Unable to sleep after the ruckus at the news studio, Dalton sought out and obtained the makings for an old remedy his mama swore by—peach-tree-leaf tea, the juice of a fresh lemon and two jiggers of moonshine, sweetened to taste with honey. He sipped gently on the concoction in his tiny kitchen a while before he wandered out to the barn to tend to Sebastian, the rats, and reptiles. By three in the morning, he was settled in his armchair, watching a World War II documentary, and working on his third tea drink.
The knock at the door stirred him from a doze, and he heaved himself to his feet and shuffled over to answer the call. He cautiously pulled the door open to see who was on the other side, but froze when he heard the visitor’s voice.
“Boy? You gonna take all night?”
Dalton froze in place.
“Just pull the god-darn door ajar and let an old woman in, whydontcha?” The voice was creaky, drawling, and familiar. “Ssshhhiiittt…. Rusty, you still scared of the dark?”
Dalton knew this was impossible. He had buried his mama at the Red Banks Community Cemetery back in Holly Springs two summers ago, after she lost a painful bout with cancer of the colon, but he did believe in miracles and Jesus did rise…so why couldn’t Mom?
He opened the door wide to the white specter of the woman he had adored in life. She floated gracefully into the room, revealing no trace of the stiff limp she’d had most of her life thanks to a cantankerous mule. She glanced at him knowingly, without as much as a peck on the cheek for her baby boy.
“Son, I don’t have long, so I’m not gonna pussyfoot around. You know I miss being here with you?” She stared straight through him.
He wanted to answer, but the cat had his tongue.
“First, don’t worry about me,” she ordered. “I sit on the right side of the Lord and my time there is joyous. All your people are here, except Cousin Herbert, praise God.”
The pastor knew that he had put a little extra shine in the teacup, but that wouldn’t call up the spirits, or so he thought. He could smell fresh peaches, like the ones she’d made cobbler with to go with the homemade ice cream at Sunday dinner.
Her face was soft as diffused moonlight and her cheeks and eyes shimmered with translucence as he looked into the deep slots of midnight where her eyes used to be. She wore a linen housecoat, just like the one she’d worn before sunrise when she fed the chickens and slopped the hogs. The threads of the cloth glowed like lightning bugs beaming from a mason jar, and revealed a space between the hem and floor where her legs should have been.
He found himself standing in the watermelon patch behind his parents’ farmhouse when he was a child, holding the reddest, juiciest wedge of watermelon he had ever seen.
“Go ahead and taste it,” his mother urged him. “It’s a gift.”
Dalton just stood there, speechless, with his eyes wide open.
“Boy, go on. Taste it.”
He found the melon crunchy-cool, and the juice gently tickled the roof of his mouth with a taste sweeter than sugarcane.
“See? I told you. Eat it quick before it melts,” she commanded, as the pale-green rind began to melt in his hands like an ice-cream cone in the middle of a summer’s day. He lapped up the rest of the red meat of the melon before it dripped through his fingers.
“You found a nice girl?” she asked. “Not like that Mae Willy back in high school that got your pants all stiff?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Pitiful child. Listen up. I got something to say.”
Dalton remembered growing up on a red clay dirt road and waiting for the school bus when the road was still moist from the morning dew and the heat from the hot sun had not yet turned the clay brown again. And he remembered Mae Willy. She had been a bright high-yellow Negro girl who had always saved a seat for him, until the bus driver had told his mom and he’d never heard the end of the stories about pitiful Mae Willy.
“Son, I saw you on that show. I don’t know about all that race and Black and White stuff, but what I do know is you acted like the scared little boy you were when the kids called you ‘tummy cakes the mummy shakes.’” She stared through him with empty holes for eyes. “Get over it. Just like on the playground, you got to git ’em back. Show them who’s in charge. Remember what I taught you?” Mama Dalton’s shadowy head grew to the size of a trailer truck, and beams of light poured out of the spaces where her eyes would be.
Mama, he thought, but the word wouldn’t come out of his mouth.
The headlights in her eyes blinked low, like high beams switching off in the face of approaching traffic, and against the dimmer illumination, he noticed that her frosty braids were now dreadlocks, and moving oddly in the wind. What wind? he wondered. Then he saw that the braids were growing in length and twisting out in different directions, as if they were alive. The locks were serpents that gnawed on each other and twirled in the light, spiraling toward the sky.
“Kick ’em in the balls,” his mother told him, “and when they fall, kick ’em some more until they fall to the ground like a bale of hay. If they be Black…don’t stop…just don’t stop. Ya hear me, boy? Don’t you ever stop,” she bellowed. And the king snake came out of the slit that was her mouth and wrapped himself around Dalton’s torso and shoulders before opening its serpentine mouth to swallow Dalton and its own body whole.
In the instant before the darkness took him, Dalton could feel the steamy vapor drying on his eyebrows and upper lip. Then he noticed that his eyes were still closed, and he heard the sound of Little Boy exploding over Hiroshima.
When the Pastor Dalton returned to the Christian Covenant Church after the Talk of the Town brawl, he was treated as a conquering hero. Before the Sunday service, he met members of his flock in the basement of the small church in Chino, California, where they were served a hot breakfast by the women’s club.
Between the Jimmy Dean sausage and farm-fresh eggs, he spoke of the experience as if he’d gone behind enemy lines in a foreign land.
“The host of the show didn’t tell me who the other guest was until just before we went on air.” Dalton chewed as he spoke. “I thought it was going to be that loudmouth coon Kubba Con. Harper is such a cretin. When he defiled Mama’s memory I had no choice but to treat him like the devil he is.”
Clement Rodgers, an elder, asked, “Did you fight after the show?”
“Harper wanted to sue the show. We all agreed to put it behind us.” Dalton swallowed a bite of his sausage biscuit, and coughed to make it go down.
After breakfast, Dalton went to the rear of the storefront church to pray before he entered the pulpit. Today he would preach to a few hundred believers who were beyond prayer. Dalton needed to give them hope and he found it through their fears and hostility against people who didn’t look like them.
Today he wanted to find a Trim tab—a control point for a scheme of epic proportions. A gospel battle he had no chance of winning, but one that would leave his righteous and indignant imprint on race relations in America. As Dalton stood at the pulpit, he knew he needed to find the right leader, and he trusted that man was in the pews this Sunday morning. Today he sought a more graphic approach.
“Some of you know ’bout my little hobby,” he began. “I raise mice and breed rats, and I keep snakes. Sure, I love the little critters to death, but I do it with purpose. What if I crossbreed the white rats with the colored ones—generation after generation? Would there be any white ones left?” He looked around at his silent, rapt listeners. “I found the answer. Heck no. The white rats are the only ones you can count on to make whites. The others just keep pootin’ out all kinds of colors.”
His followers murmured assent to an obvious bit of wisdom.
“Rats can help us see the truth,” Dalton went on. “That’s why today—with God’s help—we’re going to do something about that.”
He knew he could look into the eyes of Sister Martha Jenkins, who always sat in the right front center aisle and held her chubby arms around her two youngest grandbabies while her son Eugene and his second wife Wilandrea huddled at her right flank. Or he could just bellow accusations about the illegals that were violating American values at Brother Nate and his stepson, Timothy, who came to Bible study every Sunday morning and then stayed for service.
There were plenty of options. He had groomed his congregation well.
“Our problems started with the Blacks. They seek to extinguish the flame of our righteousness and steal the very air we breathe. Our success lies in our purity,” Dalton preached as Jenny and Herman Kimble nodded agreement from the middle center pews.
“We must take our world back,” he went on. “Not from the ones whose sexual habits bring unwanted children to the world—but from the mixed-breed babies they produce. These mongrel children are the garbage and filth of their parents. Together we can stop this scourge by destroying their seed.” The pastor stepped off the twelve-inch riser and onto the cement slab floor of the church, and strolled over to stand behind a black-draped box.
“We must command the strength and guile of the serpent,” he intoned. “Let it strike—strike—and strike again, until we have destroyed this threat to our species.” Dalton pulled the drape off the box and revealed a wire cage holding a ten-foot pale white boa constrictor. He took a fat black and white mouse from underneath his robe and held it high above his head. Some men in the congregation stiffened their necks and raised their eyebrows, and the women uttered noises of disgust and held their hands over their mouths in horror.
“Don’t be afraid of Stella—she loves to end them,” he said as he dropped the squirming rodent into the cage. The overfed mouse raced onto the back of the boa, looking for some way out as the snake’s body slowly pressed against the chicken-wire walls, leaving a square-patterned imprint on its ivory skin. Slowly, the coils closed in.
Before the dance ended, the pastor put the drape back over the cage.
“Let the church say—Amen.”
Dalton noticed Master Sergeant Jimmy Blair, dressed in his usual faded desert fatigues, sitting in a rear row with his eyes closed, swaying back and forth. The pastor slowly walked down the aisle, stood before the soldier, and rested his hand on his shoulder.
“Brother Blair,” he said, his voice ringing, “we recognize your sacrifice in the Gulf, and the Lord walks with you as you seek full employment in a job worthy of your talents and the return of your wife and kids.”
Blair opened his eyes and stared up at Dalton in worshipful silence.
“So stand up,” Dalton urged, “and join me a verse from ‘On the Battlefield.’ Hold my hand and sing with me.” He wrapped his fingers around Blair’s, stepped back, and pulled the bigger man to his feet. “Come on, soldier. We can praise God as he finds a way. Sing with me, son.”
Blair took a deep breath, and their voices rose together.
I’m a soldier on the battlefield and I’m fighting
I promised him I would serve until I die,
I’m fighting
On this Christian journey I’ve had heartaches and pain, sunshine and rain,
But I’m fighting
I’ve been up and I’ve been down
But I’ll never turn around
Because I’m fighting…
I’m on the battlefield for my Lord.
They both sang with Blair’s voice ringing out, a true baritone, always on key and on beat. Chorally trained, Dalton thought; there was something almost sad about the image of the burly soldier as a long-ago choirboy.
“Let the church sing,” he commanded.
The master sergeant sang the second stanza at the top of his lungs as tears began to run down his cheeks. When they finished, Dalton let the church settle and trusted that the next voice heard would be Blair’s.
It was.
“I’m ready to be on the battlefield,” Blair announced. “We’ve got to take back our rightful place in the free world. We’ve gotta be Christian soldiers. God bless our Pastor. God bless us all!”
Dalton smiled to the heavens.
More men bore witness and applauded Blair’s declaration. Before the offering, the Christian Covenant Church begat the Christian Soldiers.
