Fat Lightning (18 page)

When she finished telling the story, Nancy asked her how she could forgive her husband for cheating on her when she was in the hospital with a new-born baby.

“Honey,” she told Nancy, putting her hand on her knee, “sometimes I think they all cheat. The only marriages that survive, it seems like to me, are the ones where the wife can take a joke.”

She got up and handed her daughter a handkerchief from the bedside table.

“Besides,” she said as she grabbed the doorknob, “Momma's had her times, too. But Daddy can't know about that. Men can't handle it.” And she winked at Nancy as she slipped out the door.

Nancy is thinking of this when she hears Wade's first burbling, waking-up sounds.

Yes, she thinks to herself. I believe I can take a joke.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Wormwood. That's what I been tasting. In the dream, that fat lightning is turned into wormwood, just like in Revelation, where it says the third part of the waters becomes wormwood, and many men die.

Many men ought to die. All the cheating and whoring going on, it's a wonder God lets it go on.

Even Carter's boy. He thinks don't anybody know him and that yellow-haired woman is going out to that Holiday Inn, but I seen 'em. Seen his car there one morning when I was driving in to town, so I just parked my car in the back of the parking lot and waited. Sure enough, it won't 20 minutes before her and him come out, her first, pushing back her hair so she didn't look like they'd just been doing it. They'd parked their cars right next to each other, but they come out maybe 50 feet apart, like they was pulling something over on everybody.

But then, he walks over to her car and leans down and they kiss right there in broad-open daylight, all the cars and trucks going by right behind 'em on the interstate. I reckon Carter's boy's wife ain't no better than him, probably slipping around, too. They all do it. I read about it in them magazines like they sell in the stores in Richmond. Pure filth.

And they got the nerve to talk about me and Sebara. I can see folks turn away when I go get groceries, and then hear all that talking behind my back, like what they done when they started telling all them lies about me and Holly. Well, it's God's will, me and Sebara. It's His way to make His will known to all these sinful people. It's right funny, how nobody much from around here comes any more, just outsiders. Sebara says it's like when Jesus was turned on by his own people. She said it'd be folks from far off that would spread the word about Jesus-on-the-barn.

Feel right bad about the Jeter boy and all. But he was working for the devil. I seen that girl and him there that night, doing the devil's mischief right there on the ground in front of my barn, right where them pilgrims was standing not two hours before, worshipping. It had to be dealt with.

But they didn't see me. I made a noise so they'd hear, and I heard her run away, but I acted like I didn't see or hear nothing. I asked the Jeter boy if he'd help me the next afternoon moving some things, and he asked me how much I'd pay him. I told him $20 for three hours' work, which is more than I'd ever pay a sorry young'un like that to lift and tote.

The next day, he come up here 45 minutes late, shiftless just like all them Jeters. I made out like I had something I wanted to pull up out of the old irrigation pond, and that got him interested. Folks around here think I got treasure buried or something. Some even follows me when I go back in the woods; I never have caught 'em, but I can hear the leaves moving behind me when I'm being followed, which is more often than you'd think.

We walk down there to the pond, because it's so wet back there. He's got on tennis shoes, and he's cussing to beat the band because he's getting mud on 'em.

When we get to the pond, I take him right up to the edge and point towards a piece of a stick that's up out of the water, and I tell him that's where what I want pulled up is sunk, that there's a net under the water with something in it, and all he's got to do is hook the net. I hand him the rod and reel I'm carrying, tell him I'd do it myself, but I ain't so young anymore, don't think I can pull in anything that big. And he swallers it, hook, line and sinker. He's ready to pull him in some buried treasure, probably knock me over the head and run with it.

He never even seen that hickory stick I had set there next to the trail that morning. The first blow I hit him, I come down on him with both hands from behind, while he's thinking about getting rich quick, I reckon. He falls in the pond, but he tries to get back out, and I hit him again, right between the eyes, and he goes down for good. Little bubbles come up for a while, then nothing.

I throwed that stick in the middle of the pond and walked on back to the house. Next day, there come a thunderstorm and washed away all the footprints, just like I knowed it would. I kept on waiting for that boy's body to show up, for somebody to find him, but he must of got caught up in all the junk at the bottom of the pond. I couldn't even go down to my own pond ‘til somebody finally found him.

When they did, the deputy come by one day and asked me some questions. “Did you know that boy?” “Did he hang around here much?” and such as that. I answered 'em and they never come back.

When I was a young'un, sometimes I'd get so mad about something that somebody did that Warren'd have to pull me off of him. This time, there weren't no Warren around.

Some might say it ain't right to punish like that, but I just think about Isaiah, how when the young'uns come up a'mocking him and all, he called a bear down out of the mountains, and it carried them young'uns away. Sometimes God's judgment is right harsh, but it is God's judgment, and somebody has got to be His instrument.

I didn't ask for none of this.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

When Sebara was just nine years old, she woke her mother and father on a cold, windy Thursday morning and told them she had dreamt of buried silver.

Lucas Tatum wasn't averse to listening to a child's dream. Ever since he fell off the roof, he had wanted badly to hear evidence of that voice again, the one that advised him to jump in his hour of need. He had some faith, but he wanted to know.

So Lucas and his wife, Annie, got up in the 6 o'clock darkness and listened as Sebara told them about her dream.

It was about something round, buried under the dirt at the edge of a field, she told them, right beside a crepe myrtle bush. Inside it was all kinds of silver. She told them that in her dream it was right underneath a big black rock.

Lucas grew quiet while Annie asked her daughter could she show them where it was. Sebara was silent for a moment, then said she thought she could. It was just Lucas and Annie and Sebara by this time living in the back of the old store.

“Maybe it was something that old man Cates buried before he died, and nobody would of knowed where it was,” Annie said, and Lucas just nodded, somewhat sadly.

At dawn, the three of them went outside. Sebara rubbed her eyes. She and her mother both had on sweaters against the cold November wind; Lucas had on an old jacket with the zipper broken.

“Girl,” he said to Sebara, limping along beside her, “you'd better not be messin' with me. It's a sin to claim gifts if they ain't no gifts.”

She looked up at him, wide brown eyes showing hurt.

“I just know what I dreamt, Daddy,” she said.

So she led her parents, as in a dream, out into the back yard, on past the pecan trees and the swing set nobody swung on anymore and the old Ford on blocks, to where the crepe myrtle sat, naked as a bundle of sticks, at the edge of Annie's collard patch.

Lucas could feel sweat under his jacket and shirt and undershirt. How could a child know? Jesus must of told her. Lucas knew, when he prayed and when he was in the throes of a sermon such as made little children wet their pants, that Jesus saw everything. But in the everyday world of bills and new school clothes, when he counted that offering and there was nobody to check after him, he sometimes felt like Jesus couldn't have his eyes on everything at the same time, that even Jesus must wink at a crippled black preacher trying to put food on the table by slipping a few quarters, even a dollar or two, out now and then.

Lucas hadn't spent a cent of it, he kept telling himself, just saving it for when something was needed. Why, it was just like old Joseph telling them Egyptians to save their grain for the lean years. Lucas had taken a liking to a somewhat used Chevrolet that Brother William Edes had for sale, which Brother Edes said he would sell for $150 down and $25 a month for the next two years, but nothing could make him dig up what he had come to think of as his insurance for something as carnal as a Chevrolet.

Sebara didn't start digging right away. She circled it with her eyes half-closed for a full two minutes before walking to the piece of coal Lucas put there to help him find the place.

“This is it,” she said, firm with conviction.

Annie and she fell into digging. Lucas watched with his hands in his pockets. It took them all of 30 seconds to uncover the coffee can from the tilled earth at the edge of the garden, another 10 to pop open the lid.

“Lord Jesus,” Annie said, looking up at Lucas. “The child done worked a miracle.”

There was silver and green all over the bare ground. Annie and Sebara counted it right there: One hundred and fourteen dollars and fifty cents.

“Praise the Lord,” Lucas said, thinking about the nights he'd gone out and dug that can up to add four or five dollars to it. He'd been doing it all year, and he silently mouthed the amount along with Annie as she gave him a total he could have given her just as well. He was glad to know that Annie could count so well.

The word soon spread, by Annie, and Lucas was obliged to tell the congregation officially about it from the pulpit. From that day until his death 10 years later, he assumed that Jesus was watching him like a hawk.

What he never counted on was the deviousness of the nine-year-old mind. Sebara never missed a creak of the boards or a door lightly opened and then closed. She'd dug the can up herself once, when her parents were visiting at the rest home and she'd told them she had an upset stomach. She was just waiting for the right moment.

Sebara knew that she could have dug up the can herself and hid the money somewhere else, but she reasoned that there was no way a child could spend that kind of money and not draw attention to herself. Besides, she felt, in some way beneath and beyond thought, that she could better secure her future by being stamped as “special,” than by covertly spending $114.50. When it came time to decide who would succeed Lucas Tatum as minister, there were few who didn't remember that God had spoken to Lucas' little girl.

Now, 20 years later, Sebara hasn't forgotten how to watch and listen.

She's been watching Lot Chastain out of the corner of her eye for two months now. She knows that he never goes to the bank, because the time they went in together to start the joint account, he acted as if he'd never been inside the building before in his life.

“Damn banks,” he said to her after they'd left. “Like to of ruint Daddy and them in the Depression. Don't trust 'em.”

Sebara knows that Lot cashes the Social Security check he gets once a month at his brother's store, and she knows that he's got some kind of trust from which he gets money, too. One time, when she asked him if he didn't have trouble paying the electricity and phone bills and taxes on such a big place, he gave her a quick sideways look and said, “My momma took care of that.”

Two weeks before the last appearance of Jesus-on-the-barn, Sebara finally figures it out.

Other than some of his clothes and the television, the only thing Lot has taken from his trailer to his parents' house is his King James Bible.

One night, while Lot is in the bathroom down the hall, Sebara opens the Bible. There's a family tree in the front of it, and down in the right-hand corner of the first right-hand page, there's some scribbling. She finally makes out “Rev. 14:18.” She turns to Revelation, the 14th chapter, 18th verse, and sees that part of the verse is underlined lightly in pencil: “Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe.” In the margin between the verses was written in barely legible pencil: 14L,36R,7L.

The next time she goes for a midnight walk after Lot's fallen asleep, she doesn't visit Billy in the tent she's told him he can abandon for a place with her on the beach in Florida as soon as they make one last haul. Instead, she gets the flashlight out of her car and goes over to the northeast corner of the lot, out of sight of the big house, walking so lightly she barely disturbs the grass and clay.

The Chastains, like most farm families in Mosby County, raised every kind of fruit that could be canned or otherwise preserved for the winter. The apple and pear and peach trees are still there, eaten up by insects and still stubbornly bearing fruit every year. And right in the middle is the grapevine.

It's a rectangle six feet off the ground, set up on six poles. The vines were trained to grow around the horizontal boards on top, so that a person could pick grapes from a standing position. It hasn't been tended for years, but like the fruit trees, it still bears. Sebara can still smell the sweetness, even though summer's gone. She gropes around in the darkness of the new moon, and whatever she touches leaves her hands with a stickiness that she has nowhere to wash off.

Sebara knows that Lot has been here; she's seen his footprints before during an afternoon walk. Now, scouring the ground with the light, she thinks she knows why he comes here.

In the middle of the structure, where it seems another supporting pole should have been planted, she sees that the earth has been disturbed. She finds a stick and digs down into the earth with it. No more than six inches down, she meets resistance. Digging now with her hands, she touches metal and knows her suspicions were correct: Lot Chastain does not trust his money to banks.