Go Tell It on the Mountain (6 page)

John walked into his parents’ bedroom and picked up the squalling baby, who was wet. The moment Ruth felt him lift her up she stopped crying and stared at him with a wide-eyed, pathetic stare, as though she knew that there was trouble in the house. John laughed at her so ancient-seeming distress—he was very fond of his baby sister—and whispered in her ear as he started back to the living-room: “Now, you let your big brother tell you something, baby. Just as soon as you’s able to stand on your feet, you run away from
this
house, run far away.” He did not quite know why he said this, or where he wanted her to run, but it made him feel instantly better.

His father was saying, as John came back into the room: “I’m sure going to be having some questions to ask you in a minute, old lady. I’m going to be wanting to know just how come you let this boy go out and get half killed.”

“Oh, no, you ain’t,” said Aunt Florence. “You ain’t going to be starting none of that mess this evening. You know right doggone well that Roy don’t never ask
nobody
if he can do
nothing
—he just go right ahead and do like he pleases. Elizabeth sure can’t put no ball and chain on him. She got her hands full right here in this house, and it ain’t her fault if Roy got a head just as hard as his father’s.”

“You got a awful lot to say, look like for once you could keep from putting your mouth in my business.” He said this without looking at her.

“It ain’t my fault,” she said, “that you was born a fool, and always
done been a fool, and ain’t never going to change. I swear to my Father you’d try the patience of Job.”

“I done told you before,” he said—he had not ceased working over the moaning Roy, and was preparing now to dab the wound with iodine—“that I didn’t want you coming in here and using that gutter language in front of my children.”

“Don’t you worry about my language, brother,” she said with spirit, “you better start worrying about your
life
. What these children hear ain’t going to do them near as much harm as what they
see
.”

“What they
see
,” his father muttered, “is a poor man trying to serve the Lord.
That’s
my life.”

“Then I guarantee
you
,” she said, “that they going to do their best to keep it from being
their
life.
You
mark my words.”

He turned and looked at her, and intercepted the look that passed between the two women. John’s mother, for reasons that were not at all his father’s reasons, wanted Aunt Florence to keep still. He looked away, ironically. John watched his mother’s mouth tighten bitterly as she dropped her eyes. His father, in silence, began bandaging Roy’s forehead.

“It’s just the mercy of God,” he said at last, “that this boy didn’t lose his eye. Look here.”

His mother leaned over and looked into Roy’s face with a sad, sympathetic murmur. Yet, John felt, she had seen instantly the extent of the danger to Roy’s eye and to his life, and was beyond that worry now. Now she was merely marking time, as it were, and preparing herself against the moment when her husband’s anger would turn, full force, against her.

His father now turned to John, who was standing near the French doors with Ruth in his arms.

“You come here, boy,” he said, “and see what them white folks done done to your brother.”

John walked over to the sofa, holding himself as proudly beneath his father’s furious eyes as a prince approaching the scaffold.

“Look here,” said his father, grasping him roughly by one arm, “look at your brother.”

John looked down at Roy, who gazed at him with almost no expression in his dark eyes. But John knew by the weary, impatient set of Roy’s young mouth that his brother was asking that none of this be held against him. It wasn’t his fault, or John’s, Roy’s eyes said, that they had such a crazy father.

His father, with the air of one forcing the sinner to look down into the pit that is to be his portion, moved away slightly so that John could see Roy’s wound.

Roy had been gashed by a knife, luckily not very sharp, from the center of his forehead where his hair began, downward to the bone just above his left eye: the wound described a kind of crazy half-moon and ended in a violent, fuzzy tail that was the ruin of Roy’s eyebrow. Time would darken the half-moon wound into Roy’s dark skin, but nothing would bring together again the so violently divided eyebrow. This crazy lift, this question, would remain with him forever, and emphasize forever something mocking and sinister in Roy’s face. John felt a sudden impulse to smile, but his father’s eyes were on him and he fought the impulse back. Certainly the wound was now very ugly, and very red, and must, John felt, with a quickened sympathy toward Roy, who had not cried out, have been very painful. He could imagine the sensation caused when Roy staggered into the house, blinded by his blood; but just the same, he wasn’t dead, he wasn’t changed, he would be in the streets again the moment he was better.

“You see?” came now from his father. “It was white folks, some of them white folks
you
like so much that tried to cut your brother’s throat.”

John thought, with immediate anger and with a curious contempt for his father’s inexactness, that only a blind man, however white, could possibly have been aiming at Roy’s throat; and his mother said with a calm insistence:

“And he was trying to cut theirs. Him and them bad boys.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Florence, “I ain’t heard you ask that boy nary a question about how all this happened. Look like you just determined to raise cain any
how
and make everybody in this house suffer because something done happened to the apple of your eye.”

“I done asked you,” cried his father in a fearful exasperation, “to stop running your
mouth
. Don’t none of this concern you. This is
my
family and this is my house. You want me to slap you side of the head?”

“You slap me,” she said, with a placidity equally fearful, “and I
do
guarantee you you won’t do no more slapping in a hurry.”

“Hush now,” said his mother, rising, “ain’t no need for all this. What’s done is done. We ought to be on our knees, thanking the Lord it weren’t no worse.”

“Amen to that,” said Aunt Florence, “
tell
that foolish nigger something.”

“You can tell that foolish
son
of yours something,” he said to his wife with venom, having decided, it seemed, to ignore his sister, “him standing there with them big buckeyes. You can tell him to take this like a warning from the Lord.
This
is what white folks does to niggers. I been telling you, now you see.”

“He better take it like a warning?” shrieked Aunt Florence. “He better take it? Why, Gabriel, it ain’t
him
went halfway across this city to get in a fight with white boys. This boy on the sofa went
deliberately
, with a whole lot of other boys, all the way to the west side, just
looking
for a fight. I declare, I do wonder what goes on in your head.”

“You know right well,” his mother said, looking directly at his father, “that Johnny don’t travel with the same class of boys as Roy goes with. You done beat Roy too many times, here, in this very room for going out with them bad boys. Roy got hisself hurt this afternoon because he was out doing something he didn’t have no business doing, and that’s the end of it. You ought to be thanking your Redeemer he ain’t dead.”

“And for all the care you take of him,” he said, “he might as well be dead. Don’t look like you much care whether he lives, or dies.”

“
Lord
, have mercy,” said Aunt Florence.

“He’s my son, too,” his mother said, with heat. “I carried him in my belly for nine months and I know him just like I know his daddy, and they’s just
exactly
alike. Now. You ain’t got no
right
in the world to talk to me like that.”

“I reckon you
know
,” he said, choked, and breathing hard, “all about a mother’s love. I sure reckon on you telling me how a woman can sit in the house all day and let her own flesh and blood go out and get half butchered. Don’t you tell me you don’t know no way to stop him, because I remember
my
mother, God rest her soul, and
she’d
have found a way.”

“She was my mother, too,” said Aunt Florence, “and I recollect, if you don’t, you being brought home many a time more dead than alive. She didn’t find no way to stop
you
. She wore herself out beating on you, just like you been wearing yourself out beating on this boy here.”

“My, my,
my
,” he said, “you got a lot to say.”

“I ain’t doing a thing,” she said, “but trying to talk some sense into your big, black, hardhead. You better stop trying to blame everything on Elizabeth and look to your own wrongdoings.”

“Never mind, Florence,” his mother said, “it’s all over and done with now.”

“I’m out of this house,” he shouted, “every day the Lord sends, working to put the food in these children’s mouths. Don’t you think I got a right to ask the mother of these children to look after them and see that they don’t break their necks before I get back home?”

“You ain’t got but one child,” she said, “that’s liable to go out and break his neck, and that’s Roy, and you know it. And I don’t know how in the world you expect me to run this house, and look after these children, and keep running around the block after Roy.
No
, I can’t stop him, I done told you that, and you can’t stop him neither. You don’t know
what
to do with this boy, and that’s why
you all the time trying to fix the blame on somebody. Ain’t nobody to
blame
, Gabriel. You just better pray God to stop him before somebody puts another knife in him and puts him in his grave.”

They stared at each other a moment in an awful pause, she with a startled, pleading question in her eyes. Then, with all his might, he reached out and slapped her across the face. She crumpled at once, hiding her face with one thin hand, and Aunt Florence moved to hold her up. Sarah watched all this with greedy eyes. Then Roy sat up, and said in a shaking voice:

“Don’t you slap my mother. That’s my
mother
. You slap her again, you black bastard, and I swear to God I’ll kill you.”

In the moment that these words filled the room, and hung in the room like the infinitesimal moment of hanging, jagged light that precedes an explosion, John and his father were staring into each other’s eyes. John thought for that moment that his father believed the words had come from him, his eyes were so wild and depthlessly malevolent, and his mouth was twisted into such a snarl of pain. Then, in the absolute silence that followed Roy’s words, John saw that his father was not seeing him, was not seeing anything unless it were a vision. John wanted to turn and flee, as though he had encountered in the jungle some evil beast, crouching and ravenous, with eyes like Hell unclosed; and exactly as though, on a road’s turning, he found himself staring at certain destruction, he found that he could not move. Then his father turned and looked down at Roy.

“What did you say?” his father asked.

“I told you,” said Roy, “not to touch my mother.”

“You cursed me,” said his father.

Roy said nothing; neither did he drop his eyes.

“Gabriel,” said his mother, “Gabriel. Let us pray.…”

His father’s hands were at his waist, and he took off his belt. Tears were in his eyes.

“Gabriel,” cried Aunt Florence, “ain’t you done playing the fool for tonight?”

Then his father raised his belt, and it fell with a whistling sound
on Roy, who shivered, and fell back, his face to the wall. But he did not cry out. And the belt was raised again, and again. The air rang with the whistling, and the
crack!
against Roy’s flesh. And the baby, Ruth, began to scream.

“My Lord, my Lord,”
his father whispered,
“my Lord, my Lord.”

He raised the belt again, but Aunt Florence caught it from behind, and held it. His mother rushed over to the sofa and caught Roy in her arms, crying as John had never seen a woman, or anybody, cry before. Roy caught his mother around the neck and held on to her as though he were drowning.

His Aunt Florence and his father faced each other.

“Yes, Lord,” Aunt Florence said, “you was born wild, and you’s going to die wild. But ain’t no use to try to take the whole world with you. You can’t change nothing, Gabriel. You ought to know that by now.”

John opened the church door with his father’s key at six o’clock. Tarry service officially began at eight, but it could begin at any time, whenever the Lord moved one of the saints to enter the church and pray. It was seldom, however, that anyone arrived before eight thirty, the Spirit of the Lord being sufficiently tolerant to allow the saints time to do their Saturday-night shopping, clean their houses, and put their children to bed.

John closed the door behind him and stood in the narrow church aisle, hearing behind him the voices of children playing, and ruder voices, the voices of their elders, cursing and crying in the streets. It was dark in the church; street lights had been snapping on all around him on the populous avenue; the light of the day was gone. His feet seemed planted on this wooden floor; they did not wish to carry him one step farther. The darkness and silence of the church pressed on him, cold as judgment, and the voices crying from the window might have been crying from another world. John moved forward, hearing his feet crack against the sagging wood, to where the golden
cross on the red field of the altar cloth glowed like smothered fire, and switched on one weak light.

In the air of the church hung, perpetually, the odor of dust and sweat; for, like the carpet in his mother’s living-room, the dust of this church was invincible; and when the saints were praying or rejoicing, their bodies gave off an acrid, steamy smell, a marriage of the odors of dripping bodies and soaking, starched white linen. It was a storefront church and had stood, for John’s lifetime, on the corner of this sinful avenue, facing the hospital to which criminal wounded and dying were carried almost every night. The saints, arriving, had rented this abandoned store and taken out the fixtures; had painted the walls and built a pulpit, moved in a piano and camp chairs, and bought the biggest Bible they could find. They put white curtains in the show window, and painted across this window
TEMPLE OF THE FIRE BAPTIZED
. Then they were ready to do the Lord’s work.