Light to the Hills: A Novel (22)

“How do.” Mama nodded at the assembly. “Y’all likely know my husband, Harley, from down at the mine.” Sass’s eyes adjusted to the light and skipped around the faces in the room. “Or my boy Finn. He’s just lately turned nineteen.”

A few heads nodded. Clearly Mama recognized lots of faces, but they weren’t so familiar to Sass. She wondered if any of these were miners her father had brought home stories about. A woman rose from the front and made her way down the center of the aisle. She was a plain woman, thin and tall, with a cotton dress, blue wool shawl, and a wool hat tamped down over the crown of her head. She gathered Mama into an embrace like they were old friends, then turned and beamed at Sass and the others.

“Rai, I remember you from a shucking a while back across Pine Mountain. Beady Wick. Come on in and set down here. We’ll soon settle in for a message. We’d be pleased for y’all to join.” The group seemed to come to their senses then, shifting around and dragging a bench here, a chair there, to make room for the family. Beady Wick fussed over them, steering Sass to a chair with a palm flat against the back of her shoulder. Something in the woman’s smile seemed familiar.

Sass watched a pair of young girls pass the time with a hand-clapping game. It was one she and Fern played at sometimes, and she tapped her foot with the rhyme they chanted. Mama and the preacher’s wife chatted in low voices beside her.

“Mining sure is hard on a body,” Miz Wick was saying. “It’s an honest labor but a tough row to hoe.”

“I imagine preaching and smithing like your husband does has its own trials,” Mama allowed. “How’d you come to meet?”

Sass detected a blush under Miz Wick’s curls. “Jack likes to say I’m his Cinderella, since we met from a lost shoe. My horse threw a shoe at a spring dance, and he mended it so my sister and I could ride home.”

“Harley’s a hand with horses, too,” Mama said. “Tended the racehorses in Lexington for a time. Fact is, I watched him train a colt one afternoon, and that was all it took.”

Miz Wick smiled a secret smile and nudged Mama with her shoulder. “Nothing like a man that gentles a horse.” She drew out a paper fan and swiped the air with it a time or two. “When Jack told me he aimed to be a preacher and head east, I had my bag packed in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. I’d play games with the children, and he’d preach the Word like the Pied Piper. You know how rough mining towns can be, though.” She cast Mama a knowing look.

“I do, for certain. One of the reasons I wanted to put Finn off from getting in the mix. Least he had his daddy to look out for him.”

“We had a place down there at first, but one morning I woke up and found a hole above the baby’s crib where a bullet had come through from the juke joint. I asked Jack if he didn’t reckon the mountain needed a good word, too. Pretty soon, he said the Lord had laid it on his heart to bring light to the hills.”

Sass turned to see Mama’s wry smile. “Well, I coulda told you how that story was gonna finish up,” Mama said.

Miz Wick smirked. “As long as they think it’s their idea.” Another elbow nudge and a quick wink. She went on. “Before long, we had us a church building.” She waved the fan around like it was the magic wand that had conjured the benches where they sat.

All the chatter ceased as the man who’d welcomed them made his way to the front of the church. There was no finery or fuss. A simple platform lifted him another four inches or so above the audience, and he ran his hands over a pulpit made of rough-hewn wood posts and a few sanded boards. Behind him stood a half wall of shelves stacked with latched wooden boxes. He wore eyeglasses with thin wire frames that perched somewhere between the end of his nose and his sight line, so he bobbed his head up and down to peer over the top or to see the book that lay open on the pulpit. It gave the impression that he was overly agreeable, as if nodding assent to himself as he spoke.

“Seems the Lord in His wisdom has seen fit to send us some company today,” he said, nodding at the MacInteers. Mama half smiled and smoothed Hiccup’s dress. “Why, that’s all right because He calls us all in His time, calls us each by name to follow Him, our good shepherd. His Word is a light unto our feet and a lamp unto our path. He provides for all our needs, in times of plenty and times of want.”

Several listeners began nodding at this. One or two slowly rocked to the rhythm of his speech. Sass thought he had a musical voice, with a dipping and rising melody that carried you along in its current, like sitting in a flat-bottomed boat on a gentle stream, waiting for the fish to bite, easy as you please. He spoke of desperation, how desperate times don’t mark us as desperate people because we have hope. Our faith carries us, he said, carries us like a mama carries her baby, helps us bear the yokes on our shoulders, the grumbling in our children’s bellies, the knocks and setbacks of this dark world.

He started softly, almost too faint at times for Sass to hear. As he warmed up, his listeners responded—with nods, raised hands with an encouraging Amen or That’s right—and his volume and energy built. He paced about the front of the room, on and off the platform. The eyeglasses came off. The sweat on his face made them slide too far down his nose, and he no longer read from the book up front. The words flowed naturally, organically, like a mountain brook. He sang—or that was how it seemed, his words like notes in a song, a cadence about faith that saves, sustains, is tested, and delivers. Expertly, he dragged them down into the deep, dark coal mine of despair and fear until they were fairly shaking with the burden of it and brought them back up again into the light, a bright and shining light of freedom and fresh air that made them break out in rejoicing. One woman bent over and pulled a tambourine from under her skirts like it was the most natural place in the world to store an instrument and started shaking it in a jubilee, wiping the tears that streaked her face. Even the old man with the eye patch stood with his hands raised and his face to the ceiling, his lips moving in some silent prayer.