you what, Sully,” said MayBelle and gave the little black man a long look over the neck of the bottle.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said and straightened to attention until just the edges of his coat were touching the dust of the road. “What’s that?”
“You go get yourself a clean glass and bring me one too, and I’ll let you have a taste of this Communist whiskey.” Sully spun around to leave and she called after him: “You got any of that Mason jar, bring it on, too.”
“It be here directly,” Sully answered over his shoulder and hopped over a discarded table leg in his way.
MayBelle walked over to the nearest porch and sat down to wait, her feet stuck straight out in front of her, and began trying to imitate the whip-poor-will’s call, sending her voice forth into the darkness in a low quavering tone, but not a bird had answered, no matter how she listened, by the time Sully got back with two jelly glasses and a Mason jar full of yellow shine, the sheen and consistency of light oil.
“You gone fell down again in amongst all the weeds, Miz MayBelle,” Sully said, “you keep on trying to skip.”
“I have always loved to skip,” said MayBelle, moving through the pasture down the hill at a pretty good clip. She caught one foot on something in the dark and stepped high with the other one, bobbing to one side like a boxer in the ring.
“Watch me now,” she said. “Yessir. Goddamn.”
“You sho’ do cuss a lot for a white lady,” said Sully, dodging and weaving through the rank saw-grass and bull nettles.
“I know it. Damn. Hell. Shit-fart.”
“Uh-huh,” said Sully, hurrying to catch up and trying to see how far they had reached in the Shackleford back pasture. The moon was down, and he was having a hard time judging the distance to the stile over the back fence, what with his coat catching on weeds and sticks and the yellow shine thundering in his head.
He bent down to free his hem from something that had snagged it, felt the burn of bullnettle across his hand, and recognized a clump of trees against the line of the night sky.
“I’se you,” he called ahead in a high whisper. “I’d keep to the left right around here. Them old fire ants’ bed just over yonder.”
“Where?” said MayBelle, stopping in the middle of a skip so abruptly that she slipped on something which turned under her foot and almost caused her to fall. “Where are them little boogers?”
“Just over yonder about fifteen, twenty feet,” Sully said, glad to stop and take a deep breath to settle the moving shapes around him. “See where them weeds stick up, look like a old cowboy’s hat? Them ants got they old dirt nest just this side.” He paused to smooth his coat around him and rub his bullnettle burn. “That there where they sleep when they ain’t out killing things.”
“You say they tough,” said the skinny white lady. “It burns when they bite?”
“Burns? Lawdy have mercy. Do it burn when they bites? Everywhere one of them fire ants sting you it’s a little piece of your hide swell up and rot out all around it. Take about a week to happen.”
Sully felt the ground begin to tilt to one side, and he lifted one foot and brought it down sharply to level things out. The earth pushed back hard, but by keeping his knee locked, he was able to hold it steady. “I don’t know how long I can last,” he said to his right leg, “but I do what I can.”
“Shit, goddamn,” said MayBelle, “let’s go see if they’re all asleep in their bed.”
“You mean them fire ants? They kill the baby birds and little rabbits in they nests. Chop ’em up, take ’em home and eat ’em. I don’t want no part of them boogers. I ain’t lost nothing in them fire ants’ bed.”
“Well, I believe I did,” said MayBelle. “Piss damn. I’m going to go over there and go to bed with them.”
Sully heard the dry weeds crack and pop as the white lady began moving toward the cowboy hat shape, and he lifted his foot to step toward the sound. When he did, the released earth flew up and hit him all down the right side of his body and against his ear and jaw. “I knowed it was going to happen,” he said to his right leg as he lay, half-stunned in the high weeds, “I let things go too quick.”
By the time he was able to get up again, scrambling to first one knee, then the other, and then flapping his arms about him to get all the way off the ground and away from its terrible grip, the skinny white lady had already reached the fire ant bed and dropped down beside it. Sully moved at an angle, one arm much higher than the other and his ears ringing with the lick the ground had just given him, until he came up close enough to see the dark bulk of the old woman stretched out in the soft mound of ant-chewed earth.
“You got to get up from there, Miz MayBelle,” he said and began to lean toward her, hand outstretched, but then thought better of it as he felt the earth begin to gather itself for another go at him.
She was speaking in a crooning voice to the ant bed, saying words he couldn’t understand and moving herself slowly from side to side as she settled into it.
“Miz MayBelle,” Sully said, “crawl on up out of there now. They gonna eat you alive lying there. That ain’t no fun.”
“Don’t you put a hand on me, Papa,” she said in a clear hard voice, suddenly getting still, “I’m right where I want to be.”
“I see I got it to do,” Sully said and threw his head back to look around for somebody. He couldn’t see a soul, and every star in the night sky was perfectly clear and still.
“You decide to get up while I’m gone,” he said to the dark shape at his feet, “just go on ahead and do it.”
Running in a half-crouch with one arm out for balance against the tilt the earth was putting on him, Sully started down the hill toward the back fence of the Shackleford place, proceeding through the weeds and brambles like a sailboat tacking into the wind. About every fifty feet, he had to lean into a new angle and cut back to keep the ground from reaching up and slamming him another lick, and the dirt of the dry field and the hard edges of the saw-grass were working together like a charm to slow and trip him up.
He went over the stile on his hands and knees, and the earth popped him a good one again on the other side of the fence, but he was able to get himself up by leaning his back against the trunk of a pine tree and pushing himself up in stages. There was a dim yellow light coming from a cloth tent right at the back steps of the house, and Sully aimed for that and the sounds of a man’s voice coming from it in a regular singing pattern. He got there in three more angled runs, the last one involving a low clothesline that caught him in the head just where his hairline started, and he stopped about ten feet from the tent flap, dust rising around him and the earth pushing up hard against one foot and sucking down at the other one.
Barney Lee Richards lifted the tent flap and stuck his head out to see what had caused all the commotion in the middle of B. J.’s prayer against the unpardonable sin, but at first all he could make out was a cloud of suspended dust with a large dark shape in the middle of it. He blinked his eyes, focused again, and the form began to resolve itself into somebody or something standing at an angle, an arm extended above its head, which looked whiter than anything around it, and the whole thing wrapped in a long hanging garment. The clothesline was making a strange humming sound.
