Free Spencer's Mountain by Jr. Earl Hamner

way she might sneak away from home and attend the festivities, sneaking away being a necessity since neither of their mothers, being Baptists, condoned the sin of dancing.
    Lucy Godlove talked a great deal, which was unfortunate because half the time she did not say what she thought she was saying. Speaking of Frances Paine, who was taking a course in beauty culture, Rose had reported that Frances was taking a beauty vulture course. The influenza academic had taken Lucy’s father in 1917, and she never let Barbie-Glo go to Charlottesville without warning her not to speak to any of the University of Virginia students because it was a well-known fact that all they thought of was hauling young country girls off to their maternity houses and raping them.
    While the girls devoted their minds to their plans for evading their mothers that night, the two women chatted about the new preacher.
    â€œBe nice if he was young,” sighed Lucy Godlove.
    â€œBe nice if he knew some new sermons,” observed Tillie Witt. “That’s all I ask. It had got so with old Preacher Goolsby that I knew what he was goen to say before he could open his mouth.”
    â€œI didn’t mind Brother Goolsby so bad,” said Lucy Godlove, “except once in a while his stutteren used to get on my nervous. I still can’t say the Lord’s Prayer without stutteren, but I’m hopen that’ll clear up now he’s gone, bless his soul.”
    â€œI just can’t stand hearen the same old sermon, over and over. I never did do half the things Preacher Goolsby used to preach against anyway, that old adult’ry and idolizing gold. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever had any gold to idolize,” said Tillie Witt.
    â€œWhat I’m hopen this new preacher will do,” said Lucy Godlove, “is put some life back in the church. Church is all I got in my life, God knows.”
    Church indeed was Lucy’s life. Her husband Craig was the night watchman at the mill and since he had left her bed and taken up with a girl named Alabama Sweetzer, Lucy had turned completely to the church. She went to Sunday School, the Sunday Morning Sermon, the Sunday Night Sermon, Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, the Ladies Aid Society every Thursday afternoon and she even attended the Friday-night meeting of the BYPU, the Baptist Young People’s Union. Every year at the Annual Baptism over at Witt’s Creek she got herself baptized, went down with her eyes screwed tight together and her hands clenched together and came up screaming that she had seen Jesus and sputtering muddy water, her drowned hair in long wet coils down her shoulders. Afterward she would walk around telling everyone that she felt as clean as the day she was born.
    Each year as Christmas approached Lucy would take charge of Christmas Tree Night. This was the program that was presented each Christmas Eve at the Baptist church. On this one night of the year the church lost its chilly barren look and was gaily decorated in pine wreaths tied with gay Christmas red bows and festooned with streamers of crepe paper and creeping cedar. Nervous children dressed as shepherds and angels recited poems that Lucy would make up in her head. Always some little boy forgot the poem he had worked on since Thanksgiving until he found his mother’s face in the audience, mouthing the searched-for word, and then was able to continue. Afterward Mr. Willie Simpson, who sang so loud in the choir, would arrive all dressed up in a Santa Claus suit and there would be presents for everybody.
    One year after Lucy’s Christmas presentation half the congregation stopped speaking to her because she had given all the principal parts in the pageant to her own children, ugly little skinflinty things; they all looked like cats, and since it was the year Barbie-Glo was taking that mail-order course in toe dancing, Lucy had worked in a toe dance for Barbie-Glo who was playing the