Smokey Phillips looked up but said nothing; and the rest of them said the same. They were tired and weary that night, because that cold nip in the night air meant the start of another raw, heartless winter, and Smokey knew he would have to be starting south soon, with the great flocks of geese, just as he had done for so many years now.
He was born on a frosty morning, back up in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. His daddy, a knobby-legged man, a second-generation moonshiner who had fallen in love with his own product, made the fatal mistake of marrying a "good woman," a plain country girl whose life revolved around the Pine Grove Free Will Baptist Church.
Most of Smokey's childhood had been spent sitting on hard wooden benches for hours, with his little sister, Bernice, at all-day singings and foot washings.
In the regular church services, his mother had been one of the women who would occasionally stand up and start babbling, out of her head, in an unknown tongue.
Eventually, as she became more and more filled with the Spirit, his father became less so and stopped going to church altogether. He told his children, "I believe in God, but I don't think you have to go crazy to prove it."
Then, one spring when Smokey was eight, things got worse. His mother said that the Lord had told her that her husband was evil and devil-possessed, and she turned him in to the revenue agents.
Smokey remembered the day they brought his daddy down the path from the still with a gun at his back. As he passed by his wife, he looked at her, dumbfounded, and said, "Woman, don't you know what you've done? You've done took the bread right out of your own mouth."
It was the last Smokey ever saw of him.
After his father left, his mother really went off the deep end and got mixed up with a bunch of backwoods Holy Roller snake handlers. One night, after an hour of ranting and beating the Bible, the red-faced, wild-haired preacher got his barefoot congregation all excited. They were all chanting and stomping their feet when suddenly he reached into a potato sack and pulled out two huge rattlesnakes and started waving them around in the air; lost in the Spirit.
Smokey froze in his seat and squeezed his sister's hand. The preacher was dancing around, calling out for believers to take up the serpent and cleanse their souls in the faith of Abraham when all of a sudden his mother ran up, grabbed one of the snakes away from him, and looked it right in the face. She began babbling in
the unknown tongue, the whole time staring into the snake's yellow eyes. Everybody in the room began to sway and moan. As she started to walk around the room with it, people began falling down on the floor, jerking and screaming and rolling around under the pews and up and down the aisles. The place was in a frenzy, while she babbled on . . . "HOSSA . . . HELAMNA . . . HESSAMIA . . .
Before he knew what was happening, his little sister, Bernice, broke away from him, and ran up to her mother and pulled her by the hem of her dress.
"Momma, don't. . . !"
Still wild-eyed and in a trance, she glanced down at her child for one split second, and in that second the rattler lunged and struck the woman in the side of her face. She looked back at the snake, stunned, and he struck again, fast and hard this time, striking her in the neck, the fangs puncturing her jugular vein. She dropped the angry serpent with a thud, and it crawled contemptuously away down the aisle.
His mother looked around the room that was now as silent as death, with a surprised look on her face, and as her eyes glazed over, she sank slowly to the floor. She was dead in less than a minute.
In that moment, his uncle had picked up Smokey and was headed out the door. Bernice went to live with a neighbor, and Smokey stayed at his uncle's house. Then, when he was thirteen, he headed down the railroad tracks toward nowhere, and never came back.
The only thing he took with him was a photograph of his sister. He would take it out every once in awhile. There they were in the fading photograph, with their lips and cheeks painted pink: a little chubby girl with bangs and a pink ribbon tied around her head, wearing a tiny string of pearls; and he sat just behind her, his brown hair slicked down, his cheek pressed close to hers.
He often wondered how Bernice was doing and thought he'd look her up one of these days, if he ever got back on his feet.
When he was about twenty or so, he lost the picture when some railroad bull detective kicked him off a freight, into a cold, yellow river somewhere in Georgia, and now he hardly ever thought about her; except when he happened to be on a train, passing through the Smoky Mountains at night, on his way to somewhere else . . .
This morning, Smokey Phillips was on a mixed train from Georgia, headed for Florida. He had not eaten anything for two days and remembered that his friend Elmo Williams had told him there were two women running a place right outside of Birmingham who were always good for a meal or two. On the way down he'd seen the name of the cafe written on the walls of several boxcars, so when he saw the sign WHISTLE STOP, ALABAMA, he jumped off.