Fat Lightning (19 page)

“Praise Jesus,” she murmurs and quickly pushes the dirt back over the top of the strongbox. She walks lightly back toward her car with her hands in front of her like a sleepwalker in the pitch black.

The last evening that the vision can be seen on Lot's barn is a Saturday in early October, the conclusion of a golden day fit for dove hunting and college football. Lot sits on the big house's front porch and listens to dogs running two farms away while Sebara is setting up the rental folding chairs for the final service. The smoke from the sawdust pile is blown away from the house by a favorable breeze.

They've had to move the chairs back almost to the edge of the woods in order to accommodate all the people they're expecting. Last night, almost 500 came, and they were generous. A group of black ministers from other churches in distant counties brought a gift of almost $2,000, mostly in worn bills of small denomination.

Lot and Sebara have deduced that the sun will set around 6:40. Sebara has started putting the time of sunset on their sign at the turnoff on Route 17, so that no one will miss anything.

Billy has been helping Sebara set everything up. While Lot sits on the front porch, she goes over their plans one last time.

“Soon as the old fool goes to sleep,” she tells him, busily opening folding chairs and placing them in straight rows as she talks in a calm, quiet voice, “I'll get up and go. While I'm driving over to my place and emptying the safe there, you got to go dig up the strongbox where I showed you and empty it into the bag.”

Billy nods as he dusts off the chairs' seats.

“Then I meet you out on the road, around the curve between here and Jeter's,” he says, “and we'll be in Florida by morning. How much you reckon we got?”

“Well,” Sebara says, “we must of got close to $6,000 last night, probably more tonight. I reckon, maybe $50,000, plus what all's in that strongbox.”

Sebara knows exactly how much money Lot has hidden in the strongbox over the years, because she's tested the combination herself, on a second trip to the grapevine. But she isn't telling Billy that. Their pact is sealed, in his mind, because she wouldn't leave without the contents of the strongbox and he wants half of what's in the safe. Plus, he concludes, she's got a car that can get them to Florida, plus a cousin in South Carolina who can give them the license plates from a junked truck in his back yard.

“This time tomorrow,” she tells Billy, never changing her expression, “you'll be drinking one of them pina coladas on the beach in Florida. Don't look like you just won the lottery, boy. He'll see you.”

By 4 p.m., people are arriving. Some bring picnic suppers and blankets and go to the hayfields. Others just walk around the barn as if they are either trying to memorize it or seeking the answer to its riddle. A field mouse leaps from the leveled hay and children scream in surprise. Sebara has persuaded Lot to tie Granger's leash to the back of the house so that he doesn't scare the pilgrims, and his occasional bark can be heard above the crowd's murmur.

A reporter and photographer from the Times-Dispatch are there, and half the others present seem to have cameras with them. The whiskey barrel has been replaced by several smaller containers so that none of the pilgrims is more than 20 feet away from one.

Sebara is more the show now than the image of Jesus on the cross. She realizes that she and Lot might have overextended themselves by one day, that perhaps Friday was the last day you could really see the image at all. Only a person with a strong imagination can really make out anything from the lines in the faded old building. For a minute, maybe two, just as the sun disappears at its more and more oblique angle, a golden ray hits the building in just the right way and several people say, almost in unison, “I see it! I see it!”

“The LOOOORD giveth,” intones Sebara, so loudly that several people jump and a baby starts crying, “and the LOOORD taketh away. BLESSED is the name of the Lord.”

A few “Amens” are heard through the packed crowd bundled against the fast-approaching evening chill.

Sebara, half singing and half preaching, tells the crowd that there must be a shrine to Jesus in order for Him to come back next spring. She tells them that they need $10,000 more to start building on that shrine, that they'll build all winter, even in the snow, to have it ready by next April, to show their faith and love for their saviour.

By 7:15, she's finished. She leads them in singing “Amazing Grace,” and the faithful reach for their pocketbooks and wallets. A man from Michigan gives Sebara 10 $100 bills and says that he's never really believed in God until he saw that one glimpse of the vision. He's driven all night to get to Monacan for the last service of the year, slept in his car in the courthouse parking lot, and now he's going to drive back.

“Praise Jesus,” she says to the man, who's badly in need of a shave and is crying. She puts her hands on both sides of his head like a faith-healer and says, “You have a safe trip back, now.”

The deputy sheriff in charge of traffic has been joined by two others, but even with some of the people straggling to get one last look at Lot's barn, there's a 90-minute traffic jam out to the state highway. By the time Lot and Sebara have collected the money from the boxes and can go inside to dinner, it's after 9 o'clock.

Lot lets Billy have dinner with them. Sebara has gone out earlier in the day for barbecue, and now all she has to do is warm it and the hushpuppies and break out the coleslaw.

Billy is starving. He hasn't eaten since breakfast and is running out of money. He's happy that he and Sebara finally have what they need. But he knows better than to start eating until after Lot asks the blessing. While the old man is praying, he looks up through squinted eyes and sees Sebara looking at him. She winks and he smiles.

Sebara is sitting in the driver's seat of her Lincoln, watching the last moths of the season flitter around the outside porch light of her cousin's cinder-block house. It's 4:30, still a good three hours until dawn. The South Carolina air feels warm and damp to her, like the sea, and she feels as if the ocean itself must be just beyond the stand of pines that a full moon highlights in the distance behind the house.

Her cousin, a gap-toothed man much darker than Sebara, is busy changing the plates on the car. His wife and family are asleep inside; Sebara told him when she called that she'd just as soon make it short and sweet. Save the visit for another time.

Ten minutes and he's done. He comes around to the driver's side.

“You bury them plates, now,” she tells him as she hands him five 20-dollar bills. He nods and asks her again doesn't she want a bite to eat.

“Gotta go,” she says, cranking the car carefully so as not to wake up any more of the dogs along the dirt street.

By 11:30, half an hour after Lot took the pills that Sebara had been giving him for the last month to help him sleep, he had stopped moving. She waited for another 30 minutes, though. When the clock chimed midnight, she slipped out of the old feather bed, the one thing on the Chastain property that she hated to leave behind, and got dressed quickly, not even bothering with underwear.

She almost screamed when she ran into Billy Basset as she tiptoed down the front steps. He was supposed to wait for her to blink the car lights as a signal to start digging underneath the grapevine.

“Peckerhead!” she hissed at him, then calmed herself. “You was supposed to wait for me over by the tent.”

“Was afraid you won't coming,” he said.

“I'm here,” she said, “and I'll be here again in 45 minutes. You better have that strongbox money. All of it. You got the bag?”

Billy nodded, holding up the deposit bag, and walked off toward the grapevine. Sebara watched him go for perhaps 10 seconds, then headed for the car.

She backed out the driveway and was around the bend from the Chastain house before she turned on the lights. She was on Route 17, headed south, before she allowed herself the luxury of pulling off at an abandoned gas station to look in the trunk one more time.

She turned the key and the mammoth Lincoln trunk sprung open to reveal two gym bags. She couldn't quite get all the bills from the pilgrims' donations in the first one, so she had to commingle some of them with the cash she had removed from Lot's strongbox the night before.

She figured that, by now, Billy Basset would be getting ready to work the combination on the old box, and that in a minute or two he would discover that it was empty.

Sebara had gone out earlier in the day to her home to withdraw the cash from her safe, then added their take from the last night to it, telling Lot that the money would be more secure if she put it in the car trunk until Monday morning when she could deposit it.

“Unless you got a safe or something around here we can put it in,” she'd said, looking into his eyes.

He'd shaken his head wordlessly, looking away.

Sebara rolls the glass up as she approaches the paved road that leads back to I-95 and pops a Marvin Gaye tape into the tape deck. She's still clear-eyed, not sleepy a bit, thanks to the speed she usually only takes before preaching a sermon.

She can almost feel herself vibrating to the background of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which always reminds her of jungle drums.

She thinks about the grapevine back behind Lot Chastain's house and bursts into uncontrollable laughter. She's still laughing when she reaches the interstate and takes the south exit, toward Florida.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Everybody's all the time trying to take me for a fool. Carter and Aileen and them just aching to sell this land right out from under me. Them folks from the historical society wanting me to give it to 'em, like I owed them something. The sheriff and the fire chief threatening me because I won't let them put out the sawdust pile.

And now Sebara. Took me a spell to figure out what was making me so groggy of a morning. Couldn't wake up, and then I was ready to take a nap by the middle of the afternoon. That ain't like me.

Finally, I seen it was them pills, the ones that's supposed to make me sleep. Like I need to sleep. Didn't swaller the one night before last, or last night, just to see what happened. I played like I was sleeping, though.

Tonight, I seen what their game was. Can't fool Lot Chastain forever.

Wasn't half a hour after I started playing possum when I heard the bed creak and her slip out of it quiet as a mouse, old boards creaking with every tip-toe. I got good ears for a old man. Heard her open the closet and take something out. Heard her all the way down the hall. Heard the front door open soft as moonlight. Even heard feet walking in the front yard and whispers, like it was two people instead of just the one.

Playing possum. Like when I was a young'un. Warren was oldest, then me a year later, and then Carter and Aileen. And then Grace and finally Holly. There'd be two sleeping in there with Momma and Daddy, the baby and the knee-baby, so it was Aileen that moved me out. I wasn't but five.

I didn't want to stay in that big old room down the hall. Warren'd had to sleep down there by himself for a year already, since Carter come, but I didn't want no part of it. Some nights, I'd slip back in Momma and Daddy's room. If Daddy was awake, he'd make me go back to my room, said he'd beat me good if I didn't go. But if I waited, he'd fall asleep and Momma would still be awake, and she'd let me crawl in there, my knees up against her back, spoon-like, and she'd wake up before Daddy in the morning and send me back to my room. If Daddy woke up first, he'd make me go on back down the hall. I was seven when I stopped.

Last time I stayed with Momma and Daddy, I woke up and thought I was in my own room, because there wasn't any body next to mine. And then I heard the noises, and for the first time I reckon I had a notion what the noises was. When I looked over at them, Momma was under Daddy and she looked at me, and the look was like “Don't let on you're awake” and “I'm sorry. I can't help it.”

I didn't come back no more after that.

But I got right good at playing possum over the years. You could find out all kinds of things about folks by playing possum. Like Sebara.

I go into the front room, real quiet, and I can see them in the full moon outside. I stay back in the shadows and watch her when she goes towards her car and he walks off in the other direction.

I don't open that door until I hear the car start, and then I follow the boy. Figure she'll be coming back for him.

The steps feel cold under my feet, but I don't have no time to get no slippers. I can still hear her car off in the distance, and I can just barely see something, maybe the flash of a watch in the moonlight, off to my right.

Seems like the Lord is always giving me some sign. I meant to put that hoe up after I weeded last time, but there it still sat, right by the front steps, saying, “Use me.”

The boy's trail isn't hard to follow. Partly I can see the footprints, partly I can hear him, on up ahead there, down on his knees like he might be praying. He's on all fours like some animal, breathing hard and making some digging sound.

The moon looks red, like it does when the wind blows the smoke right, and the smell of sawdust is stinging my nose, making me think about fat lightning for some reason. It isn't much above 40 degrees, but it don't seem to hit me except for my feet, not 'til afterwards.

Sometimes at night, I can see something better by not looking right at it, like there's a blind spot right ahead. I can see the boy up ahead a ways, but it's like you see something out of the corner of your eye. I can't focus on him, but it don't take me too long to figure out where he is and what he's up to.

I slip around to the back of him, not making hardly a sound when I tip-toe past the apple trees, up by the pear tree. It's so bright that I can see my shadow cast all the way to the edge of the field, but that boy, he ain't looking nowhere but down.