The Devil's Dream Read Online Free PDF Page A

more I have done lost track of, and another boy and four gals that lives here and there. They bring their younguns up here to see me infrequent. I ain’t got no use fer younguns. And Piney dead in the ground these twenty year. It seems to me a quare thing that I lived with that old woman nearabout fifty year—and she was a good wife, mind ye—and yet I cannot now recall her face, fer the life of me! Not the way I recall Kate Malone the day she made the apple butter when we was young.
    Anyway, I had done been caught and trussed by Piney when all the trouble started up over there in Cold Spring Holler. Hit commenced when Kate’s ma took sick at Cana and they sent fer Kate, so Moses Bailey had to let her go. She taken Jeremiah with her, leaving Mary Magdaleen to watch little Zeke and do fer their daddy, who prayed over them out in the yard afore they left, riding on two white mules. Well, hit was two days a-riding over Lone Bald Mountain in those days, and when they got there, come to find out that Kate’s mamma had took a up-turn. So Kate and her mamma just fell on each other’s necks a-crying, it is said, and they was muching over Jeremiah, that they had not seed since he was a babe. So Kate and Jeremiah stayed on a few days to visit.
    And one night Jeremiah noted a fiddle hanging on the wall and said, “Grandaddy, what is that?” and Pink took it down and played it fer him. And Jeremiah fair loved it! He took to the fiddle like a duck to water, and when they got back home, hit was the first thing he told his daddy about the trip.
    â€œNow you hark me,” Moses said, his voice deep and terrible. “The fiddle is a instrument of the Devil, and iffen you ever take it up you will have to leave home. Fer you won’t be my boy no more, you’ll be the Devil’s boy.” And then he put both hands on Jeremiah’s head and prayed on him.
    So that was the end of that, until the follering summer, when Kate’s mamma took sick again, and this time Moses was off a-running a raft of logs down the Monongah River fer a feller, so Kate just up and lit a rag fer home without so much as a by-your-leave to Moses, and got there just in time to see her mamma buried.
    Now I don’t know but what this might of made Kate kindly reckless, fer when Jeremiah axed fer the fiddle again, Kate allowed it, and she allowed Pink to play it fer him. And then it is said that Kate herself took her own little fiddle down from the wall where it had been hanging ever since she went off to Cold Spring Holler. She took it out on the porch of her daddy’s fine big cabin over at Cana, and set out there all night long a-fiddling. Everything she had ever knowed come back to her—“Barbry Allen,” “Cripple Creek,” “Shady Grove,” “The Devil’s Dream,” “I gave my love a cherry that had no stone”—Jeremiah, he couldn’t get over his mamma a-playing thataway. But come morning, she put her little fiddle back up on the wall and busted out a-crying.
    â€œI tell you what,” old Pink Malone says to Kate when they are saddled up to leave, “honey, you take this fiddle, it is yourn, on home with you, wrapped up in these here gunny sacks, and you teach the boy to play whenever his daddy is away. The boy has got a ear fer it,” Pink said. “Besides, hit’s a sin to put your talent under a bushel,” Pink said. You know a feller can quote Scripture to make it come out however suits him.
    Well, Kate she looked at the fiddle, and she looked at Jeremiah’s face, and she looked at the fiddle again, and her whole heart was filled with longing. So she taken the fiddle.
    And from then on, every time Moses was away, why we could hear them out there making music on the porch. Even the littlun was learning, that leetle Zeke. And Mary had the sweetest high thin voice. “Down in the valley, valley so low,” she’d sing, “hang