Long white hair caught back in a ponytail, he came slow up the creek bank, developing in the smoke borne on the east wind off the burning Okefenokee Swamp. He looked like a prophet of old, but not old, only weary in his longtime service to the Lord.
“I don’t know about you, Preach,” he said to the little boy sitting cross-legged before the dead campfire, “but I’ve about had a bait of these woods.”
It was cool along the creek bed, but soon the gummy green of the pines would be steeping in heat. The boy and his Uncle Duncan had stayed the night under the Toms Creek Bridge, Echols County line, and the slant morning shadow of the old wooden bridge was inching south along the bank of reeds, weeds and sand as the sun climbed higher.
Duncan kicked at the smutty firewood. More smoke. “Time to move on.”
Quarrelsome birds awked and tittered in the willows and cypresses that arched out over the black water stream. Just a stream, dry as the weather had been. But Duncan could smell the brassy odor of fish, yes he could, though he was no fisherman. Had been, they’d have had fish for supper the night before instead of hoecake and beans. It all tasted of smoke anyway. Next town, somebody would take them in, put them up for the night and feed them real food, food not seasoned with ash.
“I ain’t preaching no more,” said the boy. He slapped at a yellow fly—got him!—on his thin tanned right arm. His bubble-gum pink lips were set in a pout. A pretty boy of twelve, but conveniently runty, with a full glossy cap of straight black hair. “Last place,” he said, “they made light of me.”
“Hey! Listen, boy. You can’t take it personal.” Striking a domineering pose, Duncan hung his thumbs in the belt loops of his faded blue jeans and cranked one long leg out to lean forward. His pale eyes seemed to spring from their sockets. “Folks back there in Fargo just didn’t cotton to a preacher young as you.”
“Then how come you didn’t tell em I was twelve instead of eight?”
“Like I say, boy, twelve ain’t nothing for a preacher, but eight…now that’s a hook. Seen in the Guinness Book of World Records where this ten year old boy went to preaching, youngest to yet.” Duncan slung his head in exasperation, switching his white ponytail like a horse after flies. “How many times I tell you, you gotta have a hook?”
“Ain’t fun no more.” The boy poked with a stick at the smutty sugar sand around the smoking sticks of glazy charred wood.
“It’s a living, ain’t it?” Duncan’s voice rose. He peered up, blue eyes tearing from the smoke. “Ain’t rained, is all. Got em moody, this drought.” Twisting side to side, limbering up, he added, “Would be something, wouldn’t it, if we could get em all believing that the world’s least preacher’s got the inside on God, can preach up a rain.”
The boy squinted up at the white cloudless sky. “Ain’t gone rain.”
“Before long and you’ll go to growing. Won’t be the least preacher no more. Too big for your britches, so to speak.” Duncan’s voice quickened. “Now on your feet and let’s go.”
The camp fire caught with a snap and hiss and twining of flames.
Hiking west along the hot open highway, they met only a couple of log trucks loaded with huge sappy limbed trees, except for a black sports car going in the other direction.
U.S. map in his hip pocket and black pack on his back, Duncan turned in the wind of the passing car as if blown into a spin. “Florida bound!” he called out. “I bet you a Popsicle, Preach, they bound for Jacksonville.” Times like that Duncan looked spirited and young—even the toes of his dirty white tennis shoes would turn up—but his sharp face was as wrinkled and used as the map. People said he looked a little like Willie Nelson and he liked that.
The boy’s brown cowboy boots clicked on the gravel. (Burning up the soles and then expecting more shoes, so figured Duncan.) "I ain’t studying them.” The boy walked on—filthy green twill shorts and orange striped knit shirt about two sizes too small. Really the boy looked more proud than pitiful. It was that very same pride that was beginning to break Duncan’s heart. Almost a year on the road, selling the boy off as the world’s littlest preacher, in the spread-out humble little towns of North Florida and South Georgia, and Duncan was beginning to go soft. He felt like a pimp.
He caught up with the boy. “Soon as we get to Statenville, I’m gone get you a Popsicle. What say?” A thin hemp rope held up his jeans; blue shirt knotted at his waist above the rope knot. Same old-blue color as his eyes.
The boy shifted the green canvas satchel on his back. Didn’t answer, which meant okay. Or maybe he was too thirsty to speak. They had been on the road over an hour without water.
The smoke was thick and smothering in spots and squiggly heat waves like fumes of gasoline rose from the pavement. The burning swamp was now some twenty-odd miles behind them, but the heat of the sun felt like the fire was gaining on them. Dead ashes drifted like snow, flurried and sifted down. Sere fields of broomsage contrasted with side-grounds and backgrounds of ever-green pines—reminder that all was not dead yet. Wide shoulders of dry grass kept the shade from Duncan and the boy and more than once they’d been lured off the highway by the shrill cheeping of frogs in vine-tented slews of cracked drying mud. But no water.
South and up ahead, around the curve in the road, Duncan could hear a strong whipping shishing sound, more vibrant than the flat ever-buzzing of the locusts in the deep flat woods. At one point the locusts’ buzzing had seemed a sign of heat stroke, then a sound always there, then nothing at all.
“What you reckon?” Duncan blew at the gnats swarming around his eyes. “Sounds like rain, don’t it?”
The boy kept walking, head hung and back bowed—going for that Popsicle, going just to be going, going till his uncle said stop.
Around the curve, they spied on their left a moving sweep of spun water falling over a field—red and yellow bell peppers on an open lake of green leaves. Smoke pushed back to the line of trees and blurred the edges like in a storybook picture of paradise.
“Dang irrigation,” said Duncan. “Now where you reckon they getting that water from?”
“Some creek, dummy.”
“Dummy, huh?” Duncan stopped walking, watching, a look of wonderment passing over his blistered face. “Yeah, these people’s hard-up for rain.”
They were then even with the outstretched robotic arms of the automatic irrigation system. Its swaging loops of rubber hose flinging water as it crept along and singing on the rank leaves and the waxy crayon-colored peppers. Of one mind for a change, the boy and Duncan loped down the ditch and climbed over the hogwire fence, dropping their back packs in the fence jamb shaded by a heat-gnawed turkey oak. Then they high-stepped, whooping, out into the patch of peppers, picked the reddest and began eating them like apples. Biting into the tart clean-tasting peppers, they waited in the path of the long left arm of the walking irrigation, backs to it and shoulders scrunched in anticipation and fear of the driving mock rain gaining on them like a storm.
Even expecting it, the blistering, deafening pellets of water came cold and surprising. In silence the boy ducked his head under one arm, suffering the blows. But Duncan lifted his face, bearing up under the wind and beating of the water, laughing like a mad man. The boy peeped out from under his arm, then raised his face to the prickling shower, eating, grinning. Shining his new large teeth with gaps between them—late bloomer, late baby-tooth-loser, fortunately. Last tooth he lost he got a quarter from a lady at the church in Folkston. Like that was some big deal.
“See, boy, this is what the rain’s gone feel like when you get done preaching here.”
Then the shower was gone, the arm had swept over them, going before them, taking with it the harsh whipping of water on leaves. In its wake, the wet peppers glistened like globs of tempera paint. Duncan’s blue shirt looked sheer, stuck to his ribby sides and back.
Mouth full of red pepper, the boy spoke up. “I ain’t preaching less you give me what money we take in to buy me a Game Boy with.”
There all along, a rainbow across the south end of the field suddenly caught Duncan’s eye. Perfect bands of purple, yellow, red, green and blue. Not a smear. Even the ends stuck fast in the pines to the east and the west were solid as painted steel stakes.
“Look, boy. Look at that rainbow.” Drenched, Duncan was eating a yellow pepper with one hand while shielding his eyes from the sun. “Kinda makes a man hate to leave this pretty world, don’t it?”
“I mean it about the Game Boy.” Preacher, dripping from crown to toes, chucked the scalloped end of the red pepper out into the thick green leaves. Not looking at the rainbow for spite.
Duncan remained transfixed. “Now this’s what heaven’s gone be like—wet, bright and cool of a summer morning.”
###
Shiny clean and dry except for his hair, the boy was dressed in his out-grown navy suit when at midday they passed the oak-shaded red brick schoolhouse on the edge of town. White ash like dandruff clung to Preacher’s hair and the padded shoulders of his cheap suit coat. The town up ahead, what they could see of it along the straightaway, looked fuzzy, bogged in smoke. A black bible was tucked under Preacher’s right arm. The bible had been passed down by Duncan and its fake-leather cover was torn in little tabs along the edges from much use during his own preaching days. His daddy before him—Preacher’s granddaddy—had likewise preached and failed. Church on the south side of Jacksonville never paid the timid old man enough and he had to take a job with the railroad, working Sundays, till finally he lost heart.
As for Duncan, he had tried to preach but had to give it up five or so years ago. For one thing, he hadn’t been called, the Spirit hadn’t been there. Another reason, he just couldn’t leave the women alone. And too he hadn’t had a hook. “Gotta leave the women alone,” he often told the boy. “Gotta have a hook to preach. Can’t catch a fish without a hook, or else be called; you can be the oldest or the youngest, the ugliest or the prettiest, but one thing you can’t be is a plain ole Joe if you haven’t been called.”
Preacher would redeem them both, Duncan and his daddy, father and son.
Four girls about Preacher’s own age, but taller, stood talking along the Hurricane fence of the schoolyard; they pretended not to see the boy. Like he cared!
They were dressed in skimpy knit shirts and low-riding dark blue jeans, uniforms from Gap. Little girls in training to be teenagers.
Walking several steps ahead of Preacher along the sidewalk, Duncan spoke. “How you little girls getting along?”
The shade of a huge old oak was littered with ash like squiggles of paper ripped from a ring-binder composition book.
One of the girls spoke. The others giggled and strolled off toward the cap-roofed main building of the school. The girl who had spoken followed with her blond ponytail and slim hips swinging. Their legs were as long as the boy was tall.
Duncan smiled, blue eyes bluer in his bright red face. He looked clean too, though dressed in a dirty white shirt and faded jeans. Shirt knotted at the waist, exposing his sucked in gut and navel like a macaroni seashell. “Looks like the good lord just went to making em out of legs, don’t it boy?”
Duncan was still walking and the boy was still trailing. Head hung and not about to give Duncan any satisfaction that he had heard.
“Got your goat, didn’t I? I mean speaking to em like that.”
“Huh!”
“Soon as we hook up with your mama in Macon, I’m gone see to it she signs you up for school.”
“She won’t be there; she won’t show up.”
“Shore she will, boy, shore she will.”
“I’d as soon stayed on in Jacksonville, me and you.”
“I ain’t no hand at settling down and raising younguns, you know that.” Duncan, still leading, glanced back at the boy—down to business now and in a deep study. “How come I ain’t never had none of my own.”
“You raising me on the road anyhow.”
“About half-raising,” Duncan mumbled. “But on-the-road’s different; me and you gets to see the sights. Try our luck at making you a bona fide preacher.”
“If Gramma had lived she wouldn’t of let you toll me off like that.”
“That’s a fact, boy. That’s a fact.” Duncan’s saintly mother had raised the boy. His sister, Preacher’s mother, popped in when she took a notion, then popped out when another notion struck. Duncan was just passing through when he got stuck with the boy.
Cooled by the irrigation and no longer burdened by the packs they’d left temporarily under the turkey oak, they felt lighter, fresher, revived from wilt. All except for the map in Duncan’s hip pocket—wilted, limp as cloth.
“Ain’t much to this place, far as I can tell.” Duncan took in the small frame houses facing each other on either side of the highway. Heaped shadows of large scattered live oaks with the dull sun overhead.
The boy caught up, limping on a blistered heel. “That mean we can go on? Maybe to Valdosta.”
A pickup truck passed with a load of produce, maybe cucumbers, maybe zucchini. Looked like a Mexican man doing the driving.
“Yep, they ripe for the picking,” Duncan said. “We’ll just stop off at the post office.”
From the schoolhouse to the crossing the rows of houses gave way to a brick Methodist Church on their right, then a red brick post office and boarded-up old service station; on their left was the courthouse square, white pipe railing around the red brick, flat-roofed, seventies-style courthouse. More oaks. American flags raised high in the smoke on metal poles with rankling chains.
Across the intersection, straight ahead, was a pickup truckload of dark-skinned teenage boys and girls, men and women, plus a few straggling children. Packed in the truck bed, eating and drinking colas and jabbering in Spanish.
“Look at that, Preach, will you?” Duncan stopped, as was his way, to look. It was as if he couldn’t focus with his feet in motion. “You’d think we was in Mexico if you didn’t know it was Georgia.”
The boy crossed the highway for the post office. He looked shrunk into his wrinkled navy suit, white shirt and red tie like a remnant from the high-flying flags; cheeky-faced and pug-nosed and smug as a little prince.
Mopping sweat with his handkerchief, Duncan caught up, stepped ahead and shoved through the glass door, out of the heat and into the refrigerated coolness. His skin looked slow-baked, like skin of roast turkey. “Dang if this air don’t feel good,” he said low.
There was a flower-sweet smell of room deodorizer but the smoke from outside overpowered it. Behind the wall of black mailboxes with combination dials, they could hear somebody shuffling paper. A cardboard box slammed the floor.
Passing through the second door on their left, they could see a stout woman with gray fixed hair behind the counter near another door. She was stooping over a cardboard box with a yellow cutter. “Yoo hoo,” she called without looking up. “Be with you in a jiff. Make yourself at home and look around.”
There was nothing to look at that Duncan and Preacher could find interesting. Green plaster walls and a few mail pricing posters; a small table on the wall behind them with a black ring-binder notebook full of photos of wanted criminals. On the counter separating the customers from the postmistress were a ballpoint pen attached by a string, a cash register, and a set of stainless steel scales for weighing packages.
The boy placed his black bible on the counter and stretched high and folded his arms on top of it, the better to see the woman, red-faced from bending, now headed their way. “I swannee, boy,” she said, hum-laughing, “if you don’t look like a little midget in a circus.” She pushed a wavy strand of gray hair from her bejeweled glasses.
The boy dropped his arms to his sides and stood eyeballing the woman over his bible.
Duncan looked down at the boy on his left and laughed. “Does, don’t he?”
“Little Mexican, I guess?” She hummed a laugh.
“Preach? Noooo.” Duncan stepped back to size up the boy. “But I been seeing a passel of em since we hit the city limits.”
“Migrants.” She rolled her bulging gray eyes and stepped closer. Denim slacks clinging to her huge hips and a white tee-shirt with the words GOD BLESS AMERICA tented over her breasts. Huge motherly breasts. Duncan couldn’t take his eyes off them.
“Big on produce farming hereabouts, huh?” Duncan propped his elbows on the counter.
“Bout took over the county.” She peeped over at the boy. “Well, if you ain’t a cutie in that suit!” Big hum. “And a bible, bless your heart. Ain’t you bout to burn up in that get-up?”
“He’s a preacher, ma’am.” Duncan turned solemn.
“Why, he’s just a baby.”
“Hey, lady, I’m going on thirteen.” The boy shot her a black look.
“Naw, boy,” said Duncan. Then to the postmistress, “He’s just messing with you, ma’am. He ain’t but eight. Real touchy about his age.”
She tilted her head. “I’d say so.” Her voice rolled and dipped, mingling with that humming laugh.
“The least preacher in the world,” Duncan said and stood tall and placed his left hand on the boy’s head. He ducked from beneath it.
“You oughta be in school, son,” said the woman.
Or picking peppers. Anything but preaching. “Preaching’s in his blood, ma’am,” said Duncan. “Me and my daddy before me was both preachers once upon a time.”
“So, you fellas travel the road preaching?”
“Stopped off here to pray up a rain for you folks,” Duncan added.
“”Pray up a rain, hum.” She leaned on the counter, breasts like twin props. “Well, honey, we could shore use one. But I figure the good Lord’ll send rain when he’s good and ready. What I say.”
She was going sour on them, Duncan could tell. “Being the least preacher in the world, he’s got a pure heart. You know what the good book says. Read to her, read it for the pretty lady, Preacher.”
The boy, still staring mean, slid the black bible from the counter and peered down, flipping pages with only the crown of his damp head showing. “Isaiah 11.6.” Balancing the bible against his chest, high up in order to see, left arm hooked around the top and right finger tracing the words, he began in a practiced but nervy voice. “Says here, ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.’” Stiff lipped and comically serious, he slapped the bible shut, denying the two sets of eyes fixed on him, especially the woman who was at that moment judging him to be either cute or a clever actor. Nobody ever took him serious because they thought he was just eight. All those months on the road, preaching, and he hadn’t saved a single soul.
“I declare if you don’t know your bible, honey.” She laughed, clapping her dainty but fat hands.
“That ain’t nothing.” Duncan chuckled, fanning both hands for silence. “Show her how you can preach, boy.”
The boy stepped to the middle of the room, arms hung loose by his side and his head bowed as if meditating. Then he began stomping his cowboy boots on the floor, tantrum-style. “I’m fired up, I’m fired up.” Speaking faster, louder and with a faint lisp and clenching both small fists. “I’m fired up for Jesus. Jesus is coming and I’m ready to go.” Suddenly he stopped, shuffled around, and turned his black eyes on the woman, speaking slow and low. “What about you, sister?” He stared down his finger and curled his lips like Elvis. “Are you ready?” Holding a point he just stood there, eyes fixed on her face.
“Precious,” she said, pressing her hands to her cheeks. “Just precious.” Then she leaned on the counter again, addressing Duncan. “But me being a Sunday school teacher myself I’d say that passage he read could be took another way.”
“You don’t reckon?” said Duncan, perking up. “I tell you what, a God-fearing woman like yourself could certainly be instrumental in putting together a revival in a place like this.”
“I don’t know about…” She looked behind her, then back again. “Folks in these parts has been going to church regular since 9-11. Course we have been trying to reach the migrants. They could use a good revival.”
“Not to mention a little rain, right?”
She wagged a ringed finger and laughed. “Now that I got my doubts about.” Sounded like she was swallowing bubbles. “We got irrigation now and peppers coming out of our ears. But I do wish this smoke’d let up. You can’t hardly go outside to water your flowers without choking. People with lung problems don’t go out atall.”
Duncan leaned closer. “Lady, you married?”
“Well, I …” She pushed away from the counter where she had been leaning, as if for a different perspective.
“Don’t mean to get personal with you, ma’am. I’m about to make a point.”
“Well yes I was. The good lord called him home, last Wednesday was four months ago.”
“Ah, I hate that. Don’t you, Preach?”
The boy was hiding behind the counter, sucking his thumb and batting his long eye lashes. Duncan eased the thumb from his mouth. “I bet it’s lonesome.”
“I make do. Now about that revival, y’all got a tent?”
“Ma’am, I tell you, we do but ain’t no call for a tent when it ain’t raining. Wide open spaces. That’s Preacher’s pulpit. Under the stars. Moon for light when it’s up.”
The black phone along the right wall behind her jangled. She answered it, talking, with her back to Duncan and the boy. She didn’t even try to hide the fact that she was telling somebody about Duncan and the boy, almost word for word what she said, what they had said. When she got to Duncan’s last line before the phone rang, she listened, humming and laughing, then said bye-bye and hung up.
“My sister, Ruth. Says it’s too hot and smoky for folks outdoors. Yellowflies’ll eat you up besides.”
So far things were going like Duncan expected. Next breath she would likely invite them to preach at her church.
“Listen, mister uh...”
“Duncan, ma’am. Duncan Metterer.”
“Mr. Duncan. Folks are kind of tenderhearted since 9-11 last year. Know what I mean? Wouldn’t hurt to have a lil ole boy like that tell in his own words how he come to the Lord after hearing about the bombing of the World Trade Center. Just might be the ticket to get people to give to the Victims’ Fund. And if a lil ole rain just happens to blow up wouldn’t hurt nobody’s feeling, I’m here to tell you.”
“Wouldn’t, no ma’am.”
“Where y’all staying at?”
“Well, ma’am, we generally camp out under a bridge.”
“Noooo.”
“Yes ma’am. Preacher claims it puts him in touch with the Lord on a regular basis.”
“I’d take y’all home with me if I wadn’t a widow. You know how people talk. I’d feed y’all some cornbread and fresh black-eyed peas. Like Jesus said, I was a stranger…”
The boy finished for her, reciting from memory, on and on in a bored tone. “I was in the slammer and you visited me,” he wrapped up, rolling his eyes.
“Hey,” she said, “that’s kind of cute. Just the kind of thing people’s gonna hook onto, what with television and Internet all the thing.”
She perked up, leaning in. “Listen, y’all come back by here tomorrow. Meantime I’ll see if our preacher won’t let the boy there speak on Sunday.”
Going out the door, into the heat and smoke, the boy asked his Uncle Duncan what the point was.
“The point?” They crossed at a diagonal under the red light at the intersection of 129 and 94. “I was just making up to her, trying to find out where she was married or not.”
Inside the cool triangular convenience store, Duncan bought the boy a grape Popsicle, then stood with him along the north wall, leaning against a bench of stacked rag rugs for sale. Both of them watching the smoke through the window and the Mexican’s passing in and out of the double glass doors like a turnstile. A steady babble of Spanish inside. Red, white and blue flags on T-shirts and caps reading Born in the USA, Proud to be an American and America Kicks Butt.
Tiny flags on sticks were stuck all along the three aisles, waving in the breeze of a paddle fan. Stale refrigerator air from the tall glassed cases along the back wall of the store struggled for first place with the sweat of the workers. A large decal of a flag on the front door was hand-smudged and fading. Through the doors and the sheet glass window on front of the store, Duncan could see the flag at the courthouse waving in the smoke.
On the white plaster wall to the right of the cash register and the cashier, who was ringing up cold drinks and snacks, was a colored newspaper picture of the same woman, a stout old blond, and several teenagers crowded around her, arms loaded with stuffed animals, a tumble of teddy bears at their feet: LOCAL STUDENTS AND SPONSOR EARN THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-THREE DOLLARS TO BUY STUFFED ANIMALS FOR CHILDREN OF 9-11 VICTIMS.
Holding a canned Coke, Duncan crossed his hands and his feet. “Okay, I’m onto em now, Preach. Got a handle.”
“What?” The boy licked the sides of the twin sickles on sticks to keep the juice from running down to the stained white cuffs of his shirt.
“Whole dang town’s after getting their picture in the newspaper.”
The boy stopped licking and began sucking on the dwindling tips of the Popsicle.
“Woman over yonder at the post office figgers to bring in a little cash from this crowd. Church against the school, you might say.”
“That don’t make no sense,” said the boy, watching a boy about his own age paying for his snacks at the counter ahead.
“They wanting earthly rewards for their good works and ain’t how it goes.” Duncan’s voice had changed from funning to critical, which always meant the boy had to lighten up and look out.
Preacher, in his navy suit with his bible under one arm, kept licking his grape Popsicle. His tongue was purple and his bisque skin had taken on a purplish cast.
“Course, much as anything,” Duncan said, “they like to bring back up that ole mellow feeling, crying and singing and hugging on one another like they done on September leven.”
Two Hispanic women, hippy in long print skirts, seemed to be arguing over a rack of potato chips.
“Hey,” Preacher said to Duncan, “how am I s’posed to get across to them?”
“Post office lady says them in school’s speaking pretty good English.”
Duncan tried out a little bible verse on a young boy passing. “Jesus wept,” he said. The boy grinned back at Duncan, then pushed on through the door to join the other workers on back of the pickup.
“They wouldn’t come no how,” Duncan said, swigging from a can of Coke.
He started out the door, leaving Preacher lapping at his melting Popsicle while trying to change modes from moody boy to man in charge.
They went back after their packs, left under the turkey oak east of town, then walked west again. The smoke was blowing on a hot wind and the sun looked like a full moon going down on a foggy morning. Beyond the crossing up ahead, they could see the concrete river bridge and on the right, a small cemetery with the same heat-wavy glittering concrete of headstones and white sand.
“Looks like she would’ve let us go home with her, don’t it, Duncan?” The boy was running to catch up. Boot heels clicking on the hot pavement. Smells of hot tar and smoke were stifling.
Duncan’s throat felt swollen, he was so hot and tired, and he was in no mood to humor the boy. Who strangely would suck up to Duncan when he acted as if he didn’t give a damn. “Preach or don’t,” he said, “I don’t give a damn. Ma run off and left you and me good enough to take you in.”
“She’ll be there, Duncan, you said she would.” The boy’s head hung and he was gazing down at his turned up boot toes.
“I know that sorry sister of mine, she won’t.”
“But you said me and you would just strike out and make a little cash, then hook up with her in Macon.”
Cemetery on the right, Duncan loped off down the dead weeds of the drain on his left, just a-getting it.
The boy ran, limping to catching up. “You said it, didn’t you?”
“I said it. I said a bunch of stuff. But that was before 9-11.”
A gray sand gully, washed when the river was last up, led down to the sloping white sand and the bridge with martins wheeping in the smoky sky and perching among the stanchions of the bridge pylons.
“9-11.” The boy was breathing hard, panting, had to pause talking to breathe. “What’s 9-11 got to do with anything?”
“You heard the post office lady—people changed. Ain’t no jobs, for one thing. People’s scared, for another.” Duncan stopped, staring out at the slow flowing creek-width brown water of the Alapaha, which was at that stage more sand than water. Standing along the water-scalloped edge of the river, he took a deep breath himself and framed his mouth with his hands. “ARE Y’ALL SAVED?” he shouted. The words echoed out over the water—SAVED, SAVED, saved. “If you died tomorrow, would you know you’re going to heaven?”
He turned to the boy behind him. “Need the Lord’s what they need. Need a boy like you to show em the way.”
“Why me?”
Fatherly all of a sudden, Duncan placed a hand on top of the boy’s head. “You young. Ain’t all full of piss and vinegar yet. Got a pure heart.”
Duncan walked off toward the shadow of the bridge, mumbling. “Course all you got a interest in is some old box of rattle and racket.”
The stout white pilings of the bridge had been blasted with spray paint, names of lovers in red. The sand was littered with broken glass and beer cans and scattered wood of campfires.
“A Game Boy,” Preach corrected, following. “Ain’t nothing wrong in that.”
“Some’d say so, some’d say not.” Again Duncan stopped at the ruffled edge of sand and lightly lapping water. “Don’t you bet they’s been a many a baptizing in this ole river?”
###
Good at her word, next day when they went to the post office, the lady had news for them. She was bubbling over with glad tidings.
“Yoo hoo!” she called out from the back. “Be with you in a jiff.”
“It’s us, ma’am, Duncan and the least preacher.”
She popped through the door like a burlesque dancer raring to go. “He said you could testify at church. Said to tell you to come to Sunday School”—speaking to the boy. “Course you’ll be in my class.” “Yessss!” Duncan tried to high-five her but she didn’t catch on, ducked instead. “What about that, Preach?”
The boy was standing behind Duncan, flipping through the photographs of fugitives—the most wanted. He had turned sour again for no good reason that Duncan could tell. He was used to the boy’s moods and the boy was used to his.
“Tomorrow morning, y’all come to the Baptist Church, left of the crossing, past the courthouse square. Now don’t think Brother Shawn is gone give up his whole hour, cause he’s not. But being who I am he’s took me at my word that the boy here knows his bible.” She looked around Duncan. “Yoo hoo, boy, you do don’t you?”
“He does,” Duncan answered for him. “Learnt hisself to read that away.”
The boy looked around, then went back to flipping the soulless faces of the fugitives, while Duncan and the woman talked.
Duncan didn’t blink an eye when she explained how the church was hoping to raise some extra cash for the families in New York who had lost loved ones on 9-11. Not just send some old teddy bears and junk, like some were still doing, she said, nodding in the direction of the store sitting diagonal to the crossing.
Everywhere Duncan and the boy had been was the same. Scraps from the love offering were mostly what they’d come to expect and got. He could feel the boy’s eyes drilling into his back.
“I tell you, ma’am,” speaking low, he said, “Preach here’s been on the road a good while now.” He whispered, “Mama run off awhile back.” Then louder, “He was kind a hoping for one of them Game Boy gizmos. Know what I mean?”
“One of them games plays that same organ-grinding music faster and faster?”
“Well, I don’t know…I…”
“That’s it,” said the boy, grinning falsely and stepping up to the counter with his bible clutched preacher-style under one arm.
“Honey, you gone ruin yourself, you go to messing with that stuff. All you need’s right in there.” She shook her finger at the bible with the burn of righteousness in her gray eyes.
Propped on one elbow, Duncan leaned into the counter and placed one filthy white tennis shoe atop the other. Eyeing the boy and the woman alternately. “Ain’t a dry eye in the house when the boy here goes to telling about how he was left an orphan after his grandma died.”
The woman leaned closer over the counter, whispering. “How’d she die?”
“We don’t know.”
“That’s too bad.” The woman shook her head. “Ain’t no tellings how many tourists went missing the morning them planes hit the twin towers Upthere. Mamas just like the boy’s there.”
“No, that was his grandmama died. My mama. Died right there in her house in Jacksonville.”
“I was just saying…you know…for all y’all know his mama could have been in one of those towers when they went down. ” The woman flipped her hands. Leaned again.
Duncan stood tall, voice heating up. “Well, beg your pardon, ma’am, but that’s all water under the bridge, wouldn’t you say?”
Knowing the signs of his uncle’s losing-it, Preacher scrunched his shoulders and stepped to the middle of the small square room, ready to rush out the door.
Duncan tempered his tone. “Sorry, ma’am. It’s just, here this place is about to dry up and blow away and y’all still stuck on some airplanes hitting a couple of buildings you ain’t never laid eyes on and didn’t even know was there before last year.”
The woman opened her mouth to speak, but didn’t. She looked slapped.
“Come on, Duncan,” the boy said, slinging his head in the direction of the door. “We got better stuff to do.”
Duncan hung his head, following on the heels of Preacher’s cowboy boots.
The woman leaned across the counter. “Listen, y’all. Ain’t no hard feelings and the offer still stands. Honey, you want to testify at our church tomorrow, I’ll see to it you’re treated right.”
Saturday night, camped out under the bridge, Duncan sat before a campfire, holding his knees, listening to the purling of the river and the fire snapping like shot. Stars overhead, no moon, no sign of rain. Earlier, before sundown, the dry east wind had quit blowing but a haze of smoke still drifted in layers across the dark water of the Alapaha and the standup punch-outs of black trees.
A car passed on the bridge, lights flashing against the concrete spindles, tires bumping over the seams in a measured whomp whomp whomp. Only after the car had gone, fading out in the direction of Valdosta, Duncan and the boy’s next destination, did Duncan’s ears pick up the trilling of the katydids. The cheeping of frogs up close and shrill as whistles, and downriver, in the deep woods, the harking calls of whippoorwills. Automobiles were slowing down and speeding up at the crossing, just east of the river. People talking and laughing—Spanish or English, Duncan couldn’t make out from the distance.
What held his attention, what voided his hearing, was watching the boy curled asleep on his green wool pallet with his back to the fire. Boots off and bare dirty toes like little turtle heads.
Tomorrow morning those same feet would be stomping up and down the aisles of the Baptist Church in his cowboy boots. Heating up for a sermon, after which the two of them would hike out west, seeking little towns with people willing to hear the little preacher preach along the way.
Preach’s long black lashes fluttered. The boy stretched long and rolled, facing Duncan. The thumb of his right hand was poised over his puckering lips as if he were sucking it in his dream. In his left hand was a white card—from across the fire Duncan could see a woman’s black and white image and a couple of lines of faint print. What? He watched for a minute then crawled around the slow burning fire to the feet of the boy, who smelled sour and of smoke. Carefully Duncan reached over and plucked the card from his hand. His fingers wiggled but he slept on.
On the far side of the fire again, Duncan leaned close to the flickering light, staring at the postage stamp size picture of his younger sister, Preacher’s mother. Straight blond hair, sharp face and a smile that lit up her pale eyes. The print read, “Bethann Staples: wanted for transporting drugs from Columbia to the US.
Last seen in airport vicinity of greater Jacksonville Florida. Reward for information leading to Staples’ capture and arrest.”
Knees up again, Duncan sat twiddling the card between his fingers and thumb. There never was a Macon with Mama waiting. Duncan wasn’t even sure there was a heaven with Jesus waiting, nor a hell with the devil waiting.
“Dang it all, boy,” he said low, staring up at the smudges of stars and the brighter pricks of light in the milky sky. One star in particular seemed to hang lower, sharper over the river. Had to be a hereafter, he thought. If there weren’t, then what would be the point? If an educated man could explain birth and death, that intricate quickening of life and phasing out of death, maybe Duncan would quit believing. As it was, there would be hell to pay for what he’d put this boy through.
“`I believe. Lord, help my unbelief.’” Duncan chuckled admiringly and slung his head. “Ole Peter, he was a sight hisself.”
He thought about the apostle denying Jesus three times before the cock crowed, just as his master had said he would. When he looked at the boy again he could see Jesus on the cross and it broke his heart.
###
Sunday morning, Duncan woke the boy late. He sat up, staring at his uncle, then out at the slow golden river and peaks of sand. His hair was sticking up, where he had pushed his bangs away from his unsunned forehead.
Last night the dew had been heavy as rain and it still dripped from the trees on the upper bank behind them and across the river where the facing sun lit the steep green bank. The smoke had lifted and the sky was blue and clean but heating up.
“Time to shake the dust off our shoes, boy,” said Duncan, leaning over to stir the corned beef hash in the small black skillet over the fire. It smelled good, real breakfast.
Last evening they had eaten wieners and beans, then bathed in the river and headed for the Jiffy Mart to get the can of hash for breakfast and another grape Popsicle for Preacher. The boy could live on Popsicles.
“What time is it?” The boy looked back at the sun rising above the tree tops. “We miss church?”
“Ain’t going. Let’s just say you ready to retire from being the least preacher. Guess you never was called no more than me or my old man. I’m the one called you.” Duncan began spooning the hash to a paper plate. “And you was good at it too. Wouldn’t surprised me if you couldn’t of prayed up some rain for these folks. But looks like everwhere we go here lately people’s got a itch to talk about the big bombing in New York. Well, we ain’t never even been to no New York, ain’t hardly been out of Georgia and Florida. We preached to the needs of the place we happened to be at. Like Jesus done.”
“So we going on to Macon?” The boy scrambled around on his bedding, damp and limp with dew.
“Ain’t going there neither.”
“She wouldn’t be there no how.”
“No, she wouldn’t be there no how.”
Packed up and read to roll west, Duncan led out up the weed-choked slope near the east end of the river bridge. Boy trudging behind him. The dead grass was dewy and the smoke from the burning Okefenokee was rolling back, heavier than ever.
Where the bridge met the highway, they stopped, waiting for a small white car heading west to cross the bridge ahead of them.
The car slowed, pulled off on the shoulder of the road and stopped not two feet from Duncan and the boy.
“Yoo hoo,” the driver called, waving, and out stepped the post office lady in a high-waisted khaki skirt and white shirt, which she had to tug down over her great hips and stomach. She reached back inside and picked up what looked like a thin gray plastic box and came high-stepping through the purple verbena in flat white shoes to where Duncan and the boy were waiting.
“Y’all missed a mighty fine sermon,” she trilled.
“Well, I hate that, ma’am. I do.” Duncan adjusted the pack on his back and stood, one foot forward on the gravel road.
“For you.” She held out the box to the boy.
He took it, eyes wide and almost smiling. “A Game Boy.”
“Thank the lady, Preach,” Duncan said.
“Well, it’s the least I can do.” Already she was bustling toward her car again, stepping high in white flats and dark stockings. “All them teddy bears and stuff for Yankee youngun’s who’ll likely laugh at what we send.”
She got into her car, backing onto the ramp of the cemetery road on the other side of the highway, then forward towards the little town buried in white smoke.
Head high, Duncan in the lead listened to the Game Boy’s icecream-truck jingle, growing faster and louder as they neared the far end of the bridge.