The Devil's Dream by Lee Smith Page A

even remember what it used to be like in those busy, busy years? . . . Had Zeke ever talked more? It seemed so, but maybe it was just that the children made so much noise . . . and how Nonnie loved to chatter along with them! But at seventeen, R.C. left home to work at a lumber camp near Holly Grove, and then Durwood got on at the sawmill. Only Pack, Lizzie, and the baby, Sally, were still at home, but Pack was mostly gone already, and Lizzie lived for school and had already announced her intentions of going on to the Methodist school in Cana, once Missus Black had taught her everything she knew. Dimly, Nonnie remembered being a smart girl herself. But she couldn’t really remember herself as a child, not really, and now her own children were growing up before her very eyes, their childish features sharpening and stretching and changing them into people she scarcely knew.
    Only Zeke remained the same, and he remained exactly the same, which infuriated Nonnie. She had given up her girlhood, her beauty, and for what? For children bent on leaving like thieves in the night, stealing her youth and her heart, for an old man with nothing to say.
    But Nonnie was not yet an old woman when she went to the medicine show.
    Lizzie talked her into it. “Oh, come on, Mamma, everybody is going, everybody from school,” Lizzie said, arms and legs flying everywhere at once as she chased her puppy around the yard. It made Nonnie tired just to watch her.
    â€œWhat do you think, Zeke?” she asked her husband, who sat in his chair and smoked and stared down the valley.
    â€œZeke!” Nonnie said sharply, but once she got his attention, he merely asked why in the world she would want to go see something like that, and mentioned that God was against it, for it had been so preached from the pulpit Sunday past.
    This made Nonnie see red. It was not like Zeke to lay down the law, it had something to do with that new preacherman that Nonnie didn’t like anyway, and speaking of him , she could tell a thing or two about him just from the way he looked at her after church, not that she would, of course. Nonnie never told Zeke anything that would bother him, or that he wouldn’t understand. But she determined, then and there, to go to the medicine show, and by the end of the week, she had cajoled Zeke into acquiescing. She got a neighbor woman to come over and stay with Sally.
    Nonnie and Lizzie set out on horseback for Cana, Lizzie leading. They stopped once to water the horses and once to eat their snack of dried beef and cornbread, and pulled up at the Streets’ boardinghouse just as the sun went down. “You all better hurry up,” old Birdie Street said, fixing her hat. “Hit’s fixing to start. Hit’s starting in a minute.” Then off she went toward the court-house square, followed by Nonnie and Lizzie as soon as they’d washed their faces and beat the road dust out of their clothes.
    Even before they turned the corner into the square, Nonnie heard the fiddle, and as they pushed through the crowd toward the makeshift stage that had been set up in front of the statue, Nonnie’s step grew lighter and lighter, until she was almost dancing to the tune. It had been years since she’d heard a fiddle— years , for in keeping with his position as an elder in the Chicken Rise church, Ezekiel didn’t hold with dancing or dance music. Nonnie didn’t know how much she’d missed it until now. She dropped years with each step as they approached the elevated stage, draped in bunting, ringed by coal-oil lamps.
    Great torches flickered at each side of the stage, while large, lurid placards promised gypsy fortune-tellers and Indian dances and touted the virtues of Chief Thunder Cloud’s Old-fashioned Indian Vegetable Compound for Scalp Renewal, and of Apache Indian Sagwa, the Bowel, Liver, and Stomach Renovator, and of Dr. Harry Sharp’s Celebrated Nervine. Maybe Nonnie needed