Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [63]
‘No, I don’t,’ she answered, refusing, with a small shake of the head, to credit his intensity. ‘I sure don’t know why you can’t let Esther have her little whisky, and have her little ways without all the time trying to make her miserable.’
He sighed with exasperation, feeling himself begin to tremble. ‘I just don’t want to see you go down, girl, I don’t want you to wake up one fine morning sorry for all the sin you done, old, and all by yourself, with nobody to respect you.’
But he heard himself speaking, and it made him ashamed. He wanted to have done with talking and leave this house—in a moment they would leave, and the nightmare would be over.
‘Reverend,’ she said, ‘I ain’t done nothing that I’m ashamed of, and I hope I don’t do nothing I’m ashamed of, ever.’
At the word ‘Reverend,’ he wanted to strike her; he reached out instead and took both her hands in his. And now they looked directly at each other. There was surprise in her look, and a guarded triumph; he was aware that their bodies were nearly touching and that he should move away. But he did not move—he could not move.
‘But I can’t help it,’ she said, after a moment, maliciously teasing, ‘if you done things that you’s ashamed of, Reverend.’
He held on to her hands as though he were in the middle of the sea and her hands were the lifeline that would drag him in to shore. ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ he prayed, ‘oh, Jesus, Jesus. Help me to stand.’ He thought that that he was pulling back against her hands—but he was pulling her to him. And he saw in her eyes now a look that he had not seen for many a long day and night, a look that was never in Deborah’s eyes.
‘Yes, you know,’ he said, ‘why I’m all the time worrying about you—why I’m all the time miserable when I look at you.’
‘But you ain’t never told me none of this,’ she said.
One hand moved to her waist, and lingered there. The tips of her breasts touched his coat, burning in like acid and closing his throat. Soon it would be too late; he wanted it to be too late. That river, his infernal need, rose, flooded, sweeping him forward as though he were a long-drowned corpse.
‘You know,’ he whispered, and touched her breasts and buried his face in her neck.
So he had fallen: for the first time since his conversion, for the last time in his life. Fallen: he and Esther in the white folks’ kitchen, the light burning, the door half-open, grappling and burning beside the sink. Fallen indeed: time was no more, and sin, death, Hell, the judgment were blotted out. There was only Esther, who contained in her narrow body all mystery and all passion, and who answered all his need. Time, snarling so swiftly past, had caused him to forget the clumsiness, and sweat, and dirt of their first coupling; how his shaking hands undressed her, standing where they stood, how her dress fell at length like a snare about her feet; how his hands tore at her undergarments so that the naked, vivid flash might meet his hands; how she protested: ‘Not here, not here’; how he worried, in some buried part of his mind, about the open door, about the sermon he was to preach, about his life, about Deborah; how the table got in their way, how his collar, until her fingers loosened it, threatened to choke him; how they found they found themselves on the floor at last, sweating and groaning and locked together; locked away from all others, all heavenly or human help. Only they could help each other. They were alone in the world.
Had Royal, his son, been conceived that night? Or the next night? Or he next? It had lasted only nine days. Then he had come to his senses—after nine days God gave him the power to tell her this thing could not be.
She took his decision with the same casualness, the same near-amusement, with which she had taken his fall. He understood about Esther, during those nine days: that she considered his fear and trembling fanciful and childish, a way of making life more complicated than it need be. She did not think life was like that; she wanted life to be simple. He understood that