by John Gardner
“They don’t take horses for glue anymore,” Leon said.
“Down at Elizabethtown they do.”
“That’s seventy miles.”
“Well, Bobby Hume drove us down in the truck,” Aunt Ella said. “It was the only decent thing to do. It wouldn’t be right to make a profit off it.” She folded her hands.
Darthamae leaned her knuckles on the table. “Aunt Ella,” she said seriously, “you’ve committed a crime. Do you know that?”
“Judge not that ye be not judged,” Aunt Ella said.
“You tell the jury that,” Darthamae said.
But Leon was gazing up at the fan, musing. At last he said, “And you still weren’t satisfied? Aunt Ella, how can that be?”
She slapped the table. “That man had insurance,” she said. “Now you tell me, Leon James, would a man that trusted in the Lord go out buying insurance?”
“The Lord helps those that help themselves,” Leon said.
She scowled, the palsy moving her head. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where rust corrupts, and thieves break in and steal.”
“The poor is hated even of his own neighbor,” Leon said, “but the rich hath many friends.”
“Be strong, fear not,” Aunt Ella said, “the Lord will come with a vengeance, even God with a recompense.”
Leon couldn’t think of one.
After a minute Aunt Ella said, “Not only that, the congregation’s buying that man a new riding horse. They had a meeting last night. There’s no justice this side of heaven.”
“Well now that beats everything,” Darthamae said. She straightened up, shocked (also, she hadn’t been informed of the meeting, and she couldn’t think who would have done it to her). It was easy to see she was inclining to Aunt Ella’s side. The dog was trying to bite off a string from Ralph’s cast, and Ralph was wincing. The baby was hitting at Ralph’s other foot with the soupspoon.
Aunt Ella sat with her hands folded and her lips closed flat. At last she said, “Well, I got a plan.”
4
Sunday was the Preacher’s hardest day, with two sermons in the morning and another one at night, so at first, above and beyond any suspicions he may have had about Aunt Ella, he wasn’t sure he could accept her invitation. She’d thought he might speak of her breaking the Sabbath, but if that ever entered his mind he kept from mentioning it. She liked him for that. There was no surer sign of small-mindedness, in Aunt Ella’s opinion, than a love of the letter of the law. His religion had imagination in it: she’d seen that the first time she’d heard him preach. It made your heart light, it was all so fine. When he spoke of the fires of torment it was purest poetry. It was by means of the Preacher’s imagination she intended to undo him.
Even though Sunday was his hardest day, he’d decided to come, in the end. As she’d known he would. She’d merely waited him out, sitting at the telephone table with the phone in her left hand and the receiver in her right, looking up over the rims of her glasses at the velvet sign over the calendar, BLESS THIS HOUSE. She’d said merely, “You have to harvest the grapes when the Lord sees fit to send them, Brother Flood.” She saw the marker ribbons coming out of the limp old Bible on the table before her and was inspired to add, “I knew you’d be interested in how we do it, for your understanding of the Lord’s Word. But of course it’s true, a Sunday’s your hardest day.”
She gave him a show. She was out to undo him, but she wasn’t going to be small about it. She normally set up the grape press on the kitchen sink and the bottle-capping machine on the kitchen table, but this time she moved the press and capper out to the barn and built a kind of platform for them and nailed up a two-by-four frame around them like a booth at the fair or an immersion closet, to make it all more impressive. When it still looked small she nailed a board against the wall and put hooks on it, and built another little platform and put a washtub on that: instead of using the same straining sack over and over, as anyone would normally do, she’d use ten different sacks and wash each one out and hang it up to dry after every use. It might ruin the grape juice—she wasn’t sure—but it made the operation something to look at. He’d appreciate that. Since Brother Flood came to Ebenezer Baptist, the worship had gotten so complicated they had to write down the directions on a program. After that she swept the barn floor till you could eat off it and brought in a table and some kitchen chairs and some glasses. The morning of the day the Preacher was to come she drove into Cobden and hired some drunkards from the Appleton Hotel, and then she drove back to teach her Sundayschool class and invited the girls to come over to her place right after lunch and join in the grapejuice making. A little after noon, after she’d put them all to work (and shortly after the Preacher had arrived), she got the Preacher to drive her down to Cobden again, for the parable’s sake, and hired herself two more drunkards.
When they got back, the place was humming like a hive, and if you didn’t know better you’d have sworn it was a real operation. The drunkards were all sweating like they hadn’t sweated in three, four years, walking around bumping into each other, slipping into the shade of the burdocks sometimes for a pull at the bottles they’d brought, getting more cheerful and more dignified as the day wore on, sometimes missing the grapes completely and snipping off the vine instead, sometimes tipping their wheelbarrows over or falling off the plank coming into the barn. One of them was already asleep, lying under the wagon in the corner. Two of the girls from Aunt Ella’s class ran the press, one cranking, one stirring sugar in, and two more ran the capper. Most of the sacks hung on the wall drying, getting bits of straw and cobweb on them. The Preacher’s wife sat with Ralph and three of the girls at the table. She had on her white hat and gloves.
The Preacher stopped in the doorway and put his hands on his hips and looked at it all. He still had on his black Sunday suit. He was a happy man. He could understand the drunkard problem. In this day and age, you took what hired labor you could find. When Aunt Ella finished her explanation of the work she gazed worriedly at the four rows of grapevines, picked clean a good half hour ago, and said, “We may need more men before sunset.” “Mmm,” the Preacher said. He too was worried. “I can drive you back to Cobden if you think—” “We’ll wait and see,” she said. And now it was time. She said, “Shall we try a taste?” He would like that very much. She led him to the table.
The crockery jug stood behind the door, right where she’d hidden it. She caught it up and carried it over to the wooden tub under the press. She turned the spigot. Her hands were beginning to shake again; her head too. At the look of mysterious joy on her face, Carol Ann Bowen, standing by the press, was startled.
She let about two cups of juice run in, then turned off the spigot and swirled the jug a time or two to mix the juice and the gin. She went back to the table and poured a glass for the Preacher and one for his wife. She watched him taste it, suspecting it tasted like hell’s last torment, and for a second she was sure it was all up. The Preacher lowered his eyebrows, disappointed, but before he could speak his wife said, “Say, that’s good.” Her glass was empty. The Preacher took another swallow, and he liked it better this time. “It waters your eyes,” he said. “It’s not at all what I expected.” Aunt Ella said she wasn’t surprised. She carried back the empty jug and filled it with plain juice and poured glasses for Ralph and the girls and the four drunkards she’d been able to persuade. Then she slipped back into the sheepfold for more gin. When she poured the second glass for the Preacher and his wife they hardly noticed she was there. The Preacher was speaking slowly and thoughtfully of friendship versus brotherhood. He could say he felt love for Aunt Ella, for instance, yet in all honesty he didn’t believe she felt actually friendly toward him, in the ordinary sense. He looked up at her sadly. She would understand what he meant. And yet she could see the position he was in. A man made certain moves, with certain intentions, and these moves had certain results, if she followed his thought….
One of the drunkards who’d been o
ut in the burdocks patted the Preacher’s shoulder, leaning on him a little. Things were going faster than Aunt Ella had expected.
“Girls,” said Aunt Ella, “it’s time you all ran home now. You’ve been a wonderful help, and each of you take a bottle of grapejuice to your mother.”
They thanked her, and in a matter of seconds she had them out of there.
She got more juice for the Preacher and his wife and sat down to observe her work. The Preacher was speaking very slowly, very solemnly, of the difference between the love of God and the love of man. His voice was loud, and he winced from time to time, making fine distinctions. His wife gazed deep into Aunt Ella’s eyes and brooded. She was a pretty child, Aunt Ella reflected. Perfectly lovely in her blue flowered dress, white hat, white gloves. In spite of the make-up, her face was as soft and innocent as a baby’s. She was feeling terribly sad, for some reason, and Aunt Ella’s heart went joyfully out to her. She smiled, and as if the girl had been waiting for that sign, she spoke.
“Why do they all call you Aunt Ella?” she asked.
“Oh, you know how it is,” Aunt Ella said. “After all these years—”
The girl burst into tears and clutched Aunt Ella’s hand. “Yes,” she said. “Yes! Oh, beautiful, beautiful!” Aunt Ella returned the girl’s grip and felt somewhat uneasy. The girl leaned her head onto her arm (carefully slipping her hat off first, for fear of spoiling it) and let the tears run, still clinging to Aunt Ella’s hand. The Preacher rubbed the small of his wife’s back while he spoke to Ralph and the drunkard about the inability of women to love, truly love, God for Himself. He could mention certain situations—they would know pretty well what he meant—in which a man and a woman stood in a certain relationship to one another and to certain matters of an exterior kind …
“Yes,” Ralph said, squinting, working his mouth. His eyes lit up, and it hit Aunt Ella like a thunderbolt that Ralph was drinking straight gin. “Yes,” he said. “Yes!”
“Good heavens,” Aunt Ella said, “the evening service starts in twenty minutes!” She started to get up, but Betty Jane Flood was still holding her hand.
“Aunt Ella,” she said, “could you learn to love me?”
5
He stood, his head and shoulders lowered, filling up her doorway like the Angel of Death, in his solemn black coat and hat. It was an awesome sight: beyond him there was still red, and the smell of smoke was sharp as brimstone in her nostrils. He had on his steel-rimmed glasses, and there was a smudge mark on his cheek. “Now are you satisfied?” he said.
“Leon James,” she said, shaking her finger, “if I burned that church may the Lord strike me dead on this spot!”
“Hah!” he said, curling his lip in his righteous scorn. But the next second he was unsure of himself. She was shaking badly, and there were still signs of her nervous crying. When he came into the kitchen his look of terrible avenger was gone; he looked merely large and foolish. Darthamae came in behind him carrying the baby. The screendoor shut with a clap as Darthamae stepped away from it, and Aunt Ella had a brief, surprisingly clear view of the sky, black with smoke, and, against the mountain, the embers of the church. It all made her think of a Biblical engraving.
“Don’t slam the door, Darthamae,” she said, knowing it was unnecessary, the bang of the screen would be enough to remind her. Darthamae shut the door without a sound, the way she’d done as a little girl coming over on a Sunday afternoon. The baby was wide-eyed and watchful, as always. When Aunt Ella clucked at it, it smiled.
“All right,” Leon said, “what happened?” He slid his hat onto the kitchen table and sat down. Before she answered she went to the toy room and brought back a plastic duck for the baby. Darthamae put him down on the floor. Ralph was still on the couch in the parlor, out.
“Well,” Aunt Ella said finally, “he was drunk.”
“What?” Darthamae said.
Leon said, “Go on.” His eyebrows sagged like the lines at the sides of his mouth.
“We made grapejuice today.” She stopped. “Would you care for some grapejuice?” They wouldn’t.
And so she told them how she’d hired some drunkards, since she wasn’t as young as she’d use to be and Ralph was laid up, and how unbeknownst to her they’d brought liquor with them and one way or another the Preacher had gotten ahold of something, and his poor wife too, and when he’d gone up to the church for the evening service he’d been so bad he’d forgotten his car. It was still out there in the driveway; they must have seen it.
Leon could see how it had been, pretty well, but he kept his suspicions to himself. “He did the evening service drunk?” he asked. He could see how that must have been, too. All those people who admired him so much—who’d take his side against even Aunt Ella, who’d passed the hat to buy him a new horse and negate the power of Aunt Ella’s vengeance—all those people would gradually have understood there was something wrong, he wasn’t himself. Darthamae’s sister, sitting at the organ prim as a pincushion, would be one of the first to catch the scent, and then the ushers would have caught it, bringing up the offering plates, and soon the choir would have smelled it too. And all the while his speech would be getting more labored, his gestures slower, the pauses for emphasis longer and longer, until somebody whispered, and then someone else: “He’s drunk!” It might be that minute or it might be days later that it would occur to them that maybe Aunt Ella had been telling the truth. If a preacher could take to drink—there was no telling.
But Aunt Ella was shaking her head, staring at the center of the table. “No he didn’t,” she said. “Not a soul in that whole church saw him, far’s I know.”
Leon mused, studying her. “How unsearchable are His judgments,” he said. “His ways are past finding out.”
“Leon,” Darthamae warned.
Aunt Ella said calmly, “There’s no satisfaction.”
“What happened, Aunt Ella?” Darthamae said.
She and Ralph had driven up the hill right behind where the Preacher and his wife were walking. They walked with their arms around one another’s waists. Her dark hair fell to the middle of her back. She’d forgotten her hat. When they got to the churchyard most of the cars were there already, and most of the people were waiting inside. There were two or three older boys on the porch, and they waved at the Preacher and his wife when they saw them, and the Preacher and his wife waved back. They walked on toward the rear of the church—the Preacher had to get into his robe—and Aunt Ella pulled the car up under a maple tree and parked. She left Ralph in the car. She couldn’t have him seen that way, and yet she hadn’t dared leave him home alone either. He didn’t mind staying. In fact when she said, “You stay here, Ralph,” he never answered. She walked along the side of the church, keeping to the shadows by the graveyard fence.
When the Preacher had his hand on the knob of the narrow back door, he paused a moment and looked at his wife. (She saw all this more or less clearly. She was too far away to see what kind of expressions they had—for which she was grateful: she was old, and such things could be tiresome—but the light over the door was on, making their figures unnaturally sharp against the drab white of the church. She could see as much as she’d have seen at any other time.) After he’d thought about it first, he leaned down and kissed her. Aunt Ella looked away, and when she looked back again they were hugging. She felt pleased for an instant, thinking it was she who had brought them together, had made them see by the simplest and most ancient of tricks how trivial, really, were all the eternal differences between women and men—not differences of wish at all, mere differences of pride. The next instant she remembered she was here for vengeance, and she felt confused and unhappy. When she looked again the Preacher’s wife was looking at the moon and the Preacher had gone inside. For a time there was no sign of him. Then she saw him going past the window with his robe on and his hands out in front of him, holding something. She couldn’t see what he was holding, and yet she knew, instantly, even before she was aware of the
glow high on the window. He was carrying a lighted candelabrum, just like a Catholic. It seemed to her now that she’d understood from that first second what was going to happen. She went for the church as fast as her stiff knees would carry her, and by the time the people in the front started shouting she was already in the hallway, the Preacher’s wife beside her, and they were dragging him away from the burning drapes and toward the back door.
“What will we do?” the girl was yelling. She seemed to believe he was dead already, and it made her cold sober.
There was no time to think, certainly no time to unscramble the confusion of her feelings about them, but Aunt Ella knew for certain it wasn’t anything like this she’d intended for the Preacher and his wife. “Get him over in the weeds,” she said. And so, each of them pulling one leg, they dragged him into the high weeds by the graveyard fence, and she told the girl to stay there with him, out of sight. “Aunt Ella,” she said, “do you think he’ll be all right?” “Don’t be silly,” she said, “he hasn’t hurt a hair of his head. You just stay here.”
And so the Preacher’s wife stayed, lying in the weeds with her arms around him (and Aunt Ella could guess what would come of that, too). Aunt Ella went back to her car.
By that time the whole inside was afire, and she woke up Ralph, because it was something he wouldn’t want to miss. There were people running around every which way, throwing buckets of water on the outside walls and running back to the well in front, and there were boys pushing cars back out of the way, and lights going on in the house across the road, the Poleham place, and Lucy Poleham yelling, “Ma, you better put some cocoa on!” It had come to Aunt Ella suddenly, like a thundering voice out of heaven: The Preacher’s going to get his new brick church.
“Aunt Ella,” Darthamae said, “you’ve really gone far enough. You’ve got to stop now.”
She was so serious Aunt Ella couldn’t meet her eyes.
“Think, Aunt Ella,” Leon said, and he too was so serious she felt like a scolded child. “Suppose somebody’d gotten killed in that fire. You want a thing like that on your conscience?”