But—out of all their troubles? Why did his mother weep? Why did his father frown? If God’s power was so great, why were their lives so troubled?
He had never tried to think of their trouble before; rather, he had never before confronted it in such a narrow place. It had always been there, at his back perhaps, all these years, but he had never turned to face it. Now it stood before him, staring, nevermore to be escaped, and its mouth was enlarged without any limit. It was ready to swallow him up. Only the hand of God could deliver him. Yet, in a moment, he somehow knew from the sound of that storm which rose so painfully in him now, which laid waste—forever?—the strange, yet comforting landscape of his mind, that the hand of God would surely lead him into this staring, waiting mouth, these distended jaws, this hot breath as of fire. He would be led into darkness, and in darkness would remain; until in some incalculable time to come the hand of God would reach down and raise him up; he, John, who having lain in darkness would no longer be himself but some other man. He would have been changed, as they said, forever; sown in dishonor, he would be raised in honor: he would have been born again.
Then he would no longer be the son of his father, but the son of his Heavenly Father, the King. Then he need no longer fear his father, for he could take, as it were, their quarrel over his father’s head to Heaven—to the Father who loved him, who had come down in the flesh to die for him. Then he and his father would be equals, in the sight, and the sound, and the love of God. Then his father could not beat him any more, or despise him any more, or mock him any more—he, John, the Lord’s anointed. He could speak to his father then as men spoke to one another—as sons spoke to their fathers, not in trembling but in sweet confidence, not in hatred but in love. His father could not cast him out, whom God had gathered in.
Yet, trembling, he knew that this was not what he wanted. He did not want to love his father; he wanted to hate him, to cherish that hatred, and give his hatred words one day. He did not want his father’s kiss—not any more, he who had received so many blows. He could not imagine, on any day to come and no matter how greatly he might be changed, wanting to take his father’s hand. The storm that raged in him tonight could not uproot this hatred, the mightiest tree in all John’s country, all that remained tonight, in this, John’s flood-time.
And he bowed his head yet lower before the altar in weariness and confusion. Oh, that his father would die!—and the road before John be open, as it must be open for others. Yet in the very grave he would hate him; his father would but have changed conditions, he would be John’s father still. The grave was not enough for punishment, for justice, for revenge. Hell, everlasting, unceasing, perpetual, unquenched forever, should be his father’s portion; with John there to watch, to linger, to smile, to laugh aloud, hearing, at last, his father’s cries of torment.
And, even then, it would not be finished. The everlasting father.
Oh, but his thoughts were evil—but tonight he did not care. Somewhere, in all this whirlwind, in the darkness of his heart, in the storm—was something—something he must find. He could not pray. His mind was like the sea itself: troubled, and too deep for the bravest man’s descent, throwing up now and again, for the naked eye to wonder at, treasure and debris long forgotten on the bottom—bones and jewels, fantastic shells, jelly that had once been flesh, pearls that had once been eyes. And he was at the mercy of this sea, hanging there with darkness all around him.
The morning of that day, as Gabriel rose and started out to work, the sky was low and nearly black and the air too thick to breathe. Late in the afternoon the wind rose, the skies opened, and the rain came. The rain came down as though once more in Heaven the Lord had been persuaded of the good uses of a flood. It drove before it the bowed wanderer, clapped children into houses, licked with fearful anger against the high, strong wall, and the wall of the lean-to, and the wall of the cabin, beat against the bark and the leaves of trees, trampled the broad grass, and broke the neck of the flower. The world turned dark, forever, everywhere, and windows ran as though their glass panes bore all the tears of eternity, threatening at every instant to shatter inward against this force, uncontrollable, so abruptly visited on the earth. Gabriel walked homeward through this wilderness of water (which had failed, however, to clear the air) to where Deborah waited for him in the bed she seldom, these days, attempted to leave.
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 today, 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 today,” 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 today 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 lightning 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 barroom, 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. I couldn’t make her my wife. I already had you”—and he said the last words with veno
m—“Esther’s mind weren’t on the Lord—she’d of dragged me right on down to Hell with her.”
“She mighty near has,” said Deborah.
“The Lord He held me back,” he said, hearing the thunder, watching the lightning. “He put out His hand and held me back.” Then, after a moment, turning back into the room: “I couldn’t of done nothing else,” he cried, “what else could I of done? Where could I of gone with Esther, and me a preacher, too? And what could I of done with you?” He looked at her, old and black and patient, smelling of sickness and age and death. “Ah,” he said, his tears still falling, “I bet you was mighty happy today, old lady, weren’t you? When she told you he, Royal, my son, was dead. You ain’t never had no son.” And he turned again to the window. Then: “How long you been knowing about this?”
“I been knowing,” she said, “ever since that evening, way back there, when Esther come to church.”
“You got a evil mind,” he said. “I hadn’t never touched her then.”
“No,” she said slowly, “but you had already done touched me.”
He moved a little from the window and stood looking down at her from the foot of the bed.
“Gabriel,” she said, “I been praying all these years that the Lord would touch my body, and make me like them women, all them women, you used to go with all the time.” She was very calm; her face was very bitter and patient. “Look like it weren’t His will. Look like I couldn’t nohow forget … how they done me way back there when I weren’t nothing but a girl.” She paused and looked away. “But, Gabriel, if you’d said something even when that poor girl was buried, if you’d wanted to own that poor boy, I wouldn’t nohow of cared what folks said, or where we might of had to go, or nothing. I’d have raised him like my own, I swear to my God I would have—and he might be living now.”
“Deborah,” he asked, “what you been thinking all this time?”
She smiled. “I been thinking,” she said, “how you better commence to tremble when the Lord, He gives you your heart’s desire.” She paused. “I’d been wanting you since I wanted anything. And then I got you.”
He walked back to the window, tears rolling down his face.
“Honey,” she said, in another, stronger voice, “you better pray God to forgive you. You better not let go until He make you know you been forgiven.”
“Yes,” he sighed, “I’m waiting on the Lord.”
Then there was only silence, except for the rain. The rain came down in buckets; it was raining, as they said, pitchforks and nigger babies. Lightning flashed again across the sky and thunder rolled.
“Listen,” said Gabriel. “God is talking.”
Slowly now, he rose from his knees, for half the church was standing: Sister Price, Sister McCandless, and Praying Mother Washington; and the young Ella Mae sat in her chair watching Elisha where he lay. Florence and Elizabeth were still on their knees; and John was on his knees.
And, rising, Gabriel thought of how the Lord had led him to this church so long ago, and how Elizabeth, one night after he had preached, had walked this long aisle to the altar, to repent before God her sin. And then they had married, for he believed her when she said that she was changed—and she was the sign, she and her nameless child, for which he had tarried so many dark years before the Lord. It was as though, when he saw them, the Lord had returned to him again that which was lost.
Then, as he stood with the others over the fallen Elisha, John rose from his knees. He bent a dazed, sleepy, frowning look on Elisha and the others, shivering a little as though he were cold; and then he felt his father’s eyes and looked up at his father.
At the same moment, Elisha, from the floor, began to speak in a tongue of fire, under the power of the Holy Ghost. John and his father stared at each other, struck dumb and still and with something come to life between them—while the Holy Ghost spoke. Gabriel had never seen such a look on John’s face before; Satan, at that moment, stared out of John’s eyes while the Spirit spoke; and yet John’s staring eyes tonight reminded Gabriel of other eyes: of his mother’s eyes when she beat him, of Florence’s eyes when she mocked him, of Deborah’s eyes when she prayed for him, of Esther’s eyes and Royal’s eyes, and Elizabeth’s eyes tonight before Roy cursed him, and of Roy’s eyes when Roy said: “You black bastard.” And John did not drop his eyes, but seemed to want to stare forever into the bottom of Gabriel’s soul. And Gabriel, scarcely believing that John could have become so brazen, stared in wrath and horror at Elizabeth’s presumptuous bastard boy, grown suddenly so old in evil. He nearly raised his hand to strike him, but did not move, for Elisha lay between them. Then he said, soundlessly, with his lips: “Kneel down.” John turned suddenly, the movement like a curse, and knelt again before the altar.
THREE
Elizabeth’s Prayer
Lord, I wish I had of died
In Egypt land!
WHILE ELISHA WAS SPEAKING, Elizabeth felt that the Lord was speaking a message to her heart, that this fiery visitation was meant for her; and that if she humbled herself to listen, God would give her the interpretation. This certainty did not fill her with exultation, but with fear. She was afraid of what God might say—of what displeasure, what condemnation, what prophesies of trials yet to be endured might issue from His mouth.
Now Elisha ceased to speak, and rose; now he sat at the piano. There was muted singing all around her; yet she waited. Before her mind’s eyes wavered, in a light like the light from a fire, the face of John, whom she had brought so unwillingly into the world. It was for this deliverance that she wept tonight: that he might be carried, past wrath unspeakable, into a state of grace.
They were singing:
“Must Jesus bear the cross alone,
And all the world go free?”
Elisha picked out the song on the piano, his fingers seeming to hesitate, almost to be unwilling. She, too, strained against her great unwillingness, but forced her heart to say Amen, as the voice of Praying Mother Washington picked up the response:
“No, there’s a cross for everyone,
And there’s a cross for me.”
She heard weeping near her—was it Ella Mae? or Florence? or the echo, magnified, of her own tears? The weeping was buried beneath the song. She had been hearing this song all her life, she had grown up with it, but she had never understood it as well as she understood it now. It filled the church, as though the church had merely become a hollow or a void, echoing with the voices that had driven her to this dark place. Her aunt had sung it always, harshly, under her breath, in a bitter pride:
“The consecrated cross I’ll bear
Till death shall set me free,
And then go home, a crown to wear,
For there’s a crown for me.”
She was probably an old, old woman now, still in the same harshness of spirit, singing this song in the tiny house down home which she and Elizabeth had shared so long. And she did not know of Elizabeth’s shame—Elizabeth had not written about John until long after she was married to Gabriel; and the Lord had never allowed her aunt to come to New York City. Her aunt had always prophesied that Elizabeth would come to no good end, proud, and vain, and foolish as as she was, and having been allowed to run wild all her childhood days.
Her aunt had come second in the series of disasters that had ended Elizabeth’s childhood. First, when she was eight, going on nine, her mother had died, an event not immediately recognized by Elizabeth as a disaster, since she had scarcely known her mother and had certainly never loved her. Her mother had been very fair, and beautiful, and delicate of health, so that she stayed in bed most of the time, reading spiritualist pamphlets concerning the benefits of disease and complaining to Elizabeth’s father of how she suffered. Elizabeth remembered of her only that she wept very easily and that she smelled like stale milk—it was, perhaps, her mother’s disquieting color that, whenever she was held in her mother’s arms, made Elizabeth think of milk. Her mother did not, however, hold Elizabeth
in her arms very often. Elizabeth very quickly suspected that this was because she was so very much darker than her mother and not nearly, of course, so beautiful. When she faced her mother she was shy, downcast, sullen. She did not know how to answer her mother’s shrill, meaningless questions, put with the furious affectation of maternal concern; she could not pretend, when she kissed her mother, or submitted to her mother’s kiss, that she was moved by anything more than an unpleasant sense of duty. This, of course, bred in her mother a kind of baffled fury, and she never tired of telling Elizabeth that she was an “unnatural” child.
But it was very different with her father; he was—and so Elizabeth never failed to think of him—young, and handsome, and kind, and generous; and he loved his daughter. He told her that she was the apple of his eye, that she was wound around his heartstrings, that she was surely the finest little lady in the land. When she was with her father she pranced and postured like a very queen: and she was not afraid of anything, save the moment when he would say that it was her bedtime, or that he had to be “getting along.” He was always buying her things, things to wear and things to play with, and taking her on Sundays for long walks through the country, or to the circus, when the circus was in town, or to Punch and Judy shows. And he was dark, like Elizabeth, and gentle, and proud; he had never been angry with her, but she had seen him angry a few times with other people—her mother, for example, and later, of course, her aunt. Her mother was always angry and Elizabeth paid no attention; and, later, her aunt was perpetually angry and Elizabeth learned to bear it: but if her father had ever been angry with her—in those days—she would have wanted to die.
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