The Prophets(21)

Nearly at the top, but the double screaming, day and night, had yanked Amos right back down. When the dreams began, Amos could make neither heads nor tails of them. The lightning, the howling wind, the thunder, the singing magnified, the colors, the blurred figures, the spinning, the music—all of it swirling together. It only confused him. The falling he recognized because that was what he told himself he would do. But he imagined that he would be falling forward, as one might after a long day, a pallet just within reach, so that the arms could extend and protect oneself from damage. But the backwardness of this new tumbling was unexpected. Outstretched arms provided no buffer. And there he was, kicking and screaming in the blinding expanse of white where not even his voice was echoed back to him.

There was someone living in the clouds, someone who had turned the world now into the same blanket of fog that Amos found himself spinning in. And it wasn’t that this someone was invisible but that, instead, it had given the world its own color so that it was merely camouflaged. Amos knew that all he had to do was wait. If he was resolute in his patience, the somebody would blink, revealing ever so briefly the precise location of its presence into which Amos could find a fool’s refuge, soft as cotton. And then, in chorus, it could say his name.

But there was no chorus to be found. He heard only a singular voice, hard, like it had been scraped across gravel or frozen. When it said his name, Amos felt his blood chill.

He woke up: sticky, wet, and dizzy; short of breath; parched and starving; his voice, also, a croak; too tired to move. But he had been touched. In his face, there was a knowledge that he didn’t have before, a certainty and a seeing that came upon him through the communion with the baffling every-which-way he encountered while unconscious. Its meaning couldn’t be interpreted, but he somehow knew he could be a conduit through which understanding could be conveyed to others. When the time came, whatever forces communicated with him would communicate through him. This was the mark of tongues. The wretched, despite all other things, anointed. Amos knew Paul evinced no similar experience. This thing was Amos’s and Amos’s alone.

As Essie lay next to him, he looked upon her with his newest eyes, tracing every kink and curl on her head, jet-black tresses that blanketed her neck until they gave way to the curve of her back. He could see the bumps of her spine leading down to the splendor that was her own and that was the gift he had hoped his transformation would be able to provide: that she would be able to reclaim what was rightfully hers and give herself back to herself while he witnessed and recited a psalm.

At the first sermon, Amos spoke to the four people who had it in them to get up on their day of rest. Amos asked Paul’s permission to use the spot just beyond the cotton field, but still on Halifax land. Paul told James to watch over.

Amos climbed upon the rock, like a mount. The light and shadow both hit him at once. From that moment, the people could look nowhere else.

“What God wouldn’t give for a jug of lemonade,” he said to them as he dabbed his head with a torn piece of cloth, folded to absorb the sweat beading at his hairline.

“Or potlikker,” A Man Called Coot shot back, and they all laughed.

“You are not your body,” Amos said softly to the people, as James stood armed in the canopy of trees.

“What you mean?” a woman named Naomi asked. “I sure is my body. Got the scars and tired hands to prove it.”

Amos smiled and went closer to her. He touched her on the arm, which she eyed suspiciously. Then laid his other hand right on the woman’s chest, felt the pulse of her heart beneath his palm, and shook his head. Amos shot up suddenly and clapped his hands together. He looked up, past the trees to the sky above, then closed his eyes to listen to the inside voice that was only a whisper, an incessant whisper that was too low to disturb the quiet, and quiet was what he needed in order to hear it properly. He needed to still everything, even the drag of his breath, to absorb the murmuring words that he was certain came from the center of everything, where the fog had only to blink to let him know where the hiding place was.

He opened his eyes and looked down at Naomi, seated before him.

“Ma’am, I got some good news for you.”

Naomi, as though she had heard the same whispering voice, placed her hand on her cheek.

From the edge, James removed his hat. He put his rifle down and leaned on it like a cane. Loud enough for Amos to hear, he said:

“Well, I’ll be damned.”



* * *



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“DID YOU LIKE THE PIE?”

Amos’s question swept up like dust and lingered in the air momentarily before being caught by a breeze and blown over Isaiah’s shoulder. Isaiah and Samuel stood, arm to arm, at the entrance of Amos and Essie’s shack. Their stance struck Amos as war, but he wasn’t afraid. Behind them, a blue cloth draped the doorway, keeping the sun at bay. But it also made it so that their faces were cast in shadow and Amos could only make out vague details: lips, bright eyes, and not much else, which didn’t matter because their blackness, which the interior of the shack merely magnified, was comforting enough.

“Essie cook good, don’t she?”

“What you want from us?” Samuel asked in a hushed but deep tone.

Amos, seated, folded his hands, pressed his lips together, and closed his eyes.

“Speak plain, Amos,” Samuel said.