Long Tale Press

-1-

No one quite knew what to do with Aunt Alicia anymore. Although in her early forties, she was the youngest and loveliest of five sisters and a dear, dear sweet girl. Certainly no denying that. But how was the family to keep her from constantly making her life a hell and why did she always seem to choose revival week to start broadcasting the sins of her youth and make herself the talk of the whole community?

“Thought that was the whole point,” young Ryerson Goode told his aunt Sally one morning at breakfast.

“What, Ryerson?”

“I mean what’s a revival for if not to confess your sins and get right with the Lord? Seems to work for everybody else. Why not Aunt Alicia? Truth is, though, I’ve never been able to figure out what she was confessing to anyway. I mean, I know what she is guilty of—and, god knows, who doesn’t?—but which one of those old sins is she trying to get forgiveness for? Maybe all of them. I don’t know. Don’t guess anybody does. But wouldn’t hurt anything to find out. Might even save the family some embarrassment.”

That much was certainly true. By the time came for testimonials, she would have been driven to such a state of fright by the sermons of Worsham Wiles—going up to him trembling and sobbing and screeching and just generally coming all apart—that you couldn’t make half sense out of whatever she was trying to say. Like some sort of crazed maenad with her titties caught in the wringer of a washing machine.

"More than just passing strange,” Aunt Sally said one morning at breakfast. “These ‘sins’ everyone talks of. Could they have been so atrocious as to have escaped the notice of everyone in this family; so wicked that she can’t even bring herself to speak of them plainly?”

Ryerson, eating hurriedly so that he could be off to the fields, looked up with mock surprise, brushing a mass of wavy, blond hair out of his eyes. He had put on a lot of weight in the last year and was in the habit of staring at himself appreciatively in the mirror each morning—at his expanding chest and the added brawn in his arms, heavily tanned in spite of his fair complexion. First-string fullback for sure in the fall.

“Well,” Ryerson said, still looking across the table at his aunt. “Does seem a little strange, doesn’t it? She must get a little confused trying to figure out which one to drag out next.”

Sally cut him down with a cold, hard stare. “What, Ryerson? Drag out what?”

“Sin. Which sin to drag out. I mean, if you’ve got so many choices . Everybody knows about all that street-walking she did in her younger days, though. Not much walking, though. Not with her looks.”

“Ryerson Hezekiah Moffit Goode! No more of that kind of talk in this kitchen! Do you hear me! Are you so lost to the comforts of the Lord you have to make up such filthy, trashy stories on your own family!.”

“What stories? Ain’t exactly made up.”

“Your Aunt Alicia, Ryerson. Your own aunt, and you can think of nothing better to do than parlay a lot of old gossip/ No more! Do you hear me! No more! Your tone was not exactly what I would describe as exemplary.”

“Didn’t mean nothing—only meant that it must be a little hard knowing which sin to confess if there were so many and you didn’t keep a list or anything.”

“Enough of that Ryerson. And stop trying to be such a smart alec. Make sure your own life is in order before you start passing judgment on others. Your aunt is quite sick, I fear. I certainly hope you haven't been spreading such ridiculous notions all around the community.”

“Or maybe there’s a diary. Isn’t there an old diary or something? I remember very distinctly that Aunt Alicia was keeping a diary at one time, as everyone should, of course. Maybe some of the old sins are in there.”

“Son! I know of no diary, and even I did I hardly think it would reflect well on us to go poking around in someone else’s private affairs.”

Aunt Sally was a formidable woman, gaunt and rawboned now that she had hit her sixties, a stern spinster who had lived alone in that big farmhouse for many years—alone except in the summers, when Ryerson was often there—and could surely lay claim to being the most devout Christian in all of Dobbs Station.

She was still glaring at him, as though waiting for him to wither like an old bloom or just get on out of the kitchen and out of her life forever. When he did neither, she said: “Son, I think it’s best that we just not speak of this again, either among ourselves or to anyone else and especially to that crowd of gangsters you insist on running around with.”

“Tain’t gangsters.”

“I’ve never seen a one of them inside the church.”

“Don’t make ‘em gangsters.”

“Infidels, then, whatever you want to call them. I hardly think you are improving your own reputation by being seen so often with that crowd.”

“Tain’t gangsters nor infidels neither one.”

“If you insist, son. I just hope you understand that no one is helped by this constant gossip all over the community about my sister’s condition.”

The embarrassment. Mostly that was what had thrown Sally and his other aunts into such a fit of consternation. Yet sin there was, maybe a great deal of it, oh, yes, to be sure, certainly a great deal of it, whole weeks and months and even years of it, some old sin of passion for sure, adultery with some character maybe twice her age, or maybe with just anybody who happened to knock at her door in those early days—and maybe even before her husband had thrown her over.

A long time ago now, long ago and forgotten perhaps even by her Maker; but in the heat of the revival nothing seemed to have been forgotten or forgiven and one could always count on Alicia not to forget whatever had happened to her or even expect to be forgiven for it. Even if his aunts had guessed the whole sordid truth they weren’t about to speak of it openly, at least not to Ryerson, a mere sixteen-year-old who could not be expected to understand the deep things of God. His job was just to sit there, when he wasn’t out helping with the tobacco or hay crop, and keep his mouth shut.

Alicia still had her looks. Hard to believe she was forty-three years old—that is when she took the trouble to fix herself up and get out of the house.

It was always the same old complaint: Alicia lying around that dark house all the time with no one to talk to but Hal, who had been a dead weight on the whole family ever since coming back from the war. Alicia constantly doping herself up on those pills old Dr. Poole kept prescribing so that she had to be half dragged downstairs even to welcome visitors.

“Why,” said another of his aunts, “sometimes the girl acts like she doesn’t have half sense!”

But, boy, what a difference when the church bells rang! An entirely different person on those nights, at once the child of turmoil and sin and fashion and grace. Amazing really, how darkly striking she could be at such times. A shame it always had to be on revival night.

“Still think they ought find that old diary somewhere,” Ry said as he rose to leave. “I reckon it would be a sight to behold; what we might find in there.”

“You uncle is waiting for you in the fields, son. And I’ve told you now: no more of that talk in this house or anywhere else. Do you hear me! You’d better spend more time trying to get your own house in order.”

-2-

Nobody could blame people for wondering if she had lost all her wits. Even Uncle Worsham had been unable to exorcise the demon of melancholia that had latched onto his sister-in-law. Perhaps his one great failure in life. Other than the long hours of work with Ryerson himself; something nobody was talking about anymore.

Mighty embarrassing too, for a man of his reputation. He had spent whole evenings trying to reason with her and praying over her without even being able to find out if she were already beyond redemption.

That was not to say he had lost any of his immense powers. Neither Alicia nor anybody else in the family nor for that matter anybody in all of Dobbs Station was quite prepared for the stir he had made since returning from the seminary.

Now, two years later, on church nights, he would fling off into another of those apocalyptic sermons for which he was already famous, every vein bulging out on his forehead as he moved frantically about the pulpit, his whole manner convulsed with the spirit of the Lord, his face flaring wildly with reddish and purplish splotches as he leapt with hardly no head start at all right to the top of the pulpit and from there to the altar without overturning the flowers, shouting out a message of redemption that sailed right on out into the night and perhaps reached the ears of the impious on their front porches far off in the dark somewhere.

Each night it was the same: the walk to church, scarcely more than a hundred yards from the Goode family home-place, which sat way back from the road across a wide treeless front yard. The hymns of salvation would have begun by the time Ryerson got there and sought his familiar seat in an alcove far at the back.

Send the light, the blessed gospel light. Let it shine from shore to shore . . .

Uncle Worsham would be sitting in the pulpit, a little flushed, waiting to turn loose the fire that was in him and in few others, and right behind him, in the seat of honor, old Edmund Fuller, who had been pastor of the church since way before World War II.

Then again the familiar solemn hush as his uncle moved about the pulpit or climbed on top of it, to wave his Bible and shout out the word of the Lord, as he had again on Wednesday evening in one of the most productive sermons of the week.

“Won’t you come, dear sinner? Won’t you come and take Him by the hand tonight? Who will speak for you in that day, dear brother or sister? And what shall you say for yourself? How will you greet Him in that day when the lights of this old world go out and you stand at last before the great Seat of Judgment—when after all your years as a faithful member of the Dobbs Station Baptist Church you find that your name is not written in the great Book of Life!”

He strode about with the fever of the Lord heavy on Him now, stomping the floor, flinging himself to either side of the choir loft with a frightful glare, bringing a look of apprehension even to the face of old preacher Fuller, pounding on the pulpit so hard that once it almost toppled over onto the Table of Confession.

“Woe betide the day, my brother! For the church cannot save you in that hour! The baptismal font cannot save you. All the cleansing waters of the River Jordan cannot save you. For then you will know, as you may know even tonight, that for all of your tithing and for all of the upright life you have lived you have not known the Lord Jesus in your heart!”

Ryerson had heard all of it before, the same words evoking the same apocalyptic visions, and found himself listening with a mixture of uneasiness and indifference, though mostly looking at the shapely Mrs. Clodfelter, church soloist and a stunningly beautiful brunette who was way yonder too much woman for her old man, a stuffy deacon who taught Ryerson’s Sunday School class.

To Ryerson she just did not look completely at home in that choir even though she came down to rededicate her life to the service of the Lord every time the congregation struck up the invitational hymn. Ryerson just kept watching her as he always did and thinking what it would be like to get her out of that place and somewhere off alone in a hotel room. And her looking at him wildly, insanely, crazy with passion:

You sure got it where it counts, don’tcha, kid?

“What shall you say to Him in that hour?” the preacher shouted. “What will be your plea? ‘Please, dear Lord, I have done your work and followed in all your ways. I have walked in perfect righteousness. I have loved my fellow man. I have given my all in your name. Let me live with you, dear Lord, in your castles of jasper. Let me walk with you on your streets of silver and gold. Let me spend eternity praising your mighty work, O Lord!’ Yet to what avail, dear brother or sister? To what avail as He banishes you off into everlasting darkness and torment?”

He paused, looking around, perspiring heavily, pulsating with a kind of inward fever. “Let us cry out again tonight as did the prophet of old: ‘Watchman, what of the night?’ Ah, the night does indeed come all too quickly for us all, dear sinner; and yet how dazzling the morning light for those who at last have heard His voice and known Him in their heart!”

His ringing voice grew yet more forceful as he came out of the altar in a tumble of righteousness. “The day is short and the hour is near, dear brethren.Yes! You say to me,‘Why, preacher, there’s no need for me to get out of my seat tonight and come up to lay down my life for the Lord. Let me live my life, preacher. You can talk to me about that tomorrow or next week or after the election.’ Yes, but which of us can say that he will return again to sit where he sits tonight in such comfort and satisfaction and pride? Who can say that tomorrow will ever come—for me, for you, for any of us who are here tonight? Who, dear brother? Who, dear sister? And in that dark day who will wipe the tears from your eye!”

-3-

Yet if he had saved many he had condemned quite a few, and not least among them Ryerson Hezekiah Moffit Goode himself: a lot of bitter memories from the summer of Forty-Six, among them the painful and despicable night he had secretly sought the help of Odell Washburn, a smelly, imbecilic ploughhand who himself had accepted the Lord just nights before and now just short of becoming a raving street-corner preacher. Odell did his best, but soon found Ry more than he could handle alone, so then it was the preacher as well, and one of Odell’ obnoxious pals dragging Ry to the altar like a sack of moldy old meal so that he too might rededicate his life to the Lord. All without his consent. The devil of a preacher looking him right in the eye and then shouting to the congregation:

Please log in or sign up to review this excerpt.