Fat Lightning (7 page)

Jeter's grandson has stopped coming, and word gets out that he's run away. He's done that twice before, so nobody other than the Jeters themselves seems too worried about it.

When Lot realizes that people actually want to hear what he has to say about things, he's ready to oblige, realizes that he's been waiting all his life for this. Some people think he's shy, but he's just doing what his mother advised him to do, when he had not yet quit school and he'd get in fights every day, other children calling him “crazy” and “vacant Lot.”

“Sugar,” she told him, looking at him with those same nearly black eyes, her hand on his arm, “they're just jealous because you know so much. But you got to keep it inside, otherwise they'll make up stuff and put you in Central State just for spite. You know what you know. Don't have to tell it to nobody.”

Lot has never forgotten this. He tries not to let all the world's sin get to him, because when it does, he winds up embarrassing his family. He's lived at home for 71 of his 73 years, working as a carpenter here and there and helping his father farm from the time he got back from World War I until his father died. He never went to church, even though almost everyone who used to talk about him behind his back before the war was gone now. He and his mother got along much better after his father died, because the two men would always get into arguments, sometimes threatening to kill each other.

But now, when he clears his throat, these people, some of them wearing fresh dresses and coats and ties like they were going to church, get quiet. And Lot finds that he has a lifetime of things to say.

“He's a-coming back,” he says to his audience. “This here's a sign; I know it is. He's coming to pay us back for all this wickedness, all this here free sex and burnin' the flag and all. You think we couldn't beat them Viet Congs if we wasn't being punished by God?”

And sometimes Lot will throw in a verse from Revelation, which he has always read, more times than he can remember.

“‘And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God, and from his power,'” Lot will read, “‘and no man was able to enter into the temple, till the seven plagues of the seven angels were fulfilled.'” Lot can find most of what he wants to find in Revelation with a quick flip of his thumb through the worn pages. His Bible looks like a book that someone has started reading from the wrong end: dog-eared at the back instead of the front.

Sometimes, when Lot reads, the wind will shift and blow in the strong scent of the burning sawdust pile from the south, causing people to take out handkerchiefs to wipe their eyes and blow their noses, giving a muffled air to the “Amens.”

Billy Basset is usually among the crowd. He's never seen anything like the image on the barn, and being there, along with the now-departed Terry Jeter, right from the beginning gives him a feeling of importance he's not used to. Now, with school out, he doesn't have anywhere better to go than the old home he's always looked at from across the river, that looks smaller and more run-down than he'd always imagined it.

But Billy isn't camping out in the yard any more. A week after the old man let him stay the first time, he started slipping into the old house at night. He found that two of the beds still had mattresses, and he even found an old alarm clock, so he could get up and go back out to the tent before sunrise.

He has also found that the old Chastain house has many items worth stealing. Billy has been a petty thief since he was 12. He finances his clothes and spending money by stealing and dealing drugs. His distributor, a retired Richmond city policeman who lives on the state road south of Monacan, can also sell just about any of the hot merchandise Billy brings him.

Billy is smart enough to take small things from out-of-the-way places, things that won't be missed. He's discovered a cubbyhole behind a wall that contains many of what his distributor calls antiques: old jewelry boxes, some minor jewelry, a pair of candelabras, dolls. One happy night Billy finds, rummaging around with his flashlight, a box full of silver dinnerware. About once a week, he goes on one of his scavenger hunts. Then he slips what he considers to be valuable out to his jonboat and goes back across the river the next morning. From there, he can get a ride to Monacan.

Billy is also smart enough to convince Lot that he's camping at the Chastain place for religious reasons. His grandmother has beaten enough of the Bible into him, Old and New Testaments, that he can talk a good game. His grandmother, like Lot, was especially fond of Revelation.

Lot likes to ask Billy questions about Revelation, such as, “How many elders in the fourth chapter?” And Billy can often give him the correct answer. When he does, Lot nods his head and might launch into a monologue about the end of the world. When Billy answers incorrectly or says he doesn't know, Lot makes him read the passage that gives the correct answer. Billy is a fast learner.

He's even got Granger, Lot's half-chow, half-German shepherd, on his side. When Billy sneaks out of the house in the dark, sometimes loaded with family relics, he can speak a quiet word and the dog stays silent.

By mid-June, the occasional out-of-state car arrives.

A woman from Steubenville, Ohio, prematurely gray, comes up one afternoon in a Ford Torino the color of her hair. She says she's driven since early morning, that she heard of the miracle of the barn on an all-night religious talk show on the radio. She waited until her husband came in from the graveyard shift and went to bed, then got his keys and headed south. She stays for two days, sleeping in her car, until Lot calls the sheriff's department and then her husband comes for her.

A couple from Iowa, driving a Winnebago across the country at the start of the husband's retirement, find their way to Old Monacan, managing to get stuck twice within 200 yards of Lot's trailer.

A black man from Tabor City, North Carolina, appears one evening, just as the sun is about to hit the side of the barn. He has no car; he's walked all the way from Monacan, where he got off the bus. He says he wants to see the picture of Jesus. He stands with the mostly white crowd for 45 minutes, then turns and walks away, never to be seen again.

The sheriff has dispatched a deputy by now for crowd control, but there isn't much he can do. The Chastain home has one small drive that fans out at what was the family garage, and the only thing for the pilgrims to do is park on the side of the rut road or in the edge of the bean field. The daily traffic has widened the trail from Jeter's to Lot's trailer so that now two cars can pass on it, but it usually takes an hour to clear everybody out after the sun sets.

Nancy comes back once a week, despite Lot. She tries to mingle with the others, but he always spots her and tries to get her to come over to his trailer for a visit.

She takes a notebook with her and tries, as unobtrusively as she can, to get it all down on paper. She's put her first novel, the homing novel, on the shelf, and she thinks she can use Lot and his barn as background for a second one. Sam is already gently pressuring her to take over as cashier at the drugstore, telling her that his mother will be glad to take care of Wade during the day, but she keeps putting him off. She fears that this somehow would be the final capitulation, that it would seal her fate forever. Sam, since the forced move from Richmond, has been less demanding than usual, and Nancy intends to stay out of the family business as long as possible.

She goes out to Old Monacan on Wednesday evenings, when Sam goes to his Civitan meeting, something he says he has to do as a businessman, something Nancy knows he'd never have done five years ago. She leaves the baby with Sam's parents, telling them she's going for a drive. They and Sam know she has been back out to Lot's, but for now they're not asking any questions.

The third time she goes out to Old Monacan by herself, the old man asks her again to stay and have some iced tea. She has no intention of going inside with him, but to hide her general uneasiness, she asks him about the burning sawdust pile. She's heard that there was another one, many years ago. Lot tells her as much as he wants to tell her, about how the present pile has been there since the sawmill went broke in the Depression, taking the place of an earlier one that eventually smoldered down to nothing.

By the time he's through, the last few stragglers have an open road in front of them.

CHAPTER NINE

Fire chief's been coming around here again. Wanted to know what I'm fixing to do about the sawdust pile. Told him, not a blessed thing. That sawdust pile ain't hurting a soul; just let it smoke. It'll burn itself out. He said it was a hazard, and I said, to what? Do I look like I'm crazy enough to climb up on top of it? Who's going to care if I do? Are you fretting about my dog? Even he's got sense enough not to walk on top of something that's a-smokin' all the time. Even Granger knows there's a fire ‘way down under there. Ain't nobody else got any business over by it.

So then the fire chief says, but what about all them people that comes out here to look at that picture of Jesus on the side of your barn? And I tell him, first, it ain't no picture, it's a vision, and, second, there's a No Trespassing sign right back of the barn, and nobody wants to have nothing to do with that sawdust pile anyhow.

Seems like them folks from Richmond and Norfolk and all is scared of it. And when the wind changes, you ought to see 'em start blowing their noses and rubbing their eyes when them cinders start to fly. Ought to get a fan and put it on the other side so I could clear 'em out when I'm tired of all of 'em hanging around.

Shoot. Everybody's so fired up about my sawdust pile, like they think that's the worst thing they got to fret about. Like that's what's causing all them boys to get sent home in body bags. Like that's what makes white folks act so hateful towards the colored. Like that's what makes the well water go bad over around the county dump.

They just got to have somebody to mess with, and they think it's going to be me. People always been messing with me. They did it when I was a young'un. Sometimes I'd get so mad I'd just start a-hitting and then it'd go black and they'd tell me about it later, or sometimes they wouldn't. And back then, before the war, I had Warren to take up for me.

One time, we had this stray mutt that took up here, part beagle, part God knows what. Us boys was playing in the woods one day, and the dog followed me and Warren. Frankie Tubbs that lived in the house that burnt down back in '61 got hold of some gasoline from somewheres, so we could watch stuff burn.

First thing I knowed, Frankie had poured gasoline on that old liver-spotted mutt, and then he throwed a match on him. The dog run in circles so fast it just seemed like a hoop of fire, and then he run off. We didn't find the dog's body until the buzzards started circling. Frankie thought it was the funniest thing he ever seen. If Warren hadn't of pulled me off of him, he told me later, he reckoned I'd of killed him. And then they said I was the crazy one.

People think because I live out here by myself and ain't got no friends in high places and such that they can just mess with me when they feel like it. Like they're a-saying, here's the big criminal that's letting his sawdust pile burn. I bet the fire chief and all his big friends just laugh and laugh when they talk about what a hard time they're a-giving old Lot Chastain. Well, it'll keep on burning ‘til it burns itself out. That's the way Daddy done it.

The other pile, the one that was between the one burning now and the river, it burnt most of the time I was a young'un, it seems like. Most of my recollections of this place has that burning wood smell in the back of it. And one day, it just caved in on its own when it had burnt enough, while I was off to war, after Holly left, too.

I remember we used to play over behind it, and we'd make like that sawdust pile was hell. Momma'd tell us if we didn't straighten up, the devil'd come out of there and get us and take us back down with him. Even had us believing it ‘til we was old enough to know better.

And us boys would play a game Warren made up, called Tempt the Devil, where we'd all draw straws, and the one that got the short one would have to run right across the top of that smoking sawdust pile or be called a scairdy-cat. Then, the first one he tagged would have to come across, too. We'd get up at least six or seven young'uns, and nobody had to do it twice. We'd have to wait ‘til it was near-bout dark, so's our folks wouldn't see us and give us a whipping.

Momma could be right mean unless you knew her like I did. She'd always tell me, “Lot, you're just like me. When you know a thing, you know it. You don't take no junk from nobody.” She used to give Daddy a hard time.

Holly used to wouldn't go nowhere near that other sawdust pile unless I was with her. Wanted me to hold her hand when we walked past it. She liked to hang around with me when I'd go down to the river and fish. It was just her and me back then, me already 18 and her 10 or 11, although it didn't seem that much difference. But then folks got hateful and said things to her about me, and then I had to go into the Army, even though Warren was already gone and they ought to of let me stay and take care of Momma and Daddy, and when I come home, she was living with the Bondurants. Other folks is always doing something to see if they can't keep others from being too happy.

But this here's my sawdust pile now, and I kind of like the smell it gives off. So I tell the fire chief, who ain't nothing but the boss of a bunch of rascals that probably start most of the fires theirselves anyhow, that he ought to mind his own business and get off my property before I unleash Granger, who's already growling over there. He goes, but he tells me I got to do something about that fire.

My Lord. It's like that place outside of Richmond where Grace and Walter live. They can't cut a tree down or paint the house without some committee or commission or something telling them they can do it. Can't even pick out their own mailboxes, 'cause they all got to look alike. And if one of 'em buys a boat or a camper, they got to put it in a big lot two miles away, so it won't spoil the looks of the place sitting there in the driveway. Might as well be in Russia.