Rant

through the opening hymn, through the first Gospel reading, and halfway into the sermon, but Buddy and Esther still ain’t arrived at the church. We’re passing the basket for the collection offering, and the church door busts open. A pounding comes up the steps outside, pounds across the church porch boards, and the big door swings open so hard the inside knob punches a hole in the vestibule wall. With all the heads turning, craning to look, little Buddy stumbles inside, panting. Leaning forward with a hand braced on each knee, the door still open behind him and sunlight bright around him, Buddy’s panting, his hair hanging over his eyes, trying to get his breath. No bow tie. His white shirt tails hanging out.
    The Reverend Curtis Dean Fields says, “Would you kindly close the door.” And Buddy gasps and says, “She’s bit.”
    He catches enough breath to say, “Grandma Esther. She’s sick, bad.” Being cold weather, I figure a dog pack, could be a dog bit her. Wild dogs.
    Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: Don’t hate me for saying, but no Casey never paid to fix that hole Rant punched with the doorknob in the church wall. Even accepting he done it by accident.
    Irene Casey: Buddy says a spider done bit Esther. From the look of it, a black widow spider. Buddy and his grandma was walking, halfway done, and she stopped, stood still, dropped his hand. Esther shouts, “Lord!” and uses both hands to rip the hat off her head, the pins pulling out ribbons of her gray hair. A sound, Buddy says, same as tearing newspaper in half. Her black church hat, round and
    black, about the size of a bath-powder box. One swing of her hand pitches that hat at the dirt ground. Both Esther’s church shoes stomp that black satin in the dust. Her black shoes, gray with the dust. Dust stomped up in a cloud around her black coat. Her purse swings in her other hand, and she waves Buddy back, saying, “Don’t you touch it.”
    Still pinned to the hat, tore out at the roots, thick hanks of Esther’s gray hair.
    With one church shoe, Esther toe-kicks the hat over, and the two of them squat down to look.
    Mixed up in the dust and gravel, the mashed-up veil, and the crumpled satin, just barely bending one leg, flexing one leg, is a spider. A dusty black spider with a red hourglass on its belly.
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): Cousin to the shoe-button spider of South Africa, of the genus Latrodectus of the comb-footed spider family, the black widow nests in isolated places such as unused clothing or outdoor latrines. Until indoor plumbing became prevalent, bites from the black widow were most commonly inflicted on the buttocks or genitals of the victim. More recently, the spider is more likely to bite when trapped between clothing and the victim’s skin—for example, when a spider nests in a seldom-worn shoe or glove.
    Irene Casey: Granny Esther touches the top of her hair, two fingertips feeling between the strands of her hair, stepping the curls one way, then the other, until she touches a spot that makes her mouth drop open and her eyes clamp shut. When she opens them, Buddy says, his grandma’s eyes, they’re blinking with tears.
    She clicks open her purse and fishes out a tissue. When Esther presses the tissue on top of her head, Buddy says, when they looked at the tissue, they seen a red spot of fresh blood. It’s then Esther told him, “Fast as you can, run get your pa.” Esther Shelby lowered herself to one knee; then sitting, then laying in the dust on the shoulder of the road, she says, “Boy, be fast!”
    Echo Lawrence: Rant says his granny told him, “Run fast, but if you ain’t fast enough, remember I still love you…”
    Cammy Elliot ( Childhood Friend): Kill me if I’m lying, because I ain’t, but Middleton dogs turned wilder when the wind blowed too hard. A real gust of wind and all the trash cans go over. Dogs love that.
    The first lesson a gal learns in sixth grade is what a septic tank can’t digest. Any female trash, you have to wrap it in newspaper and bury it, special deep, in the garbage. The honeywagon comes to pump out your tank and he finds more than just natural waste, it’s an extra cost.
    ’Course, when the wind blows over a garbage can, depending on the household, you have dirty Kotex flapping everywhere. Those gusty days, it’s everybody’s Aunt Flo has come to visit. Pads and napkins walking off, a regular army drove by the wind. Wrapped and losing their newspaper,