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and said: “I want to preach.”
    She immediately understood that I didn’t mean that I wanted to be a preacher or to become a preacher, but rather that I wanted to preach right then. She said: “Well, son, if you want to preach, just get up there and preach to us.”
    She was always open and direct with us, always kind and loving, even though she was always strict. She believed that if a child did something he knew was wrong, had been told was wrong, he had tobe whipped. And she did throughout my childhood throw some pretty good whippings on my brother and me. But she never whipped us when we did not know that we deserved it and, more, when we did not expect it.
    Mama and my brother sat there in front of the cold fireplace while I got up and turned my ladder-back chair over and got the crocheted doily off the pedal-driven Singer sewing machine to cover the chair with. The chair covered with the doily made a fine altar from which to preach. I took hold of it with both hands, looked out at them, and started my sermon.
    I said: “We all of us made out of dirt. God took Him up some dirt and put it in his hands and rolled it around and then he spit in the dirt and roll it some more and out of that dirt and God spit, he made you and me, all of us.”
    That is the way my preaching began. I don’t remember how it ended, but I know it went on for a long time and it was made pretty much out of what I had heard in church, what I had heard the preacher say about hell and God and heaven and damnation and the sorry state of the human condition. Hell was at the center of any sermon I had ever heard in Bacon County. In all the churches, you smelled the brimstone and the sulfur and you felt the fire and you were made to know that because of what you had done in your life, you were doomed forever. Unless somehow, somewhere, you were touched by the action of mercy and the Grace of God. But you could not, you must not, count on the Grace of God. It probably would not come to you because you were too sorry.
    I was exhausted by the time it was over, and I was asleep the moment my head touched the pillow. But I heard the pickup truck when it came in. And I heard daddy come through the front gate, the plow points banging and his own drunk-heavy feet on the steps and the front door slamming, and then I heard, as I already knew I would, querulous voices as mama and daddy confronted each other there beyond the thin wall. Finally, their voices raised to shouts and even screams, but since there was nothing breaking, no pots hitting the wall, no glass splattering on the floor, no furniture turning over, I could stand lying in my bed if I concentrated on hell and damnation. This was nothing compared to the eternal fires of hell that God might someday demand that I endure. Withmy whole self firmly immersed in hell, I could usually go back to sleep.
    I woke up sometime in the middle of the night. An enormous and brilliant moon shone over the cotton field where I was standing, still in my gown. It was not a dream and I knew immediately that it was not a dream. I was where I thought I was, and I had come here by walking in my sleep. I came awake that night the way I always have when I’ve gotten up in my sleep and walked. Terrified. Terrified almost beyond terror because it had no name and was sourceless. My heart was pounding, and my gown was soaked with sweat and sticking to my freezing skin. My mouth was full of the taste of blood where I’d chewed my lips.
    The cotton bolls were open all about me. As far as I could see, all the way to the dark wall of trees surrounding the field, was a white sheet of cotton, brilliant and undulating under the heavy moon. I stood there for a long time, unable to move. Off there to the left was the enormous oak tree that I had slept under that morning, it, too, brilliant in the moon, and behind the tree was the house, dark in its own shadow. I did not know what to do. I did not cry and I