Lives of Girls and Women (30 page)

A young man, boy, on the other side of the hall was looking at me steadily. I did not think I had seen him before, He was not very tall, dark-skinned; a bony face with deep eye-sockets, long slightly hollowed cheeks, a grave, unconsciously arrogant expression. At the end of the Negroes’ singing he moved from where he had been standing under the windows and disappeared in the crowd at the back of the hall. I thought at once that he was coming to stand beside me. Then I thought what nonsense; like a recognition in an opera, or some bad, sentimental, deeply stirring song.

Everybody rose, twitched cotton away from sweaty backsides, began to sing the first hymn.

Into a tent where a gypsy boy lay Dying alone at the end of the day News of Salvation we carried; said he Nobody ever has told it to me—

I desperately wished that he would come. I concentrated my whole self into a kind of white prayer, willing him to show up beside me even while I told myself,
Now he’s going round behind me, now he’s heading for the door, he’s going down the stairs
—

A change in the level of voices behind me told me he was there. People had drawn aside, there was a space with a body in it but no singing. I smelled the thin hot cotton shirt, sunburnt skin, soap and machine oil. My shoulder was grazed by his arm (it is like fire, just as they say) and he slipped into place beside me.

We both looked straight ahead at the stage. The Baptist minister had introduced the revivalist, who began to talk in a friendly, conversational way. After a little while I rested my hand on the back of the chair in front of me. A little girl was sitting there bent forward, picking a scab off her knee. He put his hand on the back of the chair about two inches from mine. Then it seemed as if all sensation in my body, all hope, life, potential, flowed down into that one hand.

The revivalist, who had started off so mildly, behind the reading stand, gradually worked himself up, and began pacing back and forth across the stage, his tone growing more and more intense, despairing, grief-stricken. Every so often he would emerge from his grief and whirl around, to roar like a lion directly into the audience. He painted a picture of a rope bridge, such as he had seen, he said, in his missionary days in South America. This bridge, frail and swaying, hung over a bottomless canyon and the canyon was filled with fire. It was the River of Fire, the River of Fire down below, in which were drowning, but never drowned, all that yelping, shrieking, blaspheming, tortured horde he now enumerated—politicians and gangsters, gamblers and drinkers and fornicators and movie stars and financiers and unbelievers. Each one of us, he said, had our own individual rope bridge, swaying over the inferno, tied up at the banks of Paradise on the other side. But Paradise was just what we could not hear or see, sometimes could not even imagine, for the roarings and writhings in the pit, and the fumes of sin it sent up all round us. What was that bridge called? It was The Lord’s Grace. The Lord’s Grace, and it was wonderfully strong; but every sin of ours, every word and act and thought of sin put a little nick in that rope, frayed that rope a little bit more—

And some of your ropes can’t take much more! Some of your ropes are almost past the point of no return. They are frayed out with sin, they are eaten away with sin, they are nothing left but a thread! Nothing but a thread is holding you out of Hell! You all know, every single last one of you knows what condition your own bridge is in! One more nibble at the fruits of Hell, one more day and night of sin, and once that rope is broken you haven’t got another! But even a thread can hold you, if you want! God didn’t pass all his miracles back in the Bible days! No, I can tell you from my heart and from my own experience He is passing them here and now, and in the midst of us. Catch ahold of him and hold right on till the Day of Judgement, and you need fear no Evil.

Ordinarily I would have been interested in listening to this and in seeing how people were taking it. For the most, calmly and pleasurably, no more disturbed than if he had been singing them a lullaby. Mr. McLaughlin, sitting on the stage, kept a suave downcast face; it was not his kind of exhortation. The Baptist minister had a broad, impressario’s smile. Old people in the audience would sing out, “Amen!” and rock themselves gently. Movie stars and politicians and fornicators gone beyond rescue; it seemed, for most people, a balmy comfortable thought. The lights were on now; bugs came in at the windows, just those few early bugs. You could hear now and then a quick, apologetic slap.

But my attention was taken up with our two hands on the back of the chair. He moved his hand slightly. I moved mine. Again. Until skin touched lightly, vividly, drew away, came back, stayed together, pressed together. Now then. Our little fingers rubbing delicately against one another, his gradually overlapping mine. Hesitation; my hand spreading out a bit, his little finger touching my fourth finger, the fourth finger captured, and so on, by stages so formal and inevitable, with such reticence and certainty, his hand covering mine. When this was achieved he lifted it from the chair and held it between us. I felt angelic with gratitude, truly as if I had come out on another level of existence. I felt no further acknowledgement was needed, no further intimacy possible.

The last hymn.

I love to tell the story,

’Twill be my theme in Glory, To tell the old, old story—

The Negroes led us, all of them except the little black man exhorting, drawing out voices upwards with their arms. Singing, people swayed together. A sharp green smell of sweat, like onions, smell of horse, pig manure, feeling of being caught, bound, borne away; tired, mournful happiness rising like a cloud. I had refused the hymn-sheets which Mr. Buchanan and other churchmen were handing out but I remembered the words and sang. I would have sung anything.

But when the hymn was over he dropped my hand and moved away, joining a crowd of people who were all going down to the front of the hall, responding to an invitation to make a decision for Jesus, sign a pledge or renew a pledge, put some stamp of accomplishment on the evening. It did not occur to me that he meant to do this. I thought he had gone to look for somebody. There was great confusion and I lost him in a moment. I turned and found my way out of the hall, down the stairs, looking around several times to see if I could see him (but ready to pretend I was looking for somebody else, if I saw him looking at me). I loitered up the main street, looking in windows. He did not come.

This was on a Friday evening. All weekend the thought of him stayed in my mind like a circus net spread underneath whatever I had to think about at the moment. I was constantly letting go and tumbling into it. I would try to recreate the exact texture of his skin, touching my own, try to remember accurately the varying pressure of his fingers. I would spread my hand out in front of me, surprised at how little it had to tell me. It was noncommittal as those objects in museums that have been handled by kings. I would analyze that smell, sorting out its familiar and unfamiliar elements. I would picture him as I first saw him across the hall, because I never really saw him after he came to stand beside me. His dark, wary, stubborn face. His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.

I did not know his name, or where he came from, or whether I would ever see him again.

Monday, after school, I walked down John Street hill with Jerry. A horn honked at us, and from an old truck, dusty with chaff, this face looked out. It was in no way changed or diminished by daylight.

“The encyclopedias,” I said to Jerry. “He’s got some money for Mother. I have to talk to him. You go on.”

Dizzy at this expected, yet unhoped-for reappearance, solid intrusion of the legendary into the real world, I got into the truck.

“I thought you would be going to school.”

“I’m almost through,” I said hastily. “I’m in Grade Thirteen.” “Lucky I saw you. I have to get back to the lumber yard. Why didn’t you wait up for me the other night?”

“Where did you go?” I said, as if I hadn’t seen him.

“I had to go down the front. There was so many people down there.”

I realized then that “had to go down the front” meant he had gone to sign a pledge card, or be saved by the revivalist. It was typical of him that he did not say this in any more definite way. He never would explain, unless he had to. What I got out of him about himself, that first afternoon in the truck, and later, was a string of simple facts, offered usually in reply to questions. His name was Garnet French, he lived on a farm out past Jericho Valley but worked here in Jubilee, in the lumber yard. He had spent four months in jail, two years ago, for his part in a terrible fight outside the Porterfield beer parlour, in which a man had lost an eye. In jail he had been visited by a Baptist minister who had converted him. He had quit school after Grade Eight but had been allowed to start a couple of high school courses in jail because he thought he might go to Bible College and become a Baptist minister himself. He spoke of this goal without urgency now. He was twenty-three years old.

The first thing he asked me to go to was a meeting of the Baptist Young People’s Society. Or perhaps he never asked me, just said, “All right, I’ll pick you up after supper,” and drove down our street that short distance and led me, dazed and silent, into the last place in Jubilee, except possibly the whorehouse, where I ever expected to be.

This was what I was going to do every Monday night all spring and into the summer—sit in a pew halfway back in the Baptist church, never getting used to it, always amazed and lonely as somebody thrown up in a shipwreck. He never asked me if I wanted to be there, what I thought of it once I was there, anything. He did say once, “I would probably have landed back in jail if it hadn’t been for the Baptist church. That’s all I know, that’s good enough for me.”

“Why would you?”

“Because I got in the habit of fighting and drinking like that.” On the back of Baptist pews were pieces of old gum, silvery-black and hard as iron. The church smelled sour, like a kitchen washed down with grey scrub-water, scrub-rags drying out behind the stove. The Young People were not all young. There was a woman named Caddie McQuaig who worked in Monk’s Butcher Shop, slapping chunks of raw meat into the grinder, hacking away with a big saw at a leg of beef, wrapped in a bloody white apron, hefty and jovial as Dutch Monk himself. Here she was in a flowered organdy dress, scrubbed hands on the pump-organ, red neck bared by her shingled hair, meek and attentive. There was a pair of short, monkey-faced brothers from the country, Ivan and Orrin Walpole, who did gymnastic tricks. And a big-busted, raw-faced girl who had worked with Fern Dogherty in the Post Office; Fern always called her
Holy Betty
. Girls from the Chainway Store, with their dusty Chainway pallor, lowest-paid, lowest on the social scale of all girls who worked in stores in Jubilee. One of them, I could not remember which, was supposed to have had a baby.

Garnet was the President. Sometimes he would lead a prayer, beginning in a firm mannerly voice, “Our Heavenly Father—” The early heat of May had disappeared, and cold spring rain washed down the windows. I had that strange and confident sensation of being in a dream from which I would presently wake up. At home on the table in the front room lay my open books and the poem, “Andrea del Sarto,” which I had been reading before I came out, and which was still going through my head:

A common greyness silvers everything, All in a twilight, you and I alike—

After what was called the worship service we would go down to the basement of the church where there was a ping-pong table. Ping-pong games would be organized, Caddie McQuaig and one of the Chainway girls would unwrap sandwiches brought from home and make cocoa on a hotplate. Garnet taught people to play ping-pong, encouraged the Chainway girls who seemed to have hardly enough strength to lift the bat, joked with Caddie McQuaig who would become as boisterous, once she got down to the basement, as she was in the butcher shop.

“I worry about you sitting there on that little organ stool, Caddie.” “What’d you say? What do you worry about?”

“You sitting there on that little organ stool. Looks too small for you.”

“You think it’s in danger of disappearing?” Her loud outraged delighted voice, face red as fresh meat.

“Why, Caddie, I never thought any such thing,” said Garnet, with a regretful, downcast face.

I smiled at everybody but was jealous, appalled, waiting only for all this to end, the cocoa cups to be washed, the church lights put out,

Garnet to lead me out to the truck. Then we would drive down that muddy road that led past Pork Childs’ place (“I know Pork, he’ll loan me a chain and get me out if I get stuck,” Garnet said, and the thought of being on these equal terms, social terms, with Pork Childs who was of course a Baptist, produced in me that quiet, now very familiar, sinking of the heart). Presently nothing mattered. The unreality, long-drawnout embarrassment and tedium of the evening vanished in the cab of the truck, in the smell of its old split seats, and poultry feed, the sight of Garnet’s rolled-up sleeves and bare forearms, of his hands, loose and alert on the wheel. Black rain on the closed windows sheltered us. Or if the rain was over we would roll down the windows and feel the rank soft air near the invisible river, smell mint crushed under the truck wheels, where we pulled off the road to park. We nosed deep into the bushes, which scratched against the hood. The truck stopped with a last little bump that seemed a signal of achievement, permission, its lights, cutting weakly into the density of night, went out, and Garnet turned to me always with the same sigh, the same veiled and serious look, and we would cross over, going into a country where there was perfect security, no move that would not bring delight, disappointment was not possible. Only when I was sick, with a fever, had I ever before had such a floating feeling, feeling of being languid and protected and at the same time possessing unlimited power. We were still in the approaches to sex, circling, back-tracking, hesitating, not because we were afraid or because we had set any sort of prohibition on “going too far” (such explicitness, in that country, and with Garnet, was next to unthinkable) but because we felt an obligation as in the game of our hands on the back of the chair, not to hurry, to make shy, formal, temporary retreats in the face of so much pleasure. That very word,
pleasure,
had changed for me; I used to think it a mild sort of word, indicating a rather low-key self-indulgence; now it seemed explosive, the two vowels in the first syllable spurting up like fireworks, ending on the plateau of the last syllable, its dreamy purr.