preacher named Snowden Wright. He’d been born with one arm—where the other should have been, up at his shoulder, was a nub with six tiny fingernails. As desperate as the army was for soldiery, they still sent him back home (all four times) he tried to sign up.
Once he’d resolved to stay, however, he took charge of the town, swearing to help all the wives while their men were gone fighting. He did their farmwork and preached Sunday sermons and counseled the ladies at their daily lives. He solved their disputes. Advised them. Whipped their unmindful boys and girls and comforted the wives in their darkest hours.
Then one morning, as he collected eggs in his henhouse, a possum dropped from the rafters onto his neck and bit him. He suspected the animal had the ray bees as daylight appearances were unusual for its kind, as was the savagery this specimen displayed. He caught it and put it in a cage and watched it refuse water and bat itself against the wire and slobber and try to bite him.
A thoughtful, self-educated man, the Reverend Wright had squatted before the cage for hours, clutching his Bible and staring as the creature snapped at him and ground its face through the wire mesh with no thought to pain or self-preservation, as if all the world’s rapture lay in the union of tooth and flesh. Day, night, Wright watched the creature thrash itself to death, the preacher thinking,
He burned the possum when it finally succumbed, and on waking several mornings later with sweats and shivers, ill at the sight of water, he had the ladies of his church lock him in a makeshift cell he’d built in the livery barn and assign a guard. Day and night he fought the disease, alternately praying and cursing God, ripping his clothes off, tearing his skin with his own fingernails. Bruises flowered on his chest and shoulders from his battering the bars. He endured fits where he couldn’t remember his own name but also relished spells of clarity, his eyes pooling at the beauty of sunlight patterned on wood and a chain’s oiled grace. In these calm moments he knew the position of every insect in the barn and could tell one sparrow’s voice from another and see in the dark.
He called for his daughter, a girl abnormally tiny and sixteen years of age. She had good handwriting and as he lectured and preached she copied down what she heard. How his condition had revealed truth he otherwise wouldn’t have known. The ray bees, he said, were the living key to God and God had told Snowden Wright that He, God, was making him, Wright, a prophet, that they should alter their church to the ways of his telling.
Write! he would shriek at his daughter when she fell asleep at the school desk they’d set outside the cage. He spoke rapidly, babbling at times, contradicting himself at others, his eyes opaquing as he squatted in the hay, naked as Adam in the bliss before the serpent, saying his strange, brilliant things.
And when Wright called to her from his cell, his daughter put down her tablet and pencils and slipped out of the school desk, straightened her skirts.
Get the key off the wall, her daddy said.
Because he was her father, she obeyed, she let herself into his cell where he rose naked from the hay. Because he was her father, she submitted to his will. Then he called for her younger sister, and for the other daughters of the town, and they were brought to his cell and he had his way with them.
In two days, when he started trying to bite the girls, they became afraid to go in, and he died within a week after being bitten, snapping his teeth to the last and incoherent in his babbling, his daughter still trying to write it all down. When they were sure he’d passed away, the girl disappeared upstairs in the large house where the family lived. She missed her father’s funeral, so consumed was she to compare the views he’d dictated and create her definitive version. The document she presented to her sister and the other ladies of the church two days later was what came to be known as the Scripture.
What did it say, Evavangeline asked.
Ike paused. It laid out they new beliefs. And they mission. The ladies was to keep em a mad-dog, ye see. They call it a struck dog, I call it a mad-dog. Keep it in a cage, and that Scripture say the ladies supposed to infect ever boy child with the ray bees. The little boys they had already, six or seven of em too young to go die in the War, was the first to be
All them girls, Ike went on, they knowed what was in store for they babies when they come. The girls had seen the ladies of the church let the mad-dog bite they brothers and they’d seen the boys in they cages. Going mad. Trying to bite they mothers when they come visit em. Ulrica and her little sister Elrica and all the other girls knocked up by Snowden Wright knew they ’d have to let that mad-dog bite they boys when they was old enough. They mothers would make em.
Why? asked Evavangeline.
Cause they believed that when that chosen child got born, all they faith would be rewarded. All them other boys the ray bees had killed would rise up from the dead like Judgement Day.
Who was that turnip, Smonk asked, up the steps yonder?
Her eyes followed his finger. My Chester, she said. My boy. She blinked at him. You killed him.
I did. Chester’s bit his last.
For a long moment Mrs. Tate stared at him through the candlelight. A tear wending down the wrinkles in her face.
Those were impossible days, she said. You won’t understand. You weren’t there. We ladies and children cut off from the rest of the county while the North destroyed us a boy, a man, at a time. We were all alone out here, fourteen ladies and twenty children. No letters, no news. Four long years. One one-armed preacher and one damned possum.
Tell me about ye daddy, Smonk said.
Mrs. Tate sighed her foul breath into the air. Daddy, she said. Well. He was fair enough to look at, I guess. Except for his absent arm. I used to be afraid of the little nubbins up on his shoulder. He could wiggle them. Used to make the boys giggle and scare us girls upstairs.
Her face changed.
But he had lovely black hair, Daddy did. He wore it long. Wore his beard long too. Gray at the edges. His back muscles were so pretty and shiny when he’d cut wood in that onehanded way of his with his shirt off.
The old woman inhaled and closed her eyes. He was a good speaker, too, she said. Of sermons, I mean. Every Sunday, a new one. He’d read from the Song of Songs. We ladies and girls fanning ourselves and squirming in our pews. She lowered her voice. If he got you off alone he could sweet-talk you, too, make you feel special, and so, by the time the War ended, we were all in love with him—even my sister Elrica and me, his own daughters. Our mother had died ten years before. Daddy would visit this lady or that each night and lend council. That’s what he called it. But it was good council because he was in constant demand. Fix this fence. It’s a fox after our chickens! My Jimmy’s got the measles and high fevers. Come sit the night with him, come comfort my soul.
Smonk tilted his gourd. He offered it to Mrs. Tate but she ignored him.
When that possum bit Daddy we were all terrified. In danger of losing our only man. But he calmed us down. Daddy. He told us what would happen. Said it was God’s plan. God was watching us, couldn’t we feel His eye? And we could, somehow, Daddy, we could. You felt bathed in His light. It felt as if He had noticed us. God. As if His eye had fixed on Old Texas.
Smonk belched.
Ike told how Ulrica, always a child who’d lived in fantasies, who’d played with sprites and danced with fairies, believed in the Scripture she’d written, and as her belly swelled with her daddy’s child she prayed for the strength to trust the Lord as Abraham had on that unthinkable walk up the mountain when he was about to sacrifice his only son. But Ulrica’s sister Elrica, who was fourteen, didn’t believe the Scripture. The younger sister hated her daddy for doing what he’d done to her and hated herself for letting him do it.
But her love for the baby inside her got bigger as he did. She would not let the church ladies have him, she decided, she would not let them feed her child to a mad-dog. She left the house one midnight and walked out to the place called Niggertown and had the baby there but died having it, he was so big and she so tiny. Before she died, though, she made the midwife promise never to let Old Texas get her son. She told what horrors transpired in that fallen town. Even as her baby suckled its first and last from its mother.
