Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [63]
‘What we going to do?’ he repeated at last; and felt that the sustaining life had gone out of him. He sat down at the kitchen table and looked at whirling pattern on the floor.
But the life had not gone out of her; she came to where he sat, speaking softly, with bitter eyes. ‘You sound mighty strange to me,’ she said. ‘Don’t look to me like you thinking of nothing but how you can get shut of this—and me, too—quick as you know how. It wasn’t like that always, was it, Reverend? Once upon a time you couldn’t think of nothing and nobody but me. What you thinking about to-night? I be damned if I think it’s me you thinking of.’
‘Girl,’ he said, wearily, ‘don’t talk like you ain’t got good sense. You know I got a wife to think about——’ and he wanted to say more, but he could not find the words, and, helplessly, he stopped.
‘I know that,’ she said with less heat, but watching him still with eyes from which the old, impatient mockery was not entirely gone, ‘but what I mean is, if you was able to forget her once you ought to be able to forger her twice.’
He did not understand her at once; but then he sat straight up, his eyes wide and angry. ‘What you mean, girl? What you trying to say?’
She did not flinch—even in his despair and anger he recognized how far she was from being the frivolous child she had always seemed to him. Or was it that she had been, in so short a space of time, transformed? But he spoke to her at this disadvantage: that whereas he was unprepared for any change in her, she had apparently taken his measure from the first and could be surprised by no change in him.
‘You know what I mean, she said. ‘You ain’t never going to have no kind of life with that skinny, black woman—and you ain’t never going to be able to make her happy—and she ain’t never going to have no children. I be blessed, anyway, if I think you was in your right mind when you married her. And it’s me that’s going to have your baby!’
‘You want me,’ he asked at last, ‘to leave my wife—and come with you?’
‘I thought,’ she answered, ‘that you had done thought of that yourself, already, many and many a time.’
‘You know,’ he said, with a halting anger, ‘I ain’t never said nothing like that. I ain’t never told you I wanted to leave my wife.’
‘I ain’t talking,’ she shouted, at the end of patience, ‘about nothing you done said!’
Immediately, they both looked toward the closed kitchen doors—for they were not alone in the house this time. She sighed, and smoothed her hair with her hand; and he saw then that her hand was trembling and that her calm deliberation was all a frenzied pose.
‘Girl,’ he said, ‘does you reckon I’m going to run off and lead a life of sin with you somewhere, just because you tell me you got my baby kicking in your belly? How many kinds of a fool you think I am? I got God’s work to do—my life don’t belong to you. Nor to that baby, neither—if it is my baby.
‘It’s your baby,’ she said, coldly, ‘and ain’t no way in the world to get around that. And it ain’t been so very long ago, right here in this very room, when looked to me like a life of sin was all you was ready for.’
‘Yes,’ he answered, rising, and turning away, ‘Satan tempted me and I fell. I ain’t the first man been made to fall on account of a wicked woman.’
‘You be careful,’ said Esther, ‘how you talk to me. I ain’t the first girl’s been ruined by a holy man, neither.’
‘Ruined?’ he cried. ‘You? How you going to be ruined? When you been walking through this town just like a harlot, and a-kicking up your heels all over the pasture? How you going to stand there and tell me you been ruined? If it hadn’t been me, it sure would have been somebody else.’
‘But it was you,’ she retorted, ‘and what I want to know is what we’s going to do about it.’
He looked at her. He face was cold and hard—ugly; she had never been so ugly before.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, deliberately, ‘what we is going to do. But I tell you what I think you better do: you better go along and get one of these boys you been running around with to marry y