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

voice that calls back to Zeke from wherever they are going to, “Sorry, buddy,” as if there has been some mistake.
    Ezekiel will not see Mary again. A restless, wild girl, she will move eventually from Sistersville to Knoxville, where she will get in trouble.
    And Zeke, standing in the doorway, has already forgotten her, her very name Mary drowned out by the sound in his head. He goes down the steps and buys some liquor from a man. After the dance is over, he goes with his cousins Willie and Tom to a whorehouse in Sistersville, where a girl takes off her clothes slow for him, stopping at the black garter belt and stockings. Zeke has never seen such a contraption. When he shoots off inside her, the noise in his head goes away, and then he sleeps. The next day, Willie keeps vomiting as they ride back over to Cana under the blazing noon sky, and Tom keeps laughing. “How’s yer hammer hanging, Zeke?” Tom asks him, and Zeke says fine.
    The other thing that Zeke likes is meeting; it helps him the way a woman and a fiddle tune help him. It quiets his head. Even though the Malones are widely known as backsliders, they all attend the Old Pisgah Primitive Baptist Church set back on the ridge toward Cana. This church, raised by its congregation in 1831, is nothing but a square cabin made of notched and chinked logs, with a puncheon floor, a single small window on each side, and a plain pine door. It stands in a high clearing on the hill, with a good view of the road to Cana and the Frog Level bottom and a glimpse of the Dismal River beyond. There’s always a breeze up on that hill. Having the graveyard right next to the church keeps things in the proper perspective. There’s no steeple, no sign, no bell to indicate that this small, plain cabin is in fact a church, but the stern lonesome air of holiness hangs everywhere about it, like fog on the ridge of a morning.
    Ezekiel walks up here every third Sunday with the rest. Other Sundays, some of them go to other meetings, often traveling miles. For many of them, especially the women, this is the only time they ever go anywhere. They approach the churchhouse soberly and quietly, eyes cast down. Horses and mules and wagon teams are hitched in the woods. Some of the wagons have little children sleeping on pallets inside, or sucking quietly on a sugar tit. Newborns are carried into meeting. Older children are left at home; meeting is not the place for children.
    The women go on in. Most of the men stand around outside the churchhouse, smoking or chewing tobacco, until the singing starts. Then they throw their cigarettes down on the ground and spit out their chaws and file in too, men to the right, women to the left. They sit on hard plank benches. Meeting is not supposed to be comfortable.
    Inside, the Pisgah churchhouse is as plain as it is outside, nothing but a potbellied stove in the back and a homemade table to lay your coats on in the wintertime, nothing up front but the rough-hewn pulpit in the center and the Amen corner over to the side, a wood platform with chairs on it for visiting elders to sit on. No cross, no pictures, no ornamentation of any kind. “Christ don’t need no fancy cross,” as old Elder Stump has been heard to say. No choir, no hymnbooks, no organ, no piano—no instruments of any kind. Christ don’t have no truck with the things of this world . Cornelius Malone leads the singing by just flat starting out with it all of a sudden, his high nasal voice almost like an assault on the rustling hush in the meetinghouse.
    â€œHit’s the old ship of Zion as she comes . ” Cornelius lines out the hymn and the others follow. “Hit’s the old ship of Zion as she comes . ” The first line is repeated for the rest of the verse, and each hymn has many verses. “She’ll be loaded with bright angels as she comes . ” Cornelius remains seated while he sings, leaning forward a little from the waist with