The Stand

Christopher and Susy came and said they wanted to get her on the city water, she had turned them down just as she had turned down Molly and Jim on their kind offer of a flushing toilet. They had argued that her dug well was shallow, and it could go dry if there was another summer like 1988, when the drought came. It was true, but she just went on saying no. They thought she had flipped her wig, of course, that she was taking coat after coat of senility the way a floor takes varnish, but she herself believed her mind was pretty nigh as good as it had ever been.

She hoisted herself off the privy’s seat, dusted lime down through the hole, and slowly let herself out into the sunlight again. She kept her privy sweet, but they were dank old places no matter how sweet they smelled.

It was as if the voice of God had been whispering in her ear when Chris and Susy offered to see that she was put on the city water… the voice of God even way back when. Molly and Jim wanted to get her that china throne with the flush-lever on the side. God did speak to folks; hadn’t He talked to Noah about the ark, telling him how many cubits long and how many deep and how many wide? Yes. And she believed He had spoken to her as well, not from a burning bush or out of a pillar of fire, but in a still, small voice that said: Abby, you are going to need your hand-pump. You enjoy your lectricity all you want, Abby, but you keep those oil-lamps of yours full and keep the wicks trimmed. You keep the cold-pantry just the way your mother kept it before you. And mind you don’t let any of the young folks talk you into anything you know to be against My will, Abby. They are your kin, but I am your Father.

She paused in the middle of the yard, looking out at the sea of corn, broken only by the dirt road going north toward Duncan and Columbus. Three miles up from her house it went to tar. The corn was going to be fine this year, and it was such a shame that no one would be around to harvest it but the rooks. It was sad to think that the big red harvesting machines were going to stay in their barns this September, sad to think there would be no husking bees and barn dances. Sad to think that, for the first time in the last one hundred and eight years, she would not be here in Hemingford Home to see the time of the change as summer gave in to pagan, jocund autumn. She would love this summer all the more because it was to be her last—she felt that clearly. And she would not be laid to rest here but farther west, in a strange country. It was bitter.

She shuffled over to the tire swing and set it to moving. It was an old tractor tire that her brother Lucas had hung here in 1922. The rope had been changed many times between then and now, but never the tire. Now the canvas showed through in many places, and on the inside rim there was a deep depression where generations of young buttocks had set themselves down. Below the tire was a deep and dusty groove in the earth where the grass had long since given up trying to grow, and on the limb where the rope was tied, the bark had been rubbed away to show the branch’s white bone. The rope creaked slowly and this time she spoke aloud.

“Please, my Lord, my Lord, not unless I have to, I’d have you take this cup from my lips if You can. I’m old and I’m scared and mostly I’d just like to lie right here on the home place. I’m ready to go right now if You want me. Thy will be done, my Lord, but Abb’s one tired shufflin old black woman. Thy will be done.”

No sound but the creak of the rope against the branch and the crows off in the corn. She put her old seamed forehead against the old seamed bark of the apple tree her father had planted so long ago and she wept bitterly.

That night she dreamed she was mounting the steps to the Grange Hall stage again, a young and pretty Abagail, three months quick with child, a dusky Ethiopian jewel in her white dress, holding her guitar by the neck, climbing, climbing into that stillness, her thoughts a millrace, yet holding above all to one thought: I am Abagail Freemantle Trotts, and I play well and I sing well. I do not know these things because anyone told me.

In the dream she turned slowly, facing those white faces turned up to her like moons, faced the hall so richly alight with its lamps and the mellow glow thrown back from the darkened, slightly steamed windows and the red velvet swags with their gold ropes.

She held firmly to that one thought and began to play “Rock of Ages.” She played and her voice came out, not nervous and restrained, but exactly as it had come out when she had been practicing, rich and mellow, like the yellow lamplight itself, and she thought: I am going to win them. With the help of God I am going to win them over. Oh my people, if you are thirsty, will I not bring water from the rock? I will win them over, and I will make David proud of me and Mamma and Daddy proud of me, I will make myself proud of myself, I will bring music from the air and water from the rock —

And that was when she saw him for the first time. He was standing far back in the corner, behind all the seats, his arms folded across his chest. He was wearing jeans and a denim jacket with buttons on the pockets. He was wearing dusty black boots with rundown heels, boots that looked as if they had walked many a dark and dusty mile. His forehead was white as gaslight, his cheeks red with jolly blood, his eyes blazing blue diamond chips, sparkling with infernal good cheer, as if the Imp of Satan had taken over the job of Kris Kringle. A hot and fleering grin had pulled his lips back from his teeth into something close to a snarl. The teeth were white and sharp and neat, like the teeth of a weasel.

He raised his hands out from his body. Both of them were curled into fists, as tight and hard as knots on an apple tree. His grin remained, jolly and utterly hideous. Drops of blood began to fall from his fists.

The words dried up in her mind. Her fingers forgot how to play; there was a final discordant jangle and then silence.

God! God! she cried, but God had turned His face away.

Then Ben Conveigh was standing up, his face red and flaming, his small pig’s eyes glittering. Nigger bitch! he shouted. What’s that nigger bitch doing up on our stage? No nigger bitch ever brought music from the air! No nigger bitch ever brought water from the rock!

Answering cries of savage agreement. People surging forward. She saw her husband stand up and attempt to mount the stage. A fist hit him in the mouth, bowling him over backward.

Get those dirty coons in the back of the hall! Bill Arnold hollered, and somebody pushed Rebecca Freemantle into the wall. Someone else—Chet Deacon, by the looks—wrapped one of the red velvet window curtains around Rebecca and then tied her in with one of the gold ropes. He was yelling: Looka here! Dressed coon! Dressed coon!

Others rushed over to where Chet Deacon was, and they all began to punch and pummel the struggling woman under the velvet drape.

Mamma! Abby screamed.

The guitar was plucked from her nerveless fingers and smashed to strips and strings on the edge of the stage.

She looked wildly for the dark man at the back of the hall, but his engine had been set in motion and was running sweet and hot; he had gone on to some other place.

Mamma! she screamed again, and then rough hands were hauling her from the stage, they were under her dress, pawing her, tweaking her, pinching her bottom. Her hand was pulled sharply by someone, yanking her arm in her socket. It was put against something hard and hot.

Ben Conveigh’s voice in her ear: How do you like MY rock of ages, you nigger slut?

The room was whirling. She saw her father struggling to get at the limp form of her mother, and she saw a white hand holding a bottle come down on the back of a folding camp chair. There was a rattle and a smash, and then the jagged neck of the bottle, twinkling in the warm glow of all those lamps, was thrust into her father’s face. She saw his staring, bulging eyes pop like grapes.

She screamed and the force of her cry seemed to break the room apart, to let in darkness, and she was Mother Abagail again one hundred and eight years old, too old, my Lord, too old (but let Thy will be done), and she was walking in the corn, the mystic corn that was rooted shallow in the earth but wide, lost in the corn that was silver with moonglow and black with shadow; she could hear the summer nightwind rustling gently through it, she could smell its growing, wholly alive smell as she had smelled it all her long, long life (and she had thought many times that this was the plant closest to all life, the corn, and its smell was the smell of life itself, the start of life, oh she had married and buried three husbands, David Trotts, Henry Hardesty, and Nate Brooks, and she had had three men in bed, had welcomed them as a woman must welcome a man, by giving way before him, and there had always been the yearning pleasure, the thought Oh my God how I love to be sexy with my man and how I love him to be sexy with me when he gets me what he gets me what he shoots in me and sometimes at the instant of her climax she would think of the corn, the bland corn with its roots planted not