The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (6 page)

Six looked out at the congregation; the people were as skeptical and exhausted as Joshua’s men. Joshua’s army circled the city a seventh time. The trumpeters lifted their horns in unison, as though they were one many-handed organism. Joshua raised his arm and his army shouted, “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” They shook their swords in the air. “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” A wall of sound pressed against the city’s wall of stone. Jericho quivered. The gray boulders in its walls split in half and then in quarters until they were nothing and there was the city of Jericho, naked.

“Those walls crumble into dust, brothers and sisters, into nothing. Can you see it? Close your eyes, brothers and sisters, and picture what the Lord has done!”

“Amen!” someone shouted. The spirit came on Six now. He couldn’t see the faces in front of him; his anxiety was replaced with an ecstasy that spun in his chest like a ball of fire.

Six remembered a song from his childhood and sang it in the reedy, cracking tenor of boys his age.
Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho. Joshua fought the battle of Jericho and the walls came a-tumbling down.
The people sang it with him. He raised his Bible heavenward, and the crowd was on its feet. The women in the front row shook their tambourines. The assembly clapped and stomped. Six held out his hand to silence them.

“ ‘Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and donkeys,’ ” he read. “Seems a little extreme, doesn’t it, brothers and sisters? But you know what, the Lord doesn’t do things halfway. He doesn’t come to sit on the porch and sip lemonade, does he? He doesn’t come to take the scene in. He comes to take over!”

“I know that’s right!” a woman shouted.

“Brothers and sisters, let me tell you what our Lord can do. When I was a little boy, I got hurt bad. They had me at the hospital, a whole hospital full of doctors couldn’t do anything for me. You know what the doctors told my mama, brothers, and sisters?”

Six paused a beat.

“They told her I wouldn’t see the morning. They said call the funeral home. Call the undertaker. They didn’t give me any more of their medicine. Those doctors just went on home. But the Lord stretched out His hand.”

“Tell it!”

“The Lord stretched out His hand and said, ‘It’s not his time. My servant has some work to do before I call him home.’ ”

“Amen!”

“You know what, brothers and sisters? He saved me for this ministry. I don’t have much experience. But what I do have—Amen!—what I do have is the Lord’s hand to guide me. Sure as I am standing here He led me to you tonight. He saved me so I could be here tonight to tell you that if we ask Him, the Lord will make our tribulations and strife fall down just like that wall in Jericho.”

“Praise Him!”

“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord tonight!”

They shouted.

“I said a joyful noise. You all don’t have anything more for Jesus?”

The congregation roared. Six paused to catch his breath and wipe the sweat from his forehead. The people clapped and shouted. The ladies in the front raised their arms over their heads and shook their tambourines.

“Let’s bow our heads and pray together. Father God, tonight we ask that you reveal what you have laid on our hearts, and give us the strength to do what you require of us. Tell us Lord, how to march around our Jericho. Give us your instructions tonight, Jesus, and we will follow them to victory.”

Six looked out at the assembly. A woman wept in the front row. Her shoulders heaved with the force of her sobbing; her arms hung limp at her sides. Six stepped from behind the makeshift pulpit and walked toward her. He wasn’t sure why. His feet carried him to her though he didn’t know what he’d say. He touched her arm with his fingertips.

“Ma’am?” he said.

She opened her eyes.

“Ma’am, what has Jesus laid on your heart tonight?”

He spoke quietly, as though they were the only two people in the tent. Looking at her closely, he saw that this woman was utterly defeated. She had been kicked until she fell down and then kicked some more. A thin scar ran from the corner of her eye to the corner of her mouth. She wasn’t young but she wasn’t old either. Six wanted to touch the tip of his tongue to the raised welt of the scar.

“I didn’t know about coming here tonight, on account of I been away so long. I was saved when I was young but I backslid. I come because I wanted—I don’t know—I just wanted to be back near Jesus.”

“The Lord always welcomes his sheep back to the fold. What’s your name, sister?”

“Coral.”

“Sister Coral, his arms are always open.”

She nodded her head. Her dress was a light-colored cotton, maybe it had been pink once. Its white collar was yellowed and frayed at the edges.

“I believe that’s true, Reverend,” she said.

Coral stood with her hands clasped in front her, pressed together so tightly that her knuckles reddened. She tried, in great shuddering gasps, to stop crying.

“I can see you have a sincere spirit,” Six said. He could feel her troubled heart and see that she meant well. That scar, he thought, ought to be avenged.

The crowd formed a semicircle around them.

“I ain’t been … I ain’t been married. Lord forgive me for saying this to a young man like you. I ain’t been married but I lived with a man, and he went on his way. I had a child by him, but she passed when she was a little thing, and I come to live with my sister. She been through a hard time too.”

“God bless her,” Six said.

“She sick now. Doc been round and he say he don’t know what’s wrong with her. She been in her bed a month and she fadin’ away. Look like a haint, ain’t nothing to her. She the only living person on this earth ever been kind to me.”

She looked at Six with such eyes, such a look she gave him, with all that’s futile and unspeakable in this world.

“Let’s pray, Sister Coral. You and me and all these souls the Lord has brought together this evening. We’re all going to pray,”

Six took Coral’s hand, and they kneeled together on the packed dirt floor. It was only in church that he felt compassion for anyone beside himself. Something happened to him when he looked at Sister Coral. When he was preaching about Jericho, strength built in his body, rising in Six until it spilled over the edges of him. He had so much power that he could afford to share it, had to share it, or it would explode in him. He could be kind, if only for that hour, because he was, if only for that single hour, strong.

Six put his hand in the dip between Coral’s shoulder blades and put his other hand on her forehead. He had seen the minister do it at Mount Pleasant. Six felt the Word pass from his body into Sister Coral’s, and her faith and grief passed into him. He felt the ridges of her spine and the hot, damp skin on her forehead. She looked like such a rough woman; he had not expected her skin to be so soft. His fingers twitched. Six had never been so aware of another person; Coral’s soul whirred inside of her like a motor. They were one organism in that moment. Six could not feel his body itching or his pulling pinching skin.

“Let’s lay hands on our sister,” he said.

A dozen hands trembled on Sister Coral. Six wept as the assembly groaned and called to Jesus.

After some time, he didn’t know how long, Six returned to himself. His knees were damp and stiff from kneeling in the dirt, his throat was raw, and Coral’s blouse was wet beneath his hand. He was seized with a powerful urge to urinate. He rubbed his knees and stood facing the assembly. Some were exhilarated, some exhausted, their faces oily and streaked with tears. Coral was still on her knees. Two women helped her to her feet and led her to a folding chair where she sat with her hands in her lap. Six didn’t know how to end the service. He couldn’t imagine how to make a neat finish to what had happened to them. He was suddenly shy, as though he had been doing something private and everyone had seen him.

“Amen,” he said and walked out of the tent and into the stand of trees outside.

Someone called his name, but Six didn’t stop. Behind him the tambourines jangled; the strains of a hymn floated out to him on the chill, wet air. The rain had stopped. The wind shook the leaves, and droplets fell onto his head and shoulders. There was still some daylight left. Six knew he should go back to the tent, but he wanted to climb into the trees. The last rays of sun caught in the drops of water on the leaves, and for a few moments the stand of trees was all quivering gold. He was quiet inside, not peaceful, but hushed, spellbound. He thought, I’m not just anybody. I’m not just any sick boy.

With great difficulty Six climbed into a tree and straddled one of the lower boughs. He heard a bell in the distance, a baritone clanging from somewhere down the dirt road that led to the revival site. Red-dirt road—nothing but trees on either side and a few cars parked near the lot in front of the tents. A ghosted quarter moon appeared. How rarely he saw the moon over Wayne Street. The sun dipped below the horizon. Far off in the distance, a string of lights went on along the road. Beyond them, a larger illuminated cluster indicated the town. Reverend Grist told him its name, but Six had forgotten it. He hadn’t any desire to go there.

Six’s moment with Coral was already receding. He didn’t know where he would sleep that night or what he would eat or who would feed him. Hattie had given him five dollars when he left. He knew that wasn’t enough to get him back to Philadelphia.

Beneath Six’s perch in the oak, two men relieved themselves against the trunks of the trees.

“That boy, what’s his name?”

“Six, name of Six.”

“He ain’t old enough to have no hairs.”

“You seen how he run outta there when he finish?”

“That’s that Coral. She got so much heathen in her she scare a young boy.”

“She come up here repenting tonight.”

“Sho’ that’s right, but she have somebody behind a shed tomorrow.”

“You wish it was you!”

“Naw, I ain’t got my mind on nothing but Jesus.”

They laughed.

They’re laughing at me, Six thought. Maybe they were all in the tent laughing at him. Stupid country folk. If August had stayed in Georgia, he might have been like these men. He might have driven a truck or hitched a ride from town to a Friday night tent revival and had a conversation like the one Six was overhearing. He thought of the South as a single undifferentiated mass of states where the people talked too slow, like August, and left because of the whites, only to spend the rest of their lives being nostalgic for the most banal and backwoods things: paper shell pecans, sweet gum trees, gigantic peaches. August went on and on: he could still recite the names of the people that lived in his neighborhood when he was a boy, and in Georgia the old people never went untended, and the North was cold and colorless, especially the food and the people. When he talked that way, Hattie would fold her arms and press her lips together into a thin line.

Floodlights came on—the soft indigo evening was swallowed in an ugly circle of light. A few people trickled out of the small tent. A man holding a young boy’s hand ambled into the brightness and crossed out of it again. Six watched them walk down the road until he couldn’t see them anymore. He couldn’t remember holding August’s hand that way. Other boys went fishing with their fathers or to ball games. Perhaps the man and boy he’d just seen had been fishing that very day. No matter, the bait would have made him nauseous. Six’s schoolmates called him a prissy boy and teased him relentlessly.

The men below Six’s tree continued to talk. “He fifteen, huh? Ain’t much to him.”

“He awful small.”

“He done all right, though.”

“He can preach, sure, but it’s something peculiar about him.”

“You just saying that ’cause he so proper.”

“Naw, it ain’t that. He put me in mind of a boll weevil.”

“That’s a shame. It ain’t his fault he small and skinched-up looking.”

Six didn’t know what a boll weevil was, but he guessed it was something little and ugly. He shifted in his tree branch, how he wanted to return to his brothers and to his cubby under the stairs.

One of the men under the tree said, “Ain’t that he look like a weevil, it’s that he kinda act like one.”

There was another boy like Six at school, pinched and delicate. His name was Avery, but the other boys called him Ava. He was runty and effeminate but healthy, so, unlike Six, he was not spared physical abuse. One afternoon, Six saw a group of boys chase him down the street. Avery was slow moving; he knew they’d catch him, so he stood in the middle of the block waiting for them. They surrounded him and shoved him to the ground. He fell to his knees. Avery refused to stand. He just kneeled there on the sidewalk while they called him sissy and faggot. When they were finished with him, he stood and brushed the dirt from his knees. Six sneered at him. He wanted the bullying boys to see that he hated Avery too; in this way they would understand that Six was only infirm, not pathetic like Avery and not as deserving of their scorn.

Perhaps there was some other way to understand the world, but Six couldn’t imagine what that could be. It seemed to him that his own father was disgusted by his frailty. After Six recovered from his accident, August stopped spending time with him—of course, it was also true that he wasn’t often home. Six once overheard Aunt Marion tell Hattie it was the babies’ deaths that sent August catting, that he had been a decent-enough man before that. Six didn’t know what she meant exactly, but he did know that his father’s presence in his life was peripheral at best. August had never taught Six any of the things fathers were supposed to teach their sons. The night before Six was sent to the revival, August had said, “I didn’t think you had that kind of hurtin’ in you, boy.” How would you know what I have in me, Six thought. All you do is make jokes and tell useless stories about a town in Georgia nobody ever heard of. How could you know what hurt I have?