Free Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote Page B

a rocker fashioned out of old barrel-staves; his reverent falsetto quavered like a broken ocarina-note, and occasionally he raised his hands to give a feeble, soundless clap.
    “. . . on my ride!”
    Perched on a toadstool-covered stump growing level with the porch, Joel alternated his interest between Zoo’s highjinks and the changing weather; the instant of petrified violence that sometimes foreruns a summer storm saturated the hushed yard, and in the unearthly tinseled light rusty buckets of trailing fern which were strung round the porch like party lanterns appeared illuminated by a faint green inward flame. A damp breeze, tuning in the boles of waterbays, carried the fresh mixed scent of rain, of pine and June flowers blooming in far-off fields. The cabin door swung open, banged closed, and there came the muffled rattle of the Landing’s window-shutters being drawn.
    Zoo mashed out a final gaudy chord, and put the accordion aside. She had varnished her upended hair with brilliantine, and exchanged the polka-dot neckerchief for a frayed red ribbon. Different colored threads darned her white dress in a dozen spots, and she’d jeweled her ears with a pair of rhinestone earrings.
    “If you gotta thirst, and the water done gone, PRAY to the Lord, pray on and on.” Outstretching her arms, balanced like a tightrope walker, she stepped into the yard, and strutted round Joel’s tree stump. “If you gotta lover, and the lover done gone, PRAY to the Lord, pray on and on.”
    High in chinaberry towers the wind moved swift as a river, the frenzied leaves, caught in its current, frothed like surf on the sky’s shore. And slowly the land came to seem as though it were submerged in dark deep water. The fern undulated like sea-floor plants, the cabin loomed mysterious as a sunken galleon hulk, and Zoo, with her fluid, insinuating grace, could only be, Joel thought, the mermaid bride of an old drowned pirate.
    “If you gotta hunger, and the food done gone, PRAY to the Lord, pray on and on.”
    A yellow tabby loped across the yard, and sprang nimbly into Jesus Fever’s lap; it was the cat Joel had seen skulking in the garden lilac. Clambering to the old man’s shoulder, it smooched its crafty mug next to the puny cheek, its tawny astonished eyes blazing at Joel. It rumbled as the little Negro stroked the striped belly. Minus his derby hat, Jesus Fever’s skull, except for sparse sprouts of motheaten wool, was like a ball of burnished metal; a black suit double his size sagged dilapidatedly on his delicate frame, and he wore tiny high-button shoes of orange leather. The spirit of the service was rousing him mightily, and, from time to time, he honked his nose between his fingers, tossing the discharge into the fern.
    The rhythmic chain of Zoo’s half-sung, half-shouted phrases rose and fell like her pounding foot, and her earrings, dangling with the sway of her head, shot flecks of sparkle. “Listen oh Lord when us pray, kindly hear what us has to say. . . .”
    Silent lightning zigzagged miles away, then another bolt, this a dragon of crackling white, now not too distant, was followed by a crawling thunder-roll. A bantam rooster raced for the safety of a well-shed, and the triangular shadow of a crow flock cut the sky.
    “I cold,” complained Jesus petulantly. “Leg all swole up with rain. I cold. . . .” The cat curled in his lap, its head flopped over his knee like a wilted dahlia.
    The off-on flash of Zoo’s gold tooth made Joel’s heart suddenly like a rock rattling in his chest, for it suggested to him a certain winking neon sign:
R. R. Oliver’s Funeral Estb.
Darkness.
R. R. Oliver’s Funeral Estb.
Darkness. “Downright tacky, but they don’t charge too outlandish,” that’s what Ellen had said, standing before the plate window where a fan of gladiolas blushed livid under the electric letters publicizing a cheap but decent berth en route to the kingdom and the glory. Now here again he’d locked the door and