Go Tell It on the Mountain (3 page)

Now she saw him and she asked, breaking off her conversation with Roy: “You hungry, little sleepyhead?”

“Well! About time you was getting up,” said Sarah.

He moved to the table and sat down, feeling the most bewildering panic of his life, a need to touch things, the table and chairs and the walls of the room, to make certain that the room existed and that he was in the room. He did not look at his mother, who stood up
and went to the stove to heat his breakfast. But he asked, in order to say something to her, and to hear his own voice:

“What we got for breakfast?”

He realized, with some shame, that he was hoping she had prepared a special breakfast for him on his birthday.

“What you
think
we got for breakfast?” Roy asked scornfully. “You got a special craving for something?”

John looked at him. Roy was not in a good mood.

“I ain’t said nothing to you,” he said.

“Oh, I
beg
your pardon,” said Roy, in the shrill, little-girl tone he knew John hated.

“What’s the
matter
with you today?” John asked, angry, and trying at the same time to lend his voice as husky a pitch as possible.

“Don’t you let Roy bother you,” said their mother. “He cross as two sticks this morning.”

“Yeah,” said John, “I reckon.” He and Roy watched each other. Then his plate was put before him: hominy grits and a scrap of bacon. He wanted to cry, like a child: “But, Mama, it’s my birthday!” He kept his eyes on his plate and began to eat.

“You can
talk
about your daddy all you want to,” said his mother, picking up her battle with Roy, “but
one
thing you can’t say—you can’t say he ain’t always done his best to be a father to you and to see to it that you ain’t never gone hungry.”

“I been hungry plenty of times,” Roy said, proud to be able to score this point against his mother.

“Wasn’t
his
fault, then. Wasn’t because he wasn’t
trying
to feed you. That man shoveled snow in zero weather when he ought’ve been in bed just to put food in your belly.”

“Wasn’t just
my
belly,” said Roy indignantly. “He got a belly, too, I
know
it’s a
shame
the way that man eats. I sure ain’t asked him to shovel no snow for me.” But he dropped his eyes, suspecting a flaw in his argument. “I just don’t want him beating on me all the time,” he said at last. “I ain’t no dog.”

She sighed, and turned slightly away, looking out of the window. “Your daddy beats you,” she said, “because he loves you.”

Roy laughed. “That ain’t the kind of love I understand, old lady. What you reckon he’d do if he didn’t love me?”

“He’d let you go right on,” she flashed, “right on down to hell where it looks like you is just determined to go anyhow! Right on, Mister Man, till somebody puts a knife in you, or takes you off to jail!”

“Mama,” John asked suddenly, “is Daddy a good man?”

He had not known that he was going to ask the question, and he watched in astonishment as her mouth tightened and her eyes grew dark.

“That ain’t no kind of question,” she said mildly. “You don’t know no better man, do you?”

“Looks to me like he’s a mighty good man,” said Sarah. “He sure is praying all the time.”

“You children is young,” their mother said, ignoring Sarah and sitting down again at the table, “and you don’t know how lucky you is to have a father what worries about you and tries to see to it that you come up right.”

“Yeah,” said Roy, “we don’t know how lucky we
is
to have a father what don’t want you to go to movies, and don’t want you to play in the streets, and don’t want you to have no friends, and he don’t want this and he don’t want that, and he don’t want you to do
nothing
. We so
lucky
to have a father who just wants us to go to church and read the Bible and beller like a fool in front of the altar and stay home all nice and quiet, like a little mouse. Boy, we sure is lucky, all right. Don’t know what I done to be so lucky.”

She laughed. “You going to find out one day,” she said, “you mark my words.”

“Yeah,” said Roy.

“But it’ll be too late, then,” she said. “It’ll be too late when you come to be … sorry.” Her voice had changed. For a moment her
eyes met John’s eyes, and John was frightened. He felt that her words, after the strange fashion God sometimes chose to speak to men, were dictated by Heaven and were meant for him. He was fourteen—was it too late? And this uneasiness was reinforced by the impression, which at that moment he realized had been his all along, that his mother was not saying everything she meant. What, he wondered, did she say to Aunt Florence when they talked together? Or to his father? What were her thoughts? Her face would never tell. And yet, looking down at him in a moment that was like a secret, passing sign, her face did tell him. Her thoughts were bitter.

“I don’t care,” Roy said, rising. “When
I
have children I ain’t going to treat them like this.” John watched his mother; she watched Roy. “I’m
sure
this ain’t no way to be. Ain’t got no right to have a houseful of children if you don’t know how to treat them.”

“You mighty grown up this morning,” his mother said. “You be careful.”

“And tell me something else,” Roy said, suddenly leaning over his mother, “tell me how come he don’t never let me talk to him like I talk to you? He’s my father, ain’t he? But he don’t never listen to me—no, I all the time got to listen to him.”

“Your father,” she said, watching him, “knows best. You listen to your father, I guarantee you, you won’t end up in no jail.”

Roy sucked his teeth in fury. “I ain’t looking to go to no
jail
. You think that’s all that’s in the world is jails and churches? You ought to know better than that, Ma.”

“I know,” she said, “there ain’t no safety except you walk humble before the Lord. You going to find it out, too, one day. You go on, hardhead. You going to come to grief.”

And suddenly Roy grinned. “But you be there, won’t you, Ma—when I’m in trouble?”

“You don’t know,” she said, trying not to smile, “how long the Lord’s going to let me stay with you.”

Roy turned and did a dance step. “That’s all right,” he said. “I
know the Lord ain’t as hard as Daddy. Is he, boy?” he demanded of John, and struck him lightly on the forehead.

“Boy, let me eat my breakfast,” John muttered—though his plate had long been empty, and he was pleased that Roy had turned to him.

“That sure is a crazy boy,” ventured Sarah, soberly.

“Just listen,” cried Roy, “to the little saint! Daddy ain’t never going to have no trouble with her—
that
one, she was born holy. I bet the first words she ever said was: ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ Ain’t that so, Ma?”

“You stop this foolishness,” she said, laughing, “and go on about your work. Can’t nobody play the fool with you all morning.”

“Oh, is you got work for me to do this morning? Well, I declare,” said Roy, “what you got for me to do?”

“I got the woodwork in the dining-room for you to do. And you going to do it, too, before you set foot out of
this
house.”

“Now, why you want to talk like that, Ma? Is I said I wouldn’t do it? You know I’m a right good worker when I got a mind. After I do it, can I go?”

“You go ahead and do it, and we’ll see. You better do it right.”

“I
always
do it right,” said Roy. “You won’t know your old woodwork when
I
get through.”

“John,” said his mother, “you sweep the front room for me like a good boy, and dust the furniture. I’m going to clean up in here.”

“Yes’m,” he said, and rose. She
had
forgotten about his birthday. He swore he would not mention it. He would not think about it any more.

To sweep the front room meant, principally, to sweep the heavy red and green and purple Oriental-style carpet that had once been that room’s glory, but was now so faded that it was all one swimming color, and so frayed in places that it tangled with the broom. John hated sweeping this carpet, for dust rose, clogging his nose and sticking to his sweaty skin, and he felt that should he sweep it forever, the
clouds of dust would not diminish, the rug would not be clean. It became in his imagination his impossible, lifelong task, his hard trial, like that of a man he had read about somewhere, whose curse it was to push a boulder up a steep hill, only to have the giant who guarded the hill roll the boulder down again—and so on, forever, throughout eternity; he was still out there, that hapless man, somewhere at the other end of the earth, pushing his boulder up the hill. He had John’s entire sympathy, for the longest and hardest part of his Saturday mornings was his voyage with the broom across this endless rug; and, coming to the French doors that ended the living-room and stopped the rug, he felt like an indescribably weary traveler who sees his home at last. Yet for each dustpan he so laboriously filled at the doorsill demons added to the rug twenty more; he saw in the expanse behind him the dust that he had raised settling again into the carpet; and he gritted his teeth, already on edge because of the dust that filled his mouth, and nearly wept to think that so much labor brought so little reward.

Nor was this the end of John’s labor; for, having put away the broom and the dustpan, he took from the small bucket under the sink the dustrag and the furniture oil and a damp cloth, and returned to the living-room to excavate, as it were, from the dust that threatened to bury them, his family’s goods and gear. Thinking bitterly of his birthday, he attacked the mirror with the cloth, watching his face appear as out of a cloud. With a shock he saw that his face had not changed, that the hand of Satan was as yet invisible. His father had always said that his face was the face of Satan—and was there not something—in the lift of the eyebrow, in the way his rough hair formed a V on his brow—that bore witness to his father’s words? In the eye there was a light that was not the light of Heaven, and the mouth trembled, lustful and lewd, to drink deep of the wines of Hell. He stared at his face as though it were, as indeed it soon appeared to be, the face of a stranger, a stranger who held secrets that John could never know. And, having thought of it as the face of a stranger, he tried to look at it as a stranger might, and tried
to discover what other people saw. But he saw only details: two great eyes, and a broad, low forehead, and the triangle of his nose, and his enormous mouth, and the barely perceptible cleft in his chin, which was, his father said, the mark of the Devil’s little finger. These details did not help him, for the principle of their unity was undiscoverable, and he could not tell what he most passionately desired to know: whether his face was ugly or not.

And he dropped his eyes to the mantelpiece, lifting one by one the objects that adorned it. The mantelpiece held, in brave confusion, photographs, greeting cards, flowered mottoes, two silver candlesticks that held no candles, and a green metal serpent, poised to strike. Today in his apathy John stared at them, not seeing; he began to dust them with the exaggerated care of the profoundly preoccupied. One of the mottoes was pink and blue, and proclaimed in raised letters, which made the work of dusting harder:

And the other, in letters of fire against a background of gold, stated:

These somewhat unrelated sentiments decorated either side of the mantelpiece, obscured a little by the silver candlesticks. Between these two extremes, the greeting cards, received year after year, on Christmas, or Easter, or birthdays, trumpeted their glad tidings; while the green metal serpent, perpetually malevolent, raised its head
proudly in the midst of these trophies, biding the time to strike. Against the mirror, like a procession, the photographs were arranged.

These photographs were the true antiques of the family, which seemed to feel that a photograph should commemorate only the most distant past. The photographs of John and Roy, and of the two girls, which seemed to violate this unspoken law, served only in fact to prove it most iron-hard: they had all been taken in infancy, a time and a condition that the children could not remember. John in his photograph lay naked on a white counterpane, and people laughed and said that it was cunning. But John could never look at it without feeling shame and anger that his nakedness should be here so unkindly revealed. None of the other children was naked; no, Roy lay in his crib in a white gown and grinned toothlessly into the camera, and Sarah, somber at the age of six months, wore a white bonnet, and Ruth was held in her mother’s arms. When people looked at these photographs and laughed, their laughter differed from the laughter with which they greeted the naked John. For this reason, when visitors tried to make advances to John he was sullen, and they, feeling that for some reason he disliked them, retaliated by deciding that he was a “funny” child.

Among the other photographs there was one of Aunt Florence, his father’s sister, in which her hair, in the old-fashioned way, was worn high and tied with a ribbon; she had been very young when this photograph was taken, and had just come North. Sometimes, when she came to visit, she called the photograph to witness that she had indeed been beautiful in her youth. There was a photograph of his mother, not the one John liked and had seen only once, but one taken immediately after her marriage. And there was a photograph of his father, dressed in black, sitting on a country porch with his hands folded heavily in his lap. The photograph had been taken on a sunny day, and the sunlight brutally exaggerated the planes of his father’s face. He stared into the sun, head raised, unbearable, and though it had been taken when he was young, it was not the face of a
young man; only something archaic in the dress indicated that this photograph had been taken long ago. At the time this picture was taken, Aunt Florence said, he was already a preacher, and had a wife who was now in Heaven. That he had been a preacher at that time was not astonishing, for it was impossible to imagine that he had ever been anything else; but that he had had a wife in the so distant past who was now dead filled John with a wonder by no means pleasant. If she had lived, John thought, then he would never have been born; his father would never have come North and met his mother. And this shadowy woman, dead so many years, whose name he knew had been Deborah, held in the fastness of her tomb, it seemed to John, the key to all those mysteries he so longed to unlock. It was she who had known his father in a life where John was not, and in a country John had never seen. When he was nothing, nowhere, dust, cloud, air, and sun, and falling rain,
not even thought of
, said his mother,
in Heaven with the angels
, said his aunt, she had known his father, and shared his father’s house. She had loved his father. She had known his father when lightning flashed and thunder rolled through Heaven, and his father said: “Listen. God is talking.” She had known him in the mornings of that far-off country when his father turned on his bed and opened his eyes, and she had looked into those eyes, seeing what they held, and she had not been afraid. She had seen him baptized,
kicking like a mule and howling
, and she had seen him weep when his mother died;
he was a right young man then
, Florence said. Because she had looked into those eyes before they had looked on John, she knew what John would never know—the purity of his father’s eyes when John was not reflected in their depths. She could have told him—had he but been able from his hiding-place to ask!—how to make his father love him. But now it was too late. She would not speak before the judgment day. And among those many voices, and stammering with his own, John would care no longer for her testimony.