“The great gift of baptism which makes us clean and acceptable—” “Amen!”
Doll put her arm around her and said, “You come on now. Doane says so.” They were gathering up their things, to get away from the noise, so they could get some sleep and nobody would be tramping around, stepping over them. If Arthur and the boys didn’t show up just then, they’d find their camp soon enough. But nobody knew where Mellie was. So the rest of them had to go off down the road while Doane stayed there watching for her. Lila thought those lamps in the trees were the most beautiful things she had ever seen, and that fiddle was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard, and it didn’t seem right that Doane, who said he hated it all, should send them away while he stayed behind. But in those days they still minded him, and there was comfort in it.
Mellie turned up finally when the preaching was over. She came walking up the road, tagging after Doane. She was drenched head to foot. Her pant legs were scraping from the wet. She said, “I fell in.”
Doane said, “Was it one of them preachers pulled you out?”
“Don’t matter. I’m just glad somebody did. I coulda drownt.”
“Was it one of them preachers told you to step into the river in the first place?”
“Them rocks is slippery. I fell in.”
“So I guess you got yourself saved.”
“I never said that.”
“I got a dollar says you’re still the same rascal you always been.”
“Well,” she said, “if you even got a dollar, it’s because I sold some of them damn apples.”
He laughed. “Sounds like I won my bet already.”
She said, “There wasn’t no bet. I fell in.”
If Lila told the old man that story he would laugh, and then he would probably wonder about it. She would tell him that Mellie always had to try whatever it was she saw other people doing. She was just curious. For the next few days she might have been checking to see if there was any change in her, because she would be mean for no reason, pinching and poking when no one was bothering her at all. Or she might have been letting Doane see that she wasn’t saved and didn’t want to be, either. Was she baptized or not? Say she walked into the water to be dunked and prayed over like the other people, just to see what it felt like. It was only her nature, poor ignorant child. What would the Good Lord have to say about that? If Lila had gone with her, she would probably have done the same thing, because she generally did what Mellie did, if she could do it. So there would have been the singing, and the lantern light sweeping out over the river, and some man with his hands under her back and her head, lowering her down into the water and lifting her out again, and then wiping the water away from her face as if it were tears, Hallelujah! Lila had seen it done any number of times. There were always meetings and revivals.
Clean and acceptable. It would be something to know what that felt like, even for an hour or two.
Well, she might start going to church again. Then she would feel better about taking her beans and her potatoes, and besides, she had let the weeds get out of hand. It’s best to weed after a good rain. The next day was a Monday, and she could always find somebody who wanted help with the wash. And she’d be done by evening, so she could stop by the preacher’s and do a little gardening, and have a nice supper afterward. If he walked out along her road, he’d see she was all right.
She read over the page she had been copying from. There were the same words over and over— He saw that it was good, And the evening and the morning. So she turned to the page she had dog-eared, and found the beginning of that book, the Book of Ezekiel. Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. She wrote it ten times. Her bedroll had been hanging from a nail, so it wasn’t really damp, and she had that sweater for a pillow. People start work early on wash day. She’d be awake in the dark as she always was. She’d practice her writing at dawn and be in Gilead while it was still barely morning.
* * *
She had bathed and waked the second time as she warmed herself in her blanket, thinking about things, and when there was light enough she took her tablet into her lap and opened her Bible beside her on the floor. She wrote, And I looked, and, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, a great cloud, with a fire infolding itself, and a brightness round about it, and out of the midst thereof as it were glowing metal, out of the midst of the fire. Well, that could have been a prairie fire in a drought year. She had never seen one, but she had heard stories. And out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they
