Journeyman (14 page)

“Well, there’s nothing but the woods over there, I reckon. There’s that, and something else. I don’t know what.”

“I’ll be doggone,” Clay said. “I never knew you did that before. There ain’t much sense in doing it, is there, Tom?”

“No,” Tom said. “I don’t reckon there’s a bit of sense in it. But I just do it, anyway.”

Semon sat down on one of the stools. He then saw the jug that had been sitting all the time against the wall.

“I reckon you’re going to be neighborly with the jug, won’t you, Tom?” he said.

“That’s what it’s for. Just help yourself.”

Semon took a long draft of the corn whisky and set the jug down none too lightly. There was no floor under the shed, only the bare earth, and so it did not break. He passed the back of his hand across his mouth and licked it.

“Help yourself, Clay,” Tom said. “That’s what I made it for. Wouldn’t be no sense in running it off if nobody made use of it.”

While Clay and Tom were drinking from the jug, Semon moved over to the stool by the wall and bent his head against the crack. He sat there, looking through it with his eye squinted for several minutes. After that he raised his head and looked at the others rather sheepishly.

“See anything?” Clay said.

“Not much.”

“Move over, then, and let me take a look through it.”

Clay sat down and looked through the crack. There was nothing much to be seen except the trees on the other side of the pasture. The fence over there that bordered that side of the pasture was barbed wire, and the posts were split pine. He saw all that in a glance, and there was nothing else to see, but he continued to look through the crack as though he saw something that he had never seen before in his life.

“Where you folks headed for?” Tom asked Semon.

“To the schoolhouse. That’s where we started. I don’t reckon there’s much up there to see, though.”

“No,” Tom said, moving restlessly on his stool. “No, there ain’t much up there. Least, I never could see much up around there.”

He turned around to see if Clay had finished looking through the crack. After waiting as long as he could, he got up and went over there.

“What’s the matter?” Clay asked.

“It’s about my turn now.”

He pushed Clay away from the stool and sat down to press his face, against the wall where the crack was. He moved his head slightly to the left, then lowered it a fraction of an inch. After that he sat motionless.

“See anything, coz?” Semon said.

Tom said nothing.

“I reckon I’ll take my other drink now, instead of later,” Semon said. He picked up the jug and drank heavily.

After he had finished, he handed it over to Clay.

“There wouldn’t be much sense in going to the schoolhouse now,” Semon said, shaking his head at Clay. “There’s nothing much up there to go for.”

“It’s bound to be just like it was the last time I saw it,” Tom agreed.

Semon walked nervously around the cow shed. He came to a stop beside Tom.

“Don’t hog it all the time, coz,” he said, pushing him. “Let a white man take a look once in a while.”

Tom got up and looked for the jug.

“I can’t seem to remember when I liked to look at a thing so much as I do now,” Semon said, adjusting his eye to the crack.

Clay leaned against the wall, taking out his harmonica. He tapped the flakes of tobacco and weed out of it, and drew it swiftly across his mouth. It made a sound like an automobile tire going flat.

He started playing “I’ve Got a Gal.”

Semon, with his eye glued to the crack, began keeping time with his feet on the bare earth.

“That’s the God-damnedest little slit in the whole world,” Tom said. “I come down here and sit on the stool and look through it all morning sometimes. There’s not a doggone thing to see but the trees over there, and maybe the fence posts, but I can’t keep from looking to save my soul. It’s the doggonest thing I ever saw in all my life.”

Semon settled himself more comfortably on the stool.

“There’s not a single thing to see,” Tom said, “and then again there’s the whole world to look at. Looking through the side of the shed ain’t like nothing else I can think of. You sit there a while, and the first thing you know, you can’t get away from it. It gets a hold on a man like nothing else does. You sit there, screwing up your eye and looking at the trees or something, and you might start to thinking what a fool thing you’re doing, but you don’t give a cuss about that. All you care for is staying there and looking.”

Semon continued keeping time to the harmonica with both feet. Neither of them made any sound on the bare ground, but he kept it up just the same.

“She wore a little yellow dress
—
”

Clay was playing as though his life depended upon it, and Tom was singing a line every once in a while. He hummed under his breath when he was not singing.

Semon was reaching for the glass jug. His hand was searching in a circle for it, but it was beyond his reach. He would not stop looking through the crack for even a second to see where the jug really was.

“Can’t help you out none, preacher,” Tom said. “You’ll have to come and get it. It’s my time to look some now.”

“
—
those eyes were made for me to see.”

Tom sang a line, and stopped to talk again.

“You ought to give somebody else a chance to look, every once in a while, preacher.”

Semon got up from the stool without moving his head. He stood there bent over until Tom shoved him out of his way.

“In the night-time is the right time
—
”

“Shove off, preacher,” Tom said, giving him a final push.

Semon sat down on the other stool, rubbing the strain from his left eye. He blinked several times, resuming the tapping of his feet.

He took a long drink and put the jug down at Clay’s side.

“That’s the God-damnedest slit I ever saw in all my life,” Semon said. “You can look through there all day and never get tired. And come back the next day, and I’ll bet it would look just as good. There’s something about looking through a crack that nothing else in the whole wide world will give you.”

Clay had warmed up until he could not stop. The song he was playing had long before run out, but the chorus would not end. He could not make himself quit.

Finally the harmonica filled up, and he had to stop. He was sorry the song was over.

Tom was still humming the tune, though, and he ended up with another line from the chorus.

“Coz, do that some more,” Semon said. “I want to hear that piece again. I don’t reckon I’ve ever heard a mouth-organ play a prettier one.”

“It’s my time to look through the crack now.”

“Here, take another drink, and me and Tom will give you the next two turns, instead of one. Just go ahead and play that pretty little piece some more. It makes me want to cry, it’s that good, and I feel like crying over it now.”

Clay drank, and jerked the harmonica across his lips. It sounded this time like air going into a tire.

With his head pressed tightly against the shed wall, Tom started humming again. He patted his feet on the ground, swinging into rhythm with the tune Clay was playing.

“There’s never been but one gal like that in all the world,” Semon said. The tears welled in his eyes and dripped against the backs of his hands. “If I could just look through the crack and see her, I wouldn’t ask to live no longer. That crack is the God-damnedest thing I ever looked through. I sit there and look, and think about that gal, thinking maybe I’ll see her with the next bat of my eye, and all the time I’m looking clear to the back side of heaven.”

He strode to the wall and pushed Tom away. Without waiting to sit down first, he pressed his eye to the slit in the wall. After that he slowly sat down on the stool.

“
—
you’re the prettiest one and the sweetest one.”

Tom stopped and picked up the jug. He took his drink and replaced it at Clay’s feet. Clay was too busy then to stop for a drink. He could not stop.

“When I’m loping you, I’m telling you
—
”

Semon put his hand to his face and wiped the tears from his cheeks.

“I don’t know what I’d do without that crack in the wall,” Tom said. “I reckon I’d just dry up and die away. I’d be that sad about it. I come down here and sit and look, and I don’t see nothing you can’t see better from the outside, but that don’t make a bit of difference. It’s sitting there looking through the crack at the trees all day long that sort of gets me. I don’t know what it is, and it might not be nothing at all when you figure it out. But it’s not the knowing about it, anyway—it’s just the sitting there and looking through it that sort of makes me feel like heaven can’t be so doggone far away.”

N
EARLY EVERYONE IN
Rocky Comfort was on the school-house grounds at two o’clock Sunday afternoon. Some of the families living on the other side of Rocky Comfort Creek had started out early that morning in wagons pulled by slow-walking mules. They forded the creek a hundred yards above the schoolhouse and drove up sitting in house chairs that had been placed in the wagon-bed. Others came in cars. Many walked, and some rode mule-back.

Clay Horey and Dene, together with Semon and Lorene, had arrived at one o’clock. They had been the first there, and Clay and Semon went inside and opened up the building and got things ready for the services. It was a two-room school, and the larger room had about forty desks in it. At one end of the room there was a platform, where the teacher sat, and on it two chairs and a table.

While they were inside, Lorene and Dene went down to the spring for a drink of water. They were gone for nearly half an hour.

The schoolhouse grounds soon filled with teams and wagons, and bare-back mules tied to trees. The automobiles were left in the sandy clearing between the building and the grove. There were thirty or forty persons there, not counting the younger children and babies.

Semon and Clay came out the front door and surveyed the crowd.

“Looks like the people are starved for preaching,” Semon said, his eyes sweeping over the grounds. “The Lord sure did know what He was doing when He told me to come to Rocky Comfort. These people are ripe for religion. Saving them will be as easy as falling off a log.”

“Shucks,” Clay said, laughing a little, “that’s nothing. Folks in Rocky Comfort will go anywhere anytime when there’s something going on. It don’t matter much to them whether it’s a wedding or a funeral, or even just an old-fashioned country break-down.”

“A break-down?” Semon asked.

“Sure.”

“I’ll have to remember to say something against dancing,” he said, making a quick note in his mind. “That’s always a good subject to preach about to country people.”

He walked off into the groups of people, shaking hands and introducing himself. The men shook hands with him readily enough, almost eagerly; but the women and girls were slow to touch his hand, and they looked at him in quick glances. Semon knew how to make himself at ease in a group of women, though; and, moreover, he had a way with them that won their interest. Soon they were all laughing and crowding around him.

“The preacher’s been staying at your house, ain’t he, Clay?” Ralph Stone said.

“He’s been there since last Wednesday,” Clay told him proudly. Some of the men pressed closer to hear them talk about Semon. “I reckon it’s something to puff up about when the preacher comes and stays at a man’s house that long.”

“Ever see him before?” Ralph asked.

“Never laid eyes on him before last Wednesday when he drove up and lit.”

Another man pushed through the crowd surrounding Clay and Ralph Stone.

“The preacher’s a sport among the women, ain’t he, Clay? Just look at him step around over there. He’s got all the girls giggling like they had been goosed.”

Everybody turned and looked at Semon. He was laughing and joking with the women and girls, stopping every now and then to stoop over a toddling baby and chuck it under the chin.

“The women take to anybody who makes out he’s a fool about them and the young ones,” Ralph said. “You can’t tell them no different, after that. You just have to let him run his course, like a dose of castor oil. There ain’t no way in heaven or hell of stopping what’s bound to be.”

Semon was moving towards the schoolhouse door. When he got to the steps, he stopped and waved his arms above his head and called the people to come inside. The men made no move; and the women waited until Semon had entered the building, and then they all crowded in at the same time, like a flock of sheep all trying to jump through a gap in a fence.

“I don’t know what he can find to preach about that everybody in Rocky Comfort don’t already know something about,” Ralph said. “I figure that he’ll preach just like all the traveling preachers who’ve been through here since I was a boy.”

Tom Rhodes came up the path from the spring and went to his car. He had been waiting down at the creek bank until his wife had gone into the schoolhouse.

The other men and older boys went further into the grove and sat down in a wide circle, some leaning back against trees, others perching on their heels, and looked at each other with familiar nods of the head.

“Come here a minute, Clay,” Tom said under his breath, standing behind Clay. “Want to take a little walk?”

Clay nodded and left the circle. He followed Tom to his car and helped him take out the jug from the back seat. The jug had been wrapped in a burlap bag and hidden there.

They strolled out of sight and stood behind some pine trees drinking Tom’s corn whisky. They made the cork tight when they had enough, and covered the jug with pine needles where it could be picked up later in the day.

When they came back to the clearing, they could hear a humming sound in the schoolhouse. The women were doing their best to raise a tune without even so much as a fiddle. Semon had taken out his tuningfork and had struck it on the table several times. The note came all right, but he could not keep the pitch. The girls and women were timid about singing, and the song never became loud enough to be heard on the outside where the men were.