The Complete Short Stories

  “That’s Bevel,” Mrs. Connin said, taking off her coat. “It’s a coincident he’s named the same as the preacher. These boys are J. C., Spivey, and Sinclair, and that’s Sarah Mildred on the porch. Take off that coat and hang it on the bedpost, Bevel.”

  The three boys watched him while he unbuttoned the coat and took it off. Then they watched him hang it on the bedpost and then they stood, watching the coat. They turned abruptly and went out the door and had a conference on the porch.

  Bevel stood looking around him at the room. It was part kitchen and part bedroom. The entire house was two rooms and two porches. Close to his foot the tail of a light-colored dog moved up and down between two floorboards as he scratched his back on the underside of the house. Bevel jumped on it but the hound was experienced and had already withdrawn when his feet hit the spot.

  The walls were filled with pictures and calendars. There were two round photographs of an old man and woman with collapsed mouths and another picture of a man whose eyebrows dashed out of two bushes of hair and clashed in a heap on the bridge of his nose; the rest of his face stuck out like a bare cliff to fall from. “That’s Mr. Connin,” Mrs. Connin said, standing back from the stove for a second to admire the face with him, “but it don’t favor him anymore.” Bevel turned from Mr. Connin to a colored picture over the bed of a man wearing a white sheet. He had long hair and a gold circle around his head and he was sawing on a board while some children stood watching him. He was going to ask who that was when the three boys came in again and motioned for him to follow them. He thought of crawling under the bed and hanging onto one of the legs but the three boys only stood there, speckled and silent, waiting, and after a second he followed them at a little distance out on the porch and around the corner of the house. They started off through a field of rough yellow weeds to the hog pen, a five-foot boarded square full of shoats, which they intended to ease him over into. When they reached it, they turned and waited silently, leaning against the side.

  He was coming very slowly, deliberately bumping his feet together as if he had trouble walking. Once he had been beaten up in the park by some strange boys when his sitter forgot him, but he hadn’t known anything was going to happen that time until it was over. He began to smell a strong odor of garbage and to hear the noises of a wild animal. He stopped a few feet from the pen and waited, pale but dogged.

  The three boys didn’t move. Something seemed to have happened to them. They stared over his head as if they saw something coming behind him but he was afraid to turn his own head and look. Their speckles were pale and their eyes were still and gray as glass. Only their ears twitched slightly. Nothing happened. Finally, the one in the middle said, “She’d kill us,” and turned, dejected and hacked, and climbed up on the pen and hung over, staring in.

  Bevel sat down on the ground, dazed with relief, and grinned up at them.

  The one sitting on the pen glanced at him severely. “Hey you,” he said after a second, “if you can’t climb up and see these pigs you can lift that bottom board off and look in thataway.” He appeared to offer this as a kindness.

  Bevel had never seen a real pig but he had seen a pig in a book and knew they were small fat pink animals with curly tails and round grinning faces and bow ties. He leaned forward and pulled eagerly at the board.

  “Pull harder,” the littlest boy said. “It’s nice and rotten. Just lift out thet nail.”

  He eased a long reddish nail out of the soft wood.

  “Now you can lift up the board and put your face to the . . .” a quiet voice began.

  He had already done it and another face, gray, wet and sour, was pushing into his, knocking him down and back as it scraped out under the plank. Something snorted over him and charged back again, rolling him over and pushing him up from behind and then sending him forward, screaming through the yellow field, while it bounded behind.

  The three Connins watched from where they were. The one sitting on the pen held the loose board back with his gangling foot. Their stern faces didn’t brighten any but they seemed to become less taut, as if some great need had been partly satisfied. “Maw ain’t going to like him lettin’ out thet hawg,” the smallest one said.

  Mrs. Connin was on the back porch and caught Bevel up as he reached the steps. The hog ran under the house and subsided, panting, but the child screamed for five minutes. When she had finally calmed him down, she gave him his breakfast and let him sit on her lap while he ate it. The shoat climbed the two steps onto the back porch and stood outside the screen door, looking in with his head lowered sullenly. He was long-legged and humpbacked and part of one of his ears had been bitten off.

  “Git away!” Mrs. Connin shouted. “That one yonder favors Mr. Paradise that has the gas station,” she said. “You’ll see him today at the healing. He’s got the cancer over his ear. He always comes to show he ain’t been healed.”

  The shoat stood squinting a few seconds longer and then moved off slowly. “I don’t want to see him,” Bevel said.

  They walked to the river, Mrs. Connin in front with him and the three boys strung out behind and Sarah Mildred, the tall girl, at the end to holler if one of them ran out on the road. They looked like the skeleton of an old boat with two pointed ends, sailing slowly on the edge of the highway. The white Sunday sun followed at a little distance, climbing fast through a scum of gray cloud as if it meant to overtake them. Bevel walked on the outside edge, holding Mrs. Connin’s hand and looking down into the orange and purple gulley that dropped off from the concrete.

  It occurred to him that he was lucky this time that they had found Mrs. Connin who would take you away for the day instead of an ordinary sitter who only sat where you lived or went to the park. You found out more when you left where you lived. He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ. Before he had thought it had been a doctor named Sladewall, a fat man with a yellow mustache who gave him shots and thought his name was Herbert, but this must have been a joke. They joked a lot where he lived. If he had thought about it before, he would have thought Jesus Christ was a word like “oh” or “damn” or “God,” or maybe somebody who had cheated them out of something sometime. When he had asked Mrs. Connin who the man in the sheet in the picture over her bed was, she had looked at him a while with her mouth open. Then she had said, “That’s Jesus,” and she had kept on looking at him.

  In a few minutes she had got up and got a book out of the other room. “See here,” she said, turning over the cover, “this belonged to my great grandmamma. I wouldn’t part with it for nothing on earth.” She ran her finger under some brown writing on a spotted page. “Emma Stevens Oakley, 1832,” she said. “Ain’t that something to have? And every word of it the gospel truth.” She turned the next page and read him the name: “The Life of Jesus Christ for Readers Under Twelve.” Then she read him the book.

  It was a small book, pale brown on the outside with gold edges and a smell like old putty. It was full of pictures, one of the carpenter driving a crowd of pigs out of a man. They were real pigs, gray and sour-looking, and Mrs. Connin said Jesus had driven them all out of this one man. When she finished reading, she let him sit on the floor and look at the pictures again.

  Just before they left for the healing, he had managed to get the book inside his innerlining without her seeing him. Now it made his coat hang down a little farther on one side than the other. His mind was dreamy and serene as they walked along and when they turned off the highway onto a long red clay road winding between banks of honeysuckle, he began to make wild leaps and pull forward on her hand as if he wanted to dash off and snatch the sun which was rolling away ahead of them now.

  They walked on the dirt road for a while and then they crossed a field stippled with purple weeds and entered the shadows of a wood where the ground was covered with thick pine needles. He had never been in woods before and he walked carefully, looking
from side to side as if he were entering a strange country. They moved along a bridle path that twisted downhill through crackling red leaves, and once, catching at a branch to keep himself from slipping, he looked into two frozen green-gold eyes enclosed in the darkness of a tree hole. At the bottom of the hill, the woods opened suddenly onto a pasture dotted here and there with black and white cows and sloping down, tier after tier, to a broad orange stream where the reflection of the sun was set like a diamond.

  There were people standing on the near bank in a group, singing. Long tables were set up behind them and a few cars and trucks were parked in a road that came up by the river. They crossed the pasture, hurrying, because Mrs. Connin, using her hand for a shed over her eyes, saw the preacher already standing out in the water. She dropped her basket on one of the tables and pushed the three boys in front of her into the knot of people so that they wouldn’t linger by the food. She kept Bevel by the hand and eased her way up to the front.

  The preacher was standing about ten feet out in the stream where the water came up to his knees. He was a tall youth in khaki trousers that he had rolled up higher than the water. He had on a blue shirt and a red scarf around his neck but no hat and his light-colored hair was cut in sideburns that curved into the hollows of his cheeks. His face was all bone and red light reflected from the river. He looked as if he might have been nineteen years old. He was singing in a high twangy voice, above the singing on the bank, and he kept his hands behind him and his head tilted back.

  He ended the hymn on a high note and stood silent, looking down at the water and shifting his feet in it. Then he looked up at the people on the bank. They stood close together, waiting; their faces were solemn but expectant and every eye was on him. He shifted his feet again.

  “Maybe I know why you come,” he said in the twangy voice, “maybe I don’t.

  “If you ain’t come for Jesus, you ain’t come for me. If you just come to see can you leave your pain in the river, you ain’t come for Jesus. You can’t leave your pain in the river,” he said. “I never told nobody that.” He stopped and looked down at his knees.

  “I seen you cure a woman oncet!” a sudden high voice shouted from the hump of people. “Seen that woman git up and walk out straight where she had limped in!”

  The preacher lifted one foot and then the other. He seemed almost but not quite to smile. “You might as well go home if that’s what you come for,” he said.

  Then he lifted his head and arms and shouted, “Listen to what I got to say, you people! There ain’t but one river and that’s the river of life, made out of Jesus’ blood. That’s the river you have to lay your pain in, in the river of faith, in the river of life, in the river of love, in the rich red river of Jesus’ blood, you people!”

  His voice grew soft and musical. “All the rivers come from that one river and go back to it like it was the ocean sea and if you believe, you can lay your pain in that river and get rid of it because that’s the river that was made to carry sin. It’s a river full of pain itself, pain itself, moving toward the Kingdom of Christ, to be washed away, slow, you people, slow as this here old red water river round my feet.

  “Listen,” he sang, “I read in Mark about an unclean man, I read in Luke about a blind man, I read in John about a dead man! Oh you people hear! The same blood that makes this river red, made that leper clean, made that blind man stare, made that dead man leap! You people with trouble,” he cried, “lay it in that river of blood, lay it in that river of pain, and watch it move away toward the kingdom of Christ.”

  While he preached, Bevel’s eyes followed drowsily the slow circles of two silent birds revolving high in the air. Across the river there was a low red and gold grove of sassafras with hills of dark blue trees behind it and an occasional pine jutting over the skyline. Behind, in the distance, the city rose like a cluster of warts on the side of the mountain. The birds revolved downward and dropped lightly in the top of the highest pine and sat hunch-shouldered as if they were supporting the sky.

  “If it’s this river of life you want to lay your pain in, then come up,” the preacher said, “and lay your sorrow here. But don’t be thinking this is the last of it because this old red river don’t end here. This old red suffering stream goes on, you people, slow to the kingdom of Christ. This old red river is good to baptize in, good to lay your faith in, good to lay your pain in, but it ain’t this muddy water here that saves you. I been all up and down this river this week,” he said. “Tuesday I was in Fortune Lake, next day in Ideal, Friday me and my wife drove to Lulawillow to see a sick man there. Them people didn’t see no healing,” he said and his face burned redder for a second. “I never said they would.”

  While he was talking a fluttering figure had begun to move forward with a kind of butterfly movement—an old woman with flapping arms whose head wobbled as if it might fall off any second. She managed to lower herself at the edge of the bank and let her arms churn in the water. Then she bent farther and pushed her face down in it and raised herself up finally, streaming wet; and still flapping, she turned a time or two in a blind circle until someone reached out and pulled her back into the group.

  “She’s been that way for thirteen years,” a rough voice shouted. “Pass the hat and give this kid his money. That’s what he’s here for.” The shout, directed out to the boy in the river, came from a huge old man who sat like a humped stone on the bumper of a long ancient gray automobile. He had on a gray hat that was turned down over one ear and up over the other to expose a purple bulge on his left temple. He sat bent forward with his hands hanging between his knees and his small eyes half closed.

  Bevel stared at him once and then moved into the folds of Mrs. Connin’s coat and hid himself.

  The boy in the river glanced at the old man quickly and raised his fist. “Believe Jesus or the devil!” he cried. “Testify to one or the other!”

  “I know from my own self-experience,” a woman’s mysterious voice called from the knot of people, “I know from it that this preacher can heal. My eyes have been opened! I testify to Jesus!”

  The preacher lifted his arms quickly and began to repeat all that he had said before about the river and the kingdom of Christ and the old man sat on the bumper, fixing him with a narrow squint. From time to time Bevel stared at him again from around Mrs. Connin.

  A man in overalls and a brown coat leaned forward and dipped his hand in the water quickly and shook it and leaned back, and a woman held a baby over the edge of the bank and splashed its feet with water. One man moved a little distance away and sat down on the bank and took off his shoes and waded out into the stream; he stood there for a few minutes with his face tilted as far back as it would go, then he waded back and put on his shoes. All this time, the preacher sang and did not appear to watch what went on.

  As soon as he stopped singing, Mrs. Connin lifted Bevel up and said, “Listen here, preacher, I got a boy from town today that I’m keeping. His mamma’s sick and he wants you to pray for her. And this is a coincident—his name is Bevel! Bevel,” she said, turning to look at the people behind her, “same as his. Ain’t that a coincident, though?”

  There were some murmurs and Bevel turned and grinned over her shoulder at the faces looking at him. “Bevel,” he said in a loud jaunty voice.

  “Listen,” Mrs. Connin said, “have you ever been Baptized, Bevel?”

  He only grinned.

  “I suspect he ain’t ever been baptized,” Mrs. Connin said, raising her eyebrows at the preacher.

  “Swang him over here,” the preacher said and took a stride forward and caught him.

  He held him in the crook of his arm and looked at the grinning face. Bevel rolled his eyes in a comical way and thrust his face forward, close to the preacher’s. “My name is Bevvvuuuuul,” he said in a loud deep voice and let the tip of his tongue slide across his mouth.

  The preacher didn’t smile. His bony
face was rigid and his narrow gray eyes reflected the almost colorless sky. There was a loud laugh from the old man sitting on the car bumper and Bevel grasped the back of the preacher’s collar and held it tightly. The grin had already disappeared from his face. He had the sudden feeling that this was not a joke. Where he lived everything was a joke. From the preacher’s face, he knew immediately that nothing the preacher said or did was a joke. “My mother named me that,” he said quickly.

  “Have you ever been baptized?” the preacher asked.

  “What’s that?” he murmured.

  “If I baptize you,” the preacher said, “you’ll be able to go to the kingdom of Christ. You’ll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you’ll go by the deep river of life. Do you want that?”

  “Yes,” the child said, and thought, I won’t go back to the apartment then, I’ll go under the river.

  “You won’t be the same again,” the preacher said. “You’ll count.” Then he turned his face to the people and began to preach and Bevel looked over his shoulder at the pieces of the white sun scattered in the river. Suddenly the preacher said, “All right, I’m going to baptize you now,” and without more warning, he tightened his hold and swung him upside down and plunged his head into the water. He held him under while he said the words of baptism and then he jerked him up again and looked sternly at the gasping child. Bevel’s eyes were dark and dilated. “You count now,” the preacher said. “You didn’t even count before.”

  The little boy was too shocked to cry. He spit out the muddy water and rubbed his wet sleeve into his eyes and over his face.