Journeyman (18 page)

“Praise God!”

“Amen!” somebody said.

Almost all the people had already come through, and those who were on their feet crowded around Semon. Semon noticed that Tom Rhodes was still struggling on the floor. He prodded Tom with his foot.

“Yeeee-yow!” Tom yelled. His voice, like a hoarse bullfrog’s, could be recognized in any crowd.

Semon laid his hand on Lucy’s wrist to feel her pulse. He began fanning her again with the palmleaf fan, and murmuring unintelligibly to himself.

“Praise God!”

Semon looked down on the floor in front of the platform and saw several men and women, torn and dirty, struggling in a mass. They were moaning and kicking, and every once in a while one of them gave a gigantic jerk that looked as if it could wrench a body apart.

Lucy was breathing more deeply by then, and Semon continued to fan her. As far as he knew, she was the only person in the schoolhouse, except Lorene, who had not come through.

“Praise God!” he said, looking at her closely. She had opened her eyes.

Fully two thirds of the men and women had become silent and still, though most of them still lay on the floor. All of them were dust-covered and damp, but on their faces were smiles of contented pleasure.

“Praise God!” Semon shouted at Lucy.

She moved her arm and tried to get up. Semon lifted her to a sitting position on the table. All at once she became alive again. It was as if her strength had held itself back in anticipation of that moment. She leaped from the table to the platform and ran leaping up and down from one wall to the other. Semon ran after her, never catching up with her, but trying to help her come through this time.

Her screams seemed to have awakened everyone else in the room. For, a moment later, the people who had been either lying still or jerking feebly, at the sound of her voice squirmed and wriggled like a nest of snakes in a dry well.

Lucy stopped at last and stood still. Her head was thrown back and her hands gripped tightly across her stomach. Her body shook, swiftly and convulsively, and she began shaking herself again.

“Praise the Lord!” Semon shouted.

“Yeeee-yow!” a man under a desk yelled. It sounded like Tom Rhodes.

Lucy Nixon began to scream with each expulsion of her breath. It was a sound that sent shivers up backbones that were almost too worn and tired to respond to further stimulation. The thrusting forward, backward, and sideways of her thighs made her breath come short. Her screams came at shorter intervals, but they were louder than they had ever been before.

Semon could see the women in the mass in front of the platform squirm with renewed vigor. Most of them had their legs locked around the legs of the desks, and the men lay flat on their stomachs moving and twisting.

He watched Lucy in her frantic struggle to come through.

The others around them were trying to help her. They pushed closer to her, yelling and screaming with her, and rubbing against each other. Some of them stood apart and began going through a duplication of her motions, trying in that way to help her.

When it seemed as if the arteries in her body would burst through her skin, Lucy’s face became less distorted and her motions more intense. She began to smile a little, and the tension of her muscles drew knots to her legs and arms. After that she gradually relaxed, slowly, in jerking rapture.

“Praise God!” somebody shouted.

There was then an expression of bliss on Lucy’s face that grew with the passing of each second. At last, with a final effort, she did come through; and the evidence was there to show that she had. While everybody stared, someone covered her thighs with a coat; but by that time everyone had seen what had happened.

While the men crowded closer to see, her emotions became slower and slower, and finally she lay perfectly still. Not even an eyelid moved.

When it was all over, Semon sank exhausted in a heap on the floor. He felt his legs giving away under him, and he could not stop himself. When he realized that he had fallen on the floor, he made no immediate effort to rise. The people who were close to him thought he was coming through for the second time, and they turned away to allow him to be alone. He was tired to the core of his body.

Everyone had become quiet, and there was only the sound of people walking on the floor. When anything was said, it was spoken in low whispers.

Lucy’s family had come forward and carried her out of the schoolhouse. She was laid in the wagon-bed and covered with those pieces of her clothing that could be found. She lay in the wagon-bed staring at the heavens through the waving branches of the pines while her mother and father and brothers were getting ready to leave.

No one spoke coming out of the schoolhouse. People walked silently on the thick carpet of pine needles towards their wagons and cars.

Clay got into the automobile alone. Soon Dene came and sat down beside him, and Lorene followed. They waited for Semon in silence.

Back in the schoolhouse Semon got up and took several steps. He found that he was too exhausted to move. He sat down at a desk, holding his head in his hands. He felt sick and discouraged. He had saved perhaps forty people that night; but the most hardened sinner he could not help. Lorene had sat through the meeting unmoved and, in the end, unsaved.

Semon got up and started blowing out the smoking lamps. It was then, when he was ready to leave the building, that he remembered that he had forgotten to take up the collection. He left the darkened building with dragging feet.

On the way home they passed several wagons of people, and two or three men walking, and several on mule-back. The horn was not sounded, and the only thing that could be heard was the hum of the motor and the clanking of trace-chains on the wagons. They passed on ahead and were soon out of sight.

C
LAY WAS UNACCUSTOMED
to being up late at night, and the sun was two hours high when he opened his eyes. He lay on his side, batting his eyes bewilderedly, and wondered why he had overslept. Springing to the floor, he remembered that it had been after midnight when they got home from the schoolhouse.

No one else was to be heard. Dene was sound asleep on her side of the bed, and she looked so exalted that he did not wake her. He slipped on his shirt and overalls, tied his shoelaces, and went out on the back porch to get a drink of water.

He knew at the instant he went to the railing and dipped some water from the bucket that everything was not as it should have been. At first he could not determine what the trouble was. He scanned as much of the yard as he could with a sweep of his eyes, and ran down the steps towards the barn trying to find out what it was that had told him something was wrong.

“I’ll be doggone,” he said, staring at the shed.

The car that had always stood under the shed beside the barn was not there. He remembered distinctly that it had been driven under the shed the night before. But now it was not there.

He turned and ran around the corner of the house. Without pausing to look closely, he could see fresh tire tracks on the sand. There had been a shower of rain some time between midnight and daybreak, and the new tracks on the sand were as clear and distinct as foot-prints in newly laid concrete. Clay went as far as the front yard, and there he stopped.

“I’ll be doggone, if I won’t,” he muttered, looking down the big road towards McGuffin.

Slowly he turned and dragged himself to the front steps. His body bending, he sank to the next to the bottom tread. His arms lay extended over his sharp knees, his elbows bending, and they hung half suspended there.

Down at the cabins Hardy came out of his kitchen door, his right arm in a sling around his neck, and walked to the wood-pile. He bent down and picked up chips, tossing them into a handleless bucket.

Semon’s old car still stood under the magnolia tree in front of the house. It had not been moved an inch since the day Semon had arrived. From where Clay sat on the steps he could see that three of the tires were flat, and that the fourth one would soon be down.

There was behind him in the house a muffled stir. He supposed it was Dene getting up to cook breakfast. He made no effort to stop her; Sugar was back, and she could come to the house to cook, but Clay remained silent and allowed nothing to disturb him.

Hearing a step in the hall behind him, he turned around to tell Dene that Sugar and Hardy had come back. But when he looked, he saw Lorene instead. She was dressed in the clothes she had worn when she came several days before, and she had on her hat. She even had her handbag with her.

“You ain’t leaving, are you, Lorene?” he said.

“Where is he?” she asked, running out on the porch.

“Where’s who?”

“Semon.”

Clay turned around in order to see her better.

“Well, I’ll be doggone!” he said. “Did you get up to go off with him?”

She nodded, running to the steps and looking in all directions for Semon.

“You might just as well go back in the house and eat breakfast,” he said, “because Semon Dye’s more than likely twenty miles on the other side of McGuffin by this time. He made away with an early start.”

Lorene dropped her handbag to the porch.

“The low-down son of a bitch,” she said, speaking through flat lips. “He told me he’d take me back to Jacksonville with him.”

“He did?” Clay said. “Well, I’ll be doggone!”

Lorene sat down in a chair, glaring down the road in the direction Semon had gone sometime during the night. She took off her hat, flinging it to the porch floor.

She was saying something inaudible through clenched teeth.

“I reckon I could call him some names, too,” Clay told her, “if I only knew what to say. It was a dirty shame for him to go off like that, leaving everybody high and dry like this.”

They both sat silent for a while, each looking down the road towards McGuffin. Clay felt weak over the loss of his car, but he would not have felt so badly if Semon had not gone away as he had. He had hoped to have the satisfaction of seeing Semon drive out of the yard and out of sight down the road. He felt cheated now.

While they were sitting there, Dene ran out on the porch. She did not see either of them until she was almost at the steps. When she saw Clay and Lorene, she stopped quickly.

“What’s—!”

She could not finish. She stepped backward.

“What makes you so wild-eyed, Dene?” Clay said, looking at her closely. “You act like the house was on fire.”

Dene was not dressed for travel, but she had on her best slippers and her new frock.

“I’ll be doggone if you don’t look like you don’t know what to do, Dene,” he said.

He saw her glance quickly at Lorene and at the hat on the floor.

“Lorene was aiming to ride back to Jacksonville with Semon, but Semon hot-footed it away and left her behind.”

“Has Semon left, sure enough?” Dene asked excitedly.

Lorene shrugged her shoulders and cursed under her breath. She gave no other reply to Dene’s question.

“It don’t look like you folks ought to be so wrought up about Semon going off,” Clay said, “because he didn’t take nothing that belonged to you. Looks like I ought to be the one to do all the swearing at him. Semon rode off in my automobile. I reckon maybe he had a right to it, but it don’t look like he’d ride off in the night. He could act like a white man about it. I wasn’t aiming to stop him. I just wanted to see him go.”

Dene sat down on the edge of a chair and gazed down the road towards McGuffin. After several minutes she glanced hurriedly at Lorene once more. Lorene looked at no one; she stared grimly at the porch floor.

A smile passed over Clay’s face.

“Semon didn’t tell you he’d take you with him, too, did he, Dene?”

A moment later he turned and glared angrily at the ground in front of him.

“By God,” he said to himself, I never thought of that before.”

Down at Sugar and Hardy’s cabin the blind at the kitchen window was thrown open. Sugar could be seen standing in the window looking at the house.

“I reckon I’d better go down and tell Sugar to come and start breakfast,” he said. “The sun’s way up there in the sky, and I’m getting as hungry as a dog.”

He made no effort then to move from the steps.

Behind him he thought he heard a suppressed sob in someone’s throat. He did not turn around to see who was crying. He knew it was not Lorene, though; if Lorene was doing anything, she was swearing under her breath.

“Somehow I sort of hate to see Semon go away now and leave us. It makes me feel left high and dry. I’m going to miss having him around here for a while to come. It makes me feel lonesome, not hearing him talk and not seeing him sitting on the porch, waiting for Sunday to come.”

He paused for a moment.

“Sunday has come and gone.”

A chair scraped on the floor behind him, and someone ran sobbing into the house. He did not turn around to see who it was.

“Semon was a sort of low-down scoundrel, taking all in all, but he had a way with him just the same. I couldn’t put up with a rascal like him very long, because I’d sooner or later go get my shotgun and blast away at him. But it does sort of leave a hollow feeling inside of me to know he aint here no longer. I feel left high and dry, like a turtle on its back that can’t turn over.”

He was not surprised to see a car appear out of the still morning. It was racing down the road, coming from the direction of the schoolhouse. When it got to the cabins where Vearl and the pickaninnies were playing, it slowed down a little.

When the car came closer, he could see Tom Rhodes twisting and steering from side to side. He did not get up to meet him.

“Up early, Tom,” he said. “Something the matter up your way?”

Tom ran up the walk, carrying a gallon jug of his corn whisky.

“Where’s the preacher? Aint he up yet?”

“He’s up, all right,” Clay said.

“I’ve got something here for him. I thought I’d like to bring him a drink for pulling me through last night in the schoolhouse. And, too, I thought maybe you and him would like to go back home with me and we could sit in the shed and look through the crack some.”