herself back up. Bill is an easy baby, a good sleeper, like Clarence was. Clarence is eight now. Robert Floyd is seven, a little devil if there ever was one . . . and John and Pancake are almost growed, God help them, nineteen and twenty year old. It sure don't seem like twenty years since Pancake was borned.
Well, they are good boys, all of them
. Looking down at Bill's fat red cheeks, Lucie shakes her head and wonders,
Where did the time go?
For it seems like no time atall since R.C. came in her aunt's kitchen selling furniture and she came over to live at Grassy Branch.

No time atall since Lucie was a girl herself, and sometimes she still feels like that girl she was then. Why, sometimes she stops dead still in the middle of whatever she's doing and looks around at her family and thinks,
Who
are
all these people? Where did they all come from, anyhow?
She's got moren enough children, that's for sure, yet Lucie still yearns for a girl, seems like a girl would keep you more company . . . like Lizzie, like Sally, Lord help us all. Lucie still can't hardly stand to think of little Sally, dead at fourteen of a rapid heart. Of course they had all knowed it might happen ever since she had the measles; Miss Covington had discovered then that her heartbeat was too fast and said she'd have to take it easy all her life, but Lord, you couldn't slow that youngun down any moren you could slow down the rest of them. Lucie will never forget the day of Sally's death. March 21, 1913. One minute she looked out the kitchen door and there was Sally, hanging out clothes; the next minute, she looked out and all she seen was the sheets and the bedspreads billowing on the line in the high wind, and by the time she got out there, Sally was dead on the ground. Sally had a thin face and a big wide crooked smile—Lucie will never forget her. She sure would like to have a little girl like Sally sometime.

Losing Lizzie was awful, too, but that was different because Lizzie was a grown woman and she'd been gone from home so long. In a way it was like they'd lost Lizzie when she first left Grassy Branch. Also, it's hard to believe somebody is dead if you don't set up with them and bury them, and Lizzie was buried over there in France, which bothered R.C. something terrible. He couldn't see why they wouldn't ship her back and bury her here, but they said it was against the law. Lizzie died of romantic fever and they buried her quick. So Lizzie is laying in foreign soil, which is real hard on R.C., who takes things hard anyway. It's all or nothing with R.C. Sometimes he's a ball of fire, other times he's distant as the moon. There's not another one like R.C., that's for sure!

Sometimes he pays Lucie a lot of attention and sometimes none atall, depending on whatever mood has seized him. One day Tampa came right out and said to Lucie, “I don't know how you can stand it, I really don't,” and all Lucie could do was smile at her. How can she say she'd rather have one hour of R.C.'s undivided attention than a whole year with poor old broken-down Durwood? How can she say what it's like in the bed with R.C.? For a good woman like Lucie can't say those things.

“We better go on in there afore he kills us all,” Virgie says, meaning R.C. She snaps her compact shut and puts it inside her purse.

“Where do you reckon he's got to, though?” Tampa asks, meaning Durwood, who took off lickety-split the minute they parked the car. Everybody knows he's out someplace taking a drink. Tampa doesn't sound mad, though. In fact, Tampa Rainette has surprised everybody by how good she's been to Durwood after all. It is not any easier being married to Durwood than it is being married to R.C., in Lucie's opinion anyway. It may be true that you never know what R.C. is going to do next, but you know for sure that Durwood isn't going to do a damn thing.
Nothing
. He didn't do a thing before he got sick, either. R.C. sees to the farm and always has. Durwood sits on the porch playing music or listening to the radio. Durwood sick is not any different from Durwood well. “Durwood has moved taking it easy up to a fine art,” Tampa always said. Still, he's sweet. He's real sweet. And this apparently is what Tampa was after, all along. She'd had it with men that are mean to you, and men had been real mean to her, so she fell in love with Durwood purely for being so sweet. She doesn't get too mad at him for drinking, she takes a drink herself. Tampa has gotten real fat, too, since she came over to Grassy Branch, putting on about ten pounds with each child: Alice, now fifteen; Freda, ten; and Buck, nine. And of course they've got Little Virginia living with them, Virgie's child. She's already sixteen.