the kind of singing Linus Lancaster could do at that place in Kentucky I know that the boy they stop the piano at church for here doesn’t have half the gift. Linus Lancaster could sing the skin off of one back and onto another. He told it once when a tinker was visiting and they were at the bottle that in Louisville he spent his share of time on the stage making speeches and singing, and that there were fine ladies of the neighborhood in attendance who had cried when he had done so. I did not cry when I listened to Linus Lancaster sing. But I listened and knew I was hearing something.
There were times after supper when Linus Lancaster would push back from the table and make a sound in his throat and give a curl to his lip, and we all knew it was time for a song. Horace and Ulysses could strum and thump when they were on their own time, and Cleome liked to clap and Zinnia to sing in a slow, private way, but it was all quiet when Linus Lancaster got the mood on him to sing after his supper. No one in that house made a sound when Linus Lancaster pushed his chair back and sucked in his air and blew that trumpet out of his throat. There were no uh-huhs or mmm-hmms, and if there was a drop of sweat tickling some lip or a fly biting at some neck the song was over before any of us moved.
Someone once told me when I was still living in my father’s house that I had a handsome voice and ought to shepherd it and not keep it to myself. After that I sang a little louder at our church and took a turn at a solo at my school. One night my first winter in Kentucky I thought to share that solo with my husband when that singing mood came upon him after his supper. He had not favored my story, but I thought he might favor my song. I sang and reckoned it was fair crooning, but Linus Lancaster’s fist came out so fast I thought an angel of the Lord had flown down off his shoulder to bestow its wroth. Even after Cleome, who was standing in attendance, had helped me back to my bench and my husband had wiped his hand and recommenced singing I thought this. I thought it then and now here it still sits. Funny how you can once think a thing then never see the tail of it.
My father liked to say God lived in the lightning and look out below. He told it that in the battles he fought when there was lead or arrows in the air the boys used to holler, “He’s a-comin’!” They get roused up when the fellow at church here sings “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.” But I keep quiet when he’s at it. There’s different kinds of glory. There’s all kinds. I have seen some.
3.
MR. LUCIOUS WILSON, my employer, has pigs. He’s got his pens and fences and keeps them nice, and people come from around to look at them. If I understand it correctly, in recent times he’s had pigs that have earned prizes. For what I didn’t catch, but there were ribbons involved, and Lucious Wilson’s man responsible got a cash bonus and went out cavorting and kissed a girl and spent the night in a ditch. They found his horse five miles away eating at a patch of lawn grass. On account of some pigs.
Time and again when I was still working in Lucious Wilson’s big house I would hear it when they would stick one. Now that is a sound can make me cringe. I understand that there are things that live and things that get killed. That’s God’s plan, and we are all just meat for his platter, well and good. When they slaughtered beef and the beef knew it was coming there was a bellowing in the yard to beat the basket, but they could have killed beef from there until Sunday and I would have kept scrubbing and dusting and setting out the silver or whatever else my employer Lucious Wilson requested that I accomplish. But let that weather get cold and let them start in on one pig and then another and then a third and all of them doing their dying at once, and I would commence to