Fiction by Jack Wills

Jack Wills is a physician living in LA. He’s a lifelong fan of the literature of the American South and is currently working on completion of a collection of short stories. “Blind Willie” is his debut literary publication. His free time is spent reading, exercising, enjoying jazz of the bebop era, and hanging out with family.

Blind Willie

When word got out that Emil Worthy was coming to preach at the tent meeting in Orvel City after the disaster he wrought upon the Stokes family those five years in the past, seemed like near the whole town of Gurneyville was willing to drive the forty miles to the next county to see him in the flesh. There was those in the congregation who recollected favorably his fiery sermons and others who thought he was the devil incarnate, but all were curious about whether he’d bring to light his view of the facts of the tragedy that had led to his hasty departure. It was only him and Willie who had any hold on the truth, and Willie had had no more to say what was true since the time right after the calamity.

Willie Stokes wasn’t born blind. She was sighted till she was eleven years old. Lost her vision the day her father, Levi, come home early from work to find his wife Rachel naked as the day she was born but sure as hell less innocent, with Emil Worthy, the preacher at the Pentecostal church in Gurneyville. Right then the reverend looked like he could be any ordinary sinner in his sleeveless undershirt, his hands holding up his pants against the pull of gravity, red suspenderslooped down inside his knees, his wingtip shoes out of reach over by the bedroom door.

Emil was a big man without a hair on his head, six foot seven, two hundred -fifty pound, a fire and brimstone giant with a voice that rolled like a thunderous tidal wave over his congregants. Made those in attendance rise up and bear witness to the glory of God.

Rachel had a lazy eye on one side, like part of her couldn’t look straight at the world. She was built wiry and flat chested. Her hair was cut choppy and short, like a boy’s. She mostly stayed around home except Sundays, when she had the habit of attending church. People seen she always set up front in the first pew on the pulpit side, her attention fixed hard on Emil.

Seeing this young woman with a shy smile hangin’ onto his every word like he’s the Holy Spirit come back to Earth left Emil open to considering her motives. That’s why he’d drove out the dusty roads of Pinetop County that day in his black Buick with the brass crucifix hood ornament, bent on bringin’ the Good News to Rachel in person. So there they were when Levi showed up, most certainly not in the act of praying.

Levi weighed maybe one -fifty soaking wet, but was known to have a short temper that belied his size. Emil hadn’t never been caught in what they call “flagrante” so suddenly Levi looked real big. Had the home field advantage so to speak.

Emil grabbed his shirt, jacket, his fancy shoes, clutched them to his chest with one hand and pulled up his pants with the other. Took off wide-eyed and sweaty, knocked over a lamp and stumbled out the door, leaving his clergy collar and his pride behind. Levi stood there paralyzed, his jaw dropped to the floor. But Rachel, she had the clarity to grab her house dress with the roses on it and slip it on over her head.

Emil drove off in a panic, the Buick buckin’ and weavin’ like it wa possessed. Near hit Willie walking home from a neighbor’s farm. Girl had to dive into a weedy ditch alongside the road to save herself.

She was near to her house when she heard Levi yell, “How could you betray me? You’re a goddam whore, that’s how.” And her mother’s plea for forgiveness; “I’ve sinned, I gave myself to him. I swear, it’s Satan made me do it.” Then Levi again, “God damn it to hell, I told you to keep away from that man. I told you his reputation.”

Willie didn’t understand the particulars of what they were arguing about, but she knew the sound of anger. When she appeared at the door everything inside turned stock still, like her being there froze the whole scene in place. Broken dishes with their  decorations of flowers her folks got on their wedding day scattered all over, the wall mirror in pieces on the floor, their wedding picture with the scrolled frame torn from off the wall, Levi holding a shard of mirror glass so’s Willie seen a reflection of his murderous eyes in it, and Rachel’s hand trembling his Smith and Wesson.

Then the wheel of time and devilry started moving again.

“Best you stay outside, Willie,” Rachel said, looking hard at Levi. “You listen now,” Levi snapped. “Your mother and me need to make things right. She done wrong. Go on before I take my belt to you.”

Willie stayed, covered her ears shut and began to sing loud as she could. But not many ears on earth’d miss the cruel words that came next. Levi yelled, “I’m gonna’ carve up your face so no man’ll want to be with you ever again.” Willie saw the gun in her mother’s hand raise up like it had its own mind, like it took it upon itself to shoot Levi. She ran to put herself in front of her father, but too late. Levi fell staring into the afterlife, his skull blown open, his burdens oozing onto the bare pine floor.The air stank of gunpowder, sweat, and blood’s iron. Rachel slumped onto the sofa, covering her face and crying out in mortal pain, Levi’s gun smoking on her lap.

Willie dropped to her hands and knees into the pool of her father’s gore and held out her bloody palms to Rachel. “Look what you done, mama. You killed him,” she screamed.

“You go wait in the barn,” Rachel said, her voice calm and sad as a dove’s coo. “I’ll come for you.”

Willie ran into the barn and closed the door. Inside, it smelt of machine grease and sweet hay.

Rays of light full of dust motes leaked through gaps in the roof shingles. Two startled barn swallows flew up and landed on a rafter and began to chirp. Willie bowed her head and prayed.

=She hadn’t been in there long when the bitter smell of burning wood overpowered the barn’s odors. Willie opened the door and was knocked back by a wall of heat. The house was aflame like hell’s fire. She cried out for Rachel but heard no voice in return. Then a manifestation of her mother appeared inside the firestorm, beckoning for her to come thither. That’s when the wind shifted and blew hot sparks onto Willie’s face and blinded her, so she didn’t see her parents’ souls board the train to perdition, leaving behind two blackened forms bearing no resemblance to any living person. And neither did she gaze upon the face of the one who rescued her, body and soul.

Shamed by the wickedness in his heart, Emil’d drove back to the Stokes’ home seeking atonement but arrived too late except to save Willie. It was him who took her and left her on the doorstep of the home for the orphaned blind in Orvel City. After he saw to Willie, he drove all night till he crossed the state line. Didn’t stop until he reached his old home town and the cemetery where his father, hisself a preacher, and his mother was buried. By then it was dawn.

Exhausted, he fell asleep on the grass in the shadow of his parents’ tombstone cast by the rising sun. There his father came to him in a dream and commanded him to cleanse his sins by taking to the road as a itinerant messenger of God. And that’s how he spent the next five years, movin’ from town to town preaching that the Lord forgives all who repent of their sins. But all that time his head was full of thoughts of Jesus being chased after by Willie and her folks, and the more passionately he preached the Word and waved the Holy Book at his congregants, the more her face intruded in his mind tryin’ to push Jesus away. And so it came to Emil in his heart that to satisfy Jesus he had to return to the town where he’d left Willie.

When Emil arrived at the meeting in Orvel City on the appointed Sunday afternoon, people waiting outside the tent gathered around the Buick like moths to a flame, so’s he could hardly get the car door open. He cranked down the window and requested for the assembled to step back and give him room. Owing to his great size and the closeness of the worshipers, he exited the Buick with difficulty, the result bein’ that he was sweating heavily as he rose up to his full height. Folks drew back in awe, most having forgot just how tall a man Emil was. He didn’t need no ladder to stand out above everybody. He promptly began to sermonize, at the same time loosening his stained dark tie and taking off his black suit coat with a hole in one sleeve down at his wrist, the coat all wrinkled because he’d been using it as a pillow for sleeping.. He eased forward alongside the car to place himself before the hood with his left hand resting on its brass ornament.

It’s been said that Judgment Day can come at any time. Some say it was chance or plain bad luck, others believe intervention from above, but as he lifted his voice toward heaven calling for salvation, he was felled by a bolt of lightning from a clear, cloudless sky, a stroke that near melted the brass crucifix ornament he was holding onto.

As for Willie, she’d been alone inside the tent waiting for Emil, sitting right up front so’s he’d be sure to see her. When she heard the crash of lightning that killed Emil and the uproar that followed, she beheld a vision of Jesus before her and with that her sight returned. She threw her blind cane toward the pulpit and rushed from the tent, cryin’ and shouting at the top of her voice,

“Praise God! Thanks be to Jesus!”

She dropped to her knees next to Emils’ scorched body and began to pray over him. “God has delivered you from sin,” she said again and again, looking up toward heaven and swayin’ back and forth in rhythm to her words. And it was on that very day, at the age of sixteen, that she took up the Cross and began to preach.