Chapter 10
It was a short walk to the stranger’s battered red F150 pickup. Harold climbed into the passenger seat and bumped down the black country roads.
“I’m Ben,” he said. “It’s good to meet you Harold.”
“Good to meet you too. Where are we going exactly?”
“Our farm, it’s not that far, over the line into Southhampton County. My brother and sister are waiting, and I bet Mother will put together a special meal for you. You’ll love it there. I wish you could see it in the daylight.”
“How do you know my name?”
“The whole congregation knows your name,” Ben said. “But it’s not my place to tell you the stories, that’s Kilby’s place. Kilby’s my older brother. It’s funny.”
“What’s funny?” Harold said.
“That you have all this power, but you don’t know anything about it, that you have all this potential and you can’t feel it in you.”
“I don’t feel anything that’s like power, not at all, that’s for sure.”
“You will, pretty soon I guess,” Ben said.
Okay, does that mean I’m going to be feeling my power, or does that mean I’m going to feel your power? Harold wondered. He spent the rest of the ride silently, thinking that he might have made a snap decision coming with this stranger. But the dashboard lights put a youthful sheen on Ben’s face that softened it like a Vaselined camera lens. In this light Ben could have been twenty-five or forty-five he couldn’t tell, but he didn’t seem ominous or scary. He decided to relax and pretend he was on a Greyhound, just ride until it stops. Nothing could be worse than staying at the Lucas’ place alone. Anyway, he wanted to hear what Ben had to say about Lucas and Opal’s motorcycle club.
They pulled up in front of a farmhouse that looked like it had not changed much since it was built, and Harold guessed that had been more than a century ago. They got out of the truck and passed between boxwoods as old and round as powder kegs, Harold going in front of Ben after a sweeping gesture of the farmer’s hand.
There was a deep porch that circled it around, ladder-back chairs and a table to the left of the double front doors. The green-black porch rail and white newels were milled so intricately that not even a dozen coats of paint could cover the beauty of their craft.
“Go on in,” Ben said.
Unlike Harold’s home place and Lucas’ house, which had both been built in the ‘20s, Ben’s farmhouse had the low ceilings and simple floor plan of a civil war house. Coming in the doors into the front room, there was an archway straight ahead into a kitchen, and beyond that, in a beeline, was the back door. On the right wall stood an upright piano. A leather easy chair with a knitted afghan draped over it, a brass lamp on a stand, a blanket rack, a loveseat. It reminded him of his Grandparent’s house, except that it felt more ancient, and more austere.
“Go on back to the kitchen,” Ben said smiling.
As Harold passed the piano he saw there was sheet music on the rack.
Nothing but the Blood by Robert Lowry
Ben urged him on into the kitchen and offered him a chair, but Harold stood in front of it, feeling awkward.
“Mother, Sister, this is Harold.”
The two women came over. Mother shook his hand and clapped him on the shoulder as a man would have done, but Sister put her arms around him and gave him a slow and generous hug. Her body was hot and very soft, and the smell coming from her hair was a flowery and far away, distracting in a way that made him want to touch it. He was unaware that his face showed what he sensed with his nostrils and his skin.
“It’s rosewater,” she said, “that’s what you smell.”
He blushed for the first time since he was sixteen and let them seat him at the big kitchen table.
“In 1925 my grandfather took a horse and wagon to Richmond and bought this stove for a hundred and twenty-five dollars,” Ben said. “You can burn coal, you can burn wood, it doesn’t matter. You can cook a whole cornbread on one stick of wood, once it’s going good. Look at the details, the craftsmanship, it’s amazing to think about. Almost eighty years later, and look at it. It’s the best, still going strong. In the summer we usually just use the hotplate because it heats up the kitchen so much. But with you here, for company, we had too much to cook. Got the windows open and fans going, so it’s not s’bad. It’s warm though.”
Harold looked back at him for the first time in the light, and saw a one-time farm boy run-down by forty years of farm labor and meals of beans, biscuits, and gravy. He looked strong, but his face was red and the whites of his eyes seemed yellow.
“It’s a beauty Ben.”
“Thanks,” Ben said. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes. I have a chore or two to finish up before we eat.”
“Chores this late?”
“There’s always chores on a farm. You could work around the clock,” Ben said. “When I come back, I’ll bring my brother Kilby with me. Hope you got an appetite.” He disappeared out the back door.
Harold watched the two ladies cooking. Mother’s hands and arms played the tools of the cooking trade like a variety show plate-spinner, veins covering their surface like kudzu on power lines. Her skin was all over thin and brown, sandpapered to a brittle brown veneer. She did not smile or speak. A gray oval on her linen apron covered her groin, her hands returning to that spot again and again, dropping off a splatter of this, picking up apiece of that.
Ben’s brown-haired sister moved in a slow and deliberate manner, each action calculated, careful, glacial. Her eyes were black and round, pupiled nocturnally. Most of the time they were planted on Harold instead of on her work as if she wanted to him to watch her movements. She blinked slowly, large eyes never fully open, never fully closed. When she walked, Harold’s persistence of vision scribed imaginary streamers in her wake, patterns in the air made by the dimples over her behind, visible above her low-slung jeans. She had the body of an animal; small waist, exaggerated breasts and buttocks, a soft belly larger than the ones men usually claim that they prefer, the kind of belly they like to touch. If she had been covered with fur men would have stood in line to curry her down.
“Honestly, I’m not really hungry,” he said.
“We’re always hungry around here,” Sister said. “It’s the work. It puts an appetite on you.”
“You’ll eat,” Mother said, “when it’s put before you.” They were the first words Mother had spoken since their introductions and they startled him. He couldn’t tell if this last comment was a threat or a prediction, so he just smiled back and changed the subject.
“So this farm’s been in your family for a long time, huh?”
“Since the Civil War,” Mother said. “The ones that had it were killed, and then some robbers took it over. My grand daddy ran off them what stole it and made it his own. My husband and I, and my brother-in-law Arlo, made it what it is today though. Put it back in the hands of southern blood for good. We got some pictures you can look at. Sister’ll show ‘em to you. Go ahead Sister, show ‘im.”
Eyes on Harold as always, Sister wiped her hands on Mother’s apron. As she left the kitchen she ran her hand along Harold’s arm and nodded toward the living room.
Harold got up from the kitchen table and followed. They sat together on an antique wine-colored loveseat and turned the pages of a scrapbook. It smelled like earth, the scent rising from the pages as they fanned.
During one brief moment when her eyes were on the book instead of him, Harold looked over and tried to get a read on her. She seemed to be in her early or mid-twenties. She wore no makeup and no jewelry in her ears, and on the surface there was nothing remarkable about her other than her dark eyes. She seemed to him a type, a girl one might find on any farm in any town anywhere, a girl it would be very hard to describe to a sketch artist. Yet there was something there that was magnetic and primal. On the circle of innocence and worldliness, she was
at the point where the extremes met, at once as innocent and as worldly as a bitch dog. At this range, in addition to rosewater, Sister smelled like sweet sweat and honeysuckle. Harold imagined her soft tanned arms around his torso and felt guilty.
“This is my Uncle Arlo. He had a million different jobs and traveled all over before he moved here to help Daddy work the farm,” she said. “He was funny. But he always got his work done.”
“What happened to your Dad?”
“I’ll let Ben and them tell you about that. They said you weren’t ready to hear some of the stuff yet. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” Harold agreed. “I guess so.”
“You’re going to like it here. This is clean living.”
The screen door banged at the other end of the house. Sister rose and led Harold down the ancient wall-papered hall, past sepia pictures in tarnished silver frames dusted white-glove clean, over to the kitchen table for dinner. Ben and Kilby were already in their seats, hands folded in their laps waiting for the starting gun to dig in.
Kilby looked like Ben with ten years added on, except that his eyes were hazel, and held a firey urgency absent from his younger brother’s. It was a look Harold had seen before in the faces of older men who sat across from him in the Human Resource Office to interview for jobs doing manual labor. Men who don’t have many able-bodied years left to work and a lot left to pay for. Men who hurt every day when they get up; who aren’t desperate yet, but who know that desperate days are coming.
Mother was the last to sit, and she did so like a man, dragging her chair up to the table across the linoleum in grates and bumps, chin high and lips yanked tight like the opening of a laundry bag.
“Let us pray,” Kilby said. Harold’s head was angled downward, but not enough to prevent him from looking at Sister as the older brother spoke.
“Dear Lord, we thank you for blessing our toil which hath brought forth nourishment for our bodies that we might do your will and work. Thank for delivering unto us a prophet, whereby your will be known and greater works be undertaken in your name. Give us strength as we give you our faith and servitude. Thy will be done. Amen.”
Everybody but Harold said, “Amen.”
“Good to finally meet you Harold. Do you like to be called Harold, or Greg?” Kilby asked.
“Greg, actually. Thanks for asking. And good to meet you too.”
“Greg, it’s an honor to have you at our table. Thank you for coming,” Kilby said.
“No, thank you for saving me. I don’t know what from, but it wasn’t good, that’s for sure. I have to say, I’m really in the dark, literally. It’s good to know that I’m not imagining things.”
“You ain’t,” Ben said. “You ain’t.”
“Please, whatever you can tell me would be great. It’s all I can do to sit still and try to behave like a normal person. I want to pace the floor and ask a thousand questions...”
“Kilby, talk to the boy,” Mother ordered.
“Yes Mother,” he said, ladling out some mashed potatoes onto his plate. He talked over the clanking of silverware on plates. Harold’s sat there empty. “The ones that are after you are demon-possessed. They are doing Lucifer’s work on Earth. You see, Lucifer knows you’re going to do God’s work, and his minions are out to put an end to you.”
“We can’t let that happen,” Ben said.
“So what does that make me?” Harold asked. “An angel or something? I don’t feel like an angel. I’m not a religious person. You seem like god-fearing folks. If you knew my feelings on the subject of religion, I’m sure you’d have a stroke.”
“You’re no angel. You are a prophet. And whatever thoughts you have about The Lord don’t matter a hill o’ beans. You’re marked by the heavenly host. You’ll come around,” Kilby said.
Harold shook his head, smiled. “Okay, so, the other day I woke up from a nap and found a little red toy car by the bed. Did the demons do that, put the car there? How did they do that, huh? And why?”
“I bet you had a dream about it, didn’t you?” Sister asked.
“Yeah, I did. How did you know?”
“Because,” Kilby said. “That’s your mark. Whatever you dream becomes real. Them demons didn’t put that there. You did, with your power. And you’re going to do more too. You’re going to save the world.”
“Right,” Harold said, trailing off. He took a biscuit off the platter but didn’t take a bite.
“We have to keep you safe,” Ben said. “So you can do the Lord’s work. Brother, tell him about the four forces.”
“Well,” Kilby said, “There are four forces at work in these parts. There’s the motorcycle club, the Legion of Kronos, those chopper-ridin’ hippies who took you in; then there’s the demon-possessed ones who call themselves the Disciples of Demeter; there’s the Congregation, which is us; and then there’s everybody else, the non-aligned, the people who don’t know nothing and don’t care to know. But the Congregation is small but strong, and we will keep you safe.”
“Thanks,” Harold said. “So who was after me at the house earlier tonight?”
“The Disciples of Demeter,” Ben said. “Filthy demons.”
“Watch your mouth!” Mama said. “If you can’t say nothing nice, don’t say nothing a’ tall. Besides, it wasn’t the Disciples of Demeter, that was Death hisself. He was just looking around the corner at ya.”
“Death?” Harold asked.
“You haven’t heard that before?” Mama said. “It’s an old saying. Sometimes when you’re tired, dog tired, and you feel like you can’t get up or do another thing a’ tall and all you want to do is just sleep and rest, you say ‘Death’s looking around the corner at you.’ It’s an old saying is all.”
“Never heard that before, but thanks, it makes feel so much better,” Harold said. “Seriously, I like the idea of it being the Disciples of Demeter, whoever they are, much better. They sound a lot less dangerous than Death.”
“They ain’t,” Ben said. “All respect Mama, I know you don’t believe in the Disciples, but Kilby does, and so do I.”
“I do,” Kilby admitted. “You’re going to ask anyway, so I might as well tell you who they are. Nobody’s ever met one of them, which is why Mama doesn’t believe they’re real, but from time to time the name comes up. They’re idolaters and heathens, and they interfere in Man’s relationship with Jesus.”
“Were they the ones who rescued me from the bay?”
Sister spoke up. “No, that was your baptism by the angels as it was foretold. They asked if you would be saved, and you accepted the Holy Spirit into your heart. That’s how you got the gift.”