The Devil's Dream (5 page)

I seen Kate one more time afore she died. She'd been a-living all alone fer a year or more, and hit was summer again, jest about dusk, when I walked over there.

Kate set on the porch in her rocking chair where I had seed her so many times, rocking and singing just like she used to,
“Go to sleep, little baby, fore the booger-man gets you! When you wake, you'll have a piece of cake, and all the pretty little horses
.
”
Her hair had gone plumb white, but her voice was as sweet as ever. She looked real peaceful.

“Kate,” I says. “Hit's Ira.”

“A black and a bay and a dapple and a gray,”
she sung.

“Kate Malone!” I says.

“So go to sleep, little baby,”
Kate sung, and I seed hit was hopeless. I don't think she even knowed me. I left her there whilst the lightning bugs was a-rising from the tall grass that had growed up all around the cabin, and a leetle wind was a-singing through the cedar trees. I thought I heerd a whisper in the breeze. And when I looked back at the cabin from the edge of the forest, I couldn't even see Kate there on the porch, I couldn't do nought but hear her, a-singing in the dark.

I believe I will take a leetle more of that there. Jest a drop, iffen ye don't mind.—What'd
I
do? Well, I'll tell ye.

I left there that night with my heart like to busting, fer a young man is a sorry wild thing, truth to tell, he don't even know what he wants, but he wants it so bad hit is like to kill him all the time. Nor did I go home to that good wife of mine. No, I walked down the creek past Bee to Reece Stiltner bottom, where a woman I knowed named Becky Trent lived, and she was glad to see me. She was allus glad to see me. But she weren't nothing like Kate Malone.

That's why hit don't bother me none to stay up here the way I do now, hit don't bother me having that hanted cabin acrost the way there. Hell, that fiddle music don't even bother me, most times. Now I won't go over there, mind ye, on a bet, but I kindly like to hear that music. Most times hit'll start up about now, jest about dark, and iffen hit's a dance tune, why sometimes I'll lean my head back and close these old eyes and listen, and them times hit'll seem like I can fair see us, Kate and me together as we never was in life, a-waltzing in the dark.

Small wonder, then, that Zeke grew up so muley-hawed and closemouthed, a big boy with a face as fair and blank as the full moon. It wasn't that he was obstinate or contrary. It was simply that he had nothing to say. And he could sit still for hours, and not do a blessed thing. It was unnatural. Everybody said so. Zeke was passed around his mamma's family at Cana like a hot potato, staying with first these cousins, then those cousins, then his lonely old Great-aunt Edith over at Honey Camp, but nobody would keep him long, not even Edith. They'd make some excuse and pass him on.

For the pure fact was, Zeke spooked them. He spooked them all. They were not used to a big old boy that wouldn't say a word. It made them feel bad, like they ought to do something about him, but they couldn't think what. For he wouldn't work, he wouldn't play, he didn't even want to shoot a gun! Finally they got tired of thinking up things for him to do. Finally they grew to hate the very sight of him sitting hunched on the floor thataway, staring into the fire. Ain't nothing to see, in a fire. And they couldn't stand the way he kept his head cocked like a robin all the time either, like he was listening out for something. For what? It wasn't natural.

Finally Zeke ended up living with his Aunt Dot, his mother's older sister, and her husband, Clovis Kincaid, and their eleven children in that tumbledown place at Frog Level, out from Cana. Zeke had never seen so many kids. All of them all the time laughing and crying and fighting, snot-nosed and gap-toothed, running, running here and there. They all looked alike, fair and tow-headed, just like Zeke. He fit right in, or appeared to. So he liked it there.

It was loud and rough over at Frog Level, and sometimes the boys ganged up on him, and sometimes there was not enough food to go around at supper, but Zeke liked it fine over there. Nobody paid him any mind. They'd say, “Go down there and get the cow,” or “Watch this littlun, honey,” or “Chop me some wood now.” They did not say, “What air ye a-thinking, honey?” or “What air ye a-listening out fer?” like his Great-aunt Edith used to. They never asked him any questions at all. Which was a good thing.

For even as a child, Zeke had sense enough not to tell anybody about the voices in his head, or that other sound he always heard, like wind through a cave. The only way Zeke knew to shut off that sound was to sit still. Real still.

But then they sent him over to Frog Level, where the Kincaids drowned it out. So Zeke could relax a little bit now. He could grow up some. He could shoot marbles with his cousin Tom or get in a wrestling match with Dan or play house with Jane and Pansy or hidey-go-seek in the woods until it got too dark to see, and then he could fall on the bed tick exhausted, and sleep in a smelly pile of boys. Girls in the front room, boys in the back room, Aunt Dot and Uncle Clovis in the middle room with the babies, kitchen just a jerry-built leanto against the side of the house. Sometimes Dot would kiss you and sometimes she'd slap you. She was a good cook, who grew fatter and sassier as the years wore on.

And Dot was a Malone through and through when it came to singing, with a high nasal voice that sent a chill up and down Zeke's backbone. After supper she'd rare back and close her eyes and set to singing by the fire or on the porch, depending on the season, and the children that wanted to would join in while Clovis sat with his arms folded and his mouth in a line and did not sing, but didn't leave either. Clovis seemed to enjoy the singing, but you never could tell about him, famous for silence. Cousin Willie or Uncle Cornelius came by sometimes with their fiddles. Dan was taking up the fiddle too, but Zeke refused to learn it, and when he said
no
to Cousin Willie's offer, his other cousins all stopped dead in their tracks and looked at each other, and Willie never asked him again.

But Zeke liked music and he liked to sing,
“Oh get around, Jenny, get around, oh get around I say,”
while Cousin Willie bit his lip and perspired and the fiddles went faster and faster,
“Oh get around, Jenny, get around, long summer day.”
Zeke would spin in the yard like a whirligig, faster and faster and faster until all the world was a green blur that looked like the sound in his head. When he finally fell to ground, his head would be completely clear, like the summer sky with no cloud in sight.

Sometimes, right then, he could remember his mother. He remembered her gray eyes and her clear voice and how she smoothed the hair back from his forehead when he ran in from the yard and grabbed her skirts. He remembered her saying “Now I lay me down to sleep” at night.

But most times he could not remember his mother, so that when Great-aunt Edith told him she was dead, that first summer they took him away from her, it meant nothing, nothing to him at all. He just looked up at Great-aunt Edith, whose chins started quivering like jelly when she told him, before she started to cry. Then Edith stood there on the porch staring at the boy for the longest time. Then she flung her apron up over her face and ran back in the cabin crying. Zeke stood right where he was and did not think about her, or about his mother, or about anything. It was hot on the porch. Red roses bloomed, climbing up over the porch rail of Edith's cabin at Honey Camp.

Later that day, Edith gave him a special marble, a steelie, which was exactly the kind Zeke had always wanted, and how did she know that? How could she possibly know? “Where did this come from?” he asked, holding it, and Edith said it had belonged to a dead boy. Then she started up crying again. Later she put on her bonnet and walked him down to the store and got him some horehound candy.

Zeke kept the steelie in his pocket always, and sometimes he'd roll it around and around in his fingers, and no one knew. He never traded it, or shot with it, or even took it out of his pocket. The only person he showed it to was his big cousin Tom, his favorite.

Ezekiel himself would grow up after all, or if he did not grow up exactly, he would at least change from a too solemn child to a too solemn young man. He would stay on at Frog Level, working the hard rock ground with Clovis, who was a man that did not talk to women and children and never appeared to notice Ezekiel at all, so that Zeke wondered at first if his uncle even knew he was present in the house. Until it came time to clear the field that first year, that is. Then his uncle let on that he knew it, all right. For Zeke was a large, strong lad, and Clovis aimed to make him earn his keep.

Zeke did not mind working, truth to tell. He was never much for school, where he sat like a bump on a log and refused to recite. Zeke would bite his lip and stare through the open schoolhouse door at the mountains while Mr. Green caned him unmercifully, until Zeke's face grew fiery red, and Pansy started crying. “Is this yet enough, Ezekiel?” Mr. Green would gasp, the slick yellow strands of his oily hair stuck to his head with perspiration. Mr. Green was a slight young fellow with pale skin, spectacles, and a constant cough. It was harder for him to beat Ezekiel than it was for Ezekiel to take the beating.

Both Zeke and Mr. Green were relieved when Clovis sent word that he'd need the boys, that it was time to clear the fields for planting. And Zeke loved it out there on the long hillside that rose gradually above Frog Level to the steeper incline of Cherokee Mountain; he loved the feel and smell of the dirt on his hands as they grabbled out the rocks, the ghosty look of the bare trees in the morning fog, the faint pink mist of the first redbud, then the purple sarvis, then the white blur of dogwood as spring came on and the birds showed up and the woods grew green again. One famous day when he was twelve, Zeke put himself in harness with Buck, the mule, when they couldn't for the life of them pull a particularly recalcitrant stump out of the stony newground they were clearing. Zeke strained forward as hard as ever he could. The other kids pushed on the back of the stump. Tom beat the mule. Finally, with a long, wrenching, sucking sound, the stump pulled free, spewing pebbles everyplace, and lay upended there on the hill for days, looking for all the world like a witchhead with big spiky root-hairs sticking out.

Then came the day when they burned it, and all the other brush besides, in a great wildfire on the hillside that caused Zeke's heart to beat so fast. He loved the acrid smell of the woodsmoke and the way it looked disappearing into the cloudy sky; he stayed up there on the hill all night long and watched the fire burn itself out, and then worked all the next day too with the rest of them, and never missed the sleep.

Later, Zeke was the one that walked behind Buck holding the bull-tongued plow to a furrow as straight as any man's, so that Clovis, watching him, hit upon the notion of renting Zeke out to whoever needed him in the field. Clovis told Zeke that he would not have to go back to school. Zeke liked this idea fine.

So Zeke settles into his life. He gets up in the morning and eats his Aunt Dot's good biscuits and her red-eye gravy, he walks to work, he works, he talks some to the people he's working for, he walks back to Frog Level, he eats, he sleeps. He gives the money he makes to his Uncle Clovis, who gives him back some. Zeke doesn't need much. It has not occurred to him to ask for more. It has not occurred to him to do anything else, or to go anyplace else. He wears overalls, brogans, and a plaid shirt, winter and summer. He fucks a widder woman over at Cana that he works for regular, it seems to be part of his job. She cuts his hair for him too. And be loves to dance. He is known for it. On Saturday nights he'll go anywhere, travel any distance to find a dance, and he'll dance as long as anybody will fiddle. He'll dance all night if he can.

At these dances he treats all the girls in the same courtly, old-fashioned manner, even the girls that are known to go back of the barn with you, the girls Tom has told him about. Ezekiel is a serious, dedicated, trancelike dancer. Sometimes a girl will start to look at him in another way, but usually this does not last long, for there is something in his face—or there is a
lack
of something in his face—that puts them off. They stop flirting. Oh, they like Ezekiel fine, they'll tease him and dance with him, but it isn't serious flirting. They wouldn't walk with him on Sunday if he asked them, which he does not. They don't treat Ezekiel like a man, somehow.

Sometimes Ezekiel goes with his uncles if they are running a set someplace away from here, at Sisterville or Little Africa or Ash Holler or even as far away as Holly Grove. One time, at a dance over in Sistersville, a pretty woman comes up to Zeke and grabs him away from his partner, grabs him off the floor. She is slight, with curly flyaway hair. She wears a frilly red dress with puff sleeves. She pulls him away from the dancing.