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

his rough hands placed on his knees, no emotion at all on his face.
    When that hymn is finally over, Aunt Dot starts another, “O Lord, remember me, now in the bowels of Thy love . ” It is straight-out tuneless singing, yet Ezekiel finds it beautiful, as his Aunt Dot does.
    One time years back, when she was sitting on the porch hooking a rug and singing one of these mournful old hymns, as she frequently did, little Ezekiel asked her, “Aunt Dot, how come you to sing that old song? How come you don’t sing something pretty?” For he knew full well how pretty his Aunt Dot could sing if she took a mind to, and how many songs she knew. She turned to look at him, pursing her mouth, and said, “Honey, they is pretty singing, and then they is true singing,” and although Ezekiel didn’t know what she meant by that then, he does now. He loves the high hard plaintive singing too and joins in energetically, face blank and eyes closed, sometimes lining out a hymn himself.
    Ezekiel likes singing as much as he likes fiddle music and black garter belts and dancing, and he makes no distinction among these things, which all comfort him. He does not care so much for the rest of the service.
    The singing goes on for about an hour, and then one of the elders lifts up a prayer, and it goes on awhile too. People pride themselves on how long and how loud they can pray. Then there’s some more singing, then another scripture read out by another elder, then Billy Looney giving the sermon in his unemotional singsong voice that comes to be punctuated halfway through his sermon by the “ah!” at the end of each sentence. “Jesus will come in the night, ah! And He will find you where you’re hid, ah!” Billy Looney didn’t even start preaching until he was an old man. You can’t prepare to preach. If God wants you, He will let you know. It will come upon you unawares. Billy Looney was called in the spring of his forty-sixth year one rainy day when he was hauling a wagonload of lumber over to a man in Sistersville. He’s been preaching ever since. He preaches frequently that man is a lonesome traveler on a long road, and whenever he takes this text, a thrill shoots through Ezekiel.
    Once Billy Looney gets to really horating, he will go on an hour or more, and then a visiting elder might preach some too, and if things get going good, if Billy Looney or one of them others gets to what Aunt Dot calls his weaving way, why then some folks might start to holler out “Amen” and Missus Clara Bellow might suffer palpitations of the heart and have to lay down on the bench while they sing the invitation hymn. By the end of meeting, the singers still appear detached, yet tears run down their cheeks as they continue to sing. Even some of the men are crying, but none of them wipe off their tears or appear to notice. Then the closing hymn, with parting handshakes all around.
    And once again, as always, hearts are somehow strengthened and lifted as all leave meeting and go outside, where the women spread dinner on the ground, everything good you can think of to eat—chicken and dumplings, shucky beans and fatback, pork roast, sweet potatoes baked in their jackets, corn pudding, applesauce, cornbread, watermelon pickle, vinegar pie, apple stack cake. The women wait on the men and children first, then they eat too. Then there’s more singing out on the hill, and the sun is low on the mountain when it’s time to go. And if a horse or two gets sold behind the churchhouse, or a boy steals a kiss from a girl back in the trees there, or one woman tells another what to do when her baby won’t take no titty, what is that? God has been served today.
    And there will be other days too, for foot-washings and protracted meetings and brush-arbor meetings on the ground, where emotions will run so high that you have to get out of the way sometimes and let the Spirit work, or you might get