The Day of Small Things (30 page)

I pat her arm and try to think of how to explain things. “Some of it was speaking in tongues—that part in the beginning that didn’t make no sense at all. And then those other things she said—some was Bible verses, I’m right sure. Those words about seeing the wicked in great power and spreading like a mighty tree.”

Dorothy’s eyes are on the dark highway ahead. “I didn’t hear in all those words nothing about where my Calven is.”

“Oh, Belvy was speaking prophecy all right,” I say, knowing Dorothy is disappointed not to have got a clearer message. I pat her arm again. “There was a message for you all right. What you got to remember, honey, is that verse about ‘through a glass darkly.’ The truth is in the words but it’s up to us to puzzle it out. That’s the way the Spirit does.”

“Why don’t you just call Aunt Belvy tomorrow and ask her what she meant?” Dorothy is holding back a yawn as she speaks, and I know that she is wore out with the battling of her hopes and her fears.

“Why, Dor’thy,” I tell her, “Belvy don’t ever remember a lick of what she says when the Spirit’s speaking through her. You saw how she swooned, there when she’d finished, and those men caught her and helped her back to her seat. She gets plumb knocked out by the Spirit passing through her—she told me once that it was like to a great wind sweeping through a house and clearing everything out. No, honey, she don’t remember nothing.”

Dorothy dims her headlights as a pickup comes around the bend ahead, then, once it’s gone past, puts them up high again. She travels considerably slower now that it’s dark, for fear of a deer or some other animal running across the road.

“Birdie,” she says after a while, “even if Aunt Belvy don’t remember saying the words, maybe she could help us to understand what they mean.”

I smile, thinking back to the first time I asked Belvy to explain the things she had cried out while laboring under an Anointment. “Do you ask the mail carrier to read your letters to you?” she had said, kind of surprised at my question. “That’s all I am—just a mail carrier bringing
messages from the Lord. I hand ’em over and it’s up to you to read ’em yourself.”

I start to tell Dorothy this but she is busy saying over parts of the prophecy and making guesses at what the words might mean. I put my face to the open car window and take in the rich cool night smells of the woods and the mountains—not all that much changed from times long back, not in the parts that is still wild.

Something has wakened in me since I found myself wrapped in the Spirit that fell upon Belvy. And I think … if this wakening come upon me in church, ain’t it from God? Ain’t there just the one God, however you name Him or worship Him? The God of the Cherokees and the God of the Holiness folk … and my Luther’s Freewill Baptist God—all the same. Mighten it be that God is sending me back to all of Granny Beck’s teachings, the same ones I turned from so long ago? Mighten it be this is all to His purposing?

The dark woods and slopes out there seem most as clear to my eyes as if it was day, and I yearn to be in amongst the trees. The wild places still hold their secrets and I remember … time was I could slip through the midnight woods, silent as any fox, hearing every leaf fall, scenting the track of the wild things, and feeling in the trunks of the old trees, the life power being pulled up from the earth beneath.

I still could
, the wild girl that hides behind my wrinkly old face calls out.
Let me try …

But Dorothy don’t stop talking, just yammers on and on, pulling me back into now, back into the car where she is making her guesses.

“That one thing Aunt Belvy said, ‘As is the mother, so is her daughter’—now I reckon that must mean Mag and
Prin.” Dorothy sounds sad as she says this. Her sister Mag has been a sorry someone all her life and a great trouble to Dorothy.

“And what about that thing she said—something about a lodge in the wilderness for wayfaring men?” Dorothy goes on. “Maybe
that’s
where Calven is! They’s all kinds of tourist cabins and lodges all through the mountains—not so many in Marshall County as in some of the others but still … might be something to think about.”

But even though I want to believe that Granny Beck’s Powers and Gifts was from God—the one God—I am troubling over the words that Belvy said just before she swooned, words that went straight to my heart.

“There is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

(Calven)

T
here ain’t nothing to it, Good Boy. I’m gonna start you at pickup, but once you get the hang of it, I believe you could make a pretty fair dip. Be better if you was smaller, but with that baby face you ought to do all right.”

Pook’s sunglasses looked Calven up and down and the boy felt a chill run over him as the unseen eyes studied him and foul breath surrounded him. Preserving a stony silence and what he hoped was an indifferent expression, Calven lifted his chin and stood his ground.

I got to go along with this. Play along and wait till me and Mama can get away
.

They had left the motel in the early morning hours and now they were in a plain little house out in the middle of nowhere. All Calven could remember was Mama waking him and telling him they were leaving. He had managed to ask to use the bathroom before they left and had taken
care of what he needed to do. Then it was down the stairs and out into the half-lit parking lot where he’d heard the sound of traffic on a highway near at hand but there hadn’t been time to look for anything that would tell him where he was.

Not that it mattered, since they were on their way somewhere else. Pook had told him to lay down on the back seat and go to sleep, and though Calven had thought about trying to look for road signs when the sunglasses weren’t turned on him, he’d shut his eyes just for a minute, so’s he’d look like he was obeying, and he’d gone and fallen deep asleep, only half-waking when they bumped down the long dirt road that led to this little cabin in the woods.

Then big guy Darrell, with a flashlight in one huge hand and the other on Calven’s shoulder, was pushing him up the steps, through a front room with a brick fireplace, and into a room where there was a cot with a thin lumpy mattress and a musty-smelling sleeping bag.

“You stay here.” Darrell had glanced at the chunky stainless steel watch on his wrist. “Couple a hours till sunup. You might as well get some more sleep. Pook’s meaning to start your schooling first thing after breakfast.”

The big man turned to go.

“Wait a minute!” To Calven’s disgust, the words had come out high-pitched and quavering. He cleared his throat and tried again. “They ain’t no light in here.”

Darrell swung the flashlight back to illuminate the little bed. “Well, git in and close your eyes. Won’t matter if it’s dark—”

“Would you hold the light while I shake out the sleeping bag?”
Don’t leave me in the dark by myself
, he wanted to
beg. “I just want to make sure they ain’t no mice or such in there.”

To Calven’s surprise, the big man had done as he asked, standing patiently while Calven unzipped the sleeping bag, shook it violently, and spread it back on the cot.

“Thanks a lot.” Calven nodded at Darrell, controlling his fear and trying for a man-to-man gesture. He shucked off his shoes and scrambled into the sleeping bag. “ ‘Preciate it. See you in the morning.” He had turned on his side with his back to the door and the hulking Darrell.

“You gone sleep in your clothes?” The voice had been soft and almost motherly.

“Yeah, I mostly do.” Calven pulled the sleeping bag up around his chest. “Night.”

The metallic click of the bolt lock seemed to set loose all his fears, and Calven lay trembling in the suffocating darkness of the room. Trembling,
like a damn baby girl
, he jeered at himself, trying to regain his nerve.

Schooling—what had the big man meant by that?
Ol’ Darrell don’t seem that bad but Pook—I don’t know what it is about him but I don’t see how Mama can stand to be around him, much less—Shitfire, he’s like something out of a horror movie—one of those bad ones me and Bib used to watch
.

For a moment Calven allowed himself to wonder about the sunglasses Pook wore, even at night, but as quickly as the thought—
What if he ain’t got no eyes, just empty sockets behind those black glasses
—began to form in his mind, a wave of cold terror swept over him and he curled himself up small inside the sleeping bag.

Stop it, you big ol’ baby. You ain’t doing a thing but scaring yourself. You got to get real … make a plan … got to play along till you can get loose
.

He yawned, exhausted by the long day and its unexpected events.
Ain’t nothing gonna happen … just play along
, he reassured himself before sinking into deep sleep and troubled dreams.

When the first hint of morning had begun to lighten the narrow horizontal window high on the wall, Calven’s eyes opened. The paralyzing fear of the night before was gone with the darkness. And now he had a plan.

He ran his fingers under the waistband of his underpants. He’d begged ol’ Dorothy to buy him boxers but somehow she was convinced that boys,
active
boys, she had stressed, needed tightie whities. As he felt the cellphone there against his johnson, he had to agree.

I still got it—but will it
work
way out here? Wonder how much charge it’s got left. I could try calling Dorothy but … ain’t nothing I can tell her about where we are. I’ll just turn it on and make sure …

Mashing the little button, he had been appalled as a tinny jingle rang out in the silence of the small room. Frantic, he had hit the button again and shoved the phone back into his briefs. Lying frozen in stark terror, Calven held his breath and listened for sounds in the rest of the house, expecting the door to fly open at any minute, expecting rough hands to seize him …

Shit, shit, shitfire! If ol’ Pook heard that, or Darrell either, they’re gone be all over me
.

It had seemed to him that the thump of his heartbeat was loud enough to waken the rest of the house, but as time passed and no other sounds could be heard, he gradually grew calmer and could even hear the
rat-a-tat-tat
and raucous cry of a pileated woodpecker, as well as the
soft calling of doves, and another bird somewhere that seemed to be saying
Chick weed teeeee
.

Son! That was close. But least I know the battery ain’t dead
.

When many minutes had passed and still there was no sound from the rest of the house, Calven folded the sleeping bag into a many-layered square, poised his finger over the cellphone’s power button, and plunged the phone into the middle of the folds of padding. Taking a deep breath and breathing a desperate prayer, the boy pushed the button and waited.

 … three, Mississippi … four, Mississippi … five, Mississippi …
He let ten more seconds go by before withdrawing the cellphone from the muffling folds of the sleeping bag.

The light from the display panel fluttered as he deliberated. Would it be better to call 911 or Dorothy? His fingers hovered over the nine.

What would he tell 911—that his mother and her boyfriend had kidnapped him? And what then? Even if that was enough for them to send help, he had no idea where he was. No, might as well call Dorothy again—

The little square of blue light flickered and went dark.

“You set over there and pay attention, Good Boy.”

With the coming of full day, Calven had been let out of his room and, after taking a whiz that must of lasted five minutes, he’d been given a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts and another Mountain Dew for breakfast. Though there were light sockets and switches, the power didn’t seem to be on, and besides, there wasn’t any toaster in the bare little kitchen.

Calven ripped the paper off one of the Pop-Tarts and
bit into it.
Might as well be cardboard with a little sweet stuff in it. One thing about ol’ Dorothy, she likes to cook a hot breakfast
.

The thought of sausage or bacon and eggs and biscuits with jam and big glasses of milk made his mouth water. He took another tasteless bite, then lowered himself obediently onto the sagging sofa as Pook and Darrell prepared to give him his first lesson in picking pockets.

The big man took his place in the middle of the dirty linoleum floor, standing still and gazing off into space, and Pook moved to stand a little behind him.

“Now Darrell’s gonna be the mark, the guy I’m trying to take a wallet off of. Darrell’s too big and too slow to be any use in this game—mostly he’ll just be waiting in whatever vehicle we’re using, ready to get us out of there if there’s trouble. But if everyone does their part right, won’t be no trouble; you understand me, Good Boy? Your mama and those big tits of hers is the bait—what some call the ‘stall’—”

“Where
is
my ma—where is she, anyhow?”

Pook turned the sunglasses on Calven and showed his teeth in something like a smile.

“Don’t you worry none about your mama, Good Boy. Me and Prin had us a little party last night and she ain’t up yet.”

Pook’s shaven head tilted toward a closed door on the farther wall. “Let her get her beauty sleep and we’ll just pretend she’s standing there in front of Darrell, rubbing them big tits against him and acting all helpless ’cause she just twisted her ankle. That’s one way we do it—Prin comes sashaying along in them high heels and right when she’s passing in front of the mark, she stumbles. Being he’s a gentleman—and that’s the only kind we bother
with—he reaches to catch her and while she’s batting her eyes at him and giving him a good feel—”

Pook jabbed Darrell in the ribs with his thumb. “You’d like that just fine, wouldn’t you, Darrell?” and Calven was surprised to see a pink flush creep over the big man’s face.

“While the mark’s standing there worrying about that hard-on he’s getting, the dip—and that’d be yours truly …”

Pook’s long white fingers had hold of the lining of Darrell’s back pocket. They were deftly pleating the thin material, bringing the wallet closer and closer to the top. It took only seconds and the fat brown wallet was in Pook’s hand. He grinned at Calven.