Journeyman (13 page)

“You must tell me all about it, Dene,” he said. “You can’t stop without finishing. God wouldn’t like that.”

He sat down in the chair and pulled her to him. For a while she stood in front of him, held firmly in the vise of his outspread legs. She did not know he was placing her on his lap until she opened her eyes and saw him lift her and place her solidly upon him. He held one arm around her waist and the other around her legs so she could not spring up and run away.

“It was Hardy,” she cried. “I let him know he could have me. He wouldn’t do it then, but I wouldn’t let him go. I locked the door and wouldn’t let him out. Then I let him know that he had to. He was afraid, but I made him stay.”

“Hardy!” Semon said deep down in his throat.

“Yes, Hardy Walker! He took me in here one day right after dinner. Clay had gone to the field, but I didn’t care if he did come back. I had to have Hardy. He held me tight when I went to him. He was still afraid, but I made him want to. If he had stopped, I’d have gone crazy. I just had to have him, and I didn’t care what happened. I loved Clay, and I still love him, but I just couldn’t help having Hardy. He wasn’t a darky then. He was a man. And he was the best man I’ve ever had. That’s why I couldn’t let him stop. It was the strangest thing.”

Semon was speechless for several minutes after she had finished. He had heard confessions from women before, but not one of them had ever been anything like that. Dene had told him what other girls and women had held back.

She cried louder. She tried to get out of his arms, but Semon would not let her. He held her around the waist and legs more strongly than ever.

Suddenly she screamed in his ears.

“You made me tell you!”

“Confession is good for the soul, Dene,” he said at once.

He drew her closer and kissed her cheeks and neck and, finally, her lips. When he released her, she did not move. After a while he raised her head and looked at her, and she did not know whether to cry or to laugh. He kissed her again, and after that she offered her lips in return.

“I think I can save you, Dene,” he said hoarsely.

She closed her eyes and lay her head on his shoulder.

“I’m going to save you. I won’t let you be damned.”

Her lips parted as if to answer him, but no sound reached his ears.

“I’m going away Monday morning, and I want you to go with me to work for the Lord. That’s the only way to be saved now, Dene.”

“I love the Lord,” she said excitedly.

“You’ll be one of his angels.”

“Oh, I love the Lord so much it hurts.”

“Praise God!” he said, kissing her.

When he lifted her to her feet and stood up beside her, she held to him frantically. He led her across the room and laid her on the bed. She lay with unopened eyes while he put his arms around her and kissed her hungrily.

“We’ll leave Monday morning,” he said again. “Be ready to leave early, Dene. You must work for the Lord now if you are going to be saved. I’ll pray for you all the time.”

“I love the Lord!”

Semon laid his revolver on the table by the bed and blew out the light. He came back, kneeling at the bed, and found her lips with his.

Her body trembled as he took her in his arms and stroked her with his hands.

“Don’t be afraid of me, Dene,” he said hoarsely. “I won’t hurt you. I’m a man of God, I am.”

He pressed his face against her breasts and kissed her savagely. When she could wait no longer, she threw her arms around his head, crying hysterically.

“I love the Lord!” she screamed in the dark room.

C
LAY GOT BACK HOME
the next morning a little before nine o’clock. He had been whipping the mule with a hickory switch all the way from McGuffin, but the mule still refused to go faster than a walk. The animal was fresh and unharried; Clay was worn to a frazzle.

He could see Semon sitting on the front porch when he was a quarter of a mile away. It was then that the mule slowed down even more instead of walking faster at the sight of the barn, and Clay threw himself to the road and ran the rest of the way home. He left the mule to come alone.

No one came out to meet him, but he was too excited to notice it.

“Here it is!” he shouted, waving a handful of greenbacks high above his head.

Semon had forgotten what Clay had gone to town for, but when he saw the money, he remembered all about it.

“I got it,” Clay said, running up the steps. “Every penny of it. I’m ready to pay it over, Semon.”

“Where’d you get it?” Semon asked suspiciously, reaching in the air for Clay’s hand and pulling it closer.

“Where?”

“Yes, where? I don’t intend taking stolen money and get myself locked up in one of these little back-country calabooses. You didn’t rob a store or bank to get it, did you?”

“I sure didn’t,” Clay said, too excited to sit down or to stand still. “I borrowed it at the farmers’ warehouse against next year’s cotton crops. I signed my name for it. I wouldn’t steal money.”

Still holding Clay’s wrist, Semon tried to take the money with his other hand. Clay hastily jerked it beyond his reach.

“Now just hold on a minute,” he said, shaking his head. “Just paying over the money ain’t good business. I know it ain’t. You’ve got to say you release me from all debts, and turn Dene back over to me. That’s a fair way of doing things.”

“Can’t you trust a man of God?”

“Just look here a minute,” Clay said. “Now I want to know exactly what kind of a preacher you are. I asked some folks in McGuffin about it, and they said they’d heard a heap about you, but hadn’t ever run across you. When I told them how you’ve been carrying on out here in Rocky Comfort, first with Sugar, and then sopping up corn liquor, and now shooting dice, they said you sounded like the damnedest kind of preacher they’d ever heard tell about. I told them you was a real traveling preacher, but I couldn’t hardly convince most of them of it.”

“You don’t doubt my word, do you, coz?”

“Me? I can’t say. It was the other folks who said that about you. But just what kind of a preacher be you, anyway?”

“God called me to preach to sinners,” Semon said gravely. “That’s all the explaining I ever have to do to white people. If folks don’t take my word for it, then I know the devil is in them.”

Clay drew up a chair, holding the money tightly in his fist. He looked at it closely, his eyes blinking at the sight of so many soiled green notes.

“Are you still aiming to preach at the schoolhouse Sunday?” he said, turning to Semon.

“I am, I am,” Semon said solemnly. “That’s what the Lord told me to come back over here to Georgia for. I wouldn’t be sitting here now if He hadn’t told me to make haste and come.”

“I’ll be doggone if you don’t hang on, as a fellow said, till there ain’t no knowing about you. I never did see a man just keep on and on like you do.”

“What do you mean to say by that?”

“You’ve got a nearly brand-new car, and Dene’s daddy’s watch, and this hundred dollars I’m bound to give you, and I can’t see why you don’t go on off to the next place now.”

“I’m going to preach Sunday,” Semon said doggedly. “Can’t nothing, hell or high water, stop me from doing that. I came over here to save sinners, and I’m going to save them if I have to get down and come through with them myself.”

“Well, here it is,” Clay said, reluctantly handing over the greenbacks. “And I reckon you’ll say you ain’t got a hold on Dene now.”

“Me?” Semon said. He grabbed the money and started in at once to count it.

“Yes, you,” Clay said bitterly. “I’m getting a little doggone tired of having you around here. If I’ve got to get my religion from you, I don’t care now whether I get none or not.”

“Now that’s no way to talk, Horey,” Semon said, stopping to look at Clay. He held the money between his fingers where he had stopped counting. “You act like I done something mean to you.”

“It ain’t that so much as it’s something else. I ain’t convinced that you are a preacher.”

“The Lord heard you then.”

“He did, sure enough?”

“He sure did. You want to be careful of what you say.”

Clay thought for several minutes. He looked across the yard towards the woods where Rocky Comfort Creek was hidden.

“But you ain’t a reverend, are you?” Clay asked.

“No,” Semon said. “I ain’t. I leave that to other people who crave to be called that.”

“Then what kind of a preacher be you, anyway?”

“I’m a lay preacher.”

“You are?”

“Yes, I’m that kind.”

“Is that any different than the real kind?”

“What real kind?”

“The reverend kind.”

“Those kind of preachers ain’t a bit more privy to the Lord than I am. I take my living where I can find it, and those other kind stick to one place all the time. That’s all the difference there is. And with the Lord there’s no difference at all. All of us are preachers in His sight. I don’t take no back-water from any kind of preacher, reverend or lay.”

“I reckon you’re resting up today to do some powerful preaching at the schoolhouse tomorrow,” Clay said. “I wouldn’t miss that session for nothing in the world. I always said I’d like to be on the ground to see a preacher make the devil take to his heels. I reckon that’s what you’re aiming to do tomorrow.”

“I always give the devil a licking,” Semon said. “Not only tomorrow, but every time I preach I bear down on him till he hollers for the calf-rope. And he’ll holler for it tomorrow, too.”

“Maybe you’ll drive the devil clear out of Rocky Comfort. That would be a fine thing to do. The folks here has always had a little of the devil in them. Looks like they just try to see how wicked they can be. You will have to do some tall preaching to get them to shed their ways.”

“The people here are no different than the folks all over the country. The devil is everywhere in Georgia. No matter where it is you go, you see his shiny head sticking up.”

“Has the devil got a shiny head?” Clay asked.

“Has he! Just like a bald head slicked with lard.”

“You don’t say!”

“And it’s red, too.”

“Well, I’ll be doggone! I never knew that before. I somehow had the idea that the devil looked something like—well, to tell you the honest-to-God truth, Semon, I didn’t know what he looked like.”

Semon had finished counting the money by then. He held it in his hand, looking at it, shaking it, and feeling it with his fingers. It was with reluctance that he put it into his pocket out of sight.

“Maybe we’d better ride up to the schoolhouse and let you look over the ground,” Clay suggested. “You can see the lay of the land, and you’ll know what to look for tomorrow.”

“That’s fine. I would like to see it. I haven’t been no further away than Tom Rhodes’ since I got here last Wednesday afternoon.”

“I reckon we can ride up in the automobile,” Clay said, leading the way to the shed.

“Sure,” Semon said. “We can ride in my car.”

He got in, found the key he had put in his pocket, and started the engine. Clay sat down beside him in the front seat, holding the door partly open, and keeping one foot on the runningboard.

Semon operated the car with no trouble at all. He backed it out, drove it out of the yard, and turned up the road just as if he had been in the habit of driving it for two or three years. They had nothing to say to each other.

A hundred yards from Tom Rhodes’ house Semon slowed down. He looked at the house and barn and at the outhouses scattered around the place without design.

“What’s the matter now?” Clay asked, following his eyes, and feeling the car slow down.

“It might not be a bad idea to stop and speak to Tom,” Semon said. “I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

Without waiting for Clay to reply, he turned into the driveway and drove down to the barnyard gate. He stopped the car, pocketed the key, and got out.

“Now I don’t know where Tom might be,” Clay said, walking towards the barn. “Sometimes he goes to town on Saturday, and sometimes he don’t.”

“There’s his car in the shed. He ought to be around somewhere.”

The Negro who worked around the house and barn came out of an outhouse.

“Where’s Mr. Tom?” Clay asked.

“Down in the pasture,” Frank said, pointing beyond the garden and orchard. “You can find him down there.”

They climbed the barnyard fence at the gate and walked across the garden. The vegetables were up and growing well. Semon stopped and pulled up a carrot. After wiping the soil off with his hands, he began eating it, taking big bites one after the other and crunching the pulp in his jaws.

Tom was nowhere to be seen in the pasture, but there was a cow shed near the creek. They went towards it, stepping gingerly along the crooked cow path.

At the door Clay stopped and looked inside. There was Tom, perched on a stool, looking through a crack in the wall of the shed. He had not seen them.

“What in thunder are you doing peeping through that crack, Tom?” Clay said, stepping inside and stopping to look closely at Tom.

Tom jumped to his feet, his face suddenly red. He did not know what to do to hide his embarrassment.

“Nothing,” he said, trying to laugh.

Semon went across the shed and bent over at the crack. He peered through it for a few minutes, shutting one eye and squinting the other.

“I don’t see a thing but the woods over there,” Semon said, standing erect and looking at Tom. But he was still wondering what it was that could be seen through the crack.

Tom did not try to explain.

“What in thunderation’s going on over across there, Tom?” Clay asked. He bent over and looked through the crack in the wall. He shut one eye, squinted the other one, but he could still see nothing except the pine trees.

“Is somebody over there, Tom?” Semon asked.

Tom shook his head, trying not to meet the eyes of either of them.

“I just come down here sometimes and sit,” he said, hemming and hawing. “I don’t have much else to do, so I just sit and look through the crack. It used to be that I could find plenty to do, but I’ve got so I’d rather stay down here.”

“And look at nothing?” Semon asked in amazement.