Cory

Chapter. 9

He lay on his bed, looking at the ceiling, sweating.

'"Cory! Supper!"

"Thank you,

(i am not afraid)

Momma."

He got up and fixed his hair. Then he went downstairs

How apparent was Cory's 'wild talent' and what did Mavis Anthony, with her extreme Christian ethic, think of it? We shall probably never know. But one is tempted to believe that Mrs Anthony's reaction must have been extreme ...

"You haven't touched your pie, Cory." Momma looked up from the tract she had been perusing while she drank her Constant Comment. "It's homemade."

"It makes me have pimples, Momma."

"Your pimples are the Lord's way of chastising you. Now eat your pie."

"Momma?"

"Yes?"

Cory plunged. "I've been invited to the Prom next Friday by Charlene Griffin-"

The tract was forgotten. Momma was staring at him with wide my ears-are-deceiving-me eyes. Her nostrils flared like those of a horse that has heard the dry rattle of a snake.

Cory tried to swallow an obstruction and only

(i am not afraid o yes i am)

got rid of part of it.

"-and she's a very nice girl. She's promised to stop in and meet you before and-"

"No."

"-to have me in by eleven. I've-"

"No, no, no!"

"-accepted. Momma, please see that I have to start to, to try and get along with the world. I'm not like you. I'm funny - I mean, the kids think I'm funny. I don't want to be. I want to try and be a whole person before it's too late to-"

Mrs Anthony threw her tea in Cory's face.

It was only lukewarm, but it could not have shut of Cory's words more suddenly if it had been scalding. He sat numbly, the amber fluid dripping from his chin and cheeks on to his white shirt, spreading. It was sticky and smelled like cinnamon.

Mrs Anthony sat trembling, her face frozen except for her nostrils, which continued to flare. Abruptly she threw back her head and screamed at the ceiling.

"God! God! God!" Her jaw snapped brutally over each syllable.

Cory sat without moving.

Mrs Anthony got up and came around the table. Her hands were hooked into shaking claws. Her face bore a half-mad expression of compassion mixed with hate.

"The closet," she said. "Go to your closet and pray."

"No, Momma."

"Girl. Yes, girls come next. After the erections the girls come. Like sniffing dogs, grinning and slobbering, trying to find out where that smell is. That ... smell!"

She swung her whole arm into the blow, and the sound of her palm against Cory's face

(o god i am so afraid now)

was like that flat sound of a leather belt being snapped in air. Cory remained seated, although his upper body swayed. The mark on his cheek was first white, then blood red.

"The mark," Mrs Anthony said. Her eyes were large but blank, she was breathing in rapid, snatching gulps of air. She seemed to be talking to herself as the claw hand descended on to Cory's shoulder and pulled him out of his chair.

"I've seen it, all right. Oh yes. But. I. Never. Did. But for him. He. Took. Me . . ." She paused, her eyes wandering vaguely toward the ceiling. Cory was terrified. Momma seemed in the throes of some great revelation which might destroy her.

"Momma-"

"In cars. Oh, I know where they take you in their arms. City limits. Roadhouses. Whiskey. Smelling ... oh they smell it on you!" Her voice rose to a scream. Tendons stood out on her neck, and her head twisted in a questing upward rotation.

"Momma, you better stop."

This seemed to snap her back to some kind of hazy reality. Her lips twitched in a kind of elementary surprise and she halted, as if groping for old bearings in a new world.

"The closet," she, muttered. "Go to your closet and pray."

"No."

Momma raised her hand to strike.

"No!"

The hand stopped in the dead air. Momma stared up at it, as if to confirm that it was still there, and whole.

The pie pan suddenly rose from the trivet on the table and hurled itself across the room to impact beside the living-room door in a splash of blueberry drool.

"I'm going, Momma!"

Momma's overturned teacup rose and flew past her head to shatter above the stove. Momma shrieked and dropped to her knees with her hands over her head.

"Devil's child," she moaned. "Devil's child. Satan spawn-"

"Momma, stand up."

"Lust and licentiousness, the cravings of the flesh-"

"Stand up!"

Momma's voice faded her but she did stand up, with her hands still on her head, like a prisoner of war.

Her lips moved. To Cory she seemed to be reciting the Lord's ]Prayer.

"I don't want to fight with you, Momma," Cory said, and his voice almost broke from him and dissolved. He struggled to control it. "I only want to be let to live my own life. I... I don't like yours." He stopped, horrified in spite of himself. The ultimate blasphemy had been spoken, and it was a thousand times worse than the Eff Word.

"Witch," Momma whispered. "It says in the Lord's Book: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to bye." Your father did the Lord's work-"

"I don't want to talk about that," Cory said. It always disturbed him to hear Momma talk about his father. "I just want you to understand that things are going to change around here, Momma." His eyes gleamed. "They better understand it, too."

But Momma was whispering to herself again.

Unsatisfied, with a feeling of anticlimax in his throat and the dismal rolling of emotional upset in his belly, he went to the cellar to get his suit material.

It was better than the closet. There was that. Anything was better than the closet with its blue light and the overpowering stench of sweat and his own sin. Anything. Everything.

He stood with the wrapped package hugged against his chest and closed his eyes, shutting out the weak glow of the cellar's bare, cobweb-festooned bulb. Charlene Griffin didn't love him, he knew that. This was some strange kind of atonement, and he could understand that and respond to it. He had lain cheek and jowl with the concept of penance since he had been old enough to reason.

She had said it would be good-that they would see to it. Well, he would see to it. They better not start anything. They just better not. He did not know if his gift had come from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that he did not care which, he was overcome with an almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from his shoulders.

Upstairs, Momma continued to whisper. It was not the Lord's Prayer. It was the Prayer of Exorcism from Deuteronomy.