Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [59]
Then they were silent, each quite vividly aware that they had reached an impasse. After a moment he turned and picked up the axe again. ‘Well, you go along, sister. I’m praying for you.’
Something struggled in her face then, as she stood for yet a moment more and watched him—a mixture of fury and amusement; it reminded him of the expression he had often found on the face of Florence. And it was like the look on the faces f the elders during that far-off and so momentous Sunday dinner. He was too angry, while she thus stared at him, to trust himself to speak. Then she shrugged, the mildest, most indifferent gesture he had ever seen, and smiled. ‘I’m mighty obliged to you, Reverend,’ she said. Then she went into the house.
This was the first time they spoke in the yard a frosty morning. There was nothing in that morning to warn him of what was coming. She offended him because she was so brazen in her sins, that was all; and he prayed for her soul, which would one day find itself naked and speechless before the judgment bar of Christ. Later, she told him that he had pursued her, that his eyes had left her not a moment’s peace. ‘That weren’t no reverend looking at me them morning in the yard,’ she had said. ‘You looked at me just like a man, like a man what hadn’t never heard of the Holy Ghost.’ But he believed that the Lord had laid her like a burden on his heart. And he carried her in his heart; he prayed for her and exhorted her, while there was yet time to bring her soul to God.
But she had not been thinking about God; though she accused him of lusting after her in his heart, it was she who, when she looked at him, insisted on seeing not God’s minister but a ‘pretty man.’ On her tongue the very title of his calling became a mark of disrespect.
It began on an evening when he was to preach, when they were alone in the house. The people of the house had gone away for three days to visit relatives; Gabriel had driven them to the railroad station after supper, leaving Esther clearing up the kitchen. When he came back to lock up the house, he found Esther waiting for him on the porch steps.
‘I didn’t think I’d better leave,’ she said, ‘till you got back. I ain’t got no keys to lock up this house, and white folks is so funny. I don’t want them blaming me if something’s missing.’
He realized immediately that she had been drinking—she was not drunk, but there was whisky on her breath. And this, for some reason, caused a strange excitement to stir in him.
‘That was mighty thoughtful, sister,’ he said, staring hard at her to let her know that he knew she had been drinking. She met his stare with a calm, bold smile, a smile mocking innocence, so that her face was filled with the age-old cunning of a woman.
He stared past her into the house; then, without thinking, and without looking at her, he offered: ‘If you ain’t got nobody waiting for you I’ll walk you a piece on your way home.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘ain’t nobody waiting for me this evening, Reverend, thank you kindly.’
He regretted making his offer almost as soon as it was made; he had been certain that she was about to rush off to some trysting-place or other, and he had merely wished to be corroborated. Now, as they walked together into the house, he became terribly aware of her youthful, vivid presence, of her lost condition; and at the same time the emptiness and silence of the house warned him that he was alone with danger.
‘You just sit down in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘I be as quick as I can.’
But his speech was harsh in his own ears, and he could not face her eyes. She sat down at the table, smiling, to wait for him. He tried to do everything as quickly as possible, the shuttering of windows, and locking of doors. But his fingers were stiff and slippery; his heart was in his mouth. And it came to him that he was barring every exit to this house, except the exit through the kitchen, where Esther sat.
When he entered the kitchen again she had moved and now stood in the doorway, looking out, holding a glass in her hand. It was a moment before he realized that she had helped herself to more of the master’s whisky.
She turned at this step, and he stared at her, and at the glass she held