Go Tell It on the Mountain (17 page)

“Folks ain’t got no time for the Lord,” he said, “one day
He
ain’t going to have time for
them
.”

When they got home she offered to make him a hot cup of tea, but he refused. He undressed in silence—which she again respected—and got into bed. At length, she lay beside him like a burden laid down at evening which must be picked up once more in the morning.

The next morning Esther said to him, coming into the yard while he was chopping wood for the woodpile: “Good morning, Reverend. I sure didn’t look to see you today. I reckoned you’d be all wore out after
that
sermon—does you always preach as hard as that?”

He paused briefly with the axe in the air; then he turned again, bringing the axe down. “I preach the way the Lord leads me, sister,” he said.

She retreated a little in the face of his hostility. “Well,” she said in a different tone, “it was a mighty fine sermon. Me and Mama was mighty glad we come out.”

He left the axe buried in the wood, for splinters flew and he was afraid one might strike her. “You and your ma—you don’t get out to service much?”

“Lord, Reverend,” she wailed, “look like we just ain’t got the time. Mama work so hard all week she just want to lie up in bed on Sunday. And she like me,” she added quickly, after a pause, “to keep her company.”

Then he looked directly at her. “Does you really mean to say, sister, that you ain’t got no time for the Lord? No time at all?”

“Reverend,” she said, looking at him with the daring defiance of a threatened child, “I does my best. I really does. Ain’t everybody got to have the same spirit.”

And he laughed shortly. “Ain’t but one spirit you got to have—and that’s the spirit of the Lord.”

“Well,” she said, “that spirit ain’t got to work in everybody the same, seems to me.”

Then they were silent, each quite vividly aware that they had
reached an impasse. After a moment he turned and picked up the axe again. “Well, you go along, sister. I’m praying for you.”

Something struggled in her face then, as she stood for yet a moment more and watched him—a mixture of fury and amusement; it reminded him of the expression he had often found on the face of Florence. And it was like the look on the faces of the elders during that far-off and so momentous Sunday dinner. He was too angry, while she thus stared at him, to trust himself to speak. Then she shrugged, the mildest, most indifferent gesture he had ever seen, and smiled. “I’m mighty obliged to you, Reverend,” she said. Then she went into the house.

This was the first time they spoke in the yard, a frosty morning. There was nothing in that morning to warn him of what was coming. She offended him because she was so brazen in her sins, that was all; and he prayed for her soul, which would one day find itself naked and speechless before the judgment bar of Christ. Later, she told him that he had pursued her, that his eyes had left her not a moment’s peace.

“That weren’t no reverend looking at me them mornings in the yard,” she had said. “You looked at me just like a man, like a man what hadn’t never heard of the Holy Ghost.” But he believed that the Lord had laid her like a burden on his heart. And he carried her in his heart; he prayed for her and exhorted her, while there was yet time to bring her soul to God.

But she had not been thinking about God; though she accused him of lusting after her in his heart, it was she who, when she looked at him, insisted on seeing not God’s minister but a “pretty man.” On her tongue the very title of his calling became a mark of disrespect.

It began on an evening when he was to preach, when they were alone in the house. The people of the house had gone away for three days to visit relatives; Gabriel had driven them to the railroad station after supper, leaving Esther clearing up the kitchen. When he came
back to lock up the house, he found Esther waiting for him on the porch steps.

“I didn’t think I’d better leave,” she said, “till you got back. I ain’t got no keys to lock up this house, and white folks is so funny. I don’t want them blaming me if something’s missing.”

He realized immediately that she had been drinking—she was not drunk, but there was whisky on her breath. And this, for some reason, caused a strange excitement to stir in him.

“That was mighty thoughtful, sister,” he said, staring hard at her to let her know that he knew she had been drinking. She met his stare with a calm, bold smile, a smile mocking innocence, so that her face was filled with the age-old cunning of a woman.

He started past her into the house; then, without thinking, and without looking at her, he offered: “If you ain’t got nobody waiting for you I’ll walk you a piece on your way home.”

“No,” she said, “ain’t nobody waiting for me this evening, Reverend, thank you kindly.”

He regretted making his offer almost as soon as it was made; he had been certain that she was about to rush off to some trysting-place or other, and he had merely wished to be corroborated. Now, as they walked together into the house, he became terribly aware of her youthful, vivid presence, of her lost condition; and at the same time the emptiness and silence of the house warned him that he was alone with danger.

“You just sit down in the kitchen,” he said. “I be as quick as I can.”

But his speech was harsh in his own ears, and he could not face her eyes. She sat down at the table, smiling, to wait for him. He tried to do everything as quickly as possible, the shuttering of windows, and locking of doors. But his fingers were stiff and slippery; his heart was in his mouth. And it came to him that he was barring every exit to this house, except the exit through the kitchen, where Esther sat.

When he entered the kitchen again she had moved, and now
stood in the doorway, looking out, holding a glass in her hand. It was a moment before he realized that she had helped herself to more of the master’s whisky.

She turned at his step, and he stared at her, and at the glass she held, with wrath and horror.

“I just thought,” she said, almost entirely unabashed, “that I’d have me a little drink while I was waiting, Reverend. But I didn’t figure on you catching me at it.”

She swallowed the last of her drink and moved to the sink to rinse out the glass. She gave a little, ladylike cough as she swallowed—he could not be sure whether this cough was genuine or in mockery of him.

“I reckon,” he said, malevolently, “you is just made up your mind to serve Satan all your days.”

“I done made up my mind,” she answered, “to live all I can
while
I can. If that’s a sin, well, I’ll go on down to Hell and pay for it. But don’t
you
fret, Reverend—it ain’t your soul.”

He moved and stood next to her, full of anger.

“Girl,” he said, “don’t you believe God? God don’t lie—and He says, plain as I’m talking to you, the soul that sinneth, it shall
die
.”

She sighed. “Reverend, look like to me you’d get tired, all the time beating on poor little Esther, trying to make Esther something she ain’t. I just don’t feel it
here
,” she said, and put one hand on her breast. “Now, what you going to do? Don’t you know I’m a woman grown, and I ain’t fixing to change?”

He wanted to weep. He wanted to reach out and hold her back from the destruction she so ardently pursued—to fold her in him, and hide her until the wrath of God was past. At the same time there rose to his nostrils again her whisky-laden breath, and beneath this, faint, intimate, the odor of her body. And he began to feel like a man in a nightmare, who stands in the path of oncoming destruction, who must move quickly—but who cannot move. “Jesus Jesus Jesus,” rang over and over again in his mind, like a bell—as he moved closer to her, undone by her breath, and her wide, angry, mocking eyes.

“You know right well,” he whispered, shaking with fury, “you know right well why I keep after you—why I keep after you like I do.”

“No, I don’t” she answered, refusing, with a small shake of the head, to credit his intensity. “I sure don’t know why you can’t let Esther have her little whisky, and have her little ways without all the time trying to make her miserable.”

He sighed with exasperation, feeling himself begin to tremble. “I just don’t want to see you go down, girl, I don’t want you to wake up one fine morning sorry for all the sin you done, old, and all by yourself, with nobody to respect you.”

But he heard himself speaking, and it made him ashamed. He wanted to have done with talking and leave this house—in a moment they would leave, and the nightmare would be over.

“Reverend,” she said, “I ain’t done nothing that I’m ashamed of, and I hope I
don’t
do nothing I’m ashamed of, ever.”

At the word “Reverend,” he wanted to strike her; he reached out instead and took both her hands in his. And now they looked directly at each other. There was surprise in her look, and a guarded triumph; he was aware that their bodies were nearly touching and that he should move away. But he did not move—he could not move.

“But I can’t help it,” she said, after a moment, maliciously teasing, “if you done things that
you’s
ashamed of, Reverend.”

He held on to her hands as though he were in the middle of the sea and her hands were the lifeline that would drag him in to shore. “Jesus Jesus Jesus,” he prayed, “oh, Jesus Jesus. Help me to stand.” He thought that he was pulling back against her hands—but he was pulling her to him. And he saw in her eyes now a look that he had not seen for many a long day and night, a look that was never in Deborah’s eyes.

“
Yes
, you know,” he said, “why I’m all the time worrying about you—why I’m all the time miserable when I look at you.”

“But you ain’t never told me none of this,” she said.

One hand moved to her waist, and lingered there. The tips of her breasts touched his coat, burning in like acid and closing his throat. Soon it would be too late; he wanted it to be too late. That river, his infernal need, rose, flooded, sweeping him forward as though he were a long-drowned corpse.

“
You
know,” he whispered, and touched her breasts and buried his face in her neck.

So he had fallen: for the first time since his conversion, for the last time in his life. Fallen: he and Esther in the white folks’ kitchen, the light burning, the door half open, grappling and burning beside the sink. Fallen indeed: time was no more, and sin, death, Hell, the judgment were blotted out. There was only Esther, who contained in her narrow body all mystery and all passion, and who answered all his need. Time, snarling so swiftly past, had caused him to forget the clumsiness, and sweat and dirt of their first coupling; how his shaking hands undressed her, standing where they stood, how her dress fell at length like a snare about her feet; how his hands tore at her undergarments so that the naked, vivid flesh might meet his hands; how she protested: “Not here, not here”; how he worried, in some buried part of his mind, about the open door, about the sermon he was to preach, about his life, about Deborah; how the table got in their way, how his collar, until her fingers loosened it, threatened to choke him; how they found themselves on the floor at last, sweating and groaning and locked together; locked away from all others, all heavenly or human help. Only they could help each other. They were alone in the world.

Had Royal, his son, been conceived that night? Or the next night? Or the next? It had lasted only nine days. Then he had come to his senses—after nine days God gave him the power to tell her this thing could not be.

She took his decision with the same casualness, the same near-amusement, with which she had taken his fall. He understood about Esther, during those nine days: that she considered his fear and trembling fanciful and childish, a way of making life more complicated
than it need be. She did not think life was like that; she wanted life to be simple. He understood that she was sorry for him because he was always worried. Sometimes, when they were together, he tried to tell her of what he felt, how the Lord would punish them for the sin they were committing. She would not listen: “You ain’t in the pulpit now. You’s here with me. Even a reverend’s got the right to take off his clothes
sometime
and act like a natural man.” When he told her that he would not see her any more, she was angry, but she did not argue. Her eyes told him that she thought he was a fool; but that, even had she loved him ever so desperately, it would have been beneath her to argue about his decision—a large part of her simplicity consisted in determining not to want what she could not have with ease.

So it was over. Though it left him bruised and frightened, though he had lost the respect of Esther forever (he prayed that she would never again come to hear him preach) he thanked God that it had been no worse. He prayed that God would forgive him, and never let him fall again.

Yet what frightened him, and kept him more than ever on his knees, was the knowledge that, once having fallen, nothing would be easier than to fall again. Having possessed Esther, the carnal man awoke, seeing the possibility of conquest everywhere. He was made to remember that though he was holy he was yet young; the women who had wanted him wanted him still; he had but to stretch out his hand and take what he wanted—even sisters in the church. He struggled to wear out his visions in the marriage bed, he struggled to awaken Deborah, for whom daily his hatred grew.

He and Esther spoke in the yard again as spring was just beginning. The ground was wet still with melting snow and ice; the sun was everywhere; the naked branches of the trees seemed to be lifting themselves upward toward the pale sun, impatient to put forth leaf and flower. He was standing at the well in his shirtsleeves, singing softly to himself—praising God for the dangers he had passed. She came down the porch steps into the yard, and though he heard the
soft step, and knew that it was she, it was a moment before he turned around.

He expected her to come up to him and ask for his help in something she was doing in the house. When she did not speak, he turned around. She was wearing a light, cotton dress of light-brown and dark-brown squares, and her hair was braided tightly all around her head. She looked like a little girl, and he almost smiled. Then: “What’s the matter?” he asked her; and felt the heart within him sicken.