Other people had followed Tampa Simmons--who was a good deal of a leader in his own right--but not for long. There was fascination in the very boards of the Old Ship and a dread fascination in Draper. His gift of torrential oratory was unlike anything the Piney Woods had known. His congregation whispered that he “had a hand,” and shivered with dreadful pleasure, seeing his power as half from Satan and half from God, and wholly interesting. Their meagre lives would have been barren of entertainment, their genuine religious fervour denied an outlet, without Draper and the Old Ship. Everyone had drifted back but the Simmonses. Woodie’s mother had remained away solely from loyalty to his father. As Woodie lingered, looking down at her, he realized with a pang that at any time during the fifteen years she would have returned to the Old Ship, if she could, as a carrier pigeon to its home. She had never really understood how his father felt, nor why. Woodie had understood, even five years ago--when he was too young to talk about it. He could have talked about it now, and now it was too late. He went into the other room. Pieces of dark cloth had been tacked up at the windows to keep out the light. Two old women were bent together beside the fireless hearth. He had always called them Aunt Caroline and Aunt Miranda, but they were not related to him. He could barely see them in the half dark, but the mound of his father’s body beneath a sheet on the bed stood out clearly. Nothing could have lain so still which had not once had life in it. The room smelled of medicine and snuff and food, and somehow faintly of death. The old women were talking in whispers and dipping snuff. There was another woman in the lean-to kitchen, beside the stove, where he had never seen anyone but his mother. She was cooking dinner: collards, turnip greens with pork, and crackling bread. The strong odours made him a little queasy. The woman was stout and black and shone with perspiration. She had big, loose breasts and cheeks and lips and shrewd, tolerant eyes. She wore the garbled remains of white women’s clothes: shoes broken at the bulges, a black silk skirt that had split on the creases, and a newly blackened waist still damp with pokeberry dye. Her face looked strange to Woodie without its usual half smile. Her name was Maria Knox, and her husband was a truck gardener. He had known her all his life, but when they spoke to each other their words were stiff and unnatural. He had played with her children almost every day until he went away, but now it seemed that it wasn’t he who had known them.