Shall we gather at the river,
Where bright angels feet have trod,
With the crystal tide forever
Flowing past the throne of God?

Well! I'd have reckoned that to be one of those what you'd call moot questions, thought Liza Light-Up-The-Sky Talahawa, who was standing on the bank of the Oconaluftee at nine o'clock on a Sunday morning in late autumn, cracking her knuckles apprehensively in grim expectation of her imminent total immersion in the river's icy water. The dull, pewter-colored mist which hugged the river like its ghost had not yet stirred and dissipated, but already the folks of Yellow Hill had collected on the shores of the Oconaluftee to do their churching. Preacher Josiah Etowah had chosen to meet down here near Birdtown where the river shallows out on its way to join the Tuckasegee near Ela instead of up in Yellow Hill on account of Peggie Whistle, the big-headed dwarf woman who stood with her armpits draped over a pair of Canadian crutches at Liza's side:

"I cannot undertake to drown any poor seeker after salvation in the ebullient and raging Blood of the Lamb," Josiah had explained to his parishoners. Well, the Oconaluftee up at Yellow Hill doesn't rage exactly, but it does run chin-high on a grown man.

On the margin of the river,
Walking up its silver spray,
We will walk and worship ever,
All the happy golden day.

Actually, it was more of what Liza would call a mizzling sort of day - just this side of rainy.

Ere we reach the shining river,
Lay we every burden down;
Grace our spirits will deliver,
And provide a robe and crown.

Liza glanced back over her shoulder at the throng of parishioners who sat huddled and hunch-shouldered on blankets spread over the bumpy, sparse grass. It's a moot question, seeing as how we're already gathered by the river, she thought. Then she cracked her knuckles once again, speculatively but also nervously, making a dry, pod-snapping kind of sound, like the report of a distant bee bee gun - Liza could be as annoying as she was fine looking, big boned and lithe-tall in a rayon dress splashed with big rust-colored leaves that hugged her figure like a lover.

Soon we'll reach the shining river,
Soon our pilgrimage will cease,
Soon our happy hearts will quiver
With the melody of peace.

Peggie, who enjoyed quite a reputation as a joker, decided to chat Liza up during the hymn-singing. "What did the Indian say to his neighbor after he watched Columbus get down from his ship?" she hissed.

"I don't know," said Liza, who hated jokes.

"There goes the neighborhood!" Peggie retorted, hacking with dry laughter.

Liza snorted.

The congregation ploughed into the refrain:

Yes, we'll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river,
Gather with the saints at the river
that flows by the throne of God.

"The only problem is that first it flows by the motels in downtown Cherokee," Peggie continued, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes with the back of one arm. "And the motels dump all the white man's sewage into it! Heh! Heh!"

Liza stood, staring at the river, remembering foaming water, littered with red and yellow and brown leaves. . . . It was just as it had been when her father had made her go to water for the first time. She searched the surface of the water for evidence of the creature which lived in these depths . . . for the broad streak of firefly green that betrayed its presence. Then suddenly she caught herself. This rite is important, she told herself. You must try and keep control of yourself. Try not to let the others know. In an effort both to reclaim and advertise her equilibrium, she feigned nonchalance: wrinkled up her fine, proud nose - it arched bonily like the back of a cat - and shook back her hair from her shoulders. Despite the fact that she was no girl, she still wore it long and black and loose to her waist.

Like the irreverent Peggie Whistle, Liza was here to be baptized, but not because she had seen anything resembling The Light. What she had seen was Walter Reginald Barkman, that white man who owned not only the Oconaluftee Joke and Rock Shop down at the juncture of Highway 441 and Highway 19, but the adjoining laundromat and a photo-finish kiosk across the way as well. He was in one of his available phases right now. Women were forever taking up with Wally Barkman, then leaving him - so much so that folks lost count. (Also there was the problem that, his wives being for the most part white, there was no telling them apart.)

Well, Liza was dirt sick of being poor. Her husband of ten years, Ronnie Talahawa, had died two years this December leaving her with nothing but 223 purely worthless baseball cards, an eviction notice and the selfsame handful of dreams she had walked down the aisle with a decade before . . . if you could call standing up in front of the Justice of the Peace of Swain County walking down the aisle. Died of an aggravated case of drinking sour mash. It was coming to him, all right; he'd been working on it for years, honing his self-destructive techniques to a pure perfection.

And those dreams she had brought to the marriage . . . they were all creased now and bent out of shape. However, all that would be set right again, once she had Wally Barkman firmly in tow. Lucky for her that she had not outgrown that gaunt, hybrid beauty - the high cheekbones and the bold nose and the big, strangely russet-colored eyes fringed with dark lashes which had once made her the talk of the Boundary. It had come to her down through her father, Joe Light-Up-The-Sky, whose family was descended from the Old Settlers out in the Oklahoma territory and was the result of the high incidence of intermarriage which had taken place in that no man's land nineteenth-century unakas , white men, called Indian Territory.

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