Long Tale Press

-1- So he had come back now, the preacher had, in that first summer after the war, the tall man who was hardly more than a stranger, to begin the great work of his life in the very church where he had so often denied the call of God before at last throwing himself, wailing and crying, at the foot of the Cross, begging for the life he had thrown away on liquor and women.

Now, all at once, listening to him, his nephew, young Ryerson Hezekiah Moffit Goode, had been struck half lifeless, driven into sleepless nights and troubled days. More than merely troubled, with an evil no less real than the fair hot sun itself, ready to seize him at any moment and drag him down into the Kingdom of the Lost, even as he walked about the yard or mowed the grass or spent long days out in the fields suckering tobacco.

A joyous morning it had been. Singing on the radio downstairs, a hit tune from a new Broadway play, a clanging about downstairs as his aunt readied the kitchen for breakfast. But no joy in him as he rose to make his way into a frightening life different from any of he had known. Something without a name was at his side all day, closing in on him, calling him to his eternal home.

Softly and tenderly Jesus is callng, calling for you and for me (italic)

No, not softly at all, not tenderly at all, nothing left for him now but to get down on his knees and crawl up the church aisle, past all the scornful faces, the secretly laughing faces, and throw himself at the foot of the Cross, or, as it happened, at the feet of his uncle, crying and wailing.

Save me O Lord save (italic)

And his uncle treating him as an ordinary useless citizen of a despicable world. Ah, yes, this young man has come tonight…

What indeed would he say in that day when he came at last before the Judgment Seat of God! O God, help me now help! (italic) Something he would have to live with for days, weeks, perhaps for the rest of his life, knowing it was his destiny for all of eternity, tremulous, unable to breathe, uncertain, no matter the time; day, night, lying awake upstairs in his bed, or even hanging around outside the church and smoking cigarettes with the rest of the gang. Or maybe at the house, on the porch with his sister Denise, half sister rather, child of his father’s first marriage, separated from him since birth.

His uncle was less than a year out of the seminary and anxious now to get on with the work for which his whole life had been a preparation, always explaining how Oh yes Lord if the world had paid more heed to the word of the Lord, Hitler and Tojo might never have been.

As he watched him Ry still wasn't sure just when he first began to feel uneasy: to feel the dread—alarm—terror—whatever it was—that had turned his whole summer upside down, blackening it with doom and despair, with fears he had never known hanging on him even in his sleep and at every waking hour. All he knew for sure was, well that it had something to do with his uncle Worsham's return from the Baptist seminary in New Orleans. Maybe it was the afternoon he went up to Mr. Cranfield's store to buy some pie fixings for Aunt Sally and had seen his uncle's face staring at him out of a revival poster someone had stuck in the window:

GREAT COMMUNITY AWAKENING!

Dobbs Station Baptist Church. Aug.14-27.

Hear Rev. Worsham Wiles.

Man of God.

Hear the Devil Being Put to Rout!

Would he ever grasp what desperate change had come over him? It was never any good. If only he could figure out what was now so disturbing in his uncle! Maybe he never would be quite sure.

The truth of his infinitely frightened and perhaps hopeless state had struck him even more profoundly on the first night of the revival. A good warm August Sunday with the sound of the bells in the steeple and a noisy crowd gathering in the churchyard. Yet he realized at once that he was not like the others. Somewhere along the line he had forgot to call on the Lord, forgot to beg for his life, forgot to save himself from eternal death and hellfire!

Uncle Worsham had his own church now, in a little place called Snow Hill, another dusty tobacco warehousing town down east, but he had already made quite a name for himself as a traveling evangelist. Nobody believed a pace as unimpressive as Snow Hill would hold him for long, just as his first church in the tiny mill town of Level Crossing had not held him for long.

His reputation had spread so quickly and so furiously that people had begun to compare him with people like Billy Sunday and the dreaded Cyclone Mack. There were a lot of towns that wouldn't be able to keep a man like that.

The boy would always find a seat on the back pew, in an alcove off the main part of the church, behind old man Luther Wickshire, the Herndon Wood grocer, and next to Odell Washburn, a brutish, smelly youth whose nostrils were a tangle of protruding hairs and who, at eighteen, was still in Ry's grade at school.

"Hain't no other place like a church," Odell had once told him. "Onliest place whar they don't make ya pay till ya git inside an’ whar ya gotta stand in a long line t’ git out."

They had been standing in line in the vestibule waiting to shake the preacher's hand, but some old lady in a polka dot dress was holding them up. A different summer then, a different preacher, and nobody going up to be saved. Not Odell, for sure; and not as though it really mattered, because he never looked as though he had quite come awake until the sermon was over anyway.

Not the same now, not the way it had been in other years. This time nobody was nodding off during the preaching services or sneaking out for home before the last hymn had been sung. All of Dobbs Station had been talking about the power of the message his uncle had brought to the community, and indeed it was true: each evening he would realize all over again how different Uncle Worsham was from the man he had known before the war, much thinner now, somber, splotched with the fire of redemption, moving frantically about the pulpit, throwing up his arms, yelling for the people to come up to God.

A strange, haunted man with a power to see beyond death. He would grip the pulpit with both hands and then again fling himself about, his voice dropping sometimes into a kind of monotone and at other times rising to such a fevered pitch that people would stop in the road to listen or come up to the church door to look inside.

"Has God stirred your heart, dear brother or sister? Is He calling you home tonight? Will you go where He bids you follow? For we are reminded again that the spirit of the Lord will not strive with a man always! Will you deny Him again and again until that last terrible day comes upon you, when you can longer feel the stirring of our Savior in your heart? So won't you come? Won't you come and put your trust in Him tonight?”

And so on until nine o'clock…nine fifteen…nine twenty…maybe even until nine thirty, the church crowded and hot and sultry, fans going, and now and then a low sobbing throughout the congregation.

Then he would be down in front of the communion table now, holding out his hands, his voice hoarse and subdued: "Have you denied His voice, dear brother or sister? Have you lost forever the perfect joy of youth and innocence?"

He strode ever more wildly about the pulpit, shouting, glaring down at the congregation, his face wasted and feverish, his neck splotched with a rash of purplish ganglia. He paused momentarily for the first time since he had first stepped into the pulpit, dropping his voice into a lower and even more menacing tone as the choir began to sing:

Sad, sad that bitter wail, almost . . . but . . . lost.

Once he lost his footing and took a crazy tumble into the aisle, getting up with no use of his hands, like a mighty Olympian, still yelling, climbing back into the pulpit and pounding on it with his Bible and then leaping on it from that same standing start, his flesh streaked again, veins bulging, his whole suit wilted on him as his voice kept climbing and kept climbing and kept right on climbing:

Yes! For even now the Day of Judgment was upon them! There would be a sound like the sound of a trumpet, the voice of thunder, a great smoldering laughter, and the drunkards would come stumbling out of the beer joints and poolrooms and the whores out of their 'leaping' houses, the rivers running black between their crumbling banks, filling the summer air with pus and sweat and there would be a plague of frogs in the land, and locusts, the moon smeared with blood, and the trees bursting out in foul pustules, slimy with canker even as those who had been saved in Christ were being caught up in the Rapture.

Then would come the days of the Great Tribulation, the horrendous reign of the Antichrist, and at last the war which bringeth forever the triumph of good over evil. Christ would reign for a thousand years in power and great glory and after that the Judgment!

The dead would come marching out of their upturned graves, their faces dripping green slime and all would stand before the throne of Judgment, the small and the great, the free and the bond, the quick and the dead, and all would be judged according to the Judgment of God and the heavens would be lit with the glory of God and the Redeemed would don their white robes and go shimmying down a long river to the end of the world, throwing up their hands and shouting “Glory glory glory glory to Him who sitteth on the throne of majestic triumph!”

"So I ask you, dear brethren, and I ask you dear sisters: Who among you have turned from the way and no longer wish to find peace with the Lord Jesus? Perhaps you are thinking: 'Don’t worry about me, preacher. God hasn't forgotten me. God will give me another chance.' Is that a risk you want to take, dear brother or sister? Is there time to dicker with God? Is there time when even now, in the distance, one can hear the trumpet beginning to sound!"

He paused again, catching his breath before dropping his voice into a lower and even more menacing tone.

"Perhaps there are those who have heard His call for the first time, and perhaps because they are young they are reluctant to come forward and put their trust in Him. It is all too easy to put it off until another day. Perhaps they have turned their backs on Him and said, 'You go your way, Lord, and I'll go mine.' Ah! But which of us can look beyond tomorrow? Which of us can say with certainty that he will return again to sit in the seat where he sits so comfortably tonight, to be offered again the life with Jesus now being offered to us so freely? And which of us can imagine an eternity without God, an eternity of torment and unremitting terror, a hell of fire and brimstone for all eternity.” His voice dropped. “Listen, brothers. Listen, sisters. Are you willing to face so hellish a fate, dear brother or sister? Or will you come tonight and take His hand and say, ‘Take me, Lord! I am thine!”

Then the congregation was singing again, the old sad hymns the boy remembered from his childhood, sounding the knell of his dying hours, calling him up to Jesus:

Almost persuaded, now to believe . . . (italic)

For all of the new and dreadful fear that hung over him he wasn't even listening to his uncle now. He was looking at Patricia Willard, the once-faded, stringy haired tart who in the two short months since school was out had blossomed into very nearly the best-looking girl in his whole class. Who would have guessed it? Blonde, bosomy, her hair cut short and full, shapely beyond her years. But for all that the same old Patricia—or Trish as she now liked to be called—at least from the little he had seen of her in recent weeks. In civics once she had turned to ask him, quite seriously and as though he were a man of the world whose word no one would dare question: “Ry, honey, why is it that boys keep telling me, ‘Trish, old girl, I’ll letcha have some of my dick, but you just gotta keep your stockings on.’?”

He didn’t know the answer. He didn’t even know where to look it up. Not hard for him to understand, though, even at twelve. In the strange and sensuous night-thoughts now a part of his life, he never failed to think of Trish with only her stockings on.

He could see it happening now: how one day she was certain to be a real beauty like her sister Pauline. She was the only member of her family who regularly attended church services, and practically a straight-A student who never opened a book. A real odd one, Pauline was. A little scary, too, sometimes, the way she always seemed to know what you were about to say before you ever opened your mouth.

The board of deacons no longer allowed her older sister inside its doors. The talk was that Pauline had severely damaged the good name of the Baptist congregation by taking up openly with a married man, one Wally Pegram, while daring to sing solos in the church choir.

The result was as in all such cases. The deacons turned her out of the choir and, when even that didn’t seem to help, they struck her name from the church rolls and threw her out in the street. No more mercy for Pauline, at least not until she had stood before the congregation and confessed all the unsavory details of her great sin.

As always aunt Sally would have her say: “Well, we all know about those Willards. We all know they are nothing but trash!”

“Trish and Pauline sure do know how to dress up those old barrels of trash. And they just perfume it all up like a milliner…”

“Shut up, Ryerson. I suppose you’ve been talking to that smarty pants sister of yours.”

The sad truth was all too plain: what more than an old Willard family tradition, for even the least of them not to be kicked out of the church? Her mother, Lucy Grey Willard, had lost her place in the congregation not for any crime of passion but for practicing witchcraft or hoodooin,’ as the black folk down in the river swamps called it. Raising people from the dead, making the lame to walk and the blind to see, and other sorts of UnChristian-like behavior. It was even said she’d been known to speak in tongues.

So it was probably inevitable that Pauline would follow in the same old path of iniquity. The last anyone had heard, she was working as a waitress for Justice Seagraves up[ at the New Dusty Roads beer tavern. “A filthy monster to be sure,” as Aunt Sally was always saying.

The preacher steadied himself against the pulpit and began to pray. "Let not the world intrude upon our hearts, O Lord! O slain and gentle Lamb, thy neck hanging down, make us firm in the way of the Cross and wash us clean with thy crimson snow! O Lord, come into our lives tonight and give us strength to stand against the temptations of this world! Possess our souls and let us come again into that time of youth and innocence, those pleasant summer days."

Was it true? Had the boy lost forever the perfect joy of youth and innocence? He wasn't looking at Trish now. The dread was always there; yet he could not keep his eyes off Trish Willard, the daughter of trash, or off of the lovely Mrs. Clay Clodfelter, the shapely choir soprano who was definitely not trash. He kept wondering how she would look with only her stockings on.

She was the wife of his Sunday School teacher. Not nearly enough man to satisfy her. She held her head tilted slightly to one side, fondling her choir book and smiling wanly and drawing those lovely long strands of dark hair over her shoulder. She had not once closed her eyes during the opening prayer; so he knew it must be true what everybody said about her:

"Naw, old Clodfelter, he ain't nothing. Why you can just look at her and tell right off that there's a lady that's wantin' a real dick and wantin' it real bad."

He watched her more intently as she nervously twisted her hair into tiny ringlets. His head was full of mist and he thought about all the times he had lain in bed wondering what it would be like to come up on her alone some night on the streets of Old Winston. She would be drunk and staggering all around and the rain dripping off her and her laughing the laugh of a drunken and thoroughly depraved streetwalker, and him walking about naked in his sin and grief and her looking at him from under the marquee of the U.S.A. Hotel and motioning for him to come over and join her:

"Honey, where you been? Goddamn, you're one more goddamn beautiful kid. And you’re the one that's gonna make me forget all about my old man?" And him:

"Indeed, my lovely.”

Then they would go up to take a room in the hotel, up there amid the grim unsheathed light bulbs and clanking pipes, and her stripping to the waist and the great soft marble breasts looking out at him and her starting to take her stockings off and him quick to throw out a reminder:

"No, not that. Leave ‘em on. You're always supposed to leave ‘em on." And her:

"Why sure. Sorry, honey. Crazy me. Kinda, you know, just skipped my mind.”

The neon flushing their bodies pale crimson and her face streaked with blood and her saying Yes O my God yes hurry and her breasts in his face like hills of whipped cream and the scent of her hanging over him and her looking up after it was over and saying, "You're some kid, ain'tcha? Yessir. You sure are something."

He looked back at her, feeling a new coldness inside him, alarmed at his unsavory thoughts and at his plunge into wholesale depravity.

Almost persuaded. Doom comes at last . . .

He looked over at Trish and finally at his uncle, who strode ever more wildly about the pulpit, shouting, glaring down at the congregation, his face wasted and feverish, his neck splotched with a rash of purplish ganglia.

Sad, sad that bitter wail, almost . . . but . . . lost. (italic)

When time came for the altar call he suddenly discovered, to his great dismay, that Oh Lord above he had been left alone in his pew.

Even Odell Washburn had gone up, grunting and sweating, to make a profession of faith, leaving behind a fetid cloud of odor as he worked his way out into the center aisle. Right behind him came old Lonnie Sessoms, a dark block of a man who looked as if he had just waked up and found himself on the edge of a cliff. Old Mr. Sessoms was best known not as a sinner but as a man greatly sinned against: for months now his wife's adulterous wartime affair with a neighbor had been the talk of the community.

Ry looked around at all the empty seats. What to do? Join Odell at the altar? Or just stand there and give up all hope of life? Again he went all cold inside, realizing he had waited too long, maybe too late now, maybe he had already committed the Unpardonable Sin and would no longer be able to hear the Lord Jesus knocking at the door of his heart.

Nothing to do but just sit there Sunday after Sunday at the back of the church, wondering what Mrs. Clodfelter, the soloist, looked like with her clothes off, the bright cherry nipples flaring crazily from behind her discreet blouse, or what Trish Willard looked like with nothing but her stockings on, until in the end, old and broken, in the last of life, he would make one last feeble attempt to go up and be saved and only then learn the irredeemable truth: yes, he had waited too long. Too late now. Too late.

The choir had struck up another hymn, and again the aisles filled with mourners, like always, everybody going up to accept the hand of the Lord. Among them his aunt Alicia, youngest of his grandfather's ten children and very much his favorite, still quite lovely, testifying now to the same old sin she had been testifying to for as long as anybody could remember—even if no one could remember exactly what it was.

He was no longer thinking of Mrs. Clodfelter or Trish Willard—only of all those many times the Lord Jesus had been knocking at his heart when he wasn't listening.

If any man hear my voice . . .

He sat there uneasily while the congregation and choir again sang Just As I Am, the small voice of terror nagging at him ever more insistently as he watched all the others going up to Jesus: gray heads bobbing up and down, a blur of skinny girls and sweaty faces, old women palsied and frantic and dying.

Then something else happened, something he sure didn’t like to think about. Mrs. Clodfelter had come down from the choir to rededicate her life to Christ. He watched her as she returned to her seat. She seemed much more at ease now, having abandoned all those old thoughts of being alone with him at the U.S.A. Hotel. He felt something hot and moist in his trousers.

Despicable thought!

He would go home now and he would lie down and he would pray to the Lamb and beg forgiveness and perhaps one day he too would return to that old time of youth and innocence, those pleasant summer days:

Just as I am and waiting not . . .

Again the preacher flung himself wildly about the pulpit. He was tall, worried, lean, looking much as he had looked on the day the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. He now spoke quite seriously, explaining that he too had known the infinite sorrow of death; he had been at once the most blessed and most tormented of men; for the Lord had lifted him up in the spirit and carried him away to the Seventh Hell; and even now he could hear the howls of the poor lost dead: the sinners with their skinny arms sticking out of the black muck, the naked whores with their stockings on, the whoremongers themselves and the adulterers and the liars, all manner of men, now lost, in the smoldering fog, shouting, through all eternity.

"O yes, dear sinner! And what shall we say to Him in that last great Day of Judgment?

"Who shall wipe the tears from our eyes?

"And who shall lift the burden from our heart?”

-2-

Morning again, a fitful clamor of birds, the heat already oppressive, an infinitely calm and changeless world to again fill him with dread and a strange lethargy that seemed almost to cripple him in all of his vital parts.

He lay there listening to the noises of the wakening house. The dim clangor from downstairs. Aunt Sally stirring about the kitchen singing of death and everlastingness. Uncle Clint coming in to say "How Y’all this morning" and then going back and climbing in his truck and roaring off to the hayfields with a load of farmhands in back. Still a lot of hay to get in as well as a whole field of tobacco to prime and prepare for market. A stir of voices and footsteps, more voices at the back screen, hushed, conspiratorial, mingled now with a full rich clamor of birdsong that would fade with the first sun.

He came fully awake just in time to see his uncle striding out across the yard and on down the grassy aisle that ran between two long rows of apple trees. Some mornings the preacher would content himself with a brisk ramble about the big yard; more often now he would go off on long walks about the fields and creek bottoms, maybe up along the little stream where Ryerson and his father often went to pick blackberries.

Ry had lain awake half the night, with the strange new dread inside him, and the heat only making it worse, and had come downstairs to find his uncle sitting strangely silent and at the far end of the breakfast table. He lounged there gaunt and tireless in spite of a long morning walk, not like the man that Ryerson remembered at all, staring at him as though to remind him that the day was short and the hour of Judgment near.

It was strange to think of him as a minister of such menacing power. The boy had always thought of him only as his uncle, a decent and completely ordinary fellow who, like his Aunt Voncile, had married into the family after a wild youth that found him in jail, and a drunk, by the time he was twenty.

To prepare for his coming Aunt Sally had spent more than a week in a fever of sweeping and bed-making and hymn-singing. Ryerson would wake each morning before daylight to hear her already at work, her voice raised in a mighty paean of hope and thanksgiving:

My hope is built on nothing less/than Jesus’s blood and righteousness …

Then he would feel the dread again, and the remorseless heat, and he would rise slowly, thinking about the long hours ahead in the tobacco fields.

He had not always spent his summers in the country but from now until time for him to enter college, it would be almost the only life he would know. Already he had lost his father to drink and his mother to a kind of profound sadness from which no pill or drug or magical elixir could entirely rescue her.

In earlier years, when he had lived in the big house on New Poplar Street, times had been good, even through the nation was still in the midst of the Great Depression and even though his father had begun to drink heavily, throwing the boy’s mother into the first of those brooding spells of melancholia that would dominate her later years and finally drive her to the grave. Yet during all of that time the country — the farm, his grandfather’s big house out at Dobbs Station — had been the one part of his life he could intimately count as his own.

3 reviews **-

Jan 11/06/2009 *3.0 #2 of 3 Story Concept 40.0% Writing Quality 80.0% Characters 60.0% Would you buy it? 60.0% I actually like this writer's style. It compelled me to keep reading through page five, but then the preaching became tiresome. I did read until the end, but I wanted something more to happen--some reason or mystery to keep reading. I did not find it in those pages.

Charlieray 11/02/2009 *-3.75 #3 of 3 Story Concept

Writing Quality

Characters

Would you buy it? What can I say? I like it. A few fix-ups and it would go from being merely very good, to great. The characters are credible, and the dialogue is, for the most part, authentic. I also like the way it sort of picks up at the beginning while giving us some of the backstory at the same time.

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