Go Tell It on the Mountain (16 page)

Yes, she was hardhearted, stiff-necked, and hard to bend, this Elizabeth whom he had married: she had not seemed so, years ago, when the Lord had moved in his heart to lift her up, she and her
nameless child, who bore his name today. And he was exactly like her, silent, watching, full of evil pride—they would be cast out, one day, into the outer darkness.

Once he had asked Elizabeth—they had been married a long while, Roy was a baby, and she was big with Sarah—if she had truly repented of her sin.

And she had looked at him, and said, “You done asked me that before. And I done told you, yes.”

But he did not believe her; and he asked: “You mean you wouldn’t do it again? If you was back there, where you was, like you was then—would you do it again?”

She looked down; then, with impatience, she looked into his eyes again: “Well, if I was back there, Gabriel, and I was the same girl!…”

There was a long silence, while she waited. Then, almost unwillingly, he asked: “And … would you let
him
be born again?”

She answered, steadily: “I know you ain’t asking me to say I’m sorry I brought Johnny in the world. Is you?” And when he did not answer: “And listen, Gabriel. I ain’t going to let you
make
me sorry. Not you, nor nothing, nor nobody in this world. We is got
two
children, Gabriel, and soon we’s going to have
three;
and I ain’t going to make no difference amongst them and you ain’t going to make none either.”

But how could there not be a difference between the son of a weak, proud woman and some careless boy, and the son that God had promised him, who would carry down the joyful line his father’s name, and who would work until the day of the second coming to bring about His Father’s Kingdom? For God had promised him this so many years ago, and he had lived only for this—forsaking the world and its pleasures, and the joys of his own life, he had tarried all these bitter years to see the promise of the Lord fulfilled. He had let Esther die, and Royal had died, and Deborah had died barren—but he had held on to the promise; he had walked before God in true repentance and waited on the promise. And the time of fulfillment
was surely at hand. He had only to possess his soul in patience and wait before the Lord.

And his mind, dwelling bitterly on Elizabeth, yet moved backward to consider once again Esther, who had been the mother of the first Royal. And he saw her, with the dumb, pale, startled ghosts of joy and desire hovering in him yet, a thin, vivid, dark-eyed girl, with something Indian in her cheekbones and her carriage and her hair; looking at him with that look in which were blended mockery, affection, desire, impatience, and scorn; dressed in the flamelike colors that, in fact, she had seldom worn, but that he always thought of her as wearing. She was associated in his mind with flame; with fiery leaves in the autumn, and the fiery sun going down in the evening over the farthest hill, and with the eternal fires of Hell.

She had come to town very shortly after he and Deborah were married, and she took a job as serving-girl with the same white family for which he worked. He saw her, therefore, all the time. Young men were always waiting for her at the back door when her work was done: Gabriel used to watch her walk off in the dusk on a young man’s arm, and their voices and their laughter floated back to him like a mockery of his condition. He knew that she lived with her mother and stepfather, sinful people, given to drinking and gambling and ragtime music and the blues, who never, except at Christmastime or Easter, appeared in church.

He began to pity her, and one day when he was to preach in the evening he invited her to come to church. This invitation marked the first time she ever really looked at him—he realized it then, and was to remember that look for many days and nights.

“You really going to preach tonight? A pretty man like you?”

“With the Lord’s help,” he said, with a gravity so extreme that it was almost hostility. At the same time, at her look and voice something leaped in him that he thought had been put down forever.

“Well, I be mighty delighted,” she said after a moment, seeming to have briefly regretted the impetuosity that had led her to call him a “pretty” man.

“Can you make yourself free to come tonight?” he could not prevent himself from asking.

And she grinned, delighted at what she took to be an oblique compliment. “Well, I don’t know, Reverend. But I’ll try.”

When the day was ended, she disappeared on the arm of yet another boy. He did not believe that she would come. And this so strangely depressed him that he could scarcely speak to Deborah at dinner, and they walked all the way to church in silence. Deborah watched him out of the corner of her eye, as was her silent and exasperating habit. It was her way of conveying respect for his calling; and she would have said, had it ever occurred to him to tax her with it, that she did not wish to distract him when the Lord had laid something on his heart. Tonight, since he was to preach, it could not be doubted that the Lord was speaking more than usual; and it behooved her, therefore, as the helpmeet of the Lord’s anointed, as the caretaker, so to speak, of the sanctified temple, to keep silence. Yet, in fact, he would have liked to talk. He would have liked to ask her—so many things; to have listened to her voice, and watched her face while she told him of her day, her hopes, her doubts, her life, and her love. But he and Deborah never talked. The voice to which he listened in his mind, and the face he watched with so much love and care, belonged not to Deborah, but to Esther. Again he felt this strange chill in him, implying disaster and delight; and then he hoped that she would not come, that something would happen that would make it impossible for him ever to see her again.

She came, however; late, just before the pastor was about to present the speaker of the hour to the congregation. She did not come alone, but had brought her mother with her—promising what spectacle Gabriel could not imagine, nor could he imagine how she had escaped her young man of the evening. But she had; she was here; she preferred, then, to hear him preach the gospel than to linger with others in carnal delight. She was here, and his heart was uplifted; something exploded in his heart when the opening door revealed her, smiling faintly and with eyes downcast, moving directly to a seat
in the back of the congregation. She did not look at him at all, and yet he knew immediately that she had seen him. And in a moment he imagined her, because of the sermon that he would preach, on her knees before the altar, and then her mother and that gambling, loud-talking stepfather of hers, brought by Esther into the service of the Lord. Heads turned when they came in, and a murmur, barely audible, of astonishment and pleasure swept over the church. Here were sinners, come to hear the Word of God.

And, indeed, from their apparel the sinfulness of their lives was evident: Esther wore a blue hat, trimmed with many ribbons, and a heavy, wine-red dress; and her mother, massive, and darker than Esther, wore great gold earrings in her pierced ears and had that air, vaguely disreputable, and hurriedly dressed, of women he had known in sporting-houses. They sat in the back, rigid and uncomfortable, like sisters of sin, like a living defiance of the drab sanctity of the saints. Deborah turned to look at them, and in that moment Gabriel saw, as though for the first time, how black and how bony was this wife of his, and how wholly undesirable. Deborah looked at him with a watchful silence in her look; he felt the hand that held his Bible begin to sweat and tremble; he thought of the joyless groaning of their marriage bed; and he hated her.

Then the pastor rose. While he spoke, Gabriel closed his eyes. He felt the words that he was about to speak fly from him; he felt the power of God go out of him. Then the voice of the pastor ceased, and Gabriel opened his eyes in the silence and found that all eyes were on him. And so he rose and faced the congregation.

“Dearly beloved in the Lord,” he began—but her eyes were on him, that strange, that mocking light—“let us bow our heads in prayer.” And he closed his eyes and bowed his head.

His later memory of this sermon was like the memory of a storm. From the moment that he raised his head and looked out over their faces again, his tongue was loosed and he was filled with the power of the Holy Ghost. Yes, the power of the Lord was on him that night, and he preached a sermon that was remembered in camp-meetings
and in cabins, and that set a standard for visiting evangelists for a generation to come. Years later, when Esther and Royal and Deborah were dead, and Gabriel was leaving the South, people remembered this sermon and the gaunt, possessed young man who had preached it.

He took his text from the eighteenth chapter of the second book of Samuel, the story of the young Ahimaaz who ran too soon to bring the tidings of battle to King David. For, before he ran, he was asked by Joab: “Wherefore wilt thou run, my son, seeing that thou hast no tidings ready?” And when Ahimaaz reached King David, who yearned to know the fate of his headlong son, Absalom, he could only say: “I saw a great tumult but I knew not what it was.”

And this was the story of all those who failed to wait on the counsel of the Lord; who made themselves wise in their own conceit and ran before they had the tidings ready. This was the story of innumerable shepherds who failed, in their arrogance, to feed the hungry sheep; of many a father and mother who gave to their children not bread but a stone, who offered not the truth of God but the tinsel of this world. This was not belief but unbelief, not humility but pride: there worked in the heart of such a one the same desire that had hurled the son of the morning from Heaven to the depths of Hell, the desire to overturn the appointed times of God, and to wrest from Him who held all power in His hands powers not meet for men. Oh, yes, they had seen it, each brother and sister beneath the sound of his voice tonight, and they had seen the destruction caused by a so lamentable unripeness! Babies, bawling, fatherless, for bread, and girls in the gutters, sick with sin, and young men bleeding in the frosty fields. Yes, and there were those who cried—they had heard it, in their homes, and on the street corner, and from the very pulpit—that they should wait no longer, despised and rejected and spat on as they were, but should rise today and bring down the mighty, establishing the vengeance that God had claimed. But blood cried out for blood, as the blood of Abel cried out from the ground. Not for nothing
was it written: “He that believeth will not make haste.” Oh, but sometimes the road was rocky. Did they think sometimes that God forgot? Oh, fall on your knees and pray for patience; fall on your knees and pray for faith; fall on your knees and pray for overcoming power to be ready on the day of His soon appearing to receive the crown of life. For God did not forget, no word proceeding from his mouth could fail. Better to wait, like Job, through all the days of our appointed time until our change comes than to rise up, unready, before God speaks. For if we but wait humbly before Him, He will speak glad tidings to our souls; if we but wait our change will come, and that in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye—we will be changed one day from this corruption into incorruptibility forever, caught up with Him beyond the clouds. And these are the tidings we now must bear to all the nations: another son of David was hung from a tree, and he who knows not the meaning of that tumult shall be damned forever in Hell! Brother, sister, you may run, but the day is coming when the King will ask: “What are the tidings that you bear?” And what will you say on that great day if you know not of the death of His Son?

“Is there a soul here tonight”—tears were on his face and he stood above them with arms outstretched—“who knows not the meaning of that tumult? Is there a soul here tonight who wants to talk to Jesus? Who wants to wait before the Lord, amen, until He speaks? Until He makes to ring in your soul, amen, the glad tidings of salvation? Oh, brothers and sisters”—and still she did not rise; but only watched him from far away—“the time is running out. One day He’s coming back to judge the nations, to take His children, hallelujah, to their rest. They tell me, bless God, that two shall be working in the fields, and one shall be taken and the other left. Two shall be lying, amen, in bed, and one shall be taken and the other left. He’s coming, beloved, like a thief in the night, and no man knows the hour of His coming. It’s going to be too late then to cry: ‘Lord, have mercy.’ Now is the time to make yourself ready, now, amen,
tonight, before His altar. Won’t somebody come tonight? Won’t somebody say No to Satan and give their life to the Lord?”

But she did not rise, only looked at him and looked about her with a bright, pleased interest, as though she were at a theater and were waiting to see what improbable delights would next be offered her. He somehow knew that she would never rise and walk that long aisle to the mercy seat. And this filled him for a moment with a holy rage—that she stood, so brazen, in the congregation of the righteous and refused to bow her head.

He said amen, and blessed them, and turned away, and immediately the congregation began to sing. Now, again, he felt drained and sick; he was soaking wet and he smelled the odor of his own body. Deborah, singing and beating her tambourine in the front of the congregation, watched him. He felt suddenly like a helpless child. He wanted to hide himself forever and never cease from crying.

Esther and her mother left during the singing—they had come, then, only to hear him preach. He could not imagine what they were saying or thinking now. And he thought of tomorrow, when he would have to see her again.

“Ain’t that the little girl that works at the same place with you?” Deborah asked him on the way home.

“Yes,” he said. Now he did not feel like talking. He wanted to get home and take his wet clothes off and sleep.

“She mighty pretty,” said Deborah. “I ain’t never seen her in church before.”

He said nothing.

“Was it you invited her to come out tonight?” she asked, after a bit.

“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.”