VIII
Gilligan, sitting in the hyacinth bed, watched Jones’ flight. “He ain’t so bad for a fat one,” he admitted, rising. “Emmy’ll sure have to sleep single tonight.” The mockingbird in the magnolia, as though it had waited for hostilities to cease, sang again.
“What in hell have you got to sing about?” Gilligan shook his fist at the tree. The bird ignored him and he brushed dark earth from his clothes. Anyway, he soliloquized, I feel better. Wish I could have held the bastard, though. He passed from the garden with a last look at the ruined hyacinth bed. The rector, looming, met him at the corner of the house, beneath the hushed slumbrous passion of the silver tree.
“That you, Joe? I thought I heard noises in the garden.”
“You did. I was trying to beat hell out of that fat one, but I couldn’t hold the so—I couldn’t hold him. He lit out.”
“Fighting? My dear boy!”
“It wasn’t no fight; he was too busy getting away. It takes two folks to fight, padre.”
“Fighting doesn’t settle anything, Joe. I’m sorry you resorted to it. Was anyone hurt?”
“No, worse luck,” Gilligan replied ruefully, thinking of his soiled clothes and his abortive vengeance.
“I am glad of that. But boys will fight, eh, Joe? Donald fought in his day.”
“You damn right he did, reverend. I bet he was a son-of-a-gun in his day.”
The rector’s heavy lined face took a flared match, between his cupped hands he sucked at his pipe. He walked slowly in the moonlight across the lawn, toward the gate. Gilligan followed. “I feel restless tonight,” he explained. “Shall we walk a while?”
They paced slowly beneath arched and moon-bitten trees, scuffing their feet in shadows of leaves. Under the moon lights in houses were yellow futilities.
“Well, Joe, things are back to normal again. People come and go, but Emmy and I seem to be like the biblical rocks. What are your plans?”
Gilligan lit a cigarette with ostentatiousness, hiding his embarrassment. “Well, padre, to tell the truth, I ain’t got any. If it’s all the same to you I think I’ll stay on with you a while longer.”
“And welcome, dear boy,” the rector answered heartily. Then he stopped and faced the other, keenly. “God bless you, Joe. Was it on my account you decided to stay?”
Gilligan averted his face guiltily. “Well, padre—”
“Not at all. I won’t have it. You have already done all you can. This is no place for a young man, Joe.”
The rector’s bald forehead and his blobby nose were intersecting planes in the moonlight. His eyes were cavernous. Gilligan knew suddenly all the old sorrows of the race, black or yellow or white, and he found himself telling the rector all about her.
“Tut, tut,” the divine said, “this is bad, Joe.” He lowered himself hugely to the edge of the sidewalk and Gilligan sat beside him. “Circumstance moves in marvellous ways, Joe.”
“I thought you’d a said God, reverend.”
“God is circumstance, Joe. God is in this life. We know nothing about the next. That will take care of itself in good time. ‘The Kingdom of God is in man’s own heart,’ the Book says.”
“Ain’t that a kind of funny doctrine for a parson to get off?”
“Remember, I am an old man, Joe. Too old for bickering or bitterness. We make our own heaven or hell in this world. Who knows; perhaps when we die we may not be required to go anywhere nor do anything at all. That would be heaven.”
“Or other people make our heaven and hell for us.”
The divine put his heavy arm across Gilligan’s shoulder. “You are suffering from disappointment. But this will pass away. The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten. How does it go? ‘Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ No, no,” as Gilligan would have interrupted, “I know that is an unbearable belief, but all truth is unbearable. Do we not both suffer at this moment from the facts of division and death?”
Gilligan knew shame. Bothering him now, me with a fancied disappointment! The rector spoke again. “I think it would be a good idea for you to stay, after all, until you make your future plans. So let’s consider it closed, eh? Suppose we walk further—unless you are tired?”
Gilligan rose in effusive negation. After a while the quiet tree-tunnelled street became a winding road, and leaving the town behind them they descended and then mounted a hill. Cresting the hill beneath the moon, seeing the world breaking away from them into dark, moon-silvered ridges above valleys where mist hung slumbrous, they passed a small house, sleeping among climbing roses. Beyond it an orchard slept the night away in symmetrical rows, squatting and pregnant. “Willard has good fruit,” the divine murmured.
The road dropped on again descending between reddish gashes, and across a level moonlit space, broken by a clump of saplings, came a pure quivering chord of music wordless and far away.
“They are holding services. Negroes,” the rector explained. They walked on in the dust, passing neat tidy houses, dark with slumber. An occasional group of negroes passed them, bearing lighted lanterns that jetted vain little flames futilely into the moonlight. “No one knows why they do that,” the divine replied to Gilligan’s question. “Perhaps it is to light their churches with.”
The singing drew nearer and nearer; at last, crouching among a clump of trees beside the road, they saw the shabby church with its canting travesty of a spire. Within it was a soft glow of kerosene serving only to make the darkness and the heat thicker, making thicker the imminence of sex after harsh labor along the mooned land; and from it welled the crooning submerged passion of the dark race. It was nothing, it was everything; then it swelled to an ecstasy, taking the white man’s words as readily as it took his remote God and made a personal Father of Him.
Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. All the longing of mankind for a Oneness with Something, somewhere. Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. … The rector and Gilligan stood side by side in the dusty road. The road went on under the moon, vaguely dissolving without perspective. Worn-out red-gutted fields were now alternate splashes of soft black and silver; trees had each a silver nimbus, save those moonward from them, which were sharp as bronze.
Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. The voices rose full and soft. There was no organ; no organ was needed as above the harmonic passion of bass and baritone soared a clear soprano of women’s voices like a flight of gold and heavenly birds. They stood together in the dust, the rector in his shapeless black, and Gilligan in his new hard serge, listening, seeing the shabby church become beautiful with mellow longing, passionate and sad. Then the singing died, fading away along the mooned land inevitable with tomorrow and sweat, with sex and death and damnation; and they turned townward under the moon, feeling dust in their shoes.