“I know.” Ephram looked back at the house to make sure Ruby was still sleeping. He rubbed his fingers. Their soreness made him smile.
“It ain’t funny. She come in church all tore up right before elections, look like she been ravished. When she commence to talking, you couldn’t knock folks over with a dick.”
A cock crowed somewhere off in the distance as if to emphasize Gubber’s point.
“First she say how she can’t sleep all that night what with hearing demons scurrying across her floor. Then she wake up and find you ain’t sleep in your bed. Then how before she make her Folger’s, one a’ them demons slither around her living room floor on her nice shag carpet with the plastic covers. That demon just keep saying, We done got him. We done got him. When she ast who was they and who they got, that demon start laughing and points to that picture of you when you was little, the one with your daddy up on the wall. Then she say she look at that picture and damn if it don’t bust into flames.”
“Well that’s easy to prove a lie.”
“Oh, she one step ahead, boy. She say when she look back them flames disappear. That’s when she say it’s a warning. Say it means they’s still time.”
“Jesus.”
“Yes nigger, why you think I move my fat ass up here this early in the morning?”
Daylight spit yellow across the heavens while Gubber told the rest of it. “Then she starts out to see you, and see the Devil three times before she got there. Each time he take a different form. First time he a crow, second, a jackal and third, he a toad. And you know how she tell it with that flourish and rhyme and all her Sanctified Saids. Each, every time the Devil say, ‘Don’t mess with that girl, she be my special pearl.’ But she say she keep on walkin’ ’til she get out to Bell land, where she see a snake slithering backwards crost the road. ’Til up she come to the door and touch the knob and it’s cold as ice.
“Then she tell how she begs you leave cuz she seen the Devil’s mark appear, spreading across your left cheek. She paint it so good them niggers was ready to run out the goddamn church and get you. If she’d told ’em, some of them fools would have burned that girl house down to the ground. But then she calm them, tell them it best to trick the Devil with kindness. Try to baptize them under his snare. Try to bring her boy back to Jesus. That the mark faded as quick as it came. There was still time.”
Ephram shook his head against stupidity. “They believe that mess?”
“The best part I ain’t told you. Some folk not saying Amen like she want. So she say the Devil told her he was gone sneak into the minds of the weak in the congregation before she got there and tell them not to believe her. So then, you know ever body was up and stomping and clapping and yelling Amen by the time she talks about the fight she had with the Devil.”
Ephram looked back at the house again. A light purple cloud was arranging itself just above its roof. Gubber let out a belch, cracked his knuckles and said, “If I was you I’d put my johnson back in my pants and get my ass home.”
“I ain’t going back. Don’t know if it’s safe for her with me here, but — I’m not going back.”
“Damn, you always been a hard-up ignorant nigger. You can still fuck her, if the pussy that good. Hell, ever’body else do.”
Ephram gave Gubber a look that let him know it was past time to stop. The look that said his fist could and would connect hard with Gubber’s slack jaw.
Gubber backed down, “Man, do what you want.” He stood to leave. “Only you better be at Junie Rankin funeral this afternoon. You already done missed the wake yester-evening. Supra and them expecting you to stand pallbearer and they gone be hell to pay you don’t cover your corner.”
“Junie were a good man.”
“Only one used to keep them rude-ass Rankin boys in check.”
“I can’t say I’ll be there Gubber. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“I ain’t say no more. Only, you best think long and hard else your next step might lead you off a goddamn cliff.”
Ephram watched Gubber struggle up from the stump then sit back down with a thud. “Damn. Need me a minute, all that walkin’ only to turn round and walk right back. I gots to catch my breath.” And he pulled a pack of Newports out of his pocket, lit one and sucked it into his lungs.
A school of swallows took flight from a tall pine, their complaints little pinpricks in the stretch of dawn. Both men looked up and watched them freckle the sky. Ephram thought about a wide-toothed comb inside the house, furry with black hair. Gubber thought to spit. But he did it in such a lazy, will-less way that it clung in streaks to his cheek. It seemed an effort even to wipe. He waited until he brought the cigarette back to his lips to give a halfhearted try. Ephram fought the urge to take out his handkerchief and hand it to him. It was hard for him to remember sometimes the boy Gubber had been, but sitting close to him on the stump, Ephram could yet see him peeking through.
Gubber Samuels’s snaggle-toothed grin, stretching full, pride bursting. Gubber, the skinny, yellow boy that he’d learned to pee standing up with. Ephram had been five, Gubber six. Ephram’s mama and Gubber’s grandmama had taught both boys to pee-pee like girls to avoid sprinkles on their new indoor toilets. So one day Ephram and Gubber had ventured into the woods near the lake, aimed away from their fallen trousers and peed and peed and peed until they could not muster another drop. Then they’d run to the well and filled the dipper so many times their bellies sloshed when they moved, and they’d waited eagerly to try their aim again.
Ephram remembered it clearly because later that same year, in June of 1934, the two boys had watched as water and mud swoll up and swallowed the Reverend Jennings’s new church. It was meant to be the star of Liberty, with twenty new pews, red velvet carpet in the aisles, brass handles on the front door and a stained glass window gotten half price because the White First Baptist in Jasper thought Jesus had mistakenly been crafted with a harelip. Reverend Jennings had gotten him for a song. After the storm Ephram and Gubber sat perched on the fallen steeple and watched the Reverend kick at the mud, cursing the hurricane until he slipped and fell face down right on top of the harelip Jesus. Split it clean in two. The boys held in their laughter until he’d started crying, big, ugly sobs. Then Ephram started crying too, at the sight of his daddy weeping, which is when the Reverend leapt up and slapped him off the steeple.
Easter of ’37 when Ephram’s mama had walked over the hill as God had made her, Gubber was the only person at the picnic who had the wherewithal to pay Ephram any mind, walking up to him, while all the women were running to put a tablecloth over Otha’s sin, and patting his friend Ephram on the back.
The next day Ephram’s daddy beat his mama for one whole hour before dragging her screaming and begging to Dearing State Mental Hospital. Wouldn’t even let her say good-bye to her son. Beat Ephram with a hair brush when he tried to defy him and come out anyway. His mama clawing at her own face until the Reverend stopped and punched her. Gubber was waiting in the tall grass through it all. He crept up to Ephram’s window to find his friend’s face under the pillow, fat from crying, his body sore, his spirit broken. He climbed into Ephram’s locked room and offered him a piece of sugarcane. The two boys sucked and gnawed in silence while the Reverend drove an unconscious Otha all the way to Dearing.
After that Gubber tended to the splinter that had lodged itself in Ephram’s heart. Not by any direct thing, but by just knowing it was there and acting like it wasn’t, both boys could pretend that life had unfurled itself in a different way. Together they found that they could ignore the pelting looks and questions directed at Ephram. Gubber Samuels knew something about hard looks too, because of his walled eye and the shenanigans with his own mama, who’d had four children by four different papas and hadn’t stayed around long enough to raise a one of them. Over the next few years the boys knitted their unique brands of forgetfulness into a shield against the folks of Liberty.