recognize saint from sinner! You know why? ’Cause she was listenin’ to that
wailin’, unholy trash!” He aimed a finger at the dead radio. “Have any of you
bothered to listen to what’s fillin’ our children’s ears this summer? Have
you?”
“Sounds like bees swarmin’ on a donkey to me!” somebody said, and people
laughed. I looked over and saw Mr. Dick Moultry’s sweat-wet bloat, the front
of his shirt splotched with barbecue sauce.
“Laugh if you want to, but before God it’s no laughin’ matter!” Reverend
Blessett raged. I don’t think I ever heard him speak in a normal voice. “You
give that song one listen, and the very hairs will rise up on the back of your
necks just like it did on mine!”
“Aw, come on, Reverend!” My father was smiling. “It’s just a song!”
“Just a song?” Reverend Blessett’s shiny face was suddenly up in my
dad’s, and his ash-colored eyes were wild under eyebrows so red they looked
painted on. “Just a song, did you say, Tom Mackenson? What if I was to tell
you this ‘just a song’ was makin’ our young people itch with immorality? What
if I was to tell you it preaches illicit sexual desires, hotrod racin’ in the
streets, and big-city evil? What would you say then, Mr. Tom Mackenson?”
Dad shrugged. “I’d say that if you heard all that in one listen, you must
have ears like a hound dog. I couldn’t understand a single word of it.”
“Ah-ha! Yes! See, that’s Satan’s trick!” Reverend Blessett stabbed my
father’s chest with an index finger that had barbecue sauce under the nail.
“It gets into our children’s heads without them even knowin’ what they’re
hearin’!”
“Huh?” Dad asked. By this time Mom had come up beside us and was holding
on to Dad’s arm. Dad had never cared much for the reverend, and maybe she was
afraid he might blow his top and take a swing.
Reverend Blessett retreated from my father and surveyed the crowd again.
If there’s anything that pulls people in, it’s a loudmouth and the smell of
Satan in the air like charred meat on a griddle. “You good folks come to the
Freedom Baptist Church at seven o’clock on Wednesday night and you’ll hear for
yourselves exactly what I’m talkin’ about!” His gaze skittered from face to
face. “If you love the Lord, this town, and your children, you’ll break any
radio that plays that Satan-squallin’ garbage!” To my dismay, several people
with dazed eyes hollered that they would. “Praise God, brothers and sisters!
Praise God!” Reverend Blessett waded through the crowd, slapping backs and
shoulders and finding hands to shake.
“He got sauce on my shirt,” Dad said, looking down at the stain.
“Come on, fellas.” Mom pulled at him. “Let’s get under some shade.”
I followed them, but I looked back to watch Reverend Blessett striding
away. A knot of people had closed around him, all of them jabbering. Their
faces seemed swollen, and a dark sweat stain the shape of a watermelon wedge
had grown on the back of the reverend’s coat. I couldn’t figure this out; the
same song I’d first heard that day in the Spinnin’ Wheel’s parking lot was
unholy? I didn’t know very much about big-city evil, but I didn’t itch with
immorality. It was just a cool song, and it made me feel… well, cool. Even
after all the listenings, I still couldn’t decipher what the chorus was after
the I get around part, and neither could Ben, Davy Ray, or Johnny, who still
had a wrapping of bandages across his beak and couldn’t yet leave his house. I
was curious; what had Reverend Blessett heard in the song that I had not?
I decided I wanted to find out.
That night fireworks blossomed red, white, and blue over Zephyr.
And sometime after midnight, a cross was set afire in front of the Lady’s
house.
5
Welcome, Lucifer
I AWAKENED WITH THE SMELL OF BURNING IN MY NOSTRILS.
Birds were singing and the sun was up, but I was reminded of a terrible
thing. Three years ago, a house two blocks south of us had caught fire. It had
been a hot, dry summer, and the house had gone up quick as pineknot kindling
in the middle of an August night. The Bellwood family had lived there: Mr. and
Mrs. Bellwood, their ten-year-old daughter Emmie, and their eight-year-old son
Carl. The fire, which had started from a bad electrical connection, had
consumed Carl in his bed before the Bellwoods could get to him. Carl died a
few days later, and was buried on Poulter Hill. His tombstone had Our Loving
Son carved on it. The Bellwoods had moved away soon after, leaving their son
in Zephyr earth. I remember Carl clearly, because his mother was allergic to
animals and wouldn’t allow him to have a dog, so he sometimes came up to my
house to play with Rebel. He was a slight boy with curly, sandy-colored hair
and he liked the banana Popsicles the Good Humor man sold from his truck. He
told me once that he wished he could have a dog more than anything in the
world. Then the fire took him away, and Dad sat down with me and said God has
a plan but sometimes it’s awfully hard to decipher.
On this particular morning, the fifth of July, Dad had gone to work and
Mom was left to tell me what that burning smell was. She’d been on the phone
most of the morning, wired into Zephyr’s amazingly accurate information
network: the society of women who circled gossip like hawks for the meat of
truth. As I ate my breakfast of scrambled eggs and grits, Mom sat with me at
the table. “You know what the Ku Klux Klan is, don’t you?” she asked.
I nodded. I had seen Klansmen on the TV news, dressed in their white
robes and conical hoods and walking around a fiery cross while they cradled
shotguns and rifles. Their spokesman, a gent who had pulled his hood back to
expose a face like a chunk of suet, had been talking about keeping your heart
in Dixie or getting your ass out and “not lettin’ no Washington politician say
I gotta kiss a colored boy’s shoes.” The rage in the man’s face had swollen
his cheeks and puffed his eyelids, and behind him the fire had gnawed at the
cross as the white-robed figures continued their grim parade.
“The Klan burned a cross in the Lady’s yard last night,” Mom said. “They
must be warnin’ her to get out of town.”
“The Lady? Why?”
“Your father says some people are afraid of her. He says some people
think she’s got too much say-so about what goes on in Bruton.”
“She lives in Bruton,” I said.
“Yes, but some people are scared she wants to have say-so about what goes
on in Zephyr, too. Last summer she asked Mayor Swope to open the swimmin’ pool
to the Bruton folks. This year she’s been askin’ him about it again.”
“Dad’s afraid of her, isn’t he?”
Mom said, “Yes, but that’s different. He’s not afraid of her because of
her skin color. He’s afraid because…” She shrugged. “Because of what he
doesn’t understand.”
I swirled my fork around in my grits, thinking this point over. “How come
Mayor Swope won’t open up the pool to them?”
“They’re black,” Mom answered. “White people don’t like to be in the
water with black people.”
“We were in the flood water with them,” I said.
“That was river water,” Morn said. “The swimmin’ pool’s never been open
to them. The Lady’s gotten a petition up that says she either wants a pool
built in Bruton or the Zephyr pool open for black people. That must be why the
Klan wants her gone.”
“She’s always lived there. Where would she go?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think the people who set that cross on fire care
much, either.” Mom frowned, the little lines surfacing around her eyes. “I
didn’t know the Klan was even anywhere around Zephyr. Your father says they’re
a bunch of scared men who want to turn time backward. He says things are gonna
get a lot worse before they get better.”
“What’ll happen if the Lady won’t leave?” I asked. “Would those men hurt
her?”
“Maybe. They might try, at least.”
“She won’t go,” I said, remembering the cool green-eyed beauty I’d seen
looking back at me from behind the Lady’s wrinkled face. “Those men can’t make
her leave.”
“You’re right about that.” Mom got up from her chair. “I’d hate to get on
her wrong side, that’s for sure. You want another glass of orange juice?”
I told her no. As Mom was pouring one for herself, I finished off my eggs
and then said something that caused her to look at me as if I’d just requested
money for a trip to the moon. “I want to go hear what Reverend Blessett has to
say.” She remained speechless. “About that song,” I continued. “I want to know
why he hates it so much.”
“Angus Blessett hates everything,” Mom said when she had recovered her
voice. “He can see the end of the world in a pair of penny loafers.”
“That’s my favorite song. I want to find out what he can hear in it that
I don’t.”
“That’s easy. He’s got old ears.” She offered a faint smile. “Like me, I
guess. I can’t abide that song, either, but I don’t think there’s anythin’
evil about it.”
“I want to know,” I persisted.
For me this was a first. I had never been so adamant about attending
church before, and it wasn’t even our congregation. When Dad got home, he
tried his best to talk me out of it, by saying that Reverend Blessett was so
full of hot air he could blow up a blimp, that he wouldn’t even think about
crossing the threshold of Reverend Blessett’s church, and so on, but, at
last—after a hushed conference with Mom in which I overheard the words
“curiosity” and “let him find out for himself”—Dad grudgingly agreed to go
with us on Wednesday night.
And so it was that we found ourselves sitting with about a hundred other
people in the sweltering hotbox of the Freedom Baptist Church on Shawson
Street near the gargoyle bridge. Neither Dad nor I wore a coat and tie, as
this was not a Sunday service, and some of the other men even wore their
field-stained overalls. We saw a lot of people we knew, and before the service
began the place was standing room only, including a lot of sullen teenagers
who looked as if they’d been dragged into the church on nooses by their
cheerless parents. I guess the reverend’s urgent hollering had gotten his
message across, as had the signs he’d posted all over town that proclaimed he
would be “wrestling with the devil on Wednesday night—our children are worth
the fight.” A record player and speakers had been set up at the front of the
church, and at long last Reverend Blessett—flush-faced and sweating in a white
suit and a rose-colored shirt—strode out onto the podium with the offending 45
rpm disc of black vinyl in one hand. In the other he held the leather grip of
a wooden box with small holes on its sides, which he placed on the floor out
of the way. Then he grinned at his audience and hollered, “Are we ready to
fight Satan tonight, brothers and sisters?”
Amen! they shouted back. Amen! and Amen!
They were ready, all right.
Reverend Blessett began with an impassioned sermon about how the evils of
the big city were creeping into Zephyr, how Satan wanted to drag all the young
people into hell and how the citizens had to fight the devil every minute of
their lives to keep from being fried in fire. Reverend Blessett’s face sweated
and his arms flew this way and that and he paced back and forth before the
congregation like a man possessed. I have to say, he put on a great show and I
was more than half convinced Satan was hiding under my bed waiting for me to
open a National Geographic to one of the naked-bosom pictures.
He stopped pacing and grinned out at us with his glistening face. The
doors had been propped open, but the heat was stifling and the sweat was
sticking my shirt to my skin. In the hazy golden light, Reverend Blessett was
steaming. He held up the record. “You came to hear it,” he said. “And hear it
you shall.”
He switched on the record player, put the disc down on its thick spindle,
and held the needle over the first groove. “Listen,” he said, “to the voices
of the demons.” Then he lowered the needle, and a static of scratches clicked
through the speakers.
Those voices. Demons or angels? Oh, those voices! Round round get around
I get around. Way out of town. I get around.
“Did you hear it?” He jerked the needle up. “Right there! Tellin’ our
children that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence? That
they’re not to be satisfied livin’ in their own hometown anymore? It’s devil’s
wanderlust they’re singin’ about!” Again the needle went down. When the song
reached the part about having a car that’s never been beat and never missing
yet with the girls we meet, Reverend Blessett was almost dancing with
delirious rage. “Hear it? Doesn’t that tell our young people to race their
cars in the streets? Doesn’t it tell them to indulge in free and easy
pleasures of the flesh?” He said it like a sneer. “Think of it, folks! Your
sons and daughters inflamed by this garbage, and Satan just a-laughin’ at us
all! Picture our streets runnin’ red with the blood of our children in wrecked
hotrods, and your pregnant daughters and sex-mad sons! You think such things
happen only in the big city? You think we here in Zephyr are safe from the
prince of darkness? You listen to some more of this so-called ‘music’ and
you’ll find out how wrong you are!” He let the needle play some more. The
sound wasn’t very good. I think Reverend Blessett himself had listened to the
song a few dozen times, judging from all the scratches. I don’t care what he
said; the music was about freedom and happiness, not about crashing cars in
the streets. I didn’t hear the song like Reverend Blessett did. To me it was
the sound of summer, a slice of heaven on earth; to him it was all stinking
brimstone and the devil’s leer. I had to wonder how a man of God like he was
could hear Satan’s voice in every word. Wasn’t God in control of everything,
like the Bible said? If God was, then why was Reverend Blessett so scared of
the devil?
“Heathen trash!” he roared at the part of the record where the Beach Boys
sang about not leaving their best girl home on a Saturday night. “Sex garbage!
God help our daughters!”
“The man,” my father said as he leaned toward Mom, “is as crazy as a
