"I see what's coming," he said a thick, breathy voice, very hard to
understand.
In order to make at his words I had lean right up to him, almost knee
to knee. He leaned forward with a kind of urgency. His mystic face loomed
only inches in front of me -- a complex conundrum of a face, dark copper
and cast brown with inner glints of lavender and purple, deep eye sockets
lost in inky shadow, mobile mouth continually flickering with transient smiles
and grimaces. A face somehow serene for all its mobility and lurking
complexities.
"I see the end o' things," he breathed. "Yep, the end. It's coming. Yessir,
it's coming!"
"The end of what things, Jess?" I asked.
He took a deep breath and I eyed me hard.
"Everything... Everything on this mother earth. All gone. All wiped away.
god'll wipe all this wicked world away, that's what he's gonna into. Wipe
it all away like you wipe dirt from a dirty window with a wet rag. Only God
won't use a rag. No. God's gonna use the tornado for a rag. He's gonna use
the hurricane for rag. He's gonna use the earthquake for rag. he's gonna
wipe away all the wicked world. Wipe always like you wipe a dirty window.
Yep, wipe it clean. All of wickedness wiped right away. Only the sky be left.
Blue sky all over... Above... And down below... All over. Just clear blue
sky... Like a clean window.
"Yep, God's mad!." Jess went on. "He's very mad at what people are doing
to His world."
"But he's a loving gone, too, Jess," Mary interjected, a certain alarm
her voice and Jess is dire words.
"Yep, he's loving, OK, but He's still mad," Jess continued, his eyes darkly
incandescent. "He's giving us signs. We've got to see them. Last year a few
weeks before those floods we had on the Mississippi, I told people, "I see
coffins coming down the river, floating on down the river like boats." I
foresaw it... The river full o' coffins. And then when the floods came a
while later, it happened! The river... It dug the cemeteries out, and all
those caskets came right out of the ground and went floating down the river!
They showed it on TV. It was the same thing I foresaw. Yeah, all them coffins
with all them people in them, all those corpses, sailing right down the river!
That's God paying them back, them people, paying them back for digging up
those Indian graves. That made God mad!"
