TWILIGHT. Another street, off by itself in the middle of a commercial part of town. Smells of supper in the air. One end of the street opens out on a wide road full of fast traffic coming from burger places down the road. The houses all have porches and many of them have hedges in front or vines trained around their railings.
An old lady says: "Yessir my son he was sittin right on this porch right in that chair where you are and he'd been feeling right down, stayed out of work. Well suddenly he just started vomiting this black blood. He started vomiting and it was all black blood. They took him to the hospital and his heart, it stopped. They hooked him up to one of these machines, heart and lung, you know. He had all these tubes and wires coming out of him. After that they said he suffered from brain damage and now he can't see or hear none."
Toward the other end of the street the houses are not as nice. They don't have lithographs or plates with John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King on them on their mantles. They're on a slope and the back ends have to be held up by rickety-looking stilts. Let one grey weathered house stand for the rest: Inside tall narrow stairs twist back up around a wide chimney. The room is hot and is smoky and full of that sweet sickening smell--like burning beans--peculiar to dirty houses with wood stoves. The plaster is cracking off the walls, revealing in places an old wallpaper from finer days, repeating and repeating a magnolia bordered portrait of your standard columned mansion house, through which irony we may fade to...
FAIRNTOSH, "stately traditional plantation home," whose owner is commemorated by a silver, state-erected plaque on a pole as "one of the state's largest slaveholders before the War." The family had brought the name from their estate in Ireland and assembled here outside of Exeter a couple of hundred slaves and a couple of thousand acres.
How we really got to Fairntosh was along the narrow black road dropping steeply down and then straightening out across a flat stretch of swampy forest where at the end of the day a rich odor of bacon cooking came drifting from some nearby shack or trailer. "They've got it fixed up real pretty," said the man we asked for directions, "with them long white fences goin up the hill and the house is hid in the trees at the top."
Things aren't simple; Fairntosh wasn't white and didn't have columns. It was a beautiful shade of yellow, and beside it was a bed of trained yellow roses, and above it were those tremendous oaks. It was actually built too early to have columns, and its porch stood out instead with sober Federalist dignity.
BEHIND HIS HOUSE, the Reverend Harper, a cracker-barrel oracle in the best tradition, has a little lean-to grocery. He is in his eighties and is well-known and respected for preaching at a different church each Sunday somewhere around the country. He is a type you have met before, in one account or another, or at least he seems to be. He is "always glad to talk to you;" he is full of wisdom.
We first encountered the Reverend one dusty day when we needed something cool to drink. He was napping on the bench in front of the grocery, fishing cap down over age-browned eyes. "Orange soda?" he says as he hands up the bottles from the panting cooler, and if you encourage him he begins telling stories from the Bible, and talking in general about the state of the world. He believes that TV faked the moon landings. We react like Zarathustra, thinking to himself, could it be that this hermit, here in his woods, has not yet heard that God is dead? He paces and leans behind the counter: Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones, you've red it, I know you have, how the Lord told Ezekiel to speak and then Ezekiel he spoke and the bones took on sinew and the bones took on flesh. Or the tale of Balaam's ass. Or about the devil going to and fro in the earth: Yessir the devil is goin to and fro making his work. Making the work of hell.
You know what hell is?
Why hell ain't nothing but a place of confusion. Even the churches can be hell, when the people start fightin' among themselves. And now all these preachers come out for big money. Some of um have ten thousand a year. But they ain't true preachers unlessen they been called. Now that's right.
Yes its the worst I ever saw. And its gonna get worse before it gets better, Bible says. Government is the worst I ever saw. They's all out for money. Now that's right. And there ain't no way to get money unlessen you steal it or kill a man for it. This wiretapin' shows it. Said in the paper they been stealing since President Jackson. Now that's right.
It's the worst it's ever been, but the Lord says at the 32nd chapter of the book of numbers and the 23rd verse, your sin shall find you out, now that's right. For the justice of the Lord shall follow you everywhere. Now that's right, you know it is, you know it.