white hair, her neck long and regal, her shoulders frail but unbowed. She wore
not a costume of outlandish color and design, but a simple black dress with a
silver belt, white shoes, and a white pillbox hat with a veil. She wore white
gloves to her bony elbows. As the Moon Man helped her from the car, the driver
opened an umbrella and held it over her royal, ancient head.
The Lady, it was said, had been born in the year 1858. That made her one
hundred and six years old. My mom said the Lady had been a slave in Louisiana,
and had run away with her momma into the swamp before the Civil War. The Lady
had grown up in a colony of lepers, escaped convicts, and slaves in the bayou
below New Orleans, and that was where she’d learned everything she knew.
The Lady was a queen, and Bruton was her kingdom. No one outside
Bruton—and no one inside Bruton, as far as I understood—knew her by any name
but “the Lady.” It suited her; she was elegance, through and through.
Someone gave her a bell. She stood looking down at the sluggish brown
river, and she began to slowly swing the bell back and forth.
I knew what she was doing. My mom did, too. Everyone who watched did.
The Lady was calling the river’s monster up from its mansion of mud.
I had never seen the beast that was called Old Moses. One night when I
was nine years of age, I did think I heard Old Moses calling after a heavy
rain, when the air itself was as thick as water. It was a low rumble, like the
deepest bass note from a church’s pipe organ, so deep your bones hear it
before your ears do. It went up into a hoarse roar that made the town’s dogs
go crazy, and then the noise was gone. It hadn’t lasted but maybe five or six
seconds. The next day, that noise was the talk of the school. Train’s whistle,
was Ben’s and Davy Ray’s opinion. Johnny didn’t say what he thought. At home,
my folks said it must’ve been the train passing through, but we didn’t find
out until later that the rain had washed away a section of track more than
twenty miles from Zephyr and the freight to Birmingham hadn’t even run that
night.
Such things make you wonder.
A mangled cow washed up, once, under the gargoyle bridge. Missing its
head and guts, Mr. Dollar told my father when he and I went to get scalped.
Two men netting crayfish along the riverbank just beyond Zephyr spread the
story that a human corpse had floated past on the current, the body’s chest
peeled open like a sardine can and its arms and legs ripped off at the roots,
but no corpse was ever found downriver. One October night, something hit a
submerged piling of the gargoyle bridge and left cracks in the support columns
that had to be filled with concrete. “A big tree trunk” was Mayor Swope’s
official explanation in the Adams Valley Journal.
The Lady rang the bell, her arm working like a metronome. She began to
chant and sing, in a voice surprisingly clear and loud. The chant was all
African words, which I understood about as much as I grasped nuclear physics.
She would stop for a while, her head slightly cocked to one side as if
watching or listening for something, and then she’d swing the bell again. She
never once said the name “Old Moses.” She kept saying “Damballah, Damballah,
Damballah,” and then her voice would sail upward in an African song again.
At last she ceased ringing the bell, and she lowered it to her side. She
nodded, and the Moon Man took it from her. She was staring fixedly at the
river, but what she was seeing there I don’t know. Then she stepped back and
the three men with the burlap bags stood at the edge of the gargoyle bridge.
They opened the bags and brought out objects wrapped up in butcher’s paper and
tape. Some of the paper was bloody, and you could smell the coppery odor of
fresh meat. They began to unwrap the gory feast, and as they did they threw
the steaks, briskets, and beef ribs down into the swirling brown water. A
whole plucked chicken went into the river, too, along with chicken intestines
poured from a plastic jar. Calf brains slid out of a green Tupperware bowl,
and wet red beef kidneys and liver came out of one of the damp packages. A
bottle of pickled pigs’ feet was opened, its contents splashing down into the
water. A pig’s snout and ears followed the feet. The last thing in was a beef
heart bigger than a wrestler’s fist. It splashed in like a red stone, and then
the three men folded up their burlap bags and the Lady stepped forward again,
watching her footing on the blood that had dripped onto the pavement.
It occurred to me that an awful lot of Sunday dinners had just gone into
the drink.
“Damballah, Damballah, Damballah!” the Lady chanted once more. She stood
there for maybe four or five minutes, motionless as she watched the river move
beneath the bridge. Then she breathed a long sigh and I saw her face behind
the veil as she turned toward her rhinestone Pontiac again. She was frowning;
whatever she had seen or had not seen, she wasn’t too happy about it. She got
into the car, the Moon Man climbed in after her, the driver closed the door
and slid behind the wheel. The Pontiac backed up to a place where it could
turn around and then started toward Bruton. The procession began to go back
the route it had come. Usually by this time there was a lot of laughing and
talking, and people would stop to speak to the white faces along the way. On
this particular Good Friday, however, the Lady’s somber mood had carried and
no one seemed to feel much like laughing.
I knew exactly what the ritual was all about. Everybody in town did. The
Lady was feeding Old Moses his annual banquet. When this had started, I didn’t
know; it had been going on long before I was born. You might think, as
Reverend Blessett at the Freedom Baptist Church did, that it was pagan and of
the devil and should be outlawed by the mayor and town council, but enough
white people believed in Old Moses to override the preacher’s objections. It
was like carrying a rabbit’s foot or throwing salt over your shoulder if you
happened to spill any; these things were part of the grain and texture of
life, and better to do them than not, just in case God’s ways were more
mysterious than we Christians could grasp.
On the following day the rain fell harder, and thunderclouds rolled over
Zephyr. The Merchants Street Easter parade was canceled, much to the dismay of
the Arts Council and the Commerce Club. Mr. Vandercamp Junior, whose family
owned the hardware and feeds store, had been dressing up as the Easter bunny
and riding in the parade’s last car for six years, having inherited the task
from Mr. Vandercamp Senior, who got too old to hop. This Easter the rain
doused all hopes of catching candy eggs thrown by the various merchants and
their families from their cars, the ladies of the Sunshine Club couldn’t show
off their Easter dresses, husbands, and children, the members of Zephyr’s VFW
unit couldn’t march behind the flag, and the Confederate Sweethearts—girls who
attended Adams Valley High School—couldn’t wear their hoop skirts and spin
their parasols.
Easter morning arrived, cloaked in gloom. My dad and I were compatriots
in grousing about getting slicked up, putting on starched white shirts, suits,
and polished shoes. Mom had an all-purpose answer to our grumbles, much the
same as Dad’s “Right as rain.” She said, “It’s only one day,” as if this made
the stiff collar and the necktie knot more comfortable. Easter was a family
day, and Mom phoned Grand Austin and Nana Alice and then Dad picked up the
telephone to call Granddaddy Jaybird and Grandmomma Sarah. We would all, as we
did every Easter, converge on the Zephyr First Methodist church to hear about
the empty tomb.
The white church on Cedarvine Street, between Bonner and Shantuck, was
filling up by the time we parked our pickup truck. We walked through the
sloppy mist toward the light that streamed through the church’s stained-glass
windows, all the polish getting soaked off our shoes. People were shedding
their raincoats and closing their umbrellas at the front door, beneath the
overhanging eaves. It was an old church, built in 1939, the whitewash coming
off and leaving gray patches. Usually the church was primed to its finest on
Easter day, but this year the rain had defeated the paintbrush and lawn mower
so weeds were winning in the front yard.
“Come in, Handsome! Come in, Flowers! Watch your step there, Noodles!
Good Easter morning to you, Sunshine!” That was Dr. Lezander, who served as
the church’s greeter. He had never missed a Sunday, as far as I knew. Dr.
Frans Lezander was the veterinarian in Zephyr, and it was he who had cured
Rebel of the worms last year. He was a Dutchman, and though he still had a
heavy accent he and his wife Veronica, Dad had told me, had come from Holland
long before I was born. He was in his mid-fifties, stood about five eight, was
broad-shouldered and baldheaded and had a neatly trimmed gray beard. He wore
natty three-piece suits, always with a bow tie and a lapel carnation, and he
made up names for people as they entered the church. “Good morning, Peach
Pie!” he said to my smiling mother. To my father, with a knuckle-popping
handshake: “Raining hard enough for you, Thunderbird?” And to me, with a
squeeze of the shoulder and a grin that shot light off a silver front tooth:
“Step right in, Bronco!”
“Hear what Dr. Lezander called me?” I asked Dad once we were inside.
“Bronco!” Getting a new christening for a day was always a highlight of
church.
The sanctuary was steamy, though the wooden ceiling fans revolved. The
Glass sisters were up front, playing a piano and organ duet. They were the
perfect definition of the word strange. While not identical twins, the two
spinster sisters were close enough to be slightly skewed mirrors. They were
both long and bony, Sonia with piled-high whitish-blond hair and Katharina
with piled-high blondish-white hair. They both wore thick black-framed
glasses. Sonia played the piano and not the organ, while Katharina did vice
versa. Depending on who you asked, the Glass sisters—who seemed to always be
nagging each other but lived together on Shantuck Street in a house that
looked like gingerbread—were either fifty-eight, sixty-two, or sixty-five. The
strangeness was completed by their wardrobes: Sonia wore only blue in all its
varying shades, while Katharina was a slave to green. Which brought about the
inevitable. Sonia was referred to by us kids as Miss Blue Glass, and Katharina
was called… you guessed it. But, strange or not, they sure could play up a
storm.
The pews were packed almost solid. The place looked and felt like a
hothouse where exotic hats had bloomed. Other people were trying to find
seats, and one of the ushers—Mr. Horace Kaylor, who had a white mustache and a
cocked left eye that gave you the creeps when you stared at it—came up the
aisle to help us.
“Tom! Over here! For God’s sake, are you blind?”
In the whole wide world there was only one person who would holler like a
bull moose in church.
He was standing up, waving his arms over the milling hats. I could feel
my mother cringe, and my dad put his arm around her as if to steady her from
falling down of shame. Granddaddy Jaybird always did something to, as Dad said
when he thought I wasn’t listening, “show his butt,” and today would be no
exception.
“We saved you seats!” my grandfather bellowed, and he caused the Glasses
to falter, one to go sharp and the other flat. “Come on before somebody steals
’em!”
Grand Austin and Nana Alice were in the same row, too. Grand Austin was
wearing a seersucker suit that looked as if the rain had drawn it up two
sizes, his wrinkled neck clenched by a starched white collar and a blue bow
tie, his thin white hair slicked back and his eyes full of misery as he sat
with his wooden leg stuck out straight below the pew in front of him. He was
sitting beside Granddaddy Jaybird, which had compounded his agitation: the two
got along like mud and biscuits. Nana Alice, however, was a vision of
happiness. She was wearing a hat covered with small white flowers, her gloves
white and her dress the glossy green of a sunlit sea. Her lovely oval face was
radiant; she was sitting beside Grandmomma Sarah, and they got along like
daisies in the same bouquet. Right now, though, Grandmomma Sarah was tugging
at Granddaddy Jaybird’s suit jacket—the same black suit he wore rain or shine,
Easter or funeral—to try to get him to sit down and stop directing traffic. He
was telling people in the rows to move in tighter and then he would holler,
“Room for two more over here!”
“Sit down, Jay! Sit down!” She had to resort to pinching his bony butt,
and then he scowled at her and took his seat.
My parents and I squenched in. Grand Austin said to Dad, “Good to see
you, Tom,” and they shook hands. “That is, if I could see you.” His spectacles
were fogged up, and he took them off and cleaned the lenses with a
handkerchief. “I’d say this is the biggest crowd in a half-dozen Eas—”
“Place is packed as the whorehouse on payday, ain’t it, Tom?” Granddaddy
Jaybird interrupted, and Grandmomma Sarah elbowed him in the ribs so hard his
false teeth clicked.
“I sure wish you’d let me finish a single sentence,” Grand Austin told
him, the red rising in his cheeks. “Ever since I’ve been sittin’ here, I’ve
yet to get a word in edgewi—”
“Boy, you’re lookin’ good!” Granddaddy Jaybird plowed on, and he reached
across Grand Austin to slap my knee. “Rebecca, you feedin’ this boy his meat,
ain’t you? You know, a growin’ boy’s got to have meat for his muscles!”
“Can’t you hear?” Grand Austin asked him, the red now pulsing in his
cheeks.
“Hear what?” Granddaddy Jaybird retorted.
“Turn up your hearin’ aid, Jay,” Grandmomma Sarah said.
“What?” he asked her.
“Hearin’ aid!” she shouted, at her rope’s end. “Turn it up!”
It was going to be an Easter to remember.
Everybody said hello to everybody, and still wet people were coming into
the church as rain started to hammer on the roof. Granddaddy Jaybird, his face
