The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (8 page)

“That’s him! That’s him!” one woman cried, waving both arms over her head to flag the car.

Reverend Grist pulled into the church lot.

“Praise the Lord! Praise Jesus! That’s you in there?” she said.

“What can we do for you, Sister Coral?” Reverend Grist said as he climbed out of the car.

In the daylight Coral didn’t look like the woman Six had prayed with the night before. Her hair was streaked with gray and plaited into four braids, two on either side of her head. She was missing a tooth on the right side of her mouth. Three thick wrinkles creased her forehead.

“Revered Six,” she said. “You come on out here and let me see you!”

The other women, murmuring among themselves, approached the car.

“Y’all was in that big tent, so you ain’t seen him. Step out here and let my friends see you!” Coral said.

Six didn’t want to step into the throng of raggedy women who were bending at the waist to peer into the car.

“Good morning, ma’am,” Six said. He wished Reverend Grist would make them go away. Coral reached into the car window to take Six’s hands in her own. Her damp hands made him want to wipe his palms on his pant legs.

“Thank you, Reverend Six. Thank you!”

“Now you calm yourself, Sister Coral. What’s this all about?” Reverend Grist asked. He gestured for Six to get out of the car. “Give the boy a little room, now.”

Six took a deep breath and closed his hand around the door handle. Sister Coral cried, “He healed my sister!”

Coral’s friends joined in. “I seen it with my own eyes. She up and sitting round back at Baby Sugar’s!” one said.

“Ain’t set so much as a toe out the bed in a month!”

“She walking round fit to run a foot race!”

“And I told everybody it was you that healed her, Reverend Six,” Coral added. “They said, ‘How Regina come to be out the house?’ And I told ’em, I said it was you. I just took her home now to rest up a little, but she be at the service this evening. God bless you, Reverend Six. God bless you!”

“Praise the Lord, sister. Don’t you forget to thank Him, from whence all miracles come,” Grist said.

“I been thanking Jesus and rejoicing all night and all morning. I come home last night, and there’s Regina sitting up in the bed! Just sitting there asking me where I been and was there anything to eat. She ain’t ate nothing that wasn’t forced down her throat since I don’t remember when.”

“Let’s say a prayer of thanks together,” Grist said and bowed his head.

Six said nothing, though he knew they expected him to. He couldn’t be sure if the older man believed in his miracle. It was true that he had felt Sister Coral in his body, that he had felt the depth and breadth of her pain as though it were a tangible thing that he could hold in his hand. And it was true too that when he was deep in his prayer for her he had an inkling of a sickbed, not a vision, but an intimation of sweaty sheets and languor and the claustrophobia of being in a room with an ill person. He had assumed it was his own convalescence that he was remembering. The intimation was fleeting, but … Could be, he thought, that the lady just felt better. Six had been near death yet here he was, and there wasn’t any miracle in it.

He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn’t notice the reverend’s prayer had ended. One of the women said, “Look at that. Reverend Six just taken up with the Lord. He don’t take no notice of this world.”

“Bless him,” another replied.

He kept his head bowed because he wouldn’t have to say anything if they thought he was praying and because it had occurred to him that he might want to be what they thought he was. All his life, women had been giving him their attention because they pitied him. Now it was because they respected him.

“Alright, sisters, we’ll see y’all later, the Lord willing,” Reverend Grist said.

They drove away from the church.

“Smell that?” Grist asked.

Six nodded.

“Cotton makes that smell. Ripe cotton,” he said.

An expanse of white-tipped stalks swayed in the fields up ahead.

“Sir?” Six asked. “What’s a boll weevil?”

“Boll weevil? Where’d you hear that? It’s a bug, nasty as the locusts in the Bible. Eats up all the cotton. Why you want to know that?”

Six shrugged.

“Your mama was of mixed mind about sending you down here. Did you know that?”

“No, sir.”

“I don’t see her at the church much,” Grist said. “When she does come and folks get to talking in tongues, she looks at them like they have two heads.”

They rode in silence for a time.

“I hope she finds the Lord one day,” the reverend said.

“I do too,” Six replied.

“Have you found the Lord, Six?”

“I don’t know,” he answered softly.

“Well,” the reverend said, “you’d know if you had. It’s not a thing you can mistake.” Then, “I don’t think you ought to preach this evening.”

“Sir?” Six asked.

“We only got tonight and tomorrow at this revival. You come to the big tent and listen, maybe the Lord’ll find you.”

“Yes, sir.”

THE REVEREND WAS RIGHT
about the numbers of people that came to the revival on a Saturday. Soon after three o’clock, people began to arrive on foot or crowded onto the beds of pickup trucks. They carried baskets of fried chicken, bags with corn fritters and apples and peaches and jugs of water and iced tea. Before the tents opened, the people sat in the grass and spread their dinners out on squares of cloth. Now and again, a cry went up and two women walked toward each other with their arms outstretched.

Six watched the picnickers through a gap between the drawn flaps of the big tent. Coral told half the town about his miracle. In a few hours the news spread to the houses where the visiting preachers were staying. All eight convened before the evening service to discuss their plan of action. Six had been elated to hear that he was to attend. The ministers could tell him whether he had healed Coral. They could tell him why these holy fits came on him—maybe they could pray them out of him.

Six sat next to Reverend Grist as the lead minister began the meeting.

“T’ain’t for us to decide who and how the Lord calls his servants,” he said.

“Amen. That’s true,” one minister agreed. The others were silent until a young preacher said, “Y’all know this boy ain’t healed nobody!”

“Regina claims he did. I went to see her myself. She looks pretty good,” the lead minister responded.

“One thing’s sure, that boy ain’t getting up in the pulpit tonight.”

The ministers, mostly of an accord, looked at Six and nodded.

“Hold on now. I think a whole lot of folks might come tonight after hearing about Regina,” the lead man said.

“You need to send the boy on home. He just causing trouble!”

More nods.

“That’s right, send him on home! All this confusion!”

“There’s no place for bitterness in the Lord’s house, brothers,” the head preacher said.

“Bitterness! Ain’t nobody bitter over a little …”

“The fact is,” Reverend Grist said, “the boy isn’t sure of his own calling.”

The lead minister fixed his gaze on Reverend Grist. “You brought the boy up here and he ain’t sure?” he said.

“I didn’t know. Don’t think he did either.”

One of the men jumped from his seat, “Put him on the next bus north!”

The preachers’ faces contorted with rage. Reverend Grist put his arm around Six’s shoulders. Six feared they would drive him from the tent. He had not considered the possibility of the ministers’ wrath. He didn’t think that one healing, one not-for-certain healing, could make them hate him.

“What’s he even doing here!” the angry preacher shouted. He stood up so abruptly that his chair tipped backward and fell onto the dirt floor. “This boy’s messing up our thing!” Six understood in that instant that he had something that the ministers wanted, and it had given him power among them. He had never been powerful among men.

In the end it was decided that Reverend Grist would take Six back to Philadelphia when the revival ended. The boy was sequestered, first in Reverend Grist’s car, where his scars itched painfully and it was so hot he thought he might faint. Later, the ministers hid Six behind the big tent. At 5:00 the revival began, and the people poured in. The tent filled with the smell of Nu Nile and sun and homemade soap. Six wanted to cry with loneliness. The people were skittish as colts. They hummed with anticipation. The children jostled each other, and their mothers shrieked at them to keep still. Through an opening at the back of the tent, Six could see a section of the crowd and the backs of the ministers’ fat necks. An announcer took the platform to lead the crowd in prayer and announce the speakers. A woman followed him and sang “Great is Thy Faithfulness” in a rich alto.

She was a pillar of a woman, so thick and round a car couldn’t knock her down. The song came out of her like a foghorn blast from the ships down at the Navy Yard in Philadelphia—that big and that effortless. A tambourine shook, but the woman’s voice dwarfed all other sound. It flowed out of the tent and rumbled down the red dirt road and though the trees, it roused the birds and made the stones tremble. She slowed the tempo and drew out the notes, and the people, in reverence, stopped clapping, stopped breathing, and let the song take them.

Six squatted in the dirt. All he could see of the congregants were their shoes. Most were worn, the leather scuffed at the toes and repolished. Some were caked with mud, a layer of dust covered the wearer’s ankles. A white loafer tapped in time to the music. There was a smudge of something dark at the toe, something reddish and slick that recalled another pair of stained loafers Six had seen the afternoon he’d hurt that boy back in Philadelphia.

“
STOP IT,
Six! Stop it!”

Six remembered a man’s voice, deep and strained with shouting.

“Stop it! Get up offa him!”

The voice had brought him back to himself. Six came back into his mind with a jolt, all the strength gone out of him. He was slumped with his head hanging limp, chin almost touching his chest. He looked to his left, toward the voice, and saw a white shoe with a smear of something dark on it.

There was a great commotion around him. Six’s arms hurt, his knuckles were sore, and there was a sharp pain across his upper back, as though his muscles had been tensed for a long time. His heart fired inside his chest. The beating took up the whole of his insides; his ribs could not contain a heart that beat like that. Gravel pressed into his knees through his pants. It was as though Six had vacated his body and returned to find it vandalized.

Two strong arms hooked under his armpits and yanked him to standing. The white loafers were wrenched from his view, and there was nowhere for him to rest his eyes, so he looked down, and there was Avery with a pulpy mess of a face and a tooth lying next to him in a little puddle of blood. His eyes were closed and his head turned so that one cheek rested on the pavement. The other was split so deeply a sliver of bone showed white through the slick, red flesh. Six looked at his feet and saw that they straddled Avery. He looked at his hands—his left fist was balled, and in his right hand he clutched a bloodied piece of concrete the size of an orange.

The gathered crowd shouted and jostled each other. A man knelt next to Avery, and a crying woman came out of the crowd. She looked at Six with such hatred that he staggered backward. She pointed at him, and two older boys rushed forward, lunging at Six like rabid dogs. Some men pulled them away. The woman was Avery’s mother, and the boys were his cousins come to his rescue, though they had never before defended him in all his years of being bullied.

Six was on Greene Street, two blocks from home. The man who’d pulled him off of Avery and another bystander, both neighborhood men Six had seen on the block for years, flanked him and led him home.

“Boy, what were you thinking?” one said.

“You done some damage,” the other added.

They spoke to each other, “That Avery boy is just a slight thing.”

“So’s this one.”

Six’s neighbors stared. It occurred to him that Avery might die. One of the men knocked at the front door, and Six realized he was home. Hattie’s mouth dropped open when she saw him.

“What happened to my son?”

“It’s the other way round, Mrs. Shepherd.”

They explained what he’d done. Hattie took in his bloody hands, sweat-shiny face, and the rip in the knee of his pants. She crossed her arms and her mouth tightened. The concern in her eyes faded, but the fear stayed and the anger grew, that low simmering anger that exploded like a thundercloud and sent all the Shepherds scurrying. Hattie thanked the men and led Six into the house.

“Is this all true?” she asked.

“I don’t … I’m not sure what happened exactly,” Six replied.

“There’s blood on you.”

Six looked at his hand and began to cry.

“So help me if I see one tear on your face … You hear me? Don’t you cry one tear.”

Six stood shaking in front of his mother. “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said.