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

praying aloud, since he always got too tongue-tied to do this in the presence of other people, but he lined out the hymns and sang lustily, always experiencing a deep secret thrill when they sang his gift hymn, and he took good care of the graveyard and the church itself, often doing something extra like adding pegs at the back where you could hang your coat, or cleaning out the spring in the nearby woods, or putting up a hitching post out back.
    When Garnet Stump died, Ezekiel dug her grave, then helped to lower her coffin down in it. She was light as a feather by the time she died. Old Preacher Stump was bent near double from the arthuritis by then. He used two canes to walk.
    But one cold December day after her death, when Ezekiel was out in the yard boiling the wash in the old black kettle, Preacher Stump came out of the cabin and made his tortuous way around to where Ezekiel hunkered by the fire, having fallen into the kind of blank blue reverie he was prone to. Ezekiel Bailey was thirty-nine years old at this time, hale and strong. He had a slow, deliberate gait, a permanent squint, and a child’s sweet heart. Preacher Stump came up behind him and said right out what was on his mind, startling Ezekiel so much that he almost pitched forward into the fire. “Boy,” the old man barked abruptly, “hit’s time you got you a wife.” Ezekiel turned to stare at the little bent-over preacher. He remembered some things. Slowly, a big grin spread across his face.

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    Nonnie and the Melungeon
    Zinnia Hulett Talking
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    I never did know what ailed Nonnie. Don’t know to this day! But she had ever chance for happiness, ever chance in the world , mind you, which it is not given to all of us to have, and stomped ever one of them chances down in the dirt like a bug. It seemed that Nonnie was bent on destruction, from the womb.
    Why, the very first thing she ever done was kill Mamma!
    I will not forget that night as long as ever I live. It was a cold snowy night in the middle of wintertime. Old Granny Horn had been with us going on a week, Daddy had went up her holler to fetch her when it commenced to snowing so bad, so she’d be here when it come Mamma’s time. Now it had snowed to where you could not even see the boxwood bush by the front steps, nor that big huge rock there by the gate, nor yet the gate itself nor the fence neither. The snow had blowed hither and you to where it had covered up what ought to have been, and made new hills and valleys all around.
    I stood on the porch looking out, as I recall, while Mamma moaned inside of the house and Daddy chopped wood out back even though it was the middle of the night. Granny Horn had sent him out there finely, she said he was nought but a bother in the house. I stood still on the porch and looked out at the snow.
    It was a new world out there! I didn’t know nothing I saw. And white—Lord, it was white! So white it stayed kindly light all night long, and all the shadders was blue. It was scary. It would be days and days before a soul could get in or out through Flat Gap.
    And I looked at that snow and felt glad for all them mason jars of applesauce and peas and such as that which me and Mamma had put up last summer, and for the sweet taters down in the grabbling hole under the porch, and for the shucky-bean leather-britches hanging up in the rafters over the loft, and the chest full of cornmeal—“cornmeal enough to last till the baby is toothing,” Mamma had said.
    The first time I heerd about this baby was back last summer when Mamma and me was out in the yard putting up butter beans. We had boiled the jars and lined them out in the sun, and the sun looked real pretty shining off of them. Mamma stirred the butter beans with a wooden paddle and wiped at her face with her apron.
    â€œHoney, you don’t have to stay out here and help me,” she said. “You can go over and play with Mickey if you’ve got a