Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [62]
‘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 stared 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 this 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 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’ 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