Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [63]
Sister Bessie grabbed Dude around the neck again and shook him vigorously. Jeeter and Ada stood beside them watching. Ellie May had heard everything, but she had not come any closer.
Dude jerked away from Bessie more quickly than he had the first time. He was learning how to get away from her more easily.
“God damn you!” he shouted, striking at her face with his fist. “Why in hell don’t you keep off me!”
“Now, Dude,” Bessie pleaded tenderly, “you promised me you was not going to cuss no more. Good folks don’t want to go and hear a Sunday sermon by a cussing preacher.”
Dude shrugged his shoulders and walked away. He was getting tired of the way Bessie jumped on him and twisted his neck every time he said something she did not want to hear.
“When’s Dude going to start being a preacher?” Jeeter asked her.
“He’s going to preach a little short sermon next Sunday at the schoolhouse. I’m already telling him what to say when he preaches.”
“Looks like to me he ought to know that himself,” Jeeter said. “You don’t have to tell him everything to do, do you? Don’t he know nothing?”
“Well, he ain’t familiar with preaching like I is. I tell him what to say and he learns to say it himself. It won’t take him long to catch on and then I won’t have to tell him nothing. My former husband told me what to say one Saturday night and I went to the schoolhouse the next afternoon and preached for almost three hours without stopping. It ain’t hard to do after you catch on. Dude’s already told me what he was going to preach about Sunday. He knows now what he’s going to say when the time comes.”
“What’s he going to preach about Sunday?”
“About men wearing black shirts.”
“Black shirts? What for?”
“You ask him. He knows.”
“Black shirts ain’t nothing to preach about, to my way of thinking. I ain’t never heard of that before.”
“You come to preaching at the schoolhouse Sunday afternoon and find out.”
“Is he going to preach for black shirts, or against black shirts?”
“Against them.”
“What for, Sister Bessie?”
“It ain’t my place to tell you about Dude’s preaching. That’s for you to go to the schoolhouse and hear. Preachers don’t want their secrets spread all over the country beforehand. Wouldn’t nobody take the trouble to go and listen, if they did that.”
“Maybe I don’t know much about preaching, but I ain’t never heard of nobody preaching about men wearing black shirts—against black shirts, at that. I ain’t never seen a man wearing a black shirt, noway.”
“Preachers has got to preach against something. It wouldn’t do them no good to preach for everything. They got to be against something every time.”
“I never looked at it that way before,” Jeeter said, “but there might be a lot in what you say. Though, take for instance, God and heaven—you wouldn’t preach against them, would you, Sister Bessie?”
“Good preachers don’t preach about God and heaven, and things like that. They always preach against something, like hell and the devil. Them is things to be against. It wouldn’t do a preacher no good to preach for God. He’s got to preach against the devil and all wicked and sinful things. That’s what the people like to hear about. They want to hear about the bad things.”
“You sure is a convincing woman, Sister Bessie,” he said. “God must be pretty proud of having a woman preacher like you. I don’t know what He’s going to think about Dude, though. Specially when he starts preaching against men wearing black shirts. I ain’t never seen a man wearing a black shirt, noway, and I don’t believe there’s such things in the country.”
Jeeter bent over and rubbed his hands on the dent in the body of the car. He scraped the surface paint with his fingernails until most of it had peeled off and fallen on the ground.
“Stop doing that to my automobile,” Bessie said. “Ain’t you got no sense at all? You and Ada has near about got all the paint off of it already doing that.”
“You wouldn’t talk to me like that, would you, Bessie?” he asked. “I ain’t hurting the automobile no more than it’s already done.”
“Well, you keep your hands off it, anyhow.