Free The Devil's Dream by Lee Smith Page B

coal.
    â€œWell, who is he?” I axed straightaway, for I knowed immediately what was up.
    Nonnie would always answer you right back, and truthful too. She was too dumb to do otherwise. “Oh, Zinnia,” she said, “I was just standing in the road talking to some folks when this man rode in on a gray horse. He was a man that none of us had ever seed before, and not from around here. He is real different-looking, real handsome, like a man in a song. Anyway, he looked at me good as he rode past,” she said. “I looked at him and he looked at me,” Nonnie said all dreamy, and I said, “So?” for this did not sound like much to me. “Well, then he got off and hitched the horse up at the rail there and come right over to where I was standing in the road talking to Missus Black, and he takes off his hat and kindly bows down like a prince, you never saw the beat of it. Then he says, ‘What is yer name?’ and I told him, and, ‘Where do you live?’ and I told him that too.”
    â€œOh, Nonnie,” I said. “He can’t come up here. You don’t know a thing about him.”
    Nonnie flashed her eyes at me and bit her pouty lip. “He has got some money from a previous venture,” she said, real highfalutin. “And he aims to settle in these parts.”
    Well, sure enough, here he come, and sure enough, Daddy run him off. He met with the man, whose name was Jake Toney, in private afore he run him off. Nonnie sat on a chair out in the yard, just tapping her foot, while Daddy talked to Jake Toney. Then she saw fit to keep quiet for the length of time it took Jake Toney to get back on his gray horse and ride out of sight, but as soon as he was gone, she just throwed herself on Daddy like a wildcat from Hell, crying and clawing at his eyes and hitting at him, and Daddy just helt her out at arm’s length and let her fight.
    â€œNow listen here, girls,” he said, when Nonnie had finely quit fighting. “That man there is a Melungeon, and he won’t be coming up here again. I knowed it as soon as I saw him,” Daddy said.
    â€œA what?” Nonnie said, and then Daddy told us about the Melungeons, that is a race of people which nobody knows where they came from, with real pale light eyes, and dark skin, and frizzy hair like sheep’s wool. Sure enough, this was what Jake Toney looked like, all right.
    â€œNiggers won’t claim a Melungeon,” Daddy told us. “Injuns won’t claim them neither.
    â€œThe Melungeon is alone in all the world,” Daddy said, and at these words, Nonnie ran off crying. She was so spoilt by then, she couldn’t believe she couldn’t have anything she wanted.
    Well, Nonnie cried for some several days after that, but then Daddy made her go back to school, and just about as soon as she started back, she cheered up considerable. In fact she cheered up too fast, and I don’t know, there was just something about her that made me feel funny, not funny ha-ha, but funny peculiar. They was something there that did not meet the eye. So one day when Nonnie rode off to school, I determined to ride over toward Cana myself, not an hour behind her. I told Daddy I was going to the store.
    I can’t say that I was surprised when I come riding around the bend there where that little old falling-down cabin is, that used to belong to the widder woman, and seed the gray horse and the little white pony hitched up in front of it. I got off my horse and tethered her back there in the woods and then walked kindly tippytoe over to the cabin, but I need not have gone to the trouble. For they were making the shamefullest, awfullest racket you ever heerd in there, laughing and giggling and moaning and crying out, and then he’d be breathing and groaning at the same time, and then he hollered out, and then she did.
    School, my foot!
    You had better believe I told our daddy what was going on in that cabin!
    So