She didn’t know that her fingers were moving until Ephram looked down at them.
Their eyes met for a moment. She smiled and shrugged. Then he mashed his face into her, his spindly arms little spider things reaching to hold tighter. So she gathered him up in her lap like she had when he was a bitty thing, not the big boy he was now, and the two watched as evening crept in like a thief and stole the rest of day.
That night after the house was asleep the Reverend slipped out, but not before walking into his son’s room. Otha was behind him, feet padding softly on the floor. She peeked in and watched her husband leaning low over the sleeping boy, rumbling strange words while his hands swept the air over Ephram’s body. He left a red velvet pouch over the head of her son’s bed. She watched as he went to the trash receptacle, opened his handkerchief and gathered tiny crescents of the boy’s fingernails he had clipped after dinner. Then he started out. Otha ran like silent lightning and hid behind the closet door. He walked right by her and out of the house. She walked into Ephram’s room and ripped the velvet bag from his headboard. Her boy kept sleeping. She sped in bare feet out into the night. She heard a twig break in the distance and she followed. The moon naked and whole above as she tracked noises so quiet that they registered in her unconscious. In this way she walked in her white gown, her hand tight about the red velvet. Where was he taking her boy’s nails? Where? She felt the same danger rushing towards her like water. Like a flood rising as she crept after her husband. At one point he stopped and looked back. She ducked down and stopped breathing, then he was off again towards Marion Lake. She saw a glow in the distant clearing, a light flaring in the black thicket woods. Her husband was walking towards it with clippings from her son, and so she followed. As she got closer she could see the trees around it, some of the branches seemed to wave and move, until Otha got close enough to see that they were the raised arms of men, staring into the flames. They were waiting for something.
Otha crept closer, as quiet as the air. A wide pine ahead would hide her. She stopped and dropped to her belly, lifted by her elbows so she could see.
Her husband joined the group. The men dropped their arms and parted. He stood taller among them. Without moving a muscle they all seemed to bend down to him. Otha felt a flush of heat through her skin, as if she were standing in front of the pit fire as well.
From this distance Otha watched the men’s blurred images take shape and form. Jaws and noses assembled into familiar faces. Otha’s breath halted as she saw they were men she already knew. Friends — deacons from her husband’s congregation. Men she had shared hymn books with for years, who had worn their Sunday best as they carried the brass collection plates. Men with patient smiles and familes. What were they doing standing before these flames? Otha lifted herself a bit more to better see their expressions. Even at that distance there was something in their eyes that seemed to crackle with the flames. Something she had never seen on Sundays or at P & K or at town functions. It sent her heart into her throat and made it hard to swallow.
In the red gold of the flames, Otha saw two men bring out a speckled calf, white with red dots — it looked like the Simpkins heifer calf not more than six months old. Eyes tender as creatures are who are new to the earth. The calf was scared. A baritone in the church choir, Josua Perdy flapped open a white sheet with strange markings on it — a black circle and twisting lines — and spread it on the ground. She watched as Deacon Marcus, the man who always bought his wife a bouquet of flowers on Friday, slowly tipped the calf over — it fell with a loud thump and let out a high, lonely mewl. Like a frightened child. Like a — and they bound its feet with a red rope. Tight, too tight, crisscrossed its legs. The animal began crying, long moans rising above the flames. Otha didn’t know she was crying too, until she heard the soft drops on the leaves beneath her chin.
As if part of an orchestrated dance, men in slick city clothes and polished shoes stepped out of the shadows and joined the circle. Men she had never seen — tall, high-yellow Creole men who looked like they had come from New Orleans. As they joined the circle, one by one, they handed her husband what looked like folded cash, each nodding, until her husband’s pockets were bulging and full. They were paying for something yet to come. Yet to — Otha felt the stars tilting, the world spin … it was too much, the thing to come.
She heard her husband speaking to the men. Their eyes rapt, alive. She could only make out a phrase here: “… at the peak of …,” then nothing, so she pushed against the wall of fear and crept even closer until the dangerous melody of his voice fingered the loose edges of her hair.
The calf’s sides were rising and falling like a bellows, skin so thin near its ribs. The heifer began to quiet some, but kept a steady beat, its hollow call unanswered. No mama. No field of grass. Only fire and the eyes of those men.
“Welcome all. Welcome all. Obeah, will you draw the circle?”
Obeah, a squatted man, opened a heavy tan sack and poured red powder in a wide circle around the men.
Otha looked around the forest, hoping for something to stop. This. To stop it. She looked up. The sky was heavy and a mist hung about the tops of the trees and the calf was groaning low. Nothing. No one was coming.
“We want to welcome our out-of-town members, come down here to experience the way we Sabine Negroes do our business.” Her husband smiled so pretty at the crowd and gave off a little wink. She had never seen him look so handsome.
“Now y’all, we got us two initiates joining us today if they got the grist.”
Two young boys, who looked to be about twelve, turned. Otha gasped as she recognized young Chauncy Rankin. His face fresh and upturned as if he was getting a medal. His younger brother Percy was the second. The men formed a tighter circle. Otha crept closer, and crouched lower still. Little Chauncy Rankin — he’d once stolen a pecan pie from her kitchen window.
All of them, all of the men began speaking into the flames, but they weren’t words, they were chanting something that Otha couldn’t make out. Words like snakes slithering from their mouths that made Otha’s hands fly to her belly, where she imagined her soul to be.
Her husband lifted his hands with a wide embellishment he’d never wasted on his congregation. His voice rang clear through the air. “I speaks these truths, my brothers. They done come into they manhood high time, so I speaks to them and to the rest of you who done forgot.”
Penter Rankin called out, “Tell the truth!”
The Reverend flashed the grace of his body against the flames and leapt up onto a stone. “Now Brothers, I was a little boy when my papa sat me down and tell me this. Just like his papa told him. Just like I’m telling y’all cuz I don’t want you getting down on your knees asking no God for nothing, not no fine clothes or no grand house. Don’t be asking for no wife to love you, or to feed your children neither. I seen men doing that whiles the whole family starve bug-eyed and them still down on they knees when they carried the youngest one out. I don’t want no man on earth to be that kind of a fool.”
Peeking through the brush, Otha watched her husband point his long, firm arm like an arrow into the sky and say, “That man up there? That one on his Roman chair? With his snow whiskers and his icicle nose? That White man what breathe out frost when he speaks, with them froze blue eyes like a lake in winter? You got to know he already done picked out who he favor and it ain’t the likes of you. It ain’t nobody with a lick a color spread over they skin. Not them he seen fit to drag down into four hundred year of slavin’. Not my grandpa who died in them salt swamps of Florida. It ain’t your brother Tom got lynched over in Jasper, and dragged some twenty miles ’til they wasn’t nothing left of him to bury.”