Georgia Boy

by Erskine Caldwell

  “Let’s not discuss religion any more today, Mr. Stroup,” he said at last. “I’m all fagged out, and I’ve got that marriage ceremony to perform in less than half an hour. It’s too late for me to hunt up anybody else to ring the bell, and if you don’t ring it for me, I’ll be in a pretty pickle.”

  My old man got up from the banister and walked down the steps into the yard. Preacher Hawshaw followed him as fast as he could.

  “I’ll ring it for you this time, just to help you out,” Pa said. “Nobody has ever been able to accuse me of refusing to lend a helping hand in a time of trouble.”

  “That’s fine!” Preacher Hawshaw said, smiling and beaming at Pa. “I knew all along I could count on you, Mr. Stroup!”

  He began dusting off his clothes and adjusting his necktie.

  “Now, there’s not much to do,” he said. “All you have to remember is to ring the bell the instant I start reading the marriage ceremony, and keep on ringing it until the bride and groom have left the church and passed out of sight down the street. When you can’t see hide or hair of them any longer, you’ll know it’s time to quit ringing it. That’s plain enough, now ain’t it, Mr. Stroup?”

  “I couldn’t get balled up doing a simple thing like that,” my old man told him. “It’ll be as easy as falling off a log.”

  He backed down the path towards the street.

  “I’ve got to hurry over to the church now,” he said nervously. “The ceremony is due to start in about twenty minutes. You dress yourself up and come over there as fast as you can, Mr. Stroup. I’ll be waiting in the vestibule right beside the bell-rope.”

  Preacher Hawshaw turned around and hurried off towards the Universalist church three blocks away. My old man started inside the house.

  “Come on, son,” he said to me, waving his arm in a big sweep. “Let’s get ready to go to the wedding. I’ll need you to help me ring that bell. Come on!”

  We went inside and Pa doused his head in the wash basin and slicked down his hair with the brush. As soon as he had finished that, we were ready to go.

  “Will you let me ring it some by myself, Pa?” I asked, running along beside him in order to keep up. “Can I, Pa?”

  “We’ll see when we get there, son,” he told me. “If it ain’t too heavy for you to pull all by yourself, you can.”

  People were walking towards the church already, and we passed them and hurried ahead so we would be there in plenty of time to start ringing the bell. There was a crowd of people standing in front of the church when we got there, but Pa only waved at them and we hurried into the vestibule.

  Preacher Hawshaw was standing right beside the bell-rope just as he said he would be doing. He was pretty nervous by that time, and it was all he could do to keep still in one place. As soon as he saw us, he began pacing up and down and glancing at his watch every few steps.

  “This is an important wedding, Mr. Stroup,” he whispered out loud to Pa. “The parties represent two of the firm pillars of my church. I wouldn’t want any thing to go wrong for the whole world. This marriage means a lot to me. It will unite two bickering families and heal the bad blood that’s been keeping the whole congregation upset.”

  “You don’t have to worry over my part,” Pa told him. “You just go ahead about the rest of your business, and I’ll take care of the bell-ringing. I used to ring the bell at the school house when I was the janitor up there, and I know all there is to know about ringing bells.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, Mr. Stroup,” he said, wiping his face with his handkerchief. “It’s a big load off my mind to be able to turn the bell-ringing over to an experienced hand.”

  The people were walking into the church by that time, and the organist began playing music. Pretty soon I saw Miss Susie Thing, all dressed up in fluffy white clothes and carrying a big armful of flowers, come in one of the side doors. Almost at the same time Hubert Willy came in one of the other doors. That was a sign that the wedding was about to begin and I told my old man that it looked as if it would be time to start ringing the bell almost any minute. Preacher Hawshaw came running back up the aisle, looking at his watch and almost tripping over somebody’s foot that was sticking out from one of the benches.

  “All right, Mr. Stroup!” he whispered in a hoarse loud voice to Pa. “As soon as you see me reach down and pick up my little black book from the table, you’ll know it’s time for you to start ringing the bell.”

  Pa nodded and got up a good grip on the heavy thick rope that hung down from the belfry through a large round hole in the ceiling.

  “Grab a good hold on it, son,” he told me. “It’ll take both of us to get this thing started. It’s a heap bigger than the school-house bell.”

  Both of us got good grips on the rope as high up as we could reach.

  “Now,” Pa told me, “look at Preacher Hawshaw and tell me when it’s time to pull on this rope.”

  Miss Susie Thing and Hubert Willy walked up in front of Preacher Hawshaw. Hubert’s face was as red as a beet, but I couldn’t see Miss Susie’s because she had her face almost buried in the big bunch of flowers. Preacher Hawshaw reached down and picked up the little black book he had told us about.

  “Now’s the time, Pa!” I whispered as loud as I dared. “They’re starting off!”

  We pulled on the heavy rope until we got the bell swinging back and forth in the belfry. Pa showed me how to pull down as hard as I could, and then to turn loose and let the rope run back upward through the hole in the ceiling. After five or six times the clapper hit the bell, and we had the rope going up and down the way we wanted it.

  The bell was ringing long beats that sounded a little peculiar, but I looked up into my old man’s face and he looked so pleased that I decided it was ringing the way it should. I happened to look down the aisle just then, though, and I saw Preacher Hawshaw beckon to an usher and whisper something to him. A lot of people were turning around in their seats and looking back towards us in the vestibule as though we were doing something wrong. The usher came running up the aisle, and as soon as he got to us, he leaned forward and whispered in Pa’s ear.

  My old man shook his head and went on ringing the bell just as we had done from the start. The usher hurried back to where Preacher Hawshaw was standing in front of Miss Susie and Hubert. Preacher Hawshaw had already stopped readings from the little black book, and as soon as the usher whispered something to him, he laid the book on the table and came running up the aisle towards us.

  “Look here, Mr. Stroup!” he said out loud. “Quit tolling that bell!”

  “What are you talking about?” Pa asked him. We kept on pulling the bell-rope and letting it run back upwards through the hole in the ceiling just as we had from the start. “I’m ringing the bell like you told me. What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong!” Preacher Hawshaw said, running his finger around the inside of his collar to loosen it up. Don’t you hear that ding-dong, ding-dong up there in the belfry?” Everybody in the church had turned around by that time and a lot of them were making motions at us with their hands. “What you’re doing is tolling the bell. That’s for a funeral. Stop making it ding-dong!”

  “What in the world do you want me to do?” my old man asked him. “When I was the janitor at the school house, I rang it just like I’m doing now. Nobody ever accused me of tolling it then.”

  “The school-house bell ain’t nothing compared in size to this one, Mr. Stroup,” Preacher Hawshaw said. “There’s all the difference in the world in size. The school-house bell would make the same sound no matter how you rang it. Now, quit ringing this bell the way you’re doing it. It makes people sad. It don’t set the right mood for a wedding.”

  “What do you want me to do to it then?” Pa asked.

  “Trill it!”

  “Trill it?” my old man said. “What’s that?”

  Preacher Hawshaw turned and took a quick look at the people in the church. Miss Susie and Hubert were still standing down in front of
the pulpit waiting for Preacher Hawshaw to come back and finish reading the wedding ceremony, but Miss Susie looked as if she might drop out of sight any second, and Hubert looked as though he might leap right through the stained-glass window.

  “Ain’t you ever trilled a bell in your life?” Preacher Hawshaw asked.

  “More than that,” Pa told him, “I ain’t never heard about it before.”

  “It goes ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling-ding,” he said.

  “It does?” Pa asked, still pulling on the rope the way we had from the beginning. “That’s something I never knew about, neither.”

  “Well, stop tolling it and begin trilling it, Mr. Stroup!” Preacher Hawshaw said. “There’s people in there who’ve already begun to cry!”

  “I just can’t change over right here in the middle of things,” Pa told him. I’ll need practice, anyway. I’ll just have to keep on like I’m doing. Next time I’ll do it the other way for you.”

  Preacher Hawshaw reached out to pull the rope himself, but just then Miss Susie Thing’s brother, Jule, rushed up to Hubert Willy and shoved him out through the side door into the cemetery, accusing Hubert of having something to do with the way the bell was ringing. Before anybody could get out there, Jule had begun fighting Hubert, and in another minute they were fist-fighting all over the graves and tombstones. Hubert’s nose began to bleed, and Jule tore a big hole in his pants when he stumbled over a wrought-iron marker on one of the graves that said, “Keep Off.”

  My old man told me to keep on ringing the bell while he went outside to watch the fist-fight. Preacher Hawshaw went, too, like everybody else in the church. I kept on ringing the bell just as we had from the start, and by then I could tell that it did make a ding-dong sound exactly like old Uncle Jeff Davis Fletcher rang it for funerals. Both Jule and Hubert were pretty badly beaten up by that time, but nobody tried to stop them, because everyone figured that the best thing to do was to let them fight it out and stop of their own accord when they were too tired to keep it up any longer. I pulled on the rope just like my old man told me to do, wondering how the same bell could make a ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling-ding sound as well as the ding-dong one, and right then Preacher Hawshaw came running in and jerked the rope out of my hands. The bell-clapper struck a couple of more times and then stopped.

  “That’s enough, William!” he said, grabbing me by the shirt and flinging me out of the vestibule and down the front steps.

  Just then my old man came running around the corner of the church. He missed hearing the bell ring, and he stopped dead in his tracks.

  “What did you quit for, son?” he asked me.

  “Preacher Hawshaw told me to,” I said. “He pushed me outside.”

  “He did!” my old man said, getting mad.

  Preacher Hawshaw came out through the door and stopped on the top step. He looked all tired out.

  “Now, look here, preacher!” Pa began. “When I agreed to ring the bell, I made up my mind to ring it or else to bust my buttons off in the effort. I’m going back inside there and finish the job like I promised to do. If you don’t like the way I ring it, that ain’t no fault of mine.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” Preacher Hawshaw said, blocking the door. “You’ve already broken up a wedding and caused a disgraceful fist-fight in the cemetery. The Things and the Willys have had their old sores opened up just because you tolled that bell. I don’t want you to ever touch that bell-rope again.”

  “How in the world was I to know you wanted it rung ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling-ding instead of ding-dong, ding-dong?”

  “Common sense ought to have told you that,” he said, shoving my old man away from the door. “Besides, a man who doesn’t know the difference between tolling a bell and trilling it hasn’t got any business touching a church bell.”

  The people who had come to the church to see the wedding began talking about the way my old man had made the feud between the Things and the Willys come back. Miss Susie, who had been crying all that time in the choir loft, ran down the street toward her house still holding the big bouquet of flowers. I didn’t see Jule and Hubert again, but I supposed they had gone home to wash up.

  “You mean you just naturally don’t like the way I rang the bell for you?” my old man asked Preacher Hawshaw.

  “That’s exactly right, Mr. Stroup,” he said, giving Pa a big shove away from the door and making him hop down the steps in order to keep his footing.

  “Then don’t never come to my house again begging me to come to church to hear you preach,” Pa said, turning and walking sidewise toward the street. “If you don’t like my bell-ringing, I sure wouldn’t take to your preaching.”

  Preacher Hawshaw went inside the vestibule. He was almost out of sight when my old man called him.

  “What am I going to do about getting recognized religion if I take a notion that I need it?” Pa asked him. “I might decide recognized religion’s something I ought to have, instead of my own private kind, and I don’t want to be left high and dry when everybody else’s being saved and sent to Heaven.”

  Preacher Hawshaw stuck his head out the door.

  “You’ll be better off among the Methodists or Baptists,” he said. “The Universalists can get along without you, Mr. Stroup.”

  III. Handsome Brown and the Aggravating Goats

  “IF IT’S NOT ONE thing your Pa’s done,” Ma said, looking all helpless and worn, “it’s something else. I declare, sometimes I think I’ll never have a minute’s peace as long as I live.”

  She walked up and down in the backyard wringing her hands, trying to think of something to do.

  The goats that Pa and Handsome Brown had brought home from our farm in the country were standing on top of the house chewing and looking down at us. The big billy goat had long white chin whiskers that made him look exactly like Mr. Carter who lived across the street.

  “What in the world am I going to do?” Ma said, still walking up and down. “I’ve invited the Ladies’ Social Circle to meet here this afternoon, and if those goats are still up on top of the house when they get here, I’ll simply die of mortification.”

  The two nanny goats were chewing, too, but their whiskers were not nearly as long as the big goat’s. In addition to the three grown goats up on the rooftop, there were two little kids up there. The kids were only two months old and they were only a quarter of the size of the billy, but all five of them up there together on top of the house looked like a lot of goats.

  “William, tell Handsome to go downtown and find your Pa and tell him to come home and get those goats down right away,” she said to me.

  Handsome was cleaning up in the kitchen, and all I had to do was go to the edge of the porch and call him. He came out and asked me what we wanted.

  “The first thing I want you to do, Handsome Brown,” Ma said angrily, “is to tell me what on earth you meant by bringing those goats here.”

  “I only done what Mr. Morris told me to do, like I always does when you or Mr. Morris tells me to do something, Mis’ Martha,” he said, shifting from one foot to the other. “Mr. Morris said he wanted them goats brung home and he told me to drive them, and I done just that. You oughtn’t blame me too much for what Mr. Morris told me to do, Mis’ Martha.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Mr. Morris he ought to ask me first, then?” she said. “You thought of that, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I thought of it, but when I got ready to mention it to Mr. Morris, Mr. Morris said, ‘The devil you say,’ just like that, and that’s why I ended up driving them here like I done.”

  Ma got madder than ever. She picked up a piece of stove wood and slung it at the goats on top of the house, but the stick fell halfway short of reaching them. It slammed against the side of the house, making a big noise and leaving a mark on the weatherboarding.

  “Go downtown this instant and find Mr. Morris,” she told Handsome, “and tell him I want to see him right away. Look in the barber shop and the hardware store and every pl
ace he loafs until you find him. And don’t you dare come back without him, Handsome Brown. I don’t want to hear any excuses from you this time.”

  “Yes, ma’am, Mis’ Martha,” Handsome said trotting off to look for Pa.

  The goats walked along the ridge plate on the roof, looking down into the backyard at Ma and me part of the time, and the rest of the time looking down the other side into the street. They had got up there by hopping from the woodpile to the woodshed, from there to the porch roof, then leaping up on top of the kitchen roof, and from there to the main part of the house. They were about two stories and a half high above us on the ground, and it was a funny sight to see the three large goats and the two little kids walking Indian file across the top of the roof.

  The next time they stopped and looked down at us, the billy chewed some more, making his whiskers sway, and it looked exactly as though he were making faces at us.

  Ma tried to find another stick of wood to throw at him, but she was too mad then to look for one. She shook her fist at all five of them and then went running into the house.

  I sat down on the steps for a minute, but Ma came back and pulled me up by the arm.

  “William, go out in the front and watch for your Pa,” she said, shoving me down the steps, “and the minute you see him coming up the street, you run and tell me. The women will be getting here any time now.”

  I went around the corner of the house and stood by the front gate watching down the street. I did not have to wait long, because the first thing I knew I heard Pa and Handsome talking. They came walking fast.

  “What’s the matter, son?” Pa asked, looking up at the five goats on the rooftop. “What’s gone wrong?”

  “Ma says to get the goats down off the house before the women start coming to the meeting,” I told him.

  “That’s easy enough,” he said, hurrying around the corner of the house to the backyard. “Come on, Handsome, and get a hustle on.”