Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [74]
And he had not been in the house five minutes before he was aware that a change had occurred in the quality of her silence: in the silence something waited, ready to spring.
He looked up at her from the table where he sat eating the meal that she had painfully prepared. He asked: ‘How you feel to-day, old lady?’
‘I feel like about the way I always do,’ and she smiled. ‘I don’t feel no better and I don’t feel no worse.’
‘We going to get the church to pray for you,’ he said, ‘and get you on your feet again.’
She said nothing and he turned his attention once more to his plate. But she was watching him; he looked up.
‘I hear some mighty bad news to-day,’ she said slowly.
‘What you hear?’
‘Sister McDonald was over this afternoon, and Lord knows she was in a pitiful state.’ He sat stock-still, staring at her. ‘She done got a letter to-day what says her grandson—you know, that Royal—done got hisself killed in Chicago. It sure look like the Lord is put a curse on that family. First the mother, and now the son.’
For a moment he could only stare at her stupidly, while the food in his mouth slowly grew heavy and dry. Outside rushed the armies of the rain, and lightening flashed against the window. Then he tried to swallow, and his gorge rose. He began to tremble. ‘Yes,’ she said, not looking at him now, ‘he been living in Chicago about a year, just a-drinking and a-carrying on—and his grandmama, she tell me that look like he got to gambling one night with some of them northern niggers, and one of them got mad because he thought the boy was trying to cheat him, and took out his knife and stabbed him. Stabbed him in the throat, and she tell me he died right there on the floor in that bar-room, didn’t even have time to get him to no hospital.’ She turned in bed and looked at him. ‘The Lord sure give that poor woman a heavy cross to bear,’
Then he tried to speak; he thought of the churchyard where Esther was buried, and Royal’s first, thin cry. ‘She going to bring him back home?’
She stared. ‘Home? Honey, they done buried him already up there in the potter’s field. Ain’t nobody never going to look on that poor boy no more.’
Then he began to cry, not making a sound, sitting at the table, and with his whole body shaking. She watched him for a long while and, finally, he put his head on the table, overturning the coffee cup, and wept aloud. Then it seemed that there was weeping everywhere, waters of anguish riding the world; Gabriel weeping, and rain beating on the roof, and at the windows, and the coffee dripping from the end of the table. And she asked at last:
‘Gabriel … that Royal … he were your flesh and blood, weren’t he?’
‘Yes,’ he said, glad even in his anguish to hear the words fall from his lips, ‘that was my son.’
And there was silence again. Then: ‘And you sent that girl away, didn’t you? With the money outen that box?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’
‘Gabriel,’ she asked, ‘why did you do it? Why you let her go off and die, all by herself? Why ain’t you never said nothing?’
And now he could not answer. He could not raise his head.
‘Why,’ she insisted. ‘Honey, I ain’t never asked you. But I got a right to know—and when you wanted a son so bad?
Then, shaking, he rose from the table and walked slowly to the window, looking out.
‘I asked my God to forgive me,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t want no harlot’s son.’
‘Esther weren’t no harlot,’ she said quietly.
‘She weren’t my wife. And I couldn’t make her my wife. I already