Light While There Is Light. Keith Waldrop

       Charles, in front of the house at 614 Neosho Street.

      There is one break in the rampart, one vacant lot between two edifices, where we held street services. J.W. would back his car over the sidewalk onto the packed clay. He had a loudspeaker on top of his car and after we had sung a few hymns he would preach into an elegant little microphone perched on a pole of aluminum. People just walking along Main Street would suddenly, when they were past Harvey’s package store, find themselves confronted by an invitation of enormous volume. And coated with static, since J.W. yelled directly into the little cup and sometimes shook the rod in his enthusiasm.

      J.W. was himself enormous, balloon-like, and when he was in the spirit it often seemed to me that he might bounce too high and be carried away. He was from somewhere in the hills—the lower Blue Ridge—and he had ministered to hill people for fifteen years before coming to Sharon to study homiletics. His reputation had, in fact, ranged from village to village over a surprising territory, mainly because of an exorcism he had performed in the late thirties. An old farmer, who produced principally moonshine, was dying in his shack and J.W., after climbing a mountain to see him, was greeted by a crone carrying a shotgun and told that the case was absolutely hopeless. The man, eighty-odd years old, had been hexed. A lady on a neighboring slope—the shotgun-carrier suggested a broken engagement, but it could hardly have been recent—was by some means or other causing his chest to constrict, a little more each day, and the end was near. J.W. went in, despite the smell, and found the man lying on a pallet, eyes bulging out of a dry skull, his arms locked around his chest as if he were holding himself to the bed. J.W. prayed, read the Twenty-third Psalm, prayed some more, put his hand on the old head, and prayed some more. The man seemed already in another world. J.W. leapt to his feet, took a charred stick from the stove and on the rough wall of the shack scratched a stick figure of more than human size.

      “Where does it hurt?” he shouted to the sick man, who in spite of himself had moved until he could see the drawing. “Where does it hurt?” J.W. shouted again and getting no reply shouted on, “Here! Here’s where the devil is!” and scratched an X in the middle of his stick figure’s chest. “The devil is there! He’s there!” he shouted, pointing at the X. Then he grabbed the shotgun from the crone, and shouting “In the blessed name of Jesus” pulled the trigger and blasted the X, the devil, and a good portion of the wall. In an instant the man was on his feet, hopping mad and cursing, chasing J.W. halfway across the mountain while the crone, on her knees, screamed hallelujahs.

      I played the violin. I started in junior high and as in many of my more complicated projects, began with promise, a promise never fulfilled. But musicians were scarce at Sharon, so for street services a fragile girl named Stella played the accordion, and I fiddled away—practically inaudible under Stella’s vast and unarticulated sound. Often Evangeline stood next to me and held the hymnbook so that the pages would not flip in the wind. I tried hard to figure out Evangeline. Glancing at her (sideways, missing a few notes of “Work For the Night is Coming”) I could sometimes suppose that she was different merely because she believed more fervently or lived more righteously or prayed more than all the others—which she may have done.

      “My text,” J.W. roared on one such occasion, “is from Revelations.” It usually was. And he proceeded to read, in its entirety, what the Spirit said to the church of the Laodiceans: “These things saith the Amen. . . .” A train was pulling in across the street, stealing J.W.’s thunder and sending a shower of soot down on all of us. There were few listeners anyway, but some left amid the roar. A teenage girl began to laugh and shout into her boyfriend’s ear—he tried then to pull her away from the meeting, but she stayed and so did he. An old woman sitting on a package wrapped in brown paper slipped a little more snuff into her already bulging lip. “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot.” The train had stopped and was snorting. “I would thou wert cold or hot.” The black cloud that belched out now blotted the daylight and we could hear nothing but the engine puffing and grinding. Engineers do not like to stop at Sharon, going east; the rails are upgrade then all the way to Easley. The electric voice came through again as the last car rumbled past and the sky slowly reappeared. “Behold I stand at the door and knock. . . .” I could look at the scripture as it was read, because Evangeline had her blue leather Bible open, but I was gazing at my brothers, whom I had not seen for two years but who were now, suitcases and all, crossing the highway from the depot, followed by two of the toughest-looking characters I had ever seen.

      “And I tell you,” J.W. was roaring, “when Jesus comes back to this earth with power and glory and sits down to judge the quick and the dead, is he going to find you with your lamps trimmed and waiting? Is he going to find you ready at the Rapture or will he say depart from me ye wicked into everlasting damnation I never knew ye?” Stella started playing for the invitation. Evangeline opened the book to “Just As I Am” and I scratched out the melody underneath the heavy chords. Most of the sidewalk congregation moved away quickly, but those who did not were soon cornered and exhorted to give their hearts to Jesus. A tall black man with white hair and expensive clothes nodded yes he was already the Lord’s and touched the hem of his jacket to make sure it still covered his hip pocket. The woman on the package was weeping and with a crooked index finger scooped a mass of snuff out of her jaw and slapped it on the sidewalk. When it was all over and the microphone and the accordion and my violin were packed away in J.W.’s car, neither Charles nor Julian was to be seen, so I rode back to the campus with the others.

      My mother’s first experience of divine healing was directly after separation from my father. It was rather an informal experience, without a service and without the shock of sudden recovery that is commonly reported. “I told the Lord,” she said, “that I was going to do his will—and he would just have to give me the strength for it.”

      The most obvious improvement was in her eyes. She now found it possible to read the Bible, in moderation, and to look at a certain amount of music. So she started again, after a lapse of twenty-odd years, teaching piano. At first she took on neighbor children, a few from the church, some friends of mine, and little by little built up a large class. The house was always ringing with some botched melody, which she would correct mercilessly, though often still she listened with her eyes closed. When we moved to South Carolina, what she regretted most leaving behind was her horde of keyboard thumpers who, twice a year, slicked up enough to be presented in public recital. Her students loved her, and some of them even learned to play.