Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [60]
‘I just thought,’ she said, almost entirely unabashed, ‘that I’d have me a little drink while I was waiting, Reverend. But I didn’t figure on you catching me at it.’
She swallowed the last of her drink and moved to the sink to rinse the glass. She gave a little, ladylike cough as she swallowed—he could not be sure whether this cough was genuine or in mockery of him.
‘I reckon,’ he said, malevolently, ‘you is just made up your mind to serve Satan all your days.’
‘I done made up my mind,’ she answered, ‘to live all I can while I can. If that’s a sin, well, I’ll go on down to Hell and pay for it. But don’t you fret, Reverend—it ain’t your soul.’
He moved and stood next to her, full of anger.
‘Girl,’ he said, ‘don’t you believe God? God don’t lie—and He says, plain as I’ talking to you, the soul that sinneth, it shall die.’
She sighed. ‘Reverend, look like to me you’d get tired, all the time beating on poor little Esther, trying to make Esther something she ain’t. I just don’t feel it here,’ she said, and put one hand on her breast. ‘Now, what you going to do? Don’t you know I’m a woman grown, and I ain’t fixing to change?’
He wanted to weep. He wanted to reach out and hold her back from the destruction she so ardently pursued—to fold her in him, and hide her until the wrath of God was past. At the same time there rose to his nostrils again her whisky-laden breath, and beneath this, faint, intimate, the odor of her body. And he began to feel like a man in a nightmare, who stands in the path of oncoming destruction, who must move quickly—but who cannot move. ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ rang over and over again in his mind, like a bell—as he moved closer to her, undone by her breath, and her wide, angry, mocking eyes.
‘You know right well,’ he whispered, shaking with fury, ‘you know right well why I keep after you—why I keep after you like I do.’
‘No, I don’t,’ she answered, refusing, with a small shake of the head, to credit his intensity. ‘I sure don’t know why you can’t let Esther have her little whisky, and have her little ways without all the time trying to make her miserable.’
He sighed with exasperation, feeling himself begin to tremble. ‘I just don’t want to see you go down, girl, I don’t want you to wake up one fine morning sorry for all the sin you done, old, and all by yourself, with nobody to respect you.’
But he heard himself speaking, and it made him ashamed. He wanted to have done with talking and leave this house—in a moment they would leave, and the nightmare would be over.
‘Reverend,’ she said, ‘I ain’t done nothing that I’m ashamed of, and I hope I don’t do nothing I’m ashamed of, ever.’
At the word ‘Reverend,’ he wanted to strike her; he reached out instead and took both her hands in his. And now they looked directly at each other. There was surprise in her look, and a guarded triumph; he was aware that their bodies were nearly touching and that he should move away. But he did not move—he could not move.
‘But I can’t help it,’ she said, after a moment, maliciously teasing, ‘if you done things that you’s ashamed of, Reverend.’
He held on to her hands as though he were in the middle of the sea and her hands were the lifeline that would drag him in to shore. ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ he prayed, ‘oh, Jesus, Jesus. Help me to stand.’ He thought that that he was pulling back against her hands—but he was pulling her to him. And he saw in her eyes now a look that he had not seen for many a long day and night, a look that was never in Deborah’s eyes.
‘Yes, you know,’ he said, ‘why I’m all the time worrying about you—why I’m all the time miserable when I look at you.’
‘But you ain’t never told me none of this,’ she said.
One hand moved to her waist, and lingered there. The tips of her breasts touched his coat, burning in like acid and closing his throat. Soon it would be too late; he wanted it to be too late. That river, his infernal need, rose, flooded, sweeping him forward as though he were a long-drowned corpse.
‘You know,’ he whispered, and touched her breasts and buried his face in her neck.
So he had fallen: for the first time since his conversion, for the last time in his life. Fallen: he