Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [61]
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think the Word of God could do her no harm.’
Deborah laughed. ‘Don’t look like it, does it. She walked out just as cool and sinful as she come in—she and that mother of her’n. And you preached a mighty fine sermon. Look like she just ain’t thinking about the Lord.’
‘Folks ain’t got no time for the Lord,’ he said, ‘one day He ain’t going to have no 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 woodpiles: ‘Good morning, Reverend. I sure didn’t look to see you to-day. I reckoned you’d be all wore out after that sermon—do 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 works 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 f 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 morning 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