Long Tale Press

-1-

Summer again and time for another great harvest of souls in the land. Sometimes when young Ryerson Hezekiah Moffit Goode looked back on those days it seemed that it was always revival time in Dobbs Station and that his best chance to become a true whoremonger or man of the world always seemed to coincide with the coming of some new evangelist to ruin all his good times and fair prospects.

Maybe it would be different this time. The community by some quirk had fallen into the hands of a dull fellow named Emmert Holt, from somewhere way up in West Virginia, no match for his uncle Worsham, who had come back to Dobbs Station that same year to succeed old preacher Fuller as pastor of the Baptist Church. Everybody had known he was the sure choice since the first sermon he had ever preached in the community. A good thing the deacons didn’t know about all those times he had grabbed for Ryerson’s pecker. Way back when he was only thirteen. Maybe he should have warned somebody before the church voted to bring him back.

Wonder who’s pecker he’s chomping on now, Ryerson kept asking himself. Odell Washburn, a smelly plowhand and one of the preacher’s first converts, had always been the chief suspect. It was he who those three summers ago had thrown in with the preacher and tried to drag Ryerson to the altar and force a confession out of him. No matter what confession. It was just that his uncle was sure he was bound for Hell, and him no goddamn queer either, even if he had joined the church two years before his uncle had come back from the New Orleans seminary. He has always suspected that his uncle was more than just one person. Maybe a lot of personalities wrapped up in one body. Neither one having known the other or so much as shaken hands. The way he had seen it in the movies. That’s the only way any of it made any sense.

Maybe he had gone nto a raving penitence, vowing never to recognize the other parts of himself. He had sure calmed down a lot, which didn’t mean that he still could bring fire down from Heaven and Hell to earth when the mood was on him. Tall, lean and menacing, he was for all that mainly just a bystander now. Couldn’t preach at his own revival. Which is why the church had to bring in the old guy from West Virginia, a sure enough dullard who had made no stir at all in the community—empty pews almost every night and almost no new souls for Christ after a whole week of preaching.

Uncle Worsham tried to rouse everybody with loud prayers and lengthy introductions of the visiting pastor. It simply wasn't enough and never would be enough to bring in the kind of harvest everyone had grown to expect.

This was one of those summers when Ryerson was mostly indifferent to the shouting and wailing and praying at the Dobbs Station Baptist Church. No more worrying about the preacher, either, not now, with Ryerson almost grown and able to drop him with a single blow. A lot of other things on his mind that summer, mainly the whereabouts of his sister Deni. He had not seen her since the Christmas holidays. A long time and maybe there was a reason for it even though she had promised to see him before going off to college. They had enjoyed exciting times together during the holiday season. Maybe too exciting. Was she afraid of what might happen next? Had he asked too much of her? She had come close to losing control during their last hours together—and for once it was she rather than he who had made the advance.

She had reason to be wary. She knew he had never been able to think of her as a sister. Perhaps it was the same with her. They had seen so little of each other since her mother walked out on Father for his wandering ways, all those many years ago.Yet she was scarcely a year older than he. She had spent most of her life in Whiteville, an eastern North Carolina tobacco warehousing town where her mother had taken up with a wealthy if cantankerous guano merchant and church deacon almost twice her age. She married the old scoundrel within the year and turned her back on old Winston forever.

As for Deni, she herself seldom got back there except for holidays and maybe a week or so each summer; and then mostly to visit with him and Father, when he could be found, and to spend time with Aunt Ethel, a widow in failing health and now wealthy in her own right, thanks to a pile of inherited wealth, mostly in stock certificates. Deni had always been her favorite.

Barely out of her mother’s arms when they moved away, Deni had flourished mightily in her new home. A fetching, dark-haired seventeen-year-old, tall, statuesque, flirtatious and, at times, a trifle intimidating even to her elders, she was a straight “A”

student and well on her way to becoming class valedictorian. She had served on her school’s student government council and cheerleading squad ever since the ninth grade, the youngest ever to so—either to sit on the council, of which she was now president, or to serve as cheerleader—and practically a unanimous choice for Whiteville High’s 1948 “Miss Popularity” contest.

She and her brother might not have been kin at all, for all the similarity in their looks: Ryerson blond, fair-skinned, with the physique of a natural-born halfback. For him as well as his father it was a rare time in Winston. The boy had spent almost all of his time, not in the city, but out at the farm where his father had grown up, helping with the planting and harvesting of the tobacco and hay crops. It had been like that ever since his mother had fallen victim to a profound melancholia and into the hands of a bunch of quacks claiming to be medical practicioners.

His father? Yes, he still kept a room at the farm, but Ryerson counted himself lucky if he saw him more than once or twice a week. He was what some people liked to call a “slumlord.” He had made good money in recent years out of his rent houses and other properties, and was always explaining that he was off tending to business. Where he really was, if not drinking and playing cards and whoring around, no one knew. Neither of them had ever cared to stay in their gloomy home on New Poplar Street when Ryerson’s mother was away. Most of the time it just sat there locked and forlorn.

During Deni’s Christmas visit, when his mother was briefly back in town from the sanitorium, where she was now spending almost all of her time, he and his sister had

laughed and talked and smoked in the privacy of his bedroom, secretly drinking great mugs of their father's eggnog, and for the first time she had seemed sad when the time came to leave.

The house itself was sad, the same as always. Dark and sad and even a little frightening, the way it had been when his grandmother was still sitting in the chair in the living room chewing her snuff stick, looking alive and not alive; the way it was when her second husband, old man Starnes, who had tried to cheat Ryerson’s mother out the house, had been there smoking his corncob pipe and threatening to lock him in the coal dungeon. "Heeheheeeheeehee. What d'ya think of that, Prather? What about you, boy? You ready to go downstairs now and let the rats nibble at that little ol’ dick of yorn’?”

Deni had enjoyed getting to know Ryerson's mother, who had come home in early December and had been almost like the boy’s first memories of her. For the first time in years she had been caught up in the festival atmosphere of the holidays, decorating the house, spending long hours cooking her favorite pies and cakes. A rare good Christmas for everybody and Deni had thoroughly enjoyed herself.

"She's really very nice. I really hope she’s finally going to have a chance at enjoying life. I almost wish I could stay for the entire holiday. Perhaps one day I shall. But I have to think about mother too. I know it just wouldn't be Christmas for her if I weren't home."

The day before she was to leave she and Ryerson went over to Aunt Ethel's for supper. She was alone now. Old Albert Lord, a wealthy Republican Scalawag Ryerson’s

grandfather had once kicked out of the house for attempting to pay Ethel a visit just as though he were just any other sort of gentleman caller, had suffered a killing stroke a year or so earlier. Still it took more than six months for him to die. Tough old galoot. Strange thing was, the house did not seem a whole lot emptier without Mr. Albert than it had before.

Ryerson and his sister came back to New Poplar after taking the long way around through an old Moravian congregation town, where all the buildings sat up next to the street and where you always felt you were living some other life, a long time ago, in one of those lovely old forgotten villages of medieval Europe.

“Such a lovely old place," Deni said as they were climbing the stone staircase to his house. “And your home, Ryerson, it just seems to have such a wonderful character and personality all its own. I’ve always loved it. Don’t you miss not being here—I mean, with your having to spend practically all of your time out at Dobbs Station?”

"Mind if I tell you something? I never much cared for it.”

“Really? Why do you say so? It has so much charm. A pity your mother can’t be happier here.”

“Nobody can. Never will.”

“Why, Ryerson? You must have an awfully good reason.”

“Haints in the attic.”

“Oh, hell, Ryerson. Don’t be silly.” She glanced briefly at the stairs leading to

the attic. “Well, I like it anyway. And, you know, I really do hate to leave. When I come down here I get the oddest feeling that I have lived before and that we have known each other in other lives, through perhaps not as brother and sister. Silly, I know, but it somehow strikes me as more real each time I come.”

“It’s all those haints.”

“Well, haints or not, I like it. It’s like, well, like something very significant happened to me here at one time, or was about to happen, or . . . “

Her voice kind of faltered as though there was more to the thought except that she didn't know how to get it out; she did not speak again till they got back to his room. When they talked the next day he thought he knew why she had sort of broken down. She was talking about her last summer at the farm, the good times they'd had, how difficult it was to bring herself to leave despite all the harsh things she’d said about the country and the way it stifled your spirit and kept you from getting anywhere in life.

Then something happened that changed everything. He wasn't sure how. Maybe the eggnog. Maybe a whole bottle of her own cologne, a drink for which she had taken a fancy during those last drunken days of the summer before. Couldn’t say for sure. She had sworn that she was off perfume forever, that is, so far as draining the bottle and everything else in the house that had a bit of alcohol in it. But boy, did she smell sweet, where the perfume was inside her or merely smeared enticingly over her tawny flesh. “Expensive, you know. Buy one to use, another to drink.”

Maybe it was the return of the old fixation, obsession or whatever it was. He only knew that everything had changed and that he himself had changed,perhaps forever.

She had to leave in time to be home for Christmas Eve. On her last day there he spent most of the morning upstairs with her in her bedroom. It was late before she was packed and ready to go. Father worried about her driving back in the dark. But she still seemed in no hurry to leave. They smoked again in her room and she must have been a little drunk because they were on third mug of eggnog by the time she was ready to go.

He stood on the landing waiting to help her carry her two travel bags down to

the car. Instead of handing the bags to him she sat them down long enough to kiss him hard and long and shamelessly and full in the mouth. The kiss for which he had been waiting for more than four years and never getting anything but hints or promises or lectures about the “devil” in him.

Now it had happened. Just like that. No warning. No anything. He knew she was drunk then, and that she was drunker still—it took so little to get her onto a real high—but he also knew that it must be the beginning of something even though she hurriedly tried to explain that she had simply "forgotten herself" and that they must never speak of it again of give it another thought. She picked up the bags and sat them down right back in the same spot and again forgot herself, kissing him even more heatedly—the first time anybody had ever thrown him out of countenance with a real French kiss.

“Don’t say anything, Ryerson. Please! Just don’t say anything, not to anybody, and especially not to that bunch of bums you’re always running out when you’re out at the farm. You wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t betray me, would

“After waiting all these years. Then ruining it for myself?

“Only a kiss, Ryerson. Please, sweetheart. You mustn’t expect more.”

The kiss was all mixed up with her tears and laughter, and they would have to worry later about all the guilt.

"I can almost convince myself that there’s nothing wrong with it," she said. "Nothing wrong with a sister kissing her brother goodbye, is there? And yet we both know there is a whole lot wrong with that kind of kiss, don't we? If you only knew how

many times I wanted to do that. And, of course, we have done more, though only when I was really, really drunk, right there in the lower hall of the old homeplace, not everything, not close to it, I guess, but enough so that the very thought has haunted me ever since. And the good Lord help me, I don't even feel guilty about it. About that or anything else. I guess that part will come later. Oh, yes, I know myself well enough to know that it very definitely will come later and I will hate myself and we both must swear never to let it go any further."

"I swear."

“You have to swear as though you mean it."

He forced another kiss even more deeply troubling and smoldering and exciting than the first two and felt his hand slowly finding its way up her skirt. She fell back flushed and palpitant against the stair wall, her voice faltering again as she grasped her chest and tried to hold herself steady. His hand went further, snagging her panties, bringing them down, fondling at last the lovely dark dish of fondest dessert for which it seemed sometimes he had been waiting his whole life long.

She did not look at him again. “Please, sweetheart, please.” She simply grabbed her bags again and hurried off. “We can’t talk of it. Never, ever, Ryerson.”

He watched her go out the screen and down the steps, feeling the same inner glow he had felt the first time they had inhaled smoke from the same cigarette. He felt it a long time after she had gone, the funny damp hard hot print of the kiss still on his lips, hating himself for refusing to press an advantage that he didn't even know he had, feeling the throb even now of her hot palpitant cunt on his hands.

He followed her on out to the car, a spanking new white Pontiac convertible her stepfather had brought her for Christmas. "No time, Ryerson. There's no time for that. Ryerson, we both know that there will never be any time for that and that we have already come too close too committing some kind of horrible crime, and that we will just have to forget it and not mention it in any of our letters or anything or ever talk about it

again as long as we live."

She did not mention it in the letter she wrote to him not long after that or in the card she sent him for his birthday and he began to wonder if she would refuse to come to see them at all that summer for fear of the one thing they could never talk about again. Not long after the holidays his mother had lapsed into another spell of the deep melancholia that he at least partly blamed on the house itself.

He and father drove her up to Morganton one day in July and came back to town late that evening and father locked up the house next day and drove Ryerson out to the farm to help with the tobacco priming. His first thought was of Deni, where she was, whether she would be paying her usual summer visit. Something besides the heat to keep him awake at night. God, how could he ever forget those kisses!

His father would come always come to Dobbs Station for Sunday church services and dinner at the farm, hungover or not from one of his Saturday night drinking bouts. Otherwise, Ryerson wasn’t seeing much more of him than he had at any time since reaching his teens. What troubled him far more than his father’s prolonged absences was the feeling that he could no longer count on seeing Deni out at the farm, as he had for the past three summers. It was late—revival time—harvest time—and still neither he nor his father had heard anything from her. He had tried to think of how he could write to her without mentioning anything and yet hinting at everything, and he realized that that would gain him nothing and perhaps lose him everything.

Yet there were reasons why the country was a whole lot better for him now.

Uncle Worsham no longer took time to lecture him on the perilous state of his soul or to search his jeans for cigarettes and fuckingrubbers, as he had done, with some help from Aunt Sally, during his first summer there.

He was then only a young evangelist fresh out of the New Orleans Baptist Seminary. It was rough that first summer, with his uncle constantly struggling to drag him up to the confessional. But the preacher had mellowed quite a bit since those days, now that he had come home to Dobbs Station to stay and was no longer seeking to make a name for himself as an itinerant evangelist.

Mellowed, yes—but that was not to say that he would ever have been quite so dull a fellow as Emmett Holt. That would hardly have been possible; but he did seem to have lost some of the fire of his first days in the ministry. Almost everybody had noticed it. Some had grown concerned and begun to murmur about it in private, much as they had when Aunt Alicia was always so ill or when his mother was preparing to return for more treatments at the rest home.

Uncle Worsham and Aunt Esther had their own home now, the pastorage just beyond the church on the road to Chinnereth. They had no children: two boys, one of whom would have been just Ryerson’s age, had died in a car crash one Sunday afternoon as they were returning home from a family reunion. It was then that his uncle’s thoughts first began to turn to the Lord. No one knew why Esther had never consented to have more children.

So Ryerson so a whole lot less of him now than during those summers right after the war when he had returned from New Orleans to conduct his first revivals in Dobbs Station, spending half his time trying to bring Ryerson into his own way of life. It was the fuckingrubber that finally ruined everything for them both. His aunt Sally, gaunt, persevering and menacing as ever, had found the unused condom in his jeans as she was getting ready to throw them in the wash tub and turned it over to the preacher, whose astonishment at the discovery of so satanic a device on his own nephew drove him a little wild, leaving him with no doubt that the boy had cast his lot with the powers of darkness and would never find his way back to the foot of the Cross.

The preacher had nervously confronted him with the “nefarious device” in the parlor before church one evening and, later, after getting no assurances that Ryerson would change his way of life, enlisted the help of Odell Washburn, an imbecilic farmhand who had been one of Worsham Wile’s earliest converts and whose strength was legendary throughout Dobbs Station, as a way of forcibly dragging him to the altar.

A couple of good blows beneath the belt had rid him of Odell’s menacing presence and Ryerson had raced home to pack his bags only to meet the preacher as he was returning from church. “A moment, son! A moment, please!” It was a crucial moment in the ministry of young Worsham Wiles. Not for what happened at the church but for happened later, back at the homeplace. Ryreson had retreated into a huge barn way off to the rear of the house and there, under a late moon, from among the great stacks of bailed hay, with his uncle still uttering his wild execrations of death and eternal

damnation, Ryerson threatened to “cut out his gizzard” with a pitchfork.

The preacher fell all the way out of the hayloft, and the boy suddenly envisioned himself in the morning headlines:

--Youth Held in Pastor’s Death--

The preacher recovered a little at a time, crawled out of the barn and went hobbling crippled back to the house. Since then, a good four years now, the preacher had hardly spoken to him alone. A hard medicine to swallow, but he plainly realized by now that he had lost the fight to reclaim Ryerson from among the Lost—so what was to be gained by constantly dwelling on it?

During those first summers, before his uncle had taken over the Dobbs Station pastorate, he and his wife had stayed at the farm, in the room directly beneath Ryerson’s, the same room Aunt Sally had now taken for her own. She had spent her whole life in that house, her only reprieve those Sunday mornings she spent in the choir loft, which she had occupied and dominated almost as much as the old homestead itself.

For the boy a fever of death still hung over that bedchamber and still, at odd moments, would revive anguished memories of his grandfather’s death—of those long ago winter afternoons when he had come there with his mother, before she had fallen into the grip of a dread emotional disease, to sit by the meager hearth fire and watch the old man struggling to lift himself from his wretched pillow and swearing that he would find a way—God be his witness!—to burn the house down if somebody didn’t bring him a

drink of the whisky that had been his whole life for the past thirty or forty years.

He had lain there all through the winter of thirty-nine and forty, fiendishly bedridden from the broken hip that would not kill him, at least not right away, but only keep him from finding his way back to all those secret nooks where he kept his liquor hidden from “all those damned Puritanical bitches” who had somehow taken over his life.

He spent most his days either sleeping restlessly or rising up in a mad passion waving his walking cane that was no longer of any use except to drive away unwanted visitors and screaming for somebody to sneak him his quota of drink before those “damnable hellish women” found out about it and started pouring all his liquor down the sink and lecturing him on how thirsty it would be for him down there in Hell and how he might as well getting used to it now.

Was it true that the old man had forever hardened his heart against the Lord despite all the times he had driven his preacher out of the pulpit and delivered his own drunken, wildly accusatory sermons that had permanently driven at least three women, previously thought righteous and unbending in their allegiance to the Holy Spirit,right smack out of the church forever. Of all the people who had tried to “save” the old man during those last days, only Ryerson’s aunt Voncile offered any real hope.

Voncile, who had married into the family after her own long history of whoredom and such like, had now grown famous as a savior of women who had fallen into her own way of life. It was she who came at last to pray over the old man and read

scripture to him (and also sneak him a bit of whisky) and in the end assure the family that he had indeed accepted the Lord in those last moments before his death. All those

worried family members felt a whole lot better about him after that even if they didn’t feel a whole lot better about Voncile.

His uncle, too, who was already feeling the call of the Holy Ghost, had taken a turn at praying over the old man, prayers far more fervent and moving than those of Voncile, though when all was said not nearly as effective, maybe because he would never have consented to let that old devil whisky help him with the work

---

Ryerson had won an honorable mention on the all-regional football team during his junior year at Old Fork and was more a part of the crowd now. He could even begin to think seriously about making a name for himself as a college running back.

On revival nights he always made one with Haskins and Slob Jordan and Red Settle and sometimes Wheaties Washburn when they came by the church looking for girls. Mostly it was just a waste of time. They would usually end up shooting billiards at the Chinnereth pool room or hanging around Crystal Lake or the Reynolds Park Skating Rink or circling the Winston courthouse and listening to Red Settle complain about how he had gone almost a full day now "without getting me a piece."

Ryerson had stayed on at the county school against all the wishes of his mother.

She had wanted the best education for him, and she greatly feared he would never get it at Old Fork. What she didn't know for a long time was that he was determined not to get it

anywhere. He hated all kinds of reading except dime-store trash and Erskine Caldwell.

There was something else as well. Going back to the city high school would likely imperil all of his athletic ambitions. Not because he wasn't fast enough or strong enough to compete with the Reynolds High hotshots, but only because it was "all politics" at the city school.

That was what his father always said. Because it was a school mostly dominated by the sons and daughters of tobacco and textile millionaires. So it was good to be back at the farm even if it had meant that his mother would have to go away again, even if nobody could never be sure anymore whether she would ever be well enough to live out her life in the house she had wanted above all else—the one place where she thought she could be happy only to have it destroy her in the end.

Please log in or sign up to review this excerpt.