Gap Creek (14 page)

The house was quiet except for pops and creaks here and there in the attic. Ma Richards must have gone on to bed for I didn’t hear her stirring. A wind had rose in the dark and gusted against the windows, rattling panes.

“Don’t you smell the stench?” Mr. Pendergast said.

“I don’t smell nothing but burned lard and soot from the kitchen,” I said.

“It’s the stink of hell,” he said and sobbed. The salt of his tears stung the burns on his cheeks. He rubbed a cheek with a swelled and blistered hand. Skin hung in little rags off his fingers.

“Let me rub butter on your hands,” I said. I figured if I could get grease on his hands he would let me spread some on his face.

“No,” he said, and jerked his hand away from me.

“Nothing else will help you heal,” I said. I was so tired it sounded like somebody else talking. I was kind of floating and knowed if I stopped I would collapse. I felt so bad for what I had done that I couldn’t think about it. I had to keep going. I had to. The awfulness of the world and the evilness of the world was in the air with the stink of the fire. The scariness was in the air like ghosts that wanted to press on my mind and haunt every second and every thought. They wanted to get in behind my eyes where the worst pain was. The devils gathered around my head and mocked me.

“Hell is scorching every inch of me!” Mr. Pendergast hollered.

“You’re in your own bed, in your own house,” I said. “And I’m here to help. I’ll rub butter on your burns and you’ll feel better.” What he needed more than anything else was soothing in his mind.

“I didn’t mean to tell a lie on my brother Jonathan,” Mr. Pendergast said, out of breath, like he was talking to a judge. “And I didn’t go to break Papa’s watch.”

“That was a long time ago,” I said.

“I didn’t mean to play with myself,” he said.

“Mr. Pendergast, there’s no need,” I said. I didn’t want to hear no more. The pain in his mind was unbearable.

“It was laughing at the preacher,” he said. “That’s how I sinned against the Holy Ghost.”

“Now, Mr. Pendergast,” I said.

“It was old Preacher Liner up there hollering, ‘And the half shall never be told.’ One of his suspenders broke and I busted out laughing. The preacher pointed his finger at me and said, ‘Them that mock the Spirit sin against the Holy Ghost.’”

“You was just a boy,” I said.

“Them that mock the Spirit are in danger of hellfire,” Mr. Pendergast quoted.

“But surely you have been forgive,” I said. “It was just a little thing.”

“I will burn forever,” Mr. Pendergast said. It was like he had give up. He even took pride in his damnation. He acted like he took some comfort in his own terror. I heard the mantel clock strike two. It was the darkest and loneliest time of night. Wind shoved against the wall of the house and a mouse or rat scratched in the wall behind Mr. Pendergast’s bed. It sounded like the rat was gnawing a nut or chewing on a piece of wood. Something swished inside the wall and then overhead, in the ceiling. I didn’t know if it was a rat running. It sounded like a big snake sliding over paneling. It sounded like something ten feet long sliding dry scales over wood.

“Please help me,” Mr. Pendergast cried.

“I’m here to help you,” I said. I put my hand on his shoulder.

“I can feel the fire on my feet,” he said.

“Your feet are right here in this cool bed,” I said.

“I’m freezing,” he screamed.

“I’ll get you another blanket,” I said.

“Hell is ice,” he said. His teeth was chattering. He looked like he seen something in the air in front of him. “Get back,” he cried.

“There’s nobody here but me,” I said.

“Leave me alone,” he shouted.

I put both my hands on his shoulders and tried to push him down on the pillow. He swung at me and hit me in the face with his burned hand. The pain made him groan. “I won’t go,” he whispered.

“You don’t have to go nowhere,” I said. I seen that the laudanum had wore off. The pain was coming back worse than before. I got the blue bottle from the nightstand and poured a spoonful of the cold liquid. “You need to drink this,” I said.

“Won’t do no good,” he said.

“It helped before,” I said.

“You’ll poison me,” he screamed.

I had to think of some way to make him drink the laudanum. Otherwise the pain would kill him. Even if I had to trick him, I had to make him take it. “If you don’t drink this I’ll have to leave,” I said.

“No,” he cried.

“I’ll have to leave you to holler by yourself,” I said. It hurt me to say a lie, but I couldn’t think of any other way to make him take the laudanum. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth and I poured the liquid between his lips. Some of it dribbled out of the corner of his mouth, but most of it went down. It was a bigger dose than the first one. I used all the rest of the laudanum.

“The devil has long, dirty claws,” Mr. Pendergast said, “and his claws are poison.”

“He won’t get his claws on you,” I said. I felt like I was talking to a little child.

“The devil is trying to get in bed with me,” Mr. Pendergast said.

“You lay back down and rest,” I said. I pushed him gently back on the pillow.

“The devil is going to choke me,” he said.

“Ain’t nobody here but you and me,” I said.

As the laudanum took effect I seen his eyes get wet and glassy, and blacker than ever. He was still troubled in his mind, but numbed by the tincture. His eyes roved around the room like he was trying to see where the evil spirit was hiding.

“You get some sleep,” I said.

He laid on the pillow and took this deep breath. It was the kind of breath you hear somebody take when they’re asleep. You expect them to take it in and then let it out. I waited without hardly knowing I was waiting. But Mr. Pendergast did not breathe out. I looked at him, and his eyes was open but not moving.

“Mr. Pendergast,” I said. I put my hand over his nose but didn’t feel any breath. I put my ear to his chest but didn’t hear any heartbeat. Mr. Pendergast was dead. One moment he had been alive and afraid, and the next he was dead. He went just like that. It was amazing how easy it was for a human life to end. A person could die and you wouldn’t hardly know it. I put my fingers on his eyes and closed them. Just then I heard Hank at the door.

THE DAY AFTER Mr. Pendergast died I felt ten years older. The doctor Hank had found on the other side of Tigerville said he thought Mr. Pendergast had a stepson in California and a stepdaughter in Columbia, but he didn’t know their addresses and didn’t even know their names. I was wore out and the kitchen was a ruin. Ma Richards blamed me for all of it. And that seemed mighty unfair to me. I
had
knocked the grease out on the stove, but it was me that drug Mr. Pendergast out of the burning kitchen, and it was me that put out the fire with wet sacks. Hank was irritated because he didn’t know what to do about the house, and about reaching Mr. Pendergast’s relatives.

“We may not have a roof over our heads,” he said the morning after Mr. Pendergast died.

“We don’t even know where to bury him,” Ma Richards said.

There we was, in somebody else’s house down in South Carolina, and him laying a corpse in the front bedroom. We might be throwed out, and I might be accused of burning the kitchen, or maybe even of killing Mr. Pendergast. Everything looked so bad the weight crushed down on me.

“Carry him into the kitchen,” I said to Hank. I cleaned off the big kitchen table so it was bare. That was the only clean place in the kitchen. Everything else was black with soot.

“You can’t lay out a corpse,” Ma Richards said. “That’s a job for an older woman.”

“I helped lay out Papa,” I said.

“We don’t even know what his kin wants to do with him,” Hank said.

“He’s got to be laid out in any case,” I said.

“You ain’t even got a cooling board,” Ma Richards said.

“We’ll have to use the table,” I said.

I cleared the stove and washed the burned grease off with soap. When I started a fire in the box the stovetop smelled like burned lard and soap as it heated up, but that was soon singed away. I brought a kettle of water to a boil. There was so much to be done, and I had to work my way through it. But the more I done the calmer I got. I scrubbed the soot and grease off the floor. And then we carried in Mr. Pendergast’s body and I stripped off his clothes. Since he was already getting stiff, he needed to be laying on something flat and hard.

I washed every inch of him with soap and water, and put a handkerchief soaked in camphor on his face to keep it from turning brown, the way I had seen it done with Papa and Masenier. And then I rubbed oil all over his skin. Mr. Pendergast’s bowels had moved after he died and I had to clean that up too.

“You oughten to have to do that,” Hank said. I’d never done anything Hank told me not to. I didn’t even know if I could, or if a wife should do something her husband said not to do. But if Hank just fussed, as he usually did, I felt justified in going ahead with what I was doing.

“Somebody’s got to make a casket,” I said.

“I need to go down to the crossroads and tell the preacher,” Hank said. “There’ll have to be a service.”

“There’ll have to be a casket,” I said.

“You think you could do that too?” Hank said.

“I was thinking you could,” I said, but wished I hadn’t.

“I’ll decide what I do, and when I do it,” Hank said, and looked at me hard. A chill went through my bones, a sick iciness sunk in my
belly. Hank and me hadn’t quarreled before. It was the surprise of Mr. Pendergast’s death, and Ma Richards being there, that made him lose his temper.

“Hank,” Ma Richards said. I hadn’t noticed she was standing in the doorway. “Hank,” she said, “you’ve got to show who’s wearing the britches in this house.”

“Don’t it look like I’m wearing the britches?” Hank said.

“You’re used to things being easy,” Ma Richards said.

Instead of answering her Hank walked out of the room, slamming the back door.

I looked at Ma, and I looked away. I was so mad I couldn’t think of anything to say. I kept washing Mr. Pendergast’s legs. I scrubbed his feet, between the toes and under the arches. His toenails was black, but I decided I wouldn’t trim them or clean them. Soon as I finished washing his body I wet his hair and combed it with a comb I found in his room.

Dressing the body was harder than washing it. I found some drawers in the bedroom, and a shirt I’d washed myself. And I found a suit of clothes hanging on a nail, but they was wrinkled. I sprinkled the wool and heated the iron on the stove and pressed the suit. It took a lot of lifting and rolling of the body to get it dressed. The arms and legs was setting stiff as wood. The eyes come open when I moved the head, and I had to brush them closed again.

Hank had gone out in the backyard, and I heard him sawing and hammering. There was a stack of old boards in the barn, and I seen he was hammering together a box from chestnut boards. With the corpse dressed and laying on the kitchen table, I started thinking about fixing some breakfast. None of us had eat since the day before. I hated to fix something to eat with the corpse laying there, but there was nothing else to do. We had to eat, and we had to get on with things. And I meant to show Ma Richards I could go on in spite of whatever she said.

I wiped the soot off the top of the meal bin and scooped out some cornmeal.

“You’re not going to cook with that thing laying here?” Ma Richards said.

“I won’t touch the body,” I said.

“I’m not eating around a corpse,” Ma Richards said.

I didn’t answer her. I wasn’t used to talking back to older people. And it wouldn’t do no good to snipe at her. I wiped off the coffeepot and poured some fresh water in it. “Would you grind some coffee?” I said to Ma. Without answering me, she took the can of coffee beans out to the back porch.

I got some fresh ribs out of the dishpan where they had been setting overnight. They had been partly cooked in the fire and soot made them black. I rubbed the smut off and put eight or nine in the frying pan. Soon the kitchen smelled like frying meat. And boiling coffee and baking cornbread. Hank was still hammering when I called him in.

“Where are we going to eat?” Hank said. Mr. Pendergast laid on the kitchen table like he was in state in a public place.

“There’s nowhere to put the body till you get a casket made,” I said.

“I’m not half done,” Hank said.

“I’m not eating with that thing in here,” Ma Richards said.

I give everybody a plate and served the cornbread and molasses and fresh ribs. We set as far away from the table as we could, eating on our laps. I was near starved, and Hank and Ma Richards was near starved too. We eat everything I’d fixed, and drunk all the coffee. It didn’t matter that Mr. Pendergast was laying there a corpse after we took the first bite.

“This is like a wake,” Ma Richards said, her mouth full of cornbread and molasses.

“We are like sin eaters,” Hank said.

“I never believed in such dreadful stuff,” Ma Richards said.

“What is a sin eater?” I said.

“Somebody the family pays to eat supper off a corpse, like they are taking on all the sins of the dead person,” Hank said.

“What an awful idea,” I said.

“It’s just a story,” Hank said.

AFTER HANK FINISHED the chestnut box and we put Mr. Pendergast in it with his hands folded, we set the coffin on two chairs in the living room. And there he laid until the funeral on Wednesday. I kept hand-kerchiefs soaked in camphor on his brow. And I tried not to look at him as I went about my work. But it was hard not to glance at the face under the handkerchief, like I was expecting it to come awake and say something.

One of the neighbors, George Poole, who run the store at the crossroads, come by and I asked him about Mr. Pendergast’s children. George Poole was a big man whose belly punched out below the bib of his overalls. “Last I heard Butch was somewhere in Californy,” he said.

“You don’t know what town?” I said.

“All I heard was he went to Californy,” Mr. Poole said.

“And how about his stepdaughter?” I said.