The Devil's Dream by Lee Smith Read Free Book Online

pebbles everyplace, and lay upended there on the hill for days, looking for all the world like a witchhead with big spiky root-hairs sticking out.
    Then came the day when they burned it, and all the other brush besides, in a great wildfire on the hillside that caused Zeke’s heart to beat so fast. He loved the acrid smell of the woodsmoke and the way it looked disappearing into the cloudy sky; he stayed up there on the hill all night long and watched the fire burn itself out, and then worked all the next day too with the rest of them, and never missed the sleep.
    Later, Zeke was the one that walked behind Buck holding the bull-tongued plow to a furrow as straight as any man’s, so that Clovis, watching him, hit upon the notion of renting Zeke out to whoever needed him in the field. Clovis told Zeke that he would not have to go back to school. Zeke liked this idea fine.

    So Zeke settles into his life. He gets up in the morning and eats his Aunt Dot’s good biscuits and her red-eye gravy, he walks to work, he works, he talks some to the people he’s working for, he walks back to Frog Level, he eats, he sleeps. He gives the money he makes to his Uncle Clovis, who gives him back some. Zeke doesn’t need much. It has not occurred to him to ask for more. It has not occurred to him to do anything else, or to go anyplace else. He wears overalls, brogans, and a plaid shirt, winter and summer. He fucks a widder woman over at Cana that he works for regular, it seems to be part of his job. She cuts his hair for him too. And be loves to dance. He is known for it. On Saturday nights he’ll go anywhere, travel any distance to find a dance, and he’ll dance as long as anybody will fiddle. He’ll dance all night if he can.
    At these dances he treats all the girls in the same courtly, old-fashioned manner, even the girls that are known to go back of the barn with you, the girls Tom has told him about. Ezekiel is a serious, dedicated, trancelike dancer. Sometimes a girl will start to look at him in another way, but usually this does not last long, for there is something in his face—or there is a lack of something in his face—that puts them off. They stop flirting. Oh, they like Ezekiel fine, they’ll tease him and dance with him, but it isn’t serious flirting. They wouldn’t walk with him on Sunday if he asked them, which he does not. They don’t treat Ezekiel like a man, somehow.
    Sometimes Ezekiel goes with his uncles if they are running a set someplace away from here, at Sisterville or Little Africa or Ash Holler or even as far away as Holly Grove. One time, at a dance over in Sistersville, a pretty woman comes up to Zeke and grabs him away from his partner, grabs him off the floor. She is slight, with curly flyaway hair. She wears a frilly red dress with puff sleeves. She pulls him away from the dancing.
    â€œZekey?” she says. “Zekey?”
    The fiddles saw away, the air is close in there, and Zeke wipes sweat off his face and looks at her. There is something about her.
    â€œZekey, is it you?” she says.
    Zeke keeps looking at her, but he can’t think what to say. While he watches, her big eyes fill with tears. Then she puts her hand up to her mouth and pushes past him roughly, through the throng of people, out the door. Zeke follows after her. He makes it to the door just in time to see her start off into the night hanging on the arm of the big feller who is waiting for her there.
    â€œMary!” Zeke calls out, his voice rusty and odd, so that everybody out there stops drinking and smoking and talking, and turns to look at the enormous boy silhouetted by the light pouring out of the dance-hall door. His hair glows fiery pale, like bright angel hair, in that light.
    But Mary Magdaleen and the man she is with have already disappeared into the darkness beyond the dance; all you can see of them is the glow of the man’s cigarette in the dark, and it is his