Go Tell It on the Mountain (19 page)

But the summer brought him a letter, with no return name or address, but postmarked from Chicago. Deborah gave it to him at breakfast, not seeming to have remarked the hand or the postmark, along with the bundle of tracts from a Bible house which they both distributed each week through the town. She had a letter, too, from Florence, and it was perhaps this novelty that distracted her attention.

Esther’s letter ended:

“What Florence got to say?” he asked dully, crumpling this letter in his fist.

Deborah looked up with a faint smile. “Nothing much, honey. But she sound like she going to get married.”

Near the end of that summer he went out again into the field. He could not stand his home, his job, the town itself—he could not endure, day in, day out, facing the scenes and the people he had known all his life. They seemed suddenly to mock him, to stand in judgment on him; he saw his guilt in everybody’s eyes. When he stood in the pulpit to preach they looked at him, he felt, as though he had no right to be there, as though they condemned him as he had once condemned the twenty-three elders. When souls came weeping to the altar he scarce dared to rejoice, remembering that soul who had not bowed, whose blood, it might be, would be required of him at judgment.

So he fled from these people, and from these silent witnesses, to tarry and preach elsewhere—to do, as it were, in secret, his first works over, seeking again the holy fire that had so transformed him once. But he was to find, as the prophets had found, that the whole earth became a prison for him who fled before the Lord. There was peace nowhere, and healing nowhere, and forgetfulness nowhere. In every church he entered, his sin had gone before him. It was in the strange, the welcoming faces, it cried up to him from the altar, it sat, as he mounted the pulpit steps, waiting for him in his seat. It stared upward from his Bible: there was no word in all that holy book which did not make him tremble. When he spoke of John on the isle of Patmos, taken up in the spirit on the Lord’s day, to behold things
past, present, and to come, saying: “He which is filthy, let him be filthy still,” it was he who, crying these words in a loud voice, was utterly confounded; when he spoke of David, the shepherd boy, raised by God’s power to be the King of Israel, it was he who, while they shouted: “Amen!” and: “Hallelujah!” struggled once more in his chains; when he spoke of the day of Pentecost when the Holy Ghost had come down on the apostles who tarried in the upper room, causing them to speak in tongues of fire, he thought of his own baptism and how he had offended the Holy Ghost. No: though his name was writ large on placards, though they praised him for the great work God worked through him, and though they came, day and night, before him to the altar, there was no word in the Book for him.

And he saw, in this wandering, how far his people had wandered from God. They had all turned aside, and gone out into the wilderness, to fall down before idols of gold and silver, and wood and stone, false gods that could not heal them. The music that filled any town or city he entered was not the music of the saints but another music, infernal, which glorified lust and held righteousness up to scorn. Women, some of whom should have been at home, teaching their grandchildren how to pray, stood, night after night, twisting their bodies into lewd hallelujahs in smoke-filled, gin-heavy dance halls, singing for their “loving man.” And their loving man was any man, any morning, noon, or night—when one left town they got another—men could drown, it seemed, in their warm flesh and they would never know the difference. “It’s here for you and if you don’t get it it ain’t no fault of mine.” They laughed at him when they saw him—“a pretty man like you?”—and they told him that they knew a long brown girl who could make him lay his Bible down. He fled from them; they frightened him. He began to pray for Esther. He imagined her standing one day where these women stood today.

And blood, in all the cities through which he passed, ran down. There seemed no door, anywhere, behind which blood did not call out, unceasingly, for blood; no woman, whether singing before defiant
trumpets or rejoicing before the Lord, who had not seen her father, her brother, her lover, or her son cut down without mercy; who had not seen her sister become part of the white man’s great whorehouse, who had not, all too narrowly, escaped that house herself; no man, preaching, or cursing, strumming his guitar in the lone, blue evening, or blowing in fury and ecstasy his golden horn at night, who had not been made to bend his head and drink white men’s muddy water; no man whose manhood had not been, at the root, sickened, whose loins had not been dishonored, whose seed had not been scattered into oblivion and worse than oblivion, into living shame and rage, and into endless battle. Yes, their parts were all cut off, they were dishonored, their very names were nothing more than dust blown disdainfully across the field of time—to fall where, to blossom where, bringing forth what fruit hereafter, where?—their very names were not their own. Behind them was the darkness, nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire—a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!

Yet, most strangely, and from deeps not before discovered, his faith looked up; before the wickedness that he saw, the wickedness from which he fled, he yet beheld like a flaming standard in the middle of the air, that power of redemption to which he must, till death, bear witness; which, though it crush him utterly, he could not deny; though none among the living might ever behold it,
he
had beheld it, and must keep the faith. He would not go back into Egypt for friend, or lover, or bastard son: he would not turn his face from God, no matter how deep might grow the darkness in which God hid His face from him. One day God would give him a sign, and the darkness would all be finished—one day God would raise him, Who had suffered him to fall so low.

Hard on the heels of his return that winter, Esther came home too. Her mother and stepfather traveled North to claim her lifeless body and her living son. Soon after Christmas, on the last, dead days of
the year, she was buried in the churchyard. It was bitterly cold and there was ice on the ground, as during the days when he had first possessed her. He stood next to Deborah, whose arm in his shivered incessantly with the cold, and watched while the long, plain box was lowered into the ground. Esther’s mother stood in silence beside the deep hole, leaning on her husband, who held their grandchild in his arms. “Lord have mercy, have mercy, have mercy,” someone began to chant; and the old mourning women clustered of a sudden around Esther’s mother to hold her up. Then earth struck the coffin; the child awakened and began to scream.

Then Gabriel prayed to be delivered from blood guiltiness. He prayed to God to give him a sign one day to make him know he was forgiven. But the child who screamed at that moment in the churchyard had cursed, and sung, and been silenced forever before God gave him a sign.

And he watched this son grow up, a stranger to his father and a stranger to God. Deborah, who became after the death of Esther more friendly with Esther’s people, reported to him from the very beginning how shamefully Royal was being spoiled. He was, inevitably, the apple of their eye, a fact that, in operation, caused Deborah to frown, and sometimes, reluctantly, to smile; and, as they said, if there was any white blood in him, it didn’t show—he was the spit and image of his mother.

The sun did not rise or set but that Gabriel saw his lost, his disinherited son, or heard of him; and he seemed with every passing day to carry more proudly the doom printed on his brow. Gabriel watched him run headlong, like David’s headlong son, toward the disaster that had been waiting for him from the moment he had been conceived. It seemed that he had scarcely begun to walk before he swaggered; he had scarcely begun to talk before he cursed. Gabriel often saw him on the streets, playing on the curbstone with other boys his age. Once, when he passed, one of the boys had said: “Here comes Reverend Grimes,” and nodded, in brief, respectful silence. But Royal had looked boldly up into the preacher’s face. He had
said: “How-de-do, Reverend?” and suddenly, irrepressibly, laughed. Gabriel, wishing to smile down into the boy’s face, to pause and touch him on the forehead, did none of these things, but walked on. Behind him, he heard Royal’s explosive whisper: “I bet he got a mighty big one!”—and then all the children laughed. It came to Gabriel then how his own mother must have suffered to watch him in the unredeemed innocence that so surely led to death and Hell.

“I wonder,” said Deborah idly once, “why she called him Royal? You reckon that’s his daddy’s name?”

He did not wonder. He had once told Esther that if the Lord ever gave him a son he would call him Royal, because the line of the faithful was a royal line—his son would be a royal child. And this she had remembered as she thrust him from her; with what had perhaps been her last breath she had mocked him and his father with this name. She had died, then, hating him; she had carried into eternity a curse on him and his.

“I reckon,” he said at last, “it
must
be his daddy’s name—less they just given him that name in the hospital up North after … she was dead.”

“His grandmama, Sister McDonald”—she was writing a letter, and did not look at him as she spoke—“well,
she
think it must’ve been one of them boys what’s all time passing through here, looking for work, on their way North—you know? them real shiftless niggers—well,
she
think it must’ve been one of them got Esther in trouble. She say Esther wouldn’t never’ve gone North if she hadn’t been a-trying to find that boy’s daddy. Because she was in trouble when she left here”—and she looked up from her letter a moment—“
that’s
for certain.”

“I reckon,” he said again, made uncomfortable by her unaccustomed chatter, but not daring, too sharply, to stop her. He was thinking of Esther, lying cold and still in the ground, who had been so vivid and shameless in his arms.

“And Sister McDonald say,” she went on, “that she left here with just a little
bit
of money; they had to keep a-sending her money all
the time she was up there almost, specially near the end. We was just talking about it yesterday—she say, look like Esther just decided over
night
she had to go, and couldn’t nothing stop her. And she say she didn’t
want
to stand in the girl’s way—but if she’d’ve
known
something was the matter she wouldn’t
never
’ve let that girl away from her.”

“Seems funny to
me
,” he muttered, scarcely knowing what he was saying, “that she didn’t think
something
.”

“Why, she didn’t think nothing, because Esther always
told
her mother everything—weren’t no shame between then—they was just like two women together. She say she never
dreamed
that Esther would run away from her if she got herself in trouble.” And she looked outward, past him, her eyes full of a strange, bitter pity. “That poor thing,” she said, “she must have suffered
some
.”

“I don’t see no need for you and Sister McDonald to sit around and
talk
about it all the time,” he said, then. “It all been a mighty long time ago; that boy is growing up already.”

“That’s true,” she said, bending her head once more, “but some things, look like, ain’t to be forgotten in a hurry.”

“Who you writing to?” he asked, as oppressed suddenly by the silence as he had been by her talk.

She looked up. “I’m writing to your sister, Florence. You got anything you want me to say?”

“No,” he said. “Just tell her I’m praying for her.”

When Royal was sixteen the war came, and all the young men, first the sons of the mighty, and then the sons of his own people, were scattered into foreign lands. Gabriel fell on his knees each night to pray that Royal would not have to go. “But I hear he
want
to go,” said Deborah. “His grandmama tell me he giving her a
time
because she won’t let him go and sign up.”

“Look like,” he said sullenly, “that won’t none of these young men be satisfied till they can go off and get themselves crippled or killed.”

“Well, you know that’s the way the young folks is,” said Deborah, cheerfully. “You can’t never tell them nothing—and when they find out it’s too late then.”

He discovered that whenever Deborah spoke of Royal, a fear deep within him listened and waited. Many times he had thought to unburden his heart to her. But she gave him no opportunity, never said anything that might allow him the healing humility of confession—or that might, for that matter, have permitted him at last to say how much he hated her for her barrenness. She demanded of him what she gave—nothing—nothing, at any rate, with which she could be reproached. She kept his house and shared his bed; she visited the sick, as she had always done, and she comforted the dying, as she had always done. The marriage for which he had once dreamed the world would mock him had so justified itself—in the eyes of the world—that no one now could imagine, for either of them, any other condition or alliance. Even Deborah’s weakness, which grew more marked with the years, keeping her more frequently in her bed, and her barrenness, like her previous dishonor, had come to seem mysterious proofs of how completely she had surrendered herself to God.

He said: “Amen,” cautiously, after her last remark, and cleared his throat.

“I declare,” she said, with the same cheerfulness, “sometime he remind me of you when you was a young man.”