Original Publication: Short Story NS 8.1 (Spring 2000): 3-20. The story is first (January) in "A Twilight Reel," a collection-in-progress that chronicles a year in the life of a small Appalachian town called Runion.
The Wine of Astonishment
One Thursday night in the dead space near the end of January, Reverend Amos Thorn stood in the kitchen of the parsonage and sipped at the lukewarm dregs of his third cup of coffee. He watched his wife shake suds from her hands and rinse the last supper dishes and stand them in the drainer. Between the swish of hot water and the clatter of plates, bowls, and silverware, he heard her soft voice, now humming, now whisper-singing snatches of a song--". . . earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone. . . ." Something in her supper of meatloaf, green beans, and baked potato quarters seemed to have affected the rims of his eyelids, making them elastic and droopy. All he wanted at that moment was to warm their bed with her.
"Wonderful supper, honey," he said as he set his father's old brown fedora on his head. Then he worked his way into the heavy brown overcoat the congregation of Runion's Southern Missionary Church had given him in December for his first Christmas as their preacher.
"I wish you didn't have to leave," Pamela said. "The temperature's already down to"--she leaned over the sink in an effort to see through the beads of sweat on the window--"looks like twenty or so."
He admired the shapeliness that showed through her dusty blue gingham skirt as she bent over the steaming water, admired the shading of muscle in her forearm as she braced herself with her right hand on the counter top.
Thou art fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.
He sighed and slipped another of her warm cinnamon buns from the cloth-covered basket on the stove top and pushed it with stubby fingers to the bottom of his cup. When he thought the bun had soaked up the last drop of coffee, he pulled it out and stuffed it whole into his mouth.
"Amos?" Pamela said, drying her hands. "What time do you think you'll be back? I don't want to have to worry about you on those icy curves any more than I have to."
"Well," he said around the sweet wad in his mouth. "You know these old mountain folk, honey. It's probably almost her bedtime right now." He walked to the sink, dropped the cup into the dishwater, and wrapped his arms around her waist.
A light sheen of perspiration lay on her forehead and her upper lip. The heat she had drawn from the hot dishwater rose up around his throat and face and ears.
"One yawn from the old woman or nine o'clock, whichever comes first, and I'll get out of there." He smiled. "Home by nine-thirty at the latest."
Pamela reached up and lifted the collar of his overcoat and pulled it tight around his thick neck.
"What about her own pastor? Doesn't she go to church back in the hills?"
"I don't know. Granger never did say exactly. But I'm the one he asked to deliver his message." He stared for a moment into her eyes, trying again to sort the colors there--the various shades of the dominant blue, the hints of green and silver, the flecks of brown. There seemed to be in her no color of emotion or shading of personality that could not be found in those eyes. He leaned and kissed her. "Wait up for me, okay?" he said and raised one eyebrow and smiled again.
Pamela grinned and patted both hands on his barrel chest, chuckled and then turned away, out of his arms.
After the warmth of the kitchen and his wife, the bitter wind outside the parsonage snapped at his flushed cheeks like some trapped or hungry animal.
He let his car warm up for a moment, then crossed the back parking lot of the church, and turned right on Main Street. At the one light at the top of the hill he took another right onto Lonesome Mountain Road, and with the suddenness that always surprised him when he traveled this direction at night, he lost the lights of town and moved beneath winter-wasted trees that stooped over him and shook in the icy wind.
* * *
"Afternoon, Reverend."
Thorn had raised his eyebrows at the sudden greeting and looked over the top of reading glasses perched on the end of his blunt nose. Beyond that he did not move. He had been staring at tithing pledge cards and the mail on his desk, his mind on Pamela. The feel and warmth of her had surrounded him since five o'clock that morning when he was called from their bed by a choir member's sudden "heart attack," which did not turn out to be gas and indigestion until he had driven all the way to the hospital in Asheville.
Granger Gosnell filled the doorway, standing there nervously working his thick fingers around the sweat-stained brim of his hat. He wore heavy brown work boots. His oil-and-mud-spattered blue jeans hung low on his hips, their button and front belt loops hidden behind the red-and-gold-checkered flannel shirt stretched across his sagging paunch. He had a bulbous red nose and spiky white hair with shocks of black at each temple.
"Come in, Granger," Reverend Thorn said.
The big man lumbered into the room and hung his hat on one pointed shoulder of a straight-backed chair across the desk from the preacher and gingerly eased himself down onto the wooden seat.
"Well, Granger, how did your check-up go this week?"
"I keep them scratching their noggins," Granger Gosnell said and chuckled. "They can't figure why I'm still kicking."
"We know the answer to that, don't we?"
"Yes, the Lord's been good," Gosnell said and cleared his throat. "But it ain't me I come to talk to you about, preacher. It's my sister I come for."
"I didn't know you had a sister. A brother, but--"
"Everybody's heard tell of Gunther, I reckon," Granger Gosnell said and shifted in the wooden chair, his blue eyes glancing from Reverend Thorn to the books that lined the wall. "But Ollie, that's my sister, she--" He stopped and scratched the back of his head and scrunched up his face.
"Go on and spit it out, Granger. I was an only child, but I know it's tough dealing with siblings." Reverend Thorn released a brief thick-lipped smile and then added, "It's been that way since Cain and Abel."
"I reckon," Gosnell said and shifted in his seat again and tried to smile in return. "Well, I know that for true so far as me and Gunther goes, but I ain't never known Ollie for much of a sister. She's nigh on twenty year behind me, you see. About your age, I expect."
Amos Thorn raised one eyebrow.
"Is she a half sister then?"
"No. We're full-blooded kin, I reckon. She just come along late in Mama's life."
Thorn took off his reading glasses and laid them on his desk. Then he leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He felt his stomach growl and peeked between his fingers at the clock. It was still two hours before Pamela would have supper for him.
"What can I do for your sister?"
Gosnell rubbed a hand as big as a skillet over his short-cropped white hair and squirmed in his seat again.
"I'd take it kindly if you'd to tell her about my condition."
"Granger, you told me you've known about your cancer for over five years."
"I reckon that's right."
"In all that time you never told your own sister?"
"Well, we don't talk none." He leaned forward over the edge of Thorn's desk. "I was done and gone from the homeplace before she was born, and to her I reckon I weren't much more than a visitor that come by a lot. But when Mama took sick, she made me promise to look after the girl. 'Granger,' she said, 'you look after Ollie now, you hear?'" He leaned back again and slumped a little in the chair. "Well, the long and short of it is I ain't done it."
"Does your brother ever see her?"
"Gunther don't know who he sees half the time. His brains is so addled--" Granger Gosnell stopped and glanced at the books again.
"He digs a fine grave," Thorn said and smiled again. "Ted Ramsey says he's never seen such precision grave digging as your brother does."
"Well, I reckon he's finally found his gift all right, but he'll probably dig my grave and never even know to think the first sad thought."
"Well, let's not get sidetracked with that here," Reverend Thorn said. He put his elbows on the desk and tented his fingers in front of his face. "Now, about your sister. Does Ollie want or need you to look after her?"
Gosnell made a frustrated swipe at the air with his right hand.
"Ah, Ollie don't want nothing but--" He paused and drew a deep breath. "I don't know. I ain't never really known her at all, you see. It's just that Mama's voice's been ringing in my ears the last while, and I've got to do something about my promise." He looked at the preacher. "Do you take my meaning?"
"I think so," Reverend Thorn said as he pulled his briefcase up from the floor. He clinched his teeth behind closed lips and stuffed a stack of pledge cards into one of the leather pockets.
Granger Gosnell stood up and lifted his hat from the back of the chair. His thick fingers again began working at its brim.
"I reckon maybe if you told her I was sick, she might--" He stopped and cocked his head to one side. "Do you think she might?"
"We can't know for sure," Thorn said. "The threat of a loss sometimes pulls families together." He stood up and closed his briefcase and followed the big man out of the office. "But if she does come around, she's not going to believe you're sick when she sees you. You look strong as an old bear."
"I'm strong enough yet, I reckon," Granger Gosnell said with a smile. "Excepting when it comes to dealing with the devil and females."
* * *
One front tire dropped off the asphalt shoulder, and he jerked the car back into the left-hand turn. He eased his foot off the brake and coasted into the straightaway that descended toward the intersection of Lonesome Mountain Road and Highway 25-70.
Suddenly the headlights touched the broad back of a man walking some distance ahead.
The walker did not turn around but kept striding down the middle of the right-hand lane.
Reverend Thorn eased his foot onto the brake again, and he could feel against the pedal the sudden acceleration in the pulsing rush of his blood. The man's sheer size frightened him, but he knew what would be said in town if his car were recognized as it passed by in the opposite lane and word spread that he had offered no Christian charity on such a bitter night. Then again--he had often thought about this--the man could be a messenger from the spiritual realm, an angel, who might have some difficult Truth to pass on or might be here as a test of his faith and his worthiness as a shepherd of God's flock.
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
When the Reverend's car was no more than thirty yards away, the figure suddenly seemed to lurch toward the safety of the roadside and stumbled out of sight down a small embankment.
Now what? Amos Thorn thought and slowly rolled the car to a stop.
There was a movement at the edge of the light, and an old man scratched his way onto the gravel at the side of the road and stood unsteadily. He wore a heavy sheepskin coat, several sizes too big for him, its broad collar turned up around his ears. His dirty overalls dragged the ground around his feet. A high-crowned hat made of some kind of dark fur sunk low over his ears and forehead.
The young preacher thought it must have been all the ill-fitting clothes that made this shrunken old man cut such a huge figure, that and some trick of shadows and reflected headlights in the clear cold mountain air. He lifted his foot from the brake and eased the car up even with the sheepish-looking fellow, leaned across the seat and rolled down the window. The rush of cold air again bit at his cheeks and nose.
The stooped old man rubbed his white whiskers and squinted at him.
"I saw you fall," Reverend Thorn said. "Are you all right?"
"Had worse falls, I reckon," the old man said, brushing leaves and twigs and bits of dirt from the front of his overalls and coat.
The voice was not the dry rustle of age the Reverend had expected but deep and rich like the low register of an old upright piano.
"Worse falls indeed," he added with a crooked tobacco-stained grin.
"Can I give you a lift somewhere?"
The old man scrunched a little deeper into his coat and looked up toward the trees and stars.
"Well, 'tis a cold night to be a-footing it," he said. "I'm headed up to my place on Hipps Mountain. You know where that is?"
"Yes, I think so. I can take you that way as far as the Belva bridge. Come in out of the cold."
"Well, since you're asking," the old man said. He rubbed his whiskers again and flicked his tongue over his lips. Then he opened the rear passenger-side door and slid into the back seat.
"Why don't you sit up front here?" Amos Thorn said, his voice shaking in the wave of bitter cold air that followed the old man into the car. "You'll be closer to the heat."
"I figure that place to be for your missus. I'd hate to devil it up with dirt and what all else there is about me after that fall."
"It's no problem," Thorn said as he jammed the heater and the fan to their highest settings.
But Pamela would notice. They had a trip to Asheville planned for the morning, and he knew already he would not feel like stopping somewhere to clean out the old man's filth tonight. He shrugged slightly and lifted his foot from the brake and let the car roll past the stop sign and left onto Highway 25-70.
The road here was wider but no straighter. It followed the sides of the age-rounded mountains, now shouldering into a broad hollow, now swinging out into space with only the tops of pine trees peeping over the guard rail. Gray pavement slid beneath him in the sudden way that sand sluices through the slim waist of an hourglass.
Reverend Thorn looked at the car's clock and saw that it was seventeen minutes after six. He glanced in the rear view mirror. All was darkness and silence behind him--no reflection of the dashboard lights off old watery eyes or moistened lips, no whistle or aged rattle of breathing. He could not even distinguish an outline of the old man and thought again of his first impression when he had seen the fellow in the road, the strange illusion of something near a giant.
The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.
He decided the old man was probably slumped into the sheepskin coat, maybe recovering his wits after the fall or feeling slightly embarrassed at his need for help.
The world danced and shivered in the beam of the headlights--the trees above and below, the slender brown weeds along the guard rail, the naked gray blackberry brambles and wild rose that climbed the embankment. And as if all this were not enough witness to its power over that night, the icy wind now and then swirled up dust and dead leaves into little tornados that crossed the road by fits and starts like a frightened animal.
A buck suddenly caught in the light, its grayish brown body the only still thing in the whole of the night. Its eyes glowed red in the high-beams. Pale grass hung from the sides of its mouth. It did not run or return to its eating but stood motionless on the lip of the gradient, watching as the car passed by.
"Looked about an eight pointer," said the deep voice from the back seat.
"You think so?"
"Good eating. Young and strong. Prime of life."
Where Highway 25-70 veered sharply left to cross the bridge over Big Laurel Creek and run in that direction toward Hot Springs, the Reverend continued straight onto County Road 208. The narrow blacktop wound through a valley--steep dark hills on the right, the shadowed trough of Big Laurel Creek across the lane on the left. From time to time he peered into that shadow, remembering all the trout he had pulled from those cold waters last summer. One of these, one perhaps worthy of a picture in The Runion Record, had broken his line without ever showing more than its darkness beneath the glittering surface.
It was right about--
"What's your business about this night?" The old man's breathy whisper crackled in his ear like close lightning.
Thorn jerked away and smacked the side of his head sharply against the window. The wheel turned with his sudden movement, and the car swerved toward the creek. He recovered and felt his face reddening, his palms sweating. He swallowed hard.
"Gosh, I'm sorry," he said. "I was thinking of a fish. You startled me."
Now there was nothing but the sound of the old man's breathing next to his ear. Reverend Thorn could feel the pull of the fellow's grip on the headrest and could see the arm hooked over the seat to his right.
"What's your business, sir?" the breathy voice said again.
The Reverend leaned up over the wheel, straightened his coat, and slowly leaned back again.
"I'm paying a visit to the sister of one of the men in my congregation," he said. "I'm the pastor down at the Southern Missionary."
"That so?" The whisper softened. "Sodom Laurel is it you're going to?"
"Well, yes," Reverend Thorn said. "That's why I told you I could take you as far as the Belva bridge."
"We've not far to go to that point."
"No. I think it's just up ahead."
Around the next bend the road straightened, and the narrow old bridge came into sight. The white-and-black-striped signs that marked its sides reflected the headlights, and a red stop sign shone just beyond.
Thorn drew a sharp breath, anxious to be rid of his passenger.
"What's the name?" the old man said.
"What?"
"What's the name of the woman?"
"Miss Ollie Gosnell, I think," the Reverend said. "I mean I think she's a Miss and not a Mrs." He heard a grunt at his ear. "Her brother's name is Granger. Do you know them?" He passed between the striped signs and rolled to a stop at the end of the short bridge.
There was a sudden movement close beside him, a click and a gleaming green reflection in the light of the dashboard, and then the ice cold blade of a knife was pressed firmly into a soft part of his neck.
The ragged whisper, "Hipps Mountain," bit at his ear.
Amos Thorn swallowed hard and, with the movement of his throat, felt the sharp blade impress itself deeper into his skin.
"What are you doing?" he said in a shaky voice.
"Hipps Mountain."
The Reverend tried to think what he could do--stomp on the gas and crash headlong into the cold dirt bank directly in front, hopefully throwing the old man into the front seat where he could wrestle the knife out of the knotted grasp; throw the door open, dive out onto the cold pavement, and run; reason with him; pray. But with the knife edge sharp against his throat and a sweat breaking out on his upper lip, he only turned the steering wheel to the left and started toward Hipps Mountain.
O God, thou hast cast us off. . . . Thou hast shewed thy people hard things: thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment.
The headlights bored a culvert in the night, and he was poured through it like water. Or it was a tunnel of light, and he was in it like a slow but runaway train. Or again the light painted a living picture upon his windshield, a picture of a cold winter night in some remote place that had long ago been settled and long ago deserted. The spidery arms of naked trees hung overhead, shaking, making the stars blink like eyes stung by the cold and spastic wind. Belly and wingwork flashed above as an owl flew over the road, hunting from tree to tree.
The old man grunted close to his ear again.
"Turn up here. Left after that there mailbox."
They were on a wide dirt road that snaked its way up Hipps Mountain, laboring through curves packed so tightly that the end of one to the left began another to the right.
No lights stood out against the darkness.
When they were near the top of the mountain, a fork appeared in the road--the right-hand side continuing upward, the left bending sharply downward and out of sight.
"Left, preacher."
The way down was steep and no straighter than the way up had been, and he was forced to ride the brake.
He did not realize the knife had left his throat until he noticed that its sharp green glint hung in the corner of his eye. The impression its edge had made in his skin was so deep he could feel it when he swallowed. The thought struck his mind that the deep red line of it might stay there forever, like a rope burn on the neck of some desperado, a man hanged but saved by his hellish gang or some wondrous miracle.
"Why--" Thorn started, but his voice failed in his dry throat.
The old man chuckled.
Witness to him, the Reverend thought and began racing through memorized Scripture, searching for just the right verse. But the words did not come before the knife edged against his throat again.
"Slow down now, preacher."
They passed through a narrow valley, and when the mountainside gave way on the left, the old man told him to turn again.
"Slow," he said. "Don't nose this thing into the ditch."
Thorn stopped the car with a jolt.
The headlights shot over a shadowed fissure that ran crosswise in front, between the road and a small shack. A footbridge led over the ditch to a patch of untended yard, and through this a dirt path led to a cinder block step that lay below a lopsided porch. The shack's exterior boards were warped and gray, and the wavy glass panes in the window frame reflected the headlights like unquiet pools.
"Shut her down and get out," the old man said. "Headlamps too."
Thorn eased the gearshift into PARK and killed the engine. Then he turned off the headlights. He touched the keys but left them dangling in the ignition.
"Get out slow," the old man said as he opened the rear driver-side door and the interior light came on.
The two of them stood up out of the car as one. The old man closed his door first, and the Reverend felt the point of the knife touch him between the shoulder blades just as he closed his own.
An absolute darkness crowded in as if the beautiful mountains of earth rising around him had rolled down from above and covered him up. This, together with the silence about the place and the biting cold, made him catch his breath at the sudden surety that this could be the very feel, and likely the very location, of his grave.
. . . and lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon me . . . even darkness which may be felt . . . darkness . . . under my feet . . . He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light.
His head fell back, and he almost cried aloud at the relieving sight of stars clear and twinkling against the black night sky.
This was not his grave.
Not yet anyway, he thought as the pressure of the knife at his back urged him forward.
"Walk slow and take your direction from the blade," the old man said.
The Reverend looked down and took a step forward. He wondered immediately why he did not keep looking upward to the only bits of light left in his world. But it seemed his balance required that he face where he was going, even if he could see nothing, even if it felt as if he were moving back into the pitchy chaos out of which God spoke the earth.
The knife pushed him to the right, then to the left, and his halting step sounded on the wooden footbridge.
"Straight now," the deep voice said from behind. "Straight to the door from here."
After what seemed a long walk, Thorn's toe stubbed against the cinder block step, and he stumbled. And when the knife urged him on, he stumbled again over the protruding lip of the porch boards.
"Feel for the door and open it," the old man said. "It ain't locked."
When they were a few paces inside and the door was closed behind, the knife left his back. He was spun around and nearly fell. He heard the old man moving past him, but he lost his direction in the spin and could not tell if the rustle of coat and thud of footsteps moved further into the room or returned to the door.
Then there was the scratch and sputter of a match firing, and the old man appeared again before him, a gothic bust in orange-yellow light, leaning over the opposite side of a small square table and lighting a lantern.
Apart from the table and its two small stools, one set on either side, the center of the room was bare. The weak light of the lantern revealed low walls covered with peeling brown and yellow newspaper. Against one wall stood a dusty oak chest of drawers and against the wall opposite, a small potbellied stove with its grate missing. There were no doors or windows other than the door they had come through and, next to it, the window whose old panes had reflected the headlights.
"Sit here," the old man said, pointing down with his knife to the stool he straddled.
Amos Thorn moved around one side of the square table, and the old man moved around the other and went to the window.
Thorn looked at the old man's back for a moment and then at the door. A desperate idea entered his mind in wordless images. But then the edge of the knife held low at the old man's side glinted in the light of the lantern. He pulled out the stool and sat down.
The old man yanked at a burlap sack tacked to the top of the lightless frame and held drawn to one side by a nail.
The sack fell stiffly across the window but did not quite cover all the panes, leaving darkness to seep around its edges and into the room.
It was not until Thorn had been seated for a few seconds that he took notice of the cold. It seemed colder in the stillness of the shack than outside beneath the stars. He felt certain that this room had never known warmth. He felt that if he lived through this night and stopped here some summer afternoon when this old man was long dead, he might find the place as cold and the old man like a wax figure sitting on the same stool he now took across the table from him, between him and the door.
"Your cheeks is flushed," the old man said. "Fear does that to folks. That or the contrary. They either get all redded up or go plum white." He laughed with a rumbling wheeze. "You scared, ain't you, preacher?"
"Yes," Amos Thorn said flatly and pulled his overcoat tighter around himself.
The old man stared at him across the top of the lantern but said nothing. He pulled a twist of tobacco from the pocket of his coat and laid it on the table.
The knife slid without hesitation through the twist. Then the tip of it stabbed the severed chunk and carried it to the thin-lipped mouth.
"I figured we'd talk first," the old man said around the wad of tobacco in his mouth. He stood up from the stool. "You smoke? You look like you could do with a smoke."
"No."
The old man walked to the chest of drawers and slid the middle drawer open. He pulled out a plastic bag and turned and laid the bag on the table beside the lantern.
Reverend Thorn saw some twisted stems, some pale seeds, some dark patches where the leaves had powdered and sifted to the side the bag had lain on in the drawer.
"My gut can't take to moonshine no more," the old man said, digging in the bag with a pipe he had drawn from another coat pocket. "I'll get this here pipe loaded for you, and you smoke it."
"I wouldn't like any."
"You smoke it." He tamped the bowl with the butt of the switchblade.
"I'd prefer not to."
"You smoke it while you've yet a throat to pass it through," the old man said, holding the loaded pipe toward him with one hand and moving the knife toward him with the other. "While you've yet breath to draw on it with."
The Reverend took the pipe and stuck it between his teeth, picked up one of the matches from the table and struck it.
As the dry weed in the bowl began to glow red and crackle and the sweet burning smell rose into his nose, his mind immediately flashed back to his last years in Hendersonville, the time after he felt he had grown too old for Sunday School lessons and hymns and prayers and his father's sermons. He had smoked marijuana then, smoked it with his teammates on Friday nights after football games as they cruised back and forth between town and the Interstate. Sometimes he smoked it alone in the barn after he had done his evening chores. Those nights he would often drive around for an hour or two afterwards on some errand he had made up, thinking he could feel the pavement beneath his tires as plainly as if he were walking on it barefoot.
"What's your name, preacher?" the old man said.
Thorn looked at him for a moment, not sure that he had spoken.
"Speak up now," the old man said. "Let's come to know one another a bit."
"Thorn. David Amos Thorn." He swallowed against the dryness in his throat.
The old man spat at a wall and drew the back of one hand across his stained lips.
"Mally," he said.
Thorn set the empty pipe on the table and rubbed his forehead and cheeks hard with one hand. Then he drew a deep breath and squinted at the face on the other side of the lantern.
"Do you believe in God, Mally?"
The old man did not answer. He grunted and laid the knife on the table and spat this time into the darkness of the stove's belly.
"Give me that pipe here, preacher."
Reverend Thorn handed him the pipe, watched him beat the ashes onto the table, and fill the bowl from the bag again.
"Please, no more."
"Smoke," Mally said.
And now as he pulled the smoke into his lungs, without thinking that the old man might not make him inhale or know if he did, he remembered particularly one night when his father was away at the side of a dying deacon, and he had smoked a bowlful in the barn before he realized the family's only car was gone. He went back to the house. His mother asked him to sit with her at the kitchen table while he did his homework and she went through the contents of some old shoe boxes full of sepia photographs and yellowed letters. He remembered nothing of what he and she said that rare hour or two they sat together, but try as he might--and he was never sure if it were the reality or the high--he never forgot the look of her eyes as she gently fingered the pictures and papers. That evening he thought of her green eyes as mossy plugs in a dam, holding back something savage and seething. And later that night, and on many nights until she died suddenly at the age of forty-six, he lay awake long hours, imagining with both fear and desire that the savage and seething thing behind those green eyes might escape. When one morning after her death he recognized above the pure white of shaving cream the same look in his own green eyes, he began to pray again.
The Reverend drew the second bowl to ashes and handed the pipe back to the old man.
"Do you believe in God, preacher?" Mally said as he dug the pipe into the bag to fill it again.
The Reverend lowered his gaze and did not answer. He watched his cold red hands twitch on the tabletop as if a book lay there and they flipped through its pages, first this way toward the front, then that way toward the back.
"You're in a muddle, preacher," the old man said and chuckled. "Do you believe in God when you're in a muddle like I got you in?"
Reverend Thorn's hands fell still.
"Well, I reckon preaching and praying ain't what they used to be whenever I was doing them," the old man said. "That's all I got to say for it."
The Reverend's mouth hung slightly open. He raised his drooping eyelids and looked at the grizzled face.
Mally laughed.
"This is powerful smoke, ain't it?" he said and tapped the ball of his forefinger on the bowl to pack it. "Them town boys got it doctored with something or other." He struck a match. "I'll take this one for myself, I will. It helps the arthritis." He drew on the pipe. "Yes, preaching and praying ain't what they used to be, Reverend Thorn. You got yourself an office in the back of the meeting house and a little place thrown in for you and the missus, I'll warrant."
Thorn stared.
"In my day a preacher worked of a week like any other man, paid his way and found his shelter like any other man. I worked six days a week at the big band saw mill in Runion."
"You were a preacher?" Thorn finally said.
"I held a little church at the head of Sodom Laurel. Rode a pale gray mare there early of a Sunday morning and come back to the house late of a Sunday night. Went back to work at sunup Monday and worked till sunset Saturday. It took a strong man to do all I done." He licked his lips. "Why, preacher, if our places was turned about and it was back then, I'd have done and whipped your ass three times by now and be down on my knees praying for the strength to whip it again." He drew on the pipe and spoke through the smoke. "You probably preach standing behind a fancy box, I reckon."
Thorn nodded.
"I preached all over the house. Up and down the aisles. Over the pews to get in the face of a sinner the spirit was calling. I could see it in their face. And when the spirit got hold of me, it knocked me to the floor, and I begun to roll." He drew on the pipe again and after a moment released the smoke in a slow cloud. "But the body wearies and worries the spirit until all you got is flesh a-rolling around. I felt the stove when I rolled up and against it. I felt a woman when I rolled up and against her. And when I rolled up and against that girl you fetched yourself out to see tonight, my preaching and praying days seen their end a-coming."
Thorn stared.
"That's right. The Gosnells was members of my church. That Ollie was a wild child of fourteen and done a woman in body. I took her under me that very afternoon in a field below the church. Nigh on thirty year ago, that was."
"Ollie Gosnell?"
"I preached just regular as you please that night, and she sat there looking like a preacher's wife except for them eyes of hers. They had a wildness she couldn't never hide. Green as any you ever seen." He drew on the pipe, pulled it out of his mouth, and looked at it. "Well, I preached the next Sunday and the next after that and on and on until it got found out somehow. She weren't pregnant so far as I know of, but come the middle of one week, Gunther up and caught me outside the mill at quitting time. His little brother that goes to your church stopped him within a blow of sending me to my reward." The old man laughed. "Crazy son of a bitch, that Gunther Gosnell." He tapped the pipe on the table and filled it again from the bag. "There's them that say Ollie's a witch and them that say she's a harlot. Them that say she's both." He laughed and reached the pipe toward Thorn again. "Now, preacher, when you've had another smoke, you can drop your breeches and drawers in yon corner and let this here blade save you from such sin as what ruined me."
Thorn swallowed hard and blinked. He watched the old man's knuckles knot around the bowl of the pipe and thought the stained fingernails grew black and long. The old man's face seemed to thin and grow gaunt with shadows and, at the same time, the body to swell into the clothes until, still sitting, he towered above the table. The pipe turned in the gnarled hand and came toward him. The stem clicked against his clenched teeth.
He glanced from the door to the knife that now lay on the edge of the tabletop next to the old man's swollen belly. Then, in his struggle to keep the pipe from passing his lips, his knee came up and jarred the small table, lifting his side of it off the floor as the old man's weight pushed down on the other side.
Mally fell back, fumbling to get his stool under him, and the knife rolled off the table and clattered on the board floor.
Thorn lashed out at the lantern, backhanding it into the lap of his once more shriveled and clothes-swallowed enemy. Like the offensive guard he had been for the Hendersonville High Bearcats almost thirty years before, sweating out his salt behind the blocking sled during Monday afternoon practices, he powered his weight into the table, churning his stocky legs, driving Mally off his stool and hard into the wall beside the window. He yanked the door open and flew out into the clear cold darkness, leaving the old man clambering and howling behind him.
He fell off the edge of the porch and sprawled face down onto the stiff grass and the frozen ground. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled blindly across the short yard, but when his stride stretched into too much air, he knew he had missed the bridge. And then he was on his knees in the ditch with the thin stream of ice popping beneath him and his trouser legs soaking up freezing water. He clawed and scratched his way up the opposite bank. He cracked a knee hard against the bumper of his dark car and fell sprawling again, this time onto the cold hood. He rolled over and lay there breathless, listening for the tramp of the old man's boots on the footbridge.
Then, as if in answer to his thoughts, footsteps pounded somewhere on old wood.
The stars shone above him again, cold in the black sky, dancing to the beat of his heart, swimming and dissolving as his eyes filled with tears.
"Damn you, preacher," the old man wheezed in the darkness.
Thorn judged that the voice came from just in front of the car, near where he still lay on his back. He drew his knees to his chest, feeling the water already beginning to stiffen in his trouser legs.
"God damn you, preacher," he said and drove both feet at the darkness. "God damn you to hell, you--" He choked and coughed and blindly rolled from the hood, opened the door of the car, and fell into the driver's seat, expecting every moment to be stabbed in the back or have his throat slit.
He cranked the engine and yanked the gear shift down into reverse, turning on the headlights at the same time.
The old man stood staring directly at him from across the black ditch. His eyes glittered from the massive folds of the coat. The towering fur hat was gone, and his bald head hunched low beneath the high collar as if he were simply carried in the pocket or pouch of a thing much bigger than himself.
Behind him the orange light of a fire flickered in the open door of the house and danced in the window, its movements strange in the wavy rectangles of glass at the edges of the glowing burlap sack.
Thorn stomped on the gas pedal and slung gravel and dirt behind him through the sharp curves that snaked up the backside of Hipps Mountain.
He passed the fork and finally reached the stop sign at the main road. He braked the car with a jolt, rammed the gear shift to PARK, threw open his door, and dove out. On all fours in the pale dust, he vomited. When the first wave of convulsions subsided, he stood up into the cold night air.
At the edge of the road, he retched again above the weeds. He tasted no hint of Pamela's meatloaf, of the green beans and potatoes, of the warm cinnamon buns and hot coffee. There was only an acidic bitterness, a taste he remembered from when he as a child had eaten too much candy. He knew in that moment he would never be sick like this again without feeling the knife against his throat and the dizziness in his head or seeing the old man standing across the footbridge with his staring eyes glittering in the headlights.
He found a napkin in his pocket and dabbed from his eyes the tears brought on by the retching and the cold wind. Then he wiped his nose and mouth and tossed the crumpled napkin into the weeds.
* * *
He drove slowly, with the same sense of the unreal he had felt in coming this way only an hour before. Then when the Belva bridge was coming up on his right, he brought the car to an uncertain stop in the middle of the road.
He sat and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles.
His throat burned from the smoke and the vomit. When he swallowed, the saliva seemed to sizzle on the back of his tongue like water drops on a hot frying pan.
Water, he thought. Just a cup of water.
Pamela and the parsonage waited to the right some seven or eight miles, some twenty minutes drive through the mountains. She did not expect him home for another two hours. She would be reading or maybe talking to her mother on the telephone. He knew she would take him into her arms and hold him, fix him hot chamomile tea, put him in a warm bath, and wait for him in bed.
Ollie Gosnell waited half a mile straight ahead, just around the next bend and up into a dark hollow to the left. She did not wait for him, but he felt somehow she would be there, waiting and alone. She might be watching Jeopardy or might--
He did not know what she might be doing. He imagined her coming to the door and pulling it open without wondering or asking who knocked, without flinching at the frigid air that rushed around him to meet her where she stood in a faded calico nightgown and tattered red apron. He saw the piercing green eyes look coolly at him--somehow knowing him for a preacher--as he shivered in the darkness on her porch. He heard his first words to her stuttered through chattering teeth: "Can I have a cup of cold water?" He imagined her motioning him into the house and silently taking his hat and coat. She would settle him into a stuffed and ragged rocker with an afghan tossed over it and go outside without a coat or a scarf or a word. And when she returned she would have a dented tin ladle full of cold water from her spring. "I broke the ice with my fist to get it," she would say as she lifted the ladle to his lips because she had seen with another chilly and penetrating glance of her green eyes how his hands trembled. And when he had drunk and swished the icy water against the bitterness in his mouth and swallowed it, she would dip a corner of her apron into the cup to soak up the dregs and with that cold damp cloth dab away the blood dried on his cheek where he had cut it when he fell.
* * *
The car waited in the middle of the road, its lights on, its exhaust billowing and red-lit. The engine murmured in the stillness, mingling its breathy rhythm with the song of the shallow rocky creek beside the road and the hoot of an owl in a dead pine partway up the mountainside. Then the brake lights dimmed, and with the same uncertainty with which it had come to a stop, the car rolled slowly forward toward the Belva bridge.
Michael Cody / PO Box 70279 / Johnson City, TN 37614 / michael.cody@comcast.net / codym@etsu.edu