Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [65]
She was going to have his baby—his baby? While Deborah, despite their groaning, despite the humility with which she endured his body, yet failed to be quickened by any coming life. It was in the womb of Esther, who was not better than a harlot, that the seed of the prophet would be nourished.
And he moved from the well, picking up, like a man in a trance, the heavy pails of water. He moved toward the house, which now—high, gleaming roof, and spun-gold window—seemed to watch him and to listen; the very sun above his head and the earth beneath his feet had ceased their turning; the water, like a million warning voices, lapped in the buckets he carried on each side; and his mother, beneath the startled earth on which he moved, lifted up, endlessly, her eyes.
They talked in the kitchen as she was cleaning up.
‘How come you’—it was the first question—‘to be so sure this here’s my baby?’
She was not crying now. ‘Don’t you start a-talking that way,’ she said. ‘Esther ain’t in the habit of lying to nobody, and I ain’t gone with so many men that I’m subject to get my mind confused.’
She was very cold and deliberate, and moved about the kitchen with a furious concentration on her tasks, scarcely looking at him.
He did not know what to say, how to reach her.
‘You tell your mother yet?’ he asked, after a pause. ‘You been to see a doctor? How come you to be so sure?’
She sighed sharply. ‘No, I ain’t told my mother, I ain’t crazy. I ain’t told nobody except you.’
‘How come you to be so sure?’ he repeated. ‘If you ain’t seen no doctor?’
‘What doctor in this town you want me to go see? I go to see a doctor, I might as well get up and shout it from the housetops. No, I ain’t seen no doctor, and I ain’t fixing to see one in a hurry. I don’t need no doctor to tell me what’s happening in my belly.’
‘And how long you been knowing about this?’
‘I been knowing this for maybe a month—maybe six weeks now.’
‘Six weeks? Why ain’t you opened your mouth before?’
‘Because I wasn’t sure. I thought I’d wait and make sure. I didn’t see no need for getting all up in the air before I knew. I didn’t want to get you all upset and scared and evil, like you is now, if it weren’t no need.’ She paused, watching him. Then: ‘And you said this morning we was going to do something. What we going to do? That’s what we got to figure out now, Gabriel.’
‘What we going to do?’ he repeated at last; and felt that the sustaining life had gone out of him. He sat down at the kitchen table and looked at whirling pattern on the floor.
But the life had not gone out of her; she came to where he sat, speaking softly, with bitter eyes. ‘You sound mighty strange to me,’ she said. ‘Don’t look to me like you thinking of nothing but how you can get shut of this—and me, too—quick as you know how. It wasn’t like that always, was it, Reverend? Once upon a time you couldn’t think of nothing and nobody but me. What you thinking about to-night? I be damned if I think it’s me you thinking of.’
‘Girl,’ he said, wearily, ‘don’t talk like you ain’t got good sense. You know I got a wife to think about——’ and he wanted to say more, but he could not find the words, and, helplessly, he stopped.
‘I know that,’ she said with less heat, but watching him still with eyes from which the old, impatient mockery was not entirely gone, ‘but what I mean is, if you was able to forget her once you ought to be able to forger her twice.’
He did not understand her at once; but then he sat straight up, his eyes wide and angry. ‘What you mean, girl? What you trying to say?’
She did not flinch—even in his despair and anger he recognized how far she was from being the frivolous child she had always seemed to him. Or was it that she had been, in so short a space of time, transformed? But he spoke to her at this disadvantage: that whereas he was unprepared for any change in her, she had apparently taken his measure from the first and could be surprised