#have yall ever tried to sit on a thin railing?

[swagging-back-to]

riding on a broom makes literally no sense any way you think about it

[ecotone99]

[RF] Zebedee

I was a youngin when daddy died in the war, and me and mama had come to Louisiana to work on a rich man’s farm. We done ok for about 10 years I guess, I was almost grown by then when mama got down. The man we worked for, Mr. Stubbs, sent for Doc Reppond. When he come ‘round, he told mama it was cancer. Couldn’t nothin’ be done for her. He told her to make her peace with the Lord, she had a few months to live at most. That’s when the other women around the camp started tellin’ her about the man from Zebedee.

No one knew his name; How long he had been there, no one knew. Some said he was old when their parents were young, they’d been hearin’ about him their whole life. They said he lived in a shack off the beaten path, where the woods grew thick and dark, and they claimed he could heal with a touch, if only you could find him.

No one there had ever seen him, but it seemed like everybody knew somebody who had. A few of the men said he didn’t exist at all; he was a figment the old folks told about. But mama believed.

***

It was on a Sunday that we left for Zebedee. We left at dawn, walkin’ into the sunrise down the old rail line. We crossed the bridge over bayou DeLoutre by around noon and turned south down the old indian trail. The trail seemed as old as time, and I had to help mama some of the way, when she got tired or when the path got too rough, but we followed it all the way down, down past Seven Devils Bottom, and across Red Creek. We stayed overnight on a widow woman’s front porch that first night at a crossroads. I chopped wood for her that next morning before we left. We walked the whole next day till a man with a mule cart come by and told us he’d carry us as far as he was going. Sometime close to sundown he dropped us at a cold lonely crossroads and pointed south. Told us there we’d find Zebedee.

We walked just a short piece up that road before we come to town. There wasn’t nothin’ much there. Little dry goods store, couple of houses, and an old church that was probably built before the great war. The dirt trail we were followin’ grew into a road and crossed with another, bigger one. There was a few people ‘round about the houses, kids playin’ in the dirt and women sweepin’ porches and whatnot. They knew we were strangers, but I reckon when they saw mama, they knew why we was there.

I told mama it was gettin’ on near evenin’, we ought to find a place to rest for the night, but she wouldn’t hear to it. Said she’d see the man before the sun went down. So I asked ‘round among the few people we saw, and they all told us the same thing- just keep walkin’ and he’ll find you.

So that’s what we done. They said to keep goin’ south outta the village, and we did. It seemed like hours we walked, but the sun never went down. I kept expectin’ mama to get tired and wear out, but she never did. Just kept steppin’. It almost seemed like she got stronger the further on we went. Then it seemed like finally the fields turned into woods, and the road became a trail, and the trail got harder and harder to follow, till we seen it just up ahead.

The house was as old as anything I’d ever seen. Mama always told people it looked like the kinda cabin the settlers built when they first come west. Out in front of it was a great big old Live Oak tree with branches going all off in every which direction, some toward the ground and some toward the sky. An old stone chimney ‘round the side puffed wisps of white smoke. There was an old garden off to one side of the clearing that the house stood in, and I could see a few stands of tomatoes an’ corn and beans and such. A few chickens pecked the ground around a little old coop. The house was built a little up off the ground, and I could see an old cur dog layin’ up underneath the porch. And there on that porch, in an old rockin’ chair, sat the man.

As we walked up closer, the man didn’t move. I could see him well once we got up to the porch steps. Everything about him seemed gray and faded- his hair, his eyes, his skin, his clothes, all the way down to the beat up old hat he wore. He was steadily rockin’ in his old wooden chair as we approached. I could see it was covered in deer hide, like some I’d seen the men make back at the camp. His face was wrinkled beyond all I’d ever seen, and a few white whiskers dotted his face. His face finally cracked in a big ole smile when I helped Mama mount the steps to the porch. He rose from where he sat and extended a thin, knotty hand out to steady her as she stepped.

“Welcome lady” he said in a way that you knew he meant it, removing his hat.

Mama began to speak but he shushed her, helping her to sit in the rocker where he’d been. I tried to think of what to say, but before I could he turned to me and said “Son, run get your mama some water” He nodded in the direction of an old pot at the other end of the porch. By the time I come back, he was talkin’ to her.

“Now you need to know Lady, there ain’t no good in this thing that’s in you. It don’t belong inside you and it shouldn’t ought to be there.”

My mama nodded, tears welling up in her troubled eyes.

The old man patted her on the back and reached down in his pocket, coming back up with a penny.

“Now lady, I’m buyin’ that cancer from you. Ya’unnderstan?”

With that, he pressed the old copper penny into mama’s forehead, right between her eyes.

My mother nodded and smiled through tears as the old man held the penny firmly up to her head, whispering “Believe, believe, believe”.

A minute or two later, he stopped. Taking her hand in his, he gently rolled her hand over, palm facing upward and placed the penny in it. “I’m buyin’ that cancer from you. It aint yours no more.”

My mother nodded her understanding, biting her lip back and closing her eyes.

The old man closed her hand around the penny and patted it. “Now go. And keep that penny with ya always, whenever you touch it, believe.”

My mother stood up and took the man’s hand to her forehead, bowing her head toward him, her tears flowing freely.

“Thank you, thank you” she whispered.

The old man shook his head. “Just believe lady. Believe. Now look, it’s gettin’ dark. You an’ your boy are welcome to stay with me tonight. I aint got much but yall are welcome to all I have.”

Mama only nodded her head, smiling through her tears. The old gray man stood up and opened the rickety screen door into the house, welcoming us in.

***

The house was as empty as could be. It was just a one room shack with a wood burning stove in one corner and a bed in the other with a dresser beside it.. A buckskin rug laid on the floor over near the stove, and that was about all there was to speak of. The old man seated my mother on the bed and set to work at the stove, cooking some kinda porridge or somethin, doling it out to us in two big bowls when he’d done. And as we set to eating, he read to us from an old bible that looked as old as the house, or even older. And I don’t remember everything he read, only that he read it with conviction like I’d never heard out of a preacher’s mouth, except he was different somehow; Not like a preacher at all, but like he knew what he was saying in a different way, like he was the one that wrote it; Or maybe more like he was there when it was written, or like it was written to him. And I’ll never forget the way he looked up at me as he spoke the last verse- “For it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God”. Closing the book in his hand, he never took his eyes off me.

He give Mama the bed and made me a pallet by the stove for the night. He told us he’d pass the night on the porch, said he’d done it many a night before and no harm would come to him. I lay on the floor for what seemed like a long time then, thinking about everything, listening to the sound of the old man’s rocking chair creaking on the porch. At some point I musta fell asleep listening to the noise. Next thing I remember was waking up to the same.

***

Next day we set out to head home. As mama made ready in the house, I stood on the porch speaking with the old man. I asked him what it was he did with all the ills he took from people- all the cancers and consumptions and all that. All the old man did was smile and nod out at the old Live Oak in front of his house. And I studied that tree for a second, and looked up, way up into the branches, and there hung from one of the high branches an old brown sack, trussed up with a length of rope tied around the mouth.

I started to ask the old man what he meant by that, but Mama came outta the house then, and we said our farewells. The old man told my mama one last time, “Believe lady, always believe”. I turned to see him one last time, and I could see the old man still sitting there upon his chair, a grin across his face like he knew something he wasn’t telling.

Mama got back healthy after that, and she lived another 15 years. She lived long enough to see me grown and married, to see her grandchildren born, and she never stopped talkin’ bout the man from Zebedee. The day she fell out in the field, they carried her back to the house and they said all she asked for was to be buried with that old penny he gave her. By the time I got to her, she had done gone on, still holdin’ that penny tight to her chest.

A friend took his wife to look for the man a few years back, but Zebedee was dried up an’ empty by then, everybody had done moved off. He said when he got to the shack, it was tumbled down, looked like nobody had lived there in a hundred years or more. Even the big old Live Oak tree was nothin but a rotten old stump now, almost like it had never been there at all. Almost like nobody believed anymore.

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